Poppy DeltaDawn: The Trial of Socrates

Jul 18 – Aug 16, 2026

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.

Poppy DeltaDawn’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Dimin (NYC), STNDRD NONSTNDRD (Sauget, IL), Ortega y Gassett Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Below Grand (NYC), Zürcher Gallery (NYC), and Standard Space (Sharon, CT), among others.

She has participated in numerous residencies and fellowships, including Fire Island Artist Residency (Fire Island, NY), a Workspace Fellowship at BRIC Arts Media (Brooklyn, NY), Tallgrass Artist Residency (Matfield Green, KS), Caldera Arts (Sisters, OR), the Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), ACRE Residency (Steuben, WI), and Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), where she received a full fellowship.

She has also participated in workshops at Fondazione Arte della Seta Lisio (Florence, IT), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Penland School of Craft, and has curated several exhibitions, most recently with Charlotte Street (Kansas City, MO), the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and New York Live Arts (NYLA)’s Immigrant Arts Mentorship Program, and at Geary Contemporary, where she served as Associate Director until 2022.

Her work has been written about in Site Unseen, Hyperallergic, Dezeen, and Maake Magazine, among other publications. She is the author of RATIO: Digital Weaving to Change the World, designed by Katie Leonard (Williams), produced and published in collaboration with LMRM (Chicago) and For the Birds Trapped in Airports (Los Angeles).

DeltaDawn holds an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, both in Fiber. She is Assistant Professor of Visual Art in Textiles + Fiber at the University of Kansas.