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We visit the artist, inventor, and designer Andrea Lauer in her studio for a look into her process around science inspired creations, plus Janna Levin reflects on their friendship, collaboration, and shared love of unconventional Brooklyn spaces.

On a strip of Flatbush Ave between the Manhattan bridge and BAM, there is an inconspicuous, dilapidated building flanked by chicken joints and fleeting discount shops. The swathe of sidewalk tolerates pedestrian traffic next to a road that is too broad and divergent, the crossings too long, to ever be transformed into a welcoming corner of the city. The door to this building was once beautiful, as were the big arched windows along its commercial ground floor. Now, you’re more likely to avert your eyes to avoid the probing strobe of traffic lights and angry cars than you are to notice the boarded-up windows. The windows technically are not boarded up, not by intentional covering paper or wood planks or For Rent signs. Rather they are blocked from the inside with a hoarder’s cornucopia of furniture tending to the commercially large: a table for twenty, salvaged restaurant equipment, and entire foregone bars. We lovingly call this building MEx, after the Metropolitan Exchange Bank sign that endures above the high ground floor—a sign put there by a set designer when the building served as the backdrop for a scene in a Rom Com more than 30 years ago.

Once upon a time, on the top floor of MEx lived a raggy collective of young, brilliant artists, many already lauded and accumulating accolades. They coalesced organically and without formality, attracted by the natural forces of their talents, which spanned engineering to art installations, music to fashion. Most, if not all, brought a technical background to their creative vision—so much so that enough powerful elements colluded to define a wave of “makers” who insisted on a synergy between the beautiful and the intellectually brawny. There, under leaky skylights and crumbling infrastructure, I met Andrea Lauer.

Andrea is undefinable as a creative and I’ve noticed that any attempts to try to define her succumb to lists, impressive lists, but still lists: artist, fashion designer, technologist, costume and character designer, story teller, educator, set designer, inventor, activist. Andrea is outrageously versatile and accomplished in so many different media that another list is required: theatre, opera, dance, film, music videos, photoshoots, protests, immersive installations, television. Yet in her versatility, she is not a chameleon. Andrea retains her indefatigable style, as though something of her charming, inimical, not unpunk character glows in every creation.

Leading musicians and artists rely on her to create styles and identities for the Grammy Awards, the Tony Awards, their high-glamour photoshoots. Her credits include: 

 magazine. On Broadway alone, she is accredited with over 50 productions including costume design for 

. She is a recipient of the Baryshnikov Fellowship and a Lucille Lortel Theatre Awards nominee. Not least, her designs have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her production design credits include The Royal Albert Hall, Shakespeare's Globe, and, appropriately, our former neighbor BAM. Andrea has longtime collaborations with the Pilobolus Dance Organization, the physicalist choreographer Elizabeth Streb, and the cabaret-inspired persona Meow Meow.

Her activism finds its natural form in designs for the body like her 

 jumpsuits which, when worn at protests by a line of provoked women with inter-linked arms, forms a wall of defiance, a mockery of “

” wall. The suits have been donned with the vibrancy and urgency that fueled the recent Women’s March, Black Lives Matter protests, and political uprisings. Some have found their way into the New York Historical Society Museum and Library.

, a couture workwear fashion brand of her own creation that celebrates the art of the jumpsuit. She also owns RISEN from the Thread, a design and innovation agency focused on the human body and its relationship with technology through which she invents products to augment human capacities for the McCann Worldgroup advertising agency and the NYU Langone Medical Center. For all of these works and her underlying creative vigor, Andrea has held many coveted positions including as an MIT Director’s Fellow and New Lab Artist Residency.

