Ten Years of Pioneer Works

On the occasion of the decadal anniversary, Janna Levin reflects on how Pioneer Works came to be.

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Main Hall, Pioneer Works.Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.

BY Janna Levin

Janna Levin is the editor-in-chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast, the Chief Science Officer at Pioneer Works, and a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her most recent book is Black Hole Survival Guide.

12.22.22

“As a young man, I struggled mightily to find my way.”

Dustin Yellin moved to New York City, like so many before and since, a confused young man with a voracious lust that only this city promised to satiate. A lust for life, for art, for poetry, for science, for ideas and disciplines as yet unknown. His thoughts were an unstable storm of hazardous sparks and influences that he was unable to pry apart, unable to organize. He dropped out of school and made his way east, absorbing the noisy, dirty, flashing ephemera of the city in a kind of hallucinatory state. Sometimes the hallucinations were drug induced, sometimes psychically unaided.

Out of the cornucopia of undisciplined, uncontrolled influences, Dustin, as he always had, pieced together collages: tiny pieces of paper cut from magazines, images from National Geographic mixed with paint, a melange of characters arranged like toys on an imaginary battlefield, an homage to industrialism, worshippers of fictional constellations of stars. As the work progressed, these seemingly random components were sealed in poured resin and eventually trapped in transparent layers of glass. What emerged from the pieces was a life-size human form or an elaborate story played out through massive glass blocks. The promised order from chaos.

Fundamental to the order that would emerge—the ambition that became Pioneer Works—is Gabriel Florenz. Second cousins in an estranged family, Dustin and Gabe first met in a year of traumatic grief—Gabe at 14 lost his brother; Dustin at 25 lost his closest friend. Gabe, who had trained as a glass blower, moved to New York at 21 to work for his second cousin whom he hardly knew, and to become an artist. While preparing one of Dustin’s pieces for exhibition, the one ton glass sculpture fell, crushing Gabe’s hand and nearly severing the fingers. The young artist was forced to reimagine his purpose. No longer able to blow glass, Gabe was in search of a new medium.

Dustin Yellin walking in an old building

Dustin walking in Pioneer Works.

Then Dustin found what would become the nexus he sought, and Gabe’s new purpose. The former Pioneer Iron Works was one of the last treasures in Red Hook to have survived a greedy wave of demolition intended to clear the neighborhood for yet another unforgivable storage facility, truck parking lot, or inhumane corporate waylay station. Peering through cracks in the boarded-up windows, Dustin could sense the potential but not exactly the original glory of the mid-1800s warehouse. The abandoned building was sealed off from all natural light but was oddly full of makeshift shacks, a multitude of silos, as though symbolically begging to be torn down, de-siloed, in favor of a new interwoven community.

A sledge hammer was taken to the shacks and wooden boards were pried off the windows, releasing beams of light animated by the random motions of century-old dust and debris. Newspapers fell out of the window recesses, newsprint from the ’30s and ’40s that had been stuffed into place as insulation, one imagines, by workers in oppressive conditions. They fell out like fractured memories inside a dilapidated structure that had been cut off from running water, functioning electricity, and all the changes happening outside in Brooklyn.

Here was the cornerstone, literally a corner stone, which brought within range the fantasy of a new kind of museum, a new kind of artists’ collective. With Dustin as founder and Gabe as founding artistic director, the partially renovated building opened its doors in 2012, imbued with a vastly different purpose and a slightly different name: Pioneer Works

Pioneer Works is a collage. A hallucination. A living, uncontrolled, unrestrained collaboration. People are folded into the mixture of ingredients—some take root, others evaporate away, the diorama no longer frozen in the seeming permanence of glue, paint, and glass.

Installation view. Solid Light Works: Anthony McCall. Curated by Gabriel Florenz. Pioneer Works, New York, January 12–March 11, 2018.Photo: Dan Bradica.

I was one such element, almost literally cut from National Geographic, arranged suggestively, placed just so on the third floor. From that unrenovated perch, in the sweltering heat of a summer and the unforgiving brutality of a winter, I hallucinated the Science Studios, a physical and metaphorical space to manifest the motto: Science is part of culture. We built the Science Studios with an intended transparency from the halls, from the gallery, from the catwalks, from the balconies, through to the artist residency studios, the exhibitions below, the windows over the garden—the garden itself a transformation of an abandoned industrial ruin. All the parts in the vision for a new cultural center were in place: Art, Music, Technology, and Science.

Now, here we are celebrating the decadal anniversary of a mad dream with a mixture of pride, deference, and aspiration. We still struggle to define Pioneer Works in one line. In the plainest terms, Pioneer Works is a non-profit organization with artist residencies and live programming that is free and open to everyone. We exist in gratitude to the talent and dedication of our staff and our board. In this brief missive I’m unable to pay homage to the invaluable contributions of so many dedicated contributors. We have welcomed thousands to exhibitions, performances, debates. We have survived at least one hurricane and one plague. We have celebrated and mourned together. We have grown beyond the walls with Pioneer Works Broadcast. We aspire to build New York City’s first public astronomical observatory, to be constructed atop the building like a crown jewel, a reminder that our gaze can range from the gutter to the sky.

You—reader, artist, audience, musician, scientist, participant—are an element in this living mirage. Together we are the fundamental units in a larger collective, a community of organisms, a complex superorganism. Pioneer Works thrives on the unification of those elements into something whole, if fleetingly so. When we peer more closely at the basic human components, we can marvel at our individuation, at the swarm of pixels that can easily disperse but instead come together to create a fugitive image. An ever shifting, ever evolving collage. ♦

Four women standing in front of a structural artwork

Abigail DeVille, Racquel Chevremont, Xaviera Simmons and Mickalene Thomas in front of Simmon’s work “Even in the variations, the division of pleasures help situate us to advocate for” for the exhibition Brand New Heavies, 2021.

Photo: Walter Wlodarczyk.