Jean Cooney Is Back at Creative Time and Ready to Take New Risks
About a month ago, the beloved New York nonprofit Creative Time announced that Jean Cooney would serve as its new executive director. Cooney replaces Justine Ludwig, who served as Creative Time’s executive director since her appointment in 2018, and arrives from the Times Square Alliance, another major institution that stages ambitious public art in the city. Cooney worked at Creative Time before Times Square Arts, and we caught up to hear more about her new job and thoughts on public art in general.
You’re returning to Creative Time after nearly seven years at Times Square Arts. I can see the ways in which the two jobs are similar, in that they both program ambitious public art, but what would you point to as the major differences between the two organizations?
Creative Time and Times Square Arts are each iconic in their own right! Both programs are built around inviting artists to think big, push the boundaries of their practices and respond to the landscape of our city as well as the contemporary cultural moment. I feel grateful that across these very different organizations, I’ve been able to work with artists and champion the realization of bold, ambitious and timely projects for the broad and diverse publics of New York City.
Times Square is an extraordinary place that sees on average 250,000 people in one day, where you truly can make no assumptions about anyone’s interest in art, which really inspired me to expand my thinking around audience and accessibility. Alternatively, Creative Time follows artists, moving throughout the city and occasionally beyond (and in one case, even into outer space), to bring their visions to life—a practice that I’m excited to dig back into, push even further and interweave with my learnings from Times Square.
At Creative Time you helped realize Nick Cave’s HEARD•NY (2013) in Grand Central Terminal, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) at the former Domino Sugar factory and Duke Riley’s Fly By Night (2016) at the Brooklyn Navy Yard—three of the most beloved pieces in recent memory. What makes a great Creative Time piece?
A very Creative Time project is when you can really feel the alchemy between a visionary artist, a bold idea and the space in which their project is sited. Our artists’ projects can take many shapes and forms, but ultimately they’re unexpected, involve risk and experimentation and push us to see ourselves and our world in new ways. And they leave an indelible mark—I can still smell the sugar melting in that giant warehouse; hear the swishes of raffia and booming drums in Vanderbilt Hall; and see the lights taking shape in the night sky over the East River, with the ringing of the bell calling the birds back home.
Last year the Thomas J Price sculpture in Times Square became a lightning rod after Fox News went after it. How did that controversy shape how you think about public art in these political end times?
This experience only reaffirmed for me the necessity of public art and artists who are opening up dialogues around our most urgent, unresolved social and political issues, especially in this divisive climate. Artists like Thomas J Price create space for difficult conversations, forcing us to grapple with the tensions between multiple truths and finding new entry points to take on the most polarizing topics. Presenting his work in Times Square and the responses it received ultimately became a psychological portrait of our ongoing and historical relationship with race, gender and identity, and held up a mirror to who we are and what we value, as individuals and as a society.
The experience also crystallized the challenges and potential of a public dialogue online and in person, and how the two can intertwine. In this case, hate-fueled chatter online sparked an outpouring of solidarity and celebration around the work, which ultimately resulted in rational, critical dialogue on social media, in the press and on the ground. Along the way, our public art ambassadors were having measured and increasingly meaningful conversations with visitors in Times Square.
You’ve worked with both Anne Pasternak, who was artistic director and president of Creative Time, and Nato Thompson as chief curator, each a major figure in the art world. What did you take from each of them as leaders, and where do you intend to diverge from them?
Those were incredibly formative years for me, and really shaped who I am and how I see the world. Working under such charismatic leadership and with the visionary artists of that period of Creative Time opened my eyes to the possibilities of public art, the ways in which artists can become agents of change within our society at large and how to foster an artist-led organizational culture. My learnings from each of them and so many of my talented colleagues from that time period continue to inspire me and drive my mission to take on the full spectrum of Creative Time magic in this next chapter—from the bold, beautiful and arresting to the socially engaged and subversive.
I have no doubt that an astounding amount of bureaucracy goes into the operation of both Times Square Arts and Creative Time. Does working with the red tape invigorate you or is it something you’ve just learned to navigate with minimal sweat?
Is it weird to say that I’m invigorated by red tape? Because at this point I really do relish a challenge, and at the core of every seemingly impossible project is some kind of bureaucratic feat—from navigating our city’s municipal codes and civic structures to the strategic negotiations and partnerships that can stretch them, and the delicate politics and nerve-wracking moments that live in between.
Since Creative Time is often reactivating or opening up spaces in novel ways for our artist commissions—whether it’s bringing the public into a 130-year-old abandoned sugar factory or staging a politically-themed haunted house in a former army terminal—the process usually entails a lot of stamps and approvals behind the scenes, and a very high-stakes visit from FDNY’s Fire Marshall moments before an unveiling. I’m still trauma-bonded with my colleagues who worked to secure all of our temporary permits of assembly; and I’ll never forget taking a call from the Federal Aviation Administration on opening night of Fly By Night to discern if the aerial height of the pigeons’ performance would interfere with the flight paths at LaGuardia; or the many hours spent in the Health Department’s mobile food vending inspection facility in Maspeth, Queens to certify Spencer Finch’s solar-powered ice cream truck. Ultimately through all of these experiences you build relationships and a constellation of people to call when you’re facing your next challenge.
You got your start doing one-night artist installations at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. What’s stayed with you from that experience?
This was such a special time, and in retrospect, had all the makings of what I continue to love about my work now. We were dreaming with artists, bending the rules a bit, and thanks to the bureaucratic navigation of my friend, collaborator and DJ-turned-Episcopalian priest, we were staging site-specific temporary installations inside a Gothic-style cathedral each month, playing music and throwing parties. At the time I remember thinking, “I don’t exactly know what this is, but I know I like it, and need to do more of it.”
Creative Time has been around since 1974. How do you think it’s managed to stay fresh? How do you intend to position it so that it remains relevant in the coming decades?
Letting artists lead is how Creative Time has continued to stay relevant and chart ground-breaking paths forward. By lifting up visionary artists who are speaking to the issues of our time and letting them dream big, you’ll always find yourself ahead of the curve. As we gear up to continue that work for another 50 years, Creative Time will need to stay nimble, responsive, willing to embrace the unexpected and game to take real risks with our artists, partners and the public.
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