What is Galapagos Art Space / our manifesto
What is Galapagos Art Space?
Galapagos Art Space is a 9,000 sq ft Obie Award winning cultural venue located in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Galapagos is about to become New York City’s first LEED certified ‘green’ cultural venue, and we have a 1600 sq ft lake inside our building with island seating on the lake that’s surrounded by a beautiful, operatic style mezzanine. Yes, we said Lake. In New York City we have our own lake.
How do we fund Galapagos Art Space?
Galapagos does not accept government grants or public funding of any kind. We believe that if the work we present is strong, communicative, and effective, audiences will support us. Since opening in Williamsburg in 1995 we’ve proved that a cultural venue operating an independent, evolved model for supporting the performing arts can indeed flourish.
Why is this important?
For the last fifty years New York City has attracted the one smartest kid from everywhere. These young savant thinkers brought with them the untested and soon-to-be transformational ideas that allowed our little islands of the coast of America to evolve separately from the mainland species. The value and function of this mechanism profoundly changed not only post war New York City but the United States as a whole.
But the raw cost of living in our city means you can no longer roll into Port Authority bus terminal with a few hundred dollars and a rolled up copy of the Village Voice under your arm. Culture, the irresistible force, has met real estate – the immovable object – and when push comes to shove only one is going anywhere and by definition it isn’t real estate.
No one can roll back the cost of real estate or prevent small performance spaces from becoming chic little clothing stores. This matters because If being an artist in New York costs you a full time career in another industry then the best and brightest young artists and cultural thinkers, the ones our meritocracy would obviously miss the most, won’t come to New York City – or won’t stay – and allow their work to suffer just to be among our tall buildings.
New York City as a cultural capital
New York is a great city, one of the greatest cultural cities to have ever risen; perhaps the greatest. But New York City could one day find itself a Paris or Rome; wonderful museum cities but cities who no longer produce much in the way of relevant artistic culture. Unbelievable you say. Impossible, that could never happen here. But while it’s certain that neither Paris nor Rome thought they’d become who they are, they are indeed who they’ve become.
New York doesn’t compete for the brightest young graduates or the most experienced minds in any industry we care about with the promise of a fine network of running paths or bike trails, we compete with culture. Yet all across the country cities like Seattle, Portland, Austin, Chapel Hill, Minneapolis, and even – gasp! – Philadelphia are working feverishly to out-compete us for the next generation of the best and brightest young cultural creators and thinkers, and they’ll win them unless we can construct civic policy that keep us a more important gateway to ideas and opportunity than they can offer.
The Future
New York can be expensive, it can even be terribly expensive, but it has to have opportunity woven into its narrative or it’s only expensive. The job of the cultural community as a whole is to ensure that if the best and brightest emerging artists and the best young cultural thinkers can’t see themselves possibly affording to live here, then we’d better find ways to make them think they can’t possibly afford to live anywhere else.
Many believe that the cultural ecosystem that supports emerging and mid-career artists is here to stay ‘just because’. This is wrong. New York doesn’t have to be the cultural capital of the emerging and mid-career arts, or anything for that matter. It has been, but it needs to continue to earn its place and it can easily price itself out of that role if it also prices out opportunity or doesn’t replace the critical and incubative small to mid-sized cultural infrastructure lost to the real estate market. If that infrastructure doesn’t exist then there’s nothing to attach a fledgling career to and no point to arrive here if you’re leaving a nest in another city.
As cultural leaders in New York City we can’t be placeholders, bystanders in the midst of what others before us have built. We have to lead. In the end only one thing matters: good artists and the best young thinkers follow ideas, and ideas flourish only when there is opportunity to realize them.
- Robert Elmes
Director, Galapagos Art Space
