Name: Second Sundays: July 2023
Start: 2023-07-09
End: 2023-07-09
Location: Pioneer Works

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This week only, we’re heavily discounting our #PWPress publications to make way for new projects. Find artist-created books for $5, $10, & $15—sales raised from the PW Store are reinvested into funding new, ambitious projects by emerging and underrepresented artists and writers.

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From November 28 through December 14, take 20% off products in the Gift Guide with code: ULTRAFESTIVE. 

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Pioneer Works will be closed for normal gallery hours this October 14 & 15 for Ragas Live Festival 2023, learn more 

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Celebrate 10 years of Pioneer Works by shopping the PW Press Archive Sale! Through October 31, take 10% off Pioneer Works Press items with code 

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Building Closures Due to Flash Floods

Due to weather conditions, Pioneer Works is suspending open gallery hours for Friday, September 29. MHYSA's performance has been rescheduled for Sunday, October 1, with all tickets being transferred to the new date.

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We’re making Pioneer Works accessible to all! While our building is temporarily closed until this September, we are continuing to host offsite programming. See upcoming programs 

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Just Announced: Pioneer Works Names Mara Manus Chief Executive Officer

The Board of Directors of Pioneer Works is pleased to announce that Mara Manus, former Executive Director for New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), has been appointed as the organization’s new Chief Executive Officer. 

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We're pleased to announce the first major renovation of Pioneer Works! To accommodate the first phase of our construction, we're temporarily relocating to 133 Imlay Street opening in Spring 2022.

Early Closure 5/10/23

Due to programming, Pioneer Works will be closed to the public on Wednesday, May 10. We will be open from Thursday through Sunday for the remainder of the week. Learn more and plan your visit 

Second Sundays returns this July with another packed lineup, including the debut of our summer exhibitions, workshops featuring potatoes grown from seeds once sent to space, screenings with our PW Residents, and a very special music performance from the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Delicious Ethiopian & Eritrean specialties by 

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

NYC Cultural Affairs

PLEASE BE CONSIDERATE OF THE ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE AND THEIR STUDIOS WHILE VISITING PIONEER WORKS.
TO HELP US PROTECT THE ARTISTS’ SPACE AND WORK, PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH ARTWORK WITHOUT CONSENT, AND ONLY ALLOW FIVE PEOPLE IN A STUDIO AT ONE TIME.

 brings together a selection of artist-in-residence alumni Xin Liu’s recent and ongoing projects. Comprising sculptures, video, virtual reality, and an outdoor installation, the presentation expands upon the artist’s explorations into themes that include space travel, vitality, mutation, and immortality.

As a way of examining humanity’s innate desire to sustain and to perpetuate its species, Xin has created a new series of mixed-media sculptures inspired by biological and medical innovations such as cryonics and egg freezing, each designed to interfere with natural life cycles. Embedded with a cooling mechanism that causes thin layers of frost to appear on its surface, the works also reference scientists’ research into subglacial lakes in Antarctica and ice-covered oceans deep beneath the surface of moons orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, where probing devices search for traces of life from ancient and unknown worlds.

(2019-2020), a three-part project comprising a performance conducted in outer space, a two-channel video installation, and a virtual reality experience. Partially realized during Xin’s residency at Pioneer Works, the series centers on the fantastical journey of her wisdom tooth, which traveled aboard the International Space Station before returning to Earth. Carried by a crystalline robotic sculpture engineered by the artist, the tooth metaphorically becomes a newborn entity as it enters an infinite darkness. While the video installation mixes documentary footage with dreamlike imagery of Xin’s performance, the virtual reality component allows viewers to experience the tooth’s journey from a first-hand perspective.

The artist, together with collaborator Lucia Monge, similarly sent potato seeds into Earth’s lower orbit in March 2020, initiating a series titled 

(2020-ongoing). Even though more than four thousand varieties of the root vegetable exist in the world, only eight types are grown commercially in the United States, and only one has been selected by the Chinese National Space Administration to be cultivated in miniature ecosystems sent to the moon. Conceived as a response to the rise of homogeneity both in agriculture and in politics, Xin and Monge’s project casts potatoes as subjects that call for a diversified imagination of what the future can look like, particularly for space exploration in non-colonial terms. A selection of these spacefaring potatoes will be grown and harvested in Pioneer Works’s garden, where the outdoor installation will give way to a dynamic host of educational programming.

