Name: Second Sundays: October 2023
Start: 2023-10-08
End: 2023-10-08
Location: Pioneer Works

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Pioneer Works is closed to the public today, October 19, for a Friends of Firefighters event. 

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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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 for the entire month of April and receive an automatic 20% off books, records, apparel, and more. Members save 35%—learn more about membership 

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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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 will close early at 5pm on Saturday, May 27. Learn more and plan your visit 

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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 

Since 2013, Pioneer Works has hosted Second Sundays, our free monthly open house featuring live music, food and workshops that activate our campus in partnership with artists-in-residents and community members in Red Hook. This October we’re pleased to offer a special slate of programs and activities inspired by the topics explored in our new exhibition 

 and close out the day with live music from 

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

, explores the shaking body as both a symptom and a cure for psychic distress. The newly commissioned presentation traces the lineage of psychosomatic disorders, from historical concepts of hysteria to contemporary diagnoses of nonepileptic seizures and spirit possession. Developed over nine years of intense conversation and friendship with the poet Ariana Reines, the exhibition comprises interactive videos offering therapeutic movement exercises, and a hallucinatory investigative report that feverishly pursues the cure for hysteria as it uncovers mysteries at Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital—a site widely regarded as the birthplace of modern neurology and psychology.

Upon entering the exhibition, viewers encounter a hall of eight mirrored monitors, collectively titled 

that riff on the smart fitness mirrors popularized in recent years. The audience’s reflections become superimposed onto the pulsating bodies of somatic practitioners, which include the artist’s own mother, choreographer and Authentic Movement Practitioner Wendy Osserman. The guides appear on screen to demonstrate methodologies such as qigong, holotropic breathwork, Kundalini yoga, and GYROKINESIS® method. Though divergent in their cultural origins, these practices all use movement as vehicles by which individuals can reach euphoric and meditative states. Punctuated by solfeggio healing frequencies—electromagnetic tones reputed to have cellular healing and consciousness raising powers—Laser’s videos prompt viewers to become empathic imitators of the figures on screen.

The instructors on the mirrored monitors appear as apparitions, functioning as a movement chorus that synchronizes with elements in the central film 

(2023). In it, Laser examines various artworks, incidents, and art therapies uncovered at the contemporary Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. The artist searches for clues about the legacy of nineteenth-century hospital director Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, whose medical innovations were informed by his own pursuits in painting, photography, and proto-performance art. Recognized as the forefather of modern neurology, Charcot’s classroom presentations of patients demonstrating fits of hysteria became popular theatrical spectacles, drawing an audience of Parisian socialites along with pupils of his, such as Sigmund Freud; the spectacles also inspired the Surrealist movement, decades later.

Laser’s film links these historical narratives to more contemporary ideas and attitudes within psychotherapy. Filmed in collaboration with French journalist Laura Geisswiller, 

follows a television reportage style, featuring interviews with doctors, historians and dance therapists. These conversations are interwoven with meditative footage that spirals around the sculptures and images of Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, rendering visible the history of hysteria and its continuing influence demonstrated in recent events—including the outbreaks of TikTok ticks spread via social media, non-epileptic seizures in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York, and the convulsive cries issued from the balconies of a locked-down Shanghai.

Gradually, Laser’s cinematic gaze transitions from "objective” journalism to her subjective experience embodying the psychosomatic condition that she set out to study. Delving further into personal essay and auto-fiction, the film arrives at the artist’s suspicion that she has instigated her own hysteria. Laser invites us to question whether her embodiment of shaking is a discharging of individual trauma, or a conjuring of our enraged collective consciousness that compels our bodies to express resistance. She asks: Is hysteria and its current incarnation—the “psychogenic nonepileptic seizure”—a phenomenon of individual maladaptation, or the appropriate social-emotional response of our collective human organism?

To expand on the themes of the exhibition, Pioneer Works will present a new iteration of Scientific Controversies, a signature series created and hosted by astrophysicist and Pioneer Works’s Director of Sciences, Janna Levin. The program, to take place on October 11th, features psychologist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who authored the celebrated book 

, and neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda. Laser will also facilitate a participatory workshop that invites viewers to partake in the therapeutic methodologies depicted on screen, as part of Second Sundays in November. Lastly, the Tate Modern in London will present a screening of 

 and host an online participatory program, as part of the Terra Foundation for American Art Series: New Perspectives.

