Commissions
The Lab gives artists unprecedented access to financial and institutional resources. Commissioned artists receive up to $150,000 each, keys to our space, the login for our website, and the option to revise every aspect of The Lab’s operations. We want to know how far they can take that inquiry and how much we can bend to make the project of art possible on every level. How do we foster risk-taking and allow for failure? What happens when their work conflicts with the way that we operate The Lab? How do we make visible the limits of our freedom?
Carrie Hott
January 2022–present
Interdisciplinary researcher and artist Carrie Hott is using The Lab’s existing digital infrastructure as a site of investigation and experimentation. Through the process of building a new website and digital archive for The Lab, Hott will be auditing The Lab’s digital footprint, determining more sustainable and accessible web solutions, and questioning whether autonomy on the internet is possible. Her project is driven by questions about much of our browseable internet is constructed, what information is clear and available (and more importantly what isn't), and how restraint and experimentation can together provide a functional but poetic website, as well as a medium that could provide a model and anchor point for critique and discussion.
Indira Allegra
September 1, 2021–February 28, 2023
Indira Allegra’s Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness and Tension Studies are limited edition literary explorations which emerge from a somatic approach to writing and image making.
What can a person abandoned as a baby in rural Georgia and a person living with fibromyalgia teach us about the nature of choreography? Dispersal of a Feeling: Bloodnotes on Choreography and Illness is a poetic treatise on choreography, moving the reader between spaces haunted with illness and spaces haunted with the loss of relatives to discover how dance can be found in everyday survival.
In Tension Studies, a domme's client becomes a lover and a lover becomes a client but it is a relationship with a weaver's wooden loom which is the most intimate of them all. Through the frame of the loom, tension lines trembling between human and nonhuman experience interlock to reveal a text/ile dense with phenomenologies of longing, touch and the dangers of encounter.
Asher Hartman
July 1, 2018–October 3, 2021
Playwright Asher Hartman and his company, Gawdafful National Theater, will create a makeshift mobile home park inside the shifting artistic environment of The Lab. Part live play, part social experiment, part mini-series, The Dope Elf is a long-term theatrical project that investigates how art spaces can weave a common narrative through disparate artistic projects, juxtaposing ideals of safe housing and safe theater, and suggesting new ways of looking at the relationship between live and mediated performances.
jose e. abad and Keith Hennessy
November 1, 2020–June 30, 2021
Scheme is a six month series of free workshops. Curated by jose e. abad and Keith Hennessy, the workshops are co-taught by artists deeply rooted in queer experimentation and decolonial practices. Nurturing community vitality, Scheme responds to the increasing fracturing of urban artist communities, especially BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, caused by gentrification, displacement, labor and housing precarity, and growing wealth inequity.
Tongo Eisen-Martin
August 3, 2018–June 30, 2021
Poet Tongo Eisen-Martin’s 2018-2021 residency includes a series of readings and the launch of his Black Freighter Press. Black Freighter Press is a platform for building movement culture and supporting Black literary arts, with a specific focus on incarcerated poets, Bay Area poets of color, and Black women.
Claudia La Rocco
June 1–22, 2019
Author Claudia La Rocco was commissioned by The Lab to write the third book in an experimental trilogy. La Rocco then asked other artists to “read” the novel in separate performances. And What’s More developed from years of La Rocco's collaborations with artists in different fields, exploring how form and content mutate but also cohere across disciplines, and how an artist can remain true to herself while also working in service of others. For this project, rather than asking artists to explicitly interpret her creation, she brought talented individuals into her imaginings (through the book form of And What’s More) in order to create a loose conversation between and among forms, both on and off the page.
Sadie Barnette
May 1–June 30, 2019
Sadie Barnette worked with her father Rodney Barnette to reimagine inside The Lab his bar – the first (and he says possibly the last) black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. Rodney Barnette was one of the few openly gay members of the Black Panther party. His Eagle Creek Saloon was a family-run business serving the multiracial gay community that was actively marginalized from bars and nightclubs practicing racist policies and profiling at that time. The bar is a story full of groundbreaking acts of resistance, celebration, and community. Barnette’s project was two-fold: to re-present the Eagle Creek Saloon as an archival installation and to host a “bar” that, as a queer social space, inspires artists and passerby to perform their own experience of culture and community.