Still bound by MEx, Andrea would visit me in the early days of sciences at Pioneer Works, when the third floor of the beautiful, old building accommodated an errant, torn couch that suited me ideally in my meditations on the potential and future of the otherwise raw and unfinished space. Unlike MEx, Pioneer Works occupies a quiet street corner bordered by sparse, one-way traffic in a remote part of Brooklyn. Plywood floors were stapled onto that third floor of the building to provide uneven footing in a vast space too big to be called a room. There, as though out of the very wood dust, exhibitions grew into film sets and temporary painters' cubbies and just as quickly everything would be swept away, effaced as though by a brutal, efficient storm. When empty, the space became an observation deck to stare into sunsets over the river and views of Manhattan and the bridges that connect the boroughs. The third floor presented an improvement on the conditions at MEx, but still retained an echo of the same permissive vibe, as though the lack of infrastructure encouraged the unwieldy sculptures and the active welding. In time, we transformed the third floor into the soul of the Science Studios, which feel as though they have always been there, in continuity with the building’s history—a manifestation of our belief that science is part of culture.

Our collaborations, Andrea’s and mine, are as natural as conversations and are as ongoing as the themes of any long friendship. Andrea would attend a science lecture at Pioneer Works on genetic manipulation, quantum mechanics, or dark matter, and in the swirling amino acid of thoughts and emotions, charged by her own curiosity, a primordial spark would ignite. In response she would prototype and invent on scales small and large. She has made a series of clever patches that read like puzzles to accompany the Scientific Controversies series. The patches are dispensed from a refurbished cigarette machine of her design in the Science Studios. Then came the bandanas, a harkening back to the canonical sweat-absorbing bandanas of filmic scientists out in the field. Picture Jane Goodall in the mountains. These pre-coronavirus garments were a prediction to be followed by the more on-the-nose, literally, masks in her Dark Matters series. Her influence pops up in these bespoke adornments and her RISEN DIVISION jumpsuits that have become the couture workwear uniform for many of us in the studios and can be spotted on stage and in the audience of our events.

, Andrea said, "I like to make things that have value and that capture memory, that capture an experience. They are often things that are a takeaway of an action so that it can live on. They’re my versions of time capsules, but they’re all my secret signature. I like that I can put out little pieces of magic into the world that someone will either unlock or not unlock, but everyone will do it in a different way."

In 2019, Andrea joined the Science Studios at Pioneer Works as an artist in residence. The video above features her time with us. Her collection of Scientific Controversies Patches, Signature Series Bandanas, and the Dark Matters Masks are now available in our online store:

Dark Matter Masks and Couture Workwear with Andrea Lauer

Residency: Andrea Lauer

Andrea Lauer

One of the original names for Pioneer Works was the Museum of the Working Artist. While the name didn’t stick, the ethos did. This series interviews residents making new strides in their own practice, all-the-while on-site and clued-in to the communities that come in and out of the studio.

ricky sallay zoker (aka. YATTA) is a multimedia artist, musician, writer, and educator who was 

 at Pioneer Works in August 2022. To accompany the release of their new residency video, YATTA shared the following reflections with 

We lived near the bayou. My grandma would walk with us, bread loaves in hand. We tossed the birds bits of food and watched them run to us for fun. We sat while Grandma stood with her hand on her hip. Down the street one way was the park with the baseball field, down the street the other way was the elementary school. In the baseball park there was the forest, inside the forest there was a tree house, which I can’t remember if it was make-believe or true. My grandma’s garden also had a forest (a forest was any place that had trees taller than me). Camping is where I saw true forests. Hot dogs and chips with our butts in the dirt. Mom was a troop leader because she didn’t want me to be the only Black person around. Camping in a huge tent with my mom and Kathleen’s mom felt like a strange ritual with an undisclosed intention. My mom wanted to have some sense of control over my interactions in an all white troop—troop like we were going out to war. A war to create culture and fashion experiences in nature that could teach us how to choose discomfort as a game. I guess the undisclosed intention was to prove something to ourselves, which still isn’t specific, but is closer to what I’ve been thinking about lately. About nature. About who owns it and why. About camping, swimming, hiking, climbing, skiing. About Blackness in relation to those things.

