Name: Second Sundays: April 2019
Start: 2019-04-14
End: 2019-04-14
Location: Pioneer Works

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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. 

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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.

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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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Food and drinks by J’eatjet and Pioneer Works Bar

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Food and drinks by J&#8217;eatjet and Pioneer Works Bar

Second Sundays is a free event series that engages Pioneer Works disciplines through live music, food, artists’ open studios, and interactive programs.

Second Sundays

For his largest-scale exhibition in the United States, The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth, AVL draws from two bodies of work that give the exhibition its name. They transform Pioneer Works into an immersive installation of sculptures and industrial machines. Central to the New Tribal Labyrinth series is Blast Furnace (2013), an imposing structure referencing Industrial Revolution-era furnaces traditionally used to produce steel. The sculpture also contains domestic elements such as a kitchen, toilet, and sleeping quarters. This environment is inhabited by an imaginary tribe of metalworkers, a “new tribe” with a visceral desire to return to the beginning of industry—the origins of Western culture, wealth, materials, and products. This tribe feeds off the heat, waste, and noise of their industrial utopia, setting the stage for the synthesis of human and machine. Some of the works in the New Tribal Labyrinth series express this synthesis through sculptural representations of sperm and reproductive organs doubling as lamps and furniture. They posit the human body as itself a kind of machine, endlessly procreating. 

Other works in the exhibition are part of AVL’s CryptoFuturist series, which takes its name, in part, from the Greek kryptós—“hidden” or “secret,” as in a person covertly supporting a group, party, or belief. In this body of work, AVL revisits the Italian Futurists, who in the 20th century glorified new technologies, cities, and war finding in them a parallel to fascist tendencies we face today, such as genetics, robotics, and big data. The sculptures propose a range of solutions to fundamental problems like a machine that turns waste material into new food supplies, or a DIY nuclear reactor. Some objects such as a bronze hammer and sickle, a symbol of the Russian Revolution, nod to the rise and fall of past political movements. Pendulum (2019), a new work premiering at Pioneer Works, is a massive, mechanical clock powered by a swinging pendulum. The clock’s hands tick loudly, ominously counting down to the “end of everything” which then ushers in the “beginning of everything”—a perpetual cycle of destruction and creation characteristic of our constant search for utopia. Mechanical Press (2019), a sculpture which crushes objects daily beneath its weight, evokes these same metaphysical cycles.

While AVL envisions utopian modalities for living, these modes can just as likely lead to a world of violence and extremism. Exposing the links between the past and the present, he also lets the viewer play a game of nostalgia for bygone political theorems and movements.

Atelier Van Lieshout: The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth is curated by Gabriel Florenz and Natalie Kovacs.

About the Artist

Sculptor, painter and visionary Joep Van Lieshout (b. 1963 in Ravenstein, Netherlands) was accepted to the Rotterdam Academy of the Arts at sixteen years of age, and has been working solely under the name Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) since the studio’s founding in 1995. AVL has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design, and architecture. Work by AVL has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, and is in the collections of MoMA, New York; FNAC, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Prada Foundation, Milan; and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich.

This program is made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage, and is part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. This exhibition is also supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.

<img src="https://pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/DutchCultureUSA_logo_url.jpg" alt="" />

<img src="https://pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/Logo-downloads-EN-web-grijs_200.jpg" alt="" />

Atelier Van Lieshout: The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth

In recent years, the contours of a new contemporary art movement have begun to emerge, forged in reaction to the ideologies of Silicon Valley, the platforming and globalization of culture, and technologies of power like artificial intelligence, photorealistic computer-generated images, and virtual and augmented reality. These “Simulists” simultaneously embrace and subvert technology as their means of interrogation–expressing humanist, nonbinary, and decolonized futures. Curated by Kelani Nichole and featuring works by Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Snow Yunxue Fu, Claudia Hart, Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Tabita Rezaire, and Lu Yang, the exhibition explores identity, the body, and the politics of technology. Virtual space is inhabited with queer bodies and cultural identity is reclaimed through subversive uses of technology. The boundaries of technology and the body are blurred, as are the lines between author, image, and copy. Possible futures emerge as the layers of simulation that mediate contemporary culture are revealed. 

Refiguring Binaries is curated by Kelani Nichole, Founder of TRANSFER Gallery.

This exhibition is supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.

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Refiguring Binaries

En El Monte is an immersive environment created by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Jose Capaz, and FABELOHUNG (Roberto Fabelo Hung). Featuring a site-specific installation of metal flagpoles and ten virtual reality works filmed in New York, Havana, and Key West, the exhibition takes Havana’s Tribuna Antimperialista (Anti-Imperialist Tribune) as the jumping off point.

Tribuna Antimperialista was the site of a long-term propaganda battle in the late 1990s between the Cuban government and the United States Interests Section, Havana (USINT), which was situated in a building across the street from the square. In 2006, the United States installed a five-feet high ticker tape display across the top floor of the building which broadcast messages and quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and other cultural figures such as the comedian George Burns, who once remarked: “How sad that all the people who would know how to run this country are driving taxis or cutting hair.” The Cuban government responded by erecting the monument Monte de las Banderas, or Wall of Flags, out of one hundred fifty flags to commemorate "victims of US aggression" and to partially block the ticker. At Pioneer Works, En El Monte evokes this square with an installation of flagpoles, onto which virtual reality headsets are attached.

