Silent Barn Reaches Its Fundraising Goal; 'Now We Can Focus On Finding A New Space'

Maks Suski

​The now-shuttered Ridgewood venue Silent Barn has been raising funds for its rebuilding and relocation since it was burglarized in July. Silent Barn's organizers took their campaign to the peer-to-peer patronage site Kickstarter, which requires people raising money through its site to set a particular fundraising goal before embarking on their money-raising; if that goal isn't reached by a certain date, no cash will be disbursed. Over the weekend—just a week shy of the campaign's September 18 deadline—the DIY venue's fundraising target of $40,000 was hit, which allows for the Barn's future to begin taking shape. "Making our Kickstarter goal does firm up both our resolve and the relevance of our projected budget," said Woods tape manipulator/Silent Barn guru G. Lucas Crane. (That budget, by the way, has been posted online, in case you care to peruse it.) "Now we can focus on finding a new space, which is the next step."

SOTC asked Crane if the Silent Barn's principals had any preferred neighborhoods. "Because of our long history at the old location, our dream is to stay in Queens near the border of Brooklyn," Lucas said. "We are looking in Ridgewood farther out on the L and M lines, and of course in Bushwick, because it happens to contain lots of the kinds of buildings we are looking for. But Queens is the dream. I grew up in the city, and I'm excited about the future of art in the borough, I think there's a lot of room to grow and It would be exciting to get people out to a different neighborhood than they're used to. Queens has so many small pockets of wildly different communities and it would be great if Silent Barn was another thing to discover."

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