On the eve of “Manus x Machina,” in the pouring rain in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, David Byrne, Alicia Keys, and Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough took refuge in Dustin Yellin’s storied Pioneer Works to sip Bombay Sapphire cocktails; feast on courses of roasted beets and seared sea bass; and talk about the fusion of tech, art, and just about every other creative discipline Yellin hopes to playfully merge. The occasion? The third annual Village Fête, a celebration of Pioneer Works’s diverse brand of come-one-come-all artistic utopia.
“We’re growing and all of these dreams are coming true,” mused Yellin, as Lauren Santo Domingo, Stacey Bendet, and friends mingled, silently bidding on works by Carol Bove, Anish Kapoor, Shirin Neshat, and more. “We have a film department now and a darkroom; we opened up a bookstore. So all the different parts of the project are slowly coalescing. And then we have Google in the residency.”
Monica Lewinsky, sporting a fine-knit sweater reading “Inter Galactica,” was the first to note the appeal of the center and the works. “Well, I would love to have everything!” exclaimed the advocate. “But I see a Marina Abramovic piece there, and I’m a huge fan of hers. I connected with Dustin last year—we both gave TED Talks. I think what he has done here is extraordinary. It’s an incredible model for the way forward. I think also really cracking open the barriers between industries and this idea that people need to be siloed off in how they work and think about things. You can take an architect’s brain and apply it to a different way to problem-solve or create something different, so I think it’s very needed in the world.”
Later in the evening, Esperanza Spalding gave a surprise performance. “It takes a certain amount of Judas for all of us to betray the status quo, so I wrote this song for all of us,” said the singer, before launching into her ballad of rebellion. Elsewhere, guests stopped to have their tarot cards read and snuck upstairs to a Polynesian-styled, hula dancer–outfitted, kitsch-heavy tiki bar.
“Together, we can fix everything,” Yellin said to his guests as the night picked up. “A place like this is here to re-engineer public space, to bring free education. This is a shell without you.”
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