Executive producers: Gershon Dublon, Justin Durazzo

Producer: Reese Donohue, Qinya (Jenny) Guo, Jacky Tran, slow immediate LLC

EBIFA Sculpture engineers: Ross McBee, Noah Feehan, Amy Lemaire, Dave Seidman

VR Executive producers: Qinya (Jenny) Guo

VR artists: Kyle Szostek, Nate Turley, Lily Fang

is supported in part by VIVE Arts, as well as public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

was created with support from MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, Sundance Institute New Frontier Story Lab, D-BOX Technologies, and Bose Corporation. It is additionally in the collection of X Museum and Kadist Foundation.

 (b. 1991, Xinjiang/China) is an artist, performer and engineer whose recent research and interests center on the verticality of space, extraterrestrial explorations and cosmic metabolism. She is the Arts Curator at MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, a member of the inaugural ONX Studio program founded by the New Museum’s NEW INC and Onassis USA, and also a current artist-in-residence in SETI Institute. Xin is recipient of numerous award, including Porches Chinese Young Artist of the Year 2021, 30 Under 30 Asia, X Museum Triennial Award and the Van Lier Fellowship from Museum of Arts and Design, and has been commissioned by institutions such as M+ Museum (Hong Kong), Ars Electronica (Austria), Rhizome (USA), Media Art Xploration Festival (USA), Onassis Foundation Enter Program (US) and Abandon Normal Devices Festival (UK). An advisor for the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, Xin graduated from MIT Media Lab with a master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences, after receiving her M.F.A from Rhode Island School of Design and B.E. from Tsinghua University in Beijing.


 is a Peruvian artist whose work explores the ways humans position themselves within the natural world and relate to other living beings, especially plants. For the past 13 years, she has organized 

, a yearly “walking forest” performance that has led to the creation of green spaces in Lima, London, New York, and Paris. Other recent projects include exploring vulnerability through plant respiration, and a "fungi broadcast" about deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. Monge has shown her work internationally, including at the Queens Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art in Lima, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Ars Electronica, and the Havana and OCAT (Shenzhen) biennales. Her work has been featured in publications such as MoMA’s Uneven Growth, Global Performance Studies, and Eco-Lógicas Latinas, among others. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA from Universidad Católica del Perú, is a founding member of FIBRA collective, and Assistant Professor of Art at Amherst College.

 is supported in part by VIVE Arts, as well as public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Seedlings and Offsprings

Xin Liu: Seedlings and Offsprings

, the first institutional solo exhibition of artist Jenson Leonard, centers on a titular film that explores the velocity and momentum of Blackness as it relates to the philosophical concept of acceleration—the notion that the only way out of capitalism is through its intensification.

, a spectral Michael Jackson Halloween mask recites a surrealistic quarterly earnings reports. Building on a 2017 essay by artist Aria Dean titled “Notes on Blacceleration,” the short film centers on the ways in which the Black subject grapples with its commodified status within the labor market despite—or, resultant of—its own history as a commodity, stemming back to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Completed during Leonard’s residency at Pioneer Works in 2021, the video utilizes uncanny humor as a mechanism to expose the shared grammars inherent in Afro-pessimism and speculative finance.

Within the exhibition, the film repeats simultaneously across two grids of computer monitors situated on ergonomic desks that flank the gallery, mimicking the workstations that can be found ubiquitously across stock trading floors and financial institutions. Sculptures modeled after computer keyboards and mouses are displayed on the desks, each rendered inoperable by concentric riffs that symbolize the erratic transformations caused by the flows of capital. The appearance of Jackson represents a transmogrification of its own; whereas many have aligned the controversial pop icon’s bleached skin and surgical procedures with Black self-hatred, Leonard positions his bodily modifications as a radical rupture from racial paradigms of being.

In Leonard’s own words, “Workflow is defined as the sequence of industrial, administrative, or other processes through which a piece of work passes from initiation to completion. My film seeks to disabuse notions of completion, whether it be completion of the human, the nation state, or civil society. As Dean notes, Blackness is ‘always already accelerationist’ via its incongruence with Western humanism, a wrench thrown into the locomotive gears of ‘capital and subjecthood.’ Her essay prompts us to look toward the way that the Black has been historically constructed outside of the human, as coterminous with the slave. Slavery therefore represents a kind of proto-automation, a mass forced coercion of labor, and the Blacks’ transition from object to subject calls for a reappraisal of accelerationist ideas about the (non)human entity and its revolutionary potential.”

The artist continues, “There is something about going to work—the repetition of it—that gets inscribed at an epigenetic level, as an everyday, embodied violence. From there, I thought about the panoptic workplace (open air plan, transparent yet closely surveilled, management that does not have to be in the room to be monitoring you), the fetish of efficiency (ergonomic mouse and keyboards so you can work longer), biometric data of a labor force (fingerprint and facial scans to help reduce repeat processing tasks). All of these methods to maximize profits and production can be traced back to methods worked out and perfected in the cotton and sugar cane fields hundreds of years prior.”


