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An Abbreviated History of Two Trees Realty and 22 Boerum Place

In March 2022, Two Trees Management company donated 22 Boerum Place to ISSUE Project Room. The donation formalized ISSUE’s ownership over 22 Boerum after being awarded the space on 20-year, rent free lease by Two Trees Management in 2009. Two Trees Reality itself had acquired 110 Livingston–the building housing 22 Boerum–from the City in 2003 for upwards of $45 million.

The relationship expressed between ISSUE, Two Trees, and the City government within these transactions is illustrative of broader dynamics within urban development and the arts. Coordination between nonprofits and private developers facilitates shifts in public space and renovation of previously underutilized buildings with the city government providing subsidies and tax breaks. The pursuit of economic growth through private industry is taken-for-granted within contemporary urban development. As anthropologist Arturo Escobar argues, development is about establishing certain economic and political processes to manage the economy and cultivating bodies of knowledge to support the same economic and political systems. It is not just that urban development be pursued by large scale developers like Two Trees, but that this approach to development must appear as common sense. This section is an attempt to deconstruct this common sense by demonstrating how empowering Two Trees to make decisions about how neighborhoods develop undermines collective decision making over culture, the economy, and the organization of urban space.

“We do not want a commercial developer deciding what should be done here,” visual artist Doreen Gallo told The New York Times in September 1997 in response to Two Trees Management’s attempts to gain control over state parkland and seven warehouses in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood. Helmed by developer David Walentas, Two Trees had acquired 2.5 million square feet of real estate between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges by the end of the 1990s. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Walentas acquired this land through a mixture of private acquisitions and transfers of city and state owned land to the developer. Walentas identified the waterfront and large loft buildings in DUMBO as raw materials. Through coordinating lobbying campaigns of City and State government, Walentas secured changes in zoning to allow residential development, initiating a shift away from the neighborhood’s roots as a low-cost living and work space for artists towards luxury focused commercial and residential development.

Local residents and artists consistently lobbied against efforts by Walentas and Two Trees to gain more control over the neighborhood. In 1984 and 1999, Walentas submitted proposals to develop the piers and State park surrounding the Bridges, viewing upscaling these areas and constructing condominiums as essential to the economic growth of the area. In both instances, local residents opposed the proposals, noting shifting control of City and State land to private developers represented a threat to democratic neighborhood management. The Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition argued in 1999 that “state would set a terrible precedent” in ceding development to a private company, continuing, “We believe that publicly-owned property should only be developed by a public authority for the public good with input from the community affected.”

While community advocacy successfully blocked the selection of Two Trees to develop state owned park land, the broader scale of Walentas’s holdings in the neighborhood continued to undermine longer-term residents. While in the process of securing rezoning ordinances and converting industrial spaces to residential, Walentas offers artists low-cost and free spaces within his DUMBO holdings to pacify local residents and grow the creative aura surrounding the neighborhood. Walentas’s son, Jed, described the company’s ambitions for DUMBO in 1997: “We’re trying to create a SoHo kind of environment.” As artists attempted to organize to resist Two Trees development, their status as precarious residents of the neighborhood occupying illegally converted lofts undermined their capacity to organize. Geographer Jason Hackworth describes in his book The Neoliberal City how shifts in DUMBO zoning law and increased coordination between City government and Two Trees coincided with more regular visits by city officials to DUMBO loft spaces, generating a fear of retaliation amongst residents. As rezoning allowed Walentas to convert 40 buildings into condominiums and rental apartments throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, local artists and residents of the nearby Farragut housing project feared upscaling of the neighborhood would increase housing and living costs, eventually forcing them to leave the neighborhood.

Walentas’s relationship to arts played a central role in gentrifying DUMBO. The Galapagos Art Space, St. Ann’s Warehouse, and over 1,000 artists received preferential rent from Two Trees in order to render the neighborhood culturally attractive to prospective tenants. As Walentas told The New York Times in 2008, the arts add “value to any neighborhood. People will pay a premium for it.” Artists and art spaces represent an intermediary, second-best option for developers like Walentas as they attract prospective higher rent tenants due to their cultural sway. The goal is not to preserve the artistic community, but to instrumentalize the artistic community to secure higher rent tenants. In this way, the aesthetics of the artistic community serve to erase the deeper working-class and racial history of the neighborhood. In interviews with long term Farragut housing project residents, sociologist David Madden observes how the identification of DUMBO with artists left residents feeling unwelcome within their own neighborhood, quoting one former Farragut resident and community organizer as arguing, “[Dumbo artists] don’t know the history. They don’t know the 1980s, how people struggled…There’s a cognitive amnesia, an amnesia about community, and a bit of racism.” The former resident identifies an ideological gentrification tactic: cultivate public interest in certain aspects of neighborhood life (arts and culture, for example) in order to distract from the working class and racial history of the neighborhood.

