Meet The Curator Leading The Charge at Creative Time
Justine Ludwig can't name the first piece of public art she ever laid eyes on, but she can certainly recall how it made her feel. "I spent a lot of my childhood in Massachusetts and remember going to the deCordova Sculpture Park as a really little kid," she tells T&C from Switzerland. "I remember feeling like Alice in Wonderland, running around these giant sculptures and just thinking about how it was so far beyond the expectations of real life and that it was a portal to something else."
It was an impression that would eventually lead her to where she is today: sitting at the helm of Creative Time, a New York City-based non-profit organization that commissions and presents public art projects. (Many of the city's social swans also know them for throwing a swanky annual gala with attendees like Julianne Moore and Jeremy Strong). This year, Creative Time turns 50, and Ludwig, who has been its executive director since 2018, is ready to usher it into the next half-century.
On our Zoom screen, Ludwig is soft-spoken and her mannerisms delicate. It's a stark difference from the revolutionary changes she's made at the organization since taking the helm. "Socially engaged public art is something that's been important throughout the history of the organization," she says. "But, I wanted to be able to name that in a very pointed way. I wanted to think about large varieties of scales: both the absolutely massive projects that stop you in your tracks, but also those subtle installations that you unexpectedly come across." Some of these ambitious socio-political public art projects include Charles Gaines's first-ever public artwork, The American Manifest (2022); Rashid Johnson’s Red Stage (2021); and Jill Magid’s Tender (2020). This year, Creative Time commissioned a project by Kite and Alisha B. Wormsley called Cosmologyscape. The project began as a website where visitors submitted their dreams. Their dreams were then interpreted by AI and turned into a pattern based on 26 Black and Lakota symbols. The collective "quilt" was broadcast at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn.
But Ludwig's changes at the organization haven't only been about the pieces produced. She also introduced CTHQ (Creative Time HQ), which serves as a programming space for artists at the intersection of art and politics, and the R&D Fellowship, which supports artists who are in the midst of deep research and development."We are thinking about the whole arc of what it means to support an artist," she says, "not just the final product, but those moments of community building, those moments of resourcing them and connecting them with experts in diverse fields and really rooting the institution."
Margaret Wang, a partner at an Investment Bank and trustee of Creative Time, says, "Creative Time is one of, if not the most, ambitious public arts organizations and it is incredibly rare to see institutions like this thrive for as long as it has. As a leader in this sphere, Creative Time acts as an inspiring model for supporting groundbreaking public art, uniting artists, activists, and thought leaders on a global scale."
This year, Creative Time's weekend-long summit (held from September 20 through 22) approaches with the theme: States of Emergence: Land After Property and Catastrophe. The event (with programming including new public art displays, discussions, and more) will foster dialogue around the question: How does an emergency produce radical possibility?
It's not too far off from one of the big themes of this year's presidential election: a stark divide among Americans. According to Ludwig, public art can be an antidote to bridge gaps. Before she joined Creative Time, she worked in the museum space in states like Ohio and Texas. "These are environments where people have radically different political values even though they live right next door to one another," she says. "What I learned firsthand from working within those contexts was that within the umbrella of art, people often were much more open to looking at things that made them uncomfortable. That's the spirit that I find unbelievably important to bring to the work of Creative Time; that the artists offer a space to imagine a different way forward, that they help us think outside of the box and imagine otherwise."
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