Description
Socrates Sculpture Park, located on the East River waterfront in Queens, was an abandoned landfill until 1986, when a group of artists and community members led by visionary sculptor Mark di Suvero turned its five acres into an open exhibition space and a neighborhood park. Socrates has since transformed the site into a thriving cultural organization dedicated to presenting public art and serving an ever-changing community, and 200,000 annual visitors in the most ethnically diverse place in the world. It represents a distinct voice in the field of public art, as an urban public park, an artist-founded and centered organization, and community-facing social space.
During its 30 years of operation, Socrates has installed over 1,100 large-scale works and projects by internationally acclaimed American artists including Mark di Suvero, Melvin Edwards, Keith Haring, Wangechi Mutu, Alison Saar, Ursula von Rydingsvard, and Nari Ward. It has established a practice of mounting three annual exhibitions: the Socrates Annual, featuring work by artists in the Socrates Fellowship Program; a juried design and build competition; and the spring exhibition, which showcases the work of a single artist or a small group for a thematic exhibition with a strong curatorial vision. Since 2014, Socrates has focused the spring exhibitions on acclaimed but underrepresented contemporary artists, inviting them to create physically ambitious and conceptually unfettered work.
Guided by its most recent strategic plan, Socrates seeks to elevate its curatorial and programmatic profile by producing substantial publications on the spring exhibitions. The proposed grant would fund catalogues for the spring exhibitions of 2018 through 2020, supporting the organization’s first sustained effort to document and disseminate significant content about these important installations.
Catalogues of public art installations have lagged behind those produced for museum exhibitions, in spite of the critical role that the work plays in the art world and in American culture more broadly. This discourse has instead been relegated to a narrow vein of journalism and criticism, or to compendium-style books focused on art controversies. Socrates launched a digital publishing initiative in 2012, but its limited in-house resources confined these on-line catalogues to basic information and installation photographs.
The proposed exhibition catalogues will document, contextualize, and interpret the artists and installations. The catalogues will record and analyze artistic process, which remains a fundamental aspect of all of the activities at Socrates; and essays commissioned from curators and scholars will offer a deeper dive into art historical context, potentially stimulating greater academic interest in the field of public art. Produced largely after the works have gone on view, the books additionally will address the response of the Socrates audience, considering their active engagement and the conversations elicited by the work. Book launch events will be held prior to the closing of the exhibition; books will be available for purchase onsite or through the website, for a modest price. The bulk of the print run will be distributed to colleagues in the field at no cost.
The 2018 spring exhibition will feature the work of Tennessee-born Virginia Overton, who brings her rural working-class upbringing and identity as a gay woman to bear in minimal forms that reference physical labor and construction while questioning contemporary society’s notions about labor and the environment. The 2019 spring exhibition will likely be a group show of work created in response to the current national debates about the history, role, and future of public monuments in the U.S. The project will include opportunities for the public to actively participate in imagining future monuments. The 2020 spring exhibition year will likely be a solo exhibition.
The proposed grant will support research, scholarly essays, three successive part-time curatorial fellows, photography, printing, and distribution.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $150,000 to Socrates Sculpture Park for the Socrates publication program.
Approved by the Board: March 7, 2018
