Art in the Parks

Description:

Zaq Landsberg recreated several of the famed Unisphere’s islands from various continents at scale and placed them together to form a global archipelago. The collection of islands act as seating, stages, and meeting places, and reflects the diversity Queens. These continents, figuratively stitched together, are recognizable by their shapes, but will have neither labels nor borders.

This exhibition was made possible by the Art in the Parks: UNIQLO Park Expressions Grant.

Description:
Functional Bodies is a community engaged project involving students from PS99, Seniors from Young Israel of Forest Hills Senior Center, Friends of MacDonald Park, and RPGA Studio. Incubated by social sculpture artist Yvonne Shortt, it is focused on creating collaboratively with local communities to prompt more people to volunteer in their park. The sculpture consists of a dog and girl, both with body parts designed for gardening. In addition to these pieces the sculpture also consists of several flowers created by people in the community from ages 11 to 85+.

Description:

Rainbow Mural is a colorful reclamation of the concrete barrier at the Forest Park Greenhouse Playground near the historical carousel. A pixelated rainbow pattern animate the masonry and contrast with the natural green of the forest. The vivid paint transforms the wall from a mundane structure into a vibrant colorful marker for the play area. In addition, sections of the mural include chalkboard color blocks which can be activated by children throughout the exhibition. Rainbow Mural is a community art project. Volunteers of all ages guided by artists Amanda Long, Tommy Hartung and Friends of Forest Park painted the Rainbow Mural using vivid paints and a hand-drawn grid.

Funding for the Rainbow Mural was generously provided by the New York City Council Parks Equity Initiative and a Capacity Fund Grant.

Description:

David Maisel’s Billboard, The Lake Project 62 (detail), is cropped from a photograph within a series of aerial images of a California lake that traces the changes of human intervention on the site. It expands Socrates’ imperative to present art that examines land use and environmental sustainability. While its subject, Owens Lake in California, is geographically and ecologically distinct from the Park’s own New York City waterfront location, the Billboard acknowledges global trends of water scarcity, air contaminants, and environmental destruction that can be caused by unregulated land-use issues pertinent to the Park. This otherworldly landscape can be a site of reflection for contradictions and our complicity in the face of looming environmental destruction. As the word ‘detail’ in the title suggests, Owens Lake is only a small element in the larger picture of the planet’s degradation.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

Description:

Each year Socrates presents an exhibition of new commissions made by artists awarded the Park’s Emerging Artist Fellowship. The Socrates Annual, 2018 exhibition does not adhere to a specific theme but rather presents the diversity of processes, material approaches, and subjects that comprise the most compelling public art practice today. For the 2018 exhibition, projects range from a decolonial greenhouse to audio-sculptural portraits of Queens hip-hop legends. Approaches vary among community-centered pedagogy and production, material experimentation, and redeployment of historical forms of construction, among others. The 2018 Artist Fellows join the ranks of over 300 artists who have received grants for producing work at Socrates since the Park’s first grant in 1995 and the formalization of the Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2000.

Participating artists, whose diverse range of medium include mosaic, cast concrete, glass, and painting, were selected by the Park’s 2018 Curatorial Advisors: Connie Choi, Associate Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Alex Fialho, Programs Director, Visual AIDS. The 2018 Socrates Annual participating artists are Leilah Babirye, Sherwin Banfield, Amy Brener, Lionel Cruet, Nathaniel Cummings-Lambert, Ronen Gamil, Jesse Harrod, Carlos Jimenez Cahua, Leander Mienardus Knust, Antone Konst, Joiri Minaya, Nicholas Missel, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Nancy Nowacek, and Joe Riley and Audrey Snyder.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

Description:
The BTN x MADSTEEZ Basketball Court brings color and life to an existing court that lacked vibrancy. The design splits the court into East and West Divisions, 7 schools in each, and uses the two main colors of each school. The mural covers the full basketball court and extends outside the court lines offering a blue sideline.

Description:

These ceramic masks were created through a series of children’s art workshops at Sunnyside Community Center at Woodside Housing. Inspired by Halloween masks, the children created thirteen unique masks that range in subject from Egyptian queen Cleopatra to friendly bunnies and cats to scary monsters

This exhibition is sponsored by Sunnyside Community Center at Woodside Houses and The Friends of Astoria Heights Park. This project is funded by the New York City Council’s Parks Equity Initiative, Council Member Costa Costantinides.

Description:

Cecile Chong’s installation is based on the myth of the lost treasure of El Dorado. Over the centuries the story has been told in many ways, often as a metaphor for an ultimate prize that one might spend a lifetime seeking. This installation promotes ideas of transformation, immigration and community. It honors the opportunities that this city offers to newcomers, but most of all, it acknowledges the labor and efforts that immigrants contribute in return. Consisting of 100 metallic and brightly-colored sculptures arranged in a circle on the lawn, the sculptures are modeled after tightly swaddled babies, or “guaguas,” that the artist saw while living in Ecuador. Forty-nine sculptures are gold, referring to the 49% of New Yorkers who speak a language other than English at home.

This exhibition is presented by the Lewis H. Latimer House Museum , with support from the Queens Council on the Arts  with public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council .

Description:
RRRolling Stones is a moveable outdoor seating system made from 3D-printed concrete. The designers exploit the standard ergonomics of a functional chair to create durable, mobile outdoor seating. RRRolling Stones’ playful design encourages creative interaction and emboldens park visitors to configure them in original arrangements based on preference and need: linear benches of various lengths; in small clusters; or as solitary seats dotting the landscape.

Folly / Function is an annual juried competition challenging architects to design and build a large- scale project for Socrates’ visitors. Jointly directed by The Architectural League of New York and Socrates Sculpture Park, the program addresses the intersection of architecture and sculpture in public space.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park and The Architectural League of New York.

Description:
?Built is a parkwide solo exhibition of newly commissioned works by Virginia Overton that refashion found materials with dynamism and potency. In succinct, elegant forms, often accompanied with wry humor, Overton addresses concepts of labor, economics, and the land in today’s society. Her material choices–fundamental elements for construction and fabrication–combined with her axiomatic approach to process, evoke narratives of self-reliance, creative constraints, and expediency. Overton creates new iterations of ongoing forms – altered pick-up trucks, a water feature, a roof truss gem sculpture, a suspended work, and a billboard, among others.

Weaving together these works is their shared role as support structures, both in their original purpose and in their new generative articulations. The wooden beams and trusses are elements that repeat through the exhibition, revealing these materials’ multiple capacities as tools. Situated in the changing, once-industrial waterfront neighborhood of Long Island City, the works shed their former functions without nostalgia. Instead, Overton’s works exhibit the vitality of creative reuse, the ingenuity of traditional forms of vernacular making, and an entwined admiration and wonder towards the physical and material world around us.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.