PS21: Center for Contemporary Performance in Chatham, N.Y., has announced that Vallejo Ganter, a distinguished international arts executive, is the new Artistic and Executive Director.
Born in Australia, Ganter has had an impact on contemporary arts internationally. Most recently, he served as Director of Creative Partnerships for the ONX Studio, a New York City-based hybrid production and exhibition space for immersive and XR artists, and from 2019 to 2021 Mr. Ganter was Artistic Executive Director of the Onassis Foundation USA, an innovative programming foundation based in Athens, Greece, with satellites in New York and Los Angeles.
For thirteen years prior, he served as Artistic Director of Performance Space 122 (now Performance Space New York). From 2002 to 2004, he was Director of the Dublin Fringe Festival. He also serves on the boards of the VII Photos, In Between Time (Bristol), The Chocolate Factory Theater (NYC), and various philanthropic institutions in Australia. Ganter was educated in Australia and has an MBA from New York University.
He was interviewed for The Berkshire Edge by James Abruzzo, a regular contributor to The Edge and (disclaimer) a board member of PS21.
James Abruzzo: The Trump administration, through their cuts and changes to arts grants rules, closing the IMLS, and taking over the Kennedy Center, is causing a real chill in the freedom of the arts in America. One result could be that places like New York and Massachusetts will become kind of sanctuary states where the population is more liberal, the respective state and local governments encourage the arts, and, particularly here in Columbia and Berkshire counties, the arts will continue to thrive. What is your take on this? Do you agree?
Vallejo Gantner: The question about the political winds blowing in this country is relevant to this moment. But it also actually creates the opportunity for an organization like PS 21 in the location that it’s in to have a far greater impact than other places may. Compared to different parts of the world, one interesting thing about the American art sector is that we operate with far greater independence from the government and its institutions than we might in other places where the central government directs and finds funding. That’s both a benefit and not, in the sense that we are in a nonprofit paradigm that is entirely dependent on the whims of individual donors and foundation leadership. The notion of innovation and experimentation is fundamental and in a place like Chatham or other parts of the rural areas, the “blue” corners in sometimes “red” areas are essential because they are places where curiosity is welcome, where divergent views can be heard, where diverse identities are indeed welcomed.
And the responsibility that I feel in this role is to ask, in a thoughtful way, “How do we speak to people who don’t think like us or don’t feel like us? We’re in a very different community to what we might find in downtown Manhattan or in a city like Brooklyn.
And so, for all those reasons and because of the different ecologies and geographies we’re in, what a fascinating place to be presenting a contemporary performing arts program!
JA: You’ve already had a distinguished international career? You could continue to do good work in New York City. Why take a job upstate with a relatively small nonprofit arts organization
VG: This is a place where the work is not taken for granted. There are opportunities and questions that I haven’t had the chance to ask before about how we get work to speak to people in different ways, in various kinds of relationships to the environment, particularly into the site, talking to people who have other concerns than I might in the city and have a different relationship and different habit of how they engage with and think about contemporary arts.
JA: PS21 has a profile of innovative contemporary arts presentations and has attracted or created an audience for its offerings. Do you plan to continue building that artistic profile? And what else can be added to enhance the brand?
VG: We want to build it. My initial goal is to amplify the impact and figure out how to do so. There’s been a remarkable program created here by Judy Grunberg and then by Elena Siyanko, who were both visionaries in entirely different ways. They created a history and trajectory of innovative and fulfilling programming, first in a tent and then in the Pavilion. Now, the task is to figure out ways for that work to exist in relationship to both the human community and a non-human set of ecological and environmental questions, the landscape, and the ecology of the place itself. So, we are trying to figure out how to amplify the work’s impact.
There will be extraordinary experiences for audiences with artists from our immediate surroundings, which has an incredible depth of artistic talent, but also, from New York, from Boston, from the region, and then globally, as I have seen in my experience working in Australia, in Asia, in Europe, and in New York City. My network of both arts organizations and artists is extensive, and I’m looking forward to bringing some of those people who won’t have been to New York City or Chatham before, as well as figuring out how we keep them here and bring to bear the kind of impact that they can have on people who live here year-round, as well as the kind of temporary or part-time homeowners
JA: You mentioned ecology and the environment a few times. For those who don’t know, PS21 is a 400-seat flexible theater in the middle of its hundred acres of apple orchards, and farms and rolling hills surround the entire complex. So, what’s all this talk about ecology and the environment?
VG: Well, here we have the meadows and the orchards you discussed. We have woods, we have a creek and a beautiful river flat. I think the work that we do needs to take that into account. I also believe that arts organizations, like every organization, whether corporate or government or other, must confront the environmental challenges we face with climate change. And we need to think about how, when we’re bringing people in from Australia or beyond, we are just not thinking “fifo,” which in Australia is “flying the artist in and flying them out.”
