Secret Project Robot

Overview

Artist-run nonprofit art space founded on Wythe Avenue in the late 1990s, incubator of the early-2000s Brooklyn indie underground (among the earliest NYC shows for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, TV on the Radio), birthplace of Bushwig drag festival, and one of the longest-surviving DIY institutions in the borough across five successive homes.

Secret Project Robot's lineage begins in 1998 when artist Erik Zajaceskowski rented the back half of a 1,000-square-foot second-floor loft at 401 Wythe Avenue, south Williamsburg (then a raw industrial fringe) and named it Mighty Robot, running it with John 'Fitz' Fitzgerald, Artur Arbit, and Etain Fitzpatrick as the self-styled 'Mighty Robot A/V Squad.' The space hosted some of the earliest New York City shows by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, TV on the Radio, Lightning Bolt, Black Dice, and Oneida, among others, and organized parties in junkyards and at venues like the Polish National Home (later The Warsaw). In 2004, Zajaceskowski and Rachel Nelson (artist, curator, and political economist) co-founded Secret Project Robot as the space's formal successor, envisioning an expanded hybrid: art installation space, experimental music venue, and community hub. The name change coincided with a move into Monster Island, a 15,000-square-foot, three-story Kent Avenue complex also housing Kayrock Screenprinting, Live With Animals gallery, and Todd P's booking operation, where the annual Monster Island Block Party drew roughly 6,000 people. When Monster Island's lease expired in 2011, SPR relocated to 389 Melrose Street in Bushwick, a former auto-body shop whose 5,000-square-foot footprint included a large rear yard, two stages, repurposed metal freight containers used as artist studios, and gallery and studio space shared by a resident group of artists. The Melrose Street era shaped SPR's mature identity: it became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit, opened the Happyfun Hideaway bar as a revenue engine to subsidize free and low-cost programming, and became the founding venue of Bushwig (est. 2012), the annual alternative drag and queer performance festival co-created by Matty 'Horrorchata' Mendoza and Babes Trust. Programming in this period included experimental music (Spiritualized and Laurie Anderson both played Melrose, brought in by Brad Truax and John Colpitts, alongside Eartheater and FlucT) and Butt Magazine's parties. The installation exhibitions with Swoon, Maya Hayuk and Raul De Nieves, Jonathan Toubin's Soul Clap, the Milksop queer dance night and the drawing brunches all date from the earlier Kent Avenue years. A 50% rent increase forced closure of the Melrose Street location in September 2016. In May 2017 SPR reopened at 1186 Broadway in Bed-Stuy/Bushwick, reportedly taking over a former nightclub space, with new partner David Kadden joining Zajaceskowski and Nelson, and a new bar named Cuckoo. This iteration closed in April 2019, short of two years into a ten-year lease, after what the founders' own account calls a social experiment gone awry. In late 2019 the founders encountered their original Wythe Avenue landlord, re-signed a lease, and re-rented 401 Wythe Avenue in March 2020, days before the pandemic shutdown; eight months of self-performed renovation produced a 2,400-square-foot space with artist studios, a ceramic studio, small gallery, and the Cloud Cuckoo Land bar, seating up to 75. As of 2026 SPR remains active at 401 Wythe, operating on the same nonprofit model it has used since the Melrose Street years, at the address where it started. The five-home trajectory—401 Wythe (1998), Monster Island on Kent Avenue (2004), 389 Melrose Street (2011), 1186 Broadway (2017), 401 Wythe again (2020)—is documented across the space's own history pages and local press. The 2016 Melrose Street move followed a 50% rent increase; the 2011 move, by the founders' account, was a choice to follow the scene to Bushwick; the 2019 Broadway closure came less than two years into a ten-year lease. The 501(c)(3) structure, formalized at the Melrose Street location around 2012, created the legal framework for arts-grant eligibility and for the cross-subsidy mechanism in which bar receipts finance low- or no-cost programming, linking the club's commercial operation directly to its arts mission. Bushwig, the annual drag and queer performance festival co-created at SPR in 2012, has continued across venues and producers beyond the SPR space itself, establishing an institutional life independent of any fixed address. The return to 401 Wythe followed a chance encounter with the original Mighty Robot landlord in December 2019, when the space happened to be vacant.