“In a Herculean, intermissionless opus, Judith Sloan delivers a provocative dramatization of a whistle-blower’s attempts to expose police brutality and political corruption in Mississippi.”

“Judith Sloan is a welcome voice crying in the contemporary wilderness of political correctness. On-the-money satire seasoned with tolerance and joie de vivre.”

“Hail, Judith Sloan and Warren Lehrer, for making a new art worthy of the new America that is quietly and not so quietly being born again out of the lives and imaginations of its newest immigrants. They combine the art of storytelling, the book, the visual, and the sound of voices, to create a true Whitmanesque vista of our infant century.”

“Judith Sloan’s compelling solo show, Yo Miss!, is grounded in her experience teaching drama to underprivileged New York City high school and college students. This deeply felt and richly entertaining show frames its earthy soulfulness in high-concept theater with ease. In a whizzing-by hour-and-a-half Sloan plays an assortment of students of many nationalities, immigrant teenagers and incarcerated youth with the simplest of adjustments–a headscarf, an accent–then fortifies the scene with crowds of recorded characters whose voices she mixes live onstage, operating several MIDI controllers with her fingers and feet. As artfully composed and intelligently framed as it is emotionally gutsy…It is a fully realized piece of inventive theater that packs a punch – and a lesson.”

“Judith Sloan challenges U.S. Foreign Policy, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, homophobia, and a host of other issues throughout an amazingly varied series of character-driven monologues.”

“The Archivist Round Table recognizes Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan for their remarkable book and audio CD, Crossing the BLVD… A stunning book structured to portray multiple perspectives. We honor Crossing the BLVD for exploding the paradigms of oral history and reinterpreting them for our multimedia century… for its boldness and creativity as it charts a lasting record of this vibrant, diverse community in New York City—the new Ellis Island.”

“Crossing the BLVD is a one-of-a kind amazingly designed book… portraits of immigrant Americans, images of their belongings, maps, and innovative typography combine to bring these lives up off the page…”

“Mercurial, mesmerizing, meaningful and entertaining, YO MISS is a one-person whirlwind of characters—— challenging preconceptions while reminding us of our common humanity. Judith Sloan’s work is inspiring and not to be missed.”

“Crossing the BLVD boldly carries the tradition of oral history into the 21st Century… electrifying collage of voices, faces, and spirits, capturing the true elasticity and inclusiveness of American culture.”

“Crossing the BLVD brims over with the energy, heart and spirit that went into creating this important work. A fitting tribute to the world it so lovingly documents.”

“Crossing the BLVD is a powerful social record… Most of the subjects live in Queens, but their stories resonate far beyond the borders of this multicultural New York borough. What often gets lost in the national debate on immigration is the human dimension, an understanding of the lives of those people who give up everything to come here. Crossing the BLVD lets them tell their stories… Extraordinary… a living work of art.”

“Crossing the BLVD is a whirlwind tour and love poem of what has often been called the most racially and ethnically diverse county in America. In the tradition of the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, Ms. Sloan performs Crossing the BLVD adopting the personae (and respectfully mimicking the accents) of the varied immigrants whose stories are in the book…”

“This stunningly innovative book goes beyond pathos and into the kaleidoscope of experience that defines real immigrant life, in all of its complexity… In Crossing the BLVD, the words of New York’s immigrants soar, in print and in sound as well. Besides crafting a book, the authors have collaborated with composer Scott Johnson to produce a CD that jangles interviewees’ speech with music often played or sung by the immigrants themselves. The result is a bricolage of foreign accents, world melodies and flinty comment. It all sounds and reads like echoing subway stations and big newsstands where you don’t know all the languages but wish you did. Crossing the BLVD lets you listen and browse and understand.”

“A Tattle Tale is a true and fascinating story about a cop breaking ranks against police brutality. Judith Sloan plays Gibbs as a friendly down-home gal who is a mix of bawdy, naive, street smart and funny..”

“Life is a post-modern neo-fascist garbage dump and Sloan’s Denial of the Fittestdeterminedly rakes through the detritus. It is a highly articulate show… Judith Sloan is funny, intimate, sexy and very frightening…”

“Denial of the Fittest — A world view that sees comedy and tragedy as two bones of the same skeleton in the closet. Superb!”

“Funny and sad, topical and biting… Exquisite comic timing, and best of all, Sloan can make you see your world in a slightly different way. And that’s what theater is supposed to do.”