In high school, I met kids who were passionate about protecting the environment. I didn’t understand why they were telling me to reuse my water bottle. I hated seeing their Nalgenes. They had the audacity to judge me for thinking about things that weren’t recycling. In college, the same kids grew up to be young adults who used jargon to protest and defend their eco-beliefs. Somehow, they were unable to conjure frustration, anger, or gusto for the protection of their Black peers. Now, they know better. They have a nuanced understanding of the intersection between racism and environmentalism. They know to be quiet and to listen. They know that to be a good white person is to question everything and to keep your racist thoughts to yourself, or think of them as intrusive thoughts because they could not be from you. Perhaps, the thoughts are downloaded from the minds of their ancestors who are so desperately afraid that their grasps on power are loosening. Anyway, enough about them.

During Covid I learned about hobbies. I began a herbalism class. It was expensive. I dropped out. I realized I don’t really care about herbalism. I know it works, but I get suspicious. I 

 believe that  plants heal and speak. Nettles sting. They teach us about boundaries. Roses prick. They teach us how to say no. Oatstraw tempers fire. I need a lot of oatstraw. Everyone has a herb store now. Everyone is a tarot reader now. Everyone remembers the earth now. Tell God Tenky. I love to quit.

I told my therapist I started surfing. He’s African. He told me he was afraid of water. My mom is afraid of water and cats. Cats are afraid of water. I love water. Neither of my parents can swim. Black people weren’t allowed in public pools in the US until the mid 1960s.

Black people were stolen and placed in ships that moved across water. Women who  jumped off of the ships had unborn babies who formed an underwater community called Drexciya. Drexciya is a music duo that made techno about Black life underwater. They’re from Detroit, Michigan. Flint, Michigan still doesn’t have clean water. Who is to blame?

In Sierra Leone they burn trash. I love the smell. White people probably think it’s bad to burn trash, too. Who knows. I’m tired. I want to rest. I want to swim. I want to feel at ease. I deserve it. I deserve it. I deserve it. ♦

ricky sallay zoker (a.k.a. YATTA) is a multimedia artist and musician. With their solo project, YATTA, they have performed nationally and internationally, alongside acts like Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Laraaji, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. Their multimedia performances, videos, and installations have been shown at institutions like the Shed, The Getty, MoCA, MoMA, and the Tate. Their music has been reviewed in magazines like Pitchfork and The Wire. They are a former Clocktower Radio resident and have taught workshops at Bard College, the New School, Vassar College, and the School of Making and Thinking.

ricky sallay zoker (YATTA) is a multimedia artist and musician from Houston, Texas. Their practice combines music combines poetry, video art, movement, and the use of their voice in a variety of different ways.

YATTA

Erin Johnson's single and multi-channel video installations blend documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmaking devices to foreground how individual lives and sociopolitical realities merge. Whether following a team of botanists or residents in a senior center, Pioneer Works Visual Arts Alum Erin Johnson uses video to find beauty—and rebellion—in the power of the collective. ♦

Erin Johnson

Umber Majeed uses virtual reality, collage, video art and her uncle’s tourism company, Trans-Pakistan as a starting point to create alternative and speculative realities. Majeed often questions larger narratives around the relationship between nationalism and Western influence. She explains her creative process including using personal archival material and how she plans to create subversive narratives that infiltrate the Pakistani tourism culture.

Umber Majeed

With work spanning sculpture and installation yet grounded in video, Ilana Harris-Babou speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever-unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom.

Ilana Harris-Babou

Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a learner seeking to make her learning and thinking visible through an ecosystem of iterative projects including “architecturally-scaled collages,” poetic gestures, long-form essays, publications, large-scale public works, digital archives, teaching, curriculum development, lecture performances, stand-up comedy, and other forms yet to be determined.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Jen Liu is a New York-based visual artist working in video, performance, and painting on topics of national identity, economy, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts. In 2017, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/Video, the NYFA/NYSCA Gregory Millard Fellowship in Digital/Electronic Media, and she premiered her most recent work, PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT, in 2018’s Berlinale Forum Expanded exhibition.

