The Museum of Pizza Just Might Be Brooklyn’s Next Big Art Destination
The pop-up exhibition features pizza-centric installations by a number of contemporary artists
Following a summer filled with experiential exhibits, another soon-to-be blockbuster pop-up is set to open in New York this weekend. Dubbed the Museum of Pizza, this new exhibition is billed as “equal parts Instagram fun house and science museum.”
Each room is a pizza-inspired immersive commission by emerging and established contemporary artists. These spaces include a pizza “beach” by Adam Green, a zine-inspired pizza reading room by Devin Troy Strother and Yuri Ogita of Coloured Publishing, a fluorescent blacklight pizza vortex by Signe Pierce and Emma Stern, and “Psychedelic Pizza Parlor,” a group show curated by RJ Supa.
There will be also be a pop-up slice shop, a selection from the largest collection of pizza boxes in the world, and even an interactive pizza video game. A portion of each ticket sold at the museum will be donated to provide a meal for a family in need.
“We wanted to create a space where everyone could come learn about pizza and experience it and think about it in a way that they haven’t before,” Kareem Rahma, who created the museum through his media company Nameless Network, tells Galerie.
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When thinking about what a museum like this would look like, Rahma looked to his own favorite art museums, citing the New Museum as an influence. “It was really a desire to see artists create experiences that are larger than life and are all celebrating a singular entity,” he says. “I want people to walk away with a new expectation of what it means to be a museum as well as what it means to be an experiential event. The way that we’re doing this is such a hybrid of those two things.”
Rahma and his team let the artists involved in the pop-up do mostly whatever they came up with, only interjecting to say yes or no to an idea.
An important aspect to Rahma was that the event would come to life in a space that legitimately felt like a museum. “When you go to museums, part of the ambiance is being in these huge spaces that you normally wouldn’t be in,” he explains. “I didn’t want it to feel like it was in a strip mall. I wanted this to feel like you were in a grand space.”
This led them to look for a space in Brooklyn, eventually landing on the William Vale, a five-star, 23-story hotel in Williamsburg, a space Rahma calls “epic.”
“We’re not the first to do it, but we’re the first to make it happen like this,” Rahma says of the museum. “It’s actually a museum that’s filled with contemporary artists and really forward-thinking, cutting-edge art, but at the same time it is a place where you can get the Instagram photos that you want to get, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It’s the way the world is moving.”