90°, Partly Cloudy Dall'alba al tramonto

Chakaia Booker Headlines Socrates Sculpture Park’s 40th Anniversary Season

Aprile 6, 2026

For the first time in the Fellowship’s 30-year history, Socrates turned to its alumni network to nominate the next generation of artists, selecting ten fellows for an expanded 2026–2028 cycle. 

The season also introduces Homecoming, a new alumni series honoring artists foundational to the Park’s legacy.

Long Island City, NY (APRIL 6, 2026) — Socrates Sculpture Park announces its 2026 season, marking the Park’s 40th anniversary with a constellation of new exhibitions, commissions, and public programs guided by a single animating idea: Ricominciare. What started in 1986 as an act of radical land reclamation, the transformation of an illegal dumpsite into a site for artistic experimentation, continues four decades later through programs that extend the Park’s founding commitment to artists, community, and public art as essential to civic health and well-being.

At the center of this anniversary season is Artisti scelgono artisti: Anniversario della borsa di studio annuale Socrates, a landmark reimagining of the Park’s longest-running artist program. For the first time in the Fellowship’s 30-year history, Socrates turned to its alumni network to shape the program’s next chapter. In a nomination-based process that echoes Artists Choose Artists, the Park’s third-ever exhibition in 1987, more than 100 former fellows and exhibiting artists were invited to nominate peers for whom the Fellowship would represent a pivotal opportunity. The result is a cohort of ten artists whose practices span sculpture, installation, ceramics, weaving, community-engaged practice, and ecological inquiry.

“Socrates was built by artists as a platform to nurture their careers and to co-author what the Park could become in collaboration with Mark di Suvero, our founder. That has always been the fundamental truth of this place,” said Shaun Leonardo, Artist and Executive Director, Socrates Sculpture Park. “For our 40th anniversary, we honor that truth by asking the artists who shaped this Park to help determine its future. Artists Choose Artists is not simply a new selection model, it is a return to the spirit that founded Socrates, and an invitation to begin again with the voices that are central to our origin and will help determine our work into the future. The ten fellows in this cohort carry forward a lineage of experimentation, care, and public commitment that has defined this site for four decades. We are proud to support and present their work.” 

2026 – 2028 Socrates Annual Fellows

The 2026–2028 Artist Fellows are Mrinalini Aggarwal, Cynthia Alberto, Francheska Alcántara, Josué Guarionex, Xayvier Haughton, Vaishnavi Ilankamban, Manami Ishimura, Jeremy John Kaplan, Nicole Mouriño, and Andrew Robinson. Selected for the artistic merit of their work and their projects’ potential to respond to the social, ecological, and historical dimensions of the Park, the fellows will engage on individualized timelines, choosing their own seasons for research, fabrication, installation, and exhibition between Spring 2026 and Fall 2028. Projects will accumulate in the Park across the two-year cycle, offering audiences a living record of sustained artistic development.

This expanded model also reflects a deeper institutional investment in artists. Beginning in 2026, each Fellow will receive a $10,000 production grant, a $4,000 artist honorarium, access to technical services and production support valued between $8,000 and $10,000, and an additional fund reserved for individualized support based on each artist’s needs.

Fellowship Anniversary projects were selected from over 100 submissions by a committee comprising Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, Chief of Programs and Partnerships at the American LGBTQ+ Museum; kier blake, Co-Founder and Director of NYC Programs at Earth Convergence; Carlos Jiménez Cahua, Artist and Socrates Fellow 2018; Kimberly Chou Tsun An, Artist and Socrates Fellow 2024; Dave Harper, Executive Director of the New York City AIDS Memorial; Jamie Maleszka-Tate, Director of Creative Arts at The Fortune Society; Prerana Reddy, Associate Director for Artist Programs at Recess; and Sofia Reeser del Rio, Curator and Associate Director of Programs at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center.

Sofia Reeser del Rio, curator, writer and educator & Fellowship Anniversary juror said: “It was an honor to contribute to Socrates Sculpture Park’s 40th anniversary, a pivotal moment in its ongoing commitment to artists, public space, and community. The jury process was both rigorous and inspiring; the strength of proposals made selection especially challenging, and it was a privilege to be in dialogue with fellow jurors around such thoughtful and ambitious proposals.” 

Ritorno a casa

The 40th anniversary season also introduces Homecoming, a new series of engagements inviting alumni artists to return to the Park that helped shape their practices.

The first Homecoming installation brings internationally acclaimed sculptor Chakaia Booker back to Socrates with an exhibition of two monumental works, Serendipity (1998) and Gridlock (2008), on view from May 2026 through April 2027. The series continues with Sanford Biggers, whose Unsui (Mirror) and early Socrates work Terra Mandala (2001) will be on view from July 2026 through June 2027. Additional details regarding Homecoming installations will be announced through the season.

