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

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

NYC Cultural Affairs

Please be considerate of the artists-in-residence and their studios while visiting Pioneer Works.


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

Paloma Izquierdo and Kyle Richardson

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

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

John Reynolds

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

Magdalena Dukiewicz

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

Java Jones

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

Utsa Hazarika

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

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

Vandana Jain

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

Ryan Decker

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

Guanyu Xu

Composer, cellist, producer, arranger, etc. Studied with violinist Michael White (Pharoah Sanders, John Handy) and cellist Walter Grey (Kronos Quartet). Creates music for cello & electronics and composes for concert, theater, film, dance. Founding member of Ghost Quartet with Dave Malloy, Gelsey Bell, and Brittain Ashford. Music Director & Conductor for Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s Candyman performances. Composer for films including The Saint of the Impossible (dir. Marc Wilkins). Played/collaborated with artists including The Antlers, Ashwini Ramaswami, Filastine, Randall Dunn, Zola Jesus, Arun Ramamurthy, Jim Jarmusch, Jessica Pavone, DJ/rupture, Hiro Kone, Andrew Drury, Aditya Kalyanpur, Eyvind Kang, Jessika Kenney, Wally Shoup, Reggie Watts, Steve Von Till, Sleater-Kinney, Modest Mouse, Baby Copperhead, and many more. Currently resides in New York City.