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The Lab is a catalyst for artistic experimentation. The Lab is W.A.G.E. Certified. W.A.G.E.

The Lab believes that if we give artists enough time, space, and funding to realize their vision, the work they produce will change the way we experience the world and each other. These are often small propositions that challenge the familiar ways we perceive value, and so we seek out extraordinary artists who are underrepresented as a result of gender, class, race, sexuality, or geography, and whose work is not easily defined and therefore monetized. As a site of constant iteration and indeterminacy, The Lab is, above all, a catalyst for artistic experimentation. Certification is a program initiated and operated by working artists that publicly recognizes non-profit arts organizations demonstrating a commitment to voluntarily paying artist fees that meet a minimum standard. The Lab is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, federal ID number 94-2952488.

10/16/2026

Digging through a stack of records collected by the late Harry Smith, Marisa Anderson selected music from countries that the U.S. had been at war or in conflict with over the decades. In a nod to Smith’s Folkways collection “Anthology of American Folk Music,” Anderson learned and transcribed these compositions for electric guitar, releasing the aptly named “Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music.” Join us on Saturday night for an evening with this incredible guitarist and musician.

Camellia Boutros and Kumi Maxson open, drawing on their vast history of collaborations and Boutros’s “electric oud-guitar” a 12-string electric guitar with all the frets removed to better perform music utilizing Persian tunings.

Marisa Anderson + Camellia Boutros & Kumi Maxson
Sat., Oct. 16 at The Lab
Tickets in bio

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Marisa Anderson’s music transcends borders. The topography of her work interrogates the intersections of artistry and expression with form and tradition. A singular guitarist and voracious musical collaborator, Anderson crafts pieces bursting with equal parts reverence and curiosity, contouring familiar shapes into work that is wholly her own.

The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music is a collection of nearly one thousand songs culled from the private record collection of the late Harry Smith. Assembled by Anderson after a chance encounter led to an opportunity to study and explore this treasure trove of music, the Anthology focuses on music from places that the United States has been in conflict with since 1970: Southeast Asia, the USSR and the Arabic and Islamic regions of the world. In Volume 1 Anderson presents her own deeply personal iterations of nine songs from the Anthology.

Camellia Boutros and Kumi Maxson are longtime musical collaborators and friends who form two-thirds of the improvisatory experimental trio Tlet Mori Kapwa. Each belonging to a different diasporic and musical tradition, they bring together the diverse sonic worlds of electrified Taqsim, avant garde jazz, and experimental tape looping to create a unique sound that calls upon the universal.

10/14/2026

Thrilled to announce the three inaugural Living Wage Residency artists for our 2027 cohort. This was the first open call for our residency program, and one we intended to address the astronomical cost of living here in the Bay Area.

Read more in the KQED link in bio!

Throughout 2027, these three artists—Amma Ateria, Zachary Epcar, and Alexa Burrell—will develop new work for The Lab’s space over a three month period of access and substantial technical support.

The Lab’s first cohort of residents was selected through a highly competitive open call process—receiving over 400 applications—through consensus by a small panel of artists and curators with deep ties to the San Francisco Bay Area. Through these upcoming programs, The Lab reaffirms its commit to ambitious, interdisciplinary work that does not easily fit into a single mode of presentation.

Amma Ateria, a composer of electroacoustic music working with psychoacoustic phenomena, premieres an expansion of her Entropic Arias in January 2027 utilizing The Lab’s forthcoming new spatial audio system from Meyer Sound, generative layered visuals, and an amplified ritual chanoyu tea ceremony.

Zachary Epcar, a filmmaker working in celluloid, plans an expanded experimental theater project incorporating celluloid film, live sound performance, and minimalist set design premiering in June 2027 exploring the so-called “Havana Syndrome,” in which U.S. intelligence agents stationed in Cuba reported complex and unexplained neurological symptoms.

Alexa Burrell, visual artist and composer as LEXAGON, will develop an immersive installation WETN’WILD at The Lab in October 2027, creating a “West Coast Gothic” video work—with a sapphic q***r take on the Southern Gothic genre—and hydraulic cinema sculptural installation in which sheets of falling water become screens.

10/13/2026

Cybernetic audiovisual collective MSHR returns to The Lab on Thursday night, touring their new system Negative Flower. MSHR tours with the great underground duo The Tenses — aka Ju Sul R**t Meate and Jackie Oblivia of the weirdo music collective Los Angeles Free Music Society and Sm**ma. Sung Kim, instrument builder, musician, and woodworker opens the night.

