Walking into Brooklyn’s ACME Studio you have to pass a TV—displaying static and embellished with disco balls—that is half-hidden under faux-jungle underbrush that also drapes over a giant wooden skull, next to a pristine vintage motorcycle.
And that’s all before you’re greeted by the bright green plastic horse.ACME Studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn calls itself a prop house or a photo studio, but its space is more like a modern cabinet of curiosities, the walls filled with oddities and artifacts accumulated from years of careful (and not so careful) collecting.
“This horse of a different color was gifted to us, oddly enough, and has been a staple of our studio ever since! Even when wrapped up in bubble wrap and packing blankets, this unmissable shape always stops traffic when being loaded out of the back of a truck.” -Brian Colgan, ACME
ACME started with a compulsive collector. Its founder, Sean Patrick Anderson, is an accomplished set designer. “He’s always had tons of cool stuff,” says Brian Colgan, ACME partner and studio director. After Anderson accumulated a wild collection of props and leftovers from sets he worked, as well as knick-knacks he picked up out in the world, he eventually had to have a warehouse to store it in. Eventually he began being approached by photographers and friends who wanted to use his space for shoots, and not long after, the idea for ACME was born.
“In the beginning we had a lot of taxidermy, just because Sean likes taxidermy,” says Colgan.
“Taxidermy is pretty fragile. A lot of the prop houses don’t have it or what they do have is pretty beat-up. I think it put us on the map somewhat.” And while their space still houses an impressive amount of intriguing taxidermy including lion, elk, and boar heads, alongside a small menagerie of other mounted critters, the space is also jam-packed with an ever-morphing assemblage of… stuff.
“The Hairy Chair, the brainchild of our founder Shawn Patrick Anderson, has become an icon of sorts for ACME. [It] never fails to delight those who encounter it—including many celebrities.”
As Colgan says, in the early days of the company, they really tried to…
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