Jen Liu

American Artist is an interdisciplinary artist whose work extends dialectics formalized in Black radicalism and organized labor into a context of networked virtual life. Their practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology. ♦

American Artist

Considered one of the pioneers of interactive cinema, New York-based artist Toni Dove creates hybrid performance, installation, and screen-based art that fuses film, game, or instrument based interaction, and experimental theater. Her work has been shown internationally at such venues as Banff Centre for the Arts, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Museum of the Moving Image, ZKM, REDCAT, EMPAC, and the Kitchen. Dove creates large-scale responsive environments, both performance and installation, that connect embodied interface technologies, like vocal analysis or video motion sensing to media and robotics to create immersive narratives.

Toni Dove

Ezra Wube is a mixed media artist born in Ethiopia and based in Brooklyn, NY. His work references the notions of past and present, the constant changing of place, and the dialogical tensions between “here” and “there.”

Ezra Wube

MV Carbon is an artist and composer whose work encompasses live performance, sound art, painting, sound for film, and multi-media installation. Her current work explores interchangeability, the human mechanism, perceptive states of consciousness, habitat, animism, and the empirical force of nature. In live performances, a non-traditional approach to music is embraced with the use of electric cello, sculptural sound objects, gongs, amplified objects, oscillators, and hand constructed instruments. Carbon reinterprets the physical form associated with virtuosity, and challenges the way a musical instrument is defined, and approached. She is interested in the psychological effect of sound and works to heighten our senses through spatial, psychic, and temporal based explorations.

MV Carbon

Mani Nilchiani and Caroline Sinders are a collaborative duo exploring the future of surveillance and networked identities in VR with their interactive narrative project “Dark Patterns.” Their project and residency is imagining a near future dystopia in a world with zero net neutrality, rising fascism, and surveillance in everyday products. “Dark Patterns” has previously been shown at MoMA PS1, the Weird Reality Conference at Carnegie Mellon University, and at Pioneer Works Second Sundays. Caroline Sinders is a researcher and artist working at the intersections of emerging technology and public good through critical design and narrative. Sinders holds a masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She is from New Orleans, Louisiana and is currently based in Brooklyn. Mani Nilchiani is an artist, technologist, and musician. His work explores displacement, memory, and diasporic psyche. Nilchiani holds a masters from the Parsons School of Design’s Design and Technology Program. He is from Tehran, Iran and is currently based in Brooklyn.

Mani Nilchiani and Caroline Sinders

Claudia Hart emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists in the “identity art” niche. She still examines identity, but updated through the scrim of technology. Her art is about issues of the body, perception, and nature collapsing into technology and then back again. Hart was an early adopter of virtual imaging, using 3D animation to make media installations and projections, then later as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR, and objects using computer-driven production machines, all based on the same computer models. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she developed a pedagogic program based on this concept called Experimental 3D. It is the first art school curriculum dedicated solely to teaching simulations technologies in a contemporary art world context. She lives in New York and Chicago and works with Transfer gallery and bitforms gallery.

Claudia Hart

Taeyoon Choi is an artist and a co-founder of School for Poetic Computation in New York City. His practice involves performance, electronics, paintings, and installations that form the basis for storytelling to explore the connection between race, gender, disability and environment. He was a fellow at Data and Society and Eyebeam Art and Technology Center. His projects were presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2019, Taeyoon is working on Distributed Web of Care and ongoing research with a critical perspective towards technology, ethics, justice and sensitivity to the concept of personhood.

Taeyoon Choi

Ziemba is the performing moniker of NYC-based musician, composer, perfumer, and cultural geographer René Kladzyk. Ziemba’s multisensory creations playfully interrogate space, perception, and the body. Since first making an incense for her debut album (using flowers from the yard of her childhood home), Ziemba has increasingly employed fragrance as a vehicle for transforming sonic spaces. Her new full length album, ARDIS, functions as a series of portals into a feminist sci-fi adventure and parallel world. It will be released sequentially throughout the spring and summer of 2019, in the form of audio download, limited batch fragrance, video, tape and vinyl.

