Free with RSVP
FF@50 / MFTA@50 / SSP@40
Party in the Park is a day-long performance art festival presented in collaboration with Franklin Furnace and Materials for the Arts. Rooted in the belief that artists thrive within a strong cultural ecosystem, the festival celebrates the decades-long partnership between three Queens-based arts organizations committed to providing artists with resources, space, opportunity, and community.
A milestone year for each organization—Socrates Sculpture Park’s 40th anniversary and Materials for the Arts’ and Franklin Furnace’s 50th anniversary — the festival brings together their shared communities for a dynamic day of live performance, music, and public engagement along Socrates’ waterfront.
Curated by Francheska Alcántara and titled Performaxxing, the program will feature bold, body-based, durational performances that embrace a more-is-more aesthetic as both symptom and material of contemporary life. Performaxxing asks a single, unresolved question: what is revealed when we take the self all the way to the maximum, and what, then, is destroyed?
More than a party, Party in the Park is a celebration of three longtime Queens-based arts organizations whose enduring partnership has strengthened New York City’s cultural landscape for decades. It is an opportunity to honor artistic collaboration, champion creative risk-taking, and reaffirm the enduring role of public space in supporting artists and nourishing communities.
Artists:
Itala Aguilera
Wearing an outfit made of edible fabric, three performers will cut away pieces to eat and share with the audience until the entire outfit is been consumed.
Crackhead Barney
The Park temporarily becomes the territory of a fictional immigration-processing system. Instead of constructing a literal detention center, Crackhead Barney creates an institution that moves.
Jake Brush w/ Candystore & Mike Feswick
A stacking contest while reciting MTV True Life episode titles as displaced confessions, with the winner earning a minor “special power” to sabotage the karaoke number that follows.
kara lynch
Keening is a sonic and somatic invitation to wail, mourn, and weep together in public, gathered at a geographical sinkhole in the Park as a metaphor for our personal and collective grief.
zavé martohardjono
An operatic lament set to a stitched-together track of disco and house singers’ wails, addressing queer emotional and physical labor under political persecution.
Reed Rushes
Exploring climate change, hypermasculinity, denial, and extraction, drag king Stan unravels through movement, clowning, and sound.
Sandy Williams IV
Pushing physical limits by playing guitar and repeating a single line from Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” until exhaustion.
Coco Villa
Fruitflesh explores how repetition and endurance operate as forms of lumination and catharsis.
Music by Madre Guía
Franklin Furnace’s mission is to present, preserve, interpret, educate, and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, ephemerality, or politically unpopular content. The organization provides physical and virtual venues for the presentation of time-based art, including artists’ books and periodicals, performance art, installation art, and unforeseen contemporary avant-garde artforms; and undertakes other activities related to these purposes. Franklin Furnace is dedicated to serving early-career artists, cultivating appreciation of avant-garde art for all, and fostering artists’ zeal to circulate ideas.
Materials for the Arts is New York City’s premier creative reuse center, which provides NYC arts nonprofits, public schools and City agencies with access to free materials. We strive to keep these valuable items from entering the landfill and put them into the hands of arts professionals, educators, and students across the five boroughs.
Itala Aguilera was born and raised in Mexico City. Her work is currently centered on finding new ways to undress by transforming the materiality of her clothes, which has led her to experimentation with different media including: water-soluble, heat-reactive, edible, and natural materials; electronics; performance; and video. In 2025, she was awarded a New York State Council on the Arts grant, through which she produced her solo exhibition Tierra Mojada (Wet Land) at Flux IV. She was also a Work-in-Progress resident at the Textile Arts Center, where she presented her live performance Pearls (a thermodynamic striptease) with support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Crackhead Barney was born in Jamaica, Queens to strict religious parents that immigrated to America from Northern Nigeria. She was raised in a one bedroom apartment with her siblings in an era before wokeness and identity politics ruled the cultural landscape and was always taunted for her immigrant African roots and dark complexion. She studied Fine Arts and Media at Hunter College and was told her artwork wasn’t shit. Rejected from museums and galleries, she decided to take matters into her own hands and use the streets of New York City as her canvas and paint pictures with her body across the landscape without the need to satisfy the desires of cultural institutions. She began the Crackhead Barney and Friends account on Instagram and Tik Tok and began to develop a cult of personality which has been supportive of her creative practice since.
