Art in the Parks

An augmented reality app that encourages participants to explore and experience local, ecological networks present in Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Cell phones and headphones are used to experience this artwork, which includes mixed-reality animations and storytelling as an overlay to the actual park. The experience is an embodied one, designed to connect humans empathetically with the biodiversity, symbioses, and unseen worlds in public park spaces.

Fantastic ecologies exist everywhere on earth and at many scales, many of which are invisible to us. This artwork is a guided tour which will allow us to inhabit the worlds of multiple species along the trail, allowing them to become visible and “sense-able” to us. The viewer re-enacts stories from the perspectives of non-humans; playing the part of a plant calling out to a bird to help with pest control, an ant planting spring flowers while simultaneously feeding her babies, an underground fungal network delivering goods to struggling trees, and a cormorant searching for a meal in a man-made lake.

There are 8 scenes, each takes place at Willow Lake, on the South end of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The starting point for the app tour is the East entrance of the Pat Dolan Trail.

The free app can be downloaded for iOS or Android. Links here: http://hypernatural.com/bb/

Collaborators include Josh Rodenberg, Danielle McPhatter, and Jayne Kennedy, with additional support from Harvestworks, the New York City Urban Field Station, and the Ohio State University.

The Audubon Mural Project enlists artists to paint climate-threatened birds, such as the Chestnut-sided Warbler, Veery, and Wood Thrush shown here in Cern’s mural Yearly Sanctuary. The bird species featured in the Audubon Mural Project are among the more than half of North American birds identified as climate-threatened by Audubon scientists in the 2014 Birds and Climate Change Report.

This project is presented by The Audubon Mural Project, a collaboration between the National Audubon Society and the Gitler Gallery, with support from the Forest Park Trust and the Dr. E. Lawrence Deckinger Family Foundation.

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh is the NYC Commission on Human Rights’ Public Artist in Residence (PAIR).  A program administered with the Department of Cultural Affairs, PAIR embeds artists within city agencies to address pressing civic issues through creative practice. Fazlalizadeh’s mural features the images of several faces, inspired by local Queens-based women she has met within community conversations, and text capturing the experiences of community members facing the daily indignities of anti-Black racism and sexism. The mural is intended to place, front and center, the voices and images of women of color and challenge societal norms that allow sexism and racism to persist.

This exhibition is presented by the NYC Commission on Human Rights and the Department of Cultural Affairs.

Jose Carlos Casado’s installation reflects typical protest posters that people make for different public manifestations. Where protest signs normally reflect someone’s opinion on a matter, Jose's sculptures become unique portraits of people from within the community. Jose worked with 10 volunteers from the community, capturing images of their palms and running these photos through 3D imaging software, creating an abstraction of the hand. As no two palms are alike, these photos capture the uniqueness of a person. The rear side of each structure also reflects the volunteers; they are painted in the pantone color matching that person’s skin tone and include text about the person it represents.

Participation is a key theme throughout Jose public artwork. The volunteers he worked with became an important part of this piece and he plans on donating the individual artworks back to the volunteers once the work is removed from the park. This work also allows a viewer to connect with it through an interactive augmented reality app that Jose designed.

This project is part of Queens Council on the Arts' public art program ArtSite.

Each fall Socrates presents an exhibition of new commissions made by artists awarded the Park’s Socrates Annual Fellowship. Produced on-site in our outdoor studio over the course of the summer, these artworks engage the Park’s unique history, landscape, and surrounding community. For the 2019 exhibition, projects range from a soundscape conflating the sounds of animals and man-made objects to a monument to the invasive Ailanthus plant. Approaches vary among collaborative investigations of authorship and visibility, the re-contextualization of domestic motifs, and the examination of biological material, among many others. Ranging from fantastical to anecdotal to pedagogical, this year’s artists use a variety of narrative strategies. Several artist projects examine storytelling’s many material manifestations, from an homage to a Native American myth in which North America exists on a turtle’s back to a suggestion that a giant has fallen asleep under the Park’s blanket of grass, its exposed nose becoming refuge for a wandering monitor lizard.

Participating artists are recipients of ‘The 2019 Socrates Annual Fellowship’ and were selected by Socrates’ Curator & Director of Exhibitions, Jess Wilcox, and the Park’s 2019 Curatorial Advisors – Rosario Güiraldes, Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center and Jennie Lamensdorf, Bay Area Lead at Facebook’s Art Department.The 2019 Socrates Annual artists are Jesus Benavente, Tecumseh Ceaser (NativeTec), Martina Onyemeachi Crouch-Anyarogbu (MOCA), Rachelle Dang, Chris Domenick, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Jes Fan, Hadrien Gérenton & Loup Sarion, Paul Kopkau, Alva Mooses, Marius Ritiu, Martin Roth, Gabriela Salazar, Lucia Thomé, and Workers Art Coalition (WAC).

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park.

Consisting of over 90 images curated by award winning photographer and teaching artist Robin Dahlberg, this exhibition presents the work of over 60 residents of Long Island City’s Queensbridge Houses through which they describe their Queensbridge - the people, the spirit and the vitality of this community. The selected images have been printed on vinyl banners hung on the fence lining Vernon Boulevard, directly across the street from the largest public housing development in the country. The F-Stop Project and exhibition aim to challenge mainstream notions about Queensbridge Houses and public housing in general and to give residents the tools and platforms to frame the narrative about their community.

This exhibition is presented by the Josephine Herrick Project. The F-Stop Project is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The Noguchi Museum’s Teen Advisory Board, led by Sejin Park, collected stories from Long Island City community members on how they advocate for an equitable future by supporting each other as strangers, neighbors, and friends. These stories are displayed on vinyl banners along the fence of Rainey Park.

This project is presented by the Noguchi Museum’s Teen Advisory Board and the Long Island City Partnership.

Las Palabras son Muros [Pavilion for Astoria] (The Words are Walls [Pavilion for Astoria]) by artist Rafael Domenech is a collectively authored dynamic sculptural “book” project. Scaffolding and construction mesh, provisional materials emblematic of the changing urban landscape, comprise the two semicircular towers of this outdoor piece. The mesh “pages” hanging from the scaffolding feature graphically dynamic laser-cut texts that rotate throughout the exhibition. Domenech gleans these texts from visitors to the Park. In its totality, experimental digital graphic technique and chance composition aggregates into an amalgamation of voices throughout the 16-week exhibition. After the completion of the exhibition, Domenech will produce a book that combines the texts and includes reused elements of the weekly mesh installments. The https://socratessculpturepark.org/exhibition/las-palabras-son-muros/result will be a collection of fragmented perspectives conjoined into a new whole.

This exhibition is presented by Socrates Sculpture Park .