Building (for) the Arts in NYC

 Image 1. The Shed. Photograph by Bas van Heur, 2025.

Photos are selective: they frame complex realities by foregrounding certain aspects while backgrounding others, which raises questions about photography’s capacity to capture urban phenomena in a holistic manner. During my fieldwork in New York–part of a longer sabbatical investigating how philanthropic and public funding shapes arts organizations globally–I found myself repeatedly drawn to photographs of arts organization buildings, particularly those associated with new constructions, major expansions, or adaptive reuse.

 

This focus on buildings had already emerged during the desk research I conducted in Brussels prior to my research stay. Across a range of media sources on arts funding in New York, from general-interest journalism to specialist publications, arts buildings repeatedly appeared as focal points. And not just any buildings, but high-profile infrastructures designed by ‘starchitects’, such as the roughly US$500 million Perelman Performing Arts Center in the World Trade Center district, designed by Joshua Ramus’ REX, or the similarly expensive Shed in Hudson Yards, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (see image 1).

 

This bias reinforces a familiar focus on large-scale cultural, ‘spectacular’ projects, from Guggenheim Bilbao and its ‘Bilbao effect’ to broader urban development strategies that mobilize cultural anchor institutions for place branding.

 

Even from a distance—and through closer reading of press releases, journalistic articles, and organizational websites—it was possible to nuance this perspective. Specialist arts journalism, in particular, pays attention to a much wider range of arts spaces. Still, it was only once I arrived in New York and began visiting these sites that my perspective shifted more fundamentally. Fieldwork, first of all, allows for the debunking of mainstream architectural photography. The Shed, for instance, turned out to be little more than, well, a massive shed, whose much-publicized kinetic shell never seems to move. Fieldwork also helps to situate even ‘starchitect’-designed buildings. Visiting the Herzog & de Meuron–designed Powerhouse Arts in Brooklyn, for example, allowed me to experience its hidden location behind a CubeSmart self-storage facility, but also its ambition to keep fabrication in the city through high-quality workshops for printmaking, ceramics, and public art (see image 2).

 

 Image 2. Powerhouse Arts. Photograph by Bas van Heur, 2025

 

 

Similarly, the recently reopened Studio Museum in Harlem (see image 3) at first glance fits a familiar global model of museum development: commission a renowned architect—here Adjaye Associates—to design a building that gestures toward the local urban fabric, yet is instantly legible as a contemporary museum for citywide and international visitors. But it was only through visiting the space, and situating it more firmly within its immediate context on Harlem’s 125th Street, that I began to grasp the other side of the coin. Black cultural institutions have long been forced to operate with limited and precarious resources, and the Studio Museum’s redevelopment can also be read as a justified claim to parity with institutions such as the Whitney or MoMA—that is, as a claim to institutional permanence.

 

 Image 3. Studio Museum in Harlem. Photograph by Bas van Heur, 2025.

 

Addressing the bias toward ‘big buildings by major architects’ required a more conscious backgrounding of photography to make room for other kinds of empirical material. While on-the-ground fieldwork helped situate buildings and their images in urban space, it proved insufficient on its own. Like other urban researchers, I also had to wade into the legal and zoning logics that structure spatial planning in New York. Policy and planning documents revealed various mixed-use developments that combine housing, retail, and arts spaces. One example is the Miramar complex in Inwood, northern Manhattan, which will house The People’s Theatre: Centro Cultural Immigrante (see image 4). Enabled by the 2018 Inwood rezoning, the project includes 40 per cent ‘affordable’ housing—closer to 15 per cent if affordability is understood in low-income terms—and draws on substantial public and philanthropic funding, with the theatre owning its own space. This context highlights a key ambivalence for arts organizations: such developments create rare opportunities to secure high-quality, long-term space, yet they also tie cultural infrastructure to a developer-driven logic in which rezoning facilitates speculative land acquisition and the expansion of market-rate housing.

 

Image 4. Miramar complex and future site of The People’s Theatre. Photograph by Bas van Heur, 2025

 

Finally, understanding the material and organizational form of arts institutions also benefits from a 'follow the money’ approach, drawing on data sources less familiar to many urban researchers. Beyond annual reports and audits, this meant working through large datasets–such as the Foundation Directory to trace philanthropic funding streams or the NYC Checkbook database to track funding distributed by the Department of Cultural Affairs. Unsurprisingly, the most heavily funded organizations are also highly visible institutions such as The Shed, the Whitney, or the New York City Ballet.. Moving further down the lists, however, brings into view organizations more likely to be backgrounded by both general-interest media and architectural journalism. Combined with interviews, this analysis offered key insights into the capital projects of smaller organizations such as 651 Arts, ABC No Rio, the Flea Theater, ISSUE Project Room, and Wild Project, adding another layer to how capital funding for the arts shapes the built environment and uneven geographies of New York City.