![]() “We’re launching a half-a-billion dollar arts facility with unknown, early-career African American talent.” The inaugural show will be a five-night concert series called Soundtrack of America, a celebration of African American music directed by McQueen, but featuring largely unknown musicians. It was a radical new space for work across all disciplines, “a commissioning centre for all arts”, which, in New York at least, had never been done before, with an emphasis on emerging talent. It would not house a permanent collection, nor would it stage revivals of existing works. The point about all this is that Poots wanted to signal, from the name down, that this was not a conventional museum or a gatekeeper to high culture. Plus, “it would’ve been shortened anyway, like the Met, so you may as well save on rebranding costs in three years’ time.” “I liked the idea of the Shed because it’s where you make things,” he said. Photograph: Christopher Laneįinally, Poots went back to the board and suggested dropping “culture” from the title and just calling it the Shed. The Shed will keep back 10% of the seats in every row for low-income visitors, who will be able to buy $10 tickets. “And he said, ‘Why would you call it Culture Shed? It’s like a soap opera putting on a laugh track to tell your dumb audience when to laugh.’” Then he called Marina Abramovic, who in her inimitable style said: “Why call it that? When they made Apple, they didn’t call it the Apple Computer.” “Culture Shed – it sounded a bit preachy.” He called a friend, one of the creative directors at Framestore, the company responsible for the CGI sequences in the Alfonso Cuarón film, Gravity. “I didn’t like the sound of it,” he says. The Culture Shed, as it was then called, would be built on public land as a way of broadening the scope of the overall development.Īll of which sounded great to Poots, with the exception of the name. ![]() ![]() At that point, it existed largely as the brainchild of Daniel Doctoroff, at the time deputy mayor of New York under Michael Bloomberg, who came up with the idea of a spectacularly funded arts space to be built alongside Hudson Yards, a luxury housing development on the west side of Manhattan that was attracting criticism as yet another of the city’s gifts to the rich. ![]() Behind all of this will be Poots who, at 51, has the kinetic energy of someone staring down an extremely short deadline and asks the central question of any public art space: “Who is it for?”Ī quick way to answer this is to revisit one of the small, pivotal disagreements Poots had with the original concept for the Shed when he signed on in 2014. There will be rehearsal and lab spaces for emerging artists, a pop-up bookshop and a 20,000 sq ft outdoor plaza for huge events. Since being hired, Poots and his board have raised half-a-billion dollars in private funding and doubled the scale of the Shed so that, when it opens this spring with a programme of original commissions including works by Steve McQueen and Björk, it will be in a multistorey glass complex where the largest performance space can accommodate up to 2,000 people. “There’s that quote: if you’re not in over your head, how will you ever find out how tall you are?”įive years later, we are in the offices of what, this April, is going to open as the Shed, the largest new art space to have opened in New York since the Lincoln Center in 1962. Would he be interested, they asked, in moving to Manhattan to run an as yet unbuilt arts centre, to which $75m (£57m) in public money had been committed but for which, at that stage, there were no offices, no staff, no website, no bank account and no mission, beyond that of creating something that was “unlike anything else in New York”? A blank space, in other words, and “terrifying”, says Poots, which is why his instinct was to jump and say yes. I n 2014, Alex Poots, then artistic director of the Manchester international festival, was approached by a group of New Yorkers with a perplexing proposal.
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