 is a multimedia video and performance based artist from New York City. Her work intervenes in semi-public spaces such as bank vestibules, movie theaters and newsrooms, involving collaborations with actors, surgeons, political strategists and motorcycle gang members. Her recent work explores the efficacy of new age techniques and psychological methods active in both corporate culture and political movements. Laser’s work has been shown at venues such as The Smithsonian American Art Museum (2023); ICA Boston (2023); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); MUDAM The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (2021); Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2019); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018); Metro Pictures, New York (2018); CAC Brétigny, France (2017); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2017); the Swiss Institute (2016); the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2010); Various Small Fires, Los Angeles (2015); Paula Cooper Gallery, New York (2013) the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013); Lisson Gallery, London (2013); the Performa 11 Biennial, New York (2011). Laser is the recipient of grants from Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation, the Southern Exposure Off-Site Graue Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art. Sternberg Press published her monograph, 

Public Relations / Öffentlichkeitsarbeit

, in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Germany (2014). Her work has been critically acclaimed in publications such as 

 is made possible by generous funding from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation. It is also 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.

 features cinematography by Laura Geisswiller; video editing by Isaac Goes and Michelle Yoon; sound design by Jared Arnold; musical recordings by GOBBY; Colorist: Nic Seago; Subtitle Translation by Charlotte de Mezamat; interviews with the staff of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, including neurologist Dr. Martin Catala, psychiatrist Dr. David Cohen, Father Frederic Louzeau, neurologist Dr. Vincent Navarro, dance therapist Svetlana Panova, neurologist Dr. Emmanuel Flamand Roze, and dance therapist France Schott-Billmann; and additional interviews with artist and tai chi instructor Fabrice Brunet, journalist Hélène Combis, librarian and archivist Remi Gaillard, and journalist Virginie Girod. The artist offers special thanks to historian Asti Hustvedt for sharing research, the memory of Dr. Catherine Bouchara, who staged the seminal exhibition 

 at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, the School of Visual Arts MFA Photography, Video and Related Media Department for equipment support, and Zhu Miansheng of Ars Asiatica and Emmanuel Roussille for supporting the participation of artist Fabrice Brunet. Additional thanks to Manuel David, Joan Dupont and Vanessa Gould.

 features performances by multidimensional medicine woman and physical therapist Eia Buenconsejo, birth doula Bonu deCaires, somatic acting technique professor Erica Fae, personal trainer and wellness coach Erik Potempa, dancer and massage therapist Cori Kresge, choreographer and Authentic Movement practitioner Wendy Osserman, GYROTONIC® Master Trainer Naoko Moriyama Robbins, and Kundalini yogi and competitive krumper Reuel Crunk Rogers; cinematography by Michelle Yoon; additional camerawork by Isaac Goes, Liz Magic Laser, and Grace Poppe; sound design by Jared Arnold; musical recordings by GOBBY; video editing by Isaac Goes and Michelle Yoon; choreographic consulting by Cori Kresge; and costume design and casting consulting by Felicia Garcia-Rivera. 

Convulsive States

Due to occasional programming, this exhibition will be closed on the following dates:

Liz Magic Laser: Convulsive States

, co-presented by Pioneer Works and Headlands Center for the Arts, features new commissions by artists 

. Curated by ecologist and climate policy expert 

, the exhibition represents the culmination of Headlands’s inaugural Threshold Fellowship, a two-year program which highlights the power and efficacy of artists’ methods and processes to imagine a more equitable future. Taking inspiration from Johnson’s forthcoming book, 

, the artists are creating works that explore topics such as creating new traditions, transforming our food system, reconnecting with nature, strengthening our diasporas, and proceeding with justice and love.

 (2022-23), Deeman envisions a decolonized future that returns to Black and Indigenous belief systems and practices of tending and care for the land and sea. The artist finds inspiration from her maternal family's connection to the Jamaican land they farmed before emigrating to the UK in the 1960s as part of the Windrush Generation, as well as contemporary farmers and coastal fishing communities who have been grappling with their ability to sustain their livelihoods in the face of climate change. Conceived as a contemplative portal that allows viewers to consider their roles in potential climate solutions, the installation features hundreds of fragments that have been hand molded from a dehydrated form of gypsum, and cast with seeds sourced from Black farmers working in the United States—for instance, callaloo, okra, and rice—as a reference to the Black diasporic journey. These fragments cascade from biodegradable fishing lines, a material that was recently used in successful, grassroots efforts to restore Jamaica’s coral reefs. The sculptural environment finally gives way to a sculpture built from suitcases once carried by Deeman’s mother on her first journey from Jamaica to the UK, culminating in a space for reflecting on what we bring into our climate future, what new traditions we might need, and what we should leave behind.