Among the video works, El año del caballo (The Year of the Horse) most directly references the square, as it was filmed within Monte de las Banderas. The artists superimpose exotic dancers onto the monumental flagpoles to foreground both the disparity between the sexes and the extreme measures taken by women to make ends meet during the ongoing United States embargo. The embargo’s negative impact on Cuba’s sugar industry—once a crucial component of the island’s economy—is represented within other works, wherein quintessentially colorful cakes are seen being thrown and sunken into the waters of the United States and Cuba, and playfully destroyed in a food fight.

Piñeiro Bello, Capaz, and FABELOHUNG also address the quest for freedom and escape, in works such as Street Dog and Raft (balseros view). The former follows three dogs on a commute from New York to Havana—as if following an emigrant’s path backwards; the latter, shot in the waters between Havana and Key West, features a raft fleeing illegally during the height of the Cuban Rafters Crisis in 1994. Through these works, the trio explores post-revolutionary Cuban life in the shadow of isolationism, propaganda campaigns, and economic hardship, as well as the artists’ personal paths working within the complex relationship between Cuba and its closest imperial neighbor, the United States.

This exhibition is supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.

This exhibition is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

<img style="width: 100%; max-width: 300px; height: auto;" src="https://pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/RBF_Logo_Primary-1.png-1-1.png" />

En El Monte: Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Jose Capaz, and FABELOHUNG

Keith Haring’s monumental Boys Club Mural (1987) was originally painted onto a cinder block wall of the Pitt Street chapter of the Boy’s Club of New York (BCNY)—a community center, founded in the late nineteenth-century, intended as a space where local boys could congregate and partake in recreational activities.

Haring’s graffiti drawings were seminal in pushing art beyond the confines of the museum and gallery setting, and into publicly-accessible spaces such as subway cars and concrete sidewalks. He also maintained an ardent belief in the positive impact of art on people’s lives, especially young people. The mural at the BCNY, marked by the words ‘For the Lower East Side Boys’ at the bottom, features Haring’s trademark figures engaged in a host of recreational activities.

When the building on Pitt Street was slated for demolition in 2007, the mural, measuring twenty by twenty feet and weighing forty thousand pounds, was carefully removed by a dedicated team of engineers, conservators, and gallerists, who deemed it culturally important to protect. Over a decade later, the mural makes its public debut at Pioneer Works, where it will become the centerpiece of community and educational programs.

Keith Haring: Boys Club Mural is a project made possible by Lacoste.
Image: Boys Club Mural (1987), copyright © Keith Haring Foundation.

<img class="alignnone wp-image-8367" src="https://pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_lacoste_HORIZON_BLCK_RVB_tight-300x50.png" alt="" width="200" height="52" />

Keith Haring: Boys Club Mural

Lorena Barrera Enciso is a Mexican filmmaker, painter, and performance artist. In her work, she uses her experience as a body with many homes to explore the sense of longing that is inarticulate and without language. The objects and images created in these explorations become the result of frustrated attempts at intimacy. Barrera Enciso grew up in Mexico and Switzerland and immigrated to the US when she was 18. She obtained her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Barrera Enciso has exhibited her work at Chicago Filmmakers, Onion City Film Festival, and Gene Siskel Film Center, all in Chicago, IL, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.

Lorena Barrera Enciso

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.” His work has been shown at the Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea; Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY; the 13th Biennial de Lyon, Lyon, France; Dak’Art 2014 Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; the 18th International Festival of Contemporary Art SESC_Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil; and as part of the Times Square Arts Midnight Moment, New York, NY. His residencies and awards include LMCC Workspace Residency Program, the Drawing Center, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Triangle Arts Association Residency, all in New York. Wube received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from Hunter College.

Ezra Wube

Jess Johnson was born in Tauranga, New Zealand in 1979. In 2016, she relocated permanently to New York after twelve years of living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Her practice is influenced by the speculative intersections between language, science fiction, culture, and technology. Her drawings depict complex worlds that combine densely layered patterns, objects, and figures within architectural settings. Johnson’s drawings are often displayed within constructed environments that act as physical portals into her speculative worlds. Her recent collaborations with Simon Ward have involved translating her drawings into animated video and virtual reality, giving audiences the simulated experience of entering the hypnotic realms depicted in her drawings. Johnson’s work has been exhibited at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; Art Basel, Hong Kong, China; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan, China; Centre Clark, Montreal, Canada; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; Alaska Projects, Sydney, Australia; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch, New Zealand; Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand; and National Gallery of Victoria, Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Monash University Museum of Art, and Gertrude Contemporary, all in Melbourne, Australia.

Simon Ward worked in feature film costuming for ten years. During this period, he developed a video making practice which eventually became his major focus. His work in video and animation is varied and usually involves collaboration with musicians, writers or visual artists. He has made over 50 music videos, directed three seasons of an animated comedy series, and his video and virtual reality collaborations have been shown in New York, Tokyo, Hubei, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Hong Kong. Influenced by the history of cinematographic special effects and animation and new developments in virtual reality technology, his work involves generating visual imagery that mixes reality with the fantastical.

