[September 19, 2026, 12-5pm] Party in the Park is a day-long performance art festival presented by Franklin Furnace, Materials for the Arts, and Socrates Sculpture Park.
Free with RSVP
FF@50 / MFTA@50 / SSP@40
Party in the Park is a day-long performance art festival presented by Franklin Furnace, Materials for the Arts and Socrates Sculpture Park. 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 Alcantara 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