Walentas successfully accomplishes this through utilizing his property holdings to elevate arts and culture amenable to his developmental vision. As he states in an oral history prepared for the Voices of Brooklyn: Waterfront series: If you follow the artist they’re probably interesting neighborhoods and buildings, you know. That’s the way SoHo was and NoHo and Dumbo […] It gives an interest, and we like art. We think art’s good for the city. Fortunately Mike Bloomberg and Patty understood that art’s a great tourist attraction. It’s a great, great quality of life thing for people that live here, work here, visit New York. […] And the other thing that is kind of unique [about Dumbo] is because we really control a neighborhood, and it has natural boundaries, nowhere in the city does anybody have that. So we can curate. We’re not going to have tattoo shops. We’re not going to have porno shops. We’re not going to have chain stores. We can curate in a subtle way what happens on the street. And that – and that adds immense value to all my apartments and my office space. So people want to be here, they’ll pay a couple of bucks more rent if they have a good experience on the waterfront and the park and the streets and the retail, and so when you own the whole neighborhood you – you can do that because you’re interested in creating the most value for the whole neighborhood not just for, if.you own one little storefront you don’t really give a shit. You want to get the highest rent, and you don’t care who the fuck it is.

For Walentas, artists are instrumentally valuable in attracting people to the neighborhood to stimulate the local economy. Given that Two Trees controls the neighborhood through owning so much property, the shape of this local economy is decoupled from local decision-making. Commercial properties can be organized by Two Trees for the explicit purpose of increasing the value of their residential and office spaces, meaning attracting businesses that appeal to wealthier prospective tenants. These same businesses are disconnected from the longstanding needs for Farragut residents and working class artists.

Walentas’s image as a patron of the art is a business decision. It is profitable to aestheticize a neighborhood in order to mask the luxury developments serving as the economic engine of the neighborhood. The appearance of the arts is a performance for capital. Madden expands on this idea, arguing “the ideological function of Dumbo” as an artistic haven is “to legitimise the trajectories of the area–to underscore the strategy that privileges luxury housing and cultural industries and sees industrial displacement, local inequality, and the proliferation of spaces for elite consumption as signs of success.”

Walentas art washes his reputation through proximity to the arts. His perceived benevolence through offering low rents and gifting spaces like 22 Boerum theater is a strategy for maintaining a profitable cultural and economic structure within neighborhoods he is invested in. What is 22 Boerum but a value add for Two Trees owned 110 Livingston.

There’s a crassness to reducing 22 Boerum to its value to property. The $3,595 studio and the $4,700 1-bedroom is not ISSUE Project Room’s fault. But I cannot shake the feeling that I am entangled in these exorbitant rents, that my art and labor is being exploited to produce value for Two Trees. How do I make sense of being given a fellowship by ISSUE for proposing to champion New York’s DIY music scene while knowing Two Trees reality is currently developing the Williamsburg waterfront and Domino Sugar Factory, projects that displaced the various DIY venues that existed throughout the 1990s and 2000s along the Williamsburg waterfront?

Entanglement means entering into relations without totally understanding them. Like making art or falling in love, we give ourselves to unknowing. Do I love ISSUE Project Room? No, but the unknowing of what it would mean to immerse myself in the world of this non-profit allowed me to become a more critical artist. Like the lovers who don’t understand what partnership means until immersed within it, I didn’t understand what making political art meant until I was presented with a political problem. Not the abstract politics of urban doom loops and city policy, but the material politics of ISSUE Project Room’s complicity in art washing Two Trees Management.

This relationship between capital and art is the political problem underscoring our censorship at the Gala. Exactly because capital is constantly needed to upkeep the 22 Boerum property and to support ISSUE’s current curatorial approach, speaking out in support of Palestine represents a threat. But a second threat emerges simultaneously: the threat of artists refusing the recognition of art institutions like ISSUE Project Room, refusing to give their art and labor to institutions silent in the face of genocide, refusing to accept non-profit art institutions as platform for advancing cultural and political conversations. This is the threat embodied in realizing, as Steven Salaita notes, that “pursuing access to microphones and New Yorker profiles by subsuming Palestinian liberation to institutions constitutionally hostile to revolutionary politics.”

