Public Art on Screens

Join Times Square Arts, Creative Time, artist Shahzia Sikander, curator and cultural leader Tom Finkelpearl, and critic and researcher Danielle Jackson for a conversation that will dig into how the politics of commercial and civic spaces have intersected with public art. From the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, to partnerships between private companies and public spaces, public art has been an important nexus in the negotiation of what artworks can be shown – and where. Taking the decades-long history of public art on the billboards of Times Square as a starting point — from Creative Time's 59th Minute, 44 1/2 and MTV Art Breaks to Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment program — we'll discern how artists have navigated New York City’s ever-changing local politics, municipal bureaucracies, commercial interests, public perception and cultural shifts over time.

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Tom Finkelpearl has been a curator, writer, museum director and public official. He worked 12 years each at PS1 MoMA (as administrator and curator), Queens Museum (Executive Director), and the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs (public art program director, then Commissioner). Along with the artist and educator Pablo Helguera, he is writing a book about the state of North American art museums. His previous books are Dialogues in Public Art (MIT Press, 2000) and What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Duke University Press, 2013). Finkelpearl is Social Practice Teaching Scholar-in-Residence at City University of New York.

Danielle Jackson is a critic, researcher, and arts administrator. As the co-founder and former co-director of the Bronx Documentary Center, a photography gallery and educational space, Danielle helped conceive, develop, and implement the organization’s mission and programs. Formerly, she ran the Cultural Department at the photo agency, Magnum Photos NY. Her projects have been covered by NPR, Wall Street Journal, and ABC News, and her essays on art and politics have appeared on Artnet. She teaches courses in photography and visual culture at Stanford in New York and New York University. She is a 2024 Getty Museum Guest Scholar.

Shahzia Sikander is widely celebrated for subverting Central and South-Asian miniature painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary international art practices and launching the form known today as neo-miniature. Engaging ideas of language, trade, empire, and migration through feminist perspectives, Sikander’s paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculpture explore gender, sexuality, racial narratives, and colonial histories. Sikander is a recipient of the MacArthur award and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation’s Pollock Prize for Creativity, among others. A survey exhibition, Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, co-organized by the Cincinnati Art Museum and Cleveland Museum of Art as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, was on view until October 20th, 2024, with complementary iterations now presented in parallel at both Ohio institutions until May 4th, and June 8th, 2025, respectively.

About CTHQ‍

CTHQ is a gathering space supporting artists working at the intersection of art and politics as they continue to plot, orchestrate, and recharge from cultural, political, and social organizing work.

Rooted in a legacy of art and activism, CTHQ emerges from the rebelliousness of artist organizers in the Lower East Side, where a critical network of neighborhood art, health, and education centers, experimental theater, protest collectives, and community-owned housing, cultural, and green spaces self organized to claim and shape space for artistic and political production.

CTHQ sits within Creative Time’s historic and ongoing work to gather artists to share tactics for political change most notably through the Think Tank, Summit, and Reports. Growing within a lineage of visionary and transgressive creative moments, CTHQ serves as a hub for today and tomorrow’s community of socially engaged and politically oriented artists in the neighborhood, citywide, across the country, and around the world.