Avant Gardner Names Josh Wyatt First-Ever CEO, ‘We Have Big Ambitions Here’

Avant Gardner, the renowned club best known for hosting dance music acts located on the edge of Bushwick in Brooklyn, New York, announced Josh Wyatt as its first-ever CEO. Wyatt comes from a background in hospitality, previously working was CEO of NeueHouse and its sister company, Fotografiska.

While Wyatt is coming in as CEO, Avant Gardner’s founder, Jürgen “Billy” Bildstein remains as Creative Director.

This season alone, Avant Garden hosted performances by Swedish House Mafia, David Guetta, Gesaffelstein, Anderson .Paak, Carl Cox, deadmau5 and more at the Brooklyn Mirage, the site’s biggest room that features a wrap-around LED screen.

Speaking with Pollstar, Wyatt shares he’s been working with Avant Gardner for the last several months working to provide structure and guidance as they enter their next chapter.

“We have big ambitions here,” Wyatt says. “One commonality in my experience is creating extraordinary venues from the perspective of design and hospitality. If you look at the overall Avant Gardner complex and how it’s designed today, there’s all of these appearing and disappearing moments within the venue for a fan or for a guest. That’s what the beauty of the Mirage is. You don’t know what you’re going to get when you come in there, there’s nooks and crannies and surprise moments and elements. One of the things we’re planning now is to bring more moments where guests can have a diverse set of experiences throughout their journey there. People don’t go to the Mirage just for a ‘concert,’ they’re going for an overall experience that oftentimes lasts anywhere from three to eight hours.”

Among Wyatt’s plans is to enhance the Great Hall, a room adjacent to the Mirage that’s opened year-round (the Mirage opened in late April and closes on Nov. 3). The room is smaller than the Mirage, holding 2,800 fans compared to Brooklyn Mirage’s 4,500.He says the room will undergo a two to three-year evolution “where everything is on the table to expand and evolve, and that also includes the King’s Hall [800 capacity].” He also plans to bring a mocktail bar to the venue for fans who aren’t interested in having alcoholic beverages.

Avant Gardner has faced numerous controversies over recent years, the most recent of which stemming from last year’s Electric Zoo music festival. The event, which took place over Labor Day weekend in 2023, canceled day one due to a delayed stage build and opened doors several hours late on day two. On day three, the festival hit capacity with several thousand fans still outside the gates, which led to fans storming past security to make it inside the venue. For fans denied access to the venue, news of how they would be refunded did not arrive until June.

“I’ve done this throughout my career, and I take great pride in running a highly transparent, highly professional, deeply cool culture-based companies,” Wyatt says. “I don’t think that the company has always done a great job of communicating effectively with its constituents, whether its fans or local community or vendors. Over the last two months, I’ve quietly spent probably 60 hours a week communicating with fans, communicating with vendors, communicating and cleaning up both legally and financially all of the Electric Zoo obligations. We have refunded all of the ticket customers, we have settled any type of litigation. I’ve paid all the vendors of EZoo who wanted to be paid, there are a few vendors who never got back to us or, quite frankly, were not open to a settlement discussion. When I picked up the phone, all of these constituents were shocked. I would say it’s a complete game changer. We built incredible goodwill and it’s only going to go up from here.”

Wyatt shares a financial investor came in to back the venue and helping them pay out fans needing refunds from Electric Zoo, saying “I can’t disclose the name, but the financial investor is a venture capital fund that has extensive, decades-long experience in music.” He says the partnership is “an amazing situation to be in, freeing the company to really operate from a position of confidence.”

After two bodies were found in Newtown Creek of fans who had attended shows at the Brooklyn Mirage last summer (with one more from a fan who attended a show at the nearby Knockdown Center being found this August), Wyatt also shared he had a plan in place for how to make the Avant Gardner campus safer. He’s installing signage to direct concert-goers how to best get to the subway from the venue, as well as adding lights on the property line.

“It’s not Knockdown Center’s problem, it’s not Avant Gardner’s problem, it’s not Elsewhere, it’s not SAA’s problem, it’s all of our problem and we need to work together as a coalition,” Wyatt says. “I’m willing to put time and money on this. I’m a 50-year-old man with three kids. My kids are not old enough to go to a venue like this, but they will be one day, and you better believe that I take the safety and security of fans seriously. As a parent, this is a meaningful issue for me. It’s a tragedy what has happened to these three people over the last year and a half.”

While Avant Gardner is typically known to host talent in the electronic dance music scene, Wyatt aims to expand their footprint. He shares they’re in active discussions with booking more hip-hop groups, the venue recently hosting Three Six Mafia on Oct. 24. Wyatt is also working to get more Latin artists at the venue, saying the company has done data analysis of the demographics of New York’s five boroughs. As Wyatt speaks to Pollstar, he shares that he’s in Los Angeles meeting with agents to bring newer talent to the venue.