Questions? Email events@creativetime.org.

Commissioned and presented by public art organization Creative Time, The Last Pictures is a project to mark one of these spacecraft with a record of our historical moment. For nearly five years, artist Trevor Paglen interviewed scientists, artists, anthropologists, and philosophers to consider what such a cultural mark should be. As an artist in residence at MIT, he worked with materials scientists to develop an ultra-archival disc of images, capable of lasting in space for billions of years.

In September 2012, the television satellite EchoStar XVI will lift off from Kazakhstan with the disc attached to its anti-earth deck, enter a geostationary orbit, and proceed to broadcast over ten trillion images over its fifteen-year lifetime. When it nears the end of its useful life, EchoStar XVI will use the last of its fuel to enter a slightly higher “graveyard orbit,” where it will power down and die. While EchoStar XVI’s broadcast images are destined to be as fleeting as the light-speed radio waves they travel on, The Last Pictures will continue to slowly circle Earth until the Earth itself is no more.

SPACE PROGRAM: MARS is a demonstration of all that is necessary for survival, scientific exploration, and colonization in extraterrestrial environs: from food delivery systems and entertainment to agriculture and human waste disposal. Sachs and his studio team of thirteen will man the installation, regularly demonstrating the myriad procedures, rituals, and tasks of their mission. The team will also “lift off” to Mars several times throughout their residency at the Armory, with real-time demonstrations playing out various narratives from take-off to landing, including planetary excursions, their first walk on the surface of Mars, collecting scientific samples, and photographing the surrounding landscape.

Beneath the compulsive tinkerer’s mentality and ribald wit that permeate SPACE PROGRAM: MARS, and Sachs’ work at-large, is a conceptual underpinning that addresses serious and profound issues—namely the commodification of abstract concepts such as originality, shock, newness, and mystery—expressing them in the personal and physical terms of production and process. With the recent shuttering of NASA’s shuttle program and the shifting focus towards privatized space travel, SPACE PROGRAM: MARS takes on timely significance within Sachs’s work, which provokes reflection on the haves and have-nots, utopian follies and dystopian realities, while asking barbed questions of modern creativity that relate to conception, production, consumption, and circulation.

SPACE PROGRAM: MARS is co-presented by Creative Time and Park Avenue Armory.

Beginning with works by five artists—Rashaad Newsome, Mickalene Thomas, Tala Madani, Jani Ruscica, and Mads Lynnerup—_Art Breaks_ builds on MTV’s rich legacy of introducing its audience to vanguard video art, including early work from Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Spike Jonze, Kenny Scharf and Doug Aitken, as well as Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes.

Image: Underman
Video Still
Courtesy Tala Madani

Like the exhibition, the book is a landmark survey of more than 100 projects selected by a twenty-five-person curatorial advisory team; projects are documented by a selection of color images. The artists include the Danish collective Superflex, who empower communities to challenge corporate interests; Turner Prize nominee Jeremy Deller, creator of socially and politically charged performance works; Women on Waves, who provides abortion services and information to women in regions where the procedure is illegal; and Santiágo Cirugeda, an architect who builds temporary structures to solve housing problems.

Living as Form contains commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists who look at this phenomenon from a global perspective and broaden the range of what constitutes this form.

In 2010, artist and activist Jim Hodges joined forces with filmmakers Carlos Marques da Cruz and Encke King to assemble a montage of archival and pop footage that conjures up the passionate activism sparked by the early years of the AIDS crisis. By juxtaposing scenes from the last few turbulent decades, Untitled presents a powerful and provocative reflection on an era when political protest and personal existence converged. At the same time, the film draws history nearer by representing the pressure and hopelessness created by regimes of power from New York to Guantanamo and beyond, as well as the brave women and men who in times of crisis stood up for themselves, their communities, and humanity.

Untitled will be screened at IFC Center in New York on Thursday, December 1, at 4:00PM, 5:15PM, 6:30PM and 9:00PM. A discussion about the film, featuring Malik Gaines and Shanti Avirgan and moderated by Nato Thompson, will follow the 6:30PM screening.

Teach 4 Amerika is presented in partnership with 1419, Carnegie Mellon, College for Creative Studies, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Detroit SOUP, The Experimental College of the Twin Cities (EXCO), Feldman Gallery at PNCA, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Illiterate Magazine, Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, LAXART, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland State University Art and Social Practice MFA, Roots & Culture, San Francisco Art Institute, The Soap Factory, Southern Exposure, threewalls, Tyler School of Art, University of Minnesota, Vox Populi, The Waffle Shop, Walker Art Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, and Win Wear.

Artist Maya Lin, for one, traveled to sites of marked environmental change (including Ecuador, Egypt, and China), where she researched mass extinctions caused by the degradation of natural habitats. Sanford Biggers, meanwhile, traveled to Brazil and used the medium of video to explore the cultural hybridization of the region. Emily Jacir took in the pulse of activism in urban areas of Italy, with a particular focus on various immigrant communities; and Swoon traveled to Haiti, where she worked with local residents to rebuild housing and community structures. K8 Hardy visited Chile, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina and investigated fringe queer culture, particularly feminist and lesbian communities actively producing cultural forms. Additionally, Walid Raad traveled to Beirut to explore the burgeoning infrastructure of the visual arts in the Arab world.

Photo by Emily Jacir

Operating in Manhattan since September 2009, the university’s initial curriculum focused on art history—specifically, creating new histories—as well as studio critiques. Lecture topics included Occult Shenanigans in 20th/21st Century Art, What’s a Metaphor?, The BHQFU Detective Agency, and Edifying. Additional courses continue to be added to the curriculum on an ongoing basis.

Programming included the participation of four arts organizations from cities at the forefront of artistic experimentation and cross-disciplinary collaboration: Detroit, Mexico City, Berlin, and Glasgow. The four organizations—the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, 032c in Berlin, and Tramway in Glasgow—partnered on curating one night each, which spotlighted the film, music, video, performance, and more of their respective cities.

The participants range from art world luminaries to those purposefully obscure, providing a glimpse into an evolving community concerned with the political implications of socially engaged art. The Creative Time Summit II was meant to be an opportunity to not only uncover the tensions that such a global form of working presents, but also to provide opportunities for new coalitions and sympathetic affinities.

In January of 2010, Creative Time commissioned Danish-Icelandic artist and filmmaker Jakob Boeskob to travel to Lagos, Nigeria. In collaboration with Nollywood film director Teco Benson, Boeskob created the short art–action video, Dr. Cruel and the Afro-Icelandic Liberation Front. A multinational satire, Dr. Cruel tells the story of a Scandinavian hero who employs terrorist tactics in an attempt to regain foreign oil money for the Nigerian people. Inspired by the local industry’s democratized, DIY approach to cinema, Boeskob’s video is a hybridization of cultures, video clips, filmic cliches, and political agendas.

Key to the City sought to ignite the public’s imagination with a complex portrait of New York City that included both the traditional tourist attractions and new places city dwellers might otherwise never visit. The project expanded Ramírez Jonas’s longstanding interest in the key not so much as an object, but a vehicle for exploring social contracts as they pertain to trust, access, and belonging.

The questions he asked spanned various aspects of his life, from the mundane to the intimate, including his inconsistent career, his tumultuous relationship with his family, personal grooming and fashion tips, and spontaneous daily dilemmas. The Advice of Strangers constituted a collaboration between artist and audience, which consisted of anyone who visited the website and casted a vote. In this way, the project explored what it is like to live one’s life by the whim of an anonymous community, as well as the ways in which online social networks are changing how we navigate the world. The results and the repercussions were recorded through edited video content on www.theadviceofstrangers.com.

A corresponding map identifies the location of each bell, allowing the listener to more specifically follow the geographic journey of the recordings. Collectively, the bells function as a sort of microcosm of the urban landscape, representing the varied sounds of the New York City reality. A Bell for Every Minute was the second of two projects commissioned for the High Line (the first was Spencer Finch’s The River That Flows Both Ways, 2009) and was presented in partnership by Creative Time, Friends of the High Line, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation.

Image by Stephen Vitiello

Every month for two years, a new artist was given a blank nine-panel grid and asked to both work within and defy its borders. In this space, they were invited to intervene, tell stories, provoke, and address a broad audience. The 24 completed works from the entire series are archived chronologically online and were also released as a full-color publication in 2010.

Curated by Shane Brennan | Image by Saya Woolfalk

Subtle and camouflaged, this quiet performance was not immediately apparent to passersby, as the actors appeared to be a normal couple and the dialogue revealed no inconsistencies with quotidian conversation. Above the actors, on MTVʼs “44 1⁄2” outdoor digital screen, the playʼs dialogue was projected in time with the action, evoking a silent movie brought to life.

