Founded in 2006, the Silent Barn Collective beat off the forces of capitalism and burglary and fire and hierarchical management to offer all-ages shows in Bushwick for over a decade. On Sunday night, Last Rites were performed: reunited bands and resident DJs performed to a packed house in the art space's 603 Bushwick Avenue home, as residents moved out from their apartments in the building's upstairs floors. "Despite the incredible support we have received from our community," a message on the Barn's website explains, "the financial and functional challenges of running a space on this scale have created an unsustainable environment with no realistic way forward."
On Sunday, in a windowless hallway of a back closet endearingly known by the collective as The Netherlands, I spoke with founding members, residents, architects, lawyers, artists and others within the sprawling network of people who have been involved with Silent Barn over the years. All were proud of what the collective had accomplished, thankful for their involvement, and emphasized they could not speak to more than their own role in something which—everyone I spoke with expressed—was far greater than any one member.
Kunal Gupta, founding member: I believe the old Silent Barn started when the band Skeleton started a recording studio in Ridgewood and they just started doing events, and then I moved in, and so did the current group of five founders of the space. Around 2009, I think as a joke, we were like, What if we did shows all of these days on the calendar? And then we just decided as a joke, in July 2010, to try [to have shows every day of] July.
So all of July, you come home at 6 p.m., you have to move all of your private possessions from the show space and your life will be back to normal in the morning. And we never stopped that joke: Since July 2010 there’s been at least one show every day since then, or on average. Except for the time we didn’t have a stage for a year. It started as a joke, but it wasn’t really a joke, it was, How much of this can we do? A three-story building is about the max and we almost did that too.
One of the principals at that time was, I think this was a key thing, we would have two spaces in the old Silent Barn and we would try to book different acts at the same time. There’s a homeless advocacy group that would be doing an event in the basement, and upstairs a noise festival or party. We would try to have these two different groups meet up, run events in the same building, with a hallway that throws them into their different paths. That was the whole point of Silent Barn. When we were looking for a new space, we were like, How do we create this collision?
Joe Ahearn, founding member: Silent Barn had two primary phases, although there are lots of different sub phases. Silent Barn started as a group of people who were living together in a warehouse and were doing shows in their living room with really no regard for future or sustainability or anything other than radical intimacy in that we really wanted you to feel like you were coming into our living room. We wanted to invite strangers to our home, we wanted to perform for them, and make food for them—the fact that it was all happening in our home was super key.
When we moved from that space, we started this crowdfunding campaign, and then everybody who had ever stayed on our couch gave us $5 or more, and that totally changed the accountability of the project in a really radical way, because suddenly it became, “ok, there’s this massive community that is very real and tangible, how are we going to acknowledge them, how are we going to leverage this momentum?” That was right when Occupy was starting. There were a lot of people learning from these working group structures. We were very inspired by that and we decided to pursue this non-hierarchical structure. We realized we were going to need a much bigger building than we had ever imagined and then we ended up getting a building even bigger than that. And we operated with a lot of the same structures we had observed from Occupy Wall Street.
(Courtesy Stephanie Griffin)
I think that all DIY art spaces need to think deeply about the accountability of how they impact the city around them and recognize that they are going to do a lot of things that inspire people but also that there are so many ways in which simply thinking about what you’re doing aspirationally as opposed to what you’re going to accomplish is two totally separate things and I think that, hope that, Silent Barn inspires people to think about that as expansively as they possibly can. That they think really, really big. Because a lot of Silent Barn was just about trying things on as extreme a scale as things could be imagined and making a lot of mistakes along the way but that still ultimately changes how people see the city around them. And I think that’s still as possible now as it ever was.
I don’t think people should take from Silent Barn closing that this isn’t possible. It totally is. Silent Barn got where it is because of a lot of really smart and talented people, and a lot of luck, and a lot of privilege from those involved and I hope that other people will take what we learned and do something even better. We got lots more shit to do.
There’s an ocean of memories, of things that have happened in this building.
G. Lucas Crane, founding member: I don’t have all of the stories, and no one can. But to know that deeply and distinctly is an important part of a project like this. It’s not just your experience, it does not have one set narrative ever, and will never. I am the person who’s been involved in this project the longest who’s still involved now and yet at the same time I don’t feel like I am a narrator of this story, because the whole point of this project was full immersion in interlaced people’s stories, distinct artists working in the meaning of performance and all of the intense upkeep and love that it takes to make something like that in America, which is a blatantly hostile environment for anything that’s not commercialized.
The ending of this place, people are like, this is very sad, and I’m like, this is actually on our own terms this time, whereas last time people were just running down the street with their cats in their arms, and then I lost all of my possessions. And it was a complete crater. Which is a very fitting end, honestly, a very American end, to what I consider that era of DIY apocalypse thinking. You keep it secret, you keep it safe. This was distinctly trying to avoid that, to be above board in the ways we needed to be but the same spirit of the project from where we came from.