This is the threat posed by DIY desires.

DIY Desires

Balancing on rock, I leaned over the cold East River and submerged a watercooler tank in the water. I felt the slippery rush running across my fingers. Small waves slid into the lip of the tank, but they’d never be enough to fill the container. In the 3am moonlight, I hovered over the water and thrust my hand and the tank deeper in the water. The container’s glugs complimented my friend’s laughing at the shore. We’d spent summer nights lounging in Transmitter Park’s grass. The waves lapped against the rocks as we exhaled the night. The ringing in our ears from Chaos Computer intermingled with the city’s murmurs and the water’s sighs.

This November night captured a different flow. We’d stumbled over to Transmitter to gather East River water in anticipation of our final program at ISSUE Project Room the next day. The water connected us to the waterfront, to Chaos Computer, to Two Trees’s development schemes, and to ISSUE Project Room. Dancing across my hand, the water embodied all the relations I’d found myself submerged in.

15 hours later, we arrived at 22 Boerum. A tense atmosphere pervaded due to our refusal to participate in the Gala. The discomfort was fuel for our plans for the evening. Our final program combined an installation, panel discussion with artists and organizers in the New York DIY scene, and performances by artist Bk and ANNIHIL. Together, the event explored the limits of non-profit arts organizing and the alternatives embodied in DIY organizing. The intent was not to vilify non-profits or romanticize DIY, but to identify the points of tension, the compromises, and the possibilities.

Our installation approached through examining the relationship between Two Trees and ISSUE in two parts. First, in homage to Haacke’s work, we placed large printouts of the apartments and office buildings available to rent from Two Trees throughout 22 Boerum. Each printout was accompanied by a booklet compiling the primary and secondary sources cited in the above discussion. Audience members were given materials without answers. They were asked to reflect on how the entanglement between property and the arts affects their experience of performances at 22 Boerum. Presented in chronological order, the documents gestured towards a period of time where the DIY spirit of the Brooklyn waterfront artists was disciplined by real estate developers, city government, and arts nonprofits.

In turn, each advertisement of lush apartments and expansive office spaces asked what it was all for. We’d found the empty, underutilized spaces we’d been searching for. They were intertwined with the processes of gentrification that elevated Two Trees to the point where it could give 22 Boerum to ISSUE Project Room.

Deeper into 22 Boerum, our second installation softly glowed. Filled with the East River water, a 20-gallon fish tank stood motionless. A bag containing stones from outside 22 Boerum and my phone was submerged in the tank. A microphone attached to the side of the tank amplified over a small speaker the muffled voice of David Walentas croaking from my phone speakers. I excerpted the above oral history recording and played it on repeat, letting Walentas’s feelings about artists ring out through the East River water. By bringing your ear close to the speaker, you could hear his wandering words pushing through the still tide.

The event began. We greeted the audience and reflected on how evil dentist is a research and performance project. This means we intend to use performance, curation, and writing as means of highlighting and intervening in social, cultural, and political issues. Research is the process of fumbling towards an artistic comment, of searching for solutions when maybe the question isn’t even fully formed, of dreaming. Our three programs were all informed by research on urban development in post-lockdown New York City. We tried to understand what role artists and art organizations should play in shaping urban change. We shared four conclusion:

1) Property Relation. Art cannot be separated from the space in which it is made and performed. From lofts to squats, theaters to basements, the ownership of property shapes what art can be. We believe in collective ownership and management of property. We believe in a world where the decisions about what a neighborhood should be are made by its residents. We believe artists can help facilitate conversations about the city to come, if they let long term residents lead these conversations.

2) The duty of art institutions is to challenge commonplace ideals in service of shifting social, cultural, and political attitudes. We reject the neutrality of the arts and of art institutions, particularly when they launder the reputations of the perpetrators of violence. This was the case with the Sackler family, perpetrators of the Opioid epidemic through Oxycotin, at various museums, and with Warren Kanders, former Whitney board member and owner of Safariland, a manufacturer of law enforcement and military supplies including bulletproof vests, bomb-defusing robots, gun holsters and tear gas. We believe art institutions should make difficult arguments, should force people to reconsider their beliefs, and should push for a more ethical society.

