downtown brooklyn – brooklyn spaces

genspace

oriana on 17 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: downtown brooklyn | space type: community biolab | active since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter

There’s a lot more to DIY in Brooklyn than underground music shows and bike-powered washing machines. Genspace, the first-ever nonprofit community biotech laboratory, aims to demystify scientific experimentation. “Members are free to experiment with whatever they want, as long as it follows biosafety guidelines,” says molecular biologist Dr. Ellen Jorgensen, the Executive Director and cofounder of the space. “It doesn’t have to make money; it doesn’t even have to make sense. This is a truly innovative space.”

pix by Kit Crenshaw

Housed in a corner of the huge old Metropolitan Exchange building, the lab, which is compatible with CDC’s Biosafety Level 1 standards, is constructed from salvaged glass doors and metal restaurant counters, and most of the equipment was donated or bought secondhand. Genspace members are working on a range of open-source projects, from liquid-handling robots to super-hardy plants that can survive on other planets. The space also hosts talks, workshops, and classes to engage people who are new to scientific experimentation. “Doing this has really restored my delight in my field,” Ellen says. “Watching people realize how awesome science is—that’s very uplifting.”

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

exapno (metropolitan exchange building)

oriana on 14 Oct ’13

neighborhood: downtown brooklyn | space type: music coworking | open since: 2010 | links: website, facebook, twitter

Founded by husband-and-wife composers Lainie and Jascha, Exapno is a coworking space for the musically minded. For a very low monthly fee, musicians (primarily “new music” composers) can rent desk space, giving them a quiet place to work on their music, network with other musicians, and give and attend performances. It’s built on the concept of a writers’ space, inspired by Paragraph in Manhattan, where Jascha was once a member.

Qubit performing; photo by Lainie

Interestingly, Exapno is just one of myriad small businesses currently residing in the fascinating Metropolitan Exchange building. The massive MEx—a 45k-square-foot, seven-floor former bank—is owned by designer Al Attara, who is striving to make it a creative startup hive. Attara has owned the building for more than three decades, but for years it was on the city’s “urban renewal” chopping block, meaning that it could be reclaimed and torn down at any time. About six years ago the building came off the list, and since then Attara has invited in a wide universe of creatives, from avant-garde furniture designers RockPaperRobot to bio research lab Genspace. The sixth floor is all architects; the fifth floor has several food importers, from chocolate to tea to fish; and the fourth floor is media-oriented, with groups like Seed Magazine and Good News Planet, a website that only prints good news. (To read more about MEx, check out this New York Times piece from back in 2011.)

MEx fifth floor, photo by Maximus Comissar

Working within this amazingly diverse community of creative entrepreneurs, Exapno is thriving—as much as it can. With a cap of around 20 musicians monthly, and restrictions such as the inability to leave instruments overnight or to put up walls or soundproofing, Exapno may have reached its growth capacity. Ultimately they may relocate to a space where they can have more control and freedom, but in the meantime they’re happily staying put. Exapno, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, is always seeking donations, and the group is open to new members—find out more on their site. But first, read my Q&A with cofounder Jascha and musician member James.

Jascha & James on left, photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What does Exapno mean?
Jascha: My wife Lainie is a huge Marx Brothers fan, Harpo in particular. In his biography, Harpo talks about how when he toured Russia in the ’30s, he would see posters advertising his show, with his name written in Cyrillic, and it looked like “Exapno Mapcase.” I think we’ve only ever run into one other person who got the reference.

brooklyn spaces: How did the space get started?
Jascha: Since at least the early 2000s, Lainie had been wanting to create a performance space that was cheap to rent out, and that could function as a community nexus, a meeting place for young musicians, a way to get into the scene. Eventually we met Al, the wonderful man who owns this building. He’s incredible; instead of turning this place into condos or office space and making millions of dollars, he has filled this sort of ramshackle building with startups and indie businesses and nonprofits, just because that’s what he believes in. Anyway, Al agreed to rent us the space for whatever we could pay, so it’s sort of by his good graces that we’re here at all.

Wet Ink, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: What’s it like being a member here?
James: It’s an amazing resource and access to a great community. All musicians needs space where they can make noise or quietly write music that will one day become noise, and it’s awesome to be able to get that for such a low monthly fee.

photo by Maximus Comissar

brooklyn spaces: What connects all the members? Does everyone write or make a similar kind of music?
Jascha: We rapidly discovered that with a really cheap rehearsal space, we had to find artful ways to deflect requests from garage bands or that sort of thing. That’s what’s nice about “new music”: occasionally it’s a little loud, but usually it’s like a string quartet, or a vibraphone and singer. It’s much more manageable in terms of neighbors.
James: It’s somewhat self-selecting. You can’t leave equipment here, you can’t make a lot of loud noise, so that disqualifies, say, a punk band that wants someplace to rehearse every night. Plus almost everyone I know in the “new music” community tends to be project-oriented, as opposed to in a definitive group. Which is why a resource like this is so important: we don’t have a whole band where each member can pitch in $20 a month for a space.
Jascha: There are a lot of things about music and musicians that are really quite antisocial—making lots of strange noise, leaving stuff everywhere, taking up lots of space with pianos and drum kits—so we’ve had to modify things. There’s a lot more we could be doing if we had a space we could control, but then we’d have to pay an awful lot of money. And actually, it feels like the people who mainly used the space two or three years ago are starting to move on to other things. Now I feel like the people who need the space are people we don’t know, so we need to work on getting the word out.
James: I’ve noticed a lot of new younger composers here. Suddenly there’s this new generation of really positive, spirited people doing all sorts of weird stuff, and a lot of it’s happening here.

