Summer Solstice
Thursday, June 20 | 5 – 8:30pm
RSVP not required but encouraged! HERE
Bring your friends and family to the Park to celebrate the longest day of the year! Come and see the works of Suchitra Matttai: We are nomads, we are dreamers and the first cohort of 2024 Socrates Artist Fellows. Watch performances and activations by the Artist Fellows, dance to the music of DJ Cisne, and enjoy food by Kinky Taco as the sun sets, and more!
Event Schedule
5:00 – 6:00PM
Cyanotype Print: What if there was room for everyone? with Landon Newton
What if borders, edges, or margin species could be considered sites of support, nourishment, and care? Join Fellow Landon Newton in making a large-scale cyanotype print of her installation TILT (what if these plants get out).
6:00 – 7:00PM
Solar Power: Land walk, talk and rituals with Kimberly Chou Tsun An + Daria Garina
A series of accessible rituals to engage with land and plant comrades at Socrates site, tapping into the Summer Solstice’s prime yang energy (the principle most commonly known in Chinese medicine, as well as other practices, that symbolizes light, heat, heaven, fire, and positivity). Come with a sense of curiosity and openness for gentle movement, visualization, plant touching, and rose smelling.
7:00 – 7:15PM
Juan Deere; Vick Quezada
As part of a solo performance, Vick Quezada (they/them) explores the history and politics of land by mowing the grass at Socrates Park. As Quezada pushes the iconic green lawnmower, a three-tiered vibrant grass garden is mounted atop the machine. Down below, steel mowing blades vigorously cut through the turf. In this extraordinary performance, Quezada draws attention to the issues of labor, citizenship, belonging in proximity to occupied lands, namely the homelands of the Lenape. Through this multimedia project, Vick Quezada not only illuminates these complex topics but also honors agricultural technologies developed by Mexican Indigenous people.
7:30 – 8:00PM
Awakening Ending Endless with Mamoun Nukumanu
Play your dreams into the roots of the nursery ring through the central resonator to create an emergent soundscape. “What song of healing would you play into the body of the earth so that it may be written in cells?” At the end of the performance, we will plant sunflowers from seed wrapped in biodegradable notes for things to be decomposed and recomposed.
About the Socrates Artist Fellowship Program
Each year Socrates presents an exhibition of new commissions made by artists selected through an Open Call. Featuring new works produced on-site by the Artist Fellows, The Socrates Annual 2024 exhibition addresses the theme of ‘Invasive Species,’ considering the legacies of species migration alongside sociopolitical themes and myths of invasion related to people, animals, and plants. These projects consider the politics of settlement, illuminate ancestral agricultural technologies, facilitate human – land interactions and propose symbiotic resonances for earth’s future inhabitants.
About the Artists
Kimberly Chou Tsun An (she/her) is a writer, cultural worker, organizer, and community artist. Her work explores the connections between people, plants, land, and ancestral and cultural practices — those we inherit, those we choose or grow into, and those we cultivate together in community. Relationships are our greatest resource. Her projects, almost always conducted in collaboration, often take the form of public programs: workshops, walks, and collective altar building or ceremony. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY with deep roots in Detroit, MI and Taiwan. She can be found on instagram @kimberchou
Daria Garina (he/him) (workshop co-facilitator) is an anti-disciplinary artist committed to ending intergenerational cycles of violence. At Accountability Mapping he teaches transformative Justice through the body. And at Red Rabbit he helps BIPOC chart the course of their destiny with Chinese Astrology. www.redrabbitastrology.com
Landon Newton (she/her) is an artist, horticulturist, and independent researcher. Her interdisciplinary practice considers the reciprocal relationships between plants and people. Her work incorporates installation, site-specific works, and research to explore themes of permanence, historical distortion, care, and maintenance using living plants as materials and participants. She received a BA in history from Smith College and an MFA in photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Frieze New York, local_30 with A.I.R. Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, WIENWOCHE, Vienna, Austria, CICA Museum, South Korea, EcoFutures: Deep Trash, London, and Open Engagement, Queens Museum, Queens, NY. Recent awards include an Emergency Artist Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and On Our Radar 2021 from Creative Capital. She has been an artist in residence at Denniston Hill, NY; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA; the Studios at MASS MoCA, MA; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY;and Marble House Project, Dorset, VT. Peer-reviewed publications include, you are here, The Journal of Creative Geography, University of Arizona (Fall, 2023) and Cultivate Journal, The Feminist Journal of the Center of Women’s Studies, University of York (2022). Her work has been discussed in Gagosian Quarterly, On Seeing, Substack by Roxane Gay, Artnet, and Hyperallergic. Landon works and gardens in Brooklyn, NY. @theabortionherbgarden
Mamoun Nukumanu (he/him) is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist that guides living trees in temporal dances. Born on Long Island, Nukumanu’s work explores the semiotic entanglement of ecology, mind and body to create doorways to other worlds. Deeply passionate about ecological regeneration, he imagines the growth of symbiotic futures through the reforestation of the earth and the reestablishment of the ecology commons through the collective cultivation of living tree cities. Nukumanu graduated from NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2019 and proceeded to work at Terreform ONE in Brooklyn for five years on the design of a living tree house prototype. He plants his tree sculptures in convergence with the will of fate, with work currently growing across the world, including: New York, Amsterdam, Puerto Rico, and Portugal.
Vick Quezada (they/them) currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Art Practice at Hampshire College in Western Massachusetts and lives in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2022, Quezada was a Fellow at Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. In 2021, they received the prestigious US Latinx Art Forum Fellowship co-sponsored by Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship and the Ford Foundation. In 2020 Quezada was hand selected from a “large-scale survey” of 40 emerging artists from the US and Puerto Rico to be featured in El Museo del Barrio’s groundbreaking, La Trienal. In 2019, Quezada was the artist-in-residence at New York University’s Latinx Project. Quezada was selected as the University Massachusetts at Amherst Contemporary Arts Curatorial Fellow in 2018 along with Fred Wilson, who curated the show “Five Takes on African Art”. Their work has been featured in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Art News, Trans Studies Quarterly:Duke University Press, and Remezcla. Quezada received a Bachelors from University Texas at El Paso and their MFA from University Massachusetts at Amherst. @vickquezada
DJ Cisne
From cumbia to drum and bass, their sound is a vibrant mosaic of the city’s energy. As part of Body Hack, they champion mutual aid across the US & Latin America. Let Cisne’s beats take you on a journey of abundance and joy. Tune in on SoundCloud to catch their wave! @cisne.world