“In listening to what people have to say, Judith Sloan captures the essence of their lives…She is one part Studs Terkel, one part Lily Tomlin, two-parts originality.”

“A book of stunning originality, tremendous visual flair and cinematic depth, Crossing the BLVD will forever change the way we think about our cities, our communities, our neighborhoods, our neighbors, and ultimately, our own backyards.”

“A therapy of self in an era of hard-boiled reality. Sloan’s monologues demonstrate the capacity of words to bear their own freakish existence in colour and comedy. Ever accessible, a committed and persistent humorist who uses pathos as a mojo stick to make us laugh and think.”

“Behind the drab storefronts and nondescript homes that define the borough, Sloan and Lehrer discover a soulful place teaming with immigrants from Mexico to Australia whose stories unfold in a kaleidoscope of color…”

“The immigrant experience in New York is one of the most important stories in the city right now, and Lehrer and Sloan have made it their beat. What’s amazing about them is they’ve been working with these people a long time. It’s not that they spend a few hours with these immigrants eliciting quotes. It’s clear that they know them as people, as complex individuals. That’s the way it should be done.”

“I’ve been interviewing authors and doing books for 24 years, and I can tell you Crossing the BLVD is one of the best books I’ve ever read! It’s so innovative, so rich, so fabulous. The book is beautifully designed. It’s like a work of performance art. Thank you, thank you, thank you [Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan] for putting this book into the world and giving a voice to these people.”

“Lehrer/Sloan’s fascinating book offers unique insights into the rich and combustible cauldron of cultures and ethnicities in the most diverse corner of America — the Borough of Queens, New York. Crossing reveals the impact of changes in immigration law through the oral histories of asylum seekers caught in mandatory detention, refugees fleeing war and persecution, and those pushed out of their countries struggling to re-create their lives. The significance of this extraordinary volume is that, ready or not, it provides a glimpse of the new America which is emerging.”

“Crossing the BLVD is a book, a CD, a website, a photography exhibit, a series of radio programs, and a live reading performance by the project creators, Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan. The book and CD is more evocative and provocative than any instructional video I’ve seen and far less expensive. It serves as a model for what you could do in your community, organization or institution.”

“Crossing the BLVD is a montage of colorful photos and astonishing first-person narratives of people who hail from every imaginable point on the globe… Their stories are spellbinding and the art is captivating. Although not an “art book,” BLVD is a work of art — a unique contribution to both art and literature… The book has special interest to those of us in health care because recent immigrants bring special problems to medical practice… (How often is a question about torture part of our Review of Systems?) A book like BLVD can help us meet the needs of this special population by using both creativity and compassion.”

“[Crossing the BLVD is] a multi-media installation of photography, text, and sounds is an exemplary exhibition that combines [Cindy] Shermanesque New York street-smarts with the compassionate, humanist universalism of an Andre Kertez or David Seymour… The experience is more akin to watching a movie, because the narratives take time to unfold, and there is an inherent drama in the real life personal accounts… Crossing the BLVD offers an object lesson in the new aesthetic—how it looks, how it generates its meanings—as well as a window on the lives of people who, mostly unnoticed by the rest of us, are steadily enlarging the concept of what it means to be an American.”

“Crossing the BLVD is spectacular in its commitment to documenting the artists’ exploration of their own neighborhood… with exquisitely detailed portraits of the people who live around them… The experience of wandering through this exhibit was astonishingly rich. Of the highest technical quality, it can also be so intimate it almost has a smell. The artistic expertise displayed in the deft oral-history gathering, the jewel-like photography and the immaculate sound work can lead directly to a tender familiarity with each of the people wrapped in the heart of this work… One imagines that Queens is now full of celebrities thanks to Lehrer and Sloan.”

“A Tattle Tale is an important show, incredible research, very touching, often humorous. The story of a feisty woman, a wonderful play of social commitment and passion.”

“In Yo Miss!, Judith Sloan’s art and teaching cross-pollinate. She performs with musical collaborators, re-enacts and riffs on her experiences teaching teenagers from myriad worlds: refugee camps, struggling neighborhoods, prisons. It is a performance about performances, a story containing many stories.”

