This week, New York’s leading public arts nonprofit Creative Time released Invitations Toward Re-worlding, the result of the organization’s first Think Tank. The path-breaking framework can best be understood as a series of administrative interventions, directed by a central question: what does repair within our work look like? Members of the Inaugural Think Tank included, Caitlin Cherry, Che Gosset, Emily Johnson, Hentyle Yapp, Kevin Gotkin, La Tanya S. Autry, Namita Wiggers, Prerana Reddy, and Sonia Guiñansaca. The culmination of their work together, Invitations Toward Re-worlding, serves as a public resource and call to action to explore new modalities to replace existing systems of oppression within our institutions and communities more broadly.
For the past year, the Think Tank has served as an incubator premised on an understanding of arts and cultural spaces as necessary points of intervention toward wider societal transformation. Working amidst a groundswell of demands for change in response to the ongoing pandemic and uprising for racial justice and decolonization, the Think Tank coalesced around a vision of how to move past reactionary and reformist approaches—rooted in representational politics and the elevation of individual achievement over collective gain—and toward true transformation of these systems guided in reparative practices that focus on collective well being.
“Over the past few years we have been asking ourselves, how can we better embody our values in all the work that we do? How does the work transform when we approach even our administrative practices as an opportunity for artistry? In this spirit, the Think Tank has been an amazing opportunity to dive deep into our organizational practices—envisioning a future for the field and our position within it, while centering the labor and vision of cultural workers. As we look toward our 50th anniversary in 2024, we reaffirm our commitment to charging forward as a leader in challenging the status quo,” states Creative Time Executive Director Justine Ludwig.
Presented as a series of iterative “programming scores,” with an emphasis on the practice and implementation of new infrastructural forms, each score is indeed an invitation, to rethinking status quo logics, languages, and framing, and the recognition of administration itself as a site of change and transformation. Examples of the scores include Emily Johnson’s “Decolonization Rider;” Kevin Gotkin’s “score for x,” on holistic disability access integration; Che Gosset’s “Abolition Aesthetics” and Prerana Reddy’s “Compositional Notes for Making a With/Against Institutional Budget,” for rethinking the budget-making process.
Creative Time is committing to this framework and ongoing self-examination of procedure and policy including immediately undergoing Decolonial Action Coalition’s institutional decolonial assessment, continuing to prioritize community-led safety and de-escalation services in place of the police, and use of the scores in the organization’s daily administration in creating budgets, contracting with artists, and commissioning new works. As the organization undertakes a phase of strategic planning over the coming year, the framework will continue to guide the conceptualization of the organization’s future and how it will sustain critical liberation movements, such as Indigenous and Black-led rematriation and reparation efforts.
Following the release of the cohort’s scores in Invitations Toward Re-worlding, Creative Time will invite additional respondents to publish on the site’s Reverb section, with new scores released over the coming months. Reverb will include responses from Eve Tuck, Miguel Gutierrez, Jen Delos Reyes, Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry, Dana Kopel, Guadalupe Maravilla, Art.Coop, and The Black School, among others.
About Creative Time
Creative Time brings ambitious, socially engaged art to the public—free and open to all. We partner with artists to spark dialogue and debate on the most pressing issues of our times, and to foster dreams for our collective future. Since 1974, Creative Time has produced over 350 public art projects in New York City, and partnered with thousands of artists across the country and around the globe, led by the conviction that art acts as a powerful means to envision change in our communities.
