Pioneer Works – förlag

Simultaneous Soloists is an artist’s book emerging from the exhibition Anthony McCall: Solid Light Works and its accompanying performance series Four Simultaneous Soloists, organized by David Grubbs. It documents these ephemeral events through multiple means: an extensive conversation between McCall and Grubbs detailing a decade of working together, interviews with sixteen participating musicians, writings by art historians Branden W. Joseph and Swagato Chakravorty, and visual materials ranging from McCall’s drawings and archival materials to photographs of the exhibition including images sourced from social media. The “simultaneous soloists” of the title variously refers to a grouping of McCall’s sculptural volumes of light, to gatherings of improvising musicians, and to McCall and Grubbs themselves—sympathetic artistic sensibilities proceeding in suggestively parallel practices.Simultaneous Soloists considers from a plurality of perspectives the challenge of combining McCall’s visual art with sound in live performance. It is unique among books about visual art, sound art, and experimental music in describing a conceptually linked set of performances within an exhibition through so extensive an oral history. Interview subjects include Susan Alcorn, MV Carbon, Maria Chavez, Che Chen, Jules Gimbrone, David Grubbs, Sarah Hennies, Eli Keszler, Okkyung Lee, Miya Masaoka, Christopher McIntyre, Tomeka Reid, Ben Vida, Yoshi Wada, Nate Wooley, and C. Spencer Yeh.

Embroidered portraits of New York City’s queer and trans communities

The result of a long-term, ongoing project by Brooklyn-based artist LJ Roberts (born 1980), Ten Years of Portraits consists of six-by-four-inch embroidered portraits of the artist’s friends, collaborators and lovers within New York City’s queer and trans communities. Stitched entirely by hand and typically completed during transit on subway trains, these textile works—culminating in Roberts’ first publication as well as their first New York solo exhibition at Pioneer Works—aim to illustrate how politics, culture and identity manifest in both visible and subtle ways through everyday encounters in daily life.Depicting both the rectos and versos of each embroidery, this publication presents portraiture in both figurative and abstract form while also providing us a glimpse into the textile craft. For Roberts, the adaptability of these techniques mirrors the flexibility, resilience and resourcefulness needed to navigate the world as a queer, gender nonconforming and nonbinary person.

Tracing Rosenberg's trajectory from early paintings to more recent endeavors in photography, film, sculpture and installation

New York– and Berlin-based artist Aura Rosenberg (born 1949) engages the many ways that images produce and reproduce conditions of everyday life, including notions of spectatorship, gender, normalized bodies, the family, history and legacy. For this reason, although she works in painting, sculpture, installation and performance, she most often deploys photography as her medium of choice.This catalog is published on the occasion of Rosenberg’s solo exhibitions at the Mishkin Gallery, Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY) and Pioneer Works. It pairs a selection of works spanning 50 years with 11 texts from notable writers such as director and actress Lena Dunham, curator and critic Robert Nickas, and curator Lumi Tan. This publication offers the first comprehensive overview of Rosenberg's work.

An idea 50 years in the making, this entertaining cookbook from a cult music legend is chock-full of stories and soul food

Before there was Snoop Dogg, there was Swamp Dogg. Born Jerry Williams Jr., he first rose to fame as a 12-year-old soul singer called Little Jerry. As an adult, he went on to reintroduce himself as “Swamp Dogg”—a legendary singer, songwriter and record producer whose singular voice and ideas have shaped the history of soul, country, hip-hop and R&B.An avid foodie, Swamp Dogg once proclaimed in 1972 that he would write a cookbook so transformative that the legacies of culinary giants such as Julia Child, Betty Crocker and even Colonel Sanders would pale in comparison. Now, more than 50 years later, that work is finally here.If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It is a book for those who appreciate recipes seasoned with personality and history, and stories to go with dinner. This is more than a cookbook: it’s a biographical artifact and a journey into the mind of a chef who’ll teach you how to make “Baked Beans Bo Diddley,” “James Brown In Flight Chicken” and “Willie Nelson Potatoes Platter.” It’s also a glimpse into the savory life of a musical genius, richly illustrated with tales and photos of family, food, music and business.Jerry Williams Jr., also known as Swamp Dogg (born 1942), sang under his own name in the 1960s while also working for record labels such as Musicor and Atlantic Records. In 1970 he adopted the moniker Swamp Dogg and has recorded 25 soul and R&B albums. His collaborators have included John Prine, Jenny Lewis and Bon Iver.

A story of the ’70s: when six New York ex-gangsters met Buckminster Fuller and built a geodesic dome

In 1970 a meeting took place in an empty loft on the Lower East Side of Manhattan between R. Buckminster Fuller, the revolutionary architect and inventor of the geodesic dome, and six ex-gang members who called themselves “CHARAS.” After a few hours, they found themselves having an earnest and important conversation, and the young men of CHARAS decided to begin implementing Bucky’s ideas. They wanted to create a program that would develop a sense of community autonomy, reclaim public space and give their lives a newfound sense of purpose. Following a period of intensive study of solid geometry, spherical trigonometry and principles of dome building, all led by Michael Ben-Eli, CHARAS constructed a geodesic dome on a vacant lot in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge.