Drawn to ideas of flight, escape, and poetic blur, 

’s (b. 1990, Detroit, Michigan) work takes form out of the collapsed context of the internet—often critiquing its slippage of meaning and techno-capital excess more generally, while pointing out its attraction at the same time. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pratt Institute, and has completed residencies at Obracadobra (Oaxaca, Mexico), Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, NY) and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY). His work has been featured in 

is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Workflow

Jenson Leonard: Workflow

Mimi Bai was born in Xi’an, China, and is based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, and film and her work draws connections between labor, assimilation, camouflage, and survival as both a lived reality and fantasy. Bai has presented work at Artists Space, A.I.R. Gallery, BRIC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films have screened at Rooftop Films, the Rockaway Film Festival, and the Maryland Film Festival. Bai was a SIP Fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Interdisciplinary Work. Bai attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and is a graduate of Alfred University (MFA Sculpture) and Wesleyan University (BA Sociology).

Mimi Bai

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (B. Puerto Rico) is a theater artist, filmmaker, performer and visual artist. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging the prioritization of written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies.

Natalia earned an MFA in Theatre Directing from CalArts and a BFA in Drama from the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU. Residencies and fellowships include: Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Amant Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Mass Moca Studio Residency & Fonderie Darling in Montréal, QC. Her work is part of the KADIST collection, and her films, installations, & performances have been presented in museums, festivals, performance venues, and unconventional spaces, internationally. She teaches Film & Video at MICA.

Natalia Lassalle-Morillo

Finnegan Shannon is an artist. They experiment with forms of access that intervene in ableist structures with humor, earnestness, and rage. Some of their recent work includes Anti-Stairs Club Lounge, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; Alt Text as Poetry, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and Do You Want Us Here or Not, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces. Their work has been supported by a Wynn Newhouse Award, an Eyebeam fellowship, and grants from Art Matters Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Disability Visibility Project. They live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

Finnegan Shannon

Le’Andra LeSeur is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins.

Le’Andra LeSeur

Angelo Madsen Minax is a multi-disciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. His projects consider how human relationships are woven through personal and collective histories, cultures, and kinships, with specific attention to subcultural experience, phenomenology, and the politics of desire. Madsen's works have shown at Berlinale, Toronto International Film Festival, BAM CinemaFest, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Anthology Film Archives, British Film Institute, and others. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Sundance Film Institute, BAVC Media, New York State Council on the Arts, LEF Foundation, and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yaddo, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and others. His film, "North By Current" (2021), aired on season 34 of POV (PBS), was nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and won the Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight award, Best Writing award from the IDA and numerous festival jury prizes. A New York Times Critics Pick, "North By Current" has been called "A beautiful, complex wonder of a film," by Rolling Stone and "A titanic work" by Criterion. Angelo Madsen is currently an Associate Professor of Time-Based Media at the University of Vermont, a Queer|Art Mentor, and a current Guggenheim Fellow.

Angelo Madsen Minax

Jamaal Peterman (b. 1990, Fort Lauderdale, FL; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY/MD) received his MFA at Pratt Institute (2019) and BFA from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (2014). He has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), Public ArtFund, New York; the University of Chicago; Kavi Gupta, Chicago; James Fuentes, New York and Vigo Gallery, London.
Peterman has been awarded the Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, commissioned by MoMA PS1 and has undertaken residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MASS MoCA, Wassaic Project Residency, Fountainhead Residency.

Jamaal Peterman

Yehwan is a Korean-born web artist and designer. Yehwan's work centers on finding the discomfort hidden in the excessively comfortable web environments in order to address systemic inequality. The work reveals the inconvenience that users who do not belong to the main user group experience and criticizes the overgeneralization of user groups and the oversimplification of web interfaces that pursue excessive comfort and consistency only. Yehwan creates anti-friendly websites and satirizes web conventions by undermining the general understanding of web design and subverting common user-experience behaviors. She pursues diversity above consistency and efficiency.

Yehwan Song

Or Zubalsky is an artist and educator based in a part of Lenapehoking also known as Brooklyn. They explore how coding participates in practices of political resistance. Or’s projects originate in software and are encountered as digital platforms, physical objects, installations, gatherings, and performances. Their work is compelled by curiosity regarding the ways in which the composition and execution of code manifest as political action, capable of both healing and shifting power relations. With a commitment to unlearn and resist settler-colonialism, they engage the complexity that software-based systems afford in order to reflect on, criticize, and intervene in existing systems of power.

