On August 8, 2018, Claudia Rankine, Jonathan Gray, Jennifer Uleman, and Julia Elena discussed the ways in which blondness (as a marker of whiteness) has developed mobility across racial and class lines in conjunction with our exhibition Stamped.

Prioritizing emerging, overlooked, or historically underrepresented artists, Pioneer Works exhibitions are often massive undertakings to achieve. This series offers a first-hand look at the finished product, chronicling the blood, sweat, and tears involved in realizing these large-scale efforts, as well as their conceptual underpinnings.

In Liz Magic Laser’s 2023 exhibition commissioned for Pioneer Works, 

, she explored the shaking body as both a symptom and a cure for psychic distress. For the first time, we're releasing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how the performance and video artist created the new body of work, which traced the lineage of psychosomatic disorders through interactive videos offering therapeutic movement exercises. Simultaneously, Laser’s investigative report feverishly pursued the cure for hysteria as it uncovered mysteries at Paris’s Salpêtrière Hospital—a site widely regarded as the birthplace of modern neurology and psychology. Laser explains: “What drew me to hysteria was the refusal to perform, the refusal to behave.” ♦

In Liz Magic Laser’s 2023 exhibition commission for Pioneer Works, Convulsive States, she explored the shaking body as both a symptom and a cure for psychic distress. For the first time, we're releasing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into how the performance and video artist created the new body of work, which traced the lineage of psychosomatic disorders through interactive videos offering therapeutic movement exercises. 

Liz Magic Laser on Convulsive States

In the fall of 2022, Charles Atlas: The Mathematics of Consciousness debuted on the brick wall of Pioneer Works’ Main Hall. Combining original footage and segments culled from the artist’s extensive archives, the immersive video work extended across 100 feet of the institution’s interior architecture. The projected images flickered and toggled between numerical fantasies, dance sequences, abstract compositions, scientific ruminations, and internet memes—simulating and commenting upon memory, thought formation, and numerical expression.

Atlas has long been a pioneering figure in film and video, testing the limits of his medium and forging new territory through experiments in genre, style, and craft. Since his beginnings as filmmaker-in-residence for Merce Cunningham Dance Company during the early 1970s, Atlas has collapsed the barriers between dance, performance, and media, collaborating with a dynamic roster of creative figures to harness a distinctly ambidextrous position. ♦

Charles Atlas: The Mathematics of Consciousness

On the occasion of Laura Parnes’s exhibition 

, up through November 28th, Pioneer Works joins the artist in her Williamsburg studio and home for a behind-the-scenes look into her multi-platform, lens-based projects that craft darkly comedic narratives of trauma and repressed memory—often around mass-culture experiences and youthful rites of passage.

, shot between 2014-2019, is no exception; it casts real-life musicians, artists, and actors as bands on tour, and expands into a cross-generational, Trump–era commentary on contemporary culture and politics. ♦

On the occasion of Laura Parnes’s exhibition Tour Without End, up through November 28th, Pioneer Works joins the artist in her Williamsburg studio and home for a behind-the-scenes look into her multi-platform, lens-based projects that craft darkly comedic narratives of trauma and repressed memory—often around mass-culture experiences and youthful rites of passage.

Laura Parnes: Tour Without End

On the occasion of LJ Roberts’s exhibition and 

Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits

, Pioneer Works joins the artist in their Brooklyn studio for a look into the process behind their long-term, ongoing project: 26 six-by-four-inch embroidered portraits of friends, collaborators, and lovers within New York City’s queer and trans communities. As much a tribute to the subjects as they are to the public and private places that provide safe spaces for vital exchange, these embroideries illustrate how politics, culture, and identity manifest in both visible and subtle ways through encounters in daily life. ♦

On the occasion of LJ Roberts’s exhibition and publication Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits, Pioneer Works joins the artist in their Brooklyn studio for a look into the process behind their long-term, ongoing project: 26 six-by-four-inch embroidered portraits of friends, collaborators, and lovers within New York City’s queer and trans communities. As much a tribute to the subjects as they are to the public and private places that provide safe spaces for vital exchange, these embroideries illustrate how politics, culture, and identity manifest in both visible and subtle ways through encounters in daily life.