“Deputy Andrea Gibbs dared to break through the monkey order known as ‘the blue wall of silence’ by speaking out against the chronic brutal treatment of inmates in Mississippi prisons. A Tattle Tale brings to life her saga in Judith Sloan’s infectious solo performance. Co-written by Warren Lehrer in a folksy idiom that invites the audience to ‘come raid my refrigerator anytime,’ Sloan’s portrait reveals the unusual courage of a garden-variety conscience.”

“Judith Sloan wickedly skewers stereotypes… screws up her face with Lily Tomlin-esque elasticity. Plus, Sloan’s a good juggler!”

“Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan are traditional oral historians in practice and radical artists transforming the field through their innovative approach to presentation. Their latest collaborative work is a vibrant and inspiring collection of stories from immigrants… For people who have so often been otherized, stereotyped, and misrepresented, Crossing the BLVD is an exercise in authenticity. Each of the stories — more like lyric poetry than narrative — is accompanied by beautiful portraits of the subjects laid out in an unusual graphic style of Lehrer’s invention… The graphic style and approach to portraiture are revolutionary for the field and the sheer volume and range of the subjects covered, rare. Visionary!”

“A celebratory chronicle of the immigrant experience in New York, Crossing the BLVD is a Whitmanesque book that reveals a staggering array of humanity… [It] chronicles life in Gotham in both its despair and boundless promise. The first-person narratives are drawn from audio-taped interviews, while the book’s ever-changing graphics and typefaces mirror the rich pastiche of religion, language and tradition that coexists in the borough… chosen for its ability to convey the inspired resiliency of the myriad communities that contribute to the city’s dynamism.”

“New York’s undersung borough of Queens, home to the new Ellis Island (the airports), may be the most diverse county in the country today, and documentarians Lehrer and Sloan have innovatively brought it to life… Crossing the BLVD is poetic, arresting, vividly printed mosaic.”

“Yo Miss! is immersive, resonant theater. Communication, cultural destabilization, history and commonality, are dramatized, raising questions, offering response… For over twenty years, this petite, steely woman has been an explorer of experience and psyche, an excavator of souls whose stories she turns into art. Judith Sloan is an extraordinary audacious artist.”

“In the new typographical and geographical adventure Crossing the BLVD… immigrants from all over the world tell their harrowing, thrilling, inspiring stories… Collected in this gripping new book, filled with photos and maps and portraits. The text jumps and continually changes clothes and sizes… because that’s how people talk. Especially when their tales are worth hearing.”

“Immigrant life in Queens, as told in the intimate, rich, comic, ironic and sad stories so often seen but not heard in America’s big cities… Archie Bunker doesn’t live here anymore — not in the Queens of Crossing the Blvd. The first-person narratives are engaging… The stories are so different, and yet many of the immigrants’ lives are so similar… What links them all is the desperation and desire that brought them here. As one immigrant says in Crossing the BLVD, ‘America can do without you, but you can’t do without America’.”

“With first-person accounts from 79 immigrants in Queens, the 400-page book [Crossing the BLVD] is an offbeat ethnic tour of one of the country’s most ethnically diverse counties. It does not point out trendy kebab palaces or obscure taco stands, but rather tells riveting stories about a new wave of immigrants to America… ”

“Crossing the BLVD collects the searing first-person stories of 79 Queens residents, recent immigrants from everywhere. Each profile is a collage of text and image, and the pages of this book frequently incorporate two or three narratives plus notes and bold photographs of the participants, their streetscapes, and iconic artifacts. The effect is dazzling but organic and appropriate; documentary artists Lehrer and Sloan have produced a collective oral history as vibrant as a live event. Strongly recommended for public and academic collections.”

“Crossing the BLVD is a paradigmatic American studies text. It is an innovatively designed, beautiful, moving, funny, stimulating, horrifying, and illuminating book. The stories that Lehrer and Sloan have collected of migrants who came to the United States after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act… remain tangibly alive in your memory… More than a book for American studies scholars or students, it is a pleasure to read — a book to be read for the sheer enjoyment of it.”

“Crossing the BLVD… has an immediacy and rich depth to it, reflecting the diversity of the most ethnically varied county in the country… Unlike other volumes about ethnic New York: It is not a guidebook to neighborhoods nor a sourcebook for ethnic shops and restaurants; rather, its focus is on immigrants’ lives… Designed by Lehrer, the book’s distinctive layout—with color photographs, visual artifacts and blocks of text in different sizes and typefaces, conveying different voices — has the feeling of an open conversation.”

