Poster designed by Dan Tesene
Join us with Prospect Park Alliance to welcome 2026!
Together, we will share an afternoon to appreciate the joy of connection and beauty around us through tea, nature, art, and community.
Winter Tea is created by many of our beloved community members and artists. In this shared moment, we reflect and create, reminding one another that within the vastness of the world, each life is significant in defining our shared humanity and the small moments will endure through time and transcend our human experience collectively.
Free event. All are welcome!
Registration opens on Dec 12.
Featuring:
Outdoor Fireside Conversations and Tea with our community members
Gather around the outdoor fire to enjoy tea, conversations, and the serenity of the winter park. Reflect on one thing you would like to let go of in the new year. You can write it down and release it into the fire at the end of the event.
Odes to Common Things Poetry Writing with Robin Lampman
Participating in our ongoing community art project, Odes to Common Things, through poetry writing to reflect on our shared experiences and this moment. To learn more about the project, check here.
Live Performances by Chris Williams, Kirin McElwain & Testu Collective
"Music is the language of the soul” - Hazrat Inayat Khan
In a time when political divisions, social media echo chambers, and global tensions threaten to fracture our shared humanity, music remains one of the few forces that can still unite us across every border and belief system.
Curated by Testu Collective, the Winter Tea Music performances are with artists they deeply admire. The first act is the premiere of a music collaboration between Kirin McElwain and Serena Stucke/Dan Tesene. Kirin McElwain is a cellist and composer who creates contrasting sonic worlds merging modular synth and cello. Serena Stucke and Dan Tesene use handbuilt sound devices and modular synth to create lush, tactile sound worlds. The closing act is trumpeter and electroacoustic composer Chris Williams, who creates ethereal soundscapes with trumpet and electronics.
Third Life Ikebana Exhibition by Flower Heart Alliance
The exhibition, titled Third Life: Before the Mulch, transforms discarded Christmas trees into ikebana (sculptural floral arrangements), giving the trees a fleeting third life as a public expression of form, impermanence, and quiet celebration before the trees are mulched by the Parks Department. Open to the public on January 2 -4.
Practical Tips:
Please bring your own cup.
Please bring a cushion if you prefer to sit on the floor comfortably, as chairs and cushions may not be guaranteed.
Plan ahead for a leisurely stroll to the Boathouse
Note that this is a free event with limited space. Registration is required.
About the Sound Performance Artists
Chris Ryan Williams is an artist and musician based in Brooklyn, NY whose work unfolds through electroacoustic composition and performance installation. His EP Live earned praise from Jazz Right Now and The Quietus for its “dazzling collaged pieces that ricochet between improvised passages and written material” (Peter Margasak, The Quietus). His debut LP Odu: Vibration II, praised by Pitchfork and named one of NPR’s Best New Albums, reimagines a journey through Plato’s Cave. @chris_ryanwilliams
"“I composed from the place that connects me to sound most, modes of reaching ecstatic transcendence, spatialization, Black improvisational practices, and ambient music,” Williams shares. “The piece unfolds like a descent into an imagined cave, guided by a search of awe, dizzying grandeur, and frenzied dissonance.”
Pic by Sydney Mieko King.
Kirin McElwain is a cellist and composer working in the realms of experimental, contemporary classical, and improvised music. Weaving together classical and Baroque influences with an affinity for sub-bass and harsh electronic textures, her music explores themes of desire, shame, perfection, and belonging.
As a cellist, Kirin has performed on various film and television scores (HBO, National Geographic, Gimlet Media, PBS, NPR Tiny Desk), with contemporary artists (Post Malone, Ioanna Gika, This Will Destroy You), and as part of mixed media installations (the MET, James Cohan Gallery, Neue Galerie) as well as traditional classical and contemporary classical concerts (Carnegie Hall, National Sawdust, Kimmel Center, Roulette), in addition to many community-run venues.
Her self-released 2023 EP Viriditas made the end-of-year lists at Anxious Magazine and A Closer Listen, and her 2025 full-length Youth was released by AKP Recordings.
Kirin has been an artist-in-residence at EMS Stockholm and Westben Center for the Arts, a New Amsterdam Records Composers Lab Fellow, and an awardee of a Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant. Her duo with vocalist Alex Koi is the recipient of a 2024 Young Arts grant for their upcoming collaborative LP Wake.
“ The juxtaposition of the ethereal with the harsh in this music is the result of getting very different parts of myself into conversation with each other, and is also reflective of the inner workings of my relationship to the cello.” shares McElwain. “I’m grateful to be able to express myself on my instrument, but my work with electronics has been a source of joy and liberation that has helped me evolve that relationship and has also given me a way to integrate these seemingly disparate aspects of myself."
Pic by Alic Plati
Testu Collective, founded by artists Serena Stucke and Dan Tesene, creates engaging experiences that combine sound, visuals, and audience participation. Through their partnership, they explore the meeting points between technology and how people experience the world around them. Their work makes the intangible tangible and uncovers the often-invisible ways technology shapes our daily lives. Each project starts with questions about crossing boundaries between different creative fields—where sound creates visual effects, live performances become interactive spaces, and audiences move from simply watching to actively taking part in the creative experience. Testu has produced site-specific installations and curated works for Gray Area (SF), 2220 Arts and Archives (LA), Artists Space (NYC), Public Visuals (Tokyo), CTM Festival(online), Ars Electronica (NYC), Ace Hotel (NYC), The Shed (NYC), Pleamar Festival (Buenos Aires). Most recently Testu created a multichannel sound installation for Dan Flavin's light sculptures at Mana Contemporary. Testu Collective is a 2025 NYSCA grantee. @testucollective
About the Flower Heart Alliance
Started by Kristina Bajunaishvili, Flower Heart Alliance is a New York–based group of artists dedicated to bringing the radical transience and softness of ikebana to everyone, everywhere.
Participating artists:
Winter Tea 2025 at Prospect Park. Photos @ Katie Gee Salisbury.