Art in the Parks

Fifteen years ago Socrates Sculpture Park inaugurated the Emerging Artist Fellowship (EAF) Exhibition and launched what would become an annual exhibition of “artists to watch.” By providing an open studio along with financial, administrative, and technical support, the EAF program offers a rare opportunity for the realization of original, large–scale complex work. From May through September EAF artists work on–site, negotiating the physical and conceptual challenges of production in the park’s outdoor studio space, becoming energetic fuel for the park’s popular summer programming.

This year’s Emerging Artist Fellows were selected through a highly competitive process that attracted over 350 applications, a record number for the program, by the park’s 2015 Curatorial Advisors, Gary Carrion–Murayari (Curator, New Museum) and Nora Lawrence (Curator, Storm King Art Center). The 2015 Emerging Artist Fellows are: Kenseth Armstead, Charlotte Becket & Roger Sayre, José Carlos Casado, Torkwase Dyson, Carla Edwards, Davey Hawkins, Lena Henke, David Horvitz, Charlotte Hyzy, Melanie McLain, Kirsten Nelson, Freya Powell, Leah Raintree, Aaron Suggs, and Noa Younse.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

To draw a Contemporary Art forum is to separate from both modern and historical perspectives, to immerse oneself in current time and space. A meeting point in the processing time from past and to the future. We might call it the “moment;” it is short and creative. It entails catching an idea when it appears like a flash of light. It can — and must — disappear in the next femtosecond. A “moment” can mean a minute portion of time, or the product of quantity (as a force) and the distance to a particular point. THE MOMENT in contemporary art can be ideally a philosophical term and scientific necessity.

In 2015, the Taiwanese American Arts Council takes THE MOMENT as a theme, and develops it to a series of multi–disciplinary programs taking place in various venues. The traditional format of painting shares space with the latest interactive technology. These are threads expressing multiple directions, meeting in this MOMENT. The MOMENT investigates the play of the virtual and the real, inward and outward, our intimate reflection on a surface, dark and light, or a view of self in the outside environment. The Moment visualizes a picture, an object, a location, a person, or a fanciful collective memory of how we evolved as creatures. We are about to investigates the artist’s relation to society and himself.

Artists on view in Flushing Meadows Corona Park as part of THE MOMENT include Ya-Hon Chang, Tang-Wei Hsu, Kuang-Yu Lee, Wen-Fu Yu.

This exhibition is presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei and the Taiwanese American Arts Council

In ten tiles, Eleni illustrates a story about her visit to local cultural hub Socrates Sculpture Park with her children. Penelope Eleni’s artwork is inspired by motherhood, exploration, adventure and the wonder of wandering around New York City with three little children. In 2010 Eleni wrote and illustrated the story Halloween Harvest Festival, which she transferred to ceramic tiles in 2015 for public display. In the story, the artist brings her daughters to the park for the annual fall event where they meet a man in a funny hat, see dogs in costumes, dance to music, and play with other children before they fall asleep on their mother’s lap after a fun–filled day. The tiles, measuring 12" x 12", are adhered to the surface of a low wall made out of cinderblocks that surrounds the park’s Butterfly Garden at 30th Road and 46th Street. Additional plants will be added to the blocks’ central voids, enhancing the horticulture in the new garden.

This exhibition is presented by the Friends of Astoria Heights Park.

Through her latest public artwork, titled Suspect Terrain, Heide Fasnacht details the creation and aftermath of a sinkhole. In Fasnacht’s vision, the particularities of fragmentation span 50-feet above ground and are detailed in painted plywood – a stand-in for the cement, asphalt, and rock substrate that the sculpture maps. Fasnacht’s surface was inspired by striking media coverage and documentation of massive sinkholes. By sculpturally depicting these devastating geological occurrences, Fasnacht turns the relationship between event and documentation into a personal and precarious action.

At Socrates Sculpture Park, the artist extends beyond the sinkhole’s composition to question assumptions about the built environment, including the park itself. At the bottom of Suspect Terrain lies a house half-submerged in a pool of illusionistic water, an allegory using the language of geological events that simultaneously explores the park’s unique history as an illegal dumpsite and landfill.

This exhibition is presented by the Socrates Sculpture Park

Degas Horses by artist Vera Lutter is the newest installment of the park’s ongoing “Broadway Billboard” series. During this program the Socrates Sculpture Park commissions artists to create a billboard image that spans the main entrance of the park and offers a unique platform for exhibiting two-dimensional media. At least twice annually (spring and fall), Socrates installs a new work on the 11"x 28"billboard, which can be seen nearly a mile away on Broadway in Long Island City.