LJ Roberts, Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits

On the occasion of Coby Kennedy's Pioneer Works exhibition 

Pioneer Works went behind the scenes with the artist as he worked on realizing his new installation, an eight-by-ten-by-six-feet sculpture that replicates the exact dimensions of a solitary confinement cell. Framed by steel, the plexiglas surfaces are etched with line renderings of the bed, barred window, and toilet that sparsely furnish the inhumane settings. ♦

On the occasion of Coby Kennedy's Pioneer Works exhibition Kalief Browder: The Box, Pioneer Works went behind the scenes with the artist as he worked on realizing his new installation, an eight-by-ten-by-six-feet sculpture that replicates the exact dimensions of a solitary confinement cell. Framed by steel, the plexiglas surfaces are etched with line renderings of the bed, barred window, and toilet that sparsely furnish the inhumane settings. 

Coby Kennedy | Kalief Browder: The Box

An intimate look at the motivations and intent behind the Pioneer Works exhibition Brand New Heavies. Curated by artists Racquel Chevremont and Mickalene Thomas—collectively known as Deux Femmes Noires—Brand New Heavies features monumental work in video, sculpture, and architecture by Abigail DeVille, Xaviera Simmons, and Rosa-Johan Uddoh. Together, the installations viscerally engage history, memory, place, pop culture, spirituality, and desire from a Black perspective.

Behind the Scenes with Brand New Heavies

Have we reached the end of capitalism? The rapid depletion of global resources could prove the need for an alternative economic model. This idea is further articulated in the political and social theory of accelerationism, which suggests that the expansion—and ensuing destruction—of capitalism is the only way to bring about radical social change. AVL’s body of work—largely made up of conceptual sculptures and architectural sites—is widely known for illuminating the connection between labor, power, and revolution and a potential new world order of scarcity and subsequent self-sufficiency. These works of art force viewers to posit the possibility of the end of capitalism. What, then, emerges in its place? When will that new economic system eventually break down under the inevitable cycle of creation and destruction that plagues the progression of civilization? In The CryptoFuturist, a fictional tribe of characters, the cryptofuturists, are living through an acceleration beyond capitalism and offering suggestions for economic alternatives through art, architecture, and design. A final question, then, remains: what is the role of the artist/designer in constructing utopias? Guests: Paola Antonelli, Timothy Furstnau and Andrea Steves, Answar Shaikh

The End of Everything: The Acceleration of Atelier Van Lieshout

Dutch sound poet and improviser Jaap Blonk give a tour of Atelier van Lieshout's The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth at Pioneer Works

Jaap Blonk in The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth

Gerard & Kelly: CLOCKWORK extends the artists’ inquiry of memory and modernist architecture in their ongoing project Modern Living, and marks the New York premiere of the film Schindler/Glass as well as new work commissioned by Pioneer Works.

Gerard and Kelly's Clockwork

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.

The CryptoFuturist and The New Tribal Labyrinth

Port-au-Prince is a polyphonic city declaring its cultural history via multiple voices. While its infrastructure is deeply compromised, the gap between rich and poor is immense, and the 2010 earthquake destroyed many of its major buildings, Port-au-Prince continues to be one of the most vibrant and creative cities in the Caribbean. Hence, PÒTOPRENS is not simply a survey show, nor is it a comprehensive snapshot of contemporary Haitian art. It is an exhibition that uses the city of Port-au-Prince as a lens through which to view the chaotic intersections of history, music, politics, religion, magic, architecture, art, and literature— to enable the viewer to reflect upon the past and speculate about the future of this vital city and its country.

PÒTOPRENS: Jean Claude Saintilus

Claudia Rankine In Conversation

PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince brings together the work of over 25 artists working in the Haitian capital. The exhibition, on view September 7 to November 11, 2018, highlights Port-au-Prince’s many diverse centers of cultural production, informal street life, religious heritage, and mythologies to create a compelling portrait of a historically significant and intensely complex city in flux. Co-curated by Haitian-American artist and curator Edouard Duval-Carrié and British artist and curator Leah Gordon, PÒTOPRENS is a large-scale exhibition of sculptures, photographs, and films, accompanied by a garden installation of a recreated Port-au-Prince barbershop as well as extensive public programming. Port-au-Prince is a polyphonic city declaring its cultural history via multiple voices. While its infrastructure is deeply compromised, the gap between rich and poor is immense, and the 2010 earthquake destroyed many of its major buildings, Port-au-Prince continues to be one of the most vibrant and creative cities in the Caribbean. Hence, PÒTOPRENS is not simply a survey show, nor is it a comprehensive snapshot of contemporary Haitian art. It is an exhibition that uses the city of Port-au-Prince as a lens through which to view the chaotic intersections of history, music, politics, religion, magic, architecture, art, and literature— to enable the viewer to reflect upon the past and speculate about the future of this vital city and its country.

