The Trial of Socrates
Tiger Strikes Asteroid
July 17-August 16, 2026
If you say to me, Socrates, this time we will let you go, but upon one condition — that you are to inquire and speculate in this way no longer... I should reply: I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy."
- Plato, Apology (trans. Benjamin Jowett)
Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present The Trial of Socrates, a solo exhibition by Poppy DeltaDawn spanning weaving, basketry, sculpture, and video.
In 399 BC, Socrates was tried and executed by Athens on a charge of corrupting the youth. He was offered, in effect, a way out: stop teaching, stop questioning, stop being what he was. He refused. DeltaDawn takes the trial as a frame for a question that has never stopped being asked. Who does a society decide is too dangerous to tolerate? The charge of corrupting the young is ancient, and it is current; a transgender artist and educator working in Kansas, DeltaDawn does not have to reach far for it. The exhibition does not argue the question so much as hold it, the way a vessel holds what is placed inside.
Her answer, such as it is, arrives as labor. "The deliberate, time-intensive nature of handwork stands in opposition to the reactionary speed of moral panic, offering instead patience, care, and sustained attention." The works in the exhibition are slow objects: woven, bound, gathered, built, and made over the same months in which the panics they answer moved at the speed of a news cycle. They are invested in transformation as a continuing state: becoming, without the promise or the demand of having become.
DeltaDawn lives and works in Kansas, where she weaves baskets from eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana), a native juniper that human alteration of the prairie has made invasive, a plant put on trial for thriving where the landscape was changed around it. She binds brooms from prairie grasses and weaves cloth on a hand loom interfaced with computer technology, a centuries-old logic of the grid carried into the present. The materials are not depicted in the work; they become it.
The Trial of Socrates is Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York’s 2026 open call exhibition and is the the first of two companion exhibitions. The second, The Apology, takes on Plato's account of Socrates' refusal to apologize, and will be on view at Vulpes Bastille in Kansas City, MO, in September 2026.
images: Pratya Jankong