Jake Brush is an artist living in New York. He is interested in reality television, gossip, and interpersonal conflicts, and works in video, performance, sculpture and installation. His recent work has been exhibited at Wave Hill, Duplex, The Shed, International Objects, Below Grand, The Emily Harvey Foundation, Nina Johnson Gallery, MIX Film Festival, and Electronic Arts Intermix. He has participated in the residency programs Shandaken: Storm King, Signal Culture, and the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred State. His work has been featured in BOMB and Cultured Magazine. His first European solo exhibition Mall, Interrupted opened with Kunstplaats Vonk (Hasselt, Belgium) in May 2025.
kara lynch, a time-based artist, lives en exilio in el Bronx and has cultural commitments in Indian Territory and New Orleans/Bulbancha. Conjuring autonomy for Black and Indigenous people across Diaspora, kara’s art practice is re-memory, vision, and movement. Collective feminist practice and social intervention animate lynch’s aesthetic/political explorations of time + space. lynch is an anchor artist for INVISIBLE – episodic, multi-site installations excavating the terror and resilient beauty of Black-Indigenous experiences; and co-editor of We Travel the Space Ways: Black Imagination, Fragments and Diffractions; director of BlackRussians – a feature documentary video; and host of Blues U, a bi-weekly radio show on radiocoyote.orgin, Tulsa, OK from 2021-24.
zavé martohardjono is a transdisciplinary artist working across dance, installation, and sound. Their time-based works, rooted in ecological and political liberation, activate audiences’ senses through rituals that facilitate dreaming of more just futures. They are a 2022 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for Outstanding Performer; Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Community Engagement fund, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and Puffin Foundation awardee; 2025 Center for Experimental Ethnography fellow; and 2024-2026 NEW INC Member in the Extended Realities track. Their work has shown at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Storm King Art Center, 92Y, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Asian Arts Initiative, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, El Museo del Barrio, Issue Project Room, Winslow Garage, and in Amsterdam, Berlin, Glasgow, Jakarta, Montréal, Skopje, and Zurich.
Reed Rushes is a British-American performance artist living and working in Queens, New York. Rushes has a multimedia performance practice that centers queer fantasy. Combining drag, movement, video, found and self made objects Rushes’ performances unpick the hierarchical distinctions between human bodies, emotional affect and objecthood. Described as “defying the boundaries of skin, enacting solidarity instead” (Exeunt Magazine) their art explores modes of connection beyond the physical realm. Often working collaboratively Rushes work reminds us of our own interdependence and capacity for collective transformation.
Sandy Williams IV makes work about time: monuments, sculptures, films, and poems. Raised in the US south, their methodical creative practice demystifies the complexities of abstract time through the lens of a Black radical imagination. Their iterative projects blend moments of communal catharsis with live, shared, experiences to highlight the layers of historical presence that structure our everyday lives. Williams is Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Richmond, and recipient of the 2024 Joan Mitchell Fellowship, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship.
Coco Villa is a Jamaican-Colombian-American dancer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. They lead an art-research practice investigating relations between body, object, and landscape rooted in African diasporic traditions and rigorous play. While Villa primarily works in analog photography and dance, their practice also includes costume design, performance art, and film.
Madre Guía (Stephanie Hewett) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work emerges from a play-based movement practice within an investigative framework. As a queer, Black, Afro-Diasporic artist with roots in the Caribbean, her work is inevitably rooted in emancipatory practices. Hewett aims to deepen curiosity around the Black American experience by focusing on the sonic, somatic, and spiritual manifestations of Black freedom through a variety of improvisational structures and cross-disciplinary experimentation.
