kickstarter – brooklyn spaces

royal palms shuffleboard club

oriana on 12 May ’15

[I’m counting down to the release of the Brooklyn Spaces book by doing one mini-post per day, sharing teasers of some of the places you’ll find in it.]

neighborhood: gowanus | space type: recreation | active since: 2013 | links: website, facebook, twitter

As soon as Royal Palms owners Ashley and Jonathan walked into a former die-cutting factory on the Gowanus Canal, they knew they had to make the shuffleboard club they’d dreamed about. “We just plunked down our life savings and started figuring out how to make it happen,” Ashley says. They worked on it for two years, spending a long time raising money, including a Kickstarter campaign for the actual courts, which raised more than twice its goal. “That gave us a lot of confidence,” Jonathan says. “It showed us how many people were excited to support this idea, to make our passion project their passion project.”

pix by Alix Piorun

As they’d hoped, the somewhat archaic game, long relegated to retirement homes and cruise ships, is doing swimmingly in Brooklyn. It’s the perfect intersection of nostalgia, novelty, and challenge, plus it’s a very social game that you can play with a drink in your hand. “Shuffleboard takes a minute to learn but a lifetime to master,” says Ashley. “It’s hard to be very, very good, but it’s also hard to be very, very bad.”

Want to learn more about Royal Palms, and 49 other incredible Brooklyn Spaces? Buy the book!

silent barn redux

oriana on 17 Jul ’13

neighborhood: ridgewood | space type: music, art, events | active since: 2013 | links: website, facebook, twitter

By now everyone probably knows the storied history of the Silent Barn. The band Skeletons started the DIY venue in their Ridgewood apartment in 2005 (which I profiled back in 2009), and until 2011 it was a raucous, dingy, rollicking good time—and then they got ransacked. Around $15k worth of equipment was destroyed, and then the city came in and evicted them. That probably should have been that, but the Silent Barn launched a Kickstarter, which brought in more than $40k. So they decided to start over, but this time, to be as legit and legal as they could be.

the Husk; photo from Showpaper

Fast forward to early 2013, and the Silent Barn 2.0 opened its doors in Bushwick. The new incarnation is definitely a continuation of the Husk (which the original space is now called), on a much bigger scale. The building itself is a lot lager—three floors and a yard, with eight bedrooms, thirteen roommates, three stages (or more, as needed), an art gallery, a dozen art and recording studios, and on and on. The scope is bigger too; in addition to music shows nearly every night, there’s the Babycastles videogame collective, science art, Aftermath Supplies artist reuse shop, multimedia video art events, a supper club, piñatas, theatre groups, and a whole lot more. And the community involvement this time around is huge: there are about 150 people participating, in various degrees, in the conceptualizing and running of the space. Administration is framed on the metaphor of a kitchen, and there are about 60 Chefs, each responsible for keeping a small aspect of the Barn going. It’s all volunteer, all consensus, and all making it up as they go along. It is, I think, pioneering a new way to do DIY—intentional, flexible, transparent, and innovative. (Want to join in the fun? Go here.)

Here’s a short Q&A with Katie, the Press Chef, and below that I asked two questions of a dozen different Barn members: 1) What’s your favorite event you’ve participated in here, and 2) Why, out of all the myriad ways you could be spending your time, is Silent Barn where you want to be?

brooklyn spaces: From the structure of the collective to the special vocabulary to all these working groups—did that evolve spontaneously as you figured it out, or was there a model you were working from?
Katie: We’re making it up as we go. We have weekly Kitchen meetings with all the Chefs, and part of that is Stew, which is all our discussion topics, whether it’s what murals are coming up or how to deal with conflict resolution; everything goes in the Stew and we work it out together.

all pix by Alix Piorun unless noted

brooklyn spaces: I love that. I feel like this space is really breaking new ground in a lot of ways, sort of changing the meaning of DIY in Brooklyn.
Katie: Well, there’s a responsibility here. Places come and go, you know? When the Husk was ransacked, we had such a huge reaction from the community, so it was our responsibility to do things the right way. After the Kickstarter, we could have re-opened the next day—and then probably gotten shut down again. So we decided to focus on longevity. I think we’re really on the right path. People always try to define DIY; we’re still doing it ourselves, we’re just doing it differently. It’s not like we’re trying to change the model for other spaces; this is just what we have to do. Plus look at this! This place rules! This never would have happened if we hadn’t taken the route we took.

Martha Moszczynski’s painting and piñata studio

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on the neighborhood? What’s it like being in Bushwick now, especially after having been in Ridgewood?
Katie: We’re really trying to make ourselves an asset to the neighborhood. We go to community board meetings every month. We want people to know us and recognize us, to know that they can come to a show or book a show or play a show or put up some art. We really want to find new ways to integrate with the community and make our presence a positive thing.

***

brooklyn spaces: What’s your favorite event you’ve participated in here?

Katie: I like the ones that seem to be holistic Barn, like when there’s a house show and a complimentary show downstairs. Like the Modular Equinox, which took place in every single room. It was really neat to have that kind of foot traffic everywhere, even in the “private” areas.

Tricia: Lani’s birthday party. We had been holding our breath waiting for a liquor license for so long, and I think that was the first show where we’d really come into our own. It was this giant wild night, everyone went crazy, just the whole Barn partying.

Joe Ahearn (Showpaper): This question never gets easier. I’ve seen / thrown / taken part in easily over a thousand shows at Silent Barn! My favorites are those that come out the blue from old friends, the ones that have strange challenges, the ones with moments that feel like magic, the ones that somehow discover a new way to use a place that thousands of bands have been playing with for years.

zine library

Mila (website): I trust that if I show up on any given night, I will see something intriguing. One evening that stands out is the Public Meeting we had in May,“Women in DIY.” It was amazing to see the room filled with women who have done really extraordinary things. It felt supportive and positive, inspiring and motivating, to be a participant in this community.

Theresa (Internal Events Chef): The Wild Boys Immersive Party, which had performances, dream machine, food, piñata, art, community costumes, etc.

another living room; sometimes transforms into the Hawkitori Dinner Club

Larissa (Paesthetics Octopus): No offense to the events (and I’ll give another shoutout to that Modular Solstice night when there were three completely different events going on simultaneously), but it’s the times in between the events and the things that happen because events are going on that I most remember.

Arielle (Aftermath Supplies): My favorite events are the ones I don’t show up for on purpose. I’ll be working in the shop or my studio and there will just be someone singing their heart out or the most nasty thrash band totally destroying. I stumble into the show room with total awe and appreciation of what’s going on and that I happen to be there to witness it.

Deep Cuts (barber shop + record shop)

Nathan Cearley (Dark Cloud Chef): On the one hand, I really love the Modular Synthesizer Solstice and Equinox shows I curate here, because I always include so many individuals who are part of the community and have such crazy visions about weird electronics. On the other hand, I really love our weekly administration meetings because it’s crazy how much we get done for a group with no traditional top-down hierarchy. Both “events” speak to the possibility of surprise still existing in such a dead, predictable, monotonous society.

***

brooklyn spaces: Why, out of all the myriad ways you could be spending your time, is Silent Barn where you want to be?

Brandon: I used to do house shows in Michigan, and the intimacy and humanity of that scale of cultural happenings was really important. When I moved to New York I was so depressed, going to all these crappy clubs where they tally at the door how many people paid for your band. It just sucked. And then I found the old Barn and it was so different. It’s a way to exist in New York and interact with other people on a much more human level.

Gravesend Recordings / Future 86 Recording Studio

Katie: I think that’s what a lot of our answers are, actually. I’m from a small town in Mississippi, where there aren’t any clubs or bars or anything, so it’s only DIY stuff, jamming with your friends, playing in someone’s basement or on the beach or whatever. And I was so depressed when I moved to New York too; I got stuck in this dorm with these people I didn’t get, and the Husk was the first place I felt at home. It’s home and family, that’s why we do it.

Larissa (Paesthetics Octopus): I love working toward the future of Silent Barn along with all these other pretty incredible people who all have such different talents and viewpoints, knowing that I might never had the change to even meet them otherwise.

backyard during Warper blockparty

Tricia: I’m here because I can be. I can’t think of anywhere else that would say, “Hey neuroscientist, come have a space!” Not only can I learn about art and music and DIY culture, but I can collaborate with artists. It’s just amazing to do science and art in the same space. And to show it to people who want to see it!

Theresa (Internal Events Chef): Being here lets us work with a bunch of people who are good at things we’re not good at. For a recent show, Martha made a huge dick piñata for us. It would have taken me ages to figure out how to make a dick piñata! There’s so many skillsets here. You can just email the Kitchen saying, “I need this weird thing. Does anyone have it or can anyone do it?” and you get three emails back saying, “I can do that!”

another living room; paintings by Devin Lily, photography by Nina Mashurova

Arielle (Aftermath Supplies): The constant friction and motion of interacting with people, art, life, and general day-to-day bullshit, like emptying trash cans or drinking coffee and sharing “that time I puked” stories over a taco. Navigating a place that is a whole made up of parts, and all the interesting drama that brings about, while ultimately having a community of people who’ve got your back. A second place to call home, to take creative refuge in.

One the living rooms; art by Lena Hawkins, Lani Combier-Kapel, Jen May

Lani (Volunteer Chef): It’s easy to get wrapped in bar culture here, or to just go to a show and leave to go home, fall asleep, and go to your 9–5 job. That’s not the life I’m interested in; I want to be immersed in the art and music that happens here. Being involved in Silent Barn satisfies a part of my personality that helps me grow as an artist and musician.

Eli (Art Chef): Silent Barn is an excellent experiment in joining art, life, and politics. We’ve managed to corral so many brilliant people and force their conflicts and concordances into creating something with the potential to be truly new and exciting.

Nina (hosts Phresh Cutz): It’s this great community environment that really supports experimental ideas or any kind of creative thing. My whole life, the events I’ve really enjoyed and been inspired by have been in community-based creative art spaces like this, so it’s really great to support that and help facilitate it by giving people space to do what they want to do.

Phresh Cutz, photo by Meghan O’Byrne

Kunal (Babycastles): The thing that’s important is the promise of this strange experiment actually producing something of immense value to the world. Once we get all the pieces solidly in place, a massively successful mechanism of including participation from almost anyone interested, a successful “community-building” pathway for any new voice interested in gathering and growing any piece of culture inside of a stew of culture, successfully extending the value of all this community, strengthening the celebration to our direct neighbors and thereby to the city as a whole as a truly exhaustively functioning projection of the social ecosystem that the world should be, the potential for the thing to be so strong that it continues to channel and nurture and organize new voices in art and communication almost entirely, and finally, some sort of flowering and seeding aspect, where the energy is too much for the small space, and the vision encompassed inside starts to blow up, fly with the wind to surrounding areas, and just take over life in the city itself, and the ideas propagate strongly and successfully. Stuff like that.

Hieroglyph Thesaurus performing

Joe Ahearn (Showpaper): Silent Barn acts as an artistically inclined autonomous zone, where we get to make the rules and share the work we want and are excited by. I don’t think it’s too different than the DIY ethos of other collective art spaces in Brooklyn and around the world throughout history, but I happen to live here and want to be able to participate directly in the culture I consume, and this is as solidly sustainable a way to do so, on my own terms, that I’ve found in New York.

Mila: The Barn is a place where my ideas about what I can and can’t do are constantly challenged. I am constantly forced to reexamine how I think and how I do things, because infinitely more is possible, permissible, and at stake. Plus it feels like family.

Title:Point theatre company’s desk/workspace.

Nathan Cearley (Dark Cloud Chef): I participate in the Silent Barn because it’s giving vitality and substance and life to the concept of constructing our own world—a concept that I find hyper-American but strangely near extinct in this country today. I love experiencing the art and ideas that all these diverse individuals create and, in a broader sense, I love helping to create the space that makes that human freedom possible.

***

Like this? Read about more collectives: Flux Factory, Monster Island, the Schoolhouse, Hive, Bushwick Project for the Arts

gemini & scorpio loft

oriana on 20 May ’13

neighborhood: gowanus | space type: art & events | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter, flickr

G&S Glitter Ball, NYE 2013 (photo by Linus Gelber)

For ten years, Gemini & Scorpio have been throwing huge, immersive themed parties, consistently positioning themselves at the forefront of the NYC underground art-party world. Along with a few other beautifully creative affairs—Rubulad, Dances of Vice, Shanghai Mermaid, Cheryl, various Winkel + Balktick shindigs—Gemini & Scorpio curate the most creative, daring, and over-the-top events that Brooklyn has to offer. Whether it’s jazz bands in a Russian banya, a steampunk Burning Man fundraiser, an old-meets-new electro-swing dance party at Lincoln Center, or a New Year’s Eve glitter explosion, Gemini & Scorpio bring together dancers, music, and performers around lavish themes to create unforgettable occasions, party after party after party. And that’s not all: G&S also curate a weekly events listing that is second only to NonsenseNYC for finding the most fantastic things to do any day of the week. Sign up here!

After years of being nomadic, Miss Scorpio found a permanent home for G&S in a repurposed Gowanus woodshop. Now, in addition to lavish monthly parties, the loft hosts lectures, dance classes, plays, photo and video shoots, and more. And after spending months on demolition and build-out of the new space, Miss Scorpio reached out to the community she has provided with so many fantastic experiences to ask for help with the next stage of development of her space—and successfully raised more than $32k through Kickstarter. In the short term, this will mean new floors, walls, and ceiling for the loft, and in the long term it will allow G&S to keep bringing us all the best, most magical affairs—the uniquely beautiful experiences that make Brooklyn the most spectacular place to be.

photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted

brooklyn spaces: Let’s start before this space: tell me how you became one of New York’s most creative party mavens.

Miss Scorpio, photo by Linus Gelber

Miss Scorpio: It was a pure accident that started with a website about online dating. This was ten years ago, when online dating was mostly considered weird and sad, but Miss Gemini and I wanted to show people that it was actually this fabulous thing, like eBay for dating. We thought you should never just do dinner and a movie with your online date; you should do something interesting, so that even if the date sucked, at least you’d have had a cool night. So every Friday we put out a list of unique things to do with your online date, and then we started throwing “singles parties that don’t suck.” Well, they didn’t suck to such a degree that we couldn’t keep couples out! We started with a Valentine’s Day party, then we did one for Halloween, and another one for New Year’s, and now it’s ten years later and this is all I do.

brooklyn spaces: What elements are necessary to make a Gemini & Scorpio party?
Miss Scorpio: First there has to be a theme, something a bit off-beat and unexpected that gives people an excuse to dress up. Live entertainment is another factor that’s really important: there’s generally a whole evening of programming curated to the theme. A G&S party isn’t one you drop into casually on your way to something else; our ideal party guest is one who leaves the house knowing that they’re coming to see us, dresses to the theme, and stays with us for the whole night.

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of your favorite parties.

banya party, photo from G&S

Miss Scorpio: I always enjoy the Lost Circus steampunk party, and also the banya parties, which we’ve been doing since 2006. A fantastic recent party was a sci-fi mashup called Cantina at the End of the Universe. It was a Star Wars Day party—I’ve been wanting to do that party for four years, but I had to wait until May 4th fell on a Saturday. One of the headliners was Big Nazo, this incredible alien monster funk band. They played the Masquerade Macabre Halloween party that I co-produced with Rubulad in 2010, which had one of my favorite moments of any party I’ve ever done. Big Nazo was onstage being joined by the five-piece Raya Brass Band, and I was leading a parade from our other party location, headed up by Extraordinary Rendition, a fifteen-person brass band. Big Nazo and Raya were supposed to be done when we got there but they weren’t, so we had like thirty people onstage jamming, along with these enormous alien monster puppets, and the crowd just lost their shit. It was beautiful. [Video of the madness here.]