Instead, they should have work that can be in residencies, have a far more significant impact, and extend its reach. We need work inspired by and sourced from the landscape around us, and we are conversing about that.
So, think about ephemeral installation or performance work that can be presented for audiences in that landscape rather than just thinking about what we put on the stage in the theater.
JA: What is your definition of community engagement, and what’s the community?
VG: I’ll answer the second question first, saying I don’t know about the community yet. My knowledge will come from listening and meeting people because there are many communities. There are communities of people who live here all year round who’ve been here for hundreds of years. There is an indigenous community that’s been here for thousands and thousands of years. There is a community of people here for 6 weekends every summer. And there’s a community of people who’ve moved here since the eighties. And then, if we wanted to be more metaphysical, there are communities of ecologies and natural influences. We engage with each of those differently. There isn’t a set way that one should do it. The approach shouldn’t be tokenistic. It shouldn’t be patronizing. It has to be done with a level of artistic integrity, a kind of search for excellence, and the notion that great art is, in fact, something that can be spoken to. Not the same work can talk to everybody. Still, everybody can engage with great art, even iWe bring work to people where they are, not necessarily not always physically, but sometimes, we will be doing work off this campus and in different parts of the campus. It means that we invite people, kids, older people, and people who are not able to make it onto the campuses at all.
It doesn’t mean that we will be doing the things usually attached to the term community engagement, which almost contradicts the idea of good art. There is extraordinary artwork out there that many people should see, and embedded within that work is an enormous amount of community engagement, not just as an audience. But also as a participant, as a co-author, as a collaborator
JA: you talked about presenting work in addition to art, like science. And about bringing different kinds of presenters or performers to the campus. What did you have in mind?
VG: One of the areas in which we have seen enormous growth in this kind of cultural ecosystem over the last decade or more maybe even fifteen years, has been the way we think about humanities.
Again, I want to break down some of the barriers between different genres, whether in TED Talks or podcasts. Or, you know, in a host of other formats, we see an enormous audience and an appetite for people to engage with ideas and hear from the visionaries and the leaders of different fields, whether scientific or economic, from the philosophers, filmmakers, ecologists, spiritual leaders, and so on. Perhaps this is a return to the days of Chautauqua and other moments when we went and saw these people speak. What I want to do is to find points of synthesis and points of coming together between the kind of contemporary performing arts practice that we have in my wheelhouse and areas that I don’t understand as well. But that is important. People want to experience and have a tangible engagement with the scientific world, economics, sociology, or whatever we don’t usually hear directly. We might read about it in the newspapers, books, or peripherally through film or television. But there’s an exciting opportunity here to think about how our performing arts sector engages with a broader set of ideas and how it can become a tool to interpret some of those ideas and influence them. It’s been a very one-way street, a one-way kind of answer, a lens through which to see these other things, and I think it should be much more about a dialogue between them. So, I think another of the projects that we will be attacking or approaching here is to try and think about how to bring an inspiring, innovative humanities program to the area.
JA: Your title is artistic and executive director. Your business experience and background are important when taking on the creative leadership of an arts organization. You sit on corporate boards; you have an Executive MBA, and a more than casual intersection with the business world ..
VG: Hopefully, it gives me a perspective. I can express myself in different formats, which is something my peers don’t always have. And one of the jobs of somebody in this role is to be a kind of translator, you know, between the artist and what they are attempting to do, whether with their bodies, with their visuals, with their text, with their performance, and an audience, board members, donors, funders and others. We are here partly to translate, contextualize, and shine a light on work so that it is better understood and its impact can be better felt. My experience outside the arts gives me a vocabulary and ease with how other people hear things, and a greater empathy for how others can sometimes see our field that I might otherwise not have. It also means that I can understand more directly and viscerally the imperatives that others have. I hope that experience from outside the arts shows a kind of entrepreneurial sense about how I will approach this organization and the region. In the words of an artist I once worked with, “We can fail to see the walls we’re about to walk through rather than to see them and stop.”
JA: Beautiful. Something I’m curious about. You were born and grew up in Australia. How did you end up with the name Vallejo?
VG: My family is a pre-Mayflower Californian family, an old Spanish Californian family for whom the town north of the Bay Area is named. General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was a very distant ancestor of mine, so one boy in each generation of my family is now called Vallejo. In Australia, particularly when I was born, Spanish was such an unfamiliar name that no one understood it as a surname.
JA: Thanks so much, my friend.
VG: Super. Cheers, mate.
