ERIK EKROTH
Pioneer Works, the multidisciplinary arts nonprofit in Red Hook, Brooklyn, founded by artist Dustin Yellin, announced today that it has appointed Regine Basha as the director of its residency program. Basha will begin in her new post immediately.
Basha is an independent curator whose credits include a 2015 Basim Magdy exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects, the artist’s first solo in London; a 2011 project at MASS MoCA called “An Exchange with Sol LeWitt,” organized with Cabinet magazine, that initiated a call for artists to participate in a restaging of LeWitt’s practice of exchanging work with other artists; and the 2004 group exhibition “Treble” at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, Queens. She also hosted and produced a six-part radio show, Turning Baghdad, for Clocktower Radio, an institutional resident at Pioneer Works.
“What they were doing felt already aligned to my interests, having multiple events happening under one roof,” Basha told ARTnews by phone. “The program brings together different fields of knowledge, without necessarily pointing to them as different. Everyone is treated as an artists, meaning everyone is there in an exploratory way.”
The residency program, which began in 2012 along with Pioneer Works, provides free studio space to visual artists as well as people in related fields, including music, technology, science, and writing. While Pioneer Works has had a residency coordinator in the past helping to run the program, Basha will serve as the organization’s first residency director. “I was hired to reshape it, make it a little more intentional, to help create those conditions under which collaborations across disciplines—artists, musicians, writers, technologists—can happen,” she said.
And while she said that this collaboration is already “happening on some level by the residents themselves,” she sees her new role as being the “glue” between the artists in residence and the wider community that comes to Pioneer Works for exhibitions and events. With the South Brooklyn ferry line launching next year, which will originate at Pier 11 and include a stop a couple of blocks from Pioneer Works, she said she hopes that this will help grow the community at the space.