Ziemba

Born and raised in New Orleans, Brandon Ares has recently produced and directed music and media content for Pink Room Project and other artists as well as participated in performances with Goldlink, Homeshake, and A-Trak. Ares, alongside Pink Room Project, has cultivated a DIY scene in New Orleans that combines 90s rave and punk culture in a series of secret underground hotline parties. Open and inclusive to all, the sights and sounds of this scene serve as the backdrop for his first mixtape, “GOOD LOVE 2017: DYKE,” a personal look inward at the line between sexual exploration, addiction, and desensitization.

Brandon Ares

Abdu Ali is an independent music artist, writer, and multimedia arts curator based in Baltimore. Ali has released five musical projects, all notable for their idiosyncratic blend of punk, futurism, jazz, Baltimore Club Music, and rap music, with lyrics yielding poetic uprise. Through their work as a rapper and curator, emphasized by their writings and outspokenness via social media/interviews, Ali has been elected as a radical underground Baltimore music and cultural figure. Ali, was also the founder of Kahlon, an iconic underground party that radicalized the artistic climate and made space for marginalized musicians in Baltimore. Unapologetically Black, gay, and queer, Abdu Ali’s work is bold, raw, and most importantly life-affirming.

Abdu Ali

Mary Helena Clark is an artist working in film, video, and installation. Her work uses the language of collage to explore dissociative states through cinema, bringing together disparate subjects and styles that suggest an exterior logic or code. Using the conventions of narrative, language, and genre, her films explore shifting subjectivities and the limits of the embodied camera.

Mary Helena Clark

Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist interested in creating platforms for ongoing dialogue about artificial intelligence (A.I.) as it intersects race, gender, aging, and our future histories. Her art employs lens-based practices, the manipulation of space, and technology to grapple with notions of consciousness, agency, perception, and social equity. Her work has been exhibited at a broad spectrum of public, private, and institutional venues by design.

Stephanie Dinkins

Victoria Scott is a Canadian-born educator and visual artist, mainly a sculptor, working between physical materials, emotional energy and electronic media of many flavors. Her projects include constructing material representations of conceptual objects and images that exist in simulated digital environments, the public commons and in the space of cultural imagination. She is currently developing interactive Virtual Reality environments to visualize human energy fields and has just founded Imaginary Objects, a VR/AR company based in San Francisco. Victoria has exhibited throughout North America and Europe, and completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Victoria Scott

 TYGAPAW (Dion McKenzie) is a multi-disciplined producer and DJ based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Her Jamaican ancestry and upbringing fused with her 13 years living in New York City have influenced a music style she dubs “Sultry Club.” She incorporates sexy 90’s R&B sounds with futuristic vibes and intricate melodies that are as much for the club as they are for a chill kiki at your home girls crib. Her productions are unique and specific to her history. She is the curator behind “Fake Accent,” a monthly Brooklyn based queer club night that has featured DJ’s such as Rizzla, False Witness, HD, Mursi Layne, and more, and also the co-curator behind queer Caribbean party series and creative platform, “NO BADMIND.”

TYGAPAW

Ka Baird is a multi-instrumentalist and vocalist living and working in NYC. She is one of the founding and continuing members of the experimental outfit Spires That In The Sunset Rise founded in Chicago in September 2001. Since relocating to NYC in November 2014, she has set off in numerous directions apart from Spires with new collaborations as well as honing in on her own solo work. She is interested specifically in performance/sound as a means to break reoccurring thought patterns in order to create passages into pure energy potential.

Ka Baird

Michael Beharie is a musician based in New York City. His music sits at the imagined intersection between sound system culture, pop transmission and free improvisation. Michael’s latest efforts include the song-cycle EP Voices, three film scores for Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo and a duo piece for himself and cellist Teddy Rankin-Parker. Beharie performs regularly in and outside of NYC and recently joined avant-noise outfit ZS.

