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?
Aine Nakamura: hands on tape
Aine Nakamura’s hands on tape encompasses a year-long research project at The Lab, taking shape as an installation and series of performances throughout June and July. The work points to disparate subjects of the raw silk trade, the erased labor of both women and silkworms, and the metamorphosis of bodies and materials. Nakamura draws a connection between the city of San Francisco (“mulberry port,” as written with Chinese characters) and her maternal family’s city of Hachioji, Japan (“mulberry city”), shortly before her family’s historical home was sold and left the family. Drawing on her longstanding practice of embodied performance, Nakamura takes on the role of an oni, with a devil mask, as a guardian of her family’s historical home in Hachioji, with photographic documentation threaded through the installation, while further drawing connections between bodies and buildings—a process of healing and release.
Zachary James Watkins: Exciting Sites of Opposition III with Li(sa E.) Harris and Jamael Smith
Zachary James Watkins’s Exciting Sites of Opposition III is the latest in a series of works by Watkins exploring the multiplicity of the term resonance in human relations and in acoustics, especially as it relates to histories of struggle and resilience. The initial work in this series, completed in 2015 at the invitation of Indigenous art collective Postcommodity, involved a community activation of the Black Heritage Society’s Heritage Hall in Guelph, Ontario, built by formerly enslaved Africans who escaped the United States aided by abolitionists and First Nation Tribes.
In 2024, Watkins returned to this theme while clearing out his mother’s art studio where he grew up in Lubbock, Texas, after her passing, collaborating with family members and soprano Lisa E. Harris on a collection of site-specific recordings. For his commission from The Lab and third entry into this series of works, Watkins is joined again by Lisa E. Harris and Bay Area-based bassoonist Jamael Smith. The trio will work within the newly excavated, raw space of the historic San Francisco Labor Temple, as a pre-renovation site of The Lab, with Watkins tuning his equipment to the site and exploring the location through improvisation and activation of natural resonances.
Carrie Hott: Our Shiver
2022 – 2025
Over the course of three years, interdisciplinary artist and researcher Carrie Hott investigated The Lab’s digital infrastructure, asking the question: “What would a truly sustainable web look like?” Our Shiver takes form as a solar-powered web server installed on-site at The Lab and accessible online. In addition to the results of Hott’s research and building process, the project includes commissioned essays from Chia Amisola, Jacob Kahn, Megan Prelinger, Andrea Steves, and Xiaowei Wang, with technical contributions by Abram Stern (aphid). The project will also be published in risograph book format, designed by Chris Hamamoto and printed by Colpa Press.
The server is currently stll hosted in the entrance of The Lab’s venue, and accessible online at ourshiver.site.
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.