creative time
Think Tank 2021
creative time: OUR FIRST THINK TANK COHORT
Link to Think Tank Project at Creative Time
From the Creative Time Website, 2.22.2022
WHY A THINK TANK
Initiated in response to the escalating demands to address the legacies of colonialism and systemic racism within our communities—a demand furthered by the ongoing pandemic—the Think Tank builds upon the decade-running Creative Time Summit, an annual global convening for the purpose of centering the voices of artists and creative practitioners in the development of tactics for political and social transformation, from both within and outside institutions.
A PATH-BREAKING FRAMEWORK FOR INTEGRATING THE TRANSFORMATIVE THEORIES, ETHICS, AND AESTHETICS THAT GUIDE LIBERATION WORK INTO ACTIONABLE PLANNING
Creative Time itself came into being in the 1970s, during a catalytic moment on the heels of a decade of large-scale protest movements and during a major financial crisis in New York City. The confluence of circumstances activated art workers and artists to build a wave of new, alternative spaces. Creative Time emerged to support living artists and to bring art into the everyday lives of the public, rooted in the political context of the day. As such, the organization has shifted and grown alongside the political practices of artists. Creative Time’s commitment to protocols for ongoing redefinition of our institutional practices and legacy have led to the Think Tank’s formation, three years before the organization’s 50th anniversary.
In the fall of 2020, we put out a call to re-imagine institutions and arts and cultural spaces together, inviting artists, creative practitioners, educators, activists, cultural producers, academics, and other agitators and boundary-pushing thinkers. The cohort formed in January 2021, with members Caitlin Cherry, Che Gossett, Emily Johnson, Hentyle Yapp, Kevin Gotkin, La Tanya S. Autry, Namita Wiggers, Prerana Reddy, and Sonia Guiñansaca. Adapting the “think tank” model, the non-sited and self-organized group spent 10 months in virtual conversations anchored in developing direct ways for shifting toward more equitable and sustainable approaches to cultural production.
Our greatest takeaways from the inaugural year of the Think Tank are the necessity to focus on process over product and to meet our communities at the point of their needs. We understand this framing to permeate into all functions of the organization. As such, we join the Think Tank’s call to action for an expansive infrastructure of care to guide all cultural production, which asks, and continuously iterates on the question, “what does repair within our work look like?”
The culmination of this work, Invitations Toward Re-worlding, provides a path-breaking framework for integrating the transformative theories, ethics, and aesthetics that guide liberation work into actionable planning.
Link: Creative Time Think Tank
Over the past 10 years, the Creative Time Summit has convened thinkers, dreamers, and doers working to develop strategies to meet our most pressing social and political issues. During this catalytic moment, we have been compelled to try something new. We have formed a non-sited group of boundary-pushing thinkers, each bringing distinct and varying perspectives from the fields of art, organizing, theory, and cultural production to think and imagine together over the course of 10 months. Adapting the “think tank” model, the cohort will cycle through phases of discussing, debating, planning, sharing, and implementing that explore new methodologies to dismantle exclusionary and colonialist modes of artistic creation and presentation and propel us into new forms of cultural praxis.
HOW DO WE DEVELOP ACTIONABLE WAYS OF
REALIZING THE CRITICAL SHIFTS NECESSARY FOR
A TRULY EQUITABLE CULTURAL SECTOR?
Initiated in response to the current demand to address the legacies of colonialism and systemic racism within our communities – a demand further catalyzed by the pandemic that continues to grip our nation – this intervention builds upon the Creative Time Summit’s history of centering the voices of artists and creative practitioners in the development of tactics for political and social transformation.
While the group will shape and define itself as it forms, it will be anchored by a principle aim to develop direct ways to create the critical shifts required to build equitable and sustainable approaches to cultural production.
From January – October 2021, the group will investigate the following set of questions through internal discussion and research as well as public programs and engagements:
– What constitutes “the field” of cultural production and what are the dominant practices of governance, value creation, and assessment?
– Do alternative modes of knowledge production currently exist in regards to art practice, cultural labor, education, and training for the field? What new forms need to be created?
– What ideological, cultural, and structural shifts are required to steward transformative change?
– What are we building towards?
Over the next 10 months, the cohort will collectively organize a series of public programs and outputs. The group receives compensation, access to administrative resources, production support, discretionary budget, and the Creative Time network. It is a privilege to offer this group the resources, the space, and the time to get to know each other and propose new modes of cultural production for the world we deserve in the here and now. Stay updated on the Think Tank by subscribing to the Creative Time newsletter and following us at @creativetime.
about the think tank cohort
La Tanya S. Autry
She/Her/Hers
Shawnee Lands, Cleveland, OH
As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, La Tanya S. Autry centers collective care in her liberatory curatorial praxis. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent and the Social Justice & Museums Resource List, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, a global initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums. Her latest project, the Black Liberation Center, an experimental series of exhibitions, workshops, and programming, spotlights arts and culture that envision and strategize paths toward the freedom of all Black people, and thus, all people. Also, she has organized institutional exhibitions and programming at moCa Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, and elsewhere. Autry, who is completing her Ph.D. in art history at University of Delaware, is examining the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space in her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America.
Caitlin Cherry
She/Her/Hers/They/Them/He/Him/His/Ze
Powhatan Lands, Richmond, VA
Caitlin Cherry draws on painting, sculpture, and installation in her multifaceted practice, coalescing into articulate and alluring representations of Black femininity. Filtering these media through layers of digital manipulation, her work draws parallels between Black femme bodies, frequently commodified and positioned as sexual assets, and the seductiveness of art objects in the commercial gallery circuit. Cherry is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University and the founder of the new online program Dark Study, a contra-institutional space for radical learning about art and theory. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Performance Space New York, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other institutions of note. She is a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship Residency and Leonore Annenberg Fellowship.