Originally published in 1973 and now published in an expanded edition, Charas: The Improbable Dome Builders is an intimate portrait in pictures and words of these dynamic young men and their community. The first half chronicles the trials and tribulations of building the dome, their intensive training, search for funding, accidental fires, holiday potlucks and Bucky visiting to see their incredible work. The second half contains interviews with the members of CHARAS and their friends, sharing personal stories of their time on the streets, as gang leaders, drug addicts, serving time in prison and finding a new sense of self and community through the applied philosophies of Buckminster Fuller. This edition also includes a new interview with Michael Ben-Eli looking back on the project four decades later.

The Haitian capital at the intersections of history, music, politics, religion, magic, architecture, art and literature

Published after a landmark 2018 exhibition at Pioneer Works—the first major survey of the astonishing artists of Haiti’s capital city—Pòtoprens is at once a portrait of a place, a celebration of its arts and a visionary re-mapping of culture in the world’s first Black republic.In this volume, Port-au-Prince's complex present is evoked through artworks, images, oral histories and essays. These contents are organized, as was the exhibition, around neighborhoods identified with particular subjects, materials and forms.Contextualized by leading writers on Caribbean culture, these artists’ stories are situated within Port-au-Prince’s rich heritage of “majority class art.” As cities everywhere grow ever more critical to our changing global environment, this book articulates urban Haiti’s unbroken link with its revolutionary past.

A wild, Jodorowsky-style graphic novel from Moldy Peaches cofounder Adam Green

In War and Paradise, a graphic novel by creative polymath and Moldy Peaches founder Adam Green (born 1981), the internet meets the Middle Ages and satire becomes the most logical response to our own wildly confusing, nonsensical world. A spiritual sequel to the 2016 cult film Adam Green's Aladdin, the story follows our hero Pausanias, a geographer of the soul, alongside a cast of unconventional characters through a kaleidoscopic landscape of absurdism, illustrated in full color by musician Toby Goodshank, animator Tom Bayne and Green himself.Released concurrently with Green's tenth album Engine of Paradise, this book cuts social commentary with laughter and imagination, all reflected through the artist-musician's characteristically quirky style.

The debut poetry collection from Arab-American poet Kareem Rahma–formerly of VICE and The New York Times–shows us the future in haiku.

What awaits us is not the future we had hoped for or what we were promised, but the terrible consequences of we've done to ourselves.Managing to be both a hopeful prayer for change and direct warning to the reader, New York–based author Kareem Rahma makes masterful work of the haiku form to build a very possible future world dominated by corporations, an earth depleted of natural resources and humans turned into zombies, glued to their screens. Elegant but caustically humorous, even in the darkness, Rahma remains hopeful that we can still keep the promises we made in the past.Paired with Jean-Marc Côté's 19th-century illustrations of an imagined year 2000, We Were Promised Flying Cars is not just for poetry and science fiction fans, but anyone interested in what tomorrow might look like.

A graphic-novel parody of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from the author of War and Paradise

A satirical graphic novel by artist, musician, creative polymath and Moldy Peaches founder Adam Green (born 1981), Subcultural Karate Turtles is a parody of the popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Green reimagines the turtles as subcultural artists who must battle the mainstream to determine the future of art. Set in an intergalactic Kabuki theater, the book is a play inside of a comic book. Against the backdrop of childhood iconography, the psychedelic dialogue functions as a critique of cultural theory.In 2019, Green published War and Paradise, a graphic novel about the clash of humans with machines, the meeting of spirituality with singularity and the bidirectional relationship between life and the afterlife. Subcultural Karate Turtles continues Green’s brilliant elaborations of the psychedelic and the satirical, the political and the spiritual.

Artists and organizers explore experimental learning initiatives fostering solidarity and dialogue

With a focus on labor organizing within the arts and tech industries, Software for Artists Book 3 explores the potential of creating alternative networks of education and challenging the material conditions that prevent us from enacting new realities with dignity and security.When we defy existing models for institution-building, what possibilities for gathering can materialize and what kinds of learning and unlearning can we practice together? Released alongside Pioneer Works’ eighth Software for Artists Day and the School for Poetic Computation’s 10th anniversary in November 2023, the book convenes educators, labor organizers and artists exploring experimental learning initiatives to be in solidarity and conversation with each other.Contributors include: Kandis Williams, manuel arturo abreu, Rahel Aima, Kameela Janan Rasheed, American Artist, Shani Peters, Neema Githere, Ayana Cotton, Lynn Yunn, Yatu Espinosa, Norm O’Hagan, Sam Lavigne, Or Zublasky and Dana Kopel.