Michael Beharie

Saxophonist, composer, and educator María Grand was born in Switzerland in 1992, to a Swiss mother and an Argentinian father. Upon her move to New York in 2011, she quickly became the protégée of legendary musicians such as Billy Harper, and Antoine Roney, as well as NEA Jazz Master Von Freeman; in just a few years, she became one of the few fresh and unique voices on her instrument.

María Grand

Composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra creates live and immersive music that explores rhythm, indigenous practices, and interaction with cities and the natural world. Ibarra is a Yamaha, Paiste, and Vic Firth Drum Artist. In 2017, Ibarra will premiere DreamTime Ensemble with a forthcoming new album on Decibel Collective titled Perception, a collection of pieces around the idea of finding unfixed meaning in sensory experiences and interaction in one's environment.

Susie Ibarra

Kristian Matsson is a Swedish songwriter/singer, based in Gagnef and Brooklyn, who performs under the stage name of The Tallest Man on Earth. He has been making records and touring the world since 2006. His latest album ‘Dark Bird is Home’ (2015), set him on a tour where he was honored to be let into places like Massey Hall in Toronto, The Beacon Theatre in New York, Royal Albert Hall in London and The Sydney Opera House.

Kristian Matsson

Oral histories from Mexican and Native peoples, post-colonial historical texts, and spaces that are safe and inclusive for people of color are the cosmologies that surround Mexican-American artist Carlos Rosales-Silva’s work. His most recent output reclaims the colors and forms that have long been (ab)used to create oppressive stereotypes of Mexican and Native American peoples. Draining direct references, symbols, and figures have allowed him a freedom to study the color and form of his identity. Rosales-Silva’s central intellectual and artistic project is de-centering his white, hetero, Euro-centric western education. He has exhibited throughout Texas, and in Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and Brooklyn.

Carlos Rosales-Silva

Watch an interview with the rhythmic punk Tashi Dorji about his artistic journey to residency. Tashi Dorji talks about what growing up in Bhutan, on the eastern side of the Himalayas, was like as a young music-lover. Dorji’s musicianship brings haunting beauty and mindfulness to each of his listeners.

Tashi Dorji

Nate Lewis is a Washington DC-based artist originally from Beaver Falls, PA. Working within portraiture and figuration, Lewis’ current focus has been on creating sculpted paper photo works that combine elements of drawing, sculpture, etching, embroidery and fabric. In these works he sculpts out unseen tensions on bodies, representing them with an array of textures and patterns to reveal hidden layers of empathy.

Nate Lewis

Genesis Belanger is a Brooklyn-based sculptor. She is currently working in ceramics hand building handsome jokes about the absurdity of the patriarchy in a material that lasts forever. The work engages in a conversation about the present and its relationship to the past, a past that so many were denied their rights to shape.

Genesis Belanger

This video features the iconic collaboration between Tahir Carl Karmali and Bob Bellerue. Brooklyn-based artist Tahir Carl Karmali, interests lie in manipulating materials that perpetuate colonialism expressing his art across multiple mediums, materials, and photography. He draws from his own experiences as a well-traveled Kenyan citizen to structure narratives around migratory identity. Bob Bellerue is a noise composer, experimental musician, and creative technician based in Brooklyn NY. Over the last 30 years, he has been involved in a wide range of sonic activities – noise art, experimental/abstract music, junk metal percussion ensembles, Balinese gamelan, sound scores for dance/ theater/ video/ performance art, and sound/video installations.

Tahir Carl Karmali

The work of Canadian-Trinidadian artist Curtis “Talwst” Santiago incorporates mixed-media and performance practices. He is currently engaged in an ongoing series of miniature dioramas in reclaimed ring boxes that highlight absent or misinterpreted narratives, revealing the non-linear complexities of history and exploring intercultural relationships. Talwst’s work has been exhibited internationally at The Art Gallery of Mississauga (Ontario), Angell Gallery (Toronto), Studio Museum Harlem (New York) and Galerie White Projects (Paris).

Curtis Santiago

MSHR, the collaborative hyperscape sensory duo, discussing their generative sculptural installation Knotted Gate Chant Cycle on Clocktower Radio.