Glasslands Gallery

Overview

Artist-founded, 300-capacity warehouse performance space on the Williamsburg waterfront known for its handmade paper-clouds installation and an all-genres booking policy that PopGun Presents took over in 2010, until Vice Media's expansion displaced it and two neighbors in 2014.

Glasslands Gallery grew directly out of Glass House Gallery, a smaller art space founded in 2004 by multimedia artists Leviticus and Brooke Baxter at 289 Kent Avenue, then a converted warehouse complex on a stretch of the Williamsburg waterfront that felt, in the founders' own words, like 'a forgotten backwater.' In May 2006, Baxter partnered with musician and artist Rolyn Hu to open a larger partition of the same building as Glasslands, built with donated and recycled materials and a fluid layout of rotating art installations, practice rooms, and performance spaces. The room's signature visual was a hanging paper-clouds installation by artist Vashti Windish, installed in 2008, that became one of the most-photographed backdrops in New York's independent music scene; after the New York Fire Department declared it a hazard, it was replaced with a controllable LED tube array designed by Noah Norman of Ancillary Magnet, the clouds were memorialized in Glasslands' first run of T-shirts. In late 2008, Brooklyn promoters Rami Haykal-Manning and Jake Rosenthal, operating as PopGun Presents, began booking one-off shows at Glasslands; within months they had taken over in-house talent buying and, by 2010, day-to-day operations. The programming was catholic (indie rock, alternative pop, electronic, folk, hip-hop, and metal) and Glasslands' 300-person capacity made it the right size for buzz artists and mid-tier touring acts alike. The room hosted early New York performances by MGMT, Bon Iver, TV on the Radio, Tame Impala, Chairlift, Yeasayer, Blood Orange / Dev Hynes, Caribou, and Future Islands, among many others; weekend late-night slots drew electronic bookings including Jon Hopkins, Mister Saturday Night, Baauer, Omar S., and Sophie. Hu and Baxter held the lease until 2012, when they completed a turn-key sale to Haykal-Manning and Rosenthal, who upgraded the bathrooms, green rooms, and sound system. Glasslands sat at the center of a cluster of independent spaces, 285 KENT and Death By Audio occupied the same warehouse complex; nearby DIY rooms included Secret Project Robot, Monster Island Basement, and the Rock Star Bar. When 285 KENT closed abruptly in early 2014 and Death By Audio announced its own closure, reporting by Gawker and Billboard confirmed what had been circulating as rumor: Vice Media, valued at $2.5 billion and in receipt of a $6.5 million New York City tax incentive to stay in Brooklyn, had struck a deal with the building's owner to clear all tenants and convert the 60,000-square-foot complex at the corner of South 2nd Street and Kent Avenue into its new headquarters. Glasslands announced its closure on October 21, 2014; the final event, 'Lastlands,' was a sold-out New Year's Eve show, and the venue went dark January 1, 2015. The closing was widely read as a case study in gentrification displacing the culture that had drawn developers to the waterfront in the first place; the luxury condos rising on the demolished Domino Sugar Refinery site directly across Kent Avenue were the most visible sign of it. PopGun's Haykal-Manning and Rosenthal, joined by partner Dhruv Chopra, eventually responded by opening Elsewhere (a 24,000-square-foot, five-room venue in Bushwick) which launched on Halloween 2017 and carried forward much of the Glasslands ethos at a larger scale. The Glasslands physical archive (concert posters, setlists, wristbands, promotional materials, and an Akai APC40 controller used post-2009) was donated to the Center for Brooklyn History in 2015 and is held as collection BCMS.0096.

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