SELECTED COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS
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The Fabrication program spans ceramic, printmaking, and public art and offers the ability to work across disciplines.
Powerhouse Arts fabricators collaborate with artists to realize ambitious projects across a variety of scales, including production runs, editions, and large-scale projects.
In Fall of 2021, Gina Beavers and Exhibition A approached Powerhouse to fabricate a limited edition of 25 ceramic sculptures. Vase Lips is the artist’s first functional sculpture edition. Influenced by online make-up artists who decorate lips with rhinestones and other elements, Beavers says Vase Lips “was born from the idea that I would try to make a vase. Sculpting with only my hands and a few tools in air-dry clay, it would have the definite feel of a handmade object. I decided it would be a set of lips with vases embedded, where the vases could be functional for small flowers or remain empty, becoming an alternative take on a traditional vase, as well as a comment on make-up, design, and digital culture.”
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ACA Galleries commissioned Powerhouse Arts to produce an edition of 113 prints of Faith Ringgold’s 1966 painting entitled Woman Looking in a Mirror. The prints were included in the exhibition “Prints and Multiples” on view from March 16 to June 17, 2022.
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As part of an expansive exhibition of his work, titled Particular Matter(s), The Shed commissioned Tomás Saraceno to construct a new artwork, which would take full advantage of their soaring multipurpose space, The McCourt. Free the Air: How to hear the universe in a spider/web, was a 95-foot pressurized sphere, inside which visitors lay on a taught web-like net floating 40-feet above the ground, in order to experience vibrations derived from the movement of particles in the air, similar to the way spiders relay information through vibratory mechanisms.
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In January of 2022, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery commissioned Powerhouse to screen print portraits for a self-titled solo exhibition by artist Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
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Times Square Arts commissioned Powerhouse Arts to project manage, fabricate, install, and deinstall Pamela Council’s A Fountain For Survivors exhibited as a public art activation in Times Square. A Fountain for Survivors is an exuberant life-affirming monument for survivors of all kinds. The work is Council’s first public artwork and their largest work to date.
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In March of 2021, Sophia Wallace commissioned Powerhouse Arts to create Swan Series, described by the artist as “an open edition of cast sculptures in stoneware and terracotta which takes inspiration from the natural world, specifically swans in motion, budding orchids and emerging succulents. It is the latest of Wallace’s ongoing project to invent an iconography of the clitoridian” and can best be described as a work of contemporary feminist art.
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Desiiiire/Diiiistortiiiion and Body/Meat are a series of prints by Rodrigo Moreira produced in 2021 in collaboration with Powerhouse Arts. For this project, Moreira worked with Powerhouse to print photo-collages from two existing bodies of work titled Desiiiire/Diiiistortiiiion and Body/Meat, which amounted to an edition of 15 prints measuring 20 x 16 inches on Coventry Rag paper in CMYK with a gray wash.
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Performa approached Powerhouse Arts in May of 2020 to create an edition of porcelain vases for Barbra Kruger as a follow up to her acclaimed Performa 17 Commission Untitled (Skate) where Kruger created a series of merchandise in the guise of a Supreme “drop”. The exhibition involved large text-based vinyl “pastings” as a site-specific installation at Coleman Skatepark in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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In Spring of 2021, Powerhouse Arts collaborated with artist Jenny Polak to fabricate a series entitled Wall Tiles, consisting of four different slip-cast ceramic bas-relief panels. The imagery within these works forms a frieze depicting prison walls looming large amidst banal golf course imagery, both of which are rendered rather unexpectedly in glazed ceramic tiles at a domestic scale. The tiles highlight the dangerous normalization of incarceration and border violence.
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Sydney Shen collaborated with Powerhouse Arts’s Wood, Metal, and Digital Fabrication team to fabricate a series of large sculptures for her newly commissioned solo exhibition Strange But True at the Queens Museum.
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Okwui Okpokwasili worked with Powerhouse to adorn a series of headpieces for the performance On the way, undone, performed in May 2021 on the Highline, inspired by Simone Leigh’s Brick House. On the way, undone reimagines black hair as an antenna or a receiver of signals from the past and the future. The performance is both an homage and a pilgrimage: performers trace a path through the park to Leigh’s magnificent sculpture at 30th Street.
