Powerhouse Arts is a nonprofit production center in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Housed in a converted 1904 power station, it provides studios and workshops for ceramics, printmaking, textiles, metalwork, and public art fabrication.
The 1904 Brooklyn Rapid Transit Power Station spent decades as a ruin on the Gowanus Canal (first a cardboard incinerator, then a graffiti destination locals called the Batcave) before becoming Powerhouse Arts, a nonprofit production center that opened in 2023. Herzog & de Meuron and PBDW Architects converted the 170,000-square-foot turbine hall and a new adjacent boiler house into ceramics studios, screenprint and digital print shops, a public art fabrication department, handwoven textile workshops through The Alpha Workshops, and metalwork via Workspace11. The MGC Community Print Studio relocated here. The Artist Subsidy Program offsets shop fees for under-resourced NYC artists. The question Powerhouse keeps asking is a structural one: what does it cost, in real materials and real labor, to keep art fabrication inside a city that keeps pricing it out?
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