Meg Webster’s Concave Room for Bees is on view until March at Socrates Sculpture Park

Meg Webster, Concave Room For Bees, 2016-2017. Photograph courtesy of Socrates Sculpture Park. [image description: a rammed earth sculpture of a circular garden with a variety of flowers and plants is placed within a larger park, in the background is Manhattan and the day is slightly cloudy]

2016 grantee Socrates Sculpture Park staged LANDMARK, the park’s 30th anniversary exhibition was comprised of eight new commissions and artist projects that respond directly to the park’s unique ecology and social role in the local community. Though the exhibition ended, Meg Webster’s Concave Room for Bees ison view until March 30. This living sculpture and circular earthen bowl, measures 70-feet in diameter, comprises of more than 400 cubic yards of fertile soil reaching six-feet high. It planted with hundreds of flowers, herbs, and shrubs that attract pollinating creatures

Several artists also contributed subtle interventions that address the park’s social role: customized caution tape by Brendan Fernandes confounded an administrative mechanism, provoking questions about the language of authority and assumptions about boundaries while Cary Leibowitz emblazoned the park’s Bobcat loader with playful bumper stickers that undercut the seriousness of this prototypical emblem of masculinity. Socrates’s status as both a social space and place for making was highlighted through Open Seating, a series of open design chairs created by Jonathan Odom and painted by volunteers, staff and youth participants in the park’s education programs.