How do you intervene in fast-paced media narratives by engaging art and design? What does it look like to subvert hyperstimulation towards a political means? Inspired by Creative Time’s powerful and iconic public media campaigns that served as direct provocations, including “Kissing Doesn‘t Kill”, “Not Just the Parade, Time to Get Paid”, “Visualize This,” and the PSA, “Most Exciting Women in Music”, this event brought together artists and organizers Viva Ruiz and Gregory Sholette to reflect on their work spanning multiple contexts and social frameworks. They shared their experiences with artist interventions in media making, and how these forms of messaging can provoke public conversation on socio-political issues. The conversation was followed by an interactive poster swap – where participants brought a poster from their own collection, or chose from a selection of reproductions of past Creative Time poster works, to swap out for posters laid out across the tables in CTHQ.

Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, activist, teacher and a co-founder of the activist art collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), REPOhistory (1989-2000), and Gulf Labor Coalition (2010-). His books include The Art of Activism and the Activism of Art, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, and Delirium and Resistance: Art Activism and the Crisis of Capitalism. Sholette holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (2017), an MFA from the University of California, San Diego Visual Art Program (1995), a BFA from The Cooper Union (1979), and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Theory (1996), as well as an alumnus of the Center for Advanced Study of Visual Art in Washington DC (2023). He is an Affiliated Faculty member of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Program, and co-directs Social Practice City University of New York together with Chloë Bass, Associate Director Catherine LaSota, and the SPCUNY team.

Viva Ruiz (shethey) is a community/family/nightlife/sex work educated artist, progeny of factory working Ecuadorian migrants born and raised in Jamaica Queens. Proud to be the “daughter” of beloved Chloe Dzubilo, the punk rock trans femme activist and icon. Ruiz has been building power and birthing pro-abortion aesthetics since 2015 with the #thankgodforabortion experiment. Ruiz is a 2022 Creative Capital grantee and 2022 Art Matters fellow. Intentional about time bending intentional about naming the white supremacist class war we are enduring intentional calling more beautiful worlds into being with and in service to the spirits that walk with them.