Jess Johnson &amp; Simon Ward

Kenneth Tam is a New York-based artist born in Queens, NY. He has held solo exhibitions at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MI; MIT List Center for Visual Arts, Boston, MA; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, CA; and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Tam has participated in recent group shows at 47 Canal, New York, NY; Hollybush Gardens, London, UK; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; and will be included in SculptureCenter’s upcoming In Practice exhibition. He has participated in residencies including LMCC Workspace, Artist Lab at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, and the Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, California Community Foundation Fellowship, and Art Matters Foundation Grant. Tam is currently Guest Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and will be a Lecturer at Princeton University in the spring.

Kenneth Tam

Avram Finkelstein is an artist, writer, and founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has been shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum, all in New York, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum, all in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art and his book After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was nominated for an International Center of Photography 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing And Research. He has been interviewed by the New York Times, Frieze, Artforum, NPR, Slate, and Interview, and spoken about art, activism, LGBTQ cultural production, and the American Left at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and NYU.

Avram Finkelstein

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<div dir="ltr">Luisa Muhr is a multi-lingual, multi- and interdisciplinary performer, director, and theater-maker originally from Vienna, lives and works in New York, and is at home in the experimental/avant-garde. Her performance work centers around theater and movement art, vocal performance, performance art, and improvisation. Luisa is also the creator and curator of the interdisciplinary womxn artists series Women Between Arts at The New School and FENGARI Works. She is currently writing a new opera with six-time Grammy winner Arturo O’Farrill. Muhr has performed at venues including Lincoln Center, The Jewish Museum, The Stone, The Kitchen, Park Avenue Armory, Judson Church, The New School, and Pioneer Works.</div>
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Luisa Muhr / Women Between Arts

Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser who moves freely between of artistic disciples and contingencies. Since moving to New York in 2000 she has worked in disparate contexts as a solo artist and collaborator with creators in a wide range of disciplines. A native of South Korea, Lee has taken a broad array of inspirations—including noise, improvisation, jazz, western classical, and the traditional and popular music of her homeland—and used them to forge a highly distinctive approach. Her curiosity and a determined sense of exploration guide the work she has made in disparate contexts.

Okkyung Lee

Beth Coleman is an artist and technologist who creates public, civic, and poetic works. She directs the City as Platform Lab, University of Waterloo, Canada and the co-founder of SoundLab Cultural Alchemy. Her work has been shown in venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Musée d'Art moderne Paris. She has held artist residencies at Recollets, and Waag among others. She had published the monograph Hello Avatar (MIT Press) along with numerous articles. Her art publications include collaborations with Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, and Parkett. Her research affiliations are Berkman Center for Internet &amp; Society, Harvard University and the New York Data &amp; Society Institute.

Beth Coleman

Ryan Kuo's works are process-based and diagrammatic and often invoke a person or people arguing. He uses the conventions of video games, productivity software, user interface design, and motion graphics to produce circuitous structures that most recently relate to whiteness. At Pioneer Works, he intends to build an AI entity that embodies the “faith” that underpins white supremacy and Christian fundamentalism and casts doubt on nonbelievers. His work is distributed online at left gallery, has appeared at Queens Museum, bitforms gallery, the Current Museum, and MIT Media Lab, and has been covered in BOMB Magazine and Rhizome.

Ryan Kuo

Make beautiful and complex drawings using a geometric drawing machine inspired by mechanical drawing machines from the late 1800s.

Drawing with Machines 

Craft houses and buildings out of text and paper on borrowed words and abandoned pages. Take your buildings home or add to our paper utopian landscape while we ask questions about language, shape, and space.

Houses of Text 

Join us in the Science Studios to learn and interact with different types of robots and creative robotic technologies, altogether exploring the human / machine interface. This follows up on PW talk on Cybernetics with Hugh Herr.

Artificial Mechanisms and Robotics Pop-Up

As part of the <a href="https://pioneerworks.org/series/heart-of-the-machine/">Heart of the Machine series</a>, members of Soft Surplus culminate a zine inspired by a conversation that developed in the #random channel of the collective’s Slack. Through this publication, we hope to encourage consideration around “good leadership”. Within the zine stores a link to a shared Google Doc where viewers are welcome to write in response. Writers have a platform to share their perspectives anonymously and/or privately and in conversation with others.

Labor and Leadership 

Award-winning online radio station 8 Ball Radio is taking over our Media Lab where you can join them to watch live recordings of DJ sets. At 8pm, 8 Ball will livestream Ziemba&#8217;s concert in the North Hall. Listen live at <a href="https://www.8ballradio.nyc/">www.8ballradio.nyc</a>

8 Ball Radio 

Join us in the PW Garden to look through telescopes at the stars. 
*Weather permitting

Solar and Stargazing with the Amateur Astronomers Association

This Pioneer Works premiere of ARDIS&#8211; the new full length album/ fragrant musical adventure by Ziemba&#8211; features a tri-fold scent journey, full choir, original sets by Ben Gazsi, costumes by Merritt Meacham, and small ensemble including players Elizabeth LoPiccolo (flute and vocals), Mara Mayer (bass clarinet), Mia Theodoratus (harp), Rhys Ziemba (bass guitar and synth). René Kladzyk (aka Ziemba) will contribute lead vocals &#038; synthesizer, and function as portal cruise director.

