Dustin Yellin (born 1975, in Los Angeles, California) is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn New York. He is best known for his glass veneer sculptures and collages, his work forms a completely accumulative, but never totalizing, repository of both gestures and images. Yellin archives material, images, and gestures by including them in his malleable, shifting subjects, by redefining what is “important” to form complex and intricate tableaux in miniature. Every subject are set into place by internal logic of their own that determines that all of them are connected within his fragmentary, distended figures. Along with his image-rich sculptures, Yellin is also the founder and director of Pioneer Works, a multidisciplinary cultural contemporary art hub in Red Hook, Brooklyn. His vision is to builds community through the arts and sciences to create an open and inspired world, because according to Yellin to be able to change the world we need to “redefine our insides and the box that we’re living in.”
As an art administrator, it is essential to cover a range of functions to maintain the effective functioning of projects for organizations such as community arts groups, theatre companies, art galleries, museums, and the public sector. The type of work can involve marketing, gaining sponsorship and funding, and managing performers. During my journey to accomplish these skills, Dustin Yellin is a huge influencer that inspired me, especially his contemporary art hub, Pioneer Works. Layers would be the best word to define Yellin’s practice, reflected in his work and also through Pioneer Works, these projects are interconnected together, as Yellin description about his art hub “For me, it’s a sculpture. It’s just like you’re working in layers you’re seeing through, where it’s layers of glass or layers of people, and eventually all those layers are in harmony and in unison to sort of making something like this possible.” These words have been ingrained in my mind during the early stage of my journey because that’s also my goal, my vision that I hope one day I can be able to achieve in the industry. Having an opportunity to connect artists together to work, to share our passion for art is an opportunity that I couldn’t ask for more.