‘the 2022 socrates annual’ open call

CALL FOR PROPOSALS – SINK OR SWIM CLIMATE FUTURES Fellowship recipients will receive a $8,000 production grant to support their project, a $2,000 honorarium, and three-months of seven-days-a-week access to the resources and fabrication facilities of the Park’s outdoor artist studio.

Artist Fellows are responsible for the fabrication, transportation (if necessary), and installation of their works. Socrates provides limited technical and installation assistance during a three-week installation period, M–F, 10AM–6PM. Specifics of installation assistance will be discussed with each artist selected.

Thematic Prompt: Sink or Swim Climate Futures

As a public park and outdoor venue Socrates is an art space particularly attuned to the effects of climate change. Applicants to the 2022 Socrates Annual Fellowship and exhibition program are encouraged to submit proposals based on the prompt *Sink or Swim with the goal of presenting a public artwork for a fall of 2022 group exhibition.

This year, Socrates asks artists to consider the present day ecological conditions and challenges that our globe faces. Just this August, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that 1.5 degrees C global temperature within the next 20 years is unavoidable, but there is a window of opportunity for global action to slow the current warming trend and consequential environmental destruction. We are at once on the tipping point of irreparable ecological devastation and at the dawn of a new age of Green politics and technologies. Reduction of future emissions paired with technologies for carbon sinking [*pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere and trapping it in rock or water] may temper the warming phenomena. Or, the rising temperatures may further melt our glaciers, increasing ocean levels, leaving coastal cities under water. In this scenario, sinking is preferable to swimming.

While a global phenomenon, climate change does not impact all equally. The costs are greater borne on disadvantaged groups with less political power—those in developing countries, women, the young, the elderly, racial and ethnic minorities, and those without access to capital.

How can we address the urgency, enormity, and challenges of climate change without falling into melancholy or paralysis? How do the matrices of race, gender, and class intersect in this Green future? What can we do to mitigate eco-anxiety surrounding these many simultaneous demands for global change? What can we learn from historically vulnerable, but thriving communities that can help us navigate this challenge?