The Lab

The Lab is announcing an open call for Bay Area artists 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)

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 @teigerfoundation for funding The Lab’s three-year series.

The Lab is expanding! After 30 years occupying part of the San Francisco Labor Temple’s Main Auditorium, we’re on track to complete our restoration and environmental remediation of this historic space over the next few months. When we’re finished, we’ll have restored the historic 1914 hardwood flooring in the additional 2,400 sq ft expansion, patched the walls and ceiling, and revamped our electrical systems to match an all-new sound system headed our way. It’s so critical to have public, non-profit spaces in our city for the long haul. We can’t sell out to Live Nation, we’ll never be beholden to investors seeking a return, and the artwork we commission seeks to stretch where the asset class commercial market can’t reach. Currently, we’re raising $200,000 toward this renovation and expansion, with a few equipment upgrades in the works as well. We’ve raised $79,000 as of this post, and we’ll come to our broad community for a final push when we’re a little closer to the goal. In the meantime, check out our renovation tracker in the bio! 📸 by @robertdiversherrick

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

Looking forward to playing 4 shows with these two extraordinary musicians - Nick Joz and Dr Tyshawn Sorey - a rare trio version of Being & Becoming. We’ll be hitting the West Coast starting with 2220 Arts + Archives on Thursday, presented by Minaret. Ticket links in bio. Hope to see you out there!

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 @robertdiversherrick

Thrilled to announce Wendy Eisenberg @wendyeyes and autotune country legend More Eaze @more_eaze with @jas.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 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.

we are thrilled to be co-presenting keyon gaskin’s new solo “uncty: a mid life ex(pectancy/istential) performance” in collaboration with the lab, rot, and gravity if you haven’t seen their work before, you gotta come through. and if you have seen it, you know you gotta be there

"The first exhibition in the newly expanded The Lab, the first in a three-year series dubbed “the compost pile”, “the wet and the dry” is a perfect distillation of the aesthetic of this quintessentially San Francisco venue: ‘sound and vision’ colliding. Anna Friz’s multi-channel sound work comes at the listener in the dark from all sides. Comprised of recordings of rodents scuttling, wind, water, and more, the work is hiding inside a wall you have to crawl into to experience. Whitney Vangrin’s work teases apart biological processes: a video fill the three-walled room with (according to the handout) “close-ups of kelp forest restoration and fermentation projected on a thin layer of kelp-based packaging material”; a tall glass fountain stands to one side like alchemical lab equipment. A promising start to the next three years." - Aaron Harbour "the wet and the dry" ~ On view through June 27th ~ @thelabsf

The time we brought The Patterns Lost to Air trio into a room together. Something shifts when the sound has somewhere to land. Thank you @thelabsf @lucreciadalt @psychicsagree Laura Shifley, and everyone who was there. 🌀

The Days.. tour starts today in Philadelphia at The Woodlands presented by @upennmusic and @hungrymonsters then Wednesday in Brooklyn at @issueprojectroom Very excited to be joined by @oliviablocksound for our Brattleboro, Boston and Hudson shows ✨ April 14th, Philadelphia, UPenn Music Presents @ Hamilton’s Mansion at the Woodlands April 15th, Brooklyn @ ISSUE Project Room April 17th, Brattleboro VT @ Epsilon Spires April 18th, Boston, Non-Event Presents at MIT April 19th, Hudson NY @ Basilica Hudson April 20th, Oberlin OH, Modern Music Guild Presents at Fairchild Chapel April 21st, solo performances in Cleveland, Rose Tavern April 24th, San Fransico, CA @ The Lab April 26th, solo performances @ The Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin