Socrates Sculpture Park is located on the East River waterfront of an industrial area of Queens, the most culturally diverse county in the United States. The Park was once an abandoned landfill and dumpsite until 1986 when a group of artists and community members, led by visionary sculptor Mark di Suvero, transformed its five acres into an open exhibition space and neighborhood park.

Over nearly 40 years, Socrates has transformed the park into a thriving cultural hub, supported the exhibition of public art by emerging and acclaimed artists, and served a broad and ever-changing community through diverse and accessible arts programming, education, and unique cultural experiences spanning an array of performing arts genres. This breadth of cultural activity enlivens the Park and creates a vibrant, welcoming environment that is completely free and accessible 365 days a year.

Saturday program: 3-5pm

Socrates Sculpture Park presents Historias Entrecruzadas: In the Dome with artists Natalia Nakazawa, dre jácome, and Matt Mottel. Moderated by Meghana Karnik, this conversation addresses the importance of telling our own stories in three perspectives rooted in social architecture, oral history, and community organizing. As more people live under threat of deportation and organized abandonment — what crucial learnings have arisen through the artists’ participatory projects?

Natalia Nakazawa engages people in creating spaces of resistance through collective map making experiences, recording oral histories, and 3D scanning objects through Our Stories of Migration. She is a Socrates Sculpture Park 2025 Artist Fellow.

dre jácome’s interactive storytelling installation, Earthseed, weaves together land-based, Indigenous, and contemporary technologies — inspired by temazcal ceremonies, ecological design, and the survival cosmologies envisioned in Octavia Butler’s Parable series. Modeled after the protective form of the pinecone, which opens and closes in response to its environment, Earthseed encodes intimate stories of survival onto seedlight sculptures, functioning as an emergent archive that reveals itself only through chosen protocols of entry. She is a 2025 Rhizome Fellow at Flux Factory.

Matthew Mottel builds geodesic domes as a performance architecture, based on Syeus Mottel’s (father) 1970’s photojournalism of Loisaida cultural organization CHARAS, who built geodesic domes in collaboration with Buckminster Fuller.

Meghana Karnik is Curator & Exhibitions Director at Flux Factory.

Contact info@ohny.org by Friday, October 11th to request additional accessibility accommodations.

This is an outdoor park. Wearing sunscreen and/or bug repellent is recommended.