Big Nazo, photo from G&S

brooklyn spaces: Who are some other favorite performers you’ve worked with?
Miss Scorpio: There’s definitely a family of performers that I book again and again. Sxip Shirey is an absolute genius composer and musician, and every time he plays I’m excited to hear it, especially when he performs with the incredible beat-boxer Adam Matta. The Love Show dancers are wonderful, they combine classical dance training with a cabaret attitude and fantastic costumes. Shayfer James is a terrific dark rock musician who deserves a much bigger audience than he’s getting. Sometimes I take on artists as a personal cause, and keep booking them until people realize how incredible they are.

G&S piano

brooklyn spaces: Have you ever had someone get so big that they outgrow your parties?
Miss Scorpio: Yes! After I booked the Hot Sardines for my Lincoln Center Midsummer Night’s Swing two years ago, their career has exploded and they are now booked constantly. That’s happened with a bunch of circus people I used to book as well. But it’s a good problem to have. I’m very proud of my talented friends.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, let’s talk about this space. How long did you spend looking for it, and what shape was it in when you found it?
Miss Scorpio: Four years of constant searching, and in the end it was a random Craigslist find. The moment I walked in, I knew this was it, even though it was completely wrecked. There was plywood over all the windows, the floor was rotted in multiple places, there were strange pipes everywhere, the ceiling was half rotted out, there were signs of a recent fire. It was terrible.

a few months after move-in

brooklyn spaces: How long did it take you to get it into shape?
Miss Scorpio: First there were two months of just demolition. Everything you see, all the walls, we did it all. We re-laid much of the floor, using wood repurposed from other parts of the space. Once we got bathrooms up—with walls—I knew I was ready to let people in. The first party we did here was Swing House, one of my 1920s remix parties. Everybody loved it, but it was a party in a construction zone.

fixing the rotted floors

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the non-party events you’ve had here.
Miss Scorpio: We’ve hosted a few lectures in conjunction with Observatory that have been great fun. We had one called “How to Trespass” with Wanderlust Projects, and another with my boyfriend, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower, called “Sex in Dictionaries.” We just had a storytelling event, “I’m Tawkin’ Here,” which was all New Yorkers and New York stories. Brooklyn Swings does a weekly swing-dancing class. We hosted an immersive, participatory version of Midsummer Night’s Dream staged by Shakespeare Shakedown. I’m always looking for people who are doing innovative, interesting things and could benefit from having access to an affordable art space.

Meet Me in Paris Cabaret, photo by Binnorie Artwork

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship like within the rest of the underground arts community? I feel like, of everyone I’ve interviewed, you really know every single person in the creative class in Brooklyn.
Miss Scorpio: It’s an extremely tight-knit community. It’s not just me; I think we all know each other. But because I do the event listings, I have a good sense of what everyone is up to. Even if I don’t know someone personally, I can tell you what arc their work has taken over the last ten years.

G&S rooftop view

brooklyn spaces: Last year when you and I were doing Occupy Sandy volunteering together, you told me you once did the listings on your phone from Paris.
Miss Scorpio: Oh yeah. Another time I did them from a tethered connection in an RV on the way to Burning Man. Everywhere I’ve traveled, I’ve brought the listings with me. I consider it my community service, a way for me to give back to the people who trust me and honor me with their presence at my events.

G&S rooftop art

brooklyn spaces: What advice would you give someone who wanted to do what you do?
Miss Scorpio: I’d say definitely don’t get into it for the glamour! Ninety percent of what I do is spreadsheets and emails. Maybe by 11 or 12 on a party night I’ll finally get to get into costume and have a few hours of fun, but for the most part it’s a job like any other. For me the payoff is conceiving something and then seeing it become a reality.

brooklyn spaces: What are your plans for the future—ten more years of this?
Miss Scorpio: Oh gosh, I don’t know. It does seem like I’m pretty committed to the New York cultural underground, but I couldn’t tell you what will happen in my life in the next ten years. I hope it’s big and exciting.

***

Like this? Read about more underground nightlife: Rubulad, the Lab, Red Lotus Room, Newsonic, House of Yes, Gowanus Ballroom, 12-turn-13

wondering around wandering

oriana on 2 Nov ’12

space type: pop-up gallery | neighborhood: crown heights | active: 2012 | links: website

Wondering Around Wandering is a huge, vibrant pop-up art gallery in a former iron-working factory in Crown Heights, run by artist and designer Mike Perry. Inspired by the publication of his monograph (also called Wondering Around Wandering), the gallery was funded through Kickstarter as a way to celebrate the book’s publication while also creating a fun, free space for people to appreciate art and make things together.

All photos by Alix Piorun

The gallery is open during the days—the permanent collection is Mike’s, and there have been several rotating group shows—and there are a slew of free events, like dance performances, drink-and-draws, and zine-making workshops. Coming up is an art salon with Moleskine, a collaging workshop, an animated-film screening, and more. But hurry! The gallery will only be around until November 20.

Braving wind & rain, Jillian Steinhauer of Hyperallergic and I went to hang out with Mike and talk about this crazy project on the afternoon Hurricane Sandy was supposed to hit. (We even made it home in time for last-minute grocery shopping!)

brooklyn spaces: What made you want to do this?
mike: Well when the book came out, it was really exciting and big, and I wanted to do something that was even bigger to celebrate it. I figured I should have a show, but then I started thinking about what expectations I would have for the space: I’d want it to be communal, I’d want it to be open, I’d want it to be free. A friend of a friend works at Kickstarter; her whole job is to find artists who don’t use Kickstarter but should.

brooklyn spaces: What an amazing job.
mike: Right? Just convincing artists that they should make money.
hyperallergic: Artists need that.
mike: Big time. And doing the project that way was brilliant, it really focused my ideas in a way that made this much easier to pull off, because it wasn’t somebody being like, “Here’s some money, figure it out!” I had a plan, there were goals and steps, I knew how to put it all together. When the Kickstarter ended, I walked over here and paid the landlord and started this journey.

hyperallergic: What was the space like when you got here?
mike: It was a total shitshow. I think they’d just been storing and dumping junk in here for like thirty years. So I hired a bunch of people, my brother-in-law came out, friends in the neighborhood, it was very communal. My friend J. is the architect, he makes everything happen. Kevin, who owns a candy store up the street, he’s like the neighborhood electrician, he came and wired everything. My friend Masha, I went to her and said, “I need a producer, someone who can line things up and cross them off the list.” Fiona, who works in the gallery now, first came to interview me for a personal project, and it was one of those days that was just so crazy, I was covered in dirt and I’d had so much coffee, and after the interview she was like, “You need help. Can I come help you?” We have so, so many people, it’s just a massively beautiful, heartwarming experience. We had this huge opening, I think we had 700 people in here. And the next day we came back and regrouped and said, “That was insane. This is just the beginning.”

brooklyn spaces: Does this make you want to find ways to do this all the time, or to never do something like this again?
mike: You know, I’m still not sure. It’s such a major commitment, but it’s so incredibly gratifying. Yesterday we had about a hundred kids in here for pumpkin-painting, and it’s like, this is why you have a space, this is what you should do! But at the same time, it’s really hard for me to go to my studio and do work. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t an artist because I can’t do both, I can’t be the advocate and the creator at the same time.

brooklyn spaces: The only other thing I can think of that’s like this is the Brucennial. Did you take a cue from other big collaborative art shows like that?
mike: Well there really aren’t a lot of galleries or institutions like this. Giant Robot was a great resource but that closed down. Some friends of mine run a terrific space in Greenpoint called Beginnings, but that just opened. There aren’t even that many zine stores anymore, other than Printed Matter. There used to be so many of them and they’ve all gone away because the audience doesn’t invest in them. Making art is really satisfying, and people love art and believe in it, but they don’t do enough to support it. Last year, every present I bought for anybody was art. Because then you serve two people: the person who gets the piece and the person who made it. If creative people don’t support each other, who’s going to support us?

