A Williamsburg Bank Gets a Bushwick-Style Gallery

“I like Brooklyn because I have the perspective of Manhattan without the inconvenience of it. Without the rush. I can see its beauty but I don’t have to cross the bridge,” says Santiago, the owner of a new gallery space that just opened in the lower level of the opulent Williamsburg Savings Bank, located under the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn. “Many of my artists for this show live in Brooklyn, and it has been a pleasure having the gallery close where they live.”

We’ve become pretty accustomed to this sentiment in the past years with Brooklyn becoming the home of so many creatives and creative movements, but Santiago isn't just any young gallerist living in Brooklyn—Santiago is a Guggenheim.

Santiago Rumney Guggenheim, the great grandson of Peggy Guggenheim and a member of art world nobility that is rarely associated with the Brooklyn art scene, is bridging the gap between the boroughs and the art world hierarchy. The Rumney Guggenheim gallery is an infiltration into high society in itself, bringing a collection of young, emerging artists into the untouchable luxury of the renovated 1875 bank, which is now an event space called Weylin B. Seymour's. "I see this gallery as operating in between the respective art scenes of Manhattan and Bushwick, in both location and practice. I want to show all types of artists, in many mediums, so that each show will be very different.”

Olivia Steele, Photo by Mercedes Noriega

The inaugural exhibition, Some Place Like Home, is a group show that is as diverse in the mediums shown as the artists involved, Rumney Guggenheim curating a collection of work that coaxes audience participation in a way that is far from the customary white wall gallery style programing. At the gallery opening, Olek’s hand-crocheted artworks covered live human models, projected with video imaging from Michelle P. Dodson. Paintings and wheatpastings from Swoon were mounted on strange materials, like a broken fence and old door, next to a paint can installation by Aiko, while a giant mural by Boxhead took over the wall outside the lavish building. Olivia Steele’s neon phrases lurk around the gallery as well as in a glistening, intricately restored vault, truly linking the past with the present.

A giant reflective house made by Moral Turgeman, stationed under the towering domed ceilings on the night of the opening, invited guests to crawl inside on their hand and knees to experience an interactive sound installation in collaboration with Joe McKey. Once inside the house, surrounded by mirrors and plush white couches, large headphones play an encapsulating blending of two different sound frequencies. When paired the sounds create a third “binaural beat” in your brain that generates a calming, hypnotic feeling, perhaps of home. The house is a surrealy futuristic microcosm inside the old grandeur of the historic bank, but with its interactive elements and seamless blending of mediums, it seems to represent Rumney Guggenheim’s vision perfectly.

“I want this space to been seen as somewhere that promotes culture. I want to bring art to the local people, and open it up to the community,” he says, mentioning future plans for pop-ups, dinners, kid’s days, and more unconventional programing that the gallery will bring to the community. The space, as well as the works shown, are non-discriminatively inviting, supplying enough structure and class for the Manhattan art crowd, and enough grit and experimentation for those more comfortable in a Bushwick basement gallery. “We hope to create a space that is welcoming and consistently surprising,” Rumney Guggenheim says. But if you can get two disparagingly opposite New York communities to both feel welcome in one space, well, that seems like a pretty surprising success.

Rumney Guggenheim opened on October 8, 2015. Click here to sign up for the newsletter.

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