Build It and They Will Come

In 2016, in the weeks leading up to the U.S. presidential election, the artist Pedro Reyes collaborated with the public arts nonprofit Creative Time to create Doomocracy, a haunted house at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. The installation’s 14 rooms were filled with frights related to hot-button political issues, from healthcare to voting rights. Actors directed by Meghan Finn helped create the horror—including a campy musical number about lost abortion access—but so did the public.

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“There was this boardroom you would enter, and the public had to vote to fire 500 employees or pocket $5 million dollars,” recalls Reyes. “Those who took the money were brought in a lift to the top floor to a luxurious loft where there was a party.” But those who sided with the workers were instructed to serve the partygoers. He adds: “It was both alien to theater and to the visual arts.”

If Doomocracy was unique within the realm of the white-wall art world, its defining characteristics—grandiosity and site-specificity while addressing political issues—are customary for Creative Time, which turns 50 this year and has collaborated with more than 2,000 artists to date, from Rashid Johnson and Jenny Holzer to Jill Magid and Risa Puno, to produce more than 350 public works around the nation. Perhaps the most famous among these remains A Subtlety, Kara Walker’s epic 2014 installation of a sphinx with African features in the defunct Domino Sugar Factory. Beyoncé came to see it, as did former art critic for The New York Times Roberta Smith, who praised the work for raising what she called “the bar on an overused art-spectacle formula.”

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In Smith’s review, Creative Time is mentioned in parentheses, a position that the organization—part guerilla production company, part art-world kingmaker—generally embraces. It’s not the talent, after all, it’s the crew. “People only know about your job if something doesn’t work,” says Natasha L. Logan, a former deputy director for the organization.

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Creative Time’s offices fill two small floors of a seven-story building on the fringes of Manhattan’s ever-diminishing Bowery district. The top space, newly named CTHQ, is open-plan with the dreamy, utilitarian feeling of an artist’s studio. Its long tables and benches contrast with assorted cubicles on the floor below occupied by its small staff, including executive director Justine Ludwig and curator Diya Vij. There’s a remarkable lack of art on the walls: fitting given the frequently ephemeral and unwieldy nature of Creative Time’s projects.

The office is modest, but it is palatial compared to the abandoned loft on Schermerhorn Row in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport where Anita Contini was living when the idea for Creative Time took root in 1974. White flight and deindustrialization had left many New York neighorhoods in a state of relative wildness with much of its housing vacant. This was good for artists, who could live affordably with ample time to experiment creatively. “You could work 10 hours a week and live,” says writer and activist Sarah Schulman. “Your ability to make art and have space [was] so much higher.”

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The second of five children, Contini grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and moved east in the 1960s to study theater. By the early ’70s, she’d graduated Hofstra University, married her first husband, and was booking commercials and other acting gigs in New York City, including a play at the Public Theater about a woman possessed who gets “thrown around the stage a lot,” says Contini. During production, she realized she was pregnant, dropped out, and began meeting more people outside the acting scene, including Susan Jones and Karin Bacon, who at the time worked for New York City Mayor John Lindsay as cultural programmers. Contini, who would become Creative Time’s first executive director, recalls an empty plot near her loft where locals grew a communal vegetable garden. Artists “would meet there sometimes and just talk,” she says. “It was so great to listen to them and hear what they’d like to do.” At some point, she decided to help.

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In early 1974, along with Jones and Bacon, Contini produced “Crafts in Action,” an artist showcase staged during working hours in a vacant building on William and Nassau Streets in New York’s Financial District. The glass walls of the ground floor allowed passersby to watch participants as they worked. Outside, the art world was quickly changing, too. “The whole alternative art scene was coming into existence,” describes Contini. “It was no longer just about galleries and museums.”

Contini had envisioned the concept as a one-off, but it captured the attention of the New York State Council on the Arts, which approached her with a small grant for “developing a real organization,” she says. She started rounding up board members, many of whom she knew from Schermerhorn Row. She took the name Creative Time from the late Flory Barnett, who had recently founded the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. “We were doing things during the middle of the day, during lunchtime or after work, a time of day where people could be creative instead of dealing with their work environment,” says Contini.

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Around the same time, real-estate developer Morley Cho approached Contini and offered her use of his not-entirely-finished skyscraper at 88 Pine Street, also known as Wall Street Plaza. Cho wanted people to “walk by his building and look up,” Contini says, and in 1974 she used it to showcase Sail, an installation by Anne Healy. The following year, Cho’s company loaned the ground floor for Red Grooms and Mimi Gross’ Ruckus Manhattan, a walkable, rickety, comically ambitious and out-of-scale model of the city that stretched more than 10,000 square feet. It took nine months and 21 assistants to complete using materials that ranged from vinyl and fiberglass to papier-mâché. As with “Crafts in Action,” the public got to witness its construction and, in turn, Grooms incorporated drawings of those spectators into the installation.

