Performance Space New York Unveils Its New Leadership Model

The musician and curator Taja Cheek, also known as L’Rain, is joining Performance Space New York as artistic director, the nonprofit organization announced on Friday. She and its two other executives will share power at the East Village institution.

“We are really not interested in a singular leader,” Pati Hertling, the senior director, said in an interview. Hertling, who says she has taken a pay cut in order to restructure the organization, will focus on the group’s financial sustainability, while the associate director, Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda, will continue to focus on community and staff operations. Cheek will be running artistic programming.

When it comes to big decisions on the institution’s direction, all three women will have an equal vote, Hertling said.

Hertling began moving in this direction last year when she started splitting responsibilities with Sepúlveda.

The structure is coming together after Jenny Schlenzka, Performance Space’s former executive artistic director, left in 2023 to lead Gropius Bau, an exhibition space in Berlin.

Performance Space has been the home for experiments in live performance since 1980, when the neighborhood became a hotbed for avant-garde musicians, graffiti artists and modern dancers. It offered an affordable alternative to major galleries and theaters. The careers of artists like Penny Arcade, Karen Finley, Ron Athey and John Bernd were incubated here.

Hertling became interim director in 2023, then the senior director. She previously worked as a lawyer in Germany, handling restitution cases involving the families of Holocaust victims. Organizing small gatherings and performance events was something of a side hustle.

Now the arts executive is looking to grow Performance Space, which has seen its programming budget expand to $766,000 today from $500,000 in 2020. But margins have been tight and it ran a $120,000 deficit in 2022, according to its most recent government filings. (The organization said it is currently operating on a balanced budget.)

Performance art “is endangered in New York,” Hertling said, adding that only a few other venues like Abrons Arts Center and the Kitchen present it. “Individual donors tend to support the visual arts more than performance. You can’t take it home. But we are trying to grow our individual donors.”

Cheek, currently touring in Europe and helping to curate the 2024 Whitney Biennial’s performance program, said that by joining Performance Space, she hopes to reach wider audiences.

“Performance art in general has a shroud of mystery covering it,” Cheek said in an interview. “For me, it is a missed opportunity because I think performance is about people.” She hopes to program more experimental performances that would happen in public spaces around the city.

Sepúlveda agreed. “I’m looking forward to continuing to identify new forms of access and engagement for those who have been historically excluded,” she said. She wants Performance Space to build that type of intimacy through its community programming, and mentioned Open Movement, a free weekly program with artist-led workshops held in its fourth-floor theaters.