When Powerhouse Arts completed renovating its Gowanus warehouse in 2023, it was heralded as a world-class hub for fabricators, printmakers, and ceramicists to make large-scale artworks with no need to depart town.
Now the nonprofit arts group has made much more bold plans to show the 170,000-square-foot (~15,794 m) former transit energy station into an exhibition house and efficiency venue rivaling the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Park Avenue Armory.
This fall, Powerhouse launched a brand new performing arts competition on its spacious third ground, headlined by artist William Kentridge’s modern opera Sybil (2019). The lineup, which runs by December, contains works by choreographers Hofesh Shechter and Christos Papadopoulos, and a efficiency by Carolina Bianchi Y Cara de Cavalo. That is paired with an interactive visible artwork set up by artist Kate McIntosh, which supplies the instruments for viewers members to take artmaking into their very own palms, together with instruments and security goggles.
The viewers at William Kentridge’s opera, Sybil (2019) in 2025 (photograph Aaron Quick/Hyperallergic)
Powerhouse Arts president Eric Shiner hoped the competition would display that the establishment can function a house for artists and uplift the general public throughout a darkish time.
“Everything that we do here is in support of artists and making sure that artists not only have the space, but the time and the resources to make their artistic dreams come true,” he informed the competition’s gala attendees on Thursday.
The artwork world seems to be taking discover. The competition’s benefactors embrace an extended listing of in-demand artists, together with Amy Sherald, Shamel Pitts, and Miles Greenberg. Goodman Gallery and Hauser & Wirth, the latter of which has collaborated with Powerhouse’s printmaking studio to make less-expensive artist editions for exhibitions, have signed on too.
Print materials and books at Powerhouse Arts (photograph courtesy Powerhouse Arts)
Different applications may change into annual traditions. Powerhouse’s grasp printmaker Luther Davis established a printmaking honest in March, and the nonprofit hosted Conductor, an artwork honest that includes work by Brazilian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Palestinian, and Indonesian-Thai artists in Could. Each occasions are scheduled to return subsequent yr.
The nonprofit has leaned closely into efficiency, dance, and printmaking this yr. However two latest hires, together with Diya Vij, a curator at Artistic Time who will function vice chairman of curatorial and humanities applications, and Brittni Collins, the director of public artwork, sign that Powerhouse plans to considerably increase its visible artwork exhibitions and public applications. Subsequent week, it’ll welcome three New York-based artists, Grace Lynne Haynes, Nazanin Noroozi, and Ngozi Olojede, as its inaugural resident artists.
Alma Communications founder Hannah Gottlieb-Graham turned acquainted with Powerhouse after they commissioned Greenberg, her consumer, to conceive a durational efficiency for the nonprofit’s grand opening in Could 2023. For seven hours, Greenberg and his performers rotated between pedestals and a artifical orange pond, wielding swords like avatars in a online game.
Powerhouse Artwork’s Artists Celebration, “Fête of the Fates” (2025) (photograph Aaron Quick/Hyperallergic)
“Any time you unveil a performance space, the first performance you do sets the stage for things,” she stated, explaining that Powerhouse has since featured efficiency artists and theater in subsequent applications.
Gottlieb-Graham, who has since change into a PHA benefactor, stated she was curious to see how the employees blends experiential exhibitions and conventional visible arts reveals inside the constructing’s huge third ground, the place graffiti from the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties has been preserved on its partitions.
“To me, there’s nothing like it aesthetically in the city,” she stated. “It has a real sense of personality.”