Ziemba 

SecondSundays_2019_April

For his largest-scale exhibition in the United States, 

The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth

, AVL draws from two bodies of work that give the exhibition its name. They transform Pioneer Works into an immersive installation of sculptures and industrial machines. Central to the 

 (2013), an imposing structure referencing Industrial Revolution-era furnaces traditionally used to produce steel. The sculpture also contains domestic elements such as a kitchen, toilet, and sleeping quarters. This environment is inhabited by an imaginary tribe of metalworkers, a “new tribe” with a visceral desire to return to the beginning of industry—the origins of Western culture, wealth, materials, and products. This tribe feeds off the heat, waste, and noise of their industrial utopia, setting the stage for the synthesis of human and machine. Some of the works in the 

 series express this synthesis through sculptural representations of sperm and reproductive organs doubling as lamps and furniture. They posit the human body as itself a kind of machine, endlessly procreating.

Other works in the exhibition are part of AVL’s 

series, which takes its name, in part, from the Greek 

—“hidden” or “secret,” as in a person covertly supporting a group, party, or belief. In this body of work, AVL revisits the Italian Futurists, who in the 20th century glorified new technologies, cities, and war finding in them a parallel to fascist tendencies we face today, such as genetics, robotics, and big data. The sculptures propose a range of solutions to fundamental problems like a machine that turns waste material into new food supplies, or a DIY nuclear reactor. Some objects such as a bronze hammer and sickle, a symbol of the Russian Revolution, nod to the rise and fall of past political movements. 

(2019), a new work premiering at Pioneer Works, is a massive, mechanical clock powered by a swinging pendulum. The clock’s hands tick loudly, ominously counting down to the “end of everything” which then ushers in the “beginning of everything”—a perpetual cycle of destruction and creation characteristic of our constant search for utopia. 

(2019), a sculpture which crushes objects daily beneath its weight, evokes these same metaphysical cycles.

While AVL envisions utopian modalities for living, these modes can just as likely lead to a world of violence and extremism. Exposing the links between the past and the present, he also lets the viewer play a game of nostalgia for bygone political theorems and movements.

 is curated by Gabriel Florenz and Natalie Kovacs.

Sculptor, painter and visionary Joep Van Lieshout (b. 1963 in Ravenstein, Netherlands) was accepted to the Rotterdam Academy of the Arts at sixteen years of age, and has been working solely under the name Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) since the studio’s founding in 1995. AVL has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design, and architecture. Work by AVL has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, and is in the collections of MoMA, New York; FNAC, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Prada Foundation, Milan; and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich.

This program is made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage, and is part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. This exhibition is also supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.

For his largest-scale exhibition in the United States, The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth, AVL draws from two bodies of work that give the exhibition its name. They transform Pioneer Works into an immersive installation of sculptures and industrial machines. Central to the New Tribal Labyrinth series is Blast Furnace (2013), an imposing structure referencing Industrial Revolution-era furnaces traditionally used to produce steel. The sculpture also contains domestic elements such as a kitchen, toilet, and sleeping quarters. This environment is inhabited by an imaginary tribe of metalworkers, a “new tribe” with a visceral desire to return to the beginning of industry—the origins of Western culture, wealth, materials, and products. This tribe feeds off the heat, waste, and noise of their industrial utopia, setting the stage for the synthesis of human and machine. Some of the works in the New Tribal Labyrinth series express this synthesis through sculptural representations of sperm and reproductive organs doubling as lamps and furniture. They posit the human body as itself a kind of machine, endlessly procreating. 
Other works in the exhibition are part of AVL’s CryptoFuturist series, which takes its name, in part, from the Greek kryptós—“hidden” or “secret,” as in a person covertly supporting a group, party, or belief. In this body of work, AVL revisits the Italian Futurists, who in the 20th century glorified new technologies, cities, and war finding in them a parallel to fascist tendencies we face today, such as genetics, robotics, and big data. The sculptures propose a range of solutions to fundamental problems like a machine that turns waste material into new food supplies, or a DIY nuclear reactor. Some objects such as a bronze hammer and sickle, a symbol of the Russian Revolution, nod to the rise and fall of past political movements. Pendulum (2019), a new work premiering at Pioneer Works, is a massive, mechanical clock powered by a swinging pendulum. The clock’s hands tick loudly, ominously counting down to the “end of everything” which then ushers in the “beginning of everything”—a perpetual cycle of destruction and creation characteristic of our constant search for utopia. Mechanical Press (2019), a sculpture which crushes objects daily beneath its weight, evokes these same metaphysical cycles.
While AVL envisions utopian modalities for living, these modes can just as likely lead to a world of violence and extremism. Exposing the links between the past and the present, he also lets the viewer play a game of nostalgia for bygone political theorems and movements.
Atelier Van Lieshout: The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth is curated by Gabriel Florenz and Natalie Kovacs.
About the Artist
Sculptor, painter and visionary Joep Van Lieshout (b. 1963 in Ravenstein, Netherlands) was accepted to the Rotterdam Academy of the Arts at sixteen years of age, and has been working solely under the name Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) since the studio’s founding in 1995. AVL has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design, and architecture. Work by AVL has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, and is in the collections of MoMA, New York; FNAC, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Prada Foundation, Milan; and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich.
This program is made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage, and is part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. This exhibition is also supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.
<img src="https://sunset.pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/DutchCultureUSA_logo_url.jpg" alt="" />
<img src="https://sunset.pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/Logo-downloads-EN-web-grijs_200.jpg" alt="" />

