Creative Time Celebrates 50 Year Anniversary 

Image: Jenny Holzer, FOR NEW YORK CITY, 2004. Photo: Charlie Samuels. 

New York’s Vanguard Public Art Non Profit 
Paved A New Path For Art and Artists in Public Life

Creative Time celebrates its 50th anniversary this year in recognition of its contribution to the art forms and social movements that have defined the last half-century. Since 1974, the renowned public art organization known for its innovative, experimental, and impactful public art projects has commissioned and presented over 350 ambitious public art projects with over 2,000 artists throughout New York City, across the country, around the world, and even in outer space. Long recognized for its championing of the vital role artists play in society—promoting artists and the creative process itself as key to societal transformation—in its 50th year, Creative Time looks to investing in and sustaining artists doing this work today. 

Creative Time has played an instrumental role for numerous contemporary artists, offering many their first chance to directly engage the public through never before realized approaches to their practice, from producing the first public artworks of artists including Doug Aitken, Jim Campbell, Charles Gaines, Jenny Holzer, Takashi Murakami, Otto Piene, and Kara Walker, among others, to repeated presentations of artists including Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Elizabeth Diller, Bill T. Jones, Jill Magid, Alison Saar, Ricardo Scofidio, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and David Wojnarowicz, among others. Over the decades, Creative Time has also collaborated in direct actions to address the political crisis’ impacting artists and their communities: protesting rightwing censorship of the National Endowment of the Arts through artist-led demonstrations with Nan Goldin and Karen Finley; activating public awareness around the HIV/AIDS crisis with Gran Fury and ACT UP; organizing public protest against the detention of Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei; producing artists work critical of the United States’ policy in the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, and platforming international dialogue on critical issues across numerous initiatives, including the Creative Time Summit, Creative Time Reports, an International Residency, and myriad other public programs and publications.

Born of a transgressive moment in 1970s New York City, Creative Time has deep roots in the cultural fabric of New York City, advancing the role of artists within societal transformation, and the establishment of a downtown NYC arts scene that revolutionized global culture and urban life. Under the leadership of founding director Anita Contini (1973-86), and with the city facing a debilitating lack of resources, artists took over the city’s neglected, underused, or off-limits spaces and remade it through their inquiries, reactivating these spaces for the public as forums to explore the potential of artists engaged in city life. Each subsequent director, Cee Brown (1986-94); Anne Pasternak (1994-2015); and Katie Hollander (2016-17), in turn shaped the organization according to needs and opportunities of their era, making undoubtedly globally influential contributions to the advancement of art in public life. 

Under the leadership of Executive Director Justine Ludwig alongside a diverse, powerhouse team of curators, producers, and administrators guiding the organization’s projects, Creative Time’s programming remains sharply focused on artists’ engaged with the conditions of our time. This is exemplified through projects such as Jill Magid’s response to the pandemic shutdown in 2020, Tender, where the artist distributed 120,000 specially engraved pennies, echoing the $1200 stimulus checks issued under The CARES Act, to bodegas across all five boroughs of New York City. Rashid Johnson’s Red Stage provided a platform for creative exploration and community togetherness amidst the on-going Covid crisis for one long, hot pandemic month the summer of 2021. Charles Gaines’ 2022-23 public art project Moving Chains challenged viewers to confront the systemic legacies of slavery in America through a monumental kinetic sculpture on Governors Island. And most recently, in 2023, Creative Time Curator Diya Vij organized her first Project commission on behalf of Creative Time, New Red Order’s The World’s UnFair, offering tangible, real world representation of growing calls to “Give It Back” and return land to Indigenous communities. 

More recent initiatives, designed by Ludwig and Vij, are geared to sustaining support of socially engaged artists beyond individual projects, including the opening of CTHQ in 2023, Creative Time’s first public space on East 4th St., which offers weekly, artist-led public programs, and free working and creative space to the public; and the R&D Fellowship, offering $50,000 to established social practice artists in recognition of their contribution to the field, with additional support toward interdisciplinary exploration, research, and development of new works. The inaugural fellows are: Guadalupe Maravilla, Carlos Motta, Linda Goode Bryant, Stephanie Dinkins, and Emily Johnson.

In 2019, Ludwig initiated Creative Time’s first Open Call project, choosing artist Risa Puno from over 600 applications from full-time practicing artists in New York City who were at pivotal career junctures and lacked significant backing from a prominent cultural institution. Repeating the process in 2022, this time opening the commission to artists nationwide, the awarded artists Kite and Alisha Wormsley will launch their Open Call Project as part the 2024 program, with a wholly Creative Time theme: the radical nature and potential of dreaming in public space. 

“Creative Time has always been an evolving entity—transforming to respond to the contours of a dynamic world. It is a privilege to learn from and lead this legacy now, as we see a profound need to invest in public life, the courageous artists working right now, and our capacity to meet this moment with creativity, timeliness, and possibility,”  said Justine Ludwig, Executive Director of Creative Time.

A LOOK AHEAD AT 2024 PROGRAMMING

• CTHQ, Creative Time’s public programming space on East 4th Street opened in 2023, hosts weekly artist-led programming on Wednesday nights, and drop-in hours, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Visit hq.creativetime.org for upcoming events.
• Kite and Alisha Wormsley’s interactive Open Call Project begins in May, with a day of public programs scheduled for the summer solstice, June 20, 2024. The series will culminate with a presentation of sculptures unveiled in September.
• The Creative Time Summit returns to New York City for its 11th Edition, September 20-22, offering a full weekend of community gatherings, mainstage events, and break-out workshops at various sites, as the longest running symposium dedicated to socially engaged art in the world. 

ABOUT CREATIVE TIME
Since 1974, Creative Time has commissioned and presented ambitious public art projects with thousands of artists throughout New York City, across the country, around the world—even in outer space. The organization’s work is guided by three core values: art matters, artists’ voices are important in shaping society, and public spaces are places for creative and free expression. Creative Time is acclaimed for the innovative and meaningful projects they have commissioned, from ​Tribute in Light,​ the twin beacons of light that illuminated lower Manhattan six months after 9/11, to bus ads promoting HIV awareness, to Paul Chan’s production of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans​, and much more. In partnership with a variety of well-known cultural institutions and community groups, Creative Time has commissioned art in unique landmark sites from the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Governors Island, and the High Line, to neglected urban treasures like the Lower East Side’s historic Essex Street Market, Coney Island, and New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward. Creative Time is committed to presenting important art for our times and engaging broad audiences that transcend geographic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers.