Dustin Yellin Is Just Getting Started

In the early 2010s, an 1866 red brick building in Red Hook, Brooklyn, was a former iron works. Dustin Yellin used to stare at it from his studio across the street. One day he explored it, and then began exploring the idea of transforming it into a hotbed for art, performance, science, and community. In 2012, it opened as the massive—and soon massively popular—Pioneer Works. “It was like a hallucination, a fantasy gone off the rails,” he says over Zoom, having only recently emerged from a long exploration of the Sơn Đoòng caves with his friend Bjarke Ingels. “Off the rails, I mean, in a good way,” he laughs. 

Today, the building’s three floors comprise studios for science and ceramics, tech and media labs, a garden, classrooms, and ample interconnected performance and exhibition spaces, along with a robust digital presence and Pioneer Works Broadcast publication. “It was a crazy vision,” he says. “But then you have to operate the vision, which means you have to start a nonprofit. You need lots of people to help you on the Board side, on the mechanicals of programming culture at that scale, and on making it free to the public. For a decade, a lot of it was just reacting to the dream.”

Pioneer Works continues to expand. “It’s a living organism,” he says. This past September, it reopened with ADA accessibility, air conditioning, and two new mezzanines, and reportedly will open a free observatory this fall. But Yellin is making time to dream other dreams. On April 1, his exhibition “The Politics of Eternity” opened at Jersey City’s Liberty Science Center. A 10,000-pound heptaptych, the piece suspends paint and thousands of print ephemera within laminated glass, and a complex, time-traveling mythology within its concept. “It’s the future mirroring the past and meeting in the present,” he says. 

He began with seven pieces of paper taped to the wall in a chevron. “That was the mainframe, and for a couple of years I added things like drones delivering fruit, satellites falling apart in space, a field of mushrooms.” Later, he set up a pair of tables for each piece of paper, upon which he slowly began constructing the sculpture itself. “It was like making a little film,” he says. “A frozen film.” 

He’s also been making paintings based on his fascination with caves that prompted the trip to Vietnam. “Dustin Yellin: Cave Paintings” runs through June 3 at Venus Over Manhattan and comprises new works inspired by ancient subterranean worlds, made of dense, detailed collage and acrylic on canvas. The paintings, he says, “are a psychedelic journey into the minutiae of the surfaces of these geological moments. Within those moments, hiding skulls and animals and dinosaur bones and masks, different sorts of weird artifacts. Sunglasses.”

It’s easy to get lost in the paintings—though much safer than getting lost in the caverns that inspired them—but their surreality can be destabilizing. “They’re very strange pictures,” he laughs. “Obviously, I was looking at a lot of Max Ernst. But I also spent time in these natural phenomena on psychedelics.” Chemistry, like so much of what interests Yellin, is at once an art and a science. 

“​​I like to see all the disciplines percolate at the same density simultaneously,” he says. “That’s when I’m really jazzed.” With upcoming Pioneer Works programming featuring Meredith Monk, Isabella Rossellini, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Dynasty Handbag, and Claire Rousay, and his own work blooming into digital and other media, we’re jazzed, too.