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel that being in Crown Heights has an effect on the space?
mike: That was the exciting part about realizing that this was what I wanted to do: finding something that’s missing in the neighborhood and trying to provide it. I meet new people here every day. The neighborhood becomes more interconnected and more exciting every second. It’s going to be really sad when the project is done.

hyperallergic: Do you know what’s going to happen to the space when you’re gone?
mike: Me and some friends may actually try to keep it, but unfortunately this is not a self-sustaining business model. The space is perfect for right now, but there’s no heat, and we basically ran the electricity from a line off the building next door. In order to turn it into something that’s more than a three-month thing, we’d have to invest some serious cash, get the landlord to agree to different terms, all those things. Which, if it happens, awesome. If not, then you know what? It’s been a great time, and we’ll do something else somewhere else some other time.
hyperallergic: That’s sort of the beauty and the sadness of pop-up spaces.

brooklyn spaces: Anything else you wanted to talk about?
mike: No, I don’t think so. I almost teared up a few times during the interview, so I think it was good.

***

Like this? Read about more art galleries: Invisible Dog, Monster Island, See.Me, Ugly Art Room, #Occupy Art Show, Gowanus Ballroom, Micro Museum, Concrete Utopia, Central Booking, 950 Hart

the illuminator

oriana on 18 Sep ’12

space type: maker, activism | neighborhood: ft. greene & all over | active since: 2012 | links: website, facebook, twitter

For many involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, the two-month anniversary last November was a galvanizing moment. As tens of thousands of activists marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, light projections suddenly appeared on the Verizon building nearby: things like “99%” “MIC CHECK” “#occupy,” and more. I was on that march and it was absolutely electrifying to see. We screamed and clapped and chanted, and the people driving by beneath us honked and cheered out their windows. It was an incredible moment.

image from Boing Boing

In the wake of that action, Mark Read, the one who pulled it off, decided that had been just the beginning. He talked it over with Ben Cohen, a longtime friend of the movement, who eventually agreed to fund the construction of a customized vehicle for mobile guerilla projections. The guy tapped to construct the unit was Chris Hackett—one of the rulers of the Brooklyn maker scene, and cofounder of the art combine Madagascar Institute. Unsurprisingly, Hackett built a formidable machine, and the Illuminator was born.

Mark put out the call and amassed a merry band of activists to bottom-line the project. The Illuminator has been a smashing success, riding through protests from OWS actions to Occupy Town Square performances, partnering with community groups like rent-strikers in Sunset Park and workers’ rights activists in Midtown, projecting slogans and pictures onto the Russian Consulate, the British Embassy, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Williamsburg Bridge, and on and on.

The Illuminator is at a crucial stage in their journey right now, because they’re about to lose their funding. So this is the last week of their Kickstarter campaign, which, if successful, will allow them not only to keep this van, but to build more for use around the country. You should absolutely donate to their fund, but first read my interview with some of the activists involved.

clockwise from top left: Lucky, Talia, Annabelle, Grayson, Mark, Dan

brooklyn spaces: What was the first outing and the first projection?
Mark: The debut was March 3rd, for Low Lives, a virtual online performance-art project. We went all over that night: Zuccotti Park, the Whitney Museum where we projected the cheap art manifesto from the Bread and Puppet Theatre, down to Cooper Union, and then to Chase Bank.

brooklyn spaces: Do you plan the art before each action? Do you make it yourselves? Where does it come from?
Lucky: We produce a lot ourselves, but the great thing about this is it really is a Occupy resource, and more than that, it’s an activist resource. We reach out to lots of groups around the city, like the Sunset Park rent-strikers and the Hot & Crusty workers, and the messaging always comes from the people we’re supporting.

brooklyn spaces: How do you decide what projects the Illuminator will get involved with?
Annabelle: Well, it started with the 99%, and anything that could fit into that. We did that first projection two days after the eviction from the park.
Talia: I think it has to come from a positive space, people have to be happy about it. There has to be that exciting kind of antagonism.
Lucky: I think this goes back to the collective way we’re run. When we want to do something, there’s automatically a dialogue. We all come from very disparate backgrounds—I’m a biologist, Annabelle is a union researcher, and Mark does media, just to name a few—which really enriches the project, because we bring so many different perspectives.

image by jenna pope photography

Mark: Here’s a funny example of something we wouldn’t do. We were contacted by Woody Harrelson, and he wanted us to do some marketing for his upcoming Off-Broadway play, Bullet for Adolph. We’ve done work for hire before; we do have to keep the van in gas and parking. But what he wanted us to project was “Adolph is coming.” He was willing to pay us ten thousand dollars, which of course we could have really used, but we just couldn’t do it, it was too awful.

photo by athena soules

brooklyn spaces: Tell me about some of the site-specific projections.
Lucky: When we do site-specific stuff, it’s more to do with the people who are rallying around the cause, or the cause itself. The van sort of becomes the hero, popping up and supporting causes, so when students go on an education strike, or renters go on rent strike, we’re part of those actions. There was the action with Occupy Tape, which was an action against Spectra, and we did a “Free Pussy Riot” projection on the Russian Consulate.

Mark: I think the first site-specific one was at Atlantic Yards. There was a mic check, a call-and-response thing about what had happened with the Barclays Center, and a piece that was produced by our community partner in that case, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn. The police were all over us that night and we sort of had to outwit them, which has been the case several times since. It was like a cat-and-mouse game.

brooklyn spaces: So the cops are not too fond of the Illuminator.
Dan: Like with the rest of Occupy, there’s a pattern of repression. The police want to disrupt people coming together, and the Illuminator rallies people and gets them excited, so we’re the last thing they want. Often they shut us down by making things up. I got a summons for disorderly conduct that we went to court for, and they didn’t even prosecute it because they knew it was bullshit. Another time they came out with a ticket already written and then asked “How is this projector mounted?” I said, “It’s bolted to this steel bar which is welded to the frame of the vehicle.” And they were like, “Um, this is a danger to pedestrians. It might fall off.”
Lucky: It’s about claiming contested space. In Zuccotti we were occupying a physical park, but the Illuminator is after the advertising space, the commercialized space above our heads and in our eye-line. So it’s predictable that that same sort of repression would happen, because we’re doing something powerful by subverting the order of things, the way society is constructed in a corporatized way.

brooklyn spaces: What’s been the most meaningful part of this project for you all?
Mark: For me, getting away with things is pleasurable, and getting people excited in an action context is awesome. There’s also the pleasure of talking to strangers, having conversations about the state of affairs in this country and the world, the kinds of crises we’re facing, what it’s going to take to solve those problems. Once these young kids came up to us, totally excited, and said, “Are you guys with the revolution?” I was like, “I hope so!”
Lucky: One of my favorite moments was Independence Hall in Philly, because that was totally spontaneous, and it often feels better when you don’t overwork yourself with planning and details. We were driving down to D.C. and saw Independence Hall to our left and figured, “Why not?” and went and projected “99%” onto the building. And as it happened, there were a bunch of Occupiers right there who took pictures and tweeted it all over. This is sort of a media machine, and a critique of mainstream media is that it privileges special interests in voice. Occupy has done a lot to use the power of modern technology to amplify important stories, and the Illuminator does that really well.

Talia: For me the best is feeling like a part of this well-oiled activism machine, and in Philly it really gelled for me how powerful this is, doing that projection and then seeing our image bouncing all around the internet afterward.
Dan: It’s the most re-tweeted thing we’ve ever done, I think. But for me it’s also about the one-on-one stuff. One of my favorite Occupy chants is “Occupy will never die / Evict us, we multiply.” This is like a manifestation of that, because we can spread all over the city and even the country in a totally different way.
Talia: And since the Illuminator 1.0 is going to be shut down, the idea of multiplying, of 2.0, is awesome. One van is great, but it’s limiting. A broader, more mobile fleet all around the nation? That’s really exciting. There’s this brand new energy fueled by all our ideas for what we’ll do next.

***

Like this? Read about more activism: #OWS art show, No-Space, Time’s Up, Brooklyn Free Store, Books Through Bars, Bushwick City Farms, Trees Not Trash

the muse

oriana on 15 Jan ’12

space type: aerialist venue | neighborhood: williamsburg, bushwick | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Update, spring 2015: Last winter, Vice magazine took over two adjoining buildings on the Williamsburg waterfront, evicting several underground spaces in one fell swoop: Death By Audio, Glasslands, and the Muse, which actually got pushed out due to construction before the end of their lease. Undaunted, the Muse family Kickstarted more than $60,000, and in April 2015 they reopened an enormous new space in Bushwick.

