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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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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. 

We are grateful for your engagement and support of Pioneer Works over the last year. Now through December 31st, we’re fundraising to meet our end of year goal and close out 2024.

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Our galleries and garden are closed to the public today for a United Sounds NYC Festival 2024. Learn more about the festival 

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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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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 

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is a four-part series that considers the realities of mass incarceration through the lens of art and activism.

In conjunction with Coby Kennedy’s Summer 2021 exhibition

, a four-part program series that considered the realities of mass incarceration through the lens of art and activism. Over the course of four weeks, Broadcast is releasing Beyond The Box’s accompanying video series, each paired with a newly commissioned text that further elaborates on the thematic pillars charted by For Freedoms: Awakening, Listening, Healing, and Justice.

Below, for Justice, For Freedoms writer and curator Anisa Tavangar reflects on the series and builds a case for art’s potential to address society’s most pressing challenges.

When Coby Kennedy first shared the design for 

, the sculpture's luminosity captured my attention. At once glimmering and grotesque, the work encapsulates the aspiration of an ideal justice and the reality of corruption that overrules this system.

Reflecting on Kalief Browder's story as a group—those of us at For Freedoms, Sam Giarratani of Negative Space, and our counterparts at Pioneer Works—we broke down the elements of this youth's life that resonated most deeply: the urgency of community care and alternatives to incarceration; the nuance of individual stories and the way language manipulates how society treats incarcerated and formerly-incarcerated individuals; the outsized impact of mass incarceration on children and young people, from the system-involved to the system-impacted; the growing rate of incarceration that necessitates qualifying it as "mass," and the responsibility we collectively hold to halt this growth and move towards abolition. These themes became the guide to our shared project.

Kalief's story inspired so much because it is extreme, but it is not unique. As I watch missiles rain down on Ukraine on social media, confronted with the quick destruction of explosions and fire, I cannot help but reflect on the slow destruction—the pernicious poisoning of individuals and whole communities—by mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is an act of extreme violence. The carceral system is one that erodes our collective potential by vilifying, hiding away, and torturing so many of our neighbors, like it did to Kalief Browder. All of these examples of violence, occupation, and oppression abase our true collective capacity.

But in the midst of so much pain, is there room for art? To construct 

, the four-part program series in conversation with Kennedy's sculpture, we turned to those who might have an answer: formerly incarcerated artists and poets, community organizers and legal advocates providing support for children and trans individuals in the criminal legal system, and individuals with lived experiences that propel them towards transformation. All of our panelists, whether or not they are traditional art-makers, are creative practitioners. Their work is profoundly creative; they dream and realize approaches that have never before existed, while pushing against the aggressive preoccupation with punishment that overrules society. A painting will not save us, but it could give us the vision of our aspiration. A poem will not shift engrained structures, but it has the capacity to give language to their overhaul.

This notion is what Grace Lee Boggs termed "

," that artists and envisioners can create a guide to transformation. 

 attempted to employ this strategy, pairing artists with activists and experts, constructing layers of creativity, data, and experience. Mass incarceration encapsulates our most pressing societal challenges—unspeakable racial prejudice, widening extremes of wealth and poverty, rampant misogyny, persistent transphobia, inaccessible education and community resources, and a demoralizing lack of opportunity. It responds to all of these by exacerbating them. Visionary organizing rallies the values of abolition, of community care and collective well-being, to address each of these issues with a greater vision for the future.

Art can also offer itself as a backdrop to this work. Art spaces and organizations can acknowledge their privileged position and create space, physical and ideological, to shift conversations in favor of abolition. At the conclusion of the series, Mikelina Belaineh, a panelist in the final event, reflected on the power of holding this conversation in a space as beautiful as Pioneer Works. Their observation, of the high ceilings, of light streaming through the windows, of the adjoining courtyard, highlights that art doesn't always have to speak; sometimes art is best when allowing others to lead the discussion. Bringing heavy topics like confinement into airy environments gives the ideas room to breathe; the spirit of the physical space fuses with the consequence of astute discourse.

Even as questions were being answered, this was not a space of resolution; it was one of process. 

 to activate the sculpture while engaging with living discourses. In that sense, the series itself was an act of art-making, of generation, or creative envisioning.

Devon Simmons, 2019 Soros Justice Fellow, co-founder of the 

 at Columbia Law School, and our perceptive and inviting moderator, made sure that art was explicitly part of every conversation:

I asked every panelist how they interacted with the installation. Every response was different.

One of the panelists spoke about how they didn’t want it in the community, which I found to be interesting. When I asked why, the person said, “it feels too heavy to be here. There’s already enough pain and suffering in our community.” I remember being baffled by the comment because I was looking at the installation in a totally different way that day. On this hot summer day, the sun illuminated the installation, which made me feel that Kalief’s presence was shining down on us. I felt happy that his story had actually had an impact on the larger society. Kalief’s case demonstrates the failure of our criminal legal system on every level: the cops who arrested him, the district attorneys who failed to do their due diligence in regards to the facts/particulars, the multiple judges who disregarded the presumption of innocence, and the department of corrections.