The performance referenced the “temporal compression” that one often experiences in Times Square, a place where the acceleration of the city is almost palpable and information is conveyed at rapid speeds through the digital billboards that blanket the streetscape.

Photograph by Sam Horine

Creative Time Open Door at P.S.1 was an extension of Creative Time’s Open Door program, which began in 2003 as a resource for artists who sought guidance in realizing public art projects. Through the program, artists met with Creative Time staff members and discussed the obstacles inherent in creating art for the public realm.

The 2010 series also included multidisciplinary artist Maya Lin’s What is Missing?, a series of four videos about mass extinction and the degradation of natural habitats. Additional videos comprised a survey of work by emerging artists Rob Carter, Graeme Patterson, and Allison Schulnik, who transported the viewer into the kinetic worlds of a city experiencing exponential growth, a discrete memory of youthful contention, and a strange, alien planet, respectively.

Image by Marina Abramovic

In addition to this labyrinth-like metropolis on the sand, White designed an open-air theater space that hosted the Art Video, Art Film, and Art Perform programs, as well as Art Basel Conversations.

Every month for two years, a new artist was given a blank nine-panel grid and asked to both work within and defy its borders. In this space, they were invited to intervene, tell stories, provoke, and address a broad audience. The 24 completed works from the entire series are archived chronologically online and were also released as a full-color publication in 2010.

Curated by Shane Brennan | Image by Packard Jennings

Throughout the course of one day, each participant gave a brief introduction to his or her work. Attendees thus gained valuable insight into widely varying global approaches, which collectively intended to not only reflect, but also act upon moments of historic change by breaking the traditional barriers between art, culture, and politics.

Curated by Nato Thompson | Photo by Sam Horine

Majestic began by evoking wonder in the audience, as they initially witnessed a magic trick performed. Then, slowly, through the performance art technique of repetition, the audience became a part of the magician’s process of rehearsal and refinement—Majestic performed the same mentalist trick with every audience member, gifting each of them a deck of cards before the piece “reset” with the next audience member. Such repetition provided audience members the rare opportunity to gain a nuanced understanding of both the magic act and the performance.

Photograph by Meghan McInnis

This World & Nearer Ones intervened in the architectural and natural fabric of the island, as the artists transformed its historic buildings and vast lawns—from the iconic Fort Jay to St. Cornelius Chapel—through installation, performance, video, and auditory works, inviting audiences to reconsider the island’s complicated history, as well as the greater uncertainty of the future.

Curated by Mark Beasley, with the support of Curatorial Assistant Shane Brennan

Inspired by the Hudson River, The River That Flows Both Ways is a poetic window installation, which documents a 700-minute journey Finch took on the river, during which he photographed the water every minute. The color of each pane was based on a single pixel point from every one of the photographs. The panes were arranged chronologically, in such a manner that time was essentially translated into a grid—reading from left to right and top to bottom—and capturing the varied reflective and translucent conditions of the water’s surface. The work, like the river, is experienced differently depending on the light levels and atmospheric conditions of the site. In this narrative orientation, the glass reveals Finch’s impossible quest for the color of water.

Photograph by Luke Stettner

The 2009 also showcased Steve McQueen’s classic video work Deadpan (1997), in which he restaged a stock-in-trade Buster Keaton gag—a house falls on top of a figure, who somehow emerges unscathed. Additional screenings included video art by three emerging artists—Bestué-Vives, Martha Colburn, and Gonzalo Lebrija—who explored themes of transformation, wars in American history, and the human and the beast, respectively.

Image by Marilyn Minter

At the end of March 2009, Deller took the project on the road and was joined by Sergeant Jonathan Harvey, an American veteran of the Iraq War; Esam Pasha, an Iraqi citizen; and Nato Thompson, Creative Time Curator. The group traveled aboard a specially outfitted RV and conducted conversations at more than ten public sites across the United States, including expanded sojourns at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. In tow was the ultimate conversation starter: a car destroyed in a bombing on Al-Mutanabbi Street, Baghdad in March 2007.

Curated by Nato Thompson and Laura Hoptman, with the support of Amy Mackie and Shane Brennan | Photograph by Jeremy Deller

From 2008 to 2010 Bronson and Hobbs brought together small groups of men—in Banff, New Orleans, Winnipeg, Manhattan, and Fire Island—in a secret group ritual that was different every time and yet always the same. Invoking the “queer” and marginalized histories of each site, the men performed something that Bronson has characterized as “a hybrid between group therapy, ceremonial magic, a séance, a circle jerk, and a quilting bee.”

Photograph by Michael Marcelle

In addition to the Convergence Center, Democracy in America included performative artist commissions, which often took place on the street and among the public, including at both the RNC and the DNC. This complex program was further diversified by mobile projects—such as an activist ice cream truck—and a publication entitled A Guide to Democracy in America, which provided artists a platform to reflect on American democracy.

Curated by Nato Thompson | Photograph by Meghan McInnis

“Hey Hey Glossolalia” derives from two terms in spoken language: “hey hey,” an exclamation and call for attention, and “glossolalia,” an evangelical term meaning “speaking in tongues”—utterances that resemble speech but are unintelligible. The title was inspired by Dadaist abstraction of language and the seemingly meaningless but often repeated beat marker in popular music.

Curated by Mark Beasley | Photograph by Sam Horine

Muhheakantuck, more specifically, explored the social and political impact of the relatively brief but violent period of contact between Dutch colonists and the Lower Hudson River Valley’s indigenous Lenape people. By examining how maps are constructed, how places are named (and thereby owned), and what stories are left silent, the film exposed the consequences of Henry Hudson’s journey. Buckingham’s narrative, too, reminded the viewer, “The river that became known as the Hudson was not discovered—it was invented and re-invented.”

Image by Matthew Buckingham

The project consisted of a retrofitted antique organ, placed in the center of the building’s cavernous second-floor gallery. When played, the keys controlled a series of devices attached to architectural features, such as metal beams, plumbing, electrical conduits, and heating and water pipes. These machines vibrated, struck, and blew across the building’s elements, triggering unique harmonics and producing finely tuned sounds.

Photograph by Justin Ouellette

Chan’s production was comprised of four site-specific outdoor performances in two New Orleans neighborhoods—one in the middle of an intersection in the Lower Ninth Ward and the other in the front yard of an abandoned house in Gentilly. The project further evolved into a larger social production involving free art seminars, educational programs, theater workshops, and conversations with the community.

Photograph by Paul Chan

Inspired by the building’s history, the surrounding neighborhood, literary and cultural references, and the current social climate in the United States, the project came to life via materials gleaned from local salvage yards and debris from the market’s heyday. A Psychic Vacuum not only offered audiences the opportunity to explore a forgotten building, but also continued Creative Time’s history of both encouraging dialogue about neighborhoods on the verge of change and producing site-specific architectural artworks.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Adrian Piper, for one, initiated an open call for volunteers to imprint the text “Everything will be taken away” on their foreheads in henna for two weeks. The four-man group Gelitin simply dug a giant hole in the beach on Coney Island for seven days, and Jonathan Monk restaged a new version of Daniel Buren’s 1975 performance Seven Ballets In Manhattan. Hamish Fulton, meanwhile, created a “walk”—his first in New York City—and Javier Tellez produced a film with seven blind New Yorkers and an elephant. Spartacus Chetwynd, with a team of four others from England, developed improvisational interventions in response to the architecture throughout the city and Coney Island.

Curated by Mark Beasley

The sites—which included Gordon Matta-Clark’s FOOD restaurant, Manhattan’s former beach, and Max’s Kansas City, among others—were also prescribed a telephone number that, when dialed, offered a personal audio recording by the individual who chose it for incorporation in the project. As such, listeners were invited to imagine what it would have been like to be a part of these various events and moments in New York’s art history.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Sussman’s remake of the myth as a 1960’s period piece featured the Romans as G-men; the Sabines as butchers’ daughters; and the heyday of Rome allegorically implied in an affluent international summer house. While the Roman myth traces the birth of a society, Sussman’s telling suggests the destruction of a utopia: the intervention of the women is fraught, and the chaos that ensues transforms the designed perfection into nothingness.

Photograph by Benedikt Partenheimer

Conceived by Aitken specifically for the museum’s broad expanses of glass, steel, and granite, sleepwalkers was inspired by the densely built environment of midtown Manhattan and portrayed the metropolis as a living organism fueled by the desires, energies, and ambitions of its inhabitants. While the installation thus suggested an inner life of the buildings, it also reclaimed modern architecture for personal expression and imbued anonymity with fluid human presence.

Curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey | Photograph by Fred Charles

Rondinone titled the sculptures with an original short poem: air gets into everything even nothing and get up girl a sun is running the world. And come winter, his white tree sculptures just as poetically complemented New York City’s snowy landscape.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Appropriately, Sky is the Limit also referenced the seemingly unlimited promise of gambling to change destiny, as the work’s narrative peaked in an ecstatic moment, evocative of the euphoria of winning. Offering relief from time, almost a parallel world, Sky is the Limit fit perfectly in the mirage that is Las Vegas.

Photograph by David Lancaster

Political, acerbic, and witty, the projects included Mel Chin’s animated film comparing the histories of September 11, 2001 in the United States with September 11, 1973 in Santiago, Chile; Coco Fusco’s multimedia performance about women’s role in the War on Terror; Michael Rakowitz’s temporarily reopened family import-export business from Brooklyn to Iraq; and Jens Haaning’s Arabic Joke, a traditional joke depicted on posters in Arabic and displayed throughout the city.

Photograph by Paula Court

The machine, installed in a commercial van, was equipped with various sensors that continually recorded such elements as current weather conditions, ambient sound, prevalent surrounding color, and stories and comments from passersby. The data was processed and rendered in real time and printed on the spot every 30 seconds over the course of a week, resulting in thousands of composite images of New York—each with the exact location, time, and date. In the end, these “snapshots” of New York and its inhabitants were sent to the printing plant to be applied onto the books. The cover of every book therefore bears a one-of-the-kind artifact made by the UVRM.

Photograph by Justin Ouellette

In 2006, The 59th Minute presented Euan MacDonald’s meditative video Healer, as well as a showcase of work by emerging artists Brian Alfred, Ara Peterson, and Mark Titchner, which grappled with the fraught history of images and advertising.

Image by Euan Macdonald

STRANGE POWERS highlighted works intended to have a paranormal effect on the world, including, among many others, two spell drawings by Brion Gysin; Douglas Gordon’s text beckoning visitors to “Do Something Evil;” a “soul stick” by Jim Lambie; aura portraits of artists by Anne Collier; and a crystal ball by Eva Rothschild. The exhibition additionally included a series of performances, public happenings and workshops.

Curated by Laura Hoptman and Peter Eleey | Photograph by Justin Ouellette

Julie Atlas Muz performed parade duties as Miss Coney Island and worked with artist Steve Powers and others to create the Miss Coney Island float. Creative Time presented the float again in the 2006 Art Parade, for which Powers also created multi-user pink bicycles.

Broken Screen is comprised of informal conversations between Aitken and a roster of twenty-five carefully chosen filmmakers, designers, architects, and artists. Part guidebook, part manifesto, Aitken’s book considers the realities of creating art in an increasingly fragmentary world. Via both casual and direct discussions, Broken Screen offers a detailed navigation through the ideas behind the previously under-documented visual language of nonlinear narratives, split screens, and fragmentary visual planes.

For Minter, the billboards were an outgrowth of her interests in blurring the boundaries between fine art and commercial art and co-opting commercial genres and spaces for her artistic practice. Both attractive and repulsive simultaneously, Minter’s billboards ultimately seduced viewers, who, complicit in their own dirty secrets, succumbed to the guilty pleasure of looking at the tainted object of desire.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

In 2005, The 59th Minute presented Song Dong’s Broken Mirror, which explored the realities and consequences of vast urbanization. Additional screenings featured Aïda Ruilova’s psychologically charged and visually striking video Countdowns, as well as Kimsooja’s A Needle Woman, A Beggar Woman, and A Laundry Woman, depicting the artist’s back to viewer in a range of locales.

Image by Kimsooja

The dinner conversations focused on the ways in which art functions as a public practice—from the globalization of creative economies and the dominance of restrictive notions of beauty to contemporary American war culture—and offered provocative and insightful analysis from a myriad of disparate perspectives. The conversations of Who Cares were recorded and reproduced as a book distributed by D.A.P. in October 2006.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

The exhibition’s title, The Plain of Heaven, adapted from a painting by British artist John Martin (1789 – 1854), referred to the idea of an elevated, sublime environment that lies just beyond our reach, yet is firmly planted in our aspirations and imagination.

Curated by Peter Eleey | Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Additionally, at New York University’s Bobst Library, Holzer projected declassified government documents, which were released under the Freedom of Information Act. Holzer’s presentation of these documents suggested America’s struggle to achieve an equitable balance between transparency and secrecy, public and private.

Photograph by Charlie Samuel

New aspects of the project included artist-designed prizes at participating arcade game booths and the launch of The Dreamland Artist Clubhouse, a kind of information center where visitors could see artists at work in the studio, buy a handmade sign from the gallery, pick up a map of the park, or receive a personal tour of the Dreamland artworks.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Hodges’s sculpture had the effect of transporting visitors on a sensual journey, as they were consumed by its warped refractive environment—it fused reflections of the viewers’ images with the opposing landscapes of skyscrapers and park, as well as raised questions about identity, artifice, and nature. Via the sculpture, Hodges furthered his exploration of camouflage as a basic pattern of light and dark, one that conceals and alters our perception of visual objects.

Nuevo Ricos features bands that use rock and electronic music as a departure point for their outlandish and interactive performances. Music and videos are available for download at nuevosricos.com.

The wheel was designed in the vein of 1950s consumer guidebooks, fusing an aesthetic echo of the American dream and 1950s American corporate optimism. Hill’s work responded to the growing symbolic force of brands and trademarks, as well as the reality that, with each passing day, increasing amounts of public space are sold off to the highest bidder. This domain, formally rejected by many artists, is now embedded in the dialogue of public art due to its ubiquitous presence in everyday life.

Photograph by Sarah Shatz

In 2004, The 59th Minute presented Carlos Amorales’s The Forest, which transformed folkloric and popular Mexican iconography into a frenetic and striking animation, as well as Günther Selichar’s Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red and Green, for which he invited internet users to create digital animations using the three colors upon which modern video, computer and television screens are based. Additionally, work by emerging artists Hiraki Sawa, Janaina Tschape, and The Neistat Brothers explored themes of dreams and fictions.

Image by Hiraki Sawa

The nighttime projections featured xenon poetry, in which the words of such acclaimed poets as Wislawa Szymborska, Yehuda Amichai, and Henri Cole were scrolled over New York sites—The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain, The Cooper Union, and New York’s Hotel Pennsylvania—illuminating them with ideas of poignant beauty.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Capitalizing and commenting on the frenzy of Fashion Week in New York, as well as challenging the pressure to conform to the retail approach, the Imitation of Christ store sold its daily singular item—whether a $2,000 couture dress or a cocker spaniel puppy—to the first buyer. Ephemeral in spirit, location and operating hours, the nomadic store literally picked up and changed location throughout the day, and closed down as soon as the item sold.

OUT functioned as a critique of increased military intrusion in civilian life since 9/11 and was presented on the eve of the Republican National Convention. The project further confronted the dual reality of these games, raising important questions about their social implications, as well as underscoring the danger of blurring boundaries between what is entertainment and what is “real.”

Fundamentally participatory, the interactive installation enticed passersby to climb its sloping ramp and voice their thoughts, poetry, grievances, and hopes. Freedom directly addressed public frustration over not being heard by offering a public forum for dialogue on the dynamics of free speech, the dualism of power and powerlessness, and a multiplicity of social and cultural concerns.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Using customized commercial carpet, such as the kind often found in upscale hotels or casinos, Stingel’s Plan B emphasized the creative potential of ordinary materials, as well as expanded the notion of contemporary painting and brought new splendor to some 125,000 commuters’ daily routines.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Like Powers, each of the participating artists had a personal, social, or aesthetic interest in the visual culture of the area; many were from Brooklyn or greater New York, though some came from Chicago and Los Angeles to participate. With a dramatic range of styles and practices, The Dreamland Artist Club offered a sampling of this era’s artistry and imagination to Coney Island, as well as proposed a new model for creative urban revitalization strategies that both compliments and builds upon the existing character of this legendary New York neighborhood.

Curated by Steve Powers and Peter Eleey | Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Five custom-designed loudspeakers set around the plaza mixed the collected noises and radiated the sound in all directions. Blue Moon—in reference to the lunar phenomenon of two full moons in one month, which occured in July 2004—transported listeners, reminding them of the inherent temporal cycles of the broader biosphere in which we live, attuning them to the quotidian sounds on which we may not otherwise focus, and offered new perspectives on our environment.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

The continuous eighteen minute loop of interwoven invocations included the Azan, the Islamic call to prayer; a Jewish tribute to God; tonal breathing exercises of Buddhist monks; and “O Jerusalem,” a historical Christian work by 12th-century composer Hildegard von Bingen. As the recording expanded and contracted in intensity it conveyed a sense of inhalation and exhalation to the inanimate sculpture. _Breath_’s structural spiral further underscored a sense of perpetual motion, defying the potential stasis of its medium.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Guests were treated to performances by Rusty Santos, PFFR, Tokeleys, Mirror Mirror, Tara Delong, Cazwell, Avenue D, and Phiiliip.

