The Lab

The Lab 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, s*xuality, or geography, and wh

ose 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.

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)

Friday — Elori Saxl and Henry Solomon’s project “Seeing is Forgetting” combines analog synths with baritone saxophone & ...
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

The Lab is announcing an open call for its celebrated Living Wage Residency program in 2026-27, providing substantial su...
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)

Photos from “the wet and the dry” are in! This group exhibition of major new works by Bay Area artists is the first in o...
04/24/2026

Photos from “the wet and the dry” are in! This group exhibition of major new works by Bay Area artists is the first in our three-year series “the compost pile,” investigating mutual interdependence among species and scale. Works by Bill Basquin, Kevin Corcoran, Anna Friz, & Whitney Vangrin assess. correspondences between species, scale, microbes, the living and the dead, life and non-life.

Open hours are Friday - Saturday, 12pm – 5pm, unless otherwise noted, and by appointment.
The Lab: 2948 16th St, SF

[1]: Full exhibition from entrance angle.
[2-3]: Bill Basquin: “Scent Posts, For Carolee Schneemann”
[4-5]: Whitney Vangrin: “Sour Coil — Cycle One”
[6]: Kevin Corcoran: Ground Figures: Moving the Earth Around Again
[7]: Anna Friz: Hole in the Wall

Photos by

Thrilled to announce Wendy Eisenberg and autotune country legend More Ease with .stade of Gumby’s Junk opening the sho...
04/22/2026

Thrilled to announce Wendy Eisenberg and autotune country legend More Ease with .stade of Gumby’s Junk opening the show! Tix just went on sale, don’t sleep, in bio!

Wendy Eisenberg + More Eaze + Jas Stade
Wednesday June 17
Doors 7pm / Show 8pm

Everything-guitarist Wendy Eisenberg and country autotune experimentalist More Eaze just both released phenomenal records, with Eisenberg scooping up Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” for their self-titled record. Jas Stade of Gumby’s Junk opens the show for this just-announced double headliner in June.

Friday! Lea Bertucci’s “The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity” for early music flutist Norbert Rodenk...
04/22/2026

Friday! Lea Bertucci’s “The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity” for early music flutist Norbert Rodenkirchen and 8-channel electronics, with an opening set by Brendan Glasson.

Lea Bertucci: The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity + Brendan Glasson
Friday April 24 at The Lab

Crystalline, minimal and dissonant, The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity is a new composition for sampled and live early flutes in 8-channel sound by Lea Bertucci. Steeped in folkloric influences, this work is a haunting contemplation of time, duration and memory that evokes the primeval and futuristic simultaneously. Written for master flutist, early music scholar, and member of the legendary early music group Sequentia, Norbert Rodenkirchen, this work reaches back through the spans of history and catapults ancient music into an immersive present.

The collection of flutes that Norbert has amassed over many decades features unique instruments not usually found in the repertoire of most flutists, which spans from the Renaissance to Medieval to Neolithic. Pre-recorded sustained pitches and abstracted melodic fragments generated from five of Norbert’s flutes (Medieval Traverso, Swan Bone, Sheep Bone, Renaissance Tenor and Renaissance Bass) are sampled and live deployed across an eight channel speaker array. Cutting edge audio technology in symbiosis with the deep history of music creates pathways for a new kind of listening.

Norbert Rodenkirchen performs live fragments of ancient songs and improvisations related to the origin of the flutes. Sustained tones and an idiosyncratic isopolyphony are two major aesthetic features of the work. The drones pulsing through the sound system create a lush and dissonant bed over which Norbert plays with minimal amplification, in effect expanding and contracting the instrument from its point of live origin to a diffused, spatialized sonic environment. This piece contemplates the depths of human history through the lens of our contemporary upheavals.

“the wet and the dry” opens Saturday night! This project is the first group exhibition in our three-year programming ser...
04/11/2026

“the wet and the dry” opens Saturday night! This project is the first group exhibition in our three-year programming series “the compost pile” and includes works by Whitney Vangrin, Bill Basquin, Kevin Corcoran Kevin Corcoran, and Anna Friz.

Whitney Vangrin performs at 7pm, with Andy Xue of Fugitive Gods, in her installation “Sour Coil - Cycle 1.”

the wet and the dry
Works by Bill Basquin, Kevin Corcoran, Anna Friz, & Whitney Vangrin
April 11 - June 27, 2026 at The Lab
Opening Reception April 11, from 6pm - 9pm
Performance by Whitney Vangrin with Andy Xue of Fugitive Gods at 7pm

the wet and the dry opens April 11, the first exhibition in The Lab’s three-year series the compost pile.the wet and the...
04/01/2026

the wet and the dry opens April 11, the first exhibition in The Lab’s three-year series the compost pile.

the wet and the dry
Works by Bill Basquin, Kevin Corcoran, Anna Friz, & Whitney Vangrin
April 11 - June 27, 2026
Opening Reception April 11, from 6pm - 9pm
Performance by Whitney Vangrin at 7pm

the wet and the dry marks the first group exhibition in The Lab’s three-year series the compost pile. The project challenges the way we think about boundaries—as membranes, as interfaces, as opportunities for collaboration—through four major works by Bay Area artists assessing correspondences between species, scale, microbes, the living and the dead, life and non-life. The exhibition takes its name from common advice about home composting, balancing wet (or green) nitrogen-rich matter with dry (or brown) carbon-containing material. This balancing act creates optimal efficiency for chemical and organic processes to operate, ensuring that the decaying matter breaks down evenly and cleanly to create a rich soil web.

The compost pile has many agents, ranging from worms freeing up nutrients, to slower-moving mycelial networks, to microbes that digest decaying plant matter. In collaboration with these is the human, a balancer of materials and turner of heaps. These four works explore that balancing act. Bill Basquin’s Scent Posts (For Farlow Mowat) draws on an anecdote in the naturalist Mowat’s seminal book Never Cry Wolf, which detailed Mowat’s experience marking his territory in an effort to keep predators out of his campsite. Whitney Vangrin’s Sour Coil - Cycle One is a performance and immersive installation that merges the symbiotic traditions of fermentation with the efforts of kelp restoration to explore themes of fecundity, survival, and resilience. Kevin Corcoran’s Ground Figures assembles field recordings of both sound and solar radiation from Mussel Rock, where coastal erosion is gradually causing a landfill to slip into the ocean. Finally, Anna Friz’s Hole in the Wall with Pamela Rodriguez-Montero brings us into to the underworld through a portal cut into the side of the gallery wall.

Thank you to for funding The Lab’s three-year series.

The Coil S*x Tapes come to SF! Dirty Looks returns, reteaming with Dark Entries, to co-present two “educational” tapes s...
03/19/2026

The Coil S*x Tapes come to SF! Dirty Looks returns, reteaming with Dark Entries, to co-present two “educational” tapes scored by legendary band Coil from 1992, during a period of moral panic in Britain. Tickets on sale now.

Saturday, April 18, 2026
Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
$12 adv & door

The “Video Nasties” was a tabloid campaign of moral panic across Britain in the 1980s, barring the sale of obscene images on home video. Softcore snuck by, however, if deemed “educational.” Basilisk Productions, known for their work with Derek Jarman, saw the loophole and roped in experimental music outfit, Coil (Jhon Balance and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson), to soundtrack two sizzle reels that purport to train viewers about safe s*x and sensual massage. Dirty Looks is thrilled to return to The Lab, reteaming with Dark Entries, to co-present the tapes in their entirety: The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer S*x and Sara Dale’s Sensual Massage: The Stroke of Pleasure.

David Lewis, The Gay Man’s Guide to Safer S*x, VHS, 49mins., 1992

David Lewis, Sara Dale’s Sensual Massage: The Stroke of Pleasure, VHS, 43mins., 1992

Few groups in recent history forged as confounding and alchemical a body of work as Coil, the partnership of Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson and John Balance. From album to album and phase to phase their recordings spelunk perplexing depths of esoteric industrial, occult electronics, and drugged poetry.

David Lewis was part of the stable at the production company Basilisk, founded by James MacKay. There, he assisted Derek Jarman in directing The Garden (1990) and Blue (1993). He currently works as an editor on British broadcast television programs, including Antiques Roadshow.

Design by Benjamin Rodgers

The visceral collaboration between and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, captured by at The Lab last week. This was an unforg...
03/19/2026

The visceral collaboration between and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, captured by at The Lab last week. This was an unforgettable performance, gripping and terrifying (double whips!) and we’re so glad to see everyone show up on a Tuesday.

Thank you to and for being such wonderful collaborators, and especially for providing support for programming at and across both institutions.

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