Archive - The Creative Time Summit

NYC 2019 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

2019 was a milestone year for the Summit, as we marked 10 years of the convening by returning to New York City, where it first began. Gathering at The Great Hall, Cooper Union where the second ever Summit was held in 2010, acknowledged the Summit’s history and the hall’s legacy as a locus for debate, political action, and truth-telling. Upon founding The Cooper Union, Peter Cooper said, “I trust the young will here catch the inspiration of truth in all its native power and beauty, and find in it a source of inexpressible pleasure to spread its transformed influence throughout the world.” We were honored to take the stage at The Great Hall and activate the East Village, a nexus for generations of grassroots organizing and action.

MIAMI 2018 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

The 11th Creative Time Summit, an annual convening for thinkers, dreamers, and doers working at the intersection of art and politics, was held in Miami for the first time November 1-3 of 2018. Titled On Archipelagos and Other Imaginaries—Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World, it took coalition as the central theme, and utilized the archipelago as a framework to delve into Miami’s historical connection to the Caribbean and, by extension, to Latin America and the entire world. The topics under discussion ranged from immigration and borders to climate realities, notions of intersectional justice, gentrification, tourism as an enabler for neocolonialism, and the roles art and activism can play in all these pressing issues.

TORONTO 2017 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

The 10th Creative Time Summit, Of Homelands and Revolution took place in Toronto, Canada from September 28th – 30th, 2017, co-produced with The Power Plant and in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario.

ATHENS 2017 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

Creative Time and Fast Forward Festival came together in Athens to co-present On Homelands and the Stateless as the World Tilts Right, an international symposium investigating the challenges facing artists and activist communities under our prevailing economic and political conditions. The symposium brought together representatives from cultural organizations across the globe and working locally (North America, South-East Asia, Middle East, Latin America, Europe, South Asia, Southern Africa, Greece), who each invited artists, activists, social workers, and scholars from the same geography, to share critical, practice-based perspectives on art and politics as experienced from their specific regions.

2016 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

Creative Time Summit DC: Occupy the Future was held at DC’s historic Lincoln Theatre. Occurring in the nation’s capital just weeks before the 2016 Presidential Election, the Creative Time Summit DC took this important moment to collectively consider what it might mean to radically transform the current state of democracy. Around the world both the left and the right are making their dissatisfaction with the center known, setting the stage for a virulent electoral season. The 2016 Summit offered a platform for citizen-led strategies and grassroots movements working within, as well as disrupting, electoral politics.

NYC 2015 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

Continuing the dialogue started at the Summit held at the Venice Biennale in August, the New York Summit was dedicated to education and other ways knowledge is disseminated and obtained. The Curriculum NYC focused on the effects of specific education policies in the United States. We explored the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, pedagogical art practices, omissions in contemporary curricula, and political issues such as the re-segregation of public schools and student debt.

VENICE 2015 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

The 7th Creative Time Summit took place within the 56th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia, All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor. The Venice Art Biennale offered a unique opportunity to gather an international, interdisciplinary community to consider how knowledge is produced and how it comes into contact with civil society. Throughout the Summit, conversations on curriculum examined the social, infrastructural, administrative, and private conditions under which knowledge is produced and intertwined with social contracts.

2014 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

In a collaboration between the New York City-based Creative Time and Public Art Agency Sweden, the 2014 Creative Time Summit took place in Stockholm. Summit: Stockholm—the first iteration of the annual conference to take place outside of New York—focused on expanded public practice, investigating uses and potentialities of art in the public sphere, with a focus on practices with social and political implications.

2013 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

In 2013 the Creative Time Summit set its sights on the fact that culture, for good or bad, is an active ingredient in the construction and shaping of the contemporary city. Tapping into widespread debate on this issue, it provided a global platform for consideration of the trials, tribulations, artistic practices, campaigns, theories, and practicalities that accompany this phenomenon.

2012 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

The 2012 Creative Time Summit–held near the one-year anniversary of the birth of the Occupy movement–addressed the extreme wealth disparity that continues to define the global economy and politics. Presenters at the 2012 Creative Time Summit, which was titled “Confronting Inequity,” reflected upon recent upheavals in the international political and economic climate, focusing specifically on wealth inequity and the ways in which it erodes democracy.

2011 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

The third annual Creative Time Summit launched the exhibition Living as Form, the first-ever survey of socially engaged art, which was itself informed by the range of work presented at previous Summits. With more than 100 projects on display, selected by an international team of twenty curatorial advisors, eight newly commissioned works, and a web archive of more than 350 projects, the exhibition-was conceived as a broad attempt to take stock of socially engaged art. It was first presented at the historic Essex Street Market and, in a partnership with International Curators International, continues to travel to venues across the globe.

2010 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

At “Revolutions in Practice 2,” the 2010 Creative Time Summit, a diverse international group of socially engaged artists presented specific projects to the general public and discussed a critical issue raised at the previous year’s conference: the idea that socially engaged art “preaches to the choir.” If this is true, then how do we assess the success of socially engaged art? How do we define the purpose of the work? What, in fact, is the “choir,” and is it bound by the racial, geographic, gender, economic, and post-colonial lines that continue to haunt the field itself? As the passionate dialogue unfolded, it became eminently clear that issues of audience are a critical element of any discussion of this work.

2009 SUMMIT SPEAKERS

The first of what would be the annual Creative Time Summit took place at the New York Public Library. Titled “Revolutions in Public Practice,” it was devoted to exploring a growing but still difficult-to-define artistic practice. Called variously socially engaged art, social aesthetics, participatory art, dialogic art, political art, and other names, the practice had been growing for some two decades and had produced some of the most exciting work to be experienced anywhere., despite existing outside of museums and galleries. The Summit was intended to fill the need for practitioners of this art to meet with others, share ideas, and learn–to create a community. to discover the methodologies and strategies behind this work, which addresses social injustice and oppression, and touches people, places, homes, and daily routines.