A Creative Time collaboration with The New School and Parsons School of Design, Blur 03 featured a presentation by Giles Lane, founder and codirector of Proboscis, a non-profit cultural organization and creative studio based in London.

Unfolding in three stages over five minutes, Light Cycle was designed to afford a variety of experiences from myriad vantage points, both within and surrounding Central Park. Simultaneously signifying renewal and wholeness, the project was intended as a blessing and a gift to New York City.

Photograph by Hiro Ihara

Zhang Huan modeled the sculpture after traditional bells found in Chinese temples and inscribed it with the names of his ancestors from his native village. Visitors were invited to push a gilded cast of the artist’s naked body into the bell, thereby forcing a symbolic confrontation between the artist and his ancestral past. Within view of Ellis Island, Peace encouraged the public to consider their own relationship to ancestry and identity.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Suspended from the vaulted ceiling of the Chicago Navy Piers, the three grids functioned as curtains holding together the spatial integrity of the exhibition hall, which was fragmented by numerous temporary gallery walls.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

The collected recordings were edited into three unique fifteen minute compositions narrated by Rita Houston of local radio station WFUV. The compilation was distributed at a variety of sites in the three neighborhoods, including film screenings, bookstores, hair salons, and takeout food joints, as well as broadcast to greater New York on WFUV. Local Frequencies culminated with a free, live concert featuring performances by the artists.

Photograph by Toshi Reagon

What is What took the form of a multifaceted project consisting of a series of three street interventions, accompanied by an expository and performative website designed by Patrick Figuera.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Lutz’s performance intended to encourage unsuspecting audiences on the street to pause, reflect, and consider the current global situation. This powerful and elegant performance offered a fresh perspective on world events, encouraged dialogue, and resonated within individual and collective memories, making a difference to the viewer and wearer alike.

Established in 2002, the Häagen-Dazs Art of Pure Pleasure initiative sought to garner attention for the innovative work of up-and-coming artists in the fields of film, fashion, and the visual and performing arts.

Photograph by Conrad Kiffin

In 2003, The 59th Minute presented Jeremy Blake’s triptych of one-minute videos titled Cowboy Waltz, as well as a selection of Thomas Struth’s Video Portraits, which were presented in conjunction with his mid-career retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Additional screenings featured PDPal (a.k.a Personal Digital Pal), conceived and created by artist Marina Zurkow, architect Scott Paterson, and technologist Julian Bleecker.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Artists not only had the rare opportunity to work in a magnificent urban landmark, but were also enabled to display their pieces using cutting-edge technology. The Catalyst System, provided by Scharff Weisberg, cast the artworks onto the vaulted ceiling of Grand Central’s main concourse with a dynamism never before achievable in video projection technology.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

In 2002, The 59th Minute presented two seminal video works by William Wegman, Dog Duet and Front Porch. Additional screenings featured Geneviève Cadieux’s Portrait, in which a tree serves as a metaphor for the isolation of solitude but, more importantly, the regeneration and renewal of spring.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Audiences experienced the various installations through speakers near the atrium’s palm trees, stairs, and surrounding air vents. The result was a diverse range of sensory experiences, which proved an intimate and curious alternative to ambient noise.

Standing ten feet tall, Back of a Snowman bridged the fall, winter, and spring seasons, reminding the New York public of the distant between the natural environment and the urban context. The sculpture’s bronze heft, moreover, defied the ephemeral nature of its implied medium.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Garlic=Rich Air set forth a monetary relationship between URL information and virtual garlic. Visitors were invited to participate online by submitting various URL addresses in return for virtual garlic, or “G,” as Cheang put it. At the close of the G-Mart, virtual “G” was cashed in for real garlic, a commodity that is desired and wholly revered in the year 2030.

The works—such as an installation of sound artifacts collected from the Brooklyn Bridge and a telescope that revealed personal messages in the city skyline—spanned virtual, physical, and social realms, as well as connected the city’s historic character with the ephemeral nature of new technologies.

As such, this Internet game playfully confronted three cultural behemoths: the biotechnology industry, the electronic gaming industry, and corporate culture at large.

Image by Action Tank

Immaterial, yet powerfully resonant, Tribute in Light reaches out into the stratosphere—the ultimate symbol of how Creative Time’s unique approach to public art is capable of something both profound and transformative.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

When the poster was mounted or plastered on a wall, the underlying posters appeared through the die-cut silhouettes, effectively reminding the pubic that September 11th created a ubiquitous filter through which everyday realities have become measured or seen.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

Viewers could access these characters from Creative Time’s public Beaming Network at various stations designed by ORG throughout Manhattan.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

As viewers approached the installation, the figure not only lost form and became amorphous, but the light bulb grid and its rudimentary nature became exceedingly apparent. For Campbell, the shadow with its poetic simplicity evoked absence, the passage of time, and feelings of loss, while the figure’s dissolution alluded to the transience of images, illusions of technology, and most importantly, the necessity to question what is simply perceived with the eye.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

The four posters appeared on media walls in a street campaign from February 11-18, 2002 and were also offered free to the public at museums, libraries, and community centers. The Deutsche Bank Lobby Gallery additionally hosted an exhibition featuring over forty of the poster proposals.

Image by Eric Liftin

Eager to embrace this profound gesture, Creative Time helped to distribute the paintings throughout lower Manhattan. Deposited in partnership with The Downtown Alliance at sites such as police precincts, fire houses, office buildings, and public schools, among others, the humanity and kinship represented by Malmgren’s paintings and gesture promoted healing and selflessness in a time of tragedy.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

In 2001, The 59th Minute surveyed a diverse range of artists, as well as explored several themes, including those of passage of time, relevant social issues, and creative processes.

Whether remolding cultural and industrial effluvia to build new forms or constructing powerful layers of pure electronic timbres and frequencies, these musicians created new sonic experiences, which were simultaneously futuristic and historic, simple and monumental, phenomenological and mind-altering.

Using both technology’s basic building blocks and new hybrid configurations, the artists of Art in the Anchorage 18 referenced and expanded upon the minimalist and ambient work of 60s and 70s artists, such as John Cage, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell. _ Massless Medium_ both sensitized and disarmed visitors, forcing them to reexamine their relationship with the environment in an increasingly technological world where the boundaries between the physical body and technology continually dissipate.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

The eyes depicted on each sculpture were distinctively different in size and expression; each one pointed in a different direction so as to emphasize the hectic bustle of Grand Central’s commuters. Floating serenely overhead, the balloons cast a lighthearted, winking glance at the curious and amused passersby.

Photograph by Robert Wilson, MTA Arts for Transit

Clouds coincided with Muniz’s show, The Things Themselves: Pictures of Dust at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as with the premiere of a documentary about the Brazilian artist’s work entitled, Worst Possible Illusion: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz.

Blur 01 was produced in partnership with Thundergulch, The New School, and Parsons School of Design.

The billboards ran concurrently with an exhibition at the Andrea Rosen Gallery.

The public was encouraged to download the banners and post them to personal websites; all banners included a link to the Creative Time Web Action site, ensuring that the participating artists’ messages concerning HIV/AIDS received widespread attention.

Photograph by Charlie Samuels

The collective whole of the projects recognized how cell phones have changed both artistic and curatorial practices, activating the phone as both the canvas and the paintbrush.

Produced with special thanks to index Magazine and the Meat Market Art Fair

DNAid Billboards were installed for the month of September 2000 and featured three artist-designed boards throughout New York City: Haluk Akakçe’s The Measure of All Things on Varick & Carmine Streets; Nancy Burson’s Five Images from the Human Race Machine at Canal & Church Streets; and Alexis Rockman’s The Farm at Lafayette & Houston Streets.

The cups, distributed throughout all five boroughs in various coffee shops and bodegas, infiltrated the morning rituals of many New York residents and effectively encouraged public awareness of genetic research: “Since Dolly [the sheep] was cloned, artists haven’t really examined how altering the human genome will affect our culture,” Creative Time director Anne Pasternak remarked. “We were looking for a way to convey complex information, spark debate, and do it with humor.”

Photograph by Robert Glasgow

Music in the Anchorage 2000 offered everything from gospel choirs to politically-charged hip-hop to literary readings performed with compositions by Vernon Reid.

Through NOISEGATE, Granular Synthesis created an immersive multi-media experience, which was comprised of six massive projections onto video screens throughout the Anchorage’s dark chambers. Using proprietary video sampling software, audio hardware, and digital video, NOISEGATE thus transformed the unique space of the Anchorage into an enormous media landscape.

