After Slashing Budget, New York’s Shed Searches for Way Forward

(Bloomberg) -- When the Shed was inaugurated in April 2019, it was designed as an unusual sort of arts organization.

Unlike a museum, or Broadway theater, the Shed wasn’t created for one purpose. It was built to present anything and everything. Its mission was accordingly ambitious: “You have an opportunity here to do something no one has done,” its artistic director Alex Poots told Bloomberg Pursuits in an interview before the Shed opened. “No one has brought performing arts, visual arts, and pop culture together under one roof.”

There was an added twist. The Shed wouldn’t repurpose touring exhibitions, performances, or plays. It would commission them, meaning that it would not just be a venue. It would also, at least in theory, be a cultural force—a patron to artists in New York and across the globe. “We [will] produce across art forms,” Poots said.

It was a grand plan set in a lavish, $475 million building, located in the heart of the massive development known as Hudson Yards.

Like the Shed, Related and Oxford Properties’ $25 billion planned complex of malls, schools, office buildings, and luxury towers on the far West Side of Manhattan was supposed to be both a part of the city (one of its taglines is “New York’s next great neighborhood”) and, as a self-contained one-stop destination, apart. (Another tagline is “a city within a city.”)

A Different City

Now Neiman Marcus, the flagship of the mall at Hudson Yards, is bankrupt, and the rest of the mall, including its restaurants, is still closed. The development’s condominium sales, which relied heavily on foreign buyers, have sputtered, reports the New York Times.

The Shed, reeling from Covid-related cancellations, has slashed its budget, from $46 million to $26 million, for the 2020 fiscal year ending Dec. 31. It has laid off 28 of 107 employees, 26% of its staff. More than 80 hourly employees have been furloughed.

“Every department had cuts” to staff, Poots says. “We’re not transforming the Shed into something different; it still needs marketing and programming and production departments. But it needs less of all of those because we’re doing less.”

Facing a straitened budget, reduced manpower, and ongoing uncertainty about when performances can resume, the Shed’s unique commissioning structure, once an asset, could become a liability. Unlike the Metropolitan Opera, which can simply unpack an old production of Rigoletto and call in its furloughed orchestra, staff, and singers, the Shed—at least in theory—must start from scratch every time. 

That clean slate was, for many artists at the beginning, an almost unbelievable stroke of good fortune. “One of the Shed's missions is to add to the canon of art forms and to help artists realize new projects," Poots says.

But what is good for artists isn't necessarily good for arts organizations.

“If you have a fixed cost of an orchestra or a chorus—and they’re maintained, or you keep a relationship with them—when the world opens up, you don’t have to rebuild a show,” says Douglas Clayton, a senior vice president at Arts Consulting Group. “But if you let all your musicians go and they have to find another way to eat for 15 months, then you have to rebuild. And that’s what everyone’s trying to avoid.”

But Poots says that the Shed’s unique model is an asset. “No one comes out of this without a lot of pain,” he says, “but our commissioning model, and the fact that we’re a new and adaptable team, means that the Shed is able to pivot.” Yes, other organizations have orchestras they can call up, he continues, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. “It’s not like there’s an orchestra or an [art] collection we have to use,” he says. “We’re very nimble, in a way.”

A New Direction

The Shed, Poots says, might not reopen in full force until fall 2021. In the interim, he says there’s a lot that can be produced.

“I think we’ll be able to do recital-type things, and monologues, if we get approvals,” Poots says. “Let’s say we’re doing a performance with Igor Levit,” a German pianist whom Poots, in his former role as artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, commissioned to perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations as restaged by performance artist Marina Abramovic. “There’s nothing in the rules that says it’s any more challenging than museums reopening in August.”

The massive McCourt Theater, which seats more than 1,200 people, might be able to sit 300 people, all six feet apart. “It has three sets of fire exit doors that go straight onto the plaza,” Poots says. “We could use those as three entry points, so there’s no corridor, no escalator” where social distancing would be impossible.

The point, he says, is that “you can do some ambitious works with a single person onstage. They don’t need to have scale, but they can have a transformational quality.” Revenue from ticket sales, he says, is a secondary concern. “Half our audience last year came to the Shed for free," he says. "The barometer for the Shed's success is not on dollar-ticket sales.”

Then there’s the Shed’s exhibition spaces to consider.

Poots says he’s optimistic the Shed will be able to show a new piece of video art by artist Howardena Pindell this Fall. Titled Rope/Fire/Water, the work, which will debut in a solo exhibition, is a history of lynchings and racist attacks. The work will be screened, Poots hopes, in the Shed’s Level 2 Gallery and be accompanied by a pair of Pindell's new, large-scale paintings “related to global atrocities of imperialism and white supremacy,” alongside several of Pindell’s abstract paintings.

“When I met her three and a half years ago, she said, ‘No one seems to want this piece,’” Poots says. “We said that we’d love to commission it.”

Part of his optimism stems, Poots says, from the support of his board, which is chaired by Dan Doctoroff, former chief executive officer of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. Mike Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg LP, donated $75 million to the Shed through Bloomberg Philanthropies.

“Doctoroff and our board and our ‘angels,’ I call them, have worked miracles in the last few months to create and help the survival of the Shed through this period of 18 to 24 months,” Poots says.

The board, he continues, has covered “a significant chunk” of the Shed’s budget this year. The rest could come from “demand to rent out our facility. We have the top floor, the Tisch Skylights, which we could rent out every day of the week,” Poots says. (A spokesperson for the Shed clarified that the space rents from the “low-to-mid five figures” per day.) 

Still, Poots acknowledges a bumpy road to recovery.

“It’s painful, and we’re all hurting, because we had to make some really awful decisions,” he says.

“Also, you have to adapt to the new world that’s coming, and you have to embrace it. You can’t pray for a return to normality, because it’s just not going to happen. That’s not how progress and history have unfolded.”

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