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For his largest-scale exhibition in the United States, The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth, AVL draws from two bodies of work that give the exhibition its name. They transform Pioneer Works into an immersive installation of sculptures and industrial machines. Central to the New Tribal Labyrinth series is Blast Furnace (2013), an imposing structure referencing Industrial Revolution-era furnaces traditionally used to produce steel. The sculpture also contains domestic elements such as a kitchen, toilet, and sleeping quarters. This environment is inhabited by an imaginary tribe of metalworkers, a “new tribe” with a visceral desire to return to the beginning of industry—the origins of Western culture, wealth, materials, and products. This tribe feeds off the heat, waste, and noise of their industrial utopia, setting the stage for the synthesis of human and machine. Some of the works in the New Tribal Labyrinth series express this synthesis through sculptural representations of sperm and reproductive organs doubling as lamps and furniture. They posit the human body as itself a kind of machine, endlessly procreating. 
Other works in the exhibition are part of AVL’s CryptoFuturist series, which takes its name, in part, from the Greek kryptós—“hidden” or “secret,” as in a person covertly supporting a group, party, or belief. In this body of work, AVL revisits the Italian Futurists, who in the 20th century glorified new technologies, cities, and war finding in them a parallel to fascist tendencies we face today, such as genetics, robotics, and big data. The sculptures propose a range of solutions to fundamental problems like a machine that turns waste material into new food supplies, or a DIY nuclear reactor. Some objects such as a bronze hammer and sickle, a symbol of the Russian Revolution, nod to the rise and fall of past political movements. Pendulum (2019), a new work premiering at Pioneer Works, is a massive, mechanical clock powered by a swinging pendulum. The clock’s hands tick loudly, ominously counting down to the “end of everything” which then ushers in the “beginning of everything”—a perpetual cycle of destruction and creation characteristic of our constant search for utopia. Mechanical Press (2019), a sculpture which crushes objects daily beneath its weight, evokes these same metaphysical cycles.
While AVL envisions utopian modalities for living, these modes can just as likely lead to a world of violence and extremism. Exposing the links between the past and the present, he also lets the viewer play a game of nostalgia for bygone political theorems and movements.
Atelier Van Lieshout: The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth is curated by Gabriel Florenz and Natalie Kovacs.
About the Artist
Sculptor, painter and visionary Joep Van Lieshout (b. 1963 in Ravenstein, Netherlands) was accepted to the Rotterdam Academy of the Arts at sixteen years of age, and has been working solely under the name Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) since the studio’s founding in 1995. AVL has established a multidisciplinary practice that produces works on the borders between art, design, and architecture. Work by AVL has been exhibited at museums and galleries worldwide, and is in the collections of MoMA, New York; FNAC, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Prada Foundation, Milan; and Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich.
This program is made possible with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage, and is part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. This exhibition is also supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.
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In recent years, the contours of a new contemporary art movement have begun to emerge, forged in reaction to the ideologies of Silicon Valley, the platforming and globalization of culture, and technologies of power like artificial intelligence, photorealistic computer-generated images, and virtual and augmented reality. These “Simulists” simultaneously embrace and subvert technology as their means of interrogation–expressing humanist, nonbinary, and decolonized futures. Curated by Kelani Nichole and featuring works by Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Snow Yunxue Fu, Claudia Hart, Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Tabita Rezaire, and Lu Yang, the exhibition explores identity, the body, and the politics of technology. Virtual space is inhabited with queer bodies and cultural identity is reclaimed through subversive uses of technology. The boundaries of technology and the body are blurred, as are the lines between author, image, and copy. Possible futures emerge as the layers of simulation that mediate contemporary culture are revealed.

 is curated by Kelani Nichole, Founder of TRANSFER Gallery.

This exhibition is supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.

In recent years, the contours of a new contemporary art movement have begun to emerge, forged in reaction to the ideologies of Silicon Valley, the platforming and globalization of culture, and technologies of power like artificial intelligence, photorealistic computer-generated images, and virtual and augmented reality. These “Simulists” simultaneously embrace and subvert technology as their means of interrogation–expressing humanist, nonbinary, and decolonized futures. Curated by Kelani Nichole and featuring works by Morehshin Allahyari, LaTurbo Avedon, Meriem Bennani, Snow Yunxue Fu, Claudia Hart, Faith Holland, Lorna Mills, Eva Papamargariti, Tabita Rezaire, and Lu Yang, the exhibition explores identity, the body, and the politics of technology. Virtual space is inhabited with queer bodies and cultural identity is reclaimed through subversive uses of technology. The boundaries of technology and the body are blurred, as are the lines between author, image, and copy. Possible futures emerge as the layers of simulation that mediate contemporary culture are revealed. 
Refiguring Binaries is curated by Kelani Nichole, Founder of TRANSFER Gallery.
This exhibition is supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.
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Unreal Engine Demo

 is an immersive environment created by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Jose Capaz, and FABELOHUNG (Roberto Fabelo Hung). Featuring a site-specific installation of metal flagpoles and ten virtual reality works filmed in New York, Havana, and Key West, the exhibition takes Havana’s Tribuna Antimperialista (Anti-Imperialist Tribune) as the jumping off point.