Che Gossett
They/Them
Lenapehoking, Brooklyn, NY
Che Gossett is a Black non-binary femme writer. In 2019–2020, they were a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program. They are currently a graduate fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Kevin Gotkin
They/Them/He/Him/His
Lenapehoking, Brooklyn, NY
Kevin Gotkin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, & Communication at NYU. Gotkin completed their Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Gotkin teaches and writes about disability, media, and public culture. In 2016, they co-founded an organization called Disability/Arts/NYC that works with the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs with the goal of getting disability arts represented in cultural policy—successfully lobbying for a $640,000 fund specifically for disability arts initiatives. Through Disability/Arts/NYC, they also trained two cohorts of activists and artists to disperse disability expertise around NYC, in addition to running programming around the city at the Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, and more. Kevin Gotkin is also a DJ, party girl, and lover of nightlife artistry. They lead the REMOTE ACCESS party series, which is a disability-centric initiative developed with members of the Critical Design Lab that they help organize with Aimi Hamraie of Vanderbilt University.
Sonia Guiñansaca
They/Them
Tovaangar, Los Angeles, CA & Lenapehoking/Manahatta, New York, NY
Sonia Guiñansaca is an internationally acclaimed poet, culture organizer, and activist. They emerged as a national leader in the migrant artistic and political communities where they coordinated and participated in groundbreaking civil disobedience actions. Guiñansaca co-founded some of the largest undocumented organizations in the US, including some of the first artistic projects by and for undocumented writers and artists. They have worked for over a decade in both policy and cultural efforts building infrastructures for migrant artists across the country. Their work has taken them to London and Mexico City to advise on migrant legislation, cultural interventions, and arts programming. Guiñansaca also consults for national social justice/cultural institutions and foundations on artist convenings, culture activations, and narrative strategies. As a writer and performer, they create narrative poems and essays on migration, queerness, and nostalgia, often collaborating with filmmakers and visual artists. They self-published their debut chapbook Nostalgia and Borders (2016).
Emily Johnson
She/Her/Hers
Lenapehoking/Manahatta, New York, NY
Emily Johnson is an artist who makes body-based work. She is a land and water protector and an activist for justice, sovereignty, and well-being. A Bessie Award-winning choreographer, Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Doris Duke Artist Award, she is based in Lenapehoking / New York City. Johnson is of the Yup’ik Nation, and since 1998, has created work that considers the experience of sensing and seeing performance. Her dances function as portals and care processions. They engage audienceship within and through space, time, and environment—interacting with a place’s architecture, peoples, history, and role in building futures. Johnson is trying to make a world where performance is part of life; where performance is an integral part of our connection to each other, our environment, our stories, our past, present, and future.
Prerana Reddy
She/Her/Hers
Rockaway Lands, New York, NY
Prerana Reddy is an independent cultural producer based in New York City working at the intersection of art, civic engagement, and social movements. She was most recently the Director of Programs at A Blade of Grass, a nonprofit that advances the field of socially engaged art through financial support for artists, public programming, research, and content creation. Previously, she was the Director of Public Programs & Community Engagement for the Queens Museum from 2005-2018 where she organized both exhibition-related and community-based programs with such renowned artists as Damon Rich, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mel Chin, and Pedro Reyes. In addition, she hired the first full-time community organizers based at an art museum to develop long-term cultural organizing initiatives. These resulted in the creation and ongoing programming of a public plaza and a bilingual popular education center in collaboration with Tania Bruguera and Creative Time. She was also a film programmer and administrator for the 3rdi NY South Asian Film Collective, Alwan for the Arts, and the African Film Festival. She earned her M.A. in Cinema Studies and Anthropology from New York University and was a fellow of the Asian Pacific Leadership program at the East-West Center/ University of Hawaii-Manoa.
Namita Gupta Wiggers
She/Her/Hers
Multnomah, Clackamas, and Chinook Lands, Portland, OR
Namita Gupta Wiggers is an educator, curator, and writer. She is the Director of the M.A. in Critical Craft Studies program at Warren Wilson College, the first low-residency graduate program focused on craft history and theory. Wiggers directs Critical Craft Forum, an online platform for dialogue and exchange (available on Facebook, iTunes, Instagram, and sessions at College Art Association 2009–19). Wiggers served as the Curator (2004–12) and as the Director and Chief Curator (2012–14) at Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR. She contributes regularly to online and in-print journals and books and serves on the Editorial Boards of CRAFTS, Garland, Norwegian Crafts, and the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of Modern Craft. Current projects include a craft anthology and an ongoing research project with Benjamin Lignel on gender and adornment. She serves on the Board of Trustees of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
Hentyle Yapp
He/Him/His
Lenapehoking/Manahatta, New York, NY
Hentyle Yapp is an Assistant Professor at New York University in the Department of Art and Public Policy and affiliated faculty with the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, Center for Disability Studies, and Asian/Pacific/American Institute. He is the author of Minor China: Method, Materialisms, and the Aesthetic (Duke University Press). He is also co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (with C. Riley Snorton, MIT Press), which is on race and the art world. His essays have appeared in American Quarterly, GLQ, Verge, Women and Performance, and Journal of Visual Culture. He received his B.A. from Brown University in French Literature; J.D. from UCLA Law, specializing in Critical Race Theory and Public Interest Law; and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Performance Studies with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Yapp is also a former professional dancer for companies in Taipei and NYC.