Creative Time, the New York-based nonprofit known for ambitious site-specific public art projects, has selected Jean Cooney as its next executive director. Cooney is currently director of Times Square Arts and vice president of arts and culture at Times Square Alliance.
Her predecessor, Justine Ludwig, moved last fall to the Getty in Los Angeles as creative director of its regional event PST Art after leading Creative Time since 2018. Cooney, who worked at Creative Time for seven years before moving to Times Square Arts in 2019, was selected from about 50 candidates in a national search. She begins at Creative Time on Feb. 23.
“Jean has dedicated her career to public art and its importance not just in the art world but in society at large,” said Jon Neidich, Creative Time board chairman, who led the search committee. They chose Cooney in part because of her “deep knowledge of contemporary art and its intersection with social justice issues,” Neidich said by phone.
In an interview, Cooney said that the opportunity to lead Creative Time into its next chapter is a dream role for her.
“The arts are under attack right now, but this is where Creative Time thrives: its ability to evolve and be responsive to not only artists’ ideas but real life,” Cooney said, noting that Times Square Arts was among scores of arts programs that had their funding from the National Endowment for the Arts rescinded by the federal government last year. (Creative Time chose not to apply for federal funding for 2025.)
“I want to make sure that Creative Time is making an urgent call to artists, cultural workers and arts advocates to rally around our most pressing shared needs and take risks together and keep art and artists at the center,” she said.
Born in Brooklyn and raised mostly outside Philadelphia, Cooney, 48, got her start in public art at Grace Cathedralin San Francisco, inviting interdisciplinary artists to do one-night installations and performances. She earned a master’s degree in visual arts administration at New York University, in 2012, and was hired at Creative Time, which was then led by Anne Pasternak, now the director of the Brooklyn Museum.
Cooney rose from project manager to deputy director, and was instrumental in groundbreaking projects such as Nick Cave’s choreographed herd of performers in his Soundsuits at Grand Central Terminal in 2013 (averaging 200,000 viewers daily over the course of a week), Kara Walker’s epic sugar-coated sphinx at the former Domino Sugar Factory in 2014 (with 130,000 ticketed visitors over two months) and Duke Riley’s light show that used 2,000 homing pigeons over the East River in 2016.
“Jean is an exceptional producer and made impossible budgets, impossible deadlines, impossible sites possible,” Pasternak said, adding that there is “probably no site in the country as difficult to program with art than Times Square.”
Cooney described her job at Times Square Arts as a “master class in how to get things done in New York City.”
During her tenure, Cooney expanded the popular Midnight Moment program to almost 100 synchronized electronic billboards broadcasting three-minute installations nightly, by artists including Joan Jonas, Rashaad Newsomeand Shahzia Sikander.
She has weathered controversy, with works like Thomas J. Price’s 12-foot-tall bronze figure of a Black woman in casual clothing installed in Times Square last spring. After Fox News derided the work as a “D.E.I. statue,” Cooney navigated an avalanche of racist messages, memes and calls for the sculpture’s removal, as well as an outpouring of support.
Cooney said she was proud of the “critical dialogue” the piece incited. “Times Square is a place that sees an average of 250,000 people each day, where you can make no assumptions about anyone’s politics or cultural references,” she said, adding that working there has been “a really invaluable education to think even more expansively about audience.”
Creative Time has a dozen employees and an operating budget of about $3 million annually. Almost 10 percent of its contributed income is from city and state funding; over the last decade, 1 percent of this income, on average, came from federal sources.
“We need to be more strategic around where we find resources,” Cooney said. “I do think that partnerships are essential.”
Pasternak said she is hopeful that Creative Time, in this pressured and polarized environment affecting all leaders of cultural institutions, will go back to some of its roots and help artists take more big leaps.
“I think what differentiates Creative Time from other public arts organizations is working with artists on realizing these dream projects that really advance their careers,” she said. “We need more interactions in public spaces that get us to talk to one another and wake us up to the possibilities of the future.”
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