Tribuna Antimperialista was the site of a long-term propaganda battle in the late 1990s between the Cuban government and the United States Interests Section, Havana (USINT), which was situated in a building across the street from the square. In 2006, the United States installed a five-feet high ticker tape display across the top floor of the building which broadcast messages and quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and other cultural figures such as the comedian George Burns, who once remarked: “How sad that all the people who would know how to run this country are driving taxis or cutting hair.” The Cuban government responded by erecting the monument Monte de las Banderas, or Wall of Flags, out of one hundred fifty flags to commemorate “victims of US aggression” and to partially block the ticker. At Pioneer Works, 

evokes this square with an installation of flagpoles, onto which virtual reality headsets are attached.

El año del caballo (The Year of the Horse) 

most directly references the square, as it was filmed within Monte de las Banderas. The artists superimpose exotic dancers onto the monumental flagpoles to foreground both the disparity between the sexes and the extreme measures taken by women to make ends meet during the ongoing United States embargo. The embargo’s negative impact on Cuba’s sugar industry—once a crucial component of the island’s economy—is represented within other works, wherein quintessentially colorful cakes are seen being thrown and sunken into the waters of the United States and Cuba, and playfully destroyed in a food fight.

Piñeiro Bello, Capaz, and FABELOHUNG also address the quest for freedom and escape, in works such as 

. The former follows three dogs on a commute from New York to Havana—as if following an emigrant’s path backwards; the latter, shot in the waters between Havana and Key West, features a raft fleeing illegally during the height of the Cuban Rafters Crisis in 1994. Through these works, the trio explores post-revolutionary Cuban life in the shadow of isolationism, propaganda campaigns, and economic hardship, as well as the artists’ personal paths working within the complex relationship between Cuba and its closest imperial neighbor, the United States.

This exhibition is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

En El Monte

En El Monte is an immersive environment created by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Jose Capaz, and FABELOHUNG (Roberto Fabelo Hung). Featuring a site-specific installation of metal flagpoles and ten virtual reality works filmed in New York, Havana, and Key West, the exhibition takes Havana’s Tribuna Antimperialista (Anti-Imperialist Tribune) as the jumping off point.
Tribuna Antimperialista was the site of a long-term propaganda battle in the late 1990s between the Cuban government and the United States Interests Section, Havana (USINT), which was situated in a building across the street from the square. In 2006, the United States installed a five-feet high ticker tape display across the top floor of the building which broadcast messages and quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and other cultural figures such as the comedian George Burns, who once remarked: “How sad that all the people who would know how to run this country are driving taxis or cutting hair.” The Cuban government responded by erecting the monument Monte de las Banderas, or Wall of Flags, out of one hundred fifty flags to commemorate &#8220;victims of US aggression&#8221; and to partially block the ticker. At Pioneer Works, En El Monte evokes this square with an installation of flagpoles, onto which virtual reality headsets are attached.
Among the video works, El año del caballo (The Year of the Horse) most directly references the square, as it was filmed within Monte de las Banderas. The artists superimpose exotic dancers onto the monumental flagpoles to foreground both the disparity between the sexes and the extreme measures taken by women to make ends meet during the ongoing United States embargo. The embargo’s negative impact on Cuba’s sugar industry—once a crucial component of the island’s economy—is represented within other works, wherein quintessentially colorful cakes are seen being thrown and sunken into the waters of the United States and Cuba, and playfully destroyed in a food fight.
Piñeiro Bello, Capaz, and FABELOHUNG also address the quest for freedom and escape, in works such as Street Dog and Raft (balseros view). The former follows three dogs on a commute from New York to Havana—as if following an emigrant’s path backwards; the latter, shot in the waters between Havana and Key West, features a raft fleeing illegally during the height of the Cuban Rafters Crisis in 1994. Through these works, the trio explores post-revolutionary Cuban life in the shadow of isolationism, propaganda campaigns, and economic hardship, as well as the artists’ personal paths working within the complex relationship between Cuba and its closest imperial neighbor, the United States.
This exhibition is supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.
This exhibition is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
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Alejandro Piñeiro Bello