***

The Muse is an aerialist performance and workshop space in South Williamsburg dedicated to fostering experimental creativity, and giving artists the space and time to try out new things. It was founded in late 2011 by Angela Buccinni, a dancer, acrobat, and aerialist, and Yuval Oz, a musician and acrobat.

Angela as a reindeer in Hot Frosty (photos by Maximus Comissar unless noted)

The space is a former garage for Domino Sugar, which Angela and Yuval built out from scratch—in only two months they did the living space with six rooms on two floors, an elevated stage, a bathroom, and a kitchen, as well as put in rigging points throughout the main performance area. They’ve gotten an outpouring of help from Williamsburg artists, and have a close partnership with Karen Fuhrman’s aerial dance company Grounded Aerial, of which Angela is also member. In addition to performances, the Muse offers classes and workshops in hand-balancing, acrobatics, silks, harness, trick ropes, kudayo, and lots more.

I was lucky enough to be invited over to the Muse for the dress rehearsal of Grounded Aerial’s first annual holiday show, Hot Frosty. I got to hang out with Karen, Angela, Yuval, and the rest of the incredibly happy and nice cast, plus Angela and Yuval’s collection of wonderful dogs.

Hot Frosty cast shot

brooklyn spaces: Karen, can we start with a quick run-down of Grounded Aerial?
Karen: Grounded does three things. We do corporate events, for companies like IBM, Microsoft, and H&R Block—the bigger the better. That tends to fund the second thing: our theatrical ventures, like Insectinside, which is an evening-length piece, equal parts dance, theatre, and aerial, and Hot Frosty, which is little scenes peppered throughout the evening, singing, dancing, aerial, over here, over there, above your head, on the stage, on the wall—it’s happening all around you as you’re hanging out drinking cocktails with your friends. The third thing we do is classes, which everyone should come out and take. They’re not only for dancers; anyone could put a harness on, even my mom. It’s an amazing workout, and it’s really empowering.

photo from The Muse’s Facebook

brooklyn spaces: What’s the link between Grounded and the Muse?
Karen: We support each other, we love each other. There’s a beautiful aerial community in Williamsburg, and Angela and Yuval having this space will really reinforce that community. It’s going to be an outstanding force.

brooklyn spaces: Angela and Yuval, what was your motivation for starting the space?
Angela: I think one of the main problems with trying to create art in New York City is that it’s so hard to survive financially that people can’t invest time in the creation process, to actually sit in your work, soak in it, develop it. With Grounded we do that a lot, we play with things, we improv, we throw things out, we get new things, we merge ideas. So part of the whole concept behind the Muse is that we want to support that kind of creation process, to ensure that there’s a place for people to do that.
Yuval: We really want to create an atmosphere for taking time for creation, for experimenting, a place when you can do everything and try everything. I think this is part of doing art.
Angela: We want it to be comfortable here, like you’re sitting in a living room, with no sense of judgment. We want that sort of calm energy, where it’s safe to go into the process and get lost in your art and feel okay, and to actually work off of the other things and people in the space.

brooklyn spaces: So tell me a quick history of the space itself.
Angela: That’s a long story. I had an outdoor dance studio in my backyard in Bushwick called Studio 43. We produced a few shows and then, do you remember the tornado we had last year? Well, it ripped up a tree from the lot next door and crushed everything. Around that time I was offered a tour that took me to Israel. One day while I was rehearsing there, this beautiful dog wandered into the theatre, and I jumped off the stage and just started hugging him. And Yuval came in looking for Shesek and found me. I think he had actually told Shesek, “Go fetch that girl.”
Yuval: That’s your version!
Angela: So Yuval and I hung out while I was doing the tour, and then I stayed in Israel. We almost opened the Muse in Tel Aviv; we were really looking, but we ultimately decided to raise some money with a Kickstarter and then come back do it here. A friend told us about this space, we came and we looked at it, and that was it. It’s amazing. There’s nothing in the cards to say we should be able to do this right now, but somehow we’re doing it. We have a long way to go, but it’s in motion. Whenever we don’t have enough money for the next thing, we have a show or a party to raise money. We had a ’70s disco party in November to pay for a hot-water heater.

Join the Circus Day (photo from The Muse’s Facebook)

brooklyn spaces: How many people are involved?
Angela: At least thirty, thirty-five people have popped in once or twenty times or a million times. It’s all artists, it’s like a big community. And it’s normally a social event; we cook together and then we build. Or I melt down and everyone hugs me and then we build. There’s a lot of that too.
Yuval: It’s a great way to discover new friends and good people.
Angela: We’ve had complete strangers come help us. People tease us that we’re basically building an artists’ kibbutz. And we’re always looking to expand it!
Yuval: Also we’re always searching for trades. People can come help us and then get free classes in hand-balancing, harness, silk, bungee, anything.

brooklyn spaces: Are you involved in the larger aerial and dance community in Brooklyn? Are people coming from House of Yes or Big Sky Works or Streb?
Angela: A lot of aerialists are involved, a lot of freelance artists. Yuval and I just received a grant from Streb to produce one of the pieces for his show. In my experience, aerialists are all allies, it’s not competitive or nasty.

brooklyn spaces: How has it been going with the build-out?
Angela: Demolition was a little harder than we thought.
Yuval: A lot of people ask us, like, construction is crazy, why don’t you just pay professional people for this? And we’re like, it’s not that hard. I mean, okay, it is hard, but it’s not that complicated, you just have to go step by step by step. Actually, we’re both glad that we didn’t know everything we would have to do before we get started, because we would have never done it.

photo from The Muse’s Facebook

brooklyn spaces: Do you think your creativity or your process is influenced by being in Williamsburg?
Angela: I think it’s more supportive here than it was in Bushwick. There’s more like-minded artists. I can call someone with an idea, and they’ll feed on it and fuel me. Or we know we’ll have the audience we need to fill the space.
Karen: Absolutely. Williamsbug just has a zest to it, a roughness, a rawness, a curiousness, a youthfulness that people feed off. It’s an amazing community. It’s really unique.

***

Like this? Read about more aerial and dance spaces: House of Yes, Big Sky Works, Chez Bushwick, Cave

swimming cities

oriana on 3 Oct ’11

neighborhood: gowanus (and the world!) | space type: art collective | active since: 2001 | links: website, blog, facebook, twitter

update, Nov 2011: Want to see some absolutely amazing photos from Swimming Cities’ incredible trip down the Ganges in India? Check ’em out on their blog here.

***

With this post, I am thrilled to say that I’ve covered all the spaces that inspired me to start this project! Not that I intend to stop; I’m just really excited to have finally gotten to talk to everyone I’d initially set out to, and to celebrate all their crazy brilliance.

So let’s talk about the crazy brilliance of Swimming Cities. They’re a nebulous art collective of somewhere between ten and thirty people who build boats out of found materials and sail them all over the world. The boats themselves are essentially floating works of art, and the group does visual, musical, and dramatic performances atop them as they go. The first project, started by Callie (aka Swoon) and assorted friends, was the Miss Rockaway Armada (since splintered into its own collective), which went down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to St. Louis in 2001. The next project, Swimming Cities of the Switchback Sea, went down the Hudson River, from Troy to Deitch Projects in Long Island City, in 2008. Then in 2009, Swimming Cities of Serenissima sailed down the Adriatic Sea, starting in Slovenia and winding up in Venice to crash the Biennale. And now, in September 2011, Swimming Cities Ocean of Blood is making their way down the Ganges in India, starting in Farrukhabad and ending in Varanasi for the Diwali festival.

photo by Tod Seelie, from Arrested Motion

They’re a well-connected group in the Brooklyn underground & art communities. Over Swimming Cities’ history, all manner of artists and collectives have taken part, including members of the Madagascar Institute, the Toyshop Collective, the Infernal Noise Brigade, GreenBusTour, Black Label Bike Club, Flux Factory, and dozens more. Much of the initial work on the Ocean of Blood boats was done at Serett Metalworks, and they throw crazy themed fundraising parties at the Gowanus Ballroom, Electric Warehouse, Chicken Hut, the warehouse on Ten Eyck, 285 Kent, and lots of others. The collective is also naturally involved in the Burning Man community and participates in Maker Faire, often winning awards for their ingenious floating creations. You can donate to their Kickstarter campaign to help them get home from India, but first check out my interview with Orien (third from left) and crewmember Angie (far right).