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The Tenses + MSHR + Sung Kim
Oct 15, 8pm doors, 8:30pm music
$17 adv or door

The Tenses—comprised of Ju Suk R**t Meate and Oblivia from Sm**ma, the legendary “band without musicians” founded in 1973—held a tradition of weekly jam sessions with MSHR (Brenna Murphy & Birch Cooper) beginning in 2012. The jam room AKA Sm**ma’s studios AKA “purple planet room,” was a longtime anchor of the Portland underground music scene with a rotating cast of weirdos and noise musicians coming through over the decades. Lifelong archivists, The Tenses would record and catalog every session, occasionally releasing highlights on labels such as their own Pigface Records, including a collaborative release with MSHR in 2015.

The two duos converge for a rare west coast tour, with The Tenses’ collection of cassette recorders, plastic water jugs, pocket trumpet, Ciat-Lonbarde synths, and occasional surf rock riffs. MSHR initiates “Negative Flower,” a new system for live improvisation with virtual acoustic feedback and sculptural patterning. Wind is blowing through a garden of stones. Sung Kim joins for an opening set with his expertly crafted handmade musical constructions drawing on kotos, lap steel, and various other stringed instruments.

10/09/2026

We are extremely disappointed to share the news that our building’s ADA lift has been tagged by the city and shut down as of today. As a result, The Lab is not easily accessible for wheelchair users. (The main entrance has 8 stairs.)

This is a result apparently of a substantial lack of maintenance over the years, and as a tenant we cannot do anything to address the issue except email the ownership (which we do 2-4 times a week). The lift was fixed last weekend, but broke again and we do not yet have a timeline. We’re told that the technicians will be out soon, but given that this is now a city-flagged issue it will not be able to be used this weekend.

The good news is that a previously ADA accessible space definitely cannot be made inaccessible. So it is upon the building ownership/management to address this, which I believe they have the intention of doing. In the meantime, we recently received a grant to make our front entrance more accessible, so we will be looking into longer term solutions that do not require wheelchair users to access the space through a different door, and discussing the possibility with the city of directing some of those grant funds toward that accessibility improvement.

We will keep everyone updated. In the meantime, please reach out with any questions.

09/30/2026

𝐊𝐚𝐥𝐢 𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐧𝐞 returns to Grace Cathedral in April 2027 presented by The Lab, with material from her new release 𝑩𝒖𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑺𝒐𝒏𝒈 for organ, guitar, and cello, joined by Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton.

This is going to be a beautiful evening, and we’re so thrilled to be back at Grace Cathedral for the first time in years. Tickets in bio, at thelab.org, and on-sale now!

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Kali Malone presents Burning Song, her new album for pipe organ, cello and guitar featuring Lucy Railton and Stephen O’Malley. The program also includes select compositions from Malone’s vast organ discography.

Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. The music moves through endings and beginnings, reflection and foresight, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. Feeling supersedes matrices, as each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone’s work Does Spring Hide Its Joy.

Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of introspection and unwavering tenderness. Chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of her organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before.

08/14/2026

The great Shahzad Ismaily joins Lithuanian ambient-folk duo Merope for The Lab’s first event of the Fall 2026 season! David Wesley Golightly opens with a set of pieces celebrating the release of his new Seven Songs for Solo Piano cassette.

Merope w/ Shahzad Ismaily + David Wesley Golightly
August 28, 2026 at The Lab
8pm doors | 8:30pm show

Merope’s roots lie deep in the soil of Lithuania’s folk songs, connecting them with ideas from across the cultural map. Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė’s kanklės and singing are the foundation of their celestial ambient folk reinterpretations, joined by ornate, experimental guitar and electronics from Belgian multi-instrumentalist Bert Cools, creating an intimate soundscape and guiding the duo towards the unknown. Diving into ancestral words and melodies, they present a contemporary vision of ancient Baltic music. Tangling elements gleaned from jazz, traditional, ambient music, 20th century minimalism and kosmische into their moving, humanist compositions, they provide a soundtrack for today’s international landscape.

David Wesley Golightly is an Oakland-based composer known for his synth work in the bands Midday Veil, Hair and Space Museum, and the Soft Landing Ensemble. This performance celebrates the release of his debut solo album Seven Songs for Solo Piano. For these songs, David returns to the instrument he learned as a child, transmuting the sound world of analog synthesis to the manual domain of acoustic piano. In so doing, he has reconnected with the simple, immediate joy of making sound and following where it leads.

Flyer by Benjamin Rodgers

06/09/2026

Saturday night, Bill Basquin presents “From Inside of Here” at The Lab, with Lori Goldstein and Phil Perkins. A feature-length film shot in 2015 during which Basquin also made the first iteration of his piece “Scent Posts” on view currently as part of “the wet and the dry”.

The exhibition (with works by Basquin, Kevin Corcoran, Anna Friz, and Whitney Vangrin) will be open prior to the screening on Saturday.

Bill Basquin: From Inside of Here with Lori Goldston and Phil Perkins
Saturday, June 13 at 8pm
Free | RSVP appreciated

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From Inside of Here is a feminist ethnographic landscape film that communicates the structure of 19th century landscape photography as well as the violence that is its context. The film uses soundscape and landscape to explore vulnerability and inter-connection through the lens of an ecosystem and through the body of the filmmaker.

The film is comprised of multiple media: 16mm film, HD video, infrared stills, inter-titles, and sound recordings.

The place itself is a character in the film, as are the filmmaker’s methods. Over the course of three years and eight camping trips, the filmmaker filmed on location in the Gila National Forest in the New Mexico - the only people encountered were elk hunters and government agents suspicious of his California license plates and reasons for being there.

The Gila is a site for the reintroduction of the endangered Mexican Grey Wolf; the species was hunted and poisoned to near extinction by the US Biological Survey in the early 1900s. The US Biological Survey is a direct predecessor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (an insight from Michael J. Robinson’s Predatory Bureaucracy), which is the agency now responsible for re-establishing the species.

For this live version of From Inside of Here, filmmaker Bill Basquin will be performing narration and Lori Goldston will be performing with cello.

06/03/2026

Weston Olencki comes to The Lab on Saturday with their electromechanical banjo and prepared autoharp, in support of their recent LP Broadsides. An ecstatic, never-ending “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” captures the euphoria of melancholy in motion, a kaleidoscopic sense of place rooted in old-time music.

Ava Koohbor opens the night with “Korkori,” an electroacoustic backgammon composition constructed from a backgammon board created by her father during the Iran-Iraq War. Artist and curator Taranaeh Hemami joins Koohbor for this performance.

Weston Olencki + Ava Koohbor
Saturday June 6, 2026
8pm doors / 8:30 show
(Tickets in bio)

05/13/2026

Friday — Elori Saxl and Henry Solomon’s project “Seeing is Forgetting” combines analog synths with baritone saxophone & bass clarinet, drawing from American jazz abstraction, New York classical minimalism, and contemporary pop’s sense of harmony, form, and hooks.

Phillip Laurent opens with a new collection of music “Hill Songs,” performed live at The Lab with Benjamin Rodgers (Agnes Martian, Tessellations) on cello. This work traces states of mind that might accompany the stewardship of another person’s home: at once foreign and immutably you.

Elori Saxl / Henry Solomon + Phillip Laurent’s “Hill Songs”
Friday May 15 at The Lab
$23 Adv / $25 Door

05/04/2026

The Lab is announcing an open call for its celebrated Living Wage Residency program in 2026-27, providing substantial support for artists in the creation of new works.

Since 2014, The Lab’s residency program has provided over $1,000,000 to artists, with artist fees representing nearly 30% of our average operating budget. Residents receive keys to our space as well as substantial support in the form of artist fees, curatorial collaboration, and technical expertise.

Artists working in all media and disciplines are invited to apply, keeping in mind The Lab’s history as a site for experimental and interdisciplinary forms of artistic work spanning performance, exhibition, installation, sound and experimental music, writing, institutional critique, social practice, parades, feasts, and further disciplines yet to be defined.

Artists selected through our 2026-27 open call will receive:

- $17,530 artistic fee, commensurate with a living wage for 3 months of work in the San Francisco Bay Area as measured by MIT’s Living Wage Calculator.
- $5,000 in additional support for collaborators and materials.
- Three months of access to The Lab’s space for rehearsals and workshops, as space is available around other programming.
- Two weeks of continuous use of The Lab’s exhibition and performance spaces for the outcome of the residency.
- Curatorial and marketing support including outside studio visits, documentation of the work, and concerted publicity efforts.

thelab.org/residency-apply (and link in bio)

Address

2948 16th Street
San Francisco, CA
94103

Telephone

+14158648855

Website

http://www.thelab.org/

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