HENDRIK ZEITLER (2)
Creative Time, the New York–based nonprofit focused on public art, has promoted former chief curator Nato Thompson to artistic director and appointed Elvira Dyangani Ose as a new senior curator.
Thompson, who was been with Creative Time since 2007, has presented some of the organization’s most-lauded projects, including Kara Walker’s massive sugar-coated installation A Subtlety (2014), featuring a sphinx-like woman in the former Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, as well as the annual Creative Time Summit and commissioned projects by Trevor Paglen, Paul Chan, and Pedro Reyes. He also recently published a new book, Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life. Before Creative Time, he was a curator at MASS MoCA, the large-scale installation-focused art space in western Massachusetts.
“The possibilities, and the need, for engaged public art have never been so great and so urgent,” Thompson said in a statement. “Creative Time has long engaged with social and political issues on a global scale, and I look forward to continuing those efforts.”
Ose is an independent curator who has most recently organized exhibitions of Theaster Gates and Betye Saar at the Fondazione Prada. She is also a lecturer in visual culture at Goldsmiths college in London, and served previously as a curator of international art at Tate Modern.
The work of Creative Time, she said in a statement, is “very much in line with my previous academic and curatorial passions.”