Where can you eat truffle popcorn surrounded by Victorian wax death masks and party in a cannonball factory-turned-contemporary exhibition space? In Brooklyn, of course.
Known to locals as the Bat Cave, the derelict Brooklyn Rapid Transit Power Station (completed in 1903) stands on the shores of the Gowanus Canal, redeemed by passing graffiti artists whose tags and murals have repurposed the location into a shabby-chic Brooklyn landmark. More recently, Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron have designed a new on-site facility for fabrication in wood, metal, ceramics, textiles, and printmaking. Construction on the soon-to-be Powerhouse Workshop will begin next year, and is due for completion in 2020.
The Williamsburg-based Brooklyn Art Library is home to more than 36,000 artist sketchbooks from over 135 countries. Comprising the library’s ongoing Sketchbook Project, each sketchbook is barcoded and catalogued with searchable details through a system developed to facilitate and personalize your perusal. Artists are also free to submit their sketches to the growing collection. While you need a library card to access the volumes, everything can be checked out for free or accessed digitally through their website.
A tricked-out brownstone has become a neighborhood landmark thanks to owner Susan Gardner’s penchant for turning trash and other discarded materials into a stunning work of mosaic art. Using buttons and beads, dropped change, broken CD fragments, and anything else you may find on the street (within reason), Gardner got to work on updating her home as a therapeutic pastime following the September 11 attacks in 2001, and her project has since spread from the building’s façade to the wrought iron fence in front.
For the next 25 years, Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery is hosting a presence of a different kind. In April, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle parted with Creative Time to inaugurate an intimate and ongoing public project in which passersby are invited to bury transcriptions of their deepest, darkest secrets in a tomb-like sculpture. Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green-Wood Cemeteryis scheduled to run until the year 2042, when Calle will exhume and ceremoniously burn the lot.
While the doors of this beloved museum shut tragically due to severed funds in December 2016, no list of Brooklyn’s unusual art spaces could possibly be complete without a nod to one of the borough’s flat-out weirdest institutions. Housed in a transformed Gowanus nightclub, the Morbid Anatomy Museum was treasured for its, well, morbid displays of taxidermy, occult objects, and other deathly artifacts. RIP.