The reason it’s closing now, in this degree, is that we’d have to keep completely change how the thing worked and was funded or something, and it can’t be said more: this kind of shit takes so much underappreciated, completely thankless work, and constant, hellish, janitorial services that it’s, the more, my entire experience in this project, it’s just unbelievably galling that there’s no culture for distinctly non commercial art in this country. New York City is an extremely harsh environment to do something like this.
Claire Wood, architect: When they got this building, there was a lot of discussion about what it could be used for and how it could be used legally. The last Silent Barn project on Wyckoff got shut down—it was a warehouse space, a one-story space that had a few rooms that they used as bedrooms, and a bathroom and essentially the living space of it was show space. They were like, well, how do we make this legit? I’m an architect so I tried to make it so that the fire chief didn’t shut it down immediately.
I feel like it’s a bit of a self-centered, egocentric thing to believe that this is an extremely important scene, or an extremely important project, but I do really feel like at the outset all the people involved tried to do something that was basically impossible in that there was not a good financial success story model to run off. The other part of it was that there was this idea of a collective governance structure that allowed a collective voice and somehow the conflict of being in the capitalist capital of the world, let’s say, and trying to do this very socialist activity here, didn’t quite bear successful long-living fruits. But at the same time I think it was a really important project in that it attempted that aspiration.
I think there’s a next generation. The spirit of what we were trying to do, which is basically make culture with zero dollars—that impulse is still alive. I guess the inspiration for keeping Silent Barn going was trying to make that available for other spaces. Doing it to be the test case, to test all these things that, oh, maybe we can get away with this, maybe we can do it this way, how do we get around this challenge that usually people just throw money at and fix.
(Edwina Hay)
Neon Mashurov, resident and shows manager:I grew up going to Brooklyn DIY spaces and I grew up going to old Silent Barn. When I got here, it started out like all the other DIY spaces but then it evolved. The core group started out with a group of men, which, by the time the second space opened, included women, and grew to include more queer people and people of color.
Some people from those groups and at the intersections of those groups were there from the start but then more came and together put in work to bring in others. I think it’s very much of its time, because it's one of the few spaces that grew towards being representative of communities it was meant to serve, which is something other places are starting to pay attention to, or need to start paying attention to.
The thing that is sad, is, I think if Educated Little Monsters were able to take the space the way they wanted to I think it would’ve been a historical narrative that went correctly. As is, I think that we tried. And that was important. The legacy of it will probably be as a place that prioritized cool weird art, because that’s what a lot of the people [who attended shows here] remember it for, but also I heard that this is one of the biggest collectives in the States going right now. It’s actually too big, which is partially why it didn’t work, but that is an important narrative to be a part of. I hope the legacy is mostly one of trying.
I am kind of a quiet person but I remember one time I was working a show that sold out at 4 p.m., and I had to spend the next 8 hours telling like 300 people that it was sold out. I think working here taught me how to boss up in a lot of ways. It really illuminated the degree to which I currently advocate for myself and other people and how that can be furthered. In a structure like this, you have an amount of agency, but not complete agency—I think it really gave me space to witness and negotiate with that.
I don’t think it’s a perfect horizontal collective because hierarchy seeps in, and I think one of the things the space made me really aware of is how hyper-vigilant you have to be. When I came here I saw that everyone has the best intentions but also scarcity is a thing and capitalism is a thing and power is a thing and you don’t even notice how these things move through you subconsciously. It’s like you're actively holding open a door that wants to close.
Michael Lawrence, lawyer: Five years ago I sent an email to the people involved in the space, asked them if they needed any help. They had just gotten $40,000 from a Kickstarter and they were having legal issues before that. The space seemed like a great opportunity to help a cause I had gained a lot from over the course of my life.
There’s just so many different people with expertise here. It’s sad that the place is closing but the good thing about it is we all have a good working relationship, we all kind of worked with each other on different projects, so that’s sort of one thing that’s making it not as painful to like leave the space, because I know I’ll still have relationships with a lot of people here, and I’ll still see a lot of them at shows.
Nat Roe, founding member: For me, the music and the art at Silent Barn were most importantly a vehicle for a community experiment—we explored and pushed the boundaries of how friends, individuals and groups can change each other's lives and this city. I am just one person who can say that my life's meaning is permanently changed by the many brilliant artists that gave so much heart to Silent Barn.
Lorissa Rinehart, founding member: The motto of Silent Barn is “Silent Barn Is People”. You don’t want to be the person who wears the t-shirt of the band to the show of the band but this shirt [gestures at her shirt] is stained with sweat and blood and tears and paint and [ceiling] stain. I think the legacy of the space is the people who go on, and who were given the opportunity to experiment and try and find out who they were. For me personally, when we started Silent Barn, my life was not in a good space and this community, particularly the community of women, really allowed me to build a platform to launch my life. And I would not be where I am. Basically, I’m living my best life, and the foundation of that was built here. The legacy is the people. The people here are all extraordinary, but it was the community that allowed them to grow into the people they’ve now become.
Check in on withfriends and Educated Little Monsters for some of Silent Barn members' new projects.
