Performance Space New York Reveals Taja Cheek as New Artistic Director

Performance Space New York has announced curator, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer Taja Cheek as its Artistic Director, taking on the role within a collaborative three-person leadership team that includes Pati Hertling (Senior Director) and Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda-Echegaray (Associate Director). Cheek is a full-time curator who has herself also nurtured a celebrated and convention-defying career as an artist (under the name L'Rain). Her appointment reflects the organization's fervent re-emphasis, in recent years, on producing, presenting, and curating with an artist-and-community-first approach. With the rare insight of her dual experiences within the world of experimental performance, Cheek will expand and deepen this legacy.

Like the institution she's entering, Cheek's life and career in the arts have never adhered to disciplinary boundaries. In the visual arts/museum spaces, she has worked consistently within the realm of live and time-based art: as Associate Curator at Large at MoMA PS1, organizing the interdisciplinary performance series Sunday Sessions and the summer outdoor music series Warm Up, and now as a guest curator of the 2024 Whitney Biennial's performance program. Though as an artist herself she's most associated with experimental music, she grew up as a dancer, having studied ballet and modern dance at The Ailey School as a teen. Even her music, as The New York Times writes, “is constantly melting down and metamorphosing, deliberately evading genres, in a way she has described as ‘approaching songness.'”

She applies this possibility for metamorphosis and play to how, as a curator, she engages other artists: “There's a tendency to pigeonhole performers as though they aren't artists in a full, holistic sense. It's a missed opportunity — people shouldn't be surprised if a dancer is interested in creating an installation or a musician has thoughts about lighting or wants to collaborate with someone outside the sonic realm. Interdisciplinarity has a long history — and Performance Space is such an important part of it. One thing that's so special about Performance Space, and what feels so special about joining this team, is its legacy of honoring artists' full practices — including parts they have yet to explore.”

Cheek was born and raised in Brooklyn, where her grandfather ran a jazz club 10 minutes from where she now lives. Through her experience growing up making and eventually programming art in the city, she is acutely attuned to the thrills of and barriers to sustaining thriving artistic practices here. She is likewise focused on how this is tied to who gets represented, and whose artistry is given space, in the city. “Curatorial work can be a historical and social corrective in a lot of ways,” she says, underscoring a dedication to underrepresented voices.

As an advocate of artists building worlds beyond their known genres, Cheek seeks to uplift artistic communities and collaborative works as much as individual artists, noting that “this is a more honest way of revealing how performance gets made and boundaries get broken.” Recalling the organization's origins as a floor of a decommissioned school building repurposed by artists into a hub for experimentation and community, Cheek also has roots (and a continued practice) in DIY presenting, and currently runs a venue out of her basement.

As she enters the role of Artistic Director, she looks to collaborate with her colleagues to bring together seasons that “include artists whose work is rooted in and relevant to New York, alongside International Artists; acknowledge the larger creative ecosystem in New York and elsewhere; honor modes of making outside of performance that make performance possible; celebrate intergenerationality; highlight the history of Performance Space; and commit to a core Performance Space audience while also inviting in other specific audiences.”

Performance Space has, in the last half-decade, and under the leadership of former Executive Artistic Director Jenny Schlenzka, rethought its values as a reflection of its radical origins and a promise for its future. It has cultivated and sustained a board of over 50% artists, and integrated vital lessons from 02020 — a year devoting the organization's curatorial leadership and budget to a group of artists — into a new mission, composed with the help of its community through Town Hall meetings. One core tenet of 02020 was horizontal leadership, an idea given further consideration within Performance Space's new three-person directorial structure. Working beyond the rigid hierarchies that typically determine arts institutions' identities — with organizations often presented as the reflection of a single leader's vision — three visionaries join forces to steward Performance Space's next chapter. (Taja Cheek herself was selected through a transparent process involving the entirety of the organization's full-time staff and an advisory committee of eight artists, curators, and directors.)

“Taja has in her work transgressed disciplines and institutional preconceptions; she's a community maker and a renegade, and her work feels so connected to what we've been doing at Performance Space,” says Senior Director Pati Hertling. “With our new leadership structure, we're continuing in the direction of a practice where new work and ideas are generated through internal collaboration—rather than us just commissioning artists who are being handed from one institution to another.”

Hertling, formerly the organization's Deputy Director, assumed the role of Senior Director in Fall 2023 following Jenny Schlenzka's departure as Performance Space Artistic Director after six momentous years at the organization's helm. (Schlenzka left to take on the role of Director of the exhibition hall Gropius Bau.) Hertling came to Performance Space with a background as a curator and art restitution lawyer, and has brought to Performance Space a dedication to inclusion and community that honors and builds new horizons from the organization's queer legacy. Hertling curated the Stages Series in 2019 and, with Keith Haring Curatorial Fellow X Arriaga, Fall 2023's Invisible Cultures series. Throughout her time at Performance Space, she has emphasized the possibilities of considering nightlife—and particularly its queer, liberatory history and potential—within a performance context.

Ana Beatriz Sepúlveda-Echegaray steps into the position of Associate Director from her role as Head of Community Access and Inclusion to Associate Director. As Associate Director, Sepúlveda-Echegaray will expand her work at the intersection of art and social justice, deepening Performance Space's commitment to community-centered programming. She is committed to expanding access across the organization through public programs, fellowships, and organizational strategies. Curating Open Room, she has engaged artists to reconceive the organization's lobby as a community gathering space and site of installation and performance. With artist Monica Mirabile, Sepúlveda-Echegaray brought back and reshaped P.S. 122's Open Movement, a free open space for movement improvisation, artist-led workshops and cross-pollination.

Says Sepúlveda-Echegaray, “I'm excited, in my work as Associate Director, to continue to challenge institutional practices in search of an environment centered around care and liberation, that approaches roles and responsibilities as experimentation. Along the way, I hope to deeply explore what relationships, equity, and access can look like within an art institution, being mindful of the colonial underpinnings that spaces like these carry—and to always be asking, ‘what can being in community look like?"