Image: Socrates Sculpture Park, Parks
Socrates Sculpture Park has announced 'Homecoming: Sanford Biggers', a yearlong exhibition running from July 2026 to June 2027 in Long Island City. The park’s artist page identifies the project as part of its exhibition program and places it within Socrates’ 40th anniversary year. The announcement follows a newsletter note that said the park was welcoming Biggers back for a third Homecoming installation with the arrival of 'Unsui (Mirror)'.
The source material links the new presentation to Biggers’ early public practice at Socrates. The artist page includes 'Terra Mandala' (2001), a poured rubber and plastic installation 30 feet in diameter that the park describes as both a performance space and a stage for breakdancing. According to Socrates, the form is based on a Buddhist mandala, the circular floor pattern used to establish sacred space for meditation. The same page says Biggers’ work often references hip-hop culture, Eastern spiritualism and urban culture.
The park’s newsletter expands that context by describing 'Terra Mandala' as transforming Socrates into a site of dance and ritual when it was first installed, and by saying that 'Unsui (Mirror)' returns to that same ground 25 years later “with something quieter.” The newsletter defines 'unsui' as the Japanese term for “clouds and water,” a phrase used for wandering Zen monks and for the kind of movement that answers to nothing. It says the new work is rendered in sequined surfaces set atop reflective poles that catch light, water and sky.
Socrates’ account presents the installation as a landscape intervention as much as a standalone object. The newsletter says the cloud-like forms will be installed across the park and alongside ongoing shoreline restoration work. It frames the sculptures as a meditation on environmental fragility and a celebration of communal resilience, and as a visual metaphor for renewal, interconnectedness and the cyclical nature of change. Those themes are tied directly to the park’s waterfront setting rather than to any broader claim about Biggers’ career.
The artist biography on the Socrates page is limited but places Biggers in clear professional context. It says he was born in Los Angeles in 1970 and is based in New York. Socrates describes his practice as spanning sculpture, film, painting, textiles and performance, and says he calls it “conceptual patchworking.” The page also lists several honors, including Guggenheim Fellowship status, the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts from the American Academy in Rome, the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and membership in the National Academy of Design.
The same source also notes that Biggers’ work is held in the collections of major institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. On the Socrates page, 'Homecoming: Sanford Biggers' is listed alongside his earlier 2001 fellowship exhibition, 'EAF01: 2001 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition', underscoring the park’s long-running record of presenting the artist’s work.
Socrates Sculpture Park’s own information describes the venue as open daily from 9am to sunset with free admission, and gives its address as 32-01 Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City. The exhibition listing places 'Homecoming: Sanford Biggers' on view from July 2026 through June 2027.
