“EAF16: Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition”

Socrates Sculpture Park

This event has ended.

Socrates Sculpture Park presents the recipients of the 2016 Emerging Artist Fellowship. From June through September, EAF artists work on-site, negotiating the physical and conceptual challenges of production in the park’s outdoor studio space, culminating in EAF16: Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition.

Please join us on Sunday, September 25 from 3 to 6PM for the Opening Reception in the park. EAF16 Fellow Madeline Hollander will present a performance at 4PM (click here for a complete performance schedule) and Director of Exhibitions Jess Wilcox will give an exhibition tour at 4:30PM.

The annual EAF Exhibition is a cornerstone of Socrates Sculpture Park’s robust visual arts programming, widely acclaimed for the ambition, breadth, and innovation of selected contemporary works. A singular opportunity for rising artists to experiment with ambitious, large-scale public art, EAF provides young artists with an open studio, monetary support, and institutional guidance.

Diverse in subject, materials, and approach, each site-specific work will address social, ecological, or political issues that are pertinent to the past, present, and future of the park as it celebrates its 30th anniversary year.

The 2016 Fellows are: Liene Bosquê, Travis Boyer, Andrew Brehm, Lea Cetera, Dachal Choi and Mathew Suen, Onyedika Chuke, Galería Perdida, Dylan Gauthier, Dmitri Hertz, Madeline Hollander, Olalekan Jeyifous, Lia Lowenthal, Sable Elyse Smith, Elizabeth Tubergen, and Bryan Zanisnik.

The 2016 EAF artists were selected through a highly competitive open call process that attracted hundreds of candidates, reviewed by the park’s 2016 curatorial advisors Larissa Harris (Curator, Queens Museum) and Amanda Hunt (Assistant Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem). The EAF exhibition is distinct in its mission to foster individual artist projects rather than present an overarching theme, and the current EAF16 artists will join the ranks of EAF alums such as Hank Willis Thomas (EAF06), Wade Guyton (EAF03), and Sanford Biggers (EAF01).

Among the projects featured in the 2016 exhibition will be Sable Elyse Smith‘s combination of video and signage confronting our conflicting ideas of “the public.” Dachal Choi and Mathew Suen‘s work, pictured above, envisions a fantastical world wherein Socrates Sculpture Park is pulled out of the Earth and floats into the sky above Queens, leaving behind a gaping hole on New York City’s waterfront. Dylan Gauthier‘s Accidental Flight draws upon Alexander Graham Bell’s original proto-flying machines to explore the spiritual, conceptual, and aesthetic implications of aviation. Artist Bryan Zanisnik will scatter life-sized busts of Christopher Walken across the grounds, paying homage to the Astoria-born actor through a farcical narrative that will be portrayed within a kiosk.