Published
Mon, Dec 8, 2014, 16:43
- "New York City has become too expensive to continue incubating young artists," the owners say.
After 20 years in Brooklyn, the Galapagos Art Space will move to Detroit and reopen in 2016.
The nightclub and performance space—the former home of The Bunker New York in addition to thousands of other music, art and cultural events—will close its DUMBO location on December 19th. Executive director Robert Elmes issued a statement on the Galapagos Detroit website this week, saying that, unlike Brooklyn, Detroit offers affordable housing for working artists and entrepreneurs.
"To flourish, a well functioning creative ecosystem needs three things in abundance; time, space and people," Elmes explains. "Arguably, New York City has people but they no longer have time or space. Detroit has time and space and is gaining its critical third component—artists—at an astonishing rate."
Elmes and his wife Philippa Kaya have purchased nine buildings in the city's Corktown and Highland Park neighborhoods, totalling over 600,000 square feet of real estate, The New York Times reports. They are planning roughly 16 months of renovation before opening their new location (which is built around a 10,000-square-foot lake) in 2016 with a Detroit Biennial.