Pòtoprens

Anthony McCall’s sculptural works explore the intersections of light, movement, drawing and space, forming evanescent and ever changing three-dimensional forms that exist not only as “objects” in space, but as environments to experience. This panel discussion will consider the artist’s ‘solid light’ films and projections in relation to his own artistic career, as well as within the context of historical and contemporary developments in drawing, sculpture and cinema. Participants will include Anthony McCall; Johanna Gosse, Visiting Assistant Professor and CWCTP Scholar, University of Colorado, Boulder; Ed Halter, Director of Light Industry, Brooklyn; Branden W. Joseph, Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University; and Melissa Ragona, Associate Professor of Visual Culture and Critical Theory, Carnegie Mellon University.

Anthony McCall In Conversation

For the close of White Man On A Pedestal, artist Kenya (Robinson) will use performance as a tool for inquiry, questioning the life cycle of white male heteronormative supremacy. If every living thing dies, it begs the question: is our current system of privilege alive, or is it an energetic impulse, abiding by the law of physics? Is it an impulse towards artificial hierarchies that cannot be created or destroyed? Are we bound to witness only a change in form, repeating the essence of oppression, indefinitely? This contemplation is at the centerpiece of CENOTAPHIC – a jazz funeral for the #WHITEMANINMYPOCKET. A procession beginning at Red Hook Houses and culminating with a eulogy and repast at Pioneer Works seeks answers, or, at the very least a “conversation”. The procession will be led by (Robinson), leaving promptly from Red Hook Houses at 4:15pm, and the eulogy will be delivered by Amanda Werner, an activist known for their viral appearance as the Monopoly Man at the Equifax Senate hearing on Capitol Hill in October 2017. Please dress in mourning attire.

White Man on a Pedestal | Cenotaphic

As part of Doreen Garner's exhibition White Man On A Pedestal with Kenya (Robinson), she recreated the seven-feet tall statue of Sims in Central Park, encasing it in a thin layer of silicone. Once peeled, his ‘skin’ lies in situ on an operating table. In Purge, Garner will perform a vesicovaginal fistula closure on the Skin of Poneros. Several body cast models featured in her work Rack of those Ravaged and Unconsenting will also assist in this procedure. Using dissection as a means​​ to get to the truth​, ​the symbolic mutilation of Sims’s body on a surgical table seeks to undo​ his ​historically ​praised posture.

White Man On A Pedestal | Purge

White Man On A Pedestal (WMOAP), was a two-person exhibition by Doreen Garner and Kenya (Robinson) at Pioneer Works from November 10 – December 17, 2017. WMOAP questions a prevailing western history that uses white-male-heteronormativity as its persistent model. Both artists approach WMOAP from an individual practice that is responsive to their experiences as black women operating in a system of white male supremacy. At a time when removing Confederate statues—literally white men on pedestals—are cultural flashpoints of whiteness and class, Garner and (Robinson) play with the size, texture, and scale of white monumentality itself, referencing both real and imagined figureheads of historical exclusion. Through WMOAP, Garner and (Robinson) collaboratively re-enact and hold a funeral for oppression, while revealing the difficulties of making this work within an institutional setting that too often benefits from systems of oppression. While their conversation brings together a literal and figurative cycle of meat and bone, life and death, it also foreshadows an institutional approach to exhibitions where a vested, active interest in inclusion and community engagement are at the core of the institutional mission, not just in its rhetoric or publicity apparatus.

White Man On A Pedestal

Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works displays vertical installations shown alongside their horizontal variants. Requiring over thirty feet of clearance from floor to ceiling, very few New York venues can accommodate these six-colossal works. A seminal figure of Expanded Cinema, McCall is well known for his “solid-light works.” It was a series he began in 1973 with the 16mm film Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of a beam of projected light slowly evolves in real, three-dimensional space. McCall regards these works as occupying a place somewhere between sculpture, cinema, and drawing: sculpture because the projected volumes must be occupied and explored by a moving spectator; cinema because these large-scale objects are not static, but structured to progressively shift and change over time; and drawing, because the genesis of each installation is a two-dimensional line-drawing.

