Pioneer Works

Pioneer Works is a multidisciplinary arts venue in Red Hook housed in a former 1866 railroad machinery factory. The space combines artist residencies, performance, scientific research, and fabrication studios under one roof.

Pioneer Works occupies a red brick building on Pioneer Street in Red Hook that was, in 1866, a factory floor for railroad tracks and sugar-refinery machinery. Artist Dustin Yellin bought it in 2011 and, with founding artistic director Gabriel Florenz and astrophysicist Janna Levin as Director of Sciences, reopened it in 2012 as something with no clean institutional category: part residency, part concert hall, part science lab, part press. The residency studios sit alongside a recording studio, ceramics studio, darkroom, metalworking and woodworking shops, a tech lab with 3-D printing and VR production, and a 20,000-square-foot garden. The animating idea, borrowed from Black Mountain College and Buckminster Fuller, is that proximity does the work: put a physicist next to a painter next to a sound artist and see what happens when none of them leave the building.