What wisdom would you share if you’d lived for 10,000 years?
Join us for a storytelling journey that begins with Urashima Taro, an ancient Japanese tale from the 8th century about a fisherman who saves a magical turtle — and is taken to a mystical undersea palace to meet a princess who will change his life forever.
Guided by artist and 2025 Socrates Fellow Natalia Nakazawa, families will imagine themselves as minogame — mythical sea spirits who’ve witnessed centuries of human experience — and explore:
✨ Lessons passed down from your ancestors
✨ How these stories shape who you are today
✨ Your vision for a sustainable, resilient future
✨ The legacies you want to pass on
After sharing stories across generations, we’ll bring them to life through collagraph printing on mulberry paper — weaving tactile patterns and ancestral memory into prints you can take home.
Natalia’s work, rooted in her Latin American and Japanese American heritage, blends painting, textiles, and social practice. Her projects invite collective participation and offer spaces to critically engage with history, migration, and identity.
This workshop is part of the Socrates Annual Fellowship, responding to our 2025 theme Up/rooted — a reflection on the delicate balance between relocation and regeneration, and how uprooting can foster new growth when done with care.
About Natalia Nakazawa
Natalia Nakazawa (b. 1982, Charlotte, NC) is a Queens-based interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work spans painting, textiles, and social practice. As a child of Latin American (Uruguayan) and Asian (Japanese American, Yonsei) diasporas, she draws on complex cultural legacies to explore identity, migration, and storytelling. Through collaborative, community-driven projects, Nakazawa blurs the boundaries between education, activism, and art, inviting collective participation. Her jacquard textiles incorporate images from open-access museum collections, often highlighting historical moments of cultural exchange. These works serve as tactile archives; places to critically engage with memory.
About the Fellowship
The Socrates Annual Fellowship and exhibition reflects Socrates’ founding commitment to artistic experimentation and excellence, while also nurturing artists’ careers. Artists are selected through an open call and receive financial support, access to Socrates’ outdoor studios and technical support, and inclusion in a Park-wide exhibition. Since 2001, 279 artists have participated with many subsequently receiving further commissions for public art projects. The Socrates Annual Fellowship & Exhibition is one of the Park’s longest running programs and is an important training ground for early career artists to gain experience creating art in the public realm.
This year’s Fellowship will respond to the theme “Up/rooted,” which explores the complexities of uprooting species for long-term sustainability and resilience. The term “uprooted” evokes the tension between dislocation and resilience. “Up” signifies the act of lifting away, while “root” refers to the hidden systems below the ground—anchoring life and absorbing essential nutrients. This duality invites us to reflect on the implications of relocation and adaptation, exploring how when done thoughtfully it can foster new growth and understanding. In what ways can we foster regeneration while acknowledging and mitigating the losses within our ecological and social landscapes? How might we navigate the delicate balance between ecological preservation and community needs to create a more resilient future?