Jose Capaz

FABELOHUNG

Gabriel Florenz

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En El Monte is an immersive environment created by Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, Jose Capaz, and FABELOHUNG (Roberto Fabelo Hung). Featuring a site-specific installation of metal flagpoles and ten virtual reality works filmed in New York, Havana, and Key West, the exhibition takes Havana’s Tribuna Antimperialista (Anti-Imperialist Tribune) as the jumping off point.
Tribuna Antimperialista was the site of a long-term propaganda battle in the late 1990s between the Cuban government and the United States Interests Section, Havana (USINT), which was situated in a building across the street from the square. In 2006, the United States installed a five-feet high ticker tape display across the top floor of the building which broadcast messages and quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. and other cultural figures such as the comedian George Burns, who once remarked: “How sad that all the people who would know how to run this country are driving taxis or cutting hair.” The Cuban government responded by erecting the monument Monte de las Banderas, or Wall of Flags, out of one hundred fifty flags to commemorate &#8220;victims of US aggression&#8221; and to partially block the ticker. At Pioneer Works, En El Monte evokes this square with an installation of flagpoles, onto which virtual reality headsets are attached.
Among the video works, El año del caballo (The Year of the Horse) most directly references the square, as it was filmed within Monte de las Banderas. The artists superimpose exotic dancers onto the monumental flagpoles to foreground both the disparity between the sexes and the extreme measures taken by women to make ends meet during the ongoing United States embargo. The embargo’s negative impact on Cuba’s sugar industry—once a crucial component of the island’s economy—is represented within other works, wherein quintessentially colorful cakes are seen being thrown and sunken into the waters of the United States and Cuba, and playfully destroyed in a food fight.
Piñeiro Bello, Capaz, and FABELOHUNG also address the quest for freedom and escape, in works such as Street Dog and Raft (balseros view). The former follows three dogs on a commute from New York to Havana—as if following an emigrant’s path backwards; the latter, shot in the waters between Havana and Key West, features a raft fleeing illegally during the height of the Cuban Rafters Crisis in 1994. Through these works, the trio explores post-revolutionary Cuban life in the shadow of isolationism, propaganda campaigns, and economic hardship, as well as the artists’ personal paths working within the complex relationship between Cuba and its closest imperial neighbor, the United States.
This exhibition is supported, in part, with funds from New York State Council on the Arts.
This exhibition is made possible with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
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 (1987) was originally painted onto a cinder block wall of the Pitt Street chapter of the Boy’s Club of New York (BCNY)—a community center, founded in the late nineteenth-century, intended as a space where local boys could congregate and partake in recreational activities.

Haring’s graffiti drawings were seminal in pushing art beyond the confines of the museum and gallery setting, and into publicly-accessible spaces such as subway cars and concrete sidewalks. He also maintained an ardent belief in the positive impact of art on people’s lives, especially young people. The mural at the BCNY, marked by the words ‘For the Lower East Side Boys’ at the bottom, features Haring’s trademark figures engaged in a host of recreational activities.

When the building on Pitt Street was slated for demolition in 2007, the mural, measuring twenty by twenty feet and weighing forty thousand pounds, was carefully removed by a dedicated team of engineers, conservators, and gallerists, who deemed it culturally important to protect. Over a decade later, the mural makes its public debut at Pioneer Works, where it will become the centerpiece of community and educational programs.

 is a project made possible by Lacoste.
Image: 

Boys Club Mural

Keith Haring’s monumental Boys Club Mural (1987) was originally painted onto a cinder block wall of the Pitt Street chapter of the Boy’s Club of New York (BCNY)—a community center, founded in the late nineteenth-century, intended as a space where local boys could congregate and partake in recreational activities.
Haring’s graffiti drawings were seminal in pushing art beyond the confines of the museum and gallery setting, and into publicly-accessible spaces such as subway cars and concrete sidewalks. He also maintained an ardent belief in the positive impact of art on people’s lives, especially young people. The mural at the BCNY, marked by the words ‘For the Lower East Side Boys’ at the bottom, features Haring’s trademark figures engaged in a host of recreational activities.
When the building on Pitt Street was slated for demolition in 2007, the mural, measuring twenty by twenty feet and weighing forty thousand pounds, was carefully removed by a dedicated team of engineers, conservators, and gallerists, who deemed it culturally important to protect. Over a decade later, the mural makes its public debut at Pioneer Works, where it will become the centerpiece of community and educational programs.
Keith Haring: Boys Club Mural is a project made possible by Lacoste. 
Image: Boys Club Mural (1987), copyright © Keith Haring Foundation.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-8367" src="https://sunset.pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_lacoste_HORIZON_BLCK_RVB_tight-300x50.png" alt="" width="200" height="52" />

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Keith Haring’s monumental Boys Club Mural (1987) was originally painted onto a cinder block wall of the Pitt Street chapter of the Boy’s Club of New York (BCNY)—a community center, founded in the late nineteenth-century, intended as a space where local boys could congregate and partake in recreational activities.
Haring’s graffiti drawings were seminal in pushing art beyond the confines of the museum and gallery setting, and into publicly-accessible spaces such as subway cars and concrete sidewalks. He also maintained an ardent belief in the positive impact of art on people’s lives, especially young people. The mural at the BCNY, marked by the words ‘For the Lower East Side Boys’ at the bottom, features Haring’s trademark figures engaged in a host of recreational activities.
When the building on Pitt Street was slated for demolition in 2007, the mural, measuring twenty by twenty feet and weighing forty thousand pounds, was carefully removed by a dedicated team of engineers, conservators, and gallerists, who deemed it culturally important to protect. Over a decade later, the mural makes its public debut at Pioneer Works, where it will become the centerpiece of community and educational programs.
Keith Haring: Boys Club Mural is a project made possible by Lacoste. 
Image: Boys Club Mural (1987), copyright © Keith Haring Foundation.
<img loading="lazy" class="alignnone wp-image-8367" src="https://pioneerworks.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_lacoste_HORIZON_BLCK_RVB_tight-300x50.png" alt="" width="200" height="52" />