Anthony McCall's Solid Light Works

Directed and produced by E.S.P. TV, this live broadcast event highlights the work, “Daytime Viewing” (1979-80) by Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom. Daytime Viewing is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. Performances by Erica Magrey with Liliou Barbier, Heidi Jien Jouet, Dana Bell with Sari Nordman, Johanna Herr, MV Carbon with Lily Benson, and Shana Moulton with Samantha Crabtree Special thanks to David Rosenboom, Jacqueline Humbert, and Tommy McCutchon, Unseen Worlds. The event coincides with the release of “Daytime Viewing” as an LP by Unseen Worlds.

E.S.P. TV, 'Daytime Viewing'

Pioneer Works is pleased to present Grand Ole Opera, a large-scale installation by Tennessee-born artists Willie Stewart and Brent Stewart. Raised by a strong matriarchy, Willie was born into a motorcycle club where all his male influences were indefinitely incarcerated. Brent was raised in a strict Christian household and is a filmmaker. They met in a bar years ago and connected over a shared interest in cinematic space—equal parts B-movies and home video memories. This exhibition, their institutional debut in the United States, also serves as a venue for a related series of noise, metal and rock concerts, staged within a revival tent. The soundtrack of this America is doom and sludge metal, Japanese noise music, rock, and psychedelic punk.

Grand Ole Opera

Pioneer Works is pleased to present WORK, E.S.P. TV’s first institutional solo exhibition in the United States. Directed by Victoria Keddie and Scott Kiernan, E.S.P. TV is best known for their live television tapings that feature experimental broadcast collaborations with underground poets, musicians, and artists via their mobile television studio. For WORK, E.S.P. TV makes Pioneer Works’ office staff and environment the subject of a six-week performative, televisual installation by relocating the organization’s second-floor, open-plan office to the first-floor’s main exhibition space. Surrounded by a de-centralized control room, the office doubles as both a dynamic sculptural set — painted partly in chroma blue and featuring movable walls, among other features — and the actual site for the staff’s five-day workweek. The staff’s “daily grind” will be mixed live, on-site, with custom video effects and commercial interruptions. Far from peddling in the sensational tropes of reality TV, WORK instead turns banal, day-to-day office routines and patterns — the movement of a chair, a co-worker getting coffee — into the improbable, playful content of a serial program to be broadcast weekly on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network. E.S.P. TV worked closely with curator David Everitt Howe to envision this social experiment and exhibition, which responds to the building’s unique environment and tight-knit, collective office culture.

E.S.P. TV, 'WORK': Episode 5

E.S.P. TV, 'WORK': Episode 4

E.S.P. TV, 'WORK': Episode 3

E.S.P. TV 'WORK': Episode 2

E.S.P. TV, 'WORK': Episode 1

ON is a solo exhibition of new work and performance by Derrick Adams. Through large-scale, boldly colored mixed media collages, performance, sound pieces, and illuminated sculptures, ON continues Adams’ investigation of consumerism and the dramatization of black figures in entertainment and popular culture.

Derrick Adams, ON

Revolving around notions of mortality and immortality, the exhibition Redwood physicalizes Lowe’s eponymous film, her first feature. Commissioned by Pioneer Works, Redwood (2016) is a time-travel family drama featuring a young woman, ostensibly Lowe, receiving a memory transplant from her grandmother who is in a vegetative state in a Mnemonegenix Center. Due to her grandmother’s dementia and the limits of technology, time frames and characters are fragmented and conflated in her memories. Worn by all characters throughout different decades are hand-made masks that depict one woman aging from adolescence to obsolescence; the masks collapse Lowe’s identity with those of the other female family members, making character dynamics and plot lines intentionally ambiguous. Redwood surround’s Lowe’s film installation with a surreal landscape, comprised of a 30-foot, suspended Redwood tree, a large, sand-dune breast, and a steep hill-bed. In addition, masks and gloves from the film are displayed as a taxonomy of the film’s characters’ aging process.

Claudia Rankine In Conversation

Exhibitions