Pioneer Works

THE MIRACLE was Jaimie Warren’s first institutional solo show in New York with the artist-led theater collective Whoop Dee Doo (@whoopdeedooshow ). The work featured daily activations and culminated in an over-the-top musical production in April of 2020. Resembling a high school musical backdrop, a vintage Disney ride, or the campy gore of a community-built haunted house, the supernatural DIY set consisted of animatronics, costumes, and special effects. Referencing iconic horror movies, B-movie camp extravaganzas, drag theater, and musical comedies, the show is an amalgamation of its manifold influences. With the help of artist peers and multiple Red Hook-based organizations (including @RedHookArtProject , @BeamCenter , and @CoraDanceOrg ), the collective reconfigured the cultural archive to disorienting, comical effect. THE MIRACLE was able to present an interplay of overlapping pop cultural inventories. Taken together, the show seemed to render, in larger than life form, the fears and insecurities of childhood. It engaged the capacity of popular entertainment to bring people together around shared cultural touchstones, producing a work defined by both strangeness and joy.

In Natalia Lassale-Morillo (@natalialassallem )’s recent show at Amant (@Amant.Arts ), she reassembled the Greek myth Antigone in collaboration with a cast of non-professional actors residing in Puerto Rico and in New York City’s Puerto Rican diasporic community. Together, they revised and rewrote the story to reflect their lived and inherited experiences of migration and belonging. For PW Broadcast, the artist spoke with her friend and collaborator Carina del Valle Schorske (@semifluentmundo ) on the power of rehearsal, inherited dreams, and Antigone. Read more at the link in bio🔍🌊🎭

In October of 2020, Bosco Sodi (@studioboscosodi )’s Perfect Bodies rested in a commercial concrete parking lot two blocks south of PW. The artist’s large-scale spheres and cubes were made from local clay fired in the artist’s studio in Oaxaca, Mexico, which made the long journey by road across the Mexico-US border to Red Hook. A longtime resident of the neighborhood—itself named after the tone of its own clay soil—Sodi is known for his use of raw and organic materials to create textured paintings and objects. This exhibition was curated by Dakin Hart (@dakinhart ). Swipe through to watch the installation’s encounter with the elements ➡️☀️❄️

Relive the transcendent 24-hour experience of last year’s Ragas Live Festival, for which The Akkarai Sisters (@akkaraisisters ) performed the final set. To close out the epic program, the sisters shared the stage with R. Sankaranarayanan and Vijay Ganesh on the mridangam. Watch more from their fiery performance (along with countless others!) at the link in bio 🖇️🪘🎻

Ragas Live Festival (@RagasLiveFestival ) returns this October at Pioneer Works! Experience 24 continuous hours of transcendent live music, inspired by the unique time cycles of the South Asian classical music tradition. In the system of Raga, which translates to “that which colors the mind,” specific modes are designed to harmonize with the moods and energy associated with different times of the day and night. For its 13th annual incarnation, this year’s program will showcase 18 performances, blending masters of the raga tradition with legendary figures in ambient and new music genres. Get your $25 off early bird tickets now, while supplies last! Featuring the likes of Arushi Jain (@modularprincess ), Debashish Bhattacharya (@guitardebashish ), Ganesh Rajagopalan (@violinganeshofficial ), Salar Nader (@salar_system ), Homayoun Sakhi (@homayounsakhi ), and so much more, the full lineup will be announced soon. In the meantime, relive the complete 24 hours of performances from Ragas Live Festival ‘23—now on our YouTube channel. Learn more at the link in bio🔗🎶🕰️

This fall, join us for a raucous night of fringe punk at @pioneerworks , with anonymous Detroit hardcore collective The Armed (@thearmedixi ) and legendary punk rap duo Ho99o9 (@ho99o9 ). The co-headliners will be supported by special guests Kumo 99 (@kumo99_ ), and DJ Haram (@djharam )! Tickets are on sale this Friday at 10AM EST—you won’t want to miss it. See you on September 25th 🎟️🧷🎛️

Art critic and curator Simon Wu (@noghost_justshell ) shares the visual inspirations behind his debut essay collection, out today from Harper Books (@HarperBooks ). As expansive as it is personal, Dancing on My Own explores the aesthetics of class aspiration, the complications of creating art and fashion, and the limits of identity politics. Read more at the link in bio 🖇️🔖👯

In this episode of the Broadcast Monologues, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell narrates her inadvertent discovery of pulsars: dense, rotating neutron stars—a death state of collapsed stars—that emit swinging beams of light, like astrophysical lighthouses. Born into a family keen on education, Jocelyn battled for her right as a young student in Ireland to learn science beside her male peers. Having developed a particular enthusiasm for astronomy, she attended the University of Glasgow, where her presence as a female student in physics lectures was an anomaly. Nevertheless, she excelled. Driven by curiosity and badgered by imposter syndrome, she strove on. Admitted as a PhD student to Cambridge University, she joined a prestigious group headed by Professor Anthony Hewish—today a Nobel laureate. There, in 1967, while operating a radio telescope built to detect quasars, she encountered an inexplicable signal in her data: the defiant, metronomic impression of a neutron star. The discovery also rendered the implausible—black holes—suddenly plausible. Animator Micah Ganske (@micahganske ) provides an ethereal visual context for Bell Burnell’s personal story.

Our commission, Liz Magic Laser (@lizmagiclaser )’s CONVULSIVE STATES, is now streaming on OVID (@ovidtv )! The film explores the shaking body as both a symptom and a cure for psychic distress, tracing the lineage of psychosomatic disorders—from historical concepts of hysteria to contemporary diagnoses of nonepileptic seizures, the rise in TikTok tics, and spirit possession. In collaboration with French journalist Laura Geisswiller (@laurageisswiller ), and in conversation with doctors, historians, and dance therapists, Laser moves from objective journalism to personal essay as she unravels the nature of mimesis and her own manifestation of the disorder she set out to study. Watch more at the link in bio🔗🎬🦵

In celebration of their 25th anniversary and their newly released album, Oath, @monoofjapan will bring their sensational live orchestral experience to New York on 12.12. Over the past two and a half decades, the band’s exquisite instrumental rock—with its stirring orchestral arrangements and noisy shoegaze sensibility—has captivated audiences worldwide, earning them the reputation of a legendary live act. Experience MONO at @pioneerworks this December when they are joined for one night only by our very own orchestra, Ensemble LPR. Ensemble LPR is comprised of some of NYC’s most distinguished instrumentalists, personifying our mission of eclecticism and artistic excellence- performing alongside select artists in-house and across New York over the past ten years while commissioning and premiering original compositions by distinguished artists across genres. Presale for LPR newsletter subscribers is available now and tickets are on sale tomorrow at 10am EST.

A few renderings of what’s to come at Pioneer Works. We’re finally making our Red Hook campus ADA accessible, with a brand new elevator and garden egress designed by PRO (@Peterson_rich_office ). See you in September! 🛗🧮🚧🤞🔜

Debuting in 2019, Lucien Samaha (@luciensamaha_myself )’s A History of Digital Photography brought together three decades of the artist’s work. In 1990, Samaha was the inaugural recipient of Kodak’s Professional Photography Division scholarship, becoming the first person to use Kodak’s DCS 100 Professional Digital Camera System outside the factory floor. Since then, the artist’s pioneering experiments with the form have reflected our radical new era of image-making. This exhibition, which ran through February of 2020, gave us a deeply intimate account of this history through Samaha’s obsessive chronicling of the people and places around him.