At For Freedoms, we have dedicated the last year of programs and projects to justice, investigating what it means to create 

This justice is one that falls beyond the bounds of what we already know and invites more participants to engage with what justice could be. This strategy acknowledges that justice, like these programs, is not a product but a process, always evolving to accommodate new findings and bring in new voices. Justice requires all of us. It's in constant effort that we can achieve perfect justice, not as a result of particular work but as a consequence of our commitment to improvement. ♦

The Art of Abolition

, a four-part program series that considered the realities of mass incarceration through the lens of art and activism. Over the course of four weeks, Broadcast is releasing Beyond The Box’s accompanying video series, each paired with a newly commissioned text that further elaborates on the thematic pillars charted by For Freedoms: Awakening, Listening, Healing, and Justice. Below, for Healing, Jasmine Wahi details how American institutions fail the public.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands, indivisible [with me invisible], and liberty and justice for some."

Epigraph/Epitaph


1. They say people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

    But what if the stone-throwers imprisoned YOU within the glass?


2. Is the ivory tower a threat or a promise?


3. Can an institution founded on the premise of Whiteness ever be anything but the    masters' house?


Do you dream in color? Or does your mind reserve Darkness for the stuff of nightmares?

Do you travel this world knowing that I put a target on your back?

I often wonder about the ways in which “we” occupy public space. The sub/unconscious cues for how we move through this world ricochet through our synapses during our waking hours. I wonder about the ways in which a society founded on White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy—a country that built its foundation on the backs of enslaved Black people—shapes our sense of space. The way we operate in public, and perhaps in private, varies greatly based on our placement on the matrix. Our intersections and multiple-converging-identities inform our experiences and interactivity with one another. Social conditioning informs our sense of space, place, and interpersonal communication.

When I think of dichotomies of public space, I am struck by the singularity of the word public. To which public do we refer to when we think about these municipal arenas? Who created this false paradigm in which we are all considered equal, in which we all have equity in the collective ownership of common ground?

When I think about public space, and the ways in which we occupy it, I think of America, the playground for hegemonic Whiteness, and America, the minefield for everyone else.

I think about the American institutions that are in service of the public. I ponder how vast and idiosyncratic our public works are—the reality that a system in “the-service-of-the-public” is functional relative to who that particular “public” is.

When I contemplate this relativism, I am reminded of Kalief Browder. A sixteen year old Black boy who was riding on a city train during the upswing of Mayor Bloomberg’s New York. This child, Kalief Browder, arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack, was a member of the public and taken in by an institution-in-the-service-of-the-public.

When you go over the three years that he spent [in jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it’s unbelievable that this could happen to a teenager in New York City. He didn’t get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!”

[An Aside: It was this same institution-in-the-service-of-the-public that gently handcuffed Dylann Roof and dotingly fed him fast food burgers shortly after he murdered nine Black worshipers in a house of God.]

When the institution-in-the-service-of-the-public is grounded on rules etched into the books of Slave owners, which public does it serve?

Is there a place in an institution for safety and salvation?

In the municipal space, our “public” systems are segmented into parts that run both parallel and perpendicular to one another. There is the justice system. There is the transport system (these two converged for Kalief). There is the education system. There is the culture system. Housing. Finances. Etc. etc.

Where does one find an antidote to a public’s peril in the thick plait of institutions-in-the-service-of-the-public systems?

When I think of Kalief Browder, I think of his drive to change institutions-in-the-service-of-the-public. I think of how he bore the wounds inflicted upon and around him for a larger public service. I think of how we must memorialize his experience, both for him and for the public.

I think about the ways we have commemorated Kalief, not only his life before but also his life after the change inflicted upon him. The Kalief 2.0, shrouded in the un-ebbing breath of solitude. It is through the artist, and the institutions that strain against the birthright of Whiteness, who create change against the machine.

I think about a memorial to Kalief 2.0, a memorial to our unattended and violated publics, and I think about Coby Kenndy’s 

. The box is glass-clear and sharp edged. Kalief’s real life box was not so beautiful or so clean.

They say people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.


But what if the stone-throwers imprisoned YOU within the glass? ♦


Notes from the Glass House: For Kalief

In conjunction with Coby Kennedy’s Summer 2021 exhibition 

, a four-part program series that considered the realities of mass incarceration through the lens of art and activism. Over the course of four weeks, Broadcast is releasing Beyond The Box’s accompanying video series, each paired with a newly commissioned text that further elaborates on the thematic pillars charted by For Freedoms: Awakening, Listening, Healing, and Justice. Below, for Listening, Pastor Isaac Scott speaks to the harms of incarceration and introduces works by several writers whom he’s worked with through his program 

Beyond the Box