Reclaimed Futures: Socrates & Materials for the Arts

Since the earliest days of the Park, Materials for the Arts (MFTA), New York City’s premier creative reuse center, has served as a close partner, providing materials for artists’ projects and community-based programming. For its 40th anniversary, Socrates honors this relationship with a new series of co-commissions offering MFTA artists-in-residence the opportunity to extend their studio practices into the public realm. The first of these collaboratively supported projects is by artist sTo Len, on view from August 2026 through April 2027.

2026 Public Programming Season

Complimenting its exhibition program, Socrates announces a full season of free public programming beginning in April and running through the fall. 

The season opens with the fifth annual Earth Month Convergence (April 18–19), a youth-led gathering co-presented with Earth Convergence that brings together organizers, educators, artists, healers, and families around land stewardship, food justice, and cultural memory. From there, the calendar unfolds across months of performance, education, and community activation including the Metropolitan Opera’s annual free SummerStage concert; Crossroads, a two-evening interdisciplinary performance series presented by Pioneers Go East Collective; Ballet Folklórico Mexicano de Nueva York’s annual Guelaguetza Festival; Cuerpxs en Resonancia, a three-part bilingual movement-and-sound workshop series presented by MexFest during Hispanic Heritage Month; Hip to Hip Theatre Company’s free Shakespeare in the Park productions of Macbeth and As You Like It; the Queensboro Dance Festival; Field Guide workshops co-presented with The Noguchi Museum; a Climate Week community cleanup; Astoria Pride’s Picnic in the Park; and Party in the Park: Trio Under the Triboro, a day-long performance art festival marking the shared anniversaries of Franklin Furnace, Materials for the Arts, and Socrates Sculpture Park.

The Park’s Healthy Living Series returns for the summer with free weekly sunset meditation sessions led by Mindful Astoria (Tuesdays, May through August), Vinyasa yoga classes with Astoria Yoga (Sundays, June through September), and free kayaking at Hallet’s Cove with LIC Community Boathouse (weekends, June through September). The season closes with the beloved Halloween Harvest Festival on October 31. All programs are free and open to the public. For the complete schedule and RSVP details, click here.

About the 2026–2028 Artist Fellows

Spring 2026 Cohort

Josué Guarionex is a self-taught sculptor whose formation began within his family: his mother is a fashion designer and his father was a woodworker and luthier. La Carreta Made a U-Turn takes its title from Jesús “Tato” Laviera’s 1979 poetry collection, written in response to René Marqués’s play La Carreta (1953). The sculpture, a full-scale cart constructed in modular wood and iron and shaped into a “U,” symbolizes the constant movement of migrant communities.

Jeremy John Kaplan is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers on public space as a site of collective endurance and durational commitment. Riposa nella Tensione unifies basketball goals with weathered nets collected from neighboring public parks that are woven into a single suspended hammock. Carrying the embedded history of community play, the piece emphasizes interconnectivity, reciprocity, and shared support through interaction and play. 

Nicole Mouriño is a Cuban-American artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her large-scale paintings, initiated in charcoal, sealed in polymers, and finished in oil or cement, depict merging understandings of beauty, desire, and identity. Massage Core is a communal sculpture designed for anxiety reduction, massage, pain management, and physical therapy. Composed of ceramic tiles, its textured surface draws a parallel to the bumpy pillars of MTA subway platforms and their use by the artist as a personal massage tool. 

Fall 2026 Cohort

Xayvier Haughton is a Jamaican-born visual artist who merges traditional and contemporary techniques to create powerful altarpieces and installations that reflect a creolized spiritual and aesthetic language within Caribbean identity. Sentinel of Passage is a monumental sculptural figure that stands as witness to an enduring presence shaped by migration, labor, and cultural inheritance. Constructed from steel, reclaimed wood, and concrete, the hybrid structure draws from Caribbean craft traditions and urban construction histories, holding multiple temporalities within a single body.  

Andrew Robinson emerged from the geography of 1980s New York, a landscape of graffiti, ACT UP, and the Tompkins Square riots, finding a lifeline in an apprenticeship at an Anglo-Japanese ceramics studio that provided the fundamental knowledge of kiln-building and the discipline of daily making. Bellwether is a practical structure and a call to action featuring a steel armature reminiscent of galvanized pipe playground jungle gyms, supporting a series of ceramic bells. Working with local communities and public school students, Robinson employs maiolica glazes, a tradition dating back 2,000 years to Persia and adapted by cultures from Italy to the Americas.

Spring 2027 Cohort

Francheska Alcántara is a queer Afro-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist whose work plays at the intersection of gesture, ritual, and myth within the Black diasporic imagination. She reworks and transforms artifacts including brown paper bags, Hispano cuaba soap, dominoes, and organic residues through sewing, folding, cutting, burning, and layering, interrogating how these materials create social meaning and cultural norms. I Pulse, I Sway, I Play is a sculpture series that reimagines the familiar domino as both game and cultural artifact. The installation features five custom-made dominoes ranging in height from three to six feet, constructed from metal, foam, mesh, cement, and paint. 

