Narrative Fieldwork is a series by Saul Appelbaum unfolding across multiple voices, media, and channels. It explores how art, narrative, desire, and communication move between personal experience and public life. Each project draws on his studio The Pioneers’ more than fifteen years of commercial, editorial, and digital-first experience, bringing expertise with an established market value grounded in paid commissions to research, writing, photography, film, and publishing. We follow the relationships through which a subject becomes meaningful: who makes it, what surrounds it, what it carries from the past, and whom it might reach. Each encounter generates original material and opens further connections between people, images, histories, and ideas.
Contributor, Los Angeles
Saul Appelbaum is a Los Angeles–based artist, media director, writer, independent curator, producer, and digital strategist whose work blends storytelling, design, architectonic thinking, and media to build new infrastructures for cultural collaboration. As Founding Director of The Pioneers, a media company and “co-op of gifted and generous minds” advancing Agile Cinema®, a hybrid mode of agile production, he leads experiments in multichannel narrative, including Narrative Fieldwork for institutions such as The Broad Museum, Serpentine Galleries, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Petzel Gallery. His collaborations span publications, museums, brands, agencies, and artists, from Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Hirmer Verlag to the Museum of the African Diaspora, Perry Ellis, ASICS, and figures such as Ann Hamilton, Mick Jenkins, Snoop Dogg, Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios, and Pope.L. Appelbaum holds degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago, and works internationally.