The success of these early projects emboldened Contini to continue seeking out property for artistic use. James Ingo Freed, one of 88 Pine Street’s architects, became her close friend and joined Creative Time’s board. His advice? “There’s only two things you’ve got to remember: insurance and security. If you deal with those two things, wherever you put your projects, it’ll be fine.” With this in mind, Contini approached the Battery Park City Authority in 1978 and successfully lobbied to use the land where the park was to be built on the southern tip of Manhattan, along the man-made shore of the Hudson River.

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Contini used the area to stage Creative Time’s mythic “Art on the Beach” series nearly every summer from 1978 through 1985, when Battery Park City’s construction finally encroached. Offering public access to the water for the first time, the vibe was relaxed, but the art was in situ and avant-garde. Harriet Feigenbaum remembers people picnicking and meditating around her installation Battery Park City—a Mirage, 1978, an eerily skeletal village of wooden tents 100 feet in diameter inspired by the view of Ellis Island and the Twin Towers. Risa Jaroslow incorporated the landscape into her ensemble dance performance Rites of Passing, 1980, which began with dancers atop a dune. The low-stakes produced works of lasting intrigue, like Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’s Entry Gate, 1984, made from perforated aluminum and wired glass. That same year, Erika Rothenberg collaborated with performer John Malpede and architect Laurie Hawkinson in erecting Freedom of Expression National Monument, a giant red megaphone with a ramp that allowed attendees to walk up and amplify their voices. The result was earnest and over the top, “one of my favorite things that I’ve ever done,” says Rothenberg.” For Battery Park City’s final “Art on the Beach” in 1985, David Hammons collaborated with the architect Jerry Barr and the artist Angela Valerio to create Delta Spirit, a Black, Southern shanty that stood as a monument to Negritude.

Indoors, Creative Time began using city properties such as a former police precinct—where Contini remembers a notable Vito Acconci sculpture involving dildos—and the Chamber of Commerce. For “Projects at the Chamber” in 1982, Theodora Skipitares staged The Age of Invention, poking fun at the disturbing legacies of celebrated inventors, with 300 puppets to match the approximate 300 portraits of captains of industry hung on the great hall’s walls. “It wasn’t really a performance space,” says Skipitares. “I remember it being sort of awkward, but wonderful and odd.”

By the time Contini, who now leads the arts program at Bloomberg Philanthropies, left Creative Time in 1987, New York was undergoing drastic change. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was sweeping through the city, killing many of the artists who made it vibrant, while Reagan-era policies ignored the epidemic and defunded the arts. Congress revised funding criteria for National Endowment for the Arts grants to stipulate general standards of “decency.” This vague moralism was infamously used to deny N.E.A. funding to four artists in 1990. One of them, the queer performance artist Holly Hughes, participated in Creative Time’s “Performance in the Park” at the start of Cee Scott Brown’s tenure as executive director in 1987.

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“There was a war on people,” says Hughes of the ’80s. “A lot of queer people stepped up to fill in the gap, whether it was doing activism or doing volunteer work.” Brown combatted this hostility by supporting politically specific work. In 1989, Creative Time ran bus ads designed by Gran Fury, an art collective that emerged from the AIDS activist group ACT UP. The signage showed three multiracial couples—two of them same-sex—mid-smooch with text that read: “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” Gran Fury and Creative Time selected bus lines they hoped would reach the city’s outer boroughs—communities impacted by AIDS but frequently overlooked by many outreach efforts.

The work demonstrated Creative Time’s growing interest in engaging broader audiences. So did projects like Spencer Finch and Paul Ramírez Jonas’ 1991 Masterpieces
Without the Director, an audio guide for the Metropolitan Museum of Art created as an alternative to the one offered by the museum’s then-director Philippe de Montebello. Ramírez Jonas and Finch photographed the works featured in de Montebello’s tour and displayed the photographs outside The Met, where they conducted “exit interviews” with visitors. “People started telling us what they thought of the masterpieces,” says Ramírez Jonas. “They were our expert voices.” The collaboration was a particularly cheeky one given Brown’s curatorial background at the Museum of Modern Art, precisely the sort of white-cube institutions being critiqued. Ramírez Jonas went on to collaborate with Creative Time four times more, most notably in 2010 for Key to the City, which distributed 24,000 master keys that allowed their holders to access more than 20 sites across New York City.

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In 1994, Anne Pasternak replaced Brown. She remained there until 2015—a tenure that accounts for nearly half the organization’s history to date, spanning three American presidents, three New York City mayors, the release of the first iPhone, and the proliferation of the Internet. Laura Raicovich, who would later join Creative Time as head of its now-defunct global initiatives program, was impressed when, around the turn of the millennium, Creative Time pursued projects related to the mapping of the human genome. “It wasn’t just about art,” she says. “It was about life, science, politics, and other universes.”

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This capaciousness helped raise money, too. The series “DNAid,” funded by the late philanthropist Daniel Langlois, allowed Creative Time to commission projects like Natalie Bookchin and Jin Lee’s Metapet, 2002, an online game that subverted capitalistic ideas about productivity, and Paul Myoda and Julian LaVerdiere’s Tribute in Light, the massive light installation at Ground Zero that commemorates 9/11 every year. In 1998, Myoda and LaVerdiere won a “DNAid” open call with a far-fetched proposal for a bioluminescent sculpture that would pulse irregularly atop the World Trade towers, powered by a single-cell organism. The project was on the verge of completion when the Twin Towers fell. The men used rudimentary Photoshop to envision a monument that would recreate the ghostly apparition created by the smoke smothering downtown. After The New York Times Magazine used the image for the cover of their September 23, 2001 issue, Creative Time pushed to make Tribute in Light a reality, navigating a city bureaucracy thrown into chaos and bringing the project to fruition in March the following year.

The 9/11 attacks changed the world at large, the art world, and Creative Time, too. It marked the end of “Art in the Anchorage,” one of the organization’s longest-running annual events that Contini had started in 1983. “Art in the Anchorage” had replicated the festival-like blueprint of “Art on the Beach” within one of the Brooklyn Bridge’s anchorages. The cavernous archway, carved through the base of the bridge in Dumbo, was a space for experimentation, the place where Doug Aitken created his first electronic sound installation in 1996 using recordings of the traffic on top of the bridge. But city security concerns closed the space after 2001, and the weirdness of the ’90s was, at least briefly, replaced with works such as Tribute in Light and Cai Guo-Qiang’s fireworks show Light Cycle, 2003, staged in Central Park for its 150th anniversary. The artist’s explosions of halos created a massive cloud of smoke that blew west then lingered thanks to high humidity. Many people in the area mistook the combustive noises for a terrorist attack—ironic given that, according to Peter Eleey, Creative Time’s curator and producer at the time, Guo-Qiang had envisioned the work as a healing spectacle.

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A more subtle response came from Hans Haacke, who was biking to work at Cooper Union when the first tower fell. He noticed people on the street looking downtown but didn’t understand why until he convened with colleagues on the college’s top floor, where they witnessed the second go down. “We were just beside ourselves,” he says. In response, he designed an untitled white poster featuring a central rectangular hole and pasted a series throughout Manhattan. The cutouts revealed the collage of street advertisements beneath them—the past rupturing through absence.

Eventually, Creative Time regained a more biting political voice, spurred in large part by America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. For Adelle Lutz’s The Peace Piece, 2003, she outfitted women in burkas painted with U.N. statistics about women and children in wartime. On Coney Island, graffiti artist Steve Powers mounted The Waterboarding Thrill Ride, 2008, which simulated the torture technique in a peep show using dummies.

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By the aughts, Creative Time also started expanding out of New York. In 2007, it worked with artist Paul Chan to produce Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, where he staged the Samuel Beckett play in the Lower Ninth Ward of the post-Katrina city. (“I had never seen Godot in real life before Godot in New Orleans,” Chan says.) Nato Thompson, Creative Time’s curator at the time, says Chan’s role was more akin to a community organizer: He insisted that Creative Time set up a shadow fund to distribute approximately $50,000 to local organizations.

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Other Creative Time works in the late ’90s and 2010s gestured more politely to the melancholy of gentrification, including Shimon Attie’s Between Dreams and History, 1998, staged around tenement housing in the Lower East Side, and “The Plain of Heaven,” a 2005 group show at 820 Washington Street on the southern end of Manhattan’s then-redeveloping High Line. Jeffrey Manzer, who worked for New York City at the time, had encountered the building in putrid condition and helped Eleey secure occupation permits after its butcher tenants cut and ran, leaving three stories of meat to rot. The exhibition was more museum-like in its impulses than many other Creative Time endeavors. It included a new wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, which was destroyed when the building was demolished to make way for the new Whitney Museum.

Perhaps the most recurring questions raised by public art concern our relationship to community, movement, and privacy. It has the power to convene, but also to reveal whom we picture when we picture “the public.” It’s worth noting that the abstraction, and spectacularity of many post-9/11 Creative Time projects under Pasternak sat comfortably within the value system of the New York City government’s so-called urban renewal efforts that prioritized corporate investment and reversal of white flight. The same Bloomberg who greenlit Tribute in Light immediately upon becoming mayor also supported stop-and-frisk, a police tactic that disproportionately affected Black and brown New Yorkers—the sort of violent surveillance that inhibits some individuals’ movement through space while training others to view them with suspicion. That’s not good for art at all.

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Inequality and segregation pre-date Bloomberg, of course. “When I came to New York in the ’90s, Black artists in large part showed their work at Black galleries, and white artists showed at white galleries,” says Simone Leigh. “The art world was extremely segregated.” The alter- native art scene of the 1970s that produced Creative Time was largely white, as was the Women’s Action Coalition, a feminist direct-action group that operated from 1992 to 1995. Pasternak was a member, as was Lorraine O’Grady, who wrote in Artforum that she attended meetings of the feminist group as a “guilty pleasure.” O’Grady enjoyed its Dadaist, nonhierarchical character but worried about its long-term survival if it did not diversify enough to be “meaningful to working-class white women and to nonwhite women of all classes.”

It is evident that such critiques influenced Creative Time incrementally. While some of its projects felt suspiciously populist, others began formally embracing social practice art and taking cues from the likes of Project Row Houses, which, starting in 1993, rehabilitated a group of neglected shotgun houses in Houston’s historically Black Third Ward. Pasternak reached out to one of its founders, Rick Lowe. “She was very interested in what we were doing and how we were doing it,” says the artist. The two became friends, and in 2010, when Creative Time awarded Lowe the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change, he told her that they should change the award’s name. “Things change. So what? What kind of change? I suggested that they change it to the Creative Time Award on Art and Social Justice. She agreed, but it never happened.”

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What did happen was “Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn,” Creative Time’s multipart, participatory 2014 exhibit embedded within Brooklyn’s historic, Black community of Weeksville. Guest-curated by Rashida Bumbray, it featured works by Xenobia Bailey, Bradford Young, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Leigh, who created Free People’s Medical Clinic, which underscored the perennial labor of Black female medical professionals and offered health screenings and acupuncture. “This was where a lot of the ideas around wellness and selfcare that have now migrated into contemporary art space was initiated,” says Bumbray.

Pasternak says she is proud of her work at Creative Time, highlighting how projects under her leadership helped alter art world sensibilities that tended to dismiss political and public art. When she left the organization in 2015 to become director of the Brooklyn Museum, her departure unavoidably created uncertainty. Katie Hollander assumed the role of executive director right as the staff was producing “Fly By Night,” Duke Riley’s 2016 spring show at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It involved training and caring for 2,000 pigeons: Hollander, Jean Cooney, Meredith Johnson, and Logan all share memories of scraping pigeon excrement off of tiny, custom-made LED fowl anklets. Later that fall, after Reyes’ Doomocracy, Donald Trump was elected. Hollander left, replaced by interim leadership, and the organization searched for a new head.

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The board selected Justine Ludwig, who had worked with Creative Time in 2009, when it commissioned “It Is What It Is,” Jeremy Deller’s cross-country road show that featured a car destroyed by a bombing in Baghdad. One of the stops was the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Ludwig was a curator. She remembers being struck by how the “auspices of art” made a wide array of people open to discussing “larger cultural legacies and power systems” with Deller, who insists “It Is What It Is,” wasn’t “an activist work.”

Now Ludwig is helping shape such conversations as its executive director. She grew up in Massachusetts and Switzerland, but spent the bulk of her early career in Dallas and Ohio, two places that are often treated as culturally peripheral. Ludwig believes it’s the perception of being on the margins that allowed many of the artists she worked with to take creative risks. After all, a high cost of living makes it hard to experiment. Gone are the days of Schermerhorn Row, but Creative Time’s new R&D Fellowships aim to help alleviate the financial burden. They’re awarded to artists based on their demonstrated commitment to socially engaged and collaborative art but don’t require a deliverable product.

What are the most pressing issues that Ludwig would like the organization to address? She names colonialism, capitalism, and the climate crisis. They are mammoth issues, but as always, the Creative Time projects attached to them are varied in approach. Last fall, it staged “The World’s UnFair,” inspired by racist World Fairs of the past and by real-life examples of individuals and institutions who have returned land to Indigenous tribes. It took Creative Time, Jackson Polys, and brothers Adam and Zack Khalil about a year to put it together, starting with what Adam admits was “an obscenely ambitious proposal.” But some projects take longer. In 2022, under Ludwig, Creative Time was finally able to present Moving Chains, Charles Gaines’ installation inspired by the abolitionist Dred Scott. It was temporarily on view on Governors Island before moving to various sites in Cincinnati, including the banks of the Ohio River, a historic pathway between slave and “free soil” states. Nine years in the making, the work is 110 feet long and resembles the hull of a boat. Above visitors’ heads move nine, 1,600- pound chains, eight moving at the pace of the currents in New York Harbor, one moving with the speed of a boat. It’s a destabilizing experience that recalls ships of the slave trade. Gaines was unprepared for the emotions it provoked in him when he walked through it himself. “The waves of a current can, from a distance, be so graceful,” he says, “but then in another context they could be so threatening.”