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Artist Liz Collins worked with Powerhouse Arts to create the sculpture Map Key for the exhibition “Wayfinding” at The Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. The sculpture is based on a map key that Collins referenced within the Phillips Academy’s Sidney R. Knafel Map Collection, which included European maps, atlases, and documents from 1434 through the 19th century. Map Key is made of wood and papier-mâché, acrylic fabric, wool, silk, screen printed antique linen tablecloth.
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Artist Caroline Garcia approached Powerhouse Arts to fabricate the main structural component of The Headless Headhunt, a multimedia installation built to resemble a boxing ring that was commissioned as part of The Shed’s Open Call, on view from June 4 through August 1, 2021.
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In March 2021, artists Aziz + Cucher approached Powerhouse Arts to produce a series of unique prints entitled You’re Welcome and I’m Sorry. The artist duo was initially introduced to Powerhouse through Virtual Consultations where they consulted with Print Director Luther Davis regarding methodologies for translating photography of performance into large-scale prints.
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During a residency in The Kitchen’s building at 512 West 19th Street, Autumn Knight created a new project to be viewed by online audiences. This project merged the artist’s practice of improvisation with new text, choreography, and sculpture that responds to the architecture of the space.
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New York’s Swivel Gallery approached Powerhouse Arts in 2020 to collaborate on producing a print edition for their inaugural exhibition, an immersive, site specific installation entitled PANACEA by Corey Wash that was on view from January 23 to February 28, 2021.
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Artist Michael Joo approached Powerhouse Arts for fabrication of QR codes that involved milling carbon, wood, and iron for his exhibition On the Passage… at CLEA_RSKY, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute. The QR code is a functional sculpture: when scanned, it leads to an archive of images, artifacts, and information that add layers of contemplation to the installation.
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Powerhouse Arts’ Project Management team was hired to install Kenseth Armstead’s Boulevard of African Monarchs, at the corner of 116th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, in the heart of Harlem described by the artist as “a hub of African excellence in America.”
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In 2020, K8 Hardy reached out to Powerhouse Arts to collaborate on the fabrication of March, a large-scale, 10 x 6 foot upholstered maxi pad with colorful stains. March is composed of silver infused dimpled bamboo fabric — currently being marketed as a face mask filtration layer.
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Artist Leah Raintree approached Powerhouse Arts in 2020 to formulate a glaze and fire works for Clearing, a series of ceramic drawings using found materials from Raintree’s childhood home on a small farm in rural Virginia.
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The Powerhouse Arts Project Management team assembled and installed the first model of Agnes Denes’ Probability Pyramid—Study for Crystal Pyramid from 1976. The sculpture was commissioned by The Shed for the artist’s retrospective exhibition Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates curated by Emma Enderby, which was on view from October 2019 through March 2020.
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Artist Bruce M. Sherman commissioned Powerhouse Arts to fabricate a series of ceramic sculptures for a new body of work entitled Infinite Columns. The works reference Brancusi’s Infinite Columns and assert a connection between the earth and the celestial realm in their prominent verticality.
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In 2019 artist Alex Dodge collaborated with the Powerhouse Arts Printshop on his print edition The Only Stars Are In Your Eyes. The print is a seven-color screenprint on Bristol that utilizes an ultraviolet light-cured ink. The UV-cured ink is printed in such a way that it creates a raised surface, such as you might encounter with braille.
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Sarah Crowner was commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans to create a series of six individual tapestry panels for the exhibition, Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension, which aimed to challenge patriarchal narratives of European modernism.
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Artists La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers were commissioned by the Ford Foundation Gallery to create I Am Queen Mary for the exhibition, Radical Love, which ran from June to August, 2019.
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Bryony Roberts Studio commissioned Powerhouse Arts to fabricate Soft Civic, a site-specific work that aims to enhance the public gathering space in Columbus, Indiana.
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