CREATIVE TIME ANNOUNCES PROGRAM SERIES: TOWARD SANCTUARY
May 18th, 2026
A series of programs about sanctuary as a living history and ongoing aspiration inspired by Guadalupe Maravilla’s artistic practice and upcoming Creative Time public art commission.
New York, NY – Monday, May 18, 2026 – Creative Time announces Toward Sanctuary, a series of programs co-curated by Celine Wong Katzman and Dr. Gervais Marsh with Buffy Sierra, inspired by Guadalupe Maravilla’s artistic practice and upcoming Creative Time public art commission. Through collective action and imagination, Toward Sanctuary contends with the possibilities and difficulties of cultivating sanctuary across legacies of public and socially engaged art. The programming is informed by the history of sanctuary movements in the U.S. and Maravilla’s practice of building community-centered spaces for holistic wellbeing.
Creating sanctuary is rooted in an expansive history of dynamic practices, and is an ongoing aspiration. The need to reimagine and actively build spaces of refuge has never been more urgent during this time marked by escalating anti-immigrant violence, increasingly authoritarian global politics, and deepening socioeconomic inequities. Sanctuary emerges both through strategies invested in liberation and as a protective enclosure from harm–an offering to breathe, to heal, to envision radical alternatives, and to be connected with community.
Artists, cultural workers, organizers, and neighbors have nurtured and sought out sanctuary through practices and sites like independent schools, underground resistance, mutual aid collectives, community gardens, experimental art spaces, and modes of underground resistance. Toward Sanctuary programs will address the promise and limitations of the designation “sanctuary city” and consider the power and potential of networked communities that extend across arcs of history and beyond borders.
Starting May 30th, 2026, Toward Sanctuary programs will take place at CTHQ, Creative Time’s gathering space for art and politics, and across other sites in New York City including a nightclub, an urban farm and more. Maravilla’s upcoming Creative Time commission, soon to be announced, will draw on his work across sculpture, sound healing, performance, and organizing in support of immigrant communities.
Toward Sanctuary programming will include performance, teach-ins, community-centered healing practices, dancing, music, films and more. Programs feature historians, community organizers, artists and collectives from throughout the city and beyond, including Adrian Wong, Alice O’Malley, Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Body Hack, Christopher Rey Pérez, Cinthya Santos Briones, Herban Cura, Julie Tolentino, Linda Goode-Bryant, Dr. Lloyd Barba, Lola Flash, Mary Mattingly, Red Canary Song, Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz, Tania Bruguera, TTA Healing Studio, Wildlife Freedom Foundation, and more to be announced.
Public Program Schedule
Full program details available on creativetime.org/projects/toward-sanctuary
We Keep Us Safe: Sanctuary Movements Past and Present
Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Cinthya Santos Briones, Dr. Lloyd Barba
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
Saturday, May 30 | 2 PM – 6 PM
Rooted: Cultivating Sanctuary in the Mind and Body
TTA Healing Studio
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
Wednesday, June 10, 2026 | 6 PM – 8 PM
Sanctuary After Dark: Legacies of Queer Nightlife
Presented in collaboration with the Body Hack collective and featuring Alice
O’Malley, Julie Tolentino, Lola Flash, and more
Ticketed and open to the public at Nowadays
Saturday, June 27 | 2 PM – 6 PM, afterward Body Hack’s Pride Nonstop will continue all weekend long
Tending Sanctuary: Plants to the People
Herban Cura
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
Thursday, July 9, 2026 | 6 PM – 8 PM
We Keep Us Safe: Sanctuary as Collective Practice
Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz and Tania Bruguera
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
Wednesday July 29, 2026 | 6 PM – 8 PM
Cat Sanctuary and Beyond: Structures of Our Shared Realms
Adrian Wong and Wildlife Freedom Foundation
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
September 2026 | Date to Be Announced
We Keep Us Safe: The Whores Feast and Feeding
Red Canary Song and collaborators
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
November 2026 | Date to Be Announced
ABOUT CREATIVE TIME
Since 1974, Creative Time has commissioned and presented over 350 ambitious public art projects in partnership with thousands of artists and organizations throughout New York City, across the country, around the world—and even in outer space. Its work is guided by three core values: art matters, artists’ voices are important in shaping society, and public spaces are places for creative and free expression.
Creative Time is acclaimed for the innovative and meaningful projects it has commissioned, from Tribute in Light (2002), the twin beacons of light that illuminate lower Manhattan annually on the anniversary of 9/11, to Kara Walker’s powerful sugar-sphinx, A Subtlety (2014), at the Domino Sugar Factory, Pedro Reyes’s Doomocracy (2016), a theatrical haunted house of political nightmares at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Chloë Bass’s If you hear something, free something (2025), a sound work in MTA subway stations throughout NYC, and so much more.
Based in New York City, Creative Time touches millions, locally, nationally, and internationally, through public programming initiatives like the Creative Time Summit, which has been presented in a variety of locations including Venice, Stockholm, Washington, D.C., and Miami. CTHQ, Creative Time’s gathering space for art and politics, offers public programs, artist-led workshops, and free co-working space.
Creative Time is committed to presenting important art for our times and engaging broad audiences that transcend geographic, racial, and socioeconomic barriers.
PROJECT SUPPORT
Toward Sanctuary programs and Creative Time’s CTHQ public programming space are made possible with visionary founding gifts from the Mellon Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.
MEDIA CONTACT
THIRD EYE: Justin Conner | justin@hellothirdeye.com
CREATIVE TIME: Gloria Celeste Perez | gloriap@creativetime.org
