We, members of the Creative Time Think Tank convened in 2021, invite care through imagining, creating, transforming, and sustaining practices that subvert, challenge, confront and work beyond institutions that enforce status quo violence. Here we envision social relationalities, embodied actions, collectives, decolonization, abolition, and institutional/administrative processes that support life, freedom, sovereignty, and thriving. As we invite through imagery, poetry, form[al] studies, questions, letters, pauses, and more, we call on you. Insist on wellbeing in the arts and all of society. Generate, design, fight for and lead more transformation.

Invitations Toward Re-Worlding collects our citations of institutional/administrative formations we seek to change; names particular forms that require sustained interrogation; and sketches programmatic scores—prompts for ourselves and/or others—to generate, design, and lead their own transformations.

We lead from the premise that the distinction between artistry and administration is tenuous, if not entirely illusory.

CAVEAT: We are not pre-determining the eventual forms that may emerge, but we are offering specificity that cannot be ignored.


A programming score is a loving challenge for the creative sector to engage in redefinition of practice. Scores themselves are a kind of magic, a kind of conjuring of spells or marking of possibilities.

WTF are we talking about? By “programming,” we mean the process of planning the conditions to engage with others. By “scores,” we mean notation or instruction of procedures to enact, embody, or acknowledge.

We might consider a musical score. It is a record of the relationships between vibrational elements that is only connected to the material or ontological dimensions of those elements by theory or desire. Musical performance is irreducible to its score and yet very often cannot occur without it.

We recognize that these expanded programming scores are always unfinished because they strive to reflect a future we seek. They are necessarily collaborative between time and space. We call on you to perform these scores within your own work/workplace. There are many more scores to consider. We encourage you to create your own.


Creative Time brings ambitious, socially engaged art to the public—free and open to all. We partner with artists to spark dialogue and debate on the most pressing issues of our times, and to foster dreams for our collective future. Since 1974, Creative Time has produced over 350 public art projects in New York City, and partnered with thousands of artists across the country and around the globe, led by the conviction that art acts as a powerful means to envision change in our communities.

Continuing the organization’s commitment to operating at the intersection of art and social justice, developed through programs like the decade-running Creative Time Summit, the first Think Tank was convened in 2021 toward further centering the voices of artists in the development of tactics for political and social transformation.

Lead program support for the Think Tank was generously provided by the Open Society Foundations and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. In the interest of promoting and expanding upon the ideas and content explored here, you are free to share, copy and redistribute the materials in any medium or format; and adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, as long as you follow the terms stated below.

Terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, “Invitations Toward Re-worlding, by the Creative Time Think Tank, 2020-2021, www.creativetime.org/reworlding,” provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.