with Shahzia Sikander, Tom Finkelpearl, moderated by Danielle Jackson

Artist Shahzia Sikander, curator and cultural leader Tom Finkelpearl, and critic and researcher Danielle Jackson, joined us for a conversation that will dig into how the politics of commercial and civic spaces has 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 discerned how artists have navigated New York City’s ever-changing local politics, municipal bureaucracies, commercial interests, public perception and cultural shifts over time.

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.

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.

Image: Reckoning, September 2023, Shahzia Sikander. Photo by Michael Hull for Times Square Arts.