Lorena Barrera Enciso is a Mexican filmmaker, painter, and performance artist. In her work, she uses her experience as a body with many homes to explore the sense of longing that is inarticulate and without language. The objects and images created in these explorations become the result of frustrated attempts at intimacy. Barrera Enciso grew up in Mexico and Switzerland and immigrated to the US when she was 18. She obtained her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Barrera Enciso has exhibited her work at Chicago Filmmakers, Onion City Film Festival, and Gene Siskel Film Center, all in Chicago, IL, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.

Lorena Barrera Enciso is a Mexican filmmaker, painter, and performance artist. In her work, she uses her experience as a body with many homes to explore the sense of longing that is inarticulate and without language. The objects and images created in these explorations become the result of frustrated attempts at intimacy. Barrera Enciso grew up in Mexico and Switzerland and immigrated to the US when she was 18. She obtained her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Barrera Enciso has exhibited her work at Chicago Filmmakers, Onion City Film Festival, and Gene Siskel Film Center, all in Chicago, IL, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA.

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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.” His work has been shown at the Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea; Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY; the 13th Biennial de Lyon, Lyon, France; Dak’Art 2014 Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; the 18th International Festival of Contemporary Art SESC_Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil; and as part of the Times Square Arts Midnight Moment, New York, NY. His residencies and awards include LMCC Workspace Residency Program, the Drawing Center, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Triangle Arts Association Residency, all in New York. Wube received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from Hunter College.

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.” His work has been shown at the Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea; Museum of the Moving Image, Queens, NY; the 13th Biennial de Lyon, Lyon, France; Dak’Art 2014 Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; the 18th International Festival of Contemporary Art SESC_Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil; and as part of the Times Square Arts Midnight Moment, New York, NY. His residencies and awards include LMCC Workspace Residency Program, the Drawing Center, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Triangle Arts Association Residency, all in New York. Wube received his BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from Hunter College.

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Jess Johnson was born in Tauranga, New Zealand in 1979. In 2016, she relocated permanently to New York after twelve years of living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Her practice is influenced by the speculative intersections between language, science fiction, culture, and technology. Her drawings depict complex worlds that combine densely layered patterns, objects, and figures within architectural settings. Johnson’s drawings are often displayed within constructed environments that act as physical portals into her speculative worlds. Her recent collaborations with Simon Ward have involved translating her drawings into animated video and virtual reality, giving audiences the simulated experience of entering the hypnotic realms depicted in her drawings. Johnson’s work has been exhibited at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; Art Basel, Hong Kong, China; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan, China; Centre Clark, Montreal, Canada; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; Alaska Projects, Sydney, Australia; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch, New Zealand; Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand; and National Gallery of Victoria, Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Monash University Museum of Art, and Gertrude Contemporary, all in Melbourne, Australia.

Simon Ward worked in feature film costuming for ten years. During this period, he developed a video making practice which eventually became his major focus. His work in video and animation is varied and usually involves collaboration with musicians, writers or visual artists. He has made over 50 music videos, directed three seasons of an animated comedy series, and his video and virtual reality collaborations have been shown in New York, Tokyo, Hubei, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Hong Kong. Influenced by the history of cinematographic special effects and animation and new developments in virtual reality technology, his work involves generating visual imagery that mixes reality with the fantastical.

Jess Johnson was born in Tauranga, New Zealand in 1979. In 2016, she relocated permanently to New York after twelve years of living and working in Melbourne, Australia. Her practice is influenced by the speculative intersections between language, science fiction, culture, and technology. Her drawings depict complex worlds that combine densely layered patterns, objects, and figures within architectural settings. Johnson’s drawings are often displayed within constructed environments that act as physical portals into her speculative worlds. Her recent collaborations with Simon Ward have involved translating her drawings into animated video and virtual reality, giving audiences the simulated experience of entering the hypnotic realms depicted in her drawings. Johnson’s work has been exhibited at Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; Art Basel, Hong Kong, China; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Hubei Museum of Art, Wuhan, China; Centre Clark, Montreal, Canada; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; Alaska Projects, Sydney, Australia; Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Christchurch, New Zealand; Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand; and National Gallery of Victoria, Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Monash University Museum of Art, and Gertrude Contemporary, all in Melbourne, Australia.
Simon Ward worked in feature film costuming for ten years. During this period, he developed a video making practice which eventually became his major focus. His work in video and animation is varied and usually involves collaboration with musicians, writers or visual artists. He has made over 50 music videos, directed three seasons of an animated comedy series, and his video and virtual reality collaborations have been shown in New York, Tokyo, Hubei, Edinburgh, San Francisco, Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Hong Kong. Influenced by the history of cinematographic special effects and animation and new developments in virtual reality technology, his work involves generating visual imagery that mixes reality with the fantastical.