Or Zubalsky

Sage Vousé is a self-taught multimedia artist based in Brooklyn who deals in otherness, physicality, and transformation by way of ceramics and virtual environments.

In sculpture, they combine experimental and flesh-like designs with profiles that evoke the classic and the antique; the decanter crumbling and covered in flowering warts, the bouquet banished to the bottom of the sea. These sculptures are captured as digital objects which form a language with which to build out immersive worlds and expand on emotive moments.

They enjoy mixing textures, materials, scale and reality.

Sage Vousé

Kwami Winfield is from Jersey City, NJ and has been based in NYC for the past few years. A multi-disciplinary type who plays trumpet, drums, electronics, trash, Kwami creates collections of visual creations, rocks, pez dispensers. Her music can touch on the relationship of externalized sound and the ancillary, grotesque functions required to produce them. Looking for windows between noisy circuits and noisy bodies, both bubbling from complications to resource consumption and procurement.

In 2022 she released “Hearts”, a 20 something track collection of noises and songs, on phone/tape label Call Waitn as Soless Dialtone.

Kwami Winfield

What would it mean for you to leave a part of yourself in outer space? Would that version of you become something new? These are some of the questions multi-disciplinary artist Xin Liu asked herself when she sent her wisdom tooth into outer space. Join the Learn & Engage Team in honoring Xin’s current exhibit Seedlings and Offsprings by creating a clay avatar of yourself that we can imagine would be sent out into space, the final frontier!

CLAY SPACE AVATARS

PW Visual Arts Resident Alum Jonathan Ojekunle has been invited to replicate QUAD II, a sculpture created by the late artist Robert Mallary in 1968 as one of the world’s first computer generated artworks. The original and new sculptures are presented for a special viewing, alongside a documentary video that reveals Ojekunle’s creative process. 

QUAD II BY JONATHAN OJEKUNLE AND ROBERT MALLARY

Or Zubalsky 
Merge Conflicts 
Series of four videos, 3-6 minutes. 
 
Staged as a series of video tutorials, Merge Conflicts engages a process of unlearning settler colonial pedagogy through using Git, a software tool for managing multiple versions of digital documents. 
 

Mimi Bai 
HIDE AND SEE 
22 minutes. 
 
HIDE AND SEE is an experimental narrative film collaboration between Sam B. Jones and Mimi Bai that activates Bai’s clay and textile sculptures, transforming them into shrouds for two ghostly figures. The specters employ bushcraft and camouflage techniques as they pursue and evade one another across time and space, while the film shifts between black and white and color—alternately concealing and revealing the ghosts within their environment. 
 
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo & Sofía Gallisá Muriente 
Foreign in a domestic sense 
4-channel mockup, 32 minutes. 
 
Foreign in a Domestic Sense is a constellation of testimonies and imaginaries of Puerto Ricans who have migrated from this US colony in the Caribbean to Central Florida in recent years. Conjured by visual artists Natalia Lassalle-Morillo and Sofía Gallisá Muriente, the film is the result of an extensive research and filming process that placed their distinct diasporic experiences and artistic methodologies in dialogue. Their images evoke, accompany and connect the lived experiences of people who are part of the fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the United States, displaced as a result of political and environmental disasters in the archipelago. Just as continuous states of emergency have unsettled space and time, the artists explore visual languages rooted in the context of Florida to deepen the fragmentation, building a choir of people, places and memories. The four channel film layers fictional and non-fictional narrative forms, high definition video and Super8 film, speculating about how community is created anew through performance and recreation. Staging a dance floor in the darkness of a swamp, the artists envision an intimate space where their cast members can find each other and learn to move freely. As the ubiquitous presence of water in times of rising tides suggests that Florida will soon become an island, the film addresses the entanglement between climate grief and human displacement through an open-ended visual poem. 
The film’s title refers to the oxymoron used by the United States Supreme Court in 1901 as part of the ruling that gave legal sanction to the US colonization of foreign territories, identifying Puerto Rico as an unincorporated possession and speaking to a uniquely strange relationship to belonging. 
 
Angelo Madsen Minax 
One Night At Babes 
 
A portrait of a rural queer bar and its dynamic intersection of patrons.