Internationally acclaimed photographer Vera Lutter creates ghostly images of subjects as varied as urban centers, abandoned factories, ancient monuments, and natural forests. Like much of her work, Degas Horses was taken using a “camera obscura” – a centuries-old optical device that uses light entering through a small hole into a darkened chamber to slowly capture an image of its subject.

This exhibition is presented by the Socrates Sculpture Park

Gabriela Albergaria has erected a 10-foot concrete wall adorned with two suspended trees for her piece Two Trees in Balance at Socrates Sculpture Park. Albergaria is interested in examining and deconstructing the cultural and social beliefs surrounding images of the natural.

As part of her installation Albergaria has meticulously reconstructed dozens of branches and tree stumps salvaged from across New York City into two new trees, which she suspends diagonally off of the ground from a steel cable. Each tree hovers in-between the wall and the earth, poised in a precarious state by their own equal weight. Visually the piece implies suspended movement – simultaneous growth and decay – and the effort required to maintain that balance. With Two Trees in Balance, the artist manipulates preconceived expectations of what the natural should look like, as well as the fictional beliefs that we use to conjure the natural world.

This exhibition is presented by the Socrates Sculpture Park

Agnes Denes adds life to the city’s skyline with a curving pyramid on the Socrates Sculpture Park’s East River waterfront in Long Island City, Queens. The Living Pyramid, Denes’s new large-scale, site-specific earthwork spans 30 feet at its four-sided base and ascend 30 feet high, created from several tons of soil and planted grasses.

Commissioned by Socrates Sculpture Park, The Living Pyramid is the artist’s first major public artwork in New York City in three decades since her iconic urban intervention, Wheatfield – A Confrontation in 1982. Her work is the product of a fiercely intellectual and distinctive study of semiotics, epistemology, mathematics, history, and ecology, which are grounded in philosophical inquiry and social observation.

This exhibition is presented by the Socrates Sculpture Park

IK Studio won this year’s Folly Program competition with their innovative proposal Torqueing Spheres. This work transforms a series of intertwining, sculpted forms into a meandering curved folly that encourages social interaction.

Torqueing Spheres features eight plywood domes, ranging from adult to child-size. The plywood is shaped by a particular cold-bending method, without the use of steam or kerfing. Assembled into their domes, two properties emerge: sound reflected as echo, and movement of the panels from humidity and weather. As the wood’s fibers absorb and lose moisture over different weather conditions, the bent panels are predefined to close and open in their particular directions.

This exhibition is presented by the Socrates Sculpture Park and the Architectural League

Studio in the Park: The Queens Museum-ArtBuilt Mobile Studio Residency Program hosts two residencies that provide visual artists the chance to work in a purpose-built mobile studio space situated adjacent to the Museum in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

The first residency, running from June 15 through July 15, has been awarded to The People’s Design Laboratory (PDL), a project by Patrick Rowe, in collaboration with Mobile Print Power. The project will function as a research center for the development of unique navigational park signage, a pressing challenge for the park, using collaborative and participatory design strategies. The signage concepts developed at the PDL will capture the spirit of the park and will be created by the park community through a series of participatory events and open studio hours. The signs will highlight the unique vernacular aesthetics that thrive in a place as culturally diverse as Queens.

The second residency, going from July 16 through August 16, has been awarded to A Collection of Walks, a project by Matthew Jensen. The project will incubate a new body of work that brings Jensen’s process of walking, collecting, and documenting to explore the landscapes and neighborhoods in and around Flushing Meadows Corona Park. New York City parks have been a source of inspiration for Jensen over the past ten years. Here in Queens, Jensen’s walks through Flushing Meadows Corona Park will yield a collection of objects, ephemera and natural detritus that will be carefully arranged inside the mobile studio as a cabinet of curiosities, where park-goers will be invited to experience the varied collections culled from local landscapes. In the weeks following the residency Jensen will create a map or “walker’s guide” that the public can use as inspiration and guidance for reexamining their neighborhood and seeing the familiar in a new light.

Additional information, including specific dates for project events and open studio hours for A Collection of Walks, will be posted on the Queens Museum’s website and social media channels.

This exhibition is presented by the Queens Museum and ArtBuilt.

The Public Utteraton Machine is an interactive work that aims to engage the local community in a discussion about public art in New York. The piece, created in part with an antique phone speaker and ear piece, is a no-dial phone that automatically connects to a conversation prompt that asks the user about the value of public art in the city and in their specific neighborhood. Do locals want it, need it, appreciate itΑ What role and purpose does public art play in public spaces and neighborhoodsΑ The Utteraton Machine revives public utterances and will help examine this hotly debated topic discussed by art, design and public administrators around the world. This solar-powered device will use an innovative paper display screen to guide the conversation and will record responses, which will remain anonymous and will ultimately be publically available online at www.utteraton.com and possibly some public libraries.