Image: Jeremy John Kaplan, Rest in Tension, 2026
Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, will unveil the second group of works in Artists Choose Artists: The Socrates Annual Fellowship Anniversary on Saturday, 31 October 2026, during its annual Halloween Harvest Festival. The new installations are by Xayvier Haughton and Andrew Robinson, the fellowship's Fall 2026 cohort.
The multi-part exhibition marks 30 years of the Socrates Annual Fellowship, which the park says has long given early-career artists funding and on-site fabrication support to produce ambitious public works, from outdoor sculpture and living ecological installations to performance and community-based projects. It also coincides with the park's own 40th anniversary in 2026.
For this edition, Socrates introduced its first nomination-based selection. The title recalls Artists Choose Artists, the park's third exhibition, held in 1987: artists who had previously shown at Socrates were invited to put forward others for whom the fellowship could make a decisive difference. A committee of artists, former fellows and leaders of New York cultural organisations then chose ten projects from more than 100 submissions, on the strength of each artist's work and its potential to engage with the social, ecological and historical layers of the site.
The ten 2026–2028 fellows are Mrinalini Aggarwal, Cynthia Alberto, Francheska Alcántara, Josué Guarionex, Xayvier Haughton, Vaishnavi Ilankamban, Manami Ishimura, Jeremy John Kaplan, Nicole Mouriño and Andrew Robinson. Their projects are built on site and revealed in stages, accumulating across the park over the two-year cycle. Guarionex, Kaplan and Mouriño, who is also the 2026 Devra Freelander Artist Fellow, formed the first cohort, presented at a summer solstice opening on 21 June. Alcántara and Ilankamban follow in spring 2027, and Aggarwal, Alberto and Ishimura in autumn 2027.
The exhibition runs until 9 April 2028. Socrates Sculpture Park is an outdoor public space on the East River waterfront, and further performances and public programmes linked to the fellowship are to be announced.
