The Shed

Alex Poots is the founding chief executive and artistic director of the Shed. He is a delightful human being and intensely passionate about the arts. He lives, breathes, sleeps and thinks about how to bring every practice of art to the public in cutting edge ways to engage audiences and excite the artist. A rare person who the Shed and NYC is lucky to have.

The Shed was built to be a flexible building where music, plays, art installations, and any kind of performance could be shown. Currently, there are two installations and a concert performance. The performance is a new interpretation of Verdi’s Requiem by conductor Teodor Currentzis with a 100-member orchestra and 80-member chorus and 4 opera singers. In the background, above the stage, there is video artwork from the late Jonas Mekas. It is about the life of biological natural resources and how climate change could kill it. It is quite brilliant.

One of the installations Agnes Denes, Absolutes and Intermediates. A Hungarian concept artist whose work is broad including brilliant breathtaking environmental installations. This is the architecture rendering to tree mountain. She created a time capsule that must outlive us by replanting for the future. Twelves years later, there were 11,000 trees planted by 11,000 people in Finland. Since its completion in 1966, the Government has legally protected this mountain for the next 400 years. It is epic.

The Wheatfield installation took place in 1982 where she planted two acres of wheat two blocks from Wall Street on landfill that harvested 1000 pounds of healthy wheat. That area is now Battery Park City. She discusses it in a video about how quickly animals came such as preying mantis. Here is Agnes in the wheatfield.

There is a room of pyramids. This large pyramid was commissioned for the Shed. It made of 6000 composable 3-D printed bricks.

These four pyramids are all filled with different materials. The first is made of mirror, the second is filled with crude oil, the third is filled with water from the Hudson River that has a living microcosm growing in there and the fourth is NYC tap water (thankfully nothing growth in there).

Manual Override is the other installation. Lynn Hershman’s electronic diaries that sent her on a technological journey. The exploration of identity, surveillance and the use of media as a tool for censorship and political repression is bound to make anyone freak.

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