While Frohman has written, published, and performed poetry for many years, 

 will mark her first foray into visual art installations. New neon sculptures that bear the activist slogan “Puerto Rico No Se Vende”—or, “Puerto Rico Is Not For Sale”—will function as a prologue to a series of work that protests the colonialist policies and rhetoric that have defined the relationship between the island and the United States. Frohman’s new poems pay homage to her own history as the descendant of coffee farmers, whose generational home eventually gave way to an Airbnb rental property. The writings will be recited as libretto to footage filmed by Cecilia Aldarondo and edited by Pati Cruz. These scenes, panning over the coastline and mountains of Puerto Rico, provide visual cues to contentious agricultural and ecologically sensitive regions that have emerged as hotbeds of local resistance against commercial privatization. Alongside this new work, an adjacent monitor will play an excerpt from Aldarondo’s documentary 

 (2020), which details the preconditions leading to, and subsequent impact, of Hurricane Maria in 2017, paired with words that reflect on themes of diaspora and self-determination while envisioning a Puerto Rico for and by Puerto Ricans.

Jeyifous will expand on his ongoing series 

(2020-current), which imagines a utopian, sustainable community in Brooklyn. The work posits a variety of advanced green technologies for the production and dissemination of food, seeds, and freshwater, set within an alternate world in which the government combats climate change through a market-based system of so-called “mobility credits” that curtails movement of the poor and working classes. For this iteration, Jeyifous will cast a new fugitive network of farming societies located throughout a fictional region that he refers to as the “Proto-Farm Communities of Upstate, New York.” Presented as an expansive body of photomontages, 3D-printed scale models, a psychogeographic map, and an animated virtual reality video, the installation builds upon a vision of resilience and resistance that references the tradition of maroon communities, recast through the lens of an Afrofuturist, ecological, and “solarpunk meets salvage punk” world brimming with Black joy.

, Pioneer Works will additionally present a host of public and educational programs throughout the duration of the exhibition. These include a new iteration of Science & Society, an ongoing conversation series curated and moderated by Dr. Johnson, that will delve into regenerative food systems and climate diasporas. Taken as a whole, 

 presents three unique artistic expressions envisioning a transformed and flourishing future, jolting us our of our doomerist resignation with provocative presentations of what could happen if we charge ahead with the climate solutions we have at our fingertips, with answers to the grand question, “What if we get it right?”

 is made possible by generous funding from the Joe & Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund. It is also 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.

 is a visual artist who considers the liminal and transitory spaces in which Black identities are formed. Her work is interdisciplinary in nature, existing in both physical and virtual spaces. The artist’s maternal family moved to the United Kingdom as part of the Windrush generation, leaving their farmland in Lesterfields, Jamaica, and eventually settling in Nottingham. She draws upon this journey, her own migration to the US, collective migratory patterns, and memory to create installations and artworks that speak to the condition of becoming and the intimate, spiritual, and ancestral history belonging to her family. Deeman received a BA (Hons), Public Relations, degree in 2000 from Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK, and a BFA, Photography degree in 2014 from Academy of Art, San Francisco. She has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions with Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Archive, Berkeley; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; and Laurence Miller Gallery, New York. In 2021, she received the 2021 Cadogan Contemporary Art Award.

 is a poet, performer, and educator whose work explores language, lineage, queerness, and the colonial relationship between the U.S and Puerto Rico. As an artist shaped by the Nuyorican Poetry Movement, she utilizes oral traditions of storytelling to build intimate connections with audiences. For Frohman, poetry is an embodied act, and she sees her work as a tool for social change, cultural preservation, and as a means to subvert traditional notions of power and knowledge. Furthermore, she hopes to inspire young people, particularly young queer people of color, to know that their stories are worth telling. Frohman’s work has appeared in 

Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color

. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she has been featured on national and international stages from The Apollo to The White House, and at over 400 colleges and universities. She is a CantoMundo Fellow, and has received residencies and awards from the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures, Leeway Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, and Millay Colony.

