As the Beatles are to Liverpool and Bruce Springsteen to Asbury Park, N.J., so are the Ramones to Queens, the polyglot New York borough that nurtured John William Cummings, Thomas Erdelyi, Douglas Glenn Colvin and Jeffrey Ross Hyman — otherwise known as Johnny, Tommy, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone, pioneers of the two-minute poppy punk song.
On April 10 the Queens Museum will present “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk,” a retrospective exhibition that will examine the group’s influence on both music and art, as part of a spate of spring programming under the museum’s new director, Laura Raicovich, that focuses on Queens as a Petri dish of global culture.
The Ramones show, organized with the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, where a second part of the exhibition will open on Sept. 16, will include more than 350 objects, from the band’s archives and those of Arturo Vega, who designed the band’s logo; from artists like Shepard Fairey and Yoshitomo Nara; and from Mad magazine and Punk magazine, to demonstrate, as the museum says, how the Ramones “served as both subject and inspiration for many visual artists, resulting in a large body of works.” (Marky Ramone, who replaced Tommy as the group’s drummer, was born in Brooklyn.)
The Queens show, which continues through July 31, will open concurrently with the museum’s Queens International, its biannual exhibition, held since 2001, that showcases artists who live or work in Queens, and a show devoted to the writer and activist Rebecca Solnit. Her “Atlas” books have used mapping as a new way to think about the cultural and political life of cities. This year “Nonstop Metropolis,” the third book in her series, after San Francisco and New Orleans, will take New York City as its subject, and Ms. Solnit will organize a series of unorthodox works and public programs with the artists Mariam Ghani and Duke Riley.
The museum’s 2016 programming will culminate on Sept. 19 with the opening of the first New York retrospective of the five-decade career of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. A pioneering environmentalist and feminist artist, Ms. Ukeles is best known for her role over more than three decades as the official, unsalaried artist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation, where she has created collaborative pieces known as “work ballets,” in which municipal workers use their heavy-duty vehicles in performance.