Ocean of Blood crew

brooklyn spaces: How did this all get started?

Miss Rockaway Armada boat

Orien: I had a boat and was living on the Gowanus Canal, and Callie lived a few blocks away. We met at Pratt, and she would hang out on my boat and we’d talk about building a floating performance art space. Then I left and spent some time in India, and she did Miss Rockaway Armada with several other artists. After that we did the Hudson River and Venice projects together, and then Callie was giving the project up, so I asked her if I could keep it going. India was the obvious choice for me; it’s my favorite place. But there was a lot of ambiguity about whether this would actually happen. I’m not a famous artist, I don’t have any money, I don’t have backing. But it gradually gained momentum, and now Swimming Cities has a presence beyond its association with Swoon and the other projects.

boats in Venice, photo by Tod Seelie, from Brooklyn Street Art

brooklyn spaces: Before we get too much into India, what was it like being in Venice for the Biennale? How was the reception?
Orien: Being in Venice with a boat is so much fun. I don’t recommend going there if you can’t get a boat, it’s just going to drive you crazy. And the reception was great, everybody loved it. Except when we went into the Arsenale, which is a military base, like a fortified marina, this big square with water and some sort of promenade around it. We went in there with Dark Dark Dark playing on the roof we and tied up the boats, and they came and cut our lines and told us to fuck off. But come on, we basically came uninvited in junk boats, so of course they did that.

brooklyn spaces: Okay, so now tell me about India. How many of you are going over, how many boats do you have, how did you set it all up?
Angie: There’s five boats, eight people are going, and we have a couple of Indian people there. We sent a scout a few of months ago, and he lined up places for us to stay and to store stuff, and people to help us, and institutions and permits and things like that.
Orien: They government wanted to know what we were doing. They don’t want to be like, “Oh, you’re doing a performance? Great!” and then you get there and quarter a cow or do something really offensive. But we got a letter of support from the Ministry of Culture that says something like, “Your project is not specifically offensive to us from a cultural perspective.”

sketch for part of the Diwali performance

brooklyn spaces: The highest praise. What are the performances going to be?
Orien: We’ll be pretty far out on the water, so it’s not practical or logistically possible to have sound or a plot. It’s going to be a gradual, five-day visual performance with a very vague narrative. It’s kind of like architectural puppetry.
Angie: We’ll have a big mechanical sculpture involving lights and movement, and at the end the boats come apart.
Orien: It sort of demonstrates the function of what makes the object interesting.

five boats in radial formation, photo by Ben Mortimer

brooklyn spaces: What do you guys do in between trips?
Angie: We have a lot of events. Most of them are fundraisers, but this summer we did the Battle for Mau Mau Island in Gerritsen Beach, where we got all our friends to form boat gangs. There was a race, a battle, and boat jousting.

West India Day fundraiser, photo from Laughing Squid

brooklyn spaces: What’s your motivation for doing this?
Orien: I’m really interested in boats as pieces of architecture, as objects. I come from an industrial design background, that’s what I went to school for. And all these people really enjoy being a family and having a common goal that isn’t about money or the banality of the homogenized world of bullshit. So I just keep doing it. It’s a reaction to the alternative. To exist in the actual world isn’t really an option for me; if I don’t do this, what the fuck am I going to do?

Bordertown party at Electric Warehouse

“Caddywhampuss,” which won Best in Show at the 2010 Maker Faire, photo from Makezine

brooklyn spaces: What’s next for you guys?
Orien: We’re probably going to go to Russia, down the Volga river to Moscow. I really want to go to Lake Baikal, which is one of the world’s largest lakes, it represents one-sixth of the world’s fresh water. It’s got seals and underwater caves, it’s insanely deep, and it’s in the middle of Siberia, there’s nothing near it. And surrounding Moscow is the Golden Ring area, the oldest part of Russia, so you have this really old architecture and culture.

welding pontoons with a martini, photo by Mayra Cimet

brooklyn spaces: Are you inspired as an artist by being in Gowanus, or in Brooklyn in general?
Angie: We were totally lucky to have Josh get that shop on the Gowanus.
Orien: Oh yeah. We built the first boat in this tiny place on Nostrand Avenue, and then Josh was like, “Guess what? I’m getting a new shop and it’s insanely massive and it’s on the Gowanus Canal.” It was just the most ridiculous luck we’ve ever had. This project wouldn’t have happened without Josh and Serett, it literally would not have. But other than that, I don’t find New York especially inspiring. It’s basically an impossible place to get anything done.

brooklyn spaces: But overall, has this been a rewarding experience?
Orien: Definitely. I have all the things I was looking for. We have the best friends anyone could have. We have something to do that isn’t awful, that doesn’t contribute to the greater horror, that doesn’t hurt people. No one has gained anything from what we’re doing, except maybe the beer distributors. Other than that, no one’s getting rich off us, which is nice. That’s about all you can ask for.

photo from Pipe Dream Museum

Like this? Read about more art collectives: Monster Island, Hive NYC, The Schoolhouse, Bushwick Project for the Arts, Flux Factory

brooklyn brainery

oriana on 12 Sep ’11

space type: skillshare | neighborhood: prospect heights | active since: 2010 | links: website, tumblr, facebook, twitter

Update: The Brainery moved! They got a sweet new space in Prospect Heights which opened in early 2013.

Brooklynites are lots of things. We’re partiers, we’re makers, we’re performers and rock stars and artists. We’re also, maybe most importantly, collaborators. We love to share our knowledge with each other, so naturally skillshare and the “quirky education” movements are huge. There’s lecture series like OCD at Pete’s Candy Store, Nerd Nite and Get Smart at Galapagos, the Secret Science Club, Adult Ed, and everything at the Observatory; plus groups that are dedicated exclusively to hobbyists and experts and those who want to learn from them, like LifeLabs, Brooklyn Skillshare, TradeSchool, 3rd Ward, and, of course, the Brooklyn Brainery.

What Dickens Drank: Historic Cocktails

The Brainery has been getting a lot of press lately—from places like the New York Times, Brooklyn Based, GOOD, and Brokelyn—and deservedly so. It’s a perfectly wonderful idea: pair people who are passionate about a topic—anything from urban forestry to microwave candy to beekeeping to Haitian Creole—with an audience who wants to learn about it. Plus (and very importantly these days) classes at the Brainery are super cheap, as low as $5 for an evening’s worth of learnin’. That’s what I paid for The History of the New York City Subway, an interactive lecture that included tons of fun facts, passed-around books with photos of old train cars and subway graffiti, and of course YouTube clips of subway scenes from Saturday Night Fever and The Warriors. That was my first Brainery class, and I plan to take a whole lot more. You should too; it would be impossible to look through their course list and not see something you find fascinating. But before you click over, check out my interview with Brainery founders Jen and Soma, who happen to be some of the nicest, most animated, funniest people I’ve interviewed yet.

[all pix courtesy of the Brainery]

Designing for Non-Designers

brooklyn spaces: Give me a quick history of how this got started and why.
Jen: I think one of the reasons we started this was to give us an excuse to learn more and research more. Soma and I are both just really curious; we had been going to all these classes and lectures, and it just started getting really expensive.

DIY Sandle-Making

Soma: We were going broke, basically. When you drop $300 on a class, there’s only so many times you can do that before you can’t pay rent.
brooklyn spaces: Yeah, I would say one time.
Jen: I guess we were richer back then.
Soma: What amazing days! So we decided that there had to be a way to offer classes more cheaply. We wanted to take classes on things like welding or shoemaking, but I mean, we’re not planning to become welders or cobblers, we just want to have a fun hobby or learn a little bit about something. And we realized that if you find people who are hobbyists at something—and really, in Brooklyn you can find an expert on anything—they love sharing it with other people. Basically the idea is that anyone can take a class, because it’s super cheap and accessible, and anyone can teach a class, because we all have a teacher hiding somewhere inside of us.