Tibor in Orbit appeared on one million Parmalat Sunnydale milk cartons in supermarkets throughout New York with panels that read, “Tibor says money isn’t everything.” Additionally, the project was displayed on a large video screen in Times Square; four “Tiborisms” (images and sayings characteristic of Tibor Kalman) appeared on screen every hour at fifty-nine minutes past the hour. These frozen Tibor in Orbit images functioned in stark contrast to Times Square’s chaotic bonanza of advertising, sound bites, and spectacular media images.

For the replica Diner, Färgfabriken imported the food, menu, and customers of the restaurant in order to simulate as closely as possible the atmosphere of the restaurant. Local Brooklyn musicians, dancers, and performance artists, too, contributed to a distinctly Williamsburgian experience, as it was created in Stockholm.

Image by Rebecca Zoller

In August and September of 1999, video shoots took place in each of these neighborhoods, during which 420 participants were documented jumping as high as they could. Edited and slowed down, the footage was later projected onto a sixty-foot building in Columbus Circle.

Photograph by Chris Doyle

Daily Dispatch, too, was offered as an additional online project, which featured stories by artists, activists, and writers from around the world and portrayed how the AIDS pandemic had impacted their communities.

Patrick Li also curated a limited-edition publication, which examined fashion presentation in print; and Victoria Bartlett created Loud and Unhinged, an installation focusing on the evolving role of film and video in fashion presentation, conceived with Andrea Rosen.

Adolescence traveled throughout four boroughs, making stops at various cultural centers along the way; it also complemented a concurrent show of Leccia’s video and sound installations, Yes, She Does, at Clinica Aesthetica. Additionally, Ille de Beaute, a film directed by Leccia and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, was screened at Tonic, and the artist’s video La Mer was shown on the World Financial Center Winter Garden video wall.

For 10 Web Action Tours, too, a choice group of artists, writers, curators, and activists were invited to lead a DWA Web Action tour. Online guests were lead through each guide’s unique perspective on living in a culture with AIDS via his or her personal web site.

Artist collective The Art Guys leased advertising space on gray suits custom-designed by Todd Oldham, which were then embroidered with commercial logos. In this way, the artists wove together a timely discourse regarding the crossover markets of art, fashion, and advertising.

Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

Using laser lights, he then projected the participants’ handwritten passages onto the facades of their buildings. The writings–in English, Spanish, Chinese, Yiddish, and Hebrew–formed a communal poem that reanimated the architecture of the neighborhood, as well as produced a testament to the history of the community.

Photograph by Shimon Attie

A wide array of artists thus descended on the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage to present works that focused on a theme of increasing interdisciplinary dialogue between music, video, film, and performance. Art in the Anchorage 15 also featured Absolut Panushka, which offered visitors the unique opportunity to create their own animated films using innovative online animation software.

After gathering first-hand feedback regarding these topics, El Mexterminator offered Techno-Museo de Etnografia Interactiva at El Museo del Barrio, an event which featured performances shaped by the audience’s prior interactions with the artists’ ethno-cyborg selves, thereby creating an embodiment of the participants’ own psychological and cultural monsters.

Photograph by Eileen Travell

These “gestures” then became part of a public installation via ATM machines in Bern, Toronto, and New York. This exhibition on ATM machine screens was presented as a means of both minimizing international borders and suggesting that it is monetary values that underpin cultural exchange. A comprehensive exhibit of all entries was offered at the Galerie Francesca Pia in Bern, as well as at the Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn.

Finley’s phone commentary responded to a range of topics, including observations relating to news headlines and social injustices, as well as more personal reflections on motherhood and daily life. 1-900-ALL-KAREN was thus an appropriation of a 1-900 exchange (usually associated with the charlatanism of phone sex, horoscopes, and psychics) as a source for artistic free expression.

Photograph by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

The project also incorporated a phone number participants could call to hear a hypnotic audioscape of rumors read by poet Nicole Blackman.

In this way, Stathacos re-created the ritual of wishing as a multisensory experience. Intentionally located in busy Grand Central Station, too, the machine and its wishes were offered with the intention of conjuring the desires of the urban commuter–however restless or varied those might be.

Pairing up prominent fashion designers with contemporary visual artists, the teams worked to produce bold new design projects, and selected works were sold to benefit for Creative Time. Exquisite Corpses launched a year of projects illuminating the depth of creativity in fashion design and honoring the discipline as an important artistic endeavor.

In an area of the city where great cultural and financial institutions exist side by side, World Views offered a literal opening through which to look into these respective domains.

The braid sculpture was lowered from the 9th floor of 80 Lafayette Street and viewed by passersby, Family Court System employees, and the people inside the building who were waiting for to hearings to commence.

Mixing with the crowds of the city’s sidewalks, the visual event traced an elegant pattern of downtown pedestrian movement.

On any given evening one could hear Ben Neill play his digitally enhanced Mutantrumpet; listen to Scanner—the self-proclaimed “telephone terrorist”—integrate cell phone conversations into his musical mixes; or dance to DJ Spooky’s phono-collages of retro-futuristic “ambient chaos” and dance beats.

Photograph by Dennis Kleiman

Plug In!, an series of eleven installations by numerous emerging digital media artists, highlighted projects by such innovators as Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, and Grahame Weinbren, creator of the first interactive film, as well as younger artists like Natalie Bookchin and Michael Joo.

Viewers navigating through the virtual station provoked mouse sensitive points, which triggered the recitation of sequential portions of text, as well as associated audio elements. As viewers proceeded through the station, a narrative dependent on the user’s choices began to unfold.

The tongue-in-cheek project also commented on the Internet’s ability to offer such an overwhelming array of information that an individual could spend hours of his or her life surfing websites, as opposed to communicating with the “real” world. The project was a part of Creative Time’s CyberWide series, and was included in Port: Navigating Digital Culture, an artnetweb exhibition of networked digital worlds on the Internet.

Kline stated, “As a location for Winter Music, the city is ready-made at Christmas Time—the lights, the familiar bustle, and furthermore, the emotions. It seems to me that even the most hardened among us succumb to a certain kind of longing and expectation that maybe something wonderful will happen.” Winter Music brought an aural awareness of the joys of the winter season to the city’s public.

The Holiday Buffet included everything from links to actual food vendors to a site detailing how to properly invite guests to dinner, as well as food photography tips from artist Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

The site allowed users to link to AIDS-related information; add to a memorial list that was sent to the President; and join a coalition of individuals and organizations expressing their unity, anger, concern, and sense of loss in response to the AIDS crisis.

Creative Time commissioned the X-Cheerleaders—feminist performance artists—to kick off the event with cheers at both the start and finish of the run.

In contrast to the immense physicality of the Anchorage environs, the exhibition considered how unseen technological innovation could be incorporated into a traditional art practice. Additionally, the June opening event featured DJ Spooky spinning records and kicked off the inaugural Music in the Anchorage event.

Directed by Jennifer Miller, the series constituted a mad spectacle of theater, frivolity, and information, as the performances were staged in community gardens, vacant lots, and city parks throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Money Amok, the central performance, grappled with the rapidly growing divide between the wealthy and the poor in the United States.

Using business-world marketing strategies, the project was promoted both inside and outside the art world, and for his New York project, Cao placed countertop displays in stores around the city, as well as produced a promotional brochure advertising his services, which was distributed through the mail.

Designed by G.H. Hovagimyan, the site featured animated poetry by John Giorno; digital versions of four AIDS-related broadsides courtesy of Visual AIDS; and links to other AIDS/HIV information sites.

Prominent artists represented in this volume include: April Gornik, the Guerilla Girls, Lynda Benglis, Vivienne Koorland, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Joan Jonas, Alison Knowles, Barbara Kruger, Carolee Schneemann, Rosemarie Castoro, Yayoi Kusama, and May Stevens.

Photograph by SOS International

Fond of concepts that have been bouncing around academia for as long as hip-hop has been putting them into practice, Spooky’s music addressed diversity and hybridization, juxtaposition and layering, and the markers and the fluidity of culture and identity.

Utilizing the Anchorage’s unique architecture of vaulted chambers, artists set up studios; held workshops and performances; and hosted educational programs. The range of artists and their processes offered visitors options such as watching skateboarders execute daring stunts in a half-pipe or a tutorial in how to make herbal remedies.

As the audience gathered for the start of the drama, actors approached people and began to converse in character. Eventually ushered into a crude, barn-like theater, the audience watched the “inmates” alternate between an interpretative performance and the oration of their own life stories.

The posters featured the following bold quotation from popular scholar Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve: “In raw numbers, European-American whites are the ethnic group with the most illegitimate children, most people on welfare, most unemployed men, and most arrests for serious crimes.”

