Name: Press Play 2023
Start: 2023-12-09
End: 2023-12-10
Location: Pioneer Works

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Own the Archive Sale

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.

Gift Guide

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

Ragas 

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

June closing

Please note, Pioneer Works will be closed for daily admissions until July 7th. We 

open for ticketed programs, view our calendar 

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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 

Flash Flood Closures

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.

April PW Store Banner

Shop the PW Store Spring Sale!

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

PW Closure 5/7

Pioneer Works is closed to the public today.

Aura Closure 5/27

Please note:

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

CEO Announcement

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.

85% of our programming is free or accessibly-priced and we rely on our community of supporters to make that possible. Give now to ensure that we can continue nurturing artists and audiences through 2025.


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PW Closed 11/11

We're closed all day Friday, November 11 for our annual Village Fête Benefit. To learn more about the After Party and get tickets, visit 

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Let Pioneer Works come to you                                    

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 

PW Newsletter

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 takes place at PW to celebrate this digital experiment and the artists, scientists, musicians, writers, and readers who’ve made it possible. RSVP 

Aura Closure 6/3

 will close early at 5pm on Saturday, June 3. Learn more and plan your visit 

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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 

Sound Check Closure

Early Closure

Pioneer Works will close at 4 pm on Thursday, April 10th in preparation for the 

15th Annual Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Sonic Liberation

Join Pioneer Works for our fourth edition of Press Play, a weekend-long fair of books, small presses, records, art, ephemera, and publications of all kinds.

This year we invite publishers, artists, musicians, labels, and their communities to participate in talks, performances, and workshops that showcase new ways of reading, listening, and creating culture today.

Press Play is organized by Pioneer Works and is free and open to the public.

Publishing at Pioneer Works comprises our imprint, 

. This year’s programs are presented in partnership with 

Press Play 2023 programs will be broadcast live on Montez Press Radio. 

 is a project dedicated to African independent art publishing. Through public programs, distribution, and an itinerant reading room, Afrophon' presents African artists' books, cultural periodicals, and art books on contemporary art, design, literature, architecture, theory, cultural politics, and adjacent fields.

 is a New York-based collective and independent press. At once a structure of coherent units and a collection of disjointed parts, BlackMass invokes an aggregate of Blackness, of matter in resistance. Combining archival photographs and found print material with poetry and jazz music, BlackMass grapples with the blurred lines and idiosyncrasies which make up the collective improvisation of African diasporic culture.

 is a nonprofit organization supporting emerging and historically significant artists who produce work across disciplines, often rooted in traditions of experimental and creative music. We aim to establish new frameworks to preserve, nurture, and present these artists’ work and to build platforms for practices underrepresented in art’s commercial, institutional, and historical fields. Blank Forms collaborates with artists on commissions, exhibitions, publications as well as archival and estate projects within contemporary cultural ecosystems and in perpetuity. In presenting and documenting this work, Blank Forms seeks to foster an artistic community founded upon engaged and equitable conversations across continents, media, and generations.

 is a New York–based magazine that publishes digital works of art and literature, books, and software, among other media and experiences. 

Day One

Day Two

Triple Canopy

Blank Forms

Afrophon'

BlackMass Publishing

Montez Press Radio

Afrophon' Reading Room features recent artists' books and independent publications from Africa. Included are experimental literary and editorial projects that defy categorization; art books and cultural periodicals on contemporary art and politics, and artist-produced zines that embrace the democratic potential of artistic multiples. Largely created through self-organized modes of production and distribution, these publications trace the urgencies and conditions of the varied regions, histories, and diasporas from which their creators emerge. Together these publishers offer a set of bold propositions for the future of publishing not only on the African continent but across the globe. 

Afrophon’ is a project dedicated to African independent art publishing. Through public programs, distribution, and an itinerant reading room, Afrophon' presents African artists' books, cultural periodicals, and art books on contemporary art, design, literature, architecture, theory, cultural politics, and adjacent fields. 

Afrophon' Reading Room features the publishers: AFRIKADAA / African Art Book Fair, Dream Press, Chimurenga, Éditions motifs, Kayfa ta, Kulte Editions, Locale, pumflet: art, architecture and stuff, ZAMAN BOOKS & CURATING

Afrophon’ Reading Room is designed in collaboration with Riley Hooker and Rush Jackson.

Afrophon’ Reading Room

Listening Session: Residency Music

Lawrence Kumpf is joined by veteran music journalist Mike Rubin for a survey of the music of producer, remixer, and Detroit house legend Theo Parrish. The pair will spin a selection of Parrish’s work, on the occasion of the release of Blank Forms 09: Sound Signatures, the organization’s penultimate journal. The book, available for purchase at the Blank Forms table, features a transcription of a career-spanning, twenty-hour conversation between Rubin and Parrish, going deep on the latter’s childhood in Chicago’s South Side, sculptural training, and how the social movements of 2020 have reshaped his practice and dance music at large. 

