No need to bring an umbrella, but it’s raining art in Long Island City these days.
Outdoor, indoor, local, international, group, individual. It’s all coming to Western Queens.
The first opening reception is for the annual Socrates Fellows show at Socrates Sculpture Park (32-01 Vernon Blvd.) on Saturday, Sept. 14, from 3 pm to 6 pm. (Activations and performances will be presented through the afternoon.)
Selected via an open call with more than 250 applicants, the nine displaying Fellows – Kimberly Chou Tsun An, Jill Cohen-Nuñez, Utsa Hazarika, Landon Newton, Mamoun Nukumanu, Juan-Manuel Pinzon, Vick Quezada, Petra Szilagyi, Nala C. Turner – will unveil their ecology-focused, site-specific pieces. This cohort harnessed the peak spring and summer growing seasons to create living installations that engage the public space’s past, present, and future inhabitants within its former industrial wetland landscape. The show marks the culmination of the 2024 Socrates Annual Fellowship, which has supported early career artists every year since 2001.
Art patrons have a few days of downtime, then it’s off to SculptureCenter (44-19 Purves St.), where an opening reception for two new exhibitions is scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 18, from 6 pm to 8 pm.
Bastien Gachet hand-produces objects and installation elements across media. In this In Practice show, he collects and organizes these contrasting modes into what he calls an “object-based dramaturgy.”
At the same time, Álvaro Urbano – a sculptor, performance artist, and writer critical to New York scenes in the 1970s and ’80s – posthumously displays Tableau Vivant, a piece by sculptor Scott Burton (1939–1989) that was rescued from destruction and now faces an uncertain future. The work was originally installed in Midtown Manhattan’s Equitable Center in 1986, but it was dismantled during a 2020 renovation.
Attendees can expect to contemplate a semi-circular marble seating area, onyx lamps, a marble centerpiece, plants, and a polished bronze circle delimiting the sculptural plane, all set into a floor inlaid with red granite tiles. It’s all positioned under an illuminated drop ceiling and alongside botanical sculptures in painted metal that reference Central Park’s spring flora in their blooming and decay.
A few more days of downtime, and MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Ave.) unveils Pass Carry Hold, a retrospective by artists-in-residence at Studio Museum in Harlem, on Sept. 26. Featuring sonia louise davis, Malcolm Peacock, and Zoë Pulley, this exhibition is the sixth presentation as part of a multiyear collaboration between Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.
Editor’s note: Two amplificatons. First, Socrates unveiled the 2024 projects by Chou Tsun An, Newton, Nukumanu, and Quezada in June, and they are still there. On Sept. 14, the public gets to see the works by Cohen-Nuñez, Hazarika, Pinzon, Szilagyi, and Turner for the first time. Second, Urbano is no longer alive; Tableau Vivant is based on work he did years ago.
Top image: Socrates Fellows;
bottom image: Álvaro Urbano