Working together, they created a large-scale street performance in Williamsburg, which incorporated the traditions of a parade, as well as the ensemble-feel of public demonstrations. Following the event, the audience was invited to participate with the performers by learning and adapting their dance and movement skills.

By blurring the boundaries of art, performance, and cultural activism, Bramwell enlisted the support of the building’s residents to advocate for the superintendent’s contracted return to performing the services Bramwell had taken up during his absence.

Photograph courtesy of Michael Bramwell

The billboards were conceived by Darrell Wilks, an environmentalist who saw the project as an opportunity to endorse clean air efforts.

The resulting film interwove conversations, documentary footage, dramatic portrayals, experimental reenactments, visual abstraction, and archival photographs in order to present a poignant portrait of contemporary American families.

During the staging of the performance, audience members viewed the set through the open facade of a three-story house, which was gradually deconstructed until all that remained was its architectural skeleton.

The HQ was complete with counseling, self-defense workshops, lectures, a hotline, online services, photographs, videos, posters, and an art installation by Mary Beth Edelson. Enlisting the collaborative talents of artists, social workers, activists, performers, and students, Combat Zone provided a new model for community activism and brought attention to a long silenced issue.

Photograph by Tom Brazil

The featured artists included Norman Salant performing Saxophone Stories #18 with Diedre Murray on cello and Fred Hopkins on bass, as well as Big Joe performing View From the Pool accompanied by Carter Burwell, Robert Een, Steve Elson, and Hearn Gadbois.

The festival acknowledged and celebrated nine months of coordinated community efforts to restore and preserve the Sara D. Roosevelt Park, on the grounds of which an African-American burial site had recently been discovered.

Creative Time founder Anita Contini was also honored for her extraordinary vision in providing the foundation for the organization’s first two decades of innovative public programming.

Individuals and groups were encouraged to visit the Anchorage and take part in Carlson’s lively laboratory. At the conclusion of the residency, Carlson presented six public performances, during which audiences moved though the space, from event to event, experiencing a carnival of images and action.

Photograph by Marty Heitner

These temporary, site-specific installations included a mysterious curtain of rain falling continuously from a theater marquee; a Pop Art-influenced mock automat; a bevy of juvenile robots programmed to prey on passersby; and numerous murals, sculptures, and interactive media works.

Photograph by Maggie Hopp

Patina du Prey’s Memorial Dress was presented during the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and produced in collaboration with The Contemporary Art Institute of New York.

Photograph by Tom Brazil

“It takes a lot of chutzpah to call drivers bozos,” said Patrick Boyle, spokesman for the Automobile Club of New York.

Holly Hughes explored the terrain of father/daughter and butch/femme relationships; Peggy Pettitt performed the one-woman piece Wrapped Up Tied Up & Tangled; Reno shared a monologue on women’s health issues from her satirical and uniquely hilarious perspective; Joyce Scott presented excerpts from her work Generic Interference, Genetic Engineering; and Mary Ellen Strom’s Checkup was a provocative indoor/outdoor multimedia performance.

The program was aired in New York City on WNET-13 and WNYC-31, as well as on public television and public access stations across the country. We Interrupt This Program… was a joint project with Visual AIDS, Deep Dish TV, and WYBE Public Television.

Consisting of several dozen stuffed, roughly sewn, faceless canvas dolls hanging in the window of the ominously lit SoHo 20 Gallery, the work served as a forcefully disturbing reminder of the imperialist policies of European countries during their explorations of the “new” world.

The arts segments of the programming presented a comprehensive range of lesbian-identified artists, including filmmakers and dancers, comics and singers, and painters and poets.

Project participants included Lincoln Center visitors and staff, who were photographed and interviewed, in order to create an additional Lincoln Center Family Album.

Participating artists took 42nd Street on its own terms in both form and content, creating temporary, site-specific works in, on, and around storefront display windows, theater marquees, roll-down security gates, posters, commercial billboard spaces, and sidewalks. In many cases, participating artists involved passersby and members of the community in the actual making of their pieces.

Photograph by Maggie Hopp

Distributed throughout New York City and exhibited nationally, Bureau’s poster campaign addressed the issue of profound discrimination and violence against gays in the military.

Streb also conducted workshops with student and community groups, and the public was invited to explore the Anchorage interior, as well as observe the company in open rehearsals.

Hairy Tales was shown at seven locations, including health clinics, women’s locker rooms, and women’s centers in all five boroughs. Sites included Columbia University, Queens College, the Emmanuel Midtown YM-YWHA, Staten Island University Hospital, the Brooklyn YMCA, and the Manhattan Plaza Health Club.

During these performances, individual artists and ensembles alike tested the boundaries of contemporary music with hybrid instruments, interactive computer processing, and unusual instruments such as the harmonium and hammer dulcimer.

The evening’s events were propelled by the music of David Linton’s Electric Owthaus–a sextet of percussion, guitars and brass–as well as a sound track by Steven Harvey and a pre-show appearance by Colette. Joining Skaggs was her core company of Eric Bradley, Thea Kaufman, Arial Herrara, Patricia McCarthy, and Melissa Wynn, as well as a group of twenty assistants. The venue was decorated by lighting designer Mary Gearhart.

Use Mass Transit 2 was presented in partnership with the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit Program and TDI.

Interactive and unpredictable, We Interrupt This Program… successfully fused the energy and exposure of live performance with both the immediacy of the AIDS crisis and the urgency of AIDS education.

The show addressed gender roles and identity among Two-Spirit people, a community that identifies with a third gender in Native American culture, which is neither male nor female, but rather encompasses the individual spirits of both genders. Two Spirits Speak Out also discussed the historical whitewashing of the genocide and imperialism that followed Columbus’s “discovery” of the Americas and its legacy for Native Americans today. The show aired on Manhattan cable television in the spring of 1993.

The poster was included in the Here and Now, Now and Then exhibition at The Bronx Council on the Arts and was also posted in public spaces around New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles. It was distributed throughout southern California by Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, and Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum.

Photograph by Sandie Butler

Writer and director Bugbee collaborated with choreographers John Maynard and Lynne Pidel, composer Joe Deihl, performers Pete Bove, Lynne Plagoff, Janine Hamilton, and George Warren, and with Lincoln Center Out of Doors to produce the piece.

Energized by the heated 1992 presidential campaign, the grassroots organization Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), for one, installed Enter Action. WAC’s project consisted of a a series of interactive kiosks that provided information and literature about Bush’s political agenda and his disregard for women’s rights, low-income workers, and migrant laborers.

The performance challenged prevailing ideas of race, class, assimilation, appropriation, affluence, and personal success, as well as served as a vehicle through which these issues and questions of identity could be raised directly with the communities most affected by them. Transitions, Inc. provoked responses ranging from curiosity to outrage from the general public, effectively generating discussion and debate between Tisdale and his audience.

Photograph by Marty Heitner

The troupe acted out the conversations more than two hundred times, visiting each subway line in the city at least once. Later, the group performed their scenes, as well as discussed their process and experiences at a special presentation at Artists Space.

The show ran as a work-in-progress during January and February of 1992, then in a revised version during the months of May and June. Over 2,500 people saw the production, and Vawter was awarded an OBIE for his performance.

The Use Mass Transit project consisted of a billboard that both addressed the health hazards created by automobile exhaust and urged the use of public transportation.

The project was instigated by the imprisonment of a women who killed her husband out of self-defense and later told Diggs that the supermarket was the only place her husband allowed her to go by herself. Diggs’s milk cartons posed the question, “When you argue at home, does it always get out of hand?” and featured a silhouette of a hand with the statement: “If you or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence, call 1-800-333-SAFE.”

Other AIDS providers and service organizations screened the tape as a means to promote grassroots distribution, while Video Data Bank and Frameline agreed to distribute No Regret to art institutions, libraries, universities, schools, and gay and lesbian film and video festivals. Transit Media assisted with filling orders from community groups and organizations. After showing No Regret at the San Francisco Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Marlon Riggs was presented with a special recognition award.

In a panel discussion on the topic of gospel music in the lesbian and gay community, panelists explored the lyrical content of a selection of songs; discussed the implications of gospel as a literary form and oral tradition; and explored why particular songs have gained great significance for the African-American lesbian and gay community.

A twenty-six minute video, (In)Visible Women focused on the heroic and positive response of Latina women to the AIDS crisis. Through community education, poetry, activism, and dance, women with AIDS challenged notions of female invisibility and complacency in the face of the epidemic.

The second part of the evening combined film and sound with a live performance by Albert Ratcliffe with Merry Conway and Noni Pratt, which observed the small rituals of letting life go. Conway and Pratt also produced an artist’s book, available at each performance, which included text, photographs, and raw material from the piece. Over 1,200 people attended the exhibition.