Ethiopian Cookfest

brooklyn spaces: Did you have this space from the start? How did that come about?
Jen: No, for the first year we rented space by the hour at Gowanus Studio Space, just across the canal by the Bell House. They were great, but we really needed a place we could settle into.
Soma: So we raised about $10k on Kickstarter and then spent a long time hunting for a space, because it turns out that in New York, finding a space is probably harder than finding ten grand. But eventually we moved in here, and it’s been great ever since.

Scents & Sensibility

brooklyn spaces: What were some of the earliest classes?
Soma: Man, I taught so many classes, I don’t even know. I think in the beginning I was teaching half the classes. It’s always been the same eccentric mix of stuff that we have now. We had a class about optics, a class about meat, a class about perfume.

brooklyn spaces: So what unites the class offerings?
Soma: It doesn’t matter what the subject is, but we really want everything to be collaborative. Everyone should be talking and it should be fun.
Jen: We don’t want people to be afraid to challenge the teacher or ask a question. People are still sort of in the mindset from college or whatever of like, up there is the person who knows everything and they are transmitting the information to you. But at this point in our lives, there’s no need to do that anymore.

setup for Making Ginger Ale

brooklyn spaces: What’s your background, are either of you teachers?
Soma: Absolutely not. Well, now we are. But no. I have a background in computer science, and Jen has a background in art.

extracting DNA from a strawberry

brooklyn spaces: What are some awesome classes that you’ve taught or taken?
Soma: My favorite class that Jen taught was her weather class. It turned out that the class was full of scientists. Everyone was a scientist, and they did their homework and knew all kinds of stuff and it was amazing. It was like a crystallization of what the Brainery could be in an alternate universe, where everyone in the class is already an expert. And I don’t even know, my favorite class to teach? I teach so much that I forget everything. I teach classes across the board, I teach Thai food and programming and the science of perception, just everything. I love every class I take, too. I will come to any class and be completely riveted by it. I can’t pick a favorite.

Spices 101

brooklyn spaces: How do decide what classes to offer?
Soma: People submit like crazy. We used to recruit people, but now people are always contacting us.
Jen: We’re always looking for new teachers. If anyone has anything they want to teach, tell us!

Soma at the Crawfish Boil

brooklyn spaces: Do you guys do events also?
Jen: Not as many as we’d like, but we had a big crawfish boil at the City Reliquary over the summer. We tried to make it educational, so we did trivia and we had a test, but it was basically just a party. It was really fun. Our newest thing is we’re putting together this club, Society for the Advancement of Social Studies. It’s going to meet at a bar, maybe monthly. We’re not sure what we’re going to talk about yet—labor rights? Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?—but it’s going to be nerdy and amazing. We’re really excited about it.

brooklyn spaces: How do you feel about being in Brooklyn today? Do you think something like this is inspired by Brooklyn?
Jen: Oh yeah, we’re totally a product of our environment. I don’t think we’d be doing this if we lived somewhere else.
Soma: We’re obviously doing a very Brooklyn thing in Brooklyn, I think it’s just hilariously Brooklyn what we do. But we’re totally self-aware and we love it.

***

Like this? Read about more skillshares: Pioneer Works, LifeLabs, 3rd Ward, Ger-Nis, Time’s Up, Urbanglass

hive nyc

oriana on 15 Jun ’11

neighborhood: bushwick | space type: art collective | active since: 2011 | links: website, facebook, twitter

During this year’s Bushwick Open Studios, I had an ambitious roster of spaces to hit, and by a fortuitous chance, one of those was Hive NYC, a nonprofit multidisciplinary art space that is home to a collective of musicians, visual artists, writers, actors, photographers, and aerialists. There was fantastic art on display, by Jewel Lim, Tamar Meir, Our Guy, Sigal Arad Inbar, and Fumie Eshii. And the artists who were there—Yula, Isaac, Kate, and Melanie—were just amazingly warm and welcoming.

Yula, Isaac, Kate, and Melanie, photo by Maximus Comissar

They showed us all around the space, then brought out a lovely little impromptu lunch: salad and couscous, hummus and boiled eggs, avocados and cheese and coffee. They were bubbling over with excitement about their space, their projects, their bands, and the life they’re making for themselves. In addition to art and music, they have plas to green their home with a rooftop garden, compost, a water accumulation system, and doing more buiding with salvaged and reused materials. They even have their own living metaphor: an actual beehive on the roof.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: How did the space get started?
Kate: There was a group of us all playing music together, and we were all into different forms of art as well, like I write, Isaac does theatre productions, we have a saw-player who paints, our trombone player is working on a rooftop garden, stuff like that. So the idea was just to bring in as many people as possible and give them a place to create whatever they wanted to create.

photo by Alix Piorun

brooklyn spaces: How did you find the space?
Yula: It was so amazing, it happened really fast. About a year ago, I told a friend, “What I want is to have a little sanctuary for the people I know and love, so they could do whatever they want to do.” And in no more than a year, the Hive started coming together. All these people started being drawn in, our friends brought more friends, and each one of them were geniuses in their little ways. So we were like, “Okay, we need a home.” And a month later, I found this place on Craigslist. Isaac came here, and he was like, “It’s amazing. It’s amazing. It’s amazing!” The landlords are awesome, they’re artists, they said, “As long as you don’t burn the place down, you can do anything you want.” And so we moved in and started doing things. It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s also really rewarding and fun.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What was the last show you had?
Yula: We had a show last night, and our band The eXtended Family played with Dolchnakov Brigade. There were so many people here, it was ridiculous.
Kate: It was so overwhelmingly positive too, everyone was just having a great time. I think there’s a mutual understanding that this isn’t a club, this is a place where people live. We had so many people dancing, and all this artwork all around, and nothing got disturbed, there were no problems at all, there was just a really beautiful, positive energy.

Yula and the eXtended Family, photo from streetcredmusic

brooklyn spaces: What are some of the other projects people here do?
Yula: The eXtended Family is the heart, it’s all of us. The music is very eclectic. We call it ro-punk, romantic punk, but you can’t really define it, it’s a mix of a lot of shit thrown together with a kind of punchy attitude, but in a positive way. And then Dolchnakov Brigade is just like a megalomaniac onion, an underdog-ish, fascist kick in the face. There are several other bands who work with us too, there’s Crooks & Perverts, Gato Loco, This Way to the Egress, Torcher Chamber Ensemble.

photo by Maximus Comissar

Kate: We have a website that features writers, artists, music, sustainability projects, and humor, as well as allowing members to barter for goods and services.
Yula: There’s also a Philly Hive. They’re doing events in a place called BookSpace, with aerialists and circus-ish type stuff and book readings and poetry.
Kate: One of our members is the editor of Helo: The Crisis Story Magazine. We’re also in the middle of a Kickstarter to try to raise money to get our roof garden off the ground, ha ha.
Yula: We have bees on our roof now. Thirty thousand little sweet bees! I never thought I would be so comfortable around so many bees. But you can be one foot away from this huge swarm, and they don’t bother you, they just mind their own business.
Kate: Didn’t you name them all Deborah?
Yula: Yes, Deborah the Hive. It’s one organism made of many little things, which is a perfect metaphor for us.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel like Brooklyn has influenced the way you conceive the space, or do you think spaces like this are having an impact on the way that Brooklyn is right now?
Yula: I think the second. For us at least. You can do pretty much anything you want here if you respect everything else. And if you set that tone, people respond to it wonderfully. Little by little, if you just spread it slowly, you might be able to make a difference in a larger way. As soon as Bushwick Open Studios started and I started walking around the neighborhood, I was like, “We’re not the only people doing this!” It’s wonderful. We just need to make some connections and make this trust circle bigger, broader, and stronger, and then who knows what can happen? I’m hoping that this is just the beginning, that everybody’s going to pick up from this and just do more and more.
Kate: There’s been a pretty big snowball effect since we’ve started. We’ve been picking up more and more people and having a great time. This space has definitely come together very quickly.
Yula: If we can just continue to do what we do and enjoy it, that’s all we really want. Just don’t bother us doing it. World, don’t interfere. If you have any bad intentions, just stay out.

