Introducing The Industry’s Artistic Director Cooperative

We are so pleased to introduce our two new Co-Artistic Directors Malik Gaines and Ash Fure, who will join our Founder Yuval Sharon in forming The Industry’s Artistic Director Cooperative. This inaugural team of three will work together to envision and expand The Industry’s artistic programming through 2024.

It’s thrilling to be part of LA’s changing arts landscape. When we return to live performance this Fall, we will emerge in the process of transformation – becoming more artist-driven, experimental, courageous, and putting our values into practice, holistically. With a multiplicity of voices and experiences at the helm of this organization, we will be ready to respond and work with a broad range of ideas, artists, and communities in new and meaningful ways.

Elizabeth Cline, Executive Director

Like anything we do, this new leadership structure is a risk on every level. And the most significant financial risk we have taken on, with increased operational and programming support.  We can’t afford not to do this – for this organization, our community, and for the future of the performing arts. We feel strongly that this is that path forward to model new ways for organizations to grow and change. It is a model that breaks down monolithic structures and asks for more integration in our institutions  — the integration of artists, collaboration, and difference. 

The decision to hire Ash and Malik is mission-driven (to extend opera and interdisciplinary art in all directions and to work with experimental artists and practices) and goal-orientated (to form a collective artistic vision for the organization that creates a wide range of projects and experiences). But we also pushed ourselves further to bring together a group of unique artists and points of view that are different from what currently exists in our local community and the opera community at large. 

The Industry began as an experiment and is dedicated to the experimental; the inauguration of an Artistic Director Cooperative might be our most far-reaching experiment yet, going right to the heart of our organization’s identity and creating a new model for artistic leadership. Having Malik and Ash join me to form a team of three artistic voices will be enormously generative for everyone: for me personally, with the opportunity to be in constant dialogue with two artists and thinkers I admire so much; for the company, with a constant and constantly shifting presence of artistic voices at the helm; for our audiences, as our offerings will increase from one project every two years to a project every year; and for our community, with the addition of new perspectives on the intersection of opera and Los Angeles.

Yuval Sharon, Co-Artistic Director

When we selected this inaugural group, we wanted to create a balance of productive differences in artistic practices, inquiries, and experiences. It was crucial to choose artists who may not have the opportunity to work on the scale that The Industry offers. Furthermore, we know that the work of DEI needs to be done in the context of the organization as it carries out its mission, not as something separate. We believe these artists are best suited to do this ongoing work in the day-to-day organization, and the best group of artists right now to think about what stories we tell in opera and who tells them. 

During their 3-year term, we expect each artist will present a smaller-scaled project and a large-scale production. We can’t wait to see what they do and look forward to welcoming their vision to The Industry and to LA. We invite you to read on below to learn more about Malik and Ash.

Meet Malik Gaines

I’ve been an admirer of The Industry for years, and am eager to contribute to and learn from the company’s great work. I’m excited for this opportunity to think about opera as something from the future as much as the past. This Artistic Director team uniquely brings together a deep knowledge of music with a daring and clever sense of how to move that medium through other fields of experience. Opera is so capacious; it may be big enough to hold some of the problems people are having being together in our present. I’m looking forward to bringing my own expertise to this project and to LA’s arts landscape.

Malik Gaines, Co-Artistic Director

Malik Gaines is hailed by Artforum as a genre-defying “writer, performer and collectivist.” In 2000, the interdisciplinary artist and scholar co-founded the musical performance art group My Barbarian, which has been featured at The Whitney Biennial, two California biennials and the Baltic Triennial, among many other prestigious exhibitions. The Whitney Museum is presenting the group’s 20-year survey of work, opening in October 2021, which will include an exhibition, performance program and publication. According to the museum, the group’s artistic presentations “theatricalize social issues, adapting narratives from modern plays, historical texts and mass media into structures for their performances.” Gaines also makes work in other collaborations, including “Star Choir,” a music and video piece with Alexandro Segade supported recently by the Park Avenue Armory and Williams College; and, during the pandemic, he gave frequent solo concerts on social media. His book “Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left” (NYU Press) traces political ideas through performances from the 1960s onward. A continuing book project, “Future Ruins,” supported by a Warhol Foundation grant, explores contemporary artworks and performances that mark the limits of national sovereignty. His writing about art and performance has appeared in Art Journal, Women & Performance and Artforum, among other publications. Gaines has written essays for numerous exhibition catalogs and artist’s books, for artists including Lorraine O’Grady, Jacolby Satterwhite, Kehinde Wiley, Senga Nengudi, Pope.L, The Judson Dance Theater, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, and Ed Bereal. He has curated and co-curated performance programs and exhibitions including Made in L.A. 2012 at the Hammer Museum and LAXART. Gaines is associate professor of Performance Studies at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

To learn more about The Whitney Museum’s upcoming retrospective of Malik’s performance group My Barbarian, click HERE.

Meet Ash Fure

I am thrilled to be joining The Industry in this new leadership formation. Now more than ever we need new modes of coming together and slowing down into the many intensities we face. Immersive performance can open experience anew, allowing people to show up wilder, to release, resist, and reimagine. I’ve admired The Industry’s fearless forays into urban opera from afar, and am eager to entangle our creative visions as we ask what acts of collective listening and cathartic encounter might have to offer these urgent times.

Ash Fure, Co-Artistic Director

Ash Fure is a sonic artist who blends installation and performance. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s full-bodied listening experiences open uncommon sites of collective encounter. Operating outside language or story, Fure shapes multisensory atmospheres that listeners and performers navigate together. Recent immersive productions include Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas (2020), commissioned by Club TransMediale (CTM) and premiered in Berlin’s iconic Berghain club; Filament: for Trio, Orchestra, and Moving Voices (2018), commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and premiered in New York’s Geffen Hall; and The Force of Things (2017), an installation opera, premiered at Peak Performances, that wrestles with the rising tide of climate dread inside us. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Fure is the recipient of two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University.

Please join us in welcoming Malik and Ash to their new roles, and be sure to save the date for our first series of in-person events! This November 15 we will host a talk with Ash, Malik and Yuval to discuss their work and the future of opera in LA. On November 20 we will present the West Coast Premiere of Ash Fure’s Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas, a migratory performance installation. Stay tuned for more details!