 examines contemporary socio-political, cultural, and environmental realities through the tradition of architectural utopianism, from a sci-fi inspired and Afro-surrealist perspective. His practice is rooted in borrowed and invented utopian or dystopian narratives anchored by direct relevance to contemporary social issues. To articulate these narratives, Jeyifous regularly combines digital illustration and 3D computer models with photographs, hand-drawings, and collage, to produce detailed illustrations, photo-montages, 360° VR experiences, adaptable and mobile architectural sculptures, and large-scale public installations that examine architecture and its relationship to place and community through an eco-political lens. Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University, and has exhibited at venues such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, MoMA, the Vitra Design Museum, and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. He has been a Wilder Green Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, has completed artist residencies with the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and is the recipient of a 2021 Fellowship by the United States Artists. He has spent over a decade creating large-scale installations for a variety of public spaces and was recently co-commissioned to create a monument dedicated to Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm as part of the City of New York’s “She Built NYC” initiative.

 is a marine biologist, policy advisor, and writer focused on climate solutions. She is co-founder of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for the future of coastal cities. Current projects include serving on the board of directors of Patagonia, Greenwave, and the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, advising Nike and La Mer on corporate sustainability, and authoring a book on climate entitled 

. Recently, she co-created a framework for including the ocean in federal climate policy (“the Blue New Deal”), and co-edited the bestselling anthology 

All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, Solutions for the Climate Crisis

. Dr. Johnson also co-created and hosted Spotify’s flagship climate podcast 

, and her opinion writing has appeared in most major U.S. publications. Recent awards include the TIME 100 Next List, and the Schneider Award for climate communication. She is the Roux distinguished scholar at Bowdoin College.


 operates a multidisciplinary, international arts center best known for its dynamic public programs and highly lauded artist residency. Located in the coastal wilderness of the Marin Headlands, within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Headlands’ historic campus is dedicated to process-driven exploration and risk-taking contemporary art in all disciplines. Its year-round programs provide visual artists, performers, musicians, and writers with opportunities for research, professional development, and peer-to-peer exchange at critical times in their careers.

Headlands’ Threshold Fellowship was designed to highlight the power of artists and experts in fields outside of the arts to imagine a more equitable future by deeply supporting their partnerships. The inaugural cohort explores climate solutions at the intersection of science, policy, culture, and justice. As a core component of the programming, each Threshold Fellow receives a $10,000 annual stipend and access to Headlands facilities, retreats, and funds for project development, fabrication, and travel.

Climate Futurism

Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman, & Olalekan Jeyifous: Climate Futurism

Paloma Izquierdo and Kyle Richardson work together. She examines techno-sociality through infrastructures, object animism and disrupting social spaces. She is concerned with surveillance and its relation to sex, labor, and the feminized body. She merges design and sculpture, using the disarming perception of feminized objects to subvert expectations by applying technologies of control. She went to the Cooper Union and to the Yale School of Art.

Paloma Izquierdo and Kyle Richardson

John Reynolds is a New York based artist. He has an MFA in painting from Brooklyn College CUNY, where he has taught 2-D design. Recently, John’s art practice has been influenced by emotional connections around issues of queerness and the global climate crisis. His paintings aim to reconcile the space between imagined futures of queer theory and futures in the era of global warming. His canvases represent a liminal space, where he contemplates human impermanence and landscapes that become less and less familiar.

Before completing his MFA in 2023, John worked in other creative fields in New York–including advertising and branding–and decided to fully devote himself to being a painter.

John Reynolds

Magdalena Dukiewicz is a Polish-born visual artist based in Brooklyn. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and the Complutense University in Madrid.
Dukiewicz’s work is grounded in her process and the materials used. She juxtaposes organic and bodily products (her own blood and hair, among others) with upcycled and repurposed industrial components. Each piece provokes visceral reactions while welcoming open-ended associations and ambiguities. Dukiewicz plays with those culturally and politically charged bodily products, exploring how their perceptions linked to the changing contexts. She presents the body as a revolutionary space of antagonism and freedom, expression and research, self-definition and power, identity, and gender.

Magdalena Dukiewicz's work is supported by the Polish Cultural Institute New York.

Polish Cultural Institute New York

Magdalena Dukiewicz

Java Jones engages environmentally and virtually sensitive methods to sculpture, painting, and image making through an anti-disciplinary lens. Jones describes their process as an act of feeling and imagining innerwise, oscillating between figuration and abstraction. ‘Inner-’ here refers to irreducible spaces necessary for refusing, for living, for imagining beyond–tilling an autobiographical ground for discursive reflections and formations. The artist's practice traverses themes related to quiet photography and haptic memory, critical love and home buildin’, and abstraction and the burden of identity. Currently, Jones is working on their forthcoming monograph, “on the edge of a dream: one last dance with/in flesh.”

