Bones, objects and ideas are equally subjected to the passage of time. The exhibition Tongue Stones explores legacies past, present and future through a constellation of histories and imminent possibilities. The works in this exhibition include experiments in research, reenactment, distribution, sampling, circulation, documentation and reanimation. In each instant, preservation is contingent on present attention spans, as the act of remembering is bound to the act of imagining the future.

Tongue Stones

David Horvitz

Julia Weist

Joachim Koester

Clara Halpern

Laura McLean-Ferris

Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation

Soda_Jerk

Elise Rasmussen

Daniel Kent

David Everitt Howe

Pioneer Works Press

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.

Notes on My Dunce Cap

Arts & Photography

BALL, JESSE

History & Criticism

I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected is a collaborative, hybrid composition by Chris Cheney and Amy Lawless: part essay, part poem and part social media collage. In the composition of this book, the authors cannibalized traditional research methods for a more personalized, technology-based process. Meditating upon Kurt Schwitters’ notion that "the medium is as unimportant as I am myself," they confront historical traumas through the body of real and virtual environments. Establishing online personas on Myspace, Yelp and Twitter, they explore the feelings that attach themselves to these expressions of self, the real sense of desire, connection, affirmation and friendship, as well as possibilities of destruction and loss. The relationship to the mother, a candlepin bowling league and an online Korean roleplaying group are the social environs through which the authors grapple with their own sense of isolation and otherness in the digital age, the blind energy of desire and the strangeness of tears.

I Cry: The Desire to Be Rejected

Cheney, Chris

Lawless, Amy

Perhaps best known for the iconic desert monolith “Cadillac Ranch” and stunts like “Media Burn,” the radical architecture and media art group Ant Farm created an abundance of works across disciplines―including video, publications, built environments and performances. Throughout their career (1968–79), Ant Farm conceived a series of time capsules that focused not on the eternal but rather on the fleeting aspects of postwar American culture: consumer goods, media archives and tchotchkes. For various reasons, all of Ant Farm’s time capsules failed to function, that is, to be opened at the allotted future time and the intact contents examined. Ant Farm’s successor group, LST, has taken up the project with their contemporary work “Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule]” (2008). This work not only functions but updates the original’s line of questioning, exploring notions of the time capsule in the digital age. The Present Is the Form of All Life represents the first comprehensive documentation of these overlooked ephemeral works. Including many previously unpublished images, this publication also boasts essays by Constance M. Lewallen, Steve Seid and Gabriella Giannachi, and a discussion between curator Rudolf Frieling and LST.

The Present Is the Form of All Life: The Time Capsules of Ant Farm and LST

Individual Artists

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.”

Sleep, Death's Brother

The Anhoek School is a pedagogical experiment that investigates alternatives to traditional American methods for learning. This book undoes the benign voice of the standardized test, awakens the reader to the history of violence embedded in the form and activates it as a site for aesthetic expression.

Quaestiones Perversas: Anhoek Record Examination (Groundworks)

Beatriz E. Balanta

Mary Walling Blackburn

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.

Pòtoprens: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince

"This project's socially based approach to art and design education hits a nerve with today's generation of active makers." –Ellen Lupton, author and curator
Making and Being draws upon the lived experience of Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, visual arts educators who have developed a framework for teaching art with the collective BFAMFAPhD that emphasizes contemplation, collaboration, and political economy. The authors share ideas and pedagogical strategies that they have adapted to spaces of learning which range widely, from self-organized workshops for professional artists to Foundations BFA and MFA thesis classes. This hands-on guide includes activities, worksheets, and assignments and is a critical resource for artists and art educators today. Making and Being is a book, a series of videos, a deck of cards, and an interactive website with freely downloadable content. Susan Jahoda is an artist, educator and organizer whose work includes video, photography, text, performance, installation and research-based collaborative projects, and a core member of the New York–based collectives BFAMFAPhD and the Pedagogy Group. She is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and resides in New York City. Caroline Woolard is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the Hartford Art School, CT. Woolard employs sculpture, installation and online networks to study the pleasures and pains of interdependence. She is the 2018–20 inaugural Walentas Fellow for Women Leaders in the Arts at Moore College of Art and Design.

Making and Being: Embodiment, Collaboration, & Circulation in the Visual Arts

Jahoda, Susan

Woolard, Caroline

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.

Simultaneous Soloists

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.

Adam Green: War and Paradise

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

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Books by Pioneer Works Press