Justine Ludwig On Creative Time’s 50 Years of Visionary Public Art and the Organization’s Future

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Creative Time, the visionary public arts organization that works with artists “to contribute to the dialogues, debates, and dreams of our times.” Since 1974, Creative Time has commissioned and presented ambitious public art projects with thousands of artists throughout New York City, across the country, worldwide—and even in outer space (Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures). We recently spoke with the executive director Justine Ludwig, a driving force behind New York’s public art scene since taking the reins of Creative Time in 2018.

Over its fifty years, Creative Time has been evolving along with the sociopolitical landscape of New York and America. “Since its conception in the 70s, the organization always wanted to be rooted in the issues and needs of the now,” Ludwig told Observer. “That’s something that we’ve been consistent with since that period, being responsive to the moment, responding to it with these big public artworks that make art part of everyday life and committing to supporting artists and their most audacious visions for societal change.”

She immediately clarified that Creative Time’s program is not limited to the installation of public sculptures. Two years ago, Creative Time also opened a permanent space, the CTHQ, conceived as a gathering point for art and politics and a platform to discuss and share tactics for creative political action, encouraging mutual labor and creative care. “It’s a space for intimate engagement,” Ludwig explained. “We have been thinking about what it means to spend time with other people, to think creatively, and to engage in the process collectively.”

The space was inspired by the Creative Time Summit, which started in 2009 and is returning this year after the pandemic suspension. “The summit is a conference that we had done for a decade, and we saw that there was such a need for people to convene in person and think collectively around the issues of the now,” Ludwig said. The 2024 Creative Time Summit will be at BAM in Brooklyn at the end of September, bringing together artists, activists, and other thought leaders engaging with today’s most pressing issues and the meaning of public art and political art.

A critical aspect of the Creative Time approach is the impermanence of their interventions, as they’re strongly connected with the now, a particular moment in space and time (like the organization’s 2012 artist sand castle competiton). Even large-scale installations are seen as only temporary, and there’s a scarcity element to it, according to Ludwig, “that marks the landscape differently.” One memorable early initiative that started in the ’70s, “Art On the Beach,” kicked off when Battery Park was still a beach. “Artists like david hammons created work very early and used that space as a site of engagement. The beach no longer exists, so it was rooted in that moment. And so many of our projects are within these spaces and moments of transformation, and I find that it marks the history of New York in an exciting way.”

Ludwig also told Observer that Creative Times recently launched a fellowship for socially engaged artists, which pairs artists with significant thinkers and experts from different fields to support them in research and development. Activating those multidisciplinary conversations is critical to developing new ideas of societal change, she said, especially at this historical juncture of new political tensions leading to the elections and global instability. “I think it’s important to think about it as a holistic ecosystem. In moments of crisis, we often turn to artists and say, save us, suggest what can be the way forward. How do we think expansively? How do we think outside the box? However, we often don’t offer them the resources to help us do this. Resources are not only financial but also access to expertise in different spaces, infrastructure and even faith, in some ways.”

Those projects interacting with the social space require Creative Time to engage with a complex mix of expertise, ranging from the most technical disciplines, such as engineering, to psychology and sociology. “I work with a group of visionaries, but many are artists in their own right; they’re all creatives in different ways,” Ludwig said. “However, for every project, we also bring in people from different places and fields to be part of the work in one way or another. I think that’s important. Our projects deal with various issues and needs, so we must always comprise these new teams for everything we do.”

In the half century Creative Time has been around, public art has become much more present and popular, with both government and corporate entities investing a lot to put art in public spaces. However, many of the resultant initiatives are focused on creating destinations to entertain or “Instragrammable” attractions. There are other ways to approach public art, as Ludwig explained: “I think art can play a fundamental role in our relationship with space; it can mark a changing landscape, be something iconic, exciting, ‘must-see.’ All of that is part of it. However, there’s a different mode of engagement that thinks more about community and interaction, and not in an entertainment way.”

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Perhaps not surprisingly, Ludwig’s background and curatorial focus are at the intersection of esthetics and politics, esthetics and violence and esthetics and globalization. A big emphasis in what she considers public art is on public art’s potential social impact more than on public engagement. “It isn’t public art because it’s in public space,” she clarified. “It’s public art because it privileges the notion of the public, questioning what it means to bring people into the work, either on a large scale or on an intimate scale.”

On a massive or a small scale, working in public spaces and with ambitious artists whose work is critical and political presents significant challenges. Ludwig relishes the work—specifically, finding ways to make the impossible possible. “I am a bit of a glutton for punishment,” she said. “I am very attracted to the idea of things that are going to, you know, push the bounds of expectation and challenge you, even as a producer, in every way. That is sort of an exciting creative moment as well. Something unique we do is that we always help produce the work. So often, institutions commission a project, but it’s then on the artist in their studio to make it happen. Instead, we build out the team and create the project.”

Production, of course, requires funding, and maintaining financial sustainability is one of the most critical challenges for all nonprofit organizations. When asked what the main factors are to securing sustainable funding, Ludwig’s answer was fluidity. “Understanding that times are changing, needs are changing and being able to respond to that accordingly is important.” Relationships are also very important, as people are a source of both knowledge and funds. “We were able to turn to this massive family of people and artists who have worked with us and continue to support us with a profound love and commitment to our work. This has been critical, especially during moments of crisis or challenging times. People with unwavering faith in the organization’s core mission are critical in making all this happen.”

Attracting and growing their next generation of patrons has been, in some ways, the easy part. Creative Time’s supporters most often come organically from their activities, according to Ludwig. “The way that we work aligns with a lot of thinking of younger generations, addressing inequity in all of its manifestations and thinking about aspirations for what comes next.”

Looking at the future, Ludwig explained to Observer that Creative Time wants to penetrate more profoundly but also very subtly into the everyday life of New Yorkers. ” We are conceiving projects that sort of creep into people’s everyday lives. That is not necessarily a massive sculpture, but something that you happen upon. I think that’s what is sacred about public art: it can be a destination, but it can also be something you trip over. I love the idea of having that be part of more of New Yorkers’ lives, that they can see that blockbuster and transformative public artwork, or they can have a transcendent moment on their way to work in a profoundly unexpected manner. Thinking on those two scales simultaneously is important.”

One imminent project that translates this alternative approach to public art is the continuation of Cosmologyscape by artists Kite and Alisha B Wormsley, selected in Creative Time’s 2022 Open Call. The multidimensional art project encourages the exploration of dreaming practices through an artist-designed interface; the project’s website invites people to submit their dreams, which are then interpreted using machine learning and translated into digital quilts. Closing our conversation, Ludwig commented, “I believe we are an organization that deals with the most pressing issues of the now. After working in museums, I ultimately questioned who are institutions for. At Creative Time, art is not separate from life but profoundly intertwined with it.”