Blank Forms Radio: Theo Parrish's Sound Signatures with Mike Rubin

We’re living in what’s been called a new golden age for "small magazines": independent periodicals have become ever-more vital organs, as our legacy media flails, for critical engagement and thought. How has the role of magazines changed––and how should it––in an era of McCarthyite terror and atrocity? Join editors from The Baffler, The Drift, and The Whitney Review, for this special conversation hosted by Pioneer Works Broadcast, to discuss what makes publishing worthwhile today––and what magazines are for.

PW Broadcast: What’s a Magazine (For)?

What’s in a feed? Or, rather, what’s in your feed? For Live Feed, Triple Canopy will attend to the balance of recognition and randomness that animates streams of content on social media feeds and For You pages. Without glorifying the algorithm (or mining your data), the magazine will bring the atomized experience of scrolling and browsing offline. In a series of short multimedia presentations, Benjamin Krusling, Rian Phin, Sydney Shen, imogen xtian smith, and Bijan Stephen will draw on personal archives to showcase digital artifacts—such as a prurient rollercoaster controversy and a revival of Y2K fashion—that reflect the conventions of expression and circulation online, particularly those operating outside the so-called mainstream.

Live Feed with Triple Canopy

It’s been a little over ten years since Hailu Mergia re-emerged on the international music scene. Following the first in a series of his classic recordings, reissued in collaboration with Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mergia assembled a band and began performing live again after many years driving a cab in Washington, DC.⁠ ⁠ In collaboration with Awesome Tapes from Africa, Pioneer Works released a recorded document from the powerful DC-based trio's 2016 show at PW. Join us for a listening session of the vinyl. Hailu Mergia will also be signing records, available for sale at our Pioneer Works Press table.

Listening Session: Hailu Mergia Pioneer Works Swing (Live) & Record Signing

Join artists Erica Deeman, Denice Frohman and Olalekan Jeyifous for a walkthrough of Climate Futurism. Curated by ecologist and climate policy expert Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, 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, What If We Get It Right?, the artists have created 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.

The program will begin on the 2nd Floor Gallery.

Climate Futurism Gallery Dialogues

Lawrence Kumpf is joined by Ahmed Abdullah for a survey on the important loft jazz figure’s sweeping career. Born in Harlem in 1947, Abdullah has been a consistent and unmistakable force in New York and Brooklyn’s jazz world as a leader and sideman, forming the group Abdullah in 1972, and founding 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. He joined the Sun Ra Arkestra as trumpeter in 1974 and remained a member for more than twenty years, an experience at the core of his memoir A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra, available for purchase at the Blank Forms table.

Blank Forms Radio: A Strange Celestial Road with Ahmed Abdullah

This collaborative workshop led by Wendy's Subway and Chang Yuchen proposes a brief study of the artist's book. Through a series of writing prompts and bookbinding exercises, participants will explore the book as a medium through which to experiment with translating form, time, movement, and genre.

Workshop: Publishing in Tempo: Imagining the Artist's Book with Wendy's Subway

Join Illustrator and comic artist Kyle Canyon to create unique mini zines that optimize a single sheet of paper. This youth-based activity encourages participants to experiment with simple concepts such as color, shape, composition, and sequence to further an understanding of bookmaking. Be ready to cut, fold, glue, and draw to make your own self-published works of art. 

Pictofold: Zine Making with Kyle Canyon

Join us at the Blank Forms table for a book signing with Ahmed Abdullah, to celebrate his memoir, A Strange Celestial Road: My Time in the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Blank Forms: Book Signing with Ahmed Abdullah

Yusuf Hassan and Kwamé Sorrell of BlackMass Publishing host an improvised roundtable with fields harrington and Harmony Holiday on “genre as medium,” sound(s) as communication, and how artists and musicians can recast our relationship to time. 

Bass-ically Speaking: genre as medium with BlackMass

Get to know our current artists-in-residence in their work through Open Studios, featuring residents Paloma Izquierdo and Kyle Richardson, John Reynolds, Magdalena Dukiewicz, Java Jones, Utsa Hazarika, Vandana Jain, Ryan Decker, Guanyu Xu, and Kenseth Armstead.

Pioneer Works Residency Open Studios

The teenage diaries of punk icon Sean DeLear—frontman for the band Glue—were recently published by Semiotext(e). Full of sex, longing, and teenage rebellion, the candid journals document both coming of age pre-AIDS and a particular moment in LA’s underground, queer history. Moderated by writer and editor Cesar Padilla, the panel Queer Punks brings together artists Justin Allen and Katrina del Mar, musician and producer Keven Kenkel, and glam rock provocateur Tony Zanetta to discuss the histories of punk, from glam to garage; contributions queers made to punk that were co-opted by the mainstream; and DeLear’s place within these histories.

PW Broadcast presents: Queer Punks

In July of this year, Kate Zambreno published The Light Room—a memoir of “art-making and care” that’s been roundly hailed as one of 2023’s finest books. To discuss her formally path-breaking work, parenting in the pandemic, and more, Kate will be joined by her acclaimed fellow-writer Elvia Wilk. This conversation is a part of the Broadcast Radio Hour, a monthly series convened and published by Pioneer Works Broadcast.