Dustin Yellin

Dustin Yellin is an artist who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the founder and director of Pioneer Works, a multidisciplinary cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn that builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world.

In tandem with his institution-building social practice, Yellin’s artwork makes the hidden forces of nature and commerce legible. Drawing on both modernism, and the sacral tradition of Hinterglas painting, Yellin primarily works through a unique form of 3-dimensional photomontage, in which paint and images clipped from various print media are embedded within laminated glass sheets to form grand pictographic allegories, which the artist calls “frozen cinema.”

These totemic and kaleidoscopic works often plumb the history and fate of human consciousness within the Anthropocene. Returning to Pioneer Works, Yellin’s twin practice can be seen as fostering a prescriptive institute on the one hand, while also running a descriptive artist’s studio on the other.

His work has been exhibited at Amorepacific Museum, Brooklyn Museum, City Museum, Colección Solo, Corning Museum of Glass, The Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Museo Del Palacio de Bellas Artes, SCAD Museum of Art, Tacoma Museum, and with Creative Time, amongst many others. Yellin is often featured in diverse media ranging from the New York Times, to Artforum, Vanity Fair, and TED. He holds an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the Savannah College of Art and Design.