Exodus: A Media Workshop

Barclays Center

Exodus: A Media Workshop is a yearlong project developed in tandem with Paul Pfeiffer’s residency and supported by the Social Justice Fund. Co-led with artist Shaun Leonardo and a team of artist-filmmaker mentors from various Brooklyn arts orgs, the initiative engages youth and adults from surrounding communities in an immersive exploration of the arena’s inner workings, particularly system-impacted and justice-impacted individuals. Through hands-on video training, storytelling, and media practices, participants gain behind-the-scenes access to the Barclays Center’s unique infrastructure, using their experience to create their own mixed media project.

Peers and friends, Leonardo and Pfeiffer share a long-standing interest in the ways sport functions as both performance and spectacle, a space where identity, competition, and collective emotion unfold before large audiences. While Pfeiffer’s work examines how media technologies shape the experience of spectatorship, Leonardo’s participatory practice engages the physical and social dynamics of sport and embodiment directly with communities.

Exodus will run through Fall 2027.

About the Artists

Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI) is an internationally recognized artist working in video, photography, and sculpture, with which he examines mass media, spectatorship, and the collective rituals of sports, religion, and popular culture. Pfeiffer has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Hamburger Bahnhof, MUSAC León, and the National Gallery of Victoria. A major retrospective of his work opened at MOCA Los Angeles in 2023 and traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao and MCA Chicago. Along with Julie Mehretu and Lawrence Chua, Pfieffer is a co-founder of Denniston Hill, an artist-founded residency in the Catskills, which is participating in the 2026 Venice Biennale.

Paul Pfeiffer is Barclays Center’s first artist-in-residence, a new initiative designed to embed an artist within the ecosystem of the arena. Known for examining spectacle, broadcast imagery, and the choreography of crowds, Pfeiffer approaches the arena as both a subject and a site for inquiry. Conceived as a cultural laboratory, the residency provides access to the arena’s public and behind-the-scenes spaces, games, and live events, creating an opportunity to observe the systems, rituals, and communities that animate the building.

Shaun Leonardo (b. 1979, Queens, NY) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist whose participatory practice explores the intersections of sport, masculinity, race, and justice. His work has been presented at the Guggenheim Museum, the High Line, New Museum, and MASS MoCA. He is currently Executive Director of Socrates Sculpture Park and previously served as co-director of Recess, where he founded Assembly, a groundbreaking diversion program for court-involved youth.