Ride on a Flushing Train

This painting captures a moment of enormous demographic and cultural change in Long Island/Queens/New York City, the post-1965 immigration explosion that has led to a much more diversified Metropolitan community. It is an artful representation of what Najarro (1924-2012), a Cuban-born artist trained at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, saw every day in his commute to New York aboard the Flushing 7 train in the 1980s. After leaving Havana for the United States as a young man, Najarro lived in Manhattan, Astoria, and Woodside, before arriving in Syosset in 1991. Najarro’s work often spoke to issues of identity and occasionally immigration; his paintings are boldly colorful, gestural, and tend to linger in one’s memory.