Roscoe Mitchell
December 7–8, 2018
Roscoe Mitchell took over The Lab for two nights with his quartet including Ambrose Akinmusire, Junius Paul and Vincent Davis. This marked Mitchell’s last performance before he returned to Madison, Wisconsin, celebrating his eleven-year contribution to the Bay Area. An iconoclastic figure in contemporary music whose work ranges from classical to contemporary, from wild and forceful free jazz to ornate chamber music, Mitchell is an internationally renowned musician, composer, and innovator. “Come and See What There Is to See,” a CD of the first concert, is available at our store.
Brontez Purnell
July 1, 2015–May 31, 2017
During his residency, the choreographer, zine-maker, punk musician, and now film director Brontez Purnell created Unstoppable Feat, The Dances of Ed Mock, a multimedia project that allowed artists and audiences to actively engage with the legacy of the late San Francisco postmodern choreographer. The project included the production and premiere of Purnell’s feature length film, movement workshops, community-generated archiving, and guerrilla public dance performances. The project revealed the hopes, aspirations, and lasting legacy of Ed Mock through his colleagues, students, and the current generation of Bay Area performing artists and audiences.
Constance Hockaday
January 12–14, 2017
Constance Hockaday’s Attention! We’ve moved. highlighted the ongoing displacement of artists and cultural spaces, drawing audiences to a floating, temporary version of the underground performance spaces that once existed in San Francisco. Dynasty Handbag, Las Sucias, MSHR, and International Freakout a GoGo performed noise music and performance art for both well-heeled art crowds and the more punkanarchic scene of the Oakland warehouse community.
Dora García
November 22–December 4, 2016
The Hearing Voices Lab was a project by Spanish artist Dora García and Oslo Academy based artists Oda Skaathun, Eva Rosa Hollup Roald, Miriam Myrstad, Agnieszka Golaszewska, Peter Horneland, Mor Efrony and Sofie Amalie Andersen. The Hearing Voices Lab draws on the ambiguities of the idea of hearing voices – considering that this is something that is done constantly while we exist in public, but as it also describes the phenomenon of hearing inner voices. There were a number of events on the history and current activities of psychiatry-related resistance and civil rights movements as well as on the relationships between language, mental idiosyncrasies, capitalism and art.
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork
October 1–31, 2016
Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork created Inside You Is Me over the course of October 2016. A dynamic sculpture with moveable walls, a multichannel sound piece, and staged performances, Inside You Is Me explored sonic hierarchies in public and private space. Local artists Maryanna Lachman, Jose Abad, Oscar Tidd, and Sam Hertz were joined by Los Angeles composers FAY and Jonathan Mandabach, and New York dancers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener. “The Lab Box,” the object-based presentation of Gordon’s sound environment, was acquired by SFMOMA, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Inside You Is Me travelled to Hong Kong, Moscow, and SFMOMA.
Fritzia Irízar
July 23–August 20, 2016
White Chameleon/HFCS is a continuation of Fritzia Irízar’s work on the psychological, economic, and symbolic conditions of value, and how industries—in this case the machinations of the sugar industry—invest heavily in fictions and sleights-of-hand to downplay the life-threatening realities of their product.
Ellen Fullman
January 1–31, 2016
With 100 50-foot strings and four resonator boxes, sculptor and composer Ellen Fullman turned The Lab into an unearthly, vibrating instrument. For Fullman, her residency provided a rare opportunity to test her Long String Instrument in an acoustically tight environment, digitally molding her sound so that she could tour and install the instrument in a wide variety of spaces.
Xara Thustra
October 23–25, 2015
Xara Thustra Retrospective Divestiture was an immersive installation that brought together over five hundred people and featured a free community dinner, music, film, and dance performances. The installation was used for a variety of projects by other underground artists during the course of the October 2015 installation. Xara’s forty-foot mural was purchased by the Berkeley Art Museum and displayed during their Way Bay exhibition in 2017.