The documentary video addressed straight, lesbian, and gay drug users—in or out of recovery—and served as an organizing tool for people who were not, at the time, perceived by the dominant media nor the government as deserving of AIDS prevention, health, and treatment services.

By revising the audio guide in this way, artists Spencer Finch and Paul Ramírez-Jonas represented varied aesthetic and political positions, as well as drew parallels between the classic artwork and contemporary popular culture, calling into question the didactic modes of traditional museum audio guides.

Photograph by Alyson Pou

Participating performers in 1991 included drag queens, performance artists, pop stars, poets, and other diverse acts such as Dancenoise, John Kelly, Peau de Soie, Deee-Lite, Ebony Jet, Lipsynka and Loretta Hogg. Wigstock encouraged its audience to display themselves as vividly as those on stage, so that the day became a unifying and reaffirming experience for everyone involved.

Oliveros executed the piece’s score at the very edge of the stage and used items ranging from an accordion to her own voice. Over eight hundred people attended the event, which was free and open to the public.

Works included: pH by Dumb Type, which was a multimedia performance exploring uncharted “post-histories;" W. Va. Schizophrenic Blues, by Linda Carmella Sibio, which took as its subject the artist’s schizophrenic mother; Sick, by Bob Flanagan, a piece that addressed a sexually masochist artist who has cystic fibrosis and ritualizes pain; and a performance by Black Market International, which explored themes such as existence and social relations.

The banners highlighted three historical periods in Chinese-American history: the “bachelor society” of the early 1900s; the growth and expansion of the 1950s; and contemporary New York Chinatown.

Performers were submerged in giant water tanks, dangled from a complex network of harnesses and ropes, climbed two-story rolling towers, then dissolved into post-battle swirls of smoke. The performance was produced in partnership with The Kitchen, P.S. 122, and The New York International Festival of the Arts.

Photograph by Robbie Lourenco

On June 10, 1991, Miller and numerous volunteers attended the Operation Welcome Home ticker tape-parade and distributed the posters and postcards to participants and observers; additionally, the posters were later mailed to twelve thousand individuals and organizations.

The Most Exciting Women in Music video received extensive media coverage in publications, despite Cuming’s difficulty in getting the PSA aired. Creative Time’s sponsorship of the project made the organization a target for attacks by the right-wing press as part of ongoing efforts to discredit the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photograph by Nan Goldin

For the performance, seven performers moved on a floor covered in white flour, as they followed commands from both radio headsets and ambient voices emanating from nearby speakers. A visual narrative also emerged, which included both the tracks and signs they left behind, as well as additional visual images of tangible products of western civilization, as they accumulated, overlapped, and disappeared on the canvas of the floor. Black Works was produced in partnership with The Kitchen.

Allyn traveled with the project to eleven sites, which spanned the Bronx, Manhattan, and Queens and included schools, community centers, and art spaces. A selection of the recorded stories were broadcast nationally on NPR.

The images were juxtaposed with explanatory text that read, “The image on the right is a normal T cell which defends the immune system from infection. The image on the left is an HIV infected T cell.” Visualize This offered a clinical representation of a reality often associated with false stereotypes and prejudices, effectively utilizing the transformative power of scientific imagery and art to inform the general public about AIDS.

In 1997, the name of the annual event was changed to Day With(out) Art, so as to simultaneously recognize and celebrate the achievements and lives of colleagues and friends who continue to work in the arts and AIDS activism.

Kelly’s piece deconstructed Schumann’s song cycle and also featured additional music by the 19th-century composer. The songs, performed in the countertenor range in German and English (translation by Michael Feingold), were characteristic of the unique vocal work of John Kelly. Fernando Torm provided added music direction and accompaniment. Far more than a simple recital, Love of a Poet was an artist’s soliloquy, incorporating movement and gesture.

Photograph by Tom Brazil

The image, a young girl holding a cloth to her face juxtaposed with bumper-to-bumper traffic, appeared on twenty billboards near highways and streets throughout New York City in the fall of 1990. Carbon Monoxide is a Lethal Gas was co-presented with the MTA Arts for Transit program and TDI.

The two performances—a free outdoor concert and dance piece—included works by four artists: Maria Bosco (music), Sumie Yonei (dance), Keith Young (dance), and Wang Chang Yuan (music).

The images were also printed as postcards and mailed to political, social, and religious leaders, including Senator Jesse Helms and the American Family Association. Slogans on the censorship posters included, “Stop This Monster that Stops at Nothing: Surgeon General’s Warning: Racism Segregates Us All” and “Censorship Never Again: Surgeon General’s Warning: Censorship May be Hazardous to Your Freedom.”

The performance addressed the process of recycling, demonstrating how Alien Comic uses trash, discarded materials, and found objects as inspiration for his props and humorous street scene spectacles.

The three components of the exhibition–installations, readings, and performances–took place over several months. Installations were on view July thru October; readings took place during July; and performances occurred in September.

Additionally, the project addressed the mystery of the water itself; the dwindling supply of clean water; and the urgency of ecological issues in New York harbors. The Wilds and the Deep was open to the public four days a week for five weeks, during which Sea Dogs, an integrated daily performance took place both inside and outside of the building.

Photograph by Martha Fleming

Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams

Previously, performances at Dixon Place had been staged in the founding director’s living room; the move was a result of increased public recognition and continual efforts on the part of the organization to obtain funding for its work.

Inspired by Joy Silverman’s work and Dona Ann McAdams’s photographs, visual artists Paul H-O and Roger Boyce created a fifty foot “Berlin Wall” painted on canvas beneath bold yellow letters proclaiming “DEMOLISH THE WALL OF CENSORSHIP!”

Video/Musica gave musicians and videographers from diverse artistic and cultural backgrounds the opportunity to work together and explore new interpretations of these familiar mediums.

Using this architectural playground/totem, Rogoff choreographed a dance theater piece for six performers, complete with a musical score. During the performance, dancers made the difficult ascent to the top of the structure, moved through the complexities of the sculpture, then tumbled down the slide and chose a new costume from the thirty or more displayed at ground level.

Photograph by Maggie Hopp

The first stage of the project was a mass mailing of a postcard-sized image of young men and women of different sexual and racial orientations kissing; it was accompanied by the text, “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” The back of the card read “Corporate greed, government inaction and public indifference make AIDS a political crisis.” The image was intentionally designed to resemble a well known clothing industry ad campaign.

The project produced exciting and thought-provoking art for public presentation, as well as encouraged information exchange among artists. Art in the Anchorage 6 was sponsored by a generous grant from the Pew Charitable Trust.

Sites visited included Tompkins Square Park, Lower Manhattan, Long Island City, Flushing Meadow Park, Staten Island, Prospect Park, Upper Manhattan, Harlem, Bronx Park, South Brooklyn, and Coney Island.

All of the bars were historically linked to the contemporary oral tradition of poetry, and were places where poets have written, given readings, and held court for years. For the readings, an established author was asked to invite a lesser known writer to participate, thereby exposing the audience to a broader range of work.

In particular, the program enlisted Guillermo Gómez-Peña and James Luna, who explored racial stereotypes, as well as sponsored readings and performances at spaces like the venerable Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side.

Makeup was provided by Estee Lauder and special effects were created by Pat Dignan.

Acting as overall site planners, artist Jackie Ferrara and architect Billie Tsien developed an orthogonal processional plan, around which the installations ensued.

Photograph by Adam Hume

The project was presented in association with the World Financial Center Arts and Events Program at Battery Park City.

Misfortunes of Desire Acted Out at an Imaginary Location Symbolizing Everything Worth Having was presented in partnership with The Kitchen, the New Museum, and the City of New York Parks and Recreation Department.

Photograph by mxcandles/adams

The project was presented in association with the World Financial Center Arts and Events Program at Battery Park City.

For the event, Creative time enacted a new format intended to highlight cooperative work: the organization of the event’s collaborative groups was put in the hands of the artists.

Photograph by Thomas Griesel

Artist Judy Pfaff produced an environmental sculpture in one of the Anchorage’s chambers, which she achieved by filling the space with brightly colored, playful assemblages of found objects. Pfaff also worked with collaborators John Kelly, Wendy Copps, and Beatricia Sagar, Huck Snyder to present CIRCUS, a series of tableaux vivants inspired by the traditional one-ring circus.

The conceptual artwork of Performance in the Park 1 grappled with issues such as the monumentality of public art; the role of the individual in sculpture; and the space of the park itself.

Photography by Peter Bellamy

Giulio Camillo (1480-1544) was a hermetic philosopher who created a memory theatre: a literal theater of myths, stories, and scenes, which suggested a diagram of the way human memory functions. While Maguire’s play contained no contemporary references, The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo primarily addressed the consequences of forgetting the past, as well as functioned as a political work concerned with cultural memory and the limitations of social structures.