Vaishnavi (Vaishu) Ilankamban is a New York-based woodworker and visual artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. If you stand here you will hear her is a sculptural installation consisting of a series of concrete drainage stones with polished flat surfaces that subtly reflect the sky. Referencing an ancient drainage system, the work alludes to Sunswick Creek’s prior existence in the Park and its submergence into pipes underground. 

Fall 2027 Cohort

Mrinalini Aggarwal makes drawings and sculptures from foraged trees and a bioplastic she synthesizes from waste grass clippings. Weaving together biophilosophy, decolonial theory, architecture, material science, and speculative fiction, her work interrogates the capitalist and colonial logics embedded in the global lawn. FIELD [monsoon] is an architectural fragment becoming living organism: arched walls infilled with translucent drawings of grass and trees, a thatched roof that gathers rain, and a plant cradled in a vessel of grass-based bioplastic that gradually outgrows and ruptures its container. Recalling monsoon architectures of South Asia, the sculpture becomes a metabolic structure whose bioplastic walls, embedded with seeds, decompose into soil as the plant thrives, proposing an aesthetic of life rooted in vegetal time.

Cynthia Alberto is an artist, designer, and the founder of the Brooklyn-based healing arts studio Weaving Hand. Her interdisciplinary practice bridges traditional and contemporary weaving techniques through social practice and community-based engagement. Weaving House – A Home of Sanctuary is a site-specific, participatory installation centered on a large communal loom surrounded by smaller tapestry looms available for public use. Functioning as both artwork and refuge, the Weaving House offers a space to slow down and reconnect through the tactile, rhythmic act of weaving.

Manami Ishimura is a visual artist and educator whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Shiga Kogen Roman Art Museum (Nagano, Japan), Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, and the Fresh Winds Art Biennale (Suðurnesjabaer, Iceland). Weaving the Unseen is a series of sculptures inspired by komomaki (菰巻き), a Japanese horticultural technique in which trees are wrapped with woven straw mats for protection during seasonal change. Requiring communal labor, this ancient practice cultivates harmony between care, time, and ecology within the urban context of Queens.   

About the Socrates Annual Fellowship

For three decades, the Socrates Annual Fellowship has embodied the Park’s founding commitment to artistic experimentation, excellence, and care. The Fellowship remains one of New York City’s most vital platforms for early career artists to create ambitious public works and develop their practices in dialogue with community, environment, and place. Since 2001, 284 artists have participated in the Fellowship, many going on to receive significant public commissions and recognition. Alumni include Sable Elyse Smith (2016), David Brooks (2009), Leilah Babirye (2018), Orly Genger (2004), Sanford Biggers (2001), and Torkwase Dyson (2015). The Fellowship Open Call will resume in the Fall of 2027.

Support

Tutti i programmi al Socrates Sculpture Park sono gratuiti e resi possibili, in parte, dal supporto dell'AG Foundation, Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Charina Endowment Fund, City Parks Foundation, Con Edison, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Sidney E. Frank Foundation, Stuart and Maxine Frankel Foundation, Ford Foundation, J. Paul Getty Trust, The Goldstone Family Foundation, William Talbott Hillman Foundation, Hyde & Watson Foundation, Kite Key Foundation, Lambent Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Mathis-Pfohl Foundation, Mellon Foundation, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Molly Blank Fund, Silman, A TYLin Company, Margaret Silva Fund, TD Charitable Foundation, nonché dal Consiglio di Amministrazione del Socrates Sculpture Park e dai nostri numerosi generosi donatori individuali.

I programmi di Socrates sono anche supportati, in parte, da fondi pubblici del Presidente del Queens Borough Donovan Richards; dal NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, in collaborazione con il New York City Council, dal New York State Council on the Arts; dal NYC Department of Parks & Recreation; e dal National Endowment for the Arts.

Il supporto in natura è generosamente fornito da Spacetime C.C.

Socrates Sculpture Park acknowledges the generous support provided by the Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY). As a coalition of small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts organizations, CANNY is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of arts nonprofits throughout New York. For more information about CANNY, please visit https://can-ny.org/.

About Socrates Sculpture Park

Socrates Sculpture Park is an internationally recognized outdoor museum and public park located on the waterfront of Long Island City, Queens. Since 1986, when artists and community members transformed an abandoned landfill and illegal dumpsite into an open studio and exhibition space for artists, Socrates has been dedicated to supporting artists in the production and exhibition of public artworks. Today, the Park’s six-acre site serves as one of New York City’s premier destinations for free outdoor art, education, and community engagement, welcoming over 200,000 visitors annually.

Media Inquiries and Images

Contact: press@socratessculpturepark.org. | Press images are available here. | Artist headshots, and additional materials are available upon request.

Follow Socrates
Instagram: @socratespark
Facebook: /socratessculpturepark
#SocratesAnnual2026 #BeginAgain

Image: Chakaia Booker, Serendipity, 1998

Contrast
Text Size