Laboratory For Freedoms Presents
Music by Reverend Sekou and The Seal Breakers

During the first 100 days of the new Presidential administration, MoMA PS1 is hosting Laboratory For Freedoms, a residency with the artist-run “super PAC” For Freedoms. As part of VW Sunday Sessions, For Freedoms presents a live concert by Reverend Sekou and The Seal Breakers. Noted activist, author, documentary filmmaker and theologian Reverend Sekou is a third generation Pentecostal preacher. For this performance, Sekou is joined by The Seal Breakers—a Brooklyn-based twelve piece band with five horns and a Hammond B3 organ—for a concert celebrating love, truth, and moral defiance inspired by protest music from African American church traditions.

In an 1802 letter, Thomas Jefferson wrote: "I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.” Responding to Jefferson’s famous words, For Freedoms seeks to challenge the contemporary art world's presumed secularism by holding a Sunday revival celebration in the VW Dome at MoMA PS1. The event explores the tenet of freedom to worship—one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four freedoms,” from which the PAC derives its name—and continues the residency’s investigation into ways in which art can inspire deeper political engagement.

MoMA PS1’s acclaimed VW Sunday Sessions performance series welcomes visitors to experience and participate in live art. Since its founding in 1976, MoMA PS1 has offered audiences one of the most extensive programs of live performance in the world. VW Sunday Sessions highlights artists responding to contemporary social and political issues through a wide variety of creative and critical lenses. Encompassing performance, music, dance, conversation, and film, the series develops and presents projects by established and emerging artists, scholars, activists, and other cultural instigators. With a focus on artists that blur and break traditional genre boundaries, VW Sunday Sessions embraces the communities in New York City that create and sustain artistic practice.

Since 2012, VW Sunday Sessions has presented a commissioning program resulting in new work by Trajal Harrell, Mårten Spångberg, Anne Imhof, Tobias Madison and Matthew Lutz Kinoy, Hannah Black, and Colin Self. Additionally, the VW Dome Artist Residency offers a platform for creative development and experimentation for artists at all stages of the creative process.

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