Java Jones

Utsa Hazarika is an artist and writer based in New York. Her research-based practice ranges across video, installation and sculpture, and explores how an interdisciplinary dialogue between art and social research can push us to think about power, memory and resistance. Her work has exhibited internationally, including at the Queens Museum (US), Cemeti Institute (Indonesia), and Museum of the City of New York (US). She has attended the Whitney Independent Study Program, and residencies in Asia and the United States, including MASS MoCA (US), Lijiang Studio (China), and Khoj (India). Her research has been published in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (UK), Trans Asia Photography Review (US) and The Caravan (India).

Utsa Hazarika

Vandana Jain is an artist and textile designer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work explores the intersections of pattern and symbol, and spirituality and consumerism. She uses a variety of materials, most notably sugar, shattered auto glass and artists tape.

Recently, she has started making weavings with things found in “free” piles around Brooklyn, used alongside more traditional weaving techniques and materials. Her compostions are improvised directly on the loom, inspired directly by the material on hand. She is interested in systems of value, such as how cheap it is to buy a mylar birthday banner, and how expensive it is to knit your own sweater.

Vandana Jain

Ryan Decker (b. 1997) was raised in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He received a BS from Appalachian State University in 2019. Primarily working digitally, Decker is a multi-disciplinary artist who creates animations, furniture, VR experiences, live projections, sculpture, and digital paintings. These works focus on the rapid oscillation between the digital and the physical that’s experienced in everyday life, blurring the line between what is real and virtual. Decker’s first solo show opened May 2022 at Superhouse Gallery in Manhattan, New York. He has also exhibited with Emma Scully Gallery (NY), Good Naked (NY), Jonald Dudd (NY), Superchief Gallery (FL/NY), and Nth Degree Gallery (NC). Decker lives and works in Brooklyn, NY

Ryan Decker

徐冠宇 Guanyu Xu (b.1993 Beijing) is an artist currently based in Chicago and a lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the recipient of the Chicago DCASE Artist Grant (2022), CENTER Development Grant (2021), Hyéres International Festival Prize (2020), PHOTOFAIRS Shanghai Exposure Award (2020), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Annual Competition (2019), Lensculture Emerging Talent Award (2019), and Kodak Film Photo Award (2019). He has received artist residencies including ACRE (Chicago, IL), Light Work (Syracuse, NY), and Latitude (Chicago, IL). His works have been exhibited and screened internationally including the Aperture Foundation, New York; International Center of Photography, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; New Orlean Museum of Art, New Orleans; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Wesleyan University, Middletown; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Mint Museum, Charlotte; 36th Kasseler Dokfest, Germany, and others. His work can be found in public collections including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums, Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago, and New Orleans Museum of Art. His works have been featured in numerous publications including The New York Times, ArtAsiaPacific, The New Yorker, W Magazine, Harper's Magazine, Dazed, and China Photographic Publishing House.

Guanyu Xu

Imogen Teasley-Vlautin is a composer, songwriter, and producer from Los Angeles. Their work has ranged from film scoring to long-form electronic music composition and performance. They’re now shifting their focus to songwriting and production, traversing themes of grief, love, black freedom, and spirituality. Imogen’s music has been featured in publications such as Fact Mag and SF Weekly, and they were a recent artist-in-residence at This Will Take Time.

Imogen Teasley-Vlautin

Kenseth Armstead has created provocative conceptual art for three decades. Historic exhibitions that feature his work include: 

Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art

It’s Happening! Celebrating 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks

 in Central Park, NY, NY, presented by NYC Parks, Art in the Parks; 

 at the Studio Museum in Harlem (their first video exhibition in 2003); 

 at the Brooklyn Museum; and Modern Heroics, 

75 years of African American Expressionism

Kenseth Armstead has created provocative conceptual art for three decades. Historic exhibitions that feature his work include: Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art; It’s Happening! Celebrating 50 Years of Public Art in NYC Parks in Central Park, NY, NY, presented by NYC Parks, Art in the Parks; Race in Digital Space at the MIT List Visual Arts Center; Veni Vidi Video at the Studio Museum in Harlem (their first video exhibition in 2003); Open House: Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum; and Modern Heroics, 75 years of African American Expressionism at the Newark Museum.

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Kenseth Armstead

The Institute of Queer Ecology invites visitors to explore the IQECO Field Station, a selected archive of projects, artworks, ephemera, and collaborations from their past six years of social practice. Join the Institute for a deep dive into “Queer Ecology”, an adaptive framework concerned with interconnectivity, deviance, intimacy, and multispecies relationality. To date, the Institute of Queer Ecology has worked with over 125 different artists to present interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating programs and directly producing artworks. IQECO will be screening video works, sharing publications, and sharing visions for multispecies utopia. Follow IQECO on Instagram at @queerecology or visit www.queerecology.org.

IQECO Field Station

Grab a scavenger hunt sheet from the North Hall and enjoy an in depth exploration of Pioneer Works latest exhibitions Liz Magic Laser’s Convulsive States (Main Hall) and Climate Futurism (Second and Third Floor.) Once you’ve completed the hunt, return your sheet and claim your prize!

Exhibition Scavenger Hunt

Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain’s Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that draws on strategies of worker sabotage and applies them in the context of high emission companies in the fossil fuel industry. Time theft is a strategy to deliberately slow productivity, where workers waste time and are therefore paid for periods of idleness. For example, fake sick days, sleeping on the job, extended lunch breaks, or engaging in non-work related activities like social media or unrelated phone calls. The Cold Call installation takes the form of a call center, where audiences are invited to connect by telephone to executives in the fossil fuel industry and instructed to keep them on the phone as long as possible. The cumulative time stolen from these executives is then quantified as carbon credits using an innovative new offsetting methodology.

Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions

Offset is a platform by Sam Lavigne and Tega Brain that aims to generate high quality, premium carbon credits from industrial sabotage and direct actions. At the heart of their work is an innovative new methodology for quantifying the climate benefits of political actions that publicly disrupt carbon flows. This methodology is applied to numerous case studies in their innovative Carbon Neutralization Registry. 

The Offset Pop-Up Store will offer a pre-release sale of these premium carbon credits and show in-progress work on the development of new offsetting methodologies. Offsets will be sold on a first-come, first-serve basis. All proceeds will be donated back to activist groups.

The Offset Pop-Up Store: Transforming Industrial Sabotage into Carbon Credits

Alex Nathanson (Solar Power for Artists/Energy Transition Design LLC) will be leading a workshop that teaches participants about solar power fundamentals and solar panel design. Participants will learn about solar power through interacting with Energy Transition Design's Educational Solar Cart system and will be able to contribute to a collaborative collaged mural on the surface of the solar panels. The collage will use Solar Skin technology, a colorful film that is applied to the surface of solar panels while still allowing light through. The film is typically applied as a single printed sheet, so this is a never before tried experiment in collaborative public art making with this technology

Solar Power Education Through Art and Design with Alex Nathanson

Pop-Up: Bike Repairs with Mechanical Gardens Bike Coop

What is your relationship to trees? Explore your connection to trees in a tree meditation and zine making workshop with Eva Elizabeth Arroyo.

Tree Meditation and Zine Workshop with Eva Elizabeth Arroyo

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

The Shakers, a utopian separatist religious group created in the 1700s, were famous for their unusual worship: Early observers describe the Shakers stomping, clapping, shouting, turning, falling down, and (of course) shaking during their meetings. ("This they call the worship of God," wrote one incredulous visitor.) This ecstatic group movement, which the Shakers called "laboring" was, they believed, a way of manifesting heaven on earth. A cacophony of people stomping and shaking together was their way of making a flawed, frightening world more sacred. Though the Shakers stopped dancing in worship in the 20th century, modern dancers like Doris Humphrey, Martha Graham and more recently Reggie Wilson have used their philosophy of movement as inspiration.


Writer and former Pioneer resident Jordan Kisner and choreographer Annie-B Parson are teaming up to conduct a public group variation on "laboring." "Using verbs collected from written descriptions of early Shaker worship, Parson and Kisner will lead a talk and choreographic workshop exploring pedestrian group movement as a vehicle for transformation. Open to the public, no dance experience whatsoever required.

This They Call Worship: A Collective Movement Experiment with Jordan Kisner and Annie-B Parson

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

Open Studios

Sasha Frere-Jones in conversation about his new memoir, Earlier, with Broadcast Contributing Editor Leon Dietsche Becker.

PW Broadcast Radio Hour: Sasha Frere-Jones with Leon Dietsche Becker

La Perla is a musical project created by Karen Forero, Giovanna Mogollón and Diana Sanmiguel, musicians investigating the musical tradition of the Colombian Caribbean with more than 10 years of experience in interpreting the format of gaitas and drums and sung dances. It was born in 2014 and throughout these years they have maintained a basic training, where they have invited other members to join and build in different stages until defining the aesthetic and staging resources that have allowed them to stand out in the capital and national environment.