In 1980, the sculptor Mark di Suvero acquired two large sheds on waterfront property in Long Island City. Three years before, he had formed the Athena Foundation with public-art administrator Anita Contini, with the goal of providing studio and outdoor exhibition space as well as equipment and supplies for emerging artists. After a sizable segment of the rubble-strewn toxic shoreline of the East River was cleared with the help of local residents, Socrates Sculpture Park opened in 1986.

The park is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary by providing grants to 20 artists for the 2006 Emerging Artist Fellowship Exhibition, which will be on view for several more months. There is no place like Socrates Sculpture Park in all of New York. Little-known and well-established sculptors exhibit their work in the public park 365 days a year and visitors can touch and interact with the work in an unguarded environment bathed in natural light. This group exhibition has its highs and lows, but a strict application process means that most of the work is strong. The majority of the sculptures were fabricated on the grounds of the park prior to the opening of the exhibition in September.

Stephanie Lempert’s sculpture, “The Scope of Language” (dated 2006, like all the work mentioned here) incorporates the skyline into her work. Conical aluminum viewing scopes, each mounted on a steel stand with a piece of Plexiglas covering the wide end, point at the skyline across the East River. Obscure letterlike symbols are printed across the viewing areas: Language modifies all our perceptions.

Fabienne Lasserre’s “Hair Tree,” a real tree covered with synthetic brown hair, and Cameron Gainer’s “Forest Through the Trees,” address the ways humans project themselves onto the natural world. “Forest” is a fiberglass, epoxy, and faux-fur replica of Big Foot as he appeared in the infamous Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967, with the addition of breasts. A retired Pepsi bottler eventually confessed to wearing the costume in the film, but this sculpture makes it possible to touch the elusive beast. Gainer’s feminization of the myth has wide-ranging implications.

Annamarie Ho’s sculptures “Untitled (Spy Rocks)” and “Untitled (Spy Stump)” consist of polyurethane rocks and stumps with electronic devices embedded in them. The sculptures recall the outing of British spies who hid transmitters in imitation rocks on a Moscow street in the mid-1980s. Robert de Saint Phalle’s writhing mound of plastic green leaves, “Momentum” (2006) is a Frankensteinian tribute to organic abstraction. Like the Big Foot and hairy tree, these sculptures are witty comments on the organic world in the age of nanotechnology and genetic manipulation.

Sculptures that represent a more straightforward constructive impulse include Rachel Champion’s “Old Growth,” placed in the middle of the only grouping of trees in the park. The work comprises of mixed-media smokestacks, wandering tubes, roof ventilators, and oddly shaped buildings with circular windows colored red, yellow, and blue. The city is familiar and strange, utilitarian and fantastical. Cal Lane transforms three rusted garbage dumpsters (“Gated Communities”), into beautiful Art Deco cells using flame-cutting and plasma-cutting machines. Tim Thyzel, another recycler, produced casts of plastic bottles using gypsum cement and then connected the shapes to form brightly painted molecular structures. They line the rocky shoreline of the East River, registering as spiky alien pods.

William Bryan Purcell’s “WBP Mountain Man at Socrates Sculpture Park” is a humorously rickety wooden lean-to. The artist’s comical flaunting of the handmade mocks the love affair between Manhattan galleries and their slickly manufactured objects. Michael Cataldi’s “Urban Plaza Equivalent” — made with sandbags, oil drums, chain-link fencing, weeds, and wood slats with orange and white stripes — are plant arrangements we might see in the malls of the future. The result is an exaggerated prototype for urban planners in the age of terrorism. Hank Willis Thomas’s sculpture adds an optimistically political dimension to the exhibition. “The Truth Is I Am You” is a photographic image printed on vinyl depicting a dark-skinned man’s arm and clenched hand, rising several feet out of the ground and jutting toward the sky in triumph. An eager visitor might read it as a gesture of celebration for the 20 years Socrates Sculpture Park has been thriving in Long Island City.

Until March 4, 32-01 Vernon Blvd., Long Island City, Queens, 718-956-1819.