3) Artistic life is split between the freedom of a precarious life doing it yourself and the constraints of a stable life in institutions. There is no space free of moral comprise as both spheres negotiate the contradictions of making art with scare resources. The difference lies in how these resources are distributed and what strings are attached. DIY’s limits can become artistic, social, and political freedom when collaboration and sharing are the norm if artists can find the time and resources to support themselves. Institutional life offers financial freedom at the cost of limitations on speech and expression. Recent instances such as Artforum firing its editor for sharing a letter in solidarity with Palestine, Hoer Radio removing a DJ for wearing a shirt with the word Palestine on it, and Fuse Factory in Ohio rescinding invitations to artists who took part in Palestinian solidarity protests illustrate the chilling ways in which institutions attempt to silence artists. We reject institutions that use the financial precocity of artists to restrict their freedom of expression.

4) In critiquing the current structures of property and power that underlie both the DIY and institutional art worlds, it’s equally important to envision what an ideal system to support the arts would look like. Rather than asking for the bare minimum, we should be ambitious and detailed in our imagination of what the future can hold. This expansiveness of imagination can operate as the foundation on which solidarity that holds people together in dark times can grow and sustain us.

And, with the tension in the room, we proudly said Free Palestine.

The Work of Art

The installations and statement were limited interventions, aimed at highlighting contradictions within how ISSUE presents itself as a transgressive institution for the avant-garde. Artistic intervention requires engaging with limits as the limits of the context in which art is made and shared structure the possibilities of art itself. There’s a distance within political art between ambition and analysis. Ambition compels artists to make sweeping political statements, to present their work as critical of and an attack against the political structures artists oppose. Analysis asks artists to consider their situated position, what social and political structures beyond their control influence the work of art itself.

Ambition without analysis risks making political statements in order to hold the “correct” opinion. Politics becomes a matter of self-branding. Aestheticize the political in order to graft it to one’s identity as an artist. This isn’t necessarily bad as embodying and representing political ambition is central to making political change seductive. If the appeal of this ambition is limited to small communities or scenes, then it can become self-congratulatory. Holding the proper perspective becomes a substitute for political action.

Analysis without ambition risks intellectual self-congratulation. Understanding the constraints and contradictions of a particular social or political organization is not enough to change those structures. This too can become a form of holding the “correct” opinion where one’s analytic skills are elevated as an act of political action or as an excuse from being involved in social movements. Ambition is needed to hold close to the idea that the world will change through collective action.

In bringing together DIY organizers and artists, the third program attempted to synthesize ambition and analysis. The panel highlighted the drive of DIY organizers to create space for artists to make money and share their art within the constraints of New York real estate. It took seriously the idea that DIY spaces are different organizations of social, artistic, economic, and political life, where the kernel of a different society may exist even if the growth of this different society is constantly stamped out by the police, real estate companies, and the state. Bk’s performance dwelled on the ecstasy and excess of building these spaces as growing waves of noise and words accompanied a collapsing sculpture of dirt, barbed wire, and wood. Building is also a process of destroying where something must be demolished to open the soil for something new to grow. ANNIHIL’s performance moved between ambient waves of synthesizers and vocals and dance rhythms, culminating in ANNIHIL slashing his shirt with a boxcutter. The body lost in the play of sound, pushing outward into new ways of living within the world.

As the performance finished, I gathered the materials from installation and left Boerum. I felt a sense of accomplishment and a sense of failure. Mixed emotions often accompany my participation in music and art scenes. Maybe I’m looking for politics in the wrong places; maybe I’m not able to enjoy the work of art itself enough; maybe I’m too lost in analysis or too caught up in my own ambition.

Uncomfortable Discomforts

It has taken me a long time to finish and post this final section. In part, I feel haunted by the question “what is to be done?” The machinations of the art world in New York City seem trivial in the broader context of colonial violence, imperial conflict, and genocide. Part of my desire in writing this series is to demystify the curatorial and artistic process, to demonstrate how I think about political interventions through art.

At the same time, I am skeptical that works of art will liberate us. Art tends toward individualism. The art world elevates the solipsistic artistic genius; the work of making art is isolating; the presentation of art often delinks the work of art from the community in which it was developed. How can artists confront this individualization?

Within experimental music and art scenes, we’re quick to embrace comfortable discomforts. These are the ways of experiencing art that challenge us, but only within the boundaries of enjoyable transgression. After going to enough punk and noise shows, you understand the gestures of abrasiveness, anticipate the drama, and are comforted by it even if it is still outside the bounds of most people’s taste. There’s something about the political character of experimental music and art that is lost when we embrace the comfortable discomforts. The transgressive potential is colonized by the world as it exists, pleasure in discomfort becoming another way in which we cope with deteriorating political and social circumstances.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have fun, but to suggest a dose of skepticism surrounding the appeal of comfortable discomforts. At a moment in which the desire of self-expression and community funnels people into subcultures and niche aesthetic interests, we should be wary of whether we’re finding comrades or cellmates. An ideal cellmate is a comrade, but I’d rather not be in prison at all.