PW RESIDENT FILM SCREENINGS

Join the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York at the sidewalk across from the Pioneer Works entrance for solar viewing. Telescopes will be provided between 1:00 and 4:00 pm. *Weather permitting*

SOLARGAZING WITH THE AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS ASSOCIATION OF NEW YORK

Mission Potato: spaceships for tubers is a workshop drawn from the collaborative project Unearthing Futures by Xin Liu and Lucia Monge, which decolonizes narratives of the planetary future by shaping, growing, and sharing potatoes. Setting right next to the space-faring potatoes, which went to the International Space Station in 2020, the artists invite participants of all ages to reimagine the aesthetics of space exploration and design vessels for potatoes traveling to space. We will explore how potatoes grow, paying particular attention to their shoots and roots as they journey off to space.

Mission Potato: spaceships for tubers

Get your bike fixed by staff mechanics and volunteers, who will provide free direct repairs, maintenance, and diagnostic services.

POP-UP BIKE REPAIRS WITH MECHANICAL GARDENS BIKE COOP

Personal history, national narratives, code, and sound facilitate a debugging session of a memory leak: a type of software bug that gradually makes memory unavailable and depletes the system of resources.

OR ZUBALSKY: When a Reference to a Name is Lost

Join artist Jenson Leonard for a walkthrough of Workflow, an exhibition that explores the velocity and momentum of Blackness as it relates to the philosophical concept of acceleration—the notion that the only way out of capitalism is through its intensification.

JENSON LEONARD GALLERY DIALOGUE

Join us to explore the microscopic world with a scientist from BioBus! Participants are encouraged to bring their own items—spices or hair, flowers, soil from the garden, or any small objects they would like to see up close.  We use our microscope to see everyday things in a new way and draw images seen from the microscope.. 

EXPLORE YOUR ECOSYSTEM WITH BIOBUS

Broadcast Radio Hour: Piotr Orlov of Dada Strain talks with HxH (Lester St. Louis and Chris Williams)

Get to know our current artists-in-residence in their work through Open Studios.

OPEN STUDIOS

Anticipating the forthcoming publication of <a href="https://www.blankforms.org/publications/ahmed-abdullah-a-strange-celestial-road">A Strange Celestial Road: My Life in the Sun Ra Arkestra</a> by Ahmed Abdullah, the first full-length account of life in the ensemble by any of its members, Blank Forms presents a performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra. This free event, part of Pioneers Works’s Second Sundays, will feature a reading by Abdullah at 5 pm and a rollicking performance by the Arkestra at 5:30 p.m. The book, described by Matthew Blackwell of The Wire as a “rare personal glimpse into the life of one of the twentieth century’s most monumental and imposing figures,” is out everywhere September 5 and available to pre-order <a href="https://www.blankforms.org/publications/ahmed-abdullah-a-strange-celestial-road">here</a>. 
 
Founded in the mid-1950s, the Sun Ra Arkestra became the primary conduit through which polymath jazz composer, bandleader, pianist, poet, and philosopher Sun Ra expressed his visionary perspective. Sun Ra’s mythology transposes the forced dislocation of the African diaspora from slave ship to spaceship, wielding technology and music as an instrument for utopian Black interplanetary migration, with the Arkestra as its vehicle. When Sun Ra left planet Earth in 1993, his role as leader of the Arkestra was taken by John Gilmore before the latter’s ascension in 1995, when Marshall Allen assumed its helm. An alto saxophonist, flutist, and electronic valve instrument player who joined the Arkestra in 1958, Allen has lived, rehearsed, toured, and recorded with Sun Ra almost exclusively throughout his musical career. Allen, now age 99, and the other members of the Arkestra continue to live at the Sun Ra residence in Philadelphia, the group’s communal base of drug, alcohol, and sex-free operations since 1968. There, Allen writes fresh arrangements of Sun Ra’s tunes and composes new music for the Arkestra, committed to a life of discipline centered on the further development of Sun Ra’s musical precepts. With a massive, joyous songbook that encompasses spiritual grooves, sing-along chants, and ecstatic fire music, the Arkestra continues to traverse their namesake’s spaceways. 
 
Ahmed Abdullah joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as a trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years. Born in Harlem in 1947, he became an important figure in the New York loft jazz movement, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and going on to found the Melodic Art-Tet with Charles Brackeen, Ronnie Boykins, and Roger Blank in the early 1970s and The Group with Marion Brown, Billy Bang, Sirone, Fred Hopkins and Andrew Cyrille in 1986. Abdullah is a co-founder of the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, has been the music director of Dianne McIntyre’s Sounds in Motion Dance Company, and is currently music director at the historic venue Sistas’ Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He has been a music instructor at Carnegie Hall and Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, and teaches at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and an elementary school in central Brooklyn. 
 
This presentation of the Sun Ra Arkestra with Ahmed Abdullah is made possible with generous support from the Cheswatyr Foundation.