Two women in tank tops and construction hats, wearing mannequin masks, pose amid construction materials in the sunlight great hall at Brooklyn's Pioneer Works. The mask is the signature of the performance artist Narcissister, who will stage a new performance at the Red Hook cultural center.
Pioneer Works will reopen with a newly commissioned performance, "Narcissister: Voyage Into Infinity." Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk, courtesy of Pioneer Works.

Red Hook’s Pioneer Works will reopen in September after eight months of renovations with solo shows by Alejandro García Contreras and Le’Andra LeSeur, plus the premiere of a newly commissioned performance piece by Narcissister.

It’s the first institutional solo show for Contreras, the first solo show at a New York institution for LeSeur, and the first large-scale performance for Narcissister in over a decade.

The fall slate of programming also marks the opening of an exciting new chapter for the Brooklyn cultural center, founded by artist Dustin Yellin in 2012. Since launching its first capital campaign in 2019, Pioneer has raised $28.3 million to renovate and upgrade its 1866 building. The goal is to raise $1.7 million more to fund additional work, including an ambitious effort to open New York City’s first public observatory.

Yellin, a longtime Red Hook resident, purchased the neighborhood’s old Pioneer Iron Works factory building for $3.7 million in 2011. His hope was to create a space where the arts could meet the sciences, inspired by historic institutions like North Carolina’s Black Mountain College. But he had his work cut out for him.

The great hall at Pioneer Works. Photo courtesy of Pioneer Works.

“It had no windows, derelict rooms throughout, old broken boilers, a concrete floor in disrepair, makeshift stairwells, steel gantries that no longer functioned, no water connection and minimal electricity,” founding artistic director Gabriel Florenz, Yellin’s second cousin, recalled in an email.

“Every piece of original brick, wood, and steel was covered in layers of decrepit white paint. Surfaces were covered in dirt and grime with some underlying potential. What is now the garden was essentially a garbage dump and a parking lot,” he added.

Without the budget to hire a construction crew, it was Florenz and the rest of Yellin’s studio staff who oversaw the space’s initial transformation. They broke through boarded up and bricked over windows, removed decades of accumulated garbage, and spent months cleaning and sandblasting the walls to restore the original bricks.

“Dustin leveraged his artistic practice by bartering artwork for architectural and construction services,” Florenz said.

That allowed them to put in a new floor, patch the leaking roof, and repair nearly 100 rotting wooden joists. But just months after opening, Hurricane Sandy hit, flooding much of Red Hook and jeopardizing the fledgling institution.

“Were it not for our insurance, we may have not survived this moment at all,” Florenz admitted.

Visitors came to experience the Great American Eclipse at Pioneer Works in 2017. Photo courtesy of Pioneer Works.

Despite the setback, Pioneer Works flourished, hosting hundreds of creatives in visual arts, music, and technology residencies, and staging exhibitions for artists including Derrick Adams, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Jean Shin. And the capital campaign meant it was possible to invest more in the space hosting it all.

For round one of renovations, Pioneer Works was closed from December 2021 to August 2022. Between the two closures, the organization has replaced the roof, installed a building-wide HVAC system, conducted asbestos abatement, added more bathrooms, and built an elevator that will make the upper levels ADA-accessible for the first time.

Still in the works is a new roof deck with an exterior staircase, which will house the planned observatory dome. The project is being overseen by local architecture firm PRO, and will house an antique telescope from 1895, as well as modern electronic astronomy equipment.

Alejandro Garcia Contreras. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.

The 16-foot-long telescope, originally from the Emerson McMillin Observatory at Ohio State University, dates to the heights of an astronomical craze in the U.S.

It revives a long-lost dream for Brooklyn, which attempted in 1847 and 1850 to build such a facility, one of three failed attempts in the city’s history.

Le’Andra LeSeur, video still. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works.

But as work on that effort continues, Pioneer Works will continue to bring New Yorkers its unique blend of interdisciplinary programming. The shows from Contreras and LeSeur will take over the second and third floor galleries.

Inspired by the idea of a mysterious archaeological site from an unknown civilization, Contreras will present new sculptures created on-site at Pioneer Works.

Pioneer Works will reopen with a newly commissioned performance, “Narcissister: Voyage Into Infinity.” Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk, courtesy of Pioneer Works.

A new video work by LeSeur, co-commissioned by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, is the centerpiece of a multimedia installation that looks at the last impact of racist monuments across the U.S. on the Black community. The piece was filmed at Stone Mountain, Georgia’s answer to Mount Rushmore featuring Confederate leaders.

For her performance Voyage Into Infinity, Narcissister will enlist a cast of performers to engage with a roving, kinetic installation with pyrotechnics. The anonymous feminist artist is known for her mannequin mask, which she employs to mind-boggling effect in humorous, sometimes fetishistic fashion.

“Alejandro García Contreras: Quien no ha intentado convertir una piedra en un recuerdo? (Who hasn’t tried to turn a stone into a memory?)” and “Le’Andra LeSeur: Monument Eternal” will be on view at Pioneer Works, 159 Pioneer Street, Brooklyn, New York, September 6–December 15, 2024. “Narcissister: Voyage Into Infinity” will take place September 14 and 15, 2024.