I make art that forces audiences to sit with uncomfortable discomfort. It asks participants to dwell in the sourness of pleasure. I’m interested in how that which we desire can be turned against us, harnessed into another technique of control and domination. I believe this work is important because in understanding the constraints and limits that structure desire itself (the desire to make art, the desire for community, the desire to be understood) we can liberate our pleasure. I’m not interested in moral purity (art as the proper political statement) or political dogmatism (art as effective propaganda), but experiences that make us dwell in the uncomfortable discomforts of our desires.

What would I want done with ISSUE Project Room? In December, I circulated a letter amongst previous curatorial fellows calling for ISSUE Project Room to take the following actions: 1) A public statement to be released via ISSUE Project Room’s website, social media, and email list opposing the genocide, calling for an immediate end to Israeli military activity in Palestine, and supporting Palestinian sovereignty. 2) Commitment to the international call for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions as outlined by the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)”. 3) The use of ISSUE’s social media platform to highlight Palestinian artists within ISSUE’s archive.
4) The inclusion of Palestinian artists, curators, poets, and thinkers within ISSUE Project Room’s 2024 programming and beyond. In response, the board committed to the following changes: 1) We’ve updated our website to include a more expansive statement that includes an affirmation of support for artists engaged in activism, advocacy, and political speech. Suzanne Fiol’s embrace of experimental musics in New York City in the face of gentrification-caused venue closures was a highly political act; she wanted a space where underrepresented and alternative artistic voices were heard, and we are unequivocally committed to ensuring that our artist’s practices are supported without hindrance or censorship. 2) We have added a Lenapehoking land acknowledgement to the website, in recognition of indigenous land rights in the United States and the continuing travesty around indigenous exclusion and erasure in this country; we look forward to continuing our support of artists from indigenous communities and finding ways to expand that aspect of our programming to ensure that indigeneity and decoloniality are welcomed as necessary parts of the conversations our artists have every day. We are also engaging with the Lenape Center on their living land acknowledgement workshop in furtherance of this work. 3) As announced in our Winter Season welcome email from today, we have added three artists as new members of ISSUE’s Artistic Advisory Council: artist Pamela Z, as well as two former Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellows: Ted Kerr and Leyya Mona Tawil; we look forward to working with them in depth on ways in which we can continue to create programming that engages diverse communities and amplifies voices that are threatened by political censorship, cultural bias, genocide, and racism worldwide. 4) We will continue to expand ISSUE’s Board of Directors to bring in diverse voices that accurately represent the broad range of stakeholders who find value in our support of experimental practices performance. As you know, our two most recent Board members (Richard Kamerman and Charmaine Lee) are themselves members of our community, and we look forward to bringing in more directors in the coming year.

While all worthwhile changes, ISSUE continues to evade confronting the question genocide in Gaza. In response to our call for ISSUE to commit to PACBI, the board argues “that the organization should not sign on to cultural boycotts or take any activity that preempts dialogue among our community of stakeholders.” The board suggests that the work of highlighting “violence, cultural erasure, and genocide” can be undertaken by individual artists and curators with ISSUE offering “a safe and open platform for this work.”

Given the censorship I faced and the cold reception of the third program by some at ISSUE, I disagree with the characterization of ISSUE as a “safe and open platform.” I do not think a space can be “safe and open” when it refused to condemn an ongoing genocide. The response uses diversity and inclusion as a means of avoiding reflecting on complicity with the violence. Particularly worrisome is how the land acknowledge uses one genocide (Native American) as a means of avoiding engaging with another (Palestinian). This reflect broader trends in the art world where institutions represent themselves as innocent through acts of inclusion that fail to meaningfully confront how art institutions are supported by racial violence and capitalism. Individual artists and curators will have to decide for themselves if the platform ISSUE offers is worth it. I will not be working with ISSUE Project Room again as the cowardice surrounding their attitude towards the genocide of the Palestinian people and PACBI is not in line with my values.

The broader question I’m interested in is how we as artists move beyond individual acts of resistance against institutions contrary to our values. What forms of collective action can be taken to criticize institutions and deconstruct the need we have for them?

So, yes, I will be boycotting ISSUE, but what will we do together?