Published in the 18th century, Diderot’s Encyclopédie was the first comprehensive encyclopedia, featuring text and self-explanatory drawings, so as to describe all human knowledge. Its publication, however, was suppressed and censored throughout Diderot’s lifetime.

Greengold’s project included a water purification device and journals by the fictional 18th-century character Charles Cooper, a proto-environmentalist created by the artist. An excerpt from the journal asserted, “When we see how drastically things can change, we can see how important it is to fight for whatever we believe is worth keeping.”

Sculptor Jody Culkin’s subterranean, brightly painted Vacation Homes of the Future, for one, was created with the assistance of engineer and earthquake specialist Guy Nordenson. Built to accommodate one or two people, these small pits in the sand were radically transformed by Uwe Mengel’s participatory spy thriller, Mushrooms, during which audience members listened to a talking and singing corpse, a victim, and six other characters as a story unfolded.

Photograph by Lawrence I. Lesman

Additionally, Creach and Koester’s Public Airing was a gymnastic, dramatic, and narrative piece about relationships between people, and William Basinksi’s performance featured new music for saxophone, which was accompanied by tape loops on his Casio keyboard.

Photograph by L. Lesman

In order to participate in each performance, the Nighttrippers audience met at Creative Time’s offices and boarded a darkened bus, only receiving clues about the project and the secret locations as the bus drove along.

Photograph by Mierle Laderman Ukeles | Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Inc.

John Malpede’s performance with the megaphone, _Alight and Foolhearted: The Banks. The Banks. What about the Banks? What About the Banks? And What About the ________?_ featured the rantings of a wise fool—part Walt Whitman, part ambulant psychotic—addressing contemporary issues such as the international banking crisis and the plight of the homeless.

Works in the show included a series of small yellow tables marching up a conveyor belt; The Flagellation of the Orange Table, which was an eight-foot high construction; and Memberships to be Carried at All Times, which included seventy-two units stacked and contained by two shelves.

Photograph by Robin Holland

Follow in Your Footsteps was another action, during which Ukeles worked eight-hour to sixteen-hour shifts; followed sanitation workers on their routes; and mirrored their motions as a street dance. In Cleansing The Bad Names, too, public officials ceremoniously removed windows that had been defaced with slurs for sanitation workers (i.e. “garbagemen”). Ukeles felt if sanitation workers are garbagemen, the public is therefore garbagepersons.

In the past, participants, while mindful of each others work, had proceeded independently; now, they were asked to work together on the design, development, and execution of each project. Each cooperative effort produced an installation that provided the collaborating performance artist with a set or stage, or simply a visual premise, for his or her work.

For the first year, ten artists were commissioned to create new works addressing the “vivid historical and visual qualities of the Anchorage,” including the barrel vaulted ceilings and massive masonry piers housing the bridge’s cables. Thus, visitors could listen to Spalding Gray muse over his and others’ reminiscences about the bridge and its surrounding neighborhood, while around him, installations addressed the Gothic nature of the environment, a dark rusticated interior reminiscent of Piranesi’s dungeons.

Photograph by Robin Holland

In Past Events, Ida Applebroog’s piece, the feminist artist placed a small bronze sculpture of a woman in the midst of the portraits and inserted a speech bubble into her lips that warned: “Gentlemen, America is in Trouble,” to which the portraits replied: “Isn’t Capitalism Working?” or “It’s a Jewish Plot.” Bob Carroll, meanwhile, presented comic narrative work, including material about famous guests at the Chamber and native inhabitants of the Hudson Valley. Other performers included Aigars Kildiss, James Corbett, and musician Olu Dara, who performed regional music.

Space for the project was provided by the New York Chamber of Commerce.

Questioning Pentagon policies, Scott Pfaffman’s Why Stop Now transformed southern-style barbecue pits made of empty oil drums into finned and cone-nosed bombs. Steve Wood’s Firedamp, a thickly tarred, spiked expanse of plywood threaded with a narrow path, evoked the barren landscape of a post-nuclear explosion at ground zero.

An apt and frequently revived simile for the artist’s project, alchemy involves the pursuit not only of a method for transforming base metals into gold, but also for rendering an ultimate truth by which all known physical laws can be integrated and resolved.

Other artists such as Kurt Ossenfort found inspiration in the tirelessly energetic Hudson River and created a Styrofoam mechanism that, once placed in the river, translated wave and tide activity into graphic patterns, which he updated daily.

Photograph by Robin Holland

The windmill, known as “Aeolus,” also produced electricity for the composting operation of the Bronx Frontier Development Corporation, a provider of compost and topsoil for gardens in the South Bronx.

For these projects, the artists were encouraged to consider the character of the setting and let site-specific elements—including a tall oak desk at the entryway and the men’s and women’s jail cells—dictate the nature of their installations. Not surprisingly, themes of incarceration, secret lives, and time pervaded.

Photograph by Robin Holland

Breaking In projects included Lucio Pozzi’s Cell Scapes, for which murals treating themes of freedom and depicting women were installed in three jail cells. The doors of the cells were “locked” with enormous foam-rubber keys, while Connie Beckley’s Trio for Five Keys played in the background.

Photograph by Lisa Kahane

As trains moved past the screens, a sequence of colorful, abstract shapes progressed for twenty seconds. The project built on Brand’s work with kinetic imagery as a means of manipulating color, line, rhythm, and figuration; the project was also informed by discussions with perceptual psychologists, lighting designers and engineers, a machinist, and an architect, which were held over the course of the three years Brand worked on the project.

The event was organized by Anita O’Neill and Molly Mullin of Creative Time with Lisa Phillips and Steven Schlough of the Downtown Branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Photograph by Helaine Messer

The artwork reflected or responded to the physical shape, dimensions, and materials of the U.S. Custom House, as well as its history, past, and current activities.

Sprawling sand dunes, covered with natural vegetation, provided a feeling of being far from the city while actually remaining in its midst.

Photograph by Redmond A. Simonsen

The event was organized by Anita O’Neill and Molly Mullin of Creative Time with Lisa Phillips and Steven Schlough of the Downtown Branch of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Photograph by Helaine Messer

The project was presented in cooperation with Custom House Institute, the New York Landmarks Conservancy, and the U.S. General Services Administration.

“I see traditional concert hall acoustics not as an ideal but as one very specific sound situation. I am interested in exploring others, such as the one which will be generated by the curved surfaces of the rotunda and which will be a basis for this work,” said Neuhaus. During a three day event, Neuhaus exploited the acoustics of the rotunda by generating a single fundamental pitch with various overtones circulating around the space via a ring of sixteen speakers, thereby creating a constant circular movement.

Photograph by Ruth Cummings

“When measured against the daily concerns of surrounding businesses, the Anemones project may seem frivolous, but it brings to an essentially urban situation a whiff of nature’s elements. For the passersby, Anemones is an unexpected lunchtime air aquarium. The theme of this venture is scale, along with movement,” said Piene. The sculptures were designed by Piene and his crew of artists and students during a workshop held in the exhibit space over the summer.

In collaboration with light artist Alejandro Sina, artist Otto Piene attached seventy-five slender, red neon tubes—each two feet in length—to the polyethylene arc. This created a dual visual effect: during the day, the outline of the arc predominated, but as night fell, the lights, programmed for a strobe effect, illuminated the summer sky.

Photograph by Ruth Cummings

Four artists collaborated with Creative Time to work with the kids, and the event kicked off Creative Time’s New York Sky Events, a summer-long project featuring wind sculptures by Otto Piene.

Finding inspiration in sources as diverse as cubism and newspaper comics, Red and Mimi Goss Grooms’s city-within-a-city provoked serious thought about everyday life in Manhattan.

In conjunction with the installation, the piece 28 feet high 80 feet long was performed by Jim Burton and his company of musicians. Burton stretched wires seven feet above the ground and across the installation space, which were also attached to a synthesizer that converted vibrations from both the sails and the crowd into sound. He and his musicians then played this scaffold of wires, as well as whiskey glasses and bicycle wheels while using other found objects such as sponges, fur, and cloth.

Sail was presented in collaboration with Orient Overseas Associates.

Photograph by Mariette Pathy Allen

Artist Joe Scheurer created a construction of knots around an aluminum frame that resembled a tree of knots and also instructed sailing enthusiasts on how to make sailing knots for their boats. Weavers Sharon Fein and Jo Ellen Scheffield, meanwhile, worked on a tapestry depicting Nassau Street full of fast-food and discount stores, effectively combining traditional customs with the realities of modern life.

Crafts in Action thus connected the rote quality and disciplined labor involved in the process of craft work with the office routines of Financial District workers.

Photograph by Bettina Cirone