Like this? Read about more communal art spaces: The Schoolhouse, Swimming Cities, Arch P&D, Silent Barn, Monster Island, Flux Factory, Bushwick Project for the Arts

rubulad

oriana on 18 Feb ’11

photo from the New York Times

neighborhood: bed-stuy | space type: parties & art space | active since: 1993 | links: none (sorry!)

update December 2011: Rubulad is moving! After nine years in South Williamsburg and six in Bed-Stuy, this amazing space is hunting for a new home. And they’ve just completed a down-to-the-wire Kickstarter campaign, raising over $35k to help them on their way. It remains to be seen where they’ll go, but it’s clear this vital community will continue to grow and inspire creative culture for years to come.

***

Rubulad—along with House of Yes, the 123 Community Center, and a handful of others—is what inspired me to start this project in the first place. For fifteen years, Rubulad has been an incubator of creative art and culture in New York; it’s one of the oldest, longest-running paeans to cultural experimentation, wild beauty, art for the sake of art. The influence of the space on Brooklyn’s creative class is impossible to overstate.

photo by E.A.R.

Rubulad is a huge, stunning, two-floor warehouse on the Bed-Stuy / Crown Heights border, and is both notorious and revered for the massive themed parties they’ve been hosting for over a decade. The events include installation art, eclectic performances, film screenings, and musicians, and attract a diverse crown, the majority of whom dress up in elaborate costumes to fit the themes.

photo by E.A.R.

Remnants of every one of the parties still adorn every inch of visible space—the walls, ceilings, rooftop, furniture, backyard, and garden are teeming with a dizzying array of decorations, from framed shellacked jellybeans to glitter-painted stuffed animals to a giant birdcage with a carousel horse inside.

photo by E.A.R.

In addition to the parties, Rubulad has also been home to many more intimate events, like kids’ days, smaller music performances, benefit parties, and art shows. Grub, the bi-monthly freegan community dinner bottom-lined by In Our Hearts, was held here for years. Want to hear how it all began? Read through for my interview with Sari, one of Rubulad’s founders.

Grub, photo by Julia Roberts

brooklyn spaces: When did you start doing this and why?
Sari: We’ve been going in different incarnations since ’93. It was started by four bands: Fly Ashtray, Uncle Wiggly, Smack Dab, and the Gamma Rays. Together we rented a huge place in South Williamsburg, back when things were cheap.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: Did you start right off throwing parties?
Sari: Well, we had this big space full of all these artists and musicians. And it felt a little flat to all the bands to just be playing in bars and not have any kind of control over the environment. We wanted to take a hand in that and say, “We’d like this band to play with these other performers, and then show these projections, and have a little play in between.” And we just invited the neighborhood in.

photo by me

brooklyn spaces: What were some of the obstacles you faced when you left Williamsburg for this new space?
Sari: One obstacle was the neighborhood. It took a while for people to want to come to Bed-Stuy. It’s hard to imagine that now, but even five years ago, people were like, “What? The G train?! You’re kidding!” But things moved quickly.

Grub, photo by Julia Roberts

brooklyn spaces: Let’s talk some more about the art and the artists.
Sari: I come at this as kind of a director of a show. My dream is to create a holistic piece of art, an experiential environment that many different people had a hand in. Our desire is to create work for people, and for people to get other work from having been here. The artists here have a chance to really evolve. We’re kind of family-oriented; lots of artists come back to do work here again and again, and so we get to see how they change and what happens to their art over several years. It’s really nice to give artists an opportunity for that growth, as opposed to just doing one show here, one show there.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: I read the interview you did with Nonsense NYC some years ago, where you talked about how for one party you needed sheets, and so you called all these hospitals to see if they would donate sheets.
Sari: We do have to hustle to get things, but you can have good adventures that way. That’s the part I like, the moment when you’re standing in a record store trying to find a square-dance caller or something else that you never thought you’d be doing.

photo from the Village Voice

brooklyn spaces: What have been some of your favorite party themes?
Sari: They always surprise you. You never really know when you pick a theme whether it’s gonna work. One of my favorite ones was Laundry Day. Who would have known that Laundry Day would turn out to be such a good theme? There’s a great picture floating around the internet of a girl playing music in roller curlers in front of the set of the laundry. And there was one party I really loved like ten years ago called Night of the Living Toys. That was really beautiful. If you look around the space, you can see remnants from them all.

photo from brokeassstuart.com

brooklyn spaces: How do you find the artists? Or do they find you?
Sari: Gosh, a lot of them find us. If they’re supposed to be here, they somehow hear about us, even in Australia or something. There’s really a lot of good stuff out there, almost endless good stuff. It’s amazing all the stuff that people know how to do.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: Clearly this is a creative space for making and appreciating art. But there are people who just see it as a party house. What do you think about that?
Sari: Well, those people are really missing the point, because if that’s what we wanted, we would just have a bar. People who are just looking for a place to drink beer, I encourage them to go to a bar, there are many. It’s not like we’re against that, but our parties are meant to be experiential. The whole point is for people to experience art that they wouldn’t see in the commercial world, or listen to music that they wouldn’t hear on commercial radio. Not that I mean to disparage beer, and I don’t want to underestimate the importance of celebration, because that’s really important to us. We definitely want to encourage more celebration and to help people make more holidays. People need them! Life is sad sometimes.

photo by E.A.R.

brooklyn spaces: How do you think being in Brooklyn has affected Rubulad? Do you feel like what you’re doing and have done is specific to Brooklyn?
Sari: That’s an interesting question. I’m a New Yorker and I went to high school in Brooklyn, so I’ve gotten to see Brooklyn really change. It used to be that everyone in Brooklyn just wanted to get to the city, and they thought of themselves as bridge-and-tunnel people. They’d think, if you make it, you go to Manhattan. That’s really changed, Brooklyn has really become its own city. Manhattan has become a place where the money lives more than where the people live. Here in Brooklyn there’s more space for independent stuff to happen, and there’s a lot of help from a great community. There are so many other spaces, other people who are doing amazing things. There’s a lot of cross-pollination between different groups, and we work with many groups who do things that are so different than we do. What was the last part of that question?

photo by Julia Roberts

brooklyn spaces: Do you feel like what you’re doing here is specific to Brooklyn?
Sari: Well, for years we thought that we were the only space like this in the world. We didn’t know that there were other Rubulads all over America and all over the world. I guess Burning Man was the first time we were like, “Holy shit, there are so many other people doing stuff!” The way we do things is specific to where we are, for sure, but we have connections to so many different kinds of spaces all over the place. I have a desire to live a life that doesn’t involve a certain kind of people, and I’ve been able to achieve that. I’m happy to never have to go to Midtown to work and live that sort of life. In New York that’s pretty hard to achieve, since it’s so expensive to live here. But there’s something about the grit of the struggle in Brooklyn that gives people a little added bite and energy. There’s so much going on right now, it’s a really good time around here, in Bushwick, Bed-Stuy. There are so many groups around that are really amazing, like the Groove Hoopers, or the Chicken Hut people. They’re like gutter-punk bike-jousters, and they throw a heck of a party. And we love Secret Project Robot. There’s so much going on in Brooklyn that we’re really excited about.

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any advice for creative people who are trying to figure out how to be involved in something like Rubulad?
Sari: There was a boy in here who once said in an interview, “Do art, be art, live art,” and that made me so happy. I want to encourage people to not be shy, to just make stuff and share it, because that’s what it’s for. I hope more people will make more spaces and do more weird theaters and galleries. If you decide to create your own thing and make it happen the way you want to, other people will enjoy it and join in.

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Like this? Read about other underground performance & party spaces: 12-turn-13, Monster Island, Flux Factory, Gemini & Scorpio loft, The Lab (Electric Warehouse), Red Lotus Room, Big Sky Works, Newsonic, Gowanus Ballroom