It's Brooklyn, 2015. Do We Still Need a Museum?
“The secret of going to museums is to get old. You know your limits,” wrote WNYC listener Frances from Manhattan.
Pioneer Works Center for Arts and Innovation is not a museum. The space, founded by artist Dustin Yellin in 2012, is a mix of gallery space,artist studios, and performance space. It is located in a former iron works in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
As the Brooklyn Museum is in the final stages of picking a new director, we are discussing the future not only of the Brooklyn museum, but of museums in general. And whether art spaces like Pioneer Works can offer more flexibility and accessibility than traditional museums, considering the time and place of this transition: Brooklyn in 2015.
To answer those questions, we visited Pioneer Works with Joseph Melillo, executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Brooklyn-based artist Paul Ramirez Jonas.
Here are some of the highlights of the conversation:
Brooklyn is the synonym of cool, with plenty of art spaces like Pioneer Works, or world-renowned performance spaces, like BAM. Does the Brooklyn Museum still matter as much as it used to?
Melillo: “It still has a very important place for the borough of Brooklyn,” he said. “It owns a whole range of individual items from art history that are essential.”
Jonas: “I think the museum is always relevant, and what is happening to Brooklyn right now, as we all know, in my lifetime, it is becoming increasingly gentrified,” he said. “It needs a director that can see, ‘If I can address all these constituencies, and they all come here and intermix, then it serves a huge social role, which is, just look at what is happening in Baltimore right now, certainly this country needs it.”
Melillo: “Yeah, the Brooklyn Museum is trying to be many things to many different people in this extraordinary, profound borough, and you know, it’s not an easy job.”
Pioneer Works is a flexible, inviting space. Is it more interesting than a traditional museum?
Melillo: “You have a blank canvas here, you are only limited by your imagination, or the resources that you have available,” he said. “This place is alive.”
There are plenty of art spaces in the city. Why did you decide to open Pioneer Works?
Yellin: “I didn’t really decide to do this, I think if I thought about it, I would have never done it,” he said. “I just had this crazy idea, why there isn’t a place where we can all be together?”
Jonas: “Now artists have a hard time even keeping a studio in Brooklyn, even someone like me, a middle-aged, mildly successful artist, I am facing the threat of closing my studio you know, by the end of the year,” he said. “Artists are survivors. They will leave Brooklyn, and that will be a loss for Brooklyn.”
As the Brooklyn Museum picks a new director and embarks in a new phase, what would you like to see there?
Melillo: “Galleries should be animated by performing artists.”
Yellin: “I would basically do what I am doing here in a larger scale over there.”
Jonas: “It can expand beyond its walls by creating incredible partnerships with things that are already happening in Brooklyn.”
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