“1001 Voices: a Symphony for a New America is a sprawling, mammoth multimedia work for orchestra, ethnic instruments, actors, visual projections, and a 190-piece choir. It celebrates the mix of languages and cultures found in Queens, and examines our changing ideas of migration and home… The mix of storytelling, music, and visuals unfolds poetically, and appeals to the diverse, sophisticated and hip audiences orchestras are trying to reach today”

“I’ve been working with refugees and immigrants as a cultural producer for twenty years, and Crossing the BLVD is simply the best project/book representing the real life experiences of immigrants in the new America.”

“An extraordinary attempt to document signs of migratory life, Crossing the BLVDundertakes the impossible task of telling the story of modern-day Queens while providing a window into the geopolitical and cultural history of the post-colonial world. It succeeds because it focuses on 79 powerful individual stories that deserve telling… This important, innovative book counters a prevailing trend toward oversimplification of American demographics and cultural history.”

“[In] Crossing the BLVD, Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan tell of refugees fleeing distant wars and repression, undocumented laborers, asylum-seekers caught in mandatory detention, school teachers…They are new Americans, tossed together as neighbors, classmates, co-workers, enemies and friends. [Crossing] is about struggle and hope and transformation.”

“An incredible and moving story… Sloan and Lehrer spent three years talking to immigrants and refugees in Queens, traveling the world, in a sense, while never leaving their backyard… a place where new immigrants from every corner of the globe come to start their lives in America. The result is a unique multi-media project. Oral History with a twist!”

“I have never seen a book like this. [Crossing the BLVD is] a remarkably beautiful, lovingly put together example of bottom-up journalism.”

“A fascinating book about new immigrants in America. Filled with vivid descriptions and very human stories of remarkable and extraordinary people. Crossing the BLVD is a whole post-graduate education in so many different cultures and world events. Not only does it show that these are real human beings with real needs and conflicts.. but they are people who play an integral role in the American economy and in American society… The BLVD is a metaphor for making it in America. Great to see, when a publisher gets it right!”

“Crossing the BLVD brings alive the most polyglot place on the planet. One moment I am in the tiny one-bedroom of Bhutanese exiles, the next in the taxi of a philosopher-poet from Bombay, then with Renata the table tennis champ from the Czech National Team. An outstanding book on the new New York!”

“A new album that uses real-life stories as a starting point for meaningful music: Crossing the BLVD by Warren Lehrer, Judith Sloan and Scott Johnson is a rich, varied listening experience, a demonstration of the way you can explore the world without leaving home. BLVD emphasises the rhythmic musicality of everyday speech… you hear laughter, sorrow and many moving tales of hardship, flight, splintered families and the difficulties of assimilation… Extravagantly artful, complex, and exhilarating… The book is a turbo-driven eye-witness guide with riveting first-person testimonies.”

“One of the most engaging photography shows to visit Rochester in years… Both book and exhibition are an innovative patchwork of photo portraits, startling life histories and flamboyant layouts… From 1999 to 2002, they [Lehrer and Sloan] toured a world in miniature exploring their own borough’s housing projects, schools and community centers. They found political refugees who survived torture, a Nigerian prophetess ordered by God to visit America, and a philosophical Hindu driver who made his taxi a sacred space — among other remarkable stories.”

“The [Crossing the BLVD] exhibit is full of stories of heartbreak and hope, told by immigrants in their own words through text and audio, accompanied by bold, color portraits taken by Lehrer… When you cross the BLVD, you’ll meet men who left their families behind for their beliefs and lawyers who now deliver food. You’ll hear prayer and song, words and wisdom. You’ll see an Egyptian man who spent seven years turning his restaurant into a mosaic-encrusted work of art. You’ll meet a woman from Tajikistan so renowned for her dancing that her image was woven into tapestries, printed on posters and glazed on ceramic urns and plates. She now runs a dance studio that can only be accessed through a subway station… An unbelievable journey…”

“In Lehrer’s and Sloan’s Crossing the BLVD, the role of oral narratives defy the caricature of migrant ethnicity perpetuated in popular culture… Lehrer and Sloan juxtapose the lived complexity of the New York neighborhood of Queens: the ways in which various (new and old) immigrant communities coexist, and how they encounter the “mainstream” and vice versa…”