Pioneer Works Press – serie

Embroidered portraits of New York City’s queer and trans communitiesThe 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.

A text for those curious about education as a context for creativity and collaboration, and for teachers who want to reconsider hierarchy in their classrooms, Jesse Ball’s Notes on My Dunce Cap includes advisory material regarding the creation of syllabi and the manner in which groups may evaluate the work of an individual without harm. Ball is renowned for the unique courses he teaches at the Art Institute of Chicago, which are compiled in this volume along with extended notes on pedagogy. His meditations consider pedagogy in terms that are at once usefully broad and insightfully profound: "When it is possible for any of us to simply go and sit somewhere in the grass, and when it is such a delightful thing to do, to go and sit in the grass, whether by oneself or with others, then it is important to remember that anytime we think about teaching, or indeed, about any other activity—that we do it instead of sitting somewhere in the grass. We are passing up on the joy of solitude, and all its virtues and pleasures. Therefore, it is crucial that what happens when we teach be of the same value as time spent alone. And that is true both for ourselves and for those we teach." Jesse Ball (born 1978) is the author of five novels, including The Curfew, Silence Once Begun and A Cure for Suicide, which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, as well as several collections of poetry, including March Book. His work has appeared in numerous publications including The New Republic, The Paris Review, Oberon, Circumference and Guernica Magazine.

Sleep, Death’s Brother is an instruction manual on dreaming for children or incarcerated persons, teaching such individuals to lucid dream and thus use their dreams to somewhat escape their situations. While it is often the case that dream life is passively experienced, acclaimed novelist Jesse Ball (born 1978) reminds us that dreaming life is also a place where a sense of agency can grow. Even in the midst of physical or emotional environments that do not support such development in waking life, dreams are a place where one can take control. Ball calls for bravery in the exploration of this practice, and provides the dreamer with useful habits and techniques. Full of affirmation and wisdom, Sleep, Death’s Brother is a guidebook “for all oneironauts young and old.”

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.

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 compendium of creative texts examining our complex and slippery relationships with new technologiesWhat will the internet of the future make possible? Untethering the Web explores the technologies, strategies and anxieties that are coalescing in 2022 to shape a new digital paradigm. As naturalized citizens of today’s always-online world and as survivors of a multiyear pandemic, the need to reform our digital tools and approaches is more pressing than ever before. Evolved models for virtual convening, collective organizing and digital ownership are making this possible, and a reckoning for the platformed web and its monolithic tech giants is beginning to feel imminent—but how will it all unfold, and what new pitfalls will emerge? In conjunction with Pioneer Works’ seventh Software for Artists Day, in October 2022, creators, technologists and members of our community share their visions for a flourishing digital multiverse, and how they imagine it manifesting over time.