Socrates Sculpture Park: The Socrates Annual 2019 through Spring, 2020

I Still Remember You Mijo, (Votive Vela), 2019. Jesus Benavente. Metal, wood, resin, fiberglass, and thermachromic pigment. Photograph by Scott Lynch. [Image Description: A text saying “I Still Remember You Mijo” has been made in three-dimensions, rising up from the ground at an angle so it tilts towards the audience member, it is flanked on either side by wings in a similar fashion. The sculpture is monumental in size and is currently hot pink, though it changes color with the atmospheric temperature in Socrates Sculpture Park.]

Each fall, Socrates presents an exhibition of new commissions made by artists awarded ‘The 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.

To hear the artists speak about their work, you can look under their individual their names provided here. The exhibition features: Jesus Benavente, Tecumseh Ceaser (Native Tec), Rachelle Dang, Chris Domenick, Hadi Fallahpisheh, Jes Fan, Hadrien Gérenton & Loup Sarion, Paul Kopkau, Alva Mooses, Marius Ritiu, Martin Roth, Gabriela Salazar, Lucia Thomé, Workers Art Coalition (WAC), and Martina Onyemaechi Crouch-Anyarogbu. 

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.