String Noise, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: Do you have any famous alumni?
Jascha: Within the modest world of the New York new music scene, sure. Dither is quite well known; they’ve been around for years and get props from major composers. They do an event every year called the Dither Extravaganza [this year’s is on October 26th, at the Gowanus Loft]. Our artistic advisory board also has some heavy hitters in it, like Morton Subotnick and Paul Lanksy.

brooklyn spaces: What’s your relationship to the neighborhood?
Jascha: The location is awesome, it’s a great hub for music. Brooklyn Academy of Music has been here forever, and recently two major venues moved in around the corner: Roulette and ISSUE Project Room. But we’re proud to say we beat them here.

Sweat Lodge, photo by Lainie

brooklyn spaces: What are your thoughts on being an artist in Brooklyn these days?
Jascha: Well, when we started this space, Lainie and I were living in Chelsea, but most of our music friends lived in Brooklyn, and increasingly the concerts we were going to were in Brooklyn too. The center of gravity for our scene—and so many other artistic scenes—has been shifting here more and more. Brooklyn is incredible right now; there’s just so much creative activity here.

Exapno rooftop, photo by Maximus Comissar

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Like this? Read about other coworking and skillshare spaces: Time’s Up, Pioneer Works, Bushwick Print Lab, Arch P&D, Urbanglass, 3rd Ward, Brooklyn Lyceum, No-Space

micro museum

oriana on 6 Feb ’11

neighborhood: downtown brooklyn | space type: art & events | active since: 1986 | links: website, blog, twitter

I found out about the Micro Museum by accident—I was checking the directions to go somewhere else in the neighborhood, and Micro Museum showed up on the Google Map. What lovely serendipity! The tiny exhibition space on busy Smith Street is intimate and aesthetically innovative, and I spent a while examining and experiencing the art and interactive installations.

Micro Museum, founded by Kathleen and William Laziza, has been around for twenty-five years. This “living arts center” is, according to their website, “dedicated to interactive, media, visual, and performing arts.” It’s a 501(c)3 nonprofit, a Registered Trademark, a Registered Charity for the State of New York, and a founding member of the Brooklyn Cultural Circuit. It’s open every Saturday from 12–7 and only costs $2. I highly recommend stopping by.

Q&A with Kathleen Laziza, Micro Museum’s founder

brooklyn spaces: Tell me a little bit about the museum.
Kathleen: This is our twenty-fifth year on Smith Street, which is pretty fantastic. We do curated programming, classes, media art, performance art, visual art, live events, all kinds of fun things. Our current program is called “Above & Beyond,” and it features exclusively the work of myself and my husband—we’re the founders of the museum. It’s the first time we’ve ever had fully our own exhibit, and it’s been a wonderful mix of extremely fun and extremely scary. The exhibit runs until December 2013, and every few months we’ll add another installation or series of paintings or assemblages or video tapes or whatever. And we invite everyone to come, because it really is for kids of all ages, it has interactive art and things that you can manipulate and manage and experience, and it’s also got visual art and media art, too.

brooklyn spaces: How do you select the art you’re going to exhibit?
Kathleen: We usually have themes, and sometimes we work with guest curators. In 2006 I did a very famous show with Juliette Pelletier from Reflect Arts, called “Circus Surreal.” We did a whole year of curating for it and we ended up selecting forty works, and we had all kinds of live events and media. It was fabulous. In 2007 we chose “Spectrum” as our theme, so all of the shows were focused on a color. We did a program called “Big Ideas”—which was pretty esoteric, I have to admit, looking back. Once we pick a theme, we do national calls for art, but we’re really very community-minded. We often show the same artists again and again, because a lot of what Micro Museum does is create an environment where an artist can grow. There’s a long arc to the development of an artist, and you don’t make a masterpiece every single time, so you need to be in a world that gives you a chance. Was every piece that we’ve ever selected the most amazing, incredible, brilliant work ever? No. But they were often great stepping stones for the industry at large, and some of our artists went on to get accolades and do fabulous shows all over the place. We try to be as inclusive as possible, but we do have an edge to what we show. It would be rare that we’d do a watercolor show; it would be like a watercolor show on acid, you know? There would be some kind of a twist.

brooklyn spaces: I’d like to talk about your relationship with the community, and with Brooklyn in general.
Kathleen: We’ve been here twenty-five years, so we were here before anything. We were here when it was actually dangerous, when there were arsons and murders and mayhem, so we feel very integral to the development of Smith Street. Micro Museum was trendy, because art in general is always trendy, and we were a classic case of going to the edge of where we could afford to be, and the artists came to us. Then eventually the big national chains started to move in, and it really changed the character of the block. Which didn’t really mean a lot to us in the sense that we would have to re-identify, it just meant that we were in a different kind of situation. In the late nineties I went to Columbia University’s Arts Leadership Institute to find out how art works in a commercial environment, and they basically predicted what would happen, although of course I didn’t believe them. They said that Micro Museum would have to work against erasure at a certain point, because everyone around us would become very successful and would forget why they had customers in the first place, why people were showing up from all over the globe. But we’ve always been kind to artists looking for a friendly environment where they could create and be comfortable creating.

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Like this? Read about more art galleries: Concrete Utopia, Wondering Around Wandering, Invisible Dog, 950 Hart, Ugly Art Room, Central Booking