An Art Hub Built on Friendship

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“It has really been a coming together of friends,” says Irene Mei Zhi Shum ’93, as she stands on the first floor of the Williamsburg Biannual (WB), an expansive, new arts organization that opened last September.

Sitting catty-corner to the iconic Domino Sugar Refinery building on Brooklyn’s waterfront, the artist-centric space is the brainchild of Shum, WB’s founding vice president, and four friends — Tom Morbitzer, Goil Amornvivat, Divya Mahindra, and Jorge A. Zapata — the founding board members. It came to fruition thanks to a touch of serendipity and, above all, a shared love for New York City’s diverse and vibrant artist community.

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Shum, an art world veteran, has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, where she was the inaugural curator. In 2020, after working in Houston as the associate curator of contemporary art at the Menil Collection, she returned to the East Coast just as the pandemic hit, jolting the city’s artists and cultural institutions. She hadn’t considered opening her own organization until Amornvivat mentioned that Zapata, an architect, had his own gallery space, which he’d designed. Shum made plans to check it out. 

“I really thought it would be something more raw, like a garage,” recalls Shum.

Instead, she found a capacious, light-filled space with double-height galleries, an open auditorium and seating area, a black box theatre for music and video installations, and a private outdoor area. Zapata, who is the founding principal of JAZ Architect, purchased the 10,000-square-foot building in 2011 and undertook an extensive adaptive reuse project, overhauling the 1920s warehouse with the intention of turning it into a community arts center. 

“We were interested in these more monographic shows, where you can really understand the creative process of an artist … the idea of having time to come back and look again and reconsider artwork,” says Shum. 

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They decided to mount two exhibitions a year, focusing either on a single artist’s body of work or a small group show. The name, Williamsburg Biannual, Shum explains, “is a little playful interpretation of the biennial,” such as the ones hosted in Venice and by the Whitney Museum every two years. 

The WB’s inaugural show, “You Could Feel the Sky,” presented a midcareer survey of Williamsburg-based artist Brian Alfred’s work, consisting of paintings, collages, and digital animations dispersed throughout the space. In a room subtly designed to look like his home office, Alfred showed a series of works on paper that picture his partner over a discrete period of time; on a lower level, large-scale paintings depicted scenes of domestic interiors, cityscapes, and environmental vistas. 

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Exhibitions run for approximately five months to encourage what Shum calls “a kind of slow looking.” Next up is an exhibition and performance series by artist Maria de Victoria, whose work, Shum says, often “grapples with the immigrant experience.”

For Shum and the board members, who met as graduate students in Yale’s architecture program, education is a key part of the organization’s mission. Since launching, they’ve opened their doors to high school and college students through a variety of programs and internships. Adjunct assistant professor of architecture Frederick Tang brought his class from Barnard for a private tour related to his coursework. Barnard art professor Joan Snitzer, who was Shum’s advisor, introduced her to Beyond Barnard, which helped connect WB with its first intern, Barnard student Micheline Parsa ’26.

Although opening a new arts space may not have previously been on Shum’s radar, she does recognize that there is an unexpected logic to her trajectory. It is, she says, “the sum of all of these positive experiences — in work and education — that gave me the confidence and knowledge to do this.”

Photos in slideshow by Ines Leong/L-INES Photo and Andy Romer Photography