Toward Sanctuary is 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 in May 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. 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.
 
 

 
We Keep Us Safe: Sanctuary Movements Past and Present
Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Dr. Lloyd Barba, and Cinthya Santos-Briones
Saturday, May 30 | 2–6 PM
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
2 PM: Teach-in with Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI)
3 PM: Break for refreshments
4:30 PM: Presentations and discussion with Cinthya Santos-Briones and Dr. Lloyd Barba
Register Here
 
Who do we turn to for our safety? Can we create sanctuary within our communities? Part one of the We Keep Us Safe series brings together artist Cynthia Santos Briones, community organizer Abraham Paulos, and historian Dr. Lloyd Barba to reflect on the legacies and present day realities of sanctuary movements in the U.S., and the potential of community-centered actions for immigrant safety.
 
First, Abraham Paulos, Deputy Director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) will lead a teach-in exploring how Black communities in New York City are already building sanctuary and mutual support for one another while examining the limitations of traditional sanctuary practices. Participants will also learn Know Your Rights basics and gain practical guidance on how friends and neighbors can provide meaningful material support to those most impacted.
 
Then, historian Dr. Lloyd Barba and artist Cinthya Santos-Briones will share their work, grounding us in the history of the sanctuary movement in the U.S. during the 1980s, which was led by networks of faith based institutions to protect and support refugees fleeing civil war in Central American countries including El Salvador and Guatemala. Barba and Santos-Briones also highlight the resurgence of these movements over the last two decades, which has expanded to include migrants from across the globe and the community strategies implemented to keep them safe.
 
 
Rooted: Cultivating Sanctuary in the Mind and Body
TTA Healing Studio
Wednesday, June 10 | 6–8 PM
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
Register Here
 
To find sanctuary in oneself is a practice of tuning into the experiences of the body and caring for the mind. Sanctuary is not just a physical space but it is an ongoing action to create holistic wellbeing. Reiki practitioner Savannah Schmidt from TTA Healing Studio emphasizes healing through connection with the Earth and ancestral energies. The session will end with a reflection on critical work of holistic healing approaches such as reiki, the importance of its availability for all communities, and the potential of embodied care.
 
Yoga mats and cushions will be provided. Participants are encouraged to wear loose, comfortable clothing and bring a journal, something to write with, and a water bottle.
 
 
Sanctuary After Dark: Legacies of Queer Nightlife
Presented in collaboration with Body Hack’s 48 Hour Pride Nonstop (Saturday, June 27, 10 PM – Sunday, June 28, 3 PM
Alice O’Malley, Body Hack Collective, Julie Tolentino, Lola Flash, and more
Saturday, June 27 | 2–6 PM, afterward Body Hack’s Pride Nonstop will continue all weekend long
Ticketed and open to the public at Nowadays
Ticket information coming soon
 
The club, the party, the disco, the bar, the rave, the rager, the afters, the carry. Are these all sanctuary, however imperfect?
 
Sanctuary After Dark unfolds legacies of nightlife as sites of sanctuary, particularly as refuge for queer communities across generations in New York City. Artists including Lola Flash, Alice O’Malley, and Julie Tolentino will reflect upon queer 90s nightlife and its echoes through today through different creative engagements. These will include a thread of lineage drawn between Body Hack and the Clit Club. Operating from 1990 to 2002, the Clit Club was a legendary queer party in New York’s meatpacking district that organized and galvanized queer communities through years of crisis and upheaval. Active since 2018, Body Hack is a collective and event series producing multi-faceted parties and fundraisers supporting trans and gender non-conforming community members.
 
Sanctuary After Dark will occur during Body Hack’s 2026 Pride Nonstop at Nowadays, a weekend-long party supporting mutual aid campaigns for trans healthcare, decarceration, housing, and overall stability while revealing vital resonances between multiple generations of queer nightlife sanctuary spaces.
 
 
Tending Sanctuary: Plants to the People
Herban Cura
Thursday, July 9 | 6–8 PM
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
Register Here
 
The plants we live alongside hold power. Herban Cura fosters healing justice through herbalism, teaching communities to restore relationships to land, ancestry and cultural lifeways. Join us to celebrate Plants to the People, a new book by Herban Cura, and learn more about foraging practices and herbs from the collective’s farm in the Catskills.
 
Plants to the People (P2P) is a mutual aid project that occurs in public spaces in the Hudson Valley and New York City where participants enjoy free herbs and acupuncture. The book includes photographs and stories from the community that attends these gatherings.
 
 
We Keep Us Safe: Sanctuary as Collective Practice
Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz and Tania Bruguera
Wednesday July 29 | 6–8 PM
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
Register Here
 
Public space is a site of contested realities and political potentials. Artists and organizers have long harnessed this balance, understanding the importance of public art and campaigns to mobilize wide networks of people, while strategically messaging with their intended communities.
 
For the second event in the We Keep Us Safe series, artist Tania Bruguera and Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz reflect on the work of public art and grassroots organizing as tools of community support to create spaces of protection and solidarity in times of social and political uncertainty. Bruguera and Ruiz will consider what it means to build a sanctuary—not only as a physical refuge, but as a collective practice.
 
FALL 2026: Toward Sanctuary Continues
 
Cat Sanctuary and Beyond: Structures of Our Shared Realms
Adrian Wong and Wildlife Freedom Foundation
September | More information coming soon
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
 
Artist Adrian Wong and Wildlife Freedom Foundation founder Rossana Ceruzzi will reflect on animal rescue and rehabilitation, artistic collaboration across species, and the possibilities of communication beyond the human. Together, they consider sanctuary as an ongoing practice of attention, relation, and coexistence.
 
 
We Keep Us Safe: The Whores Feast and Feeding
Red Canary Song and collaborators
November | More information coming soon
Free and open to the public at CTHQ
 
Red Canary Song activates CTHQ with performances on the occasion of the premiere of The Whores Feast. Filmed over a shared dinner with organizers and collaborators, the film reflects on nourishment, labor, chosen family, and the collective practices of care that sustain communities through ongoing precarity.
 
Red Canary Song is a grassroots organization of Asian and migrant sex workers and massage workers organizing transnationally. Their work is in the tradition of sex worker mutual aid, and they center base-building with migrant massage workers through labor rights, migrant justice, and abolitionist frameworks.
 
 

 
Toward Sanctuary programs will feature 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.
 
 

 
Guadalupe Maravilla is a transdisciplinary visual artist who combines sculpture, painting, performance, and installation. As an artist and healer, he combines pre-colonial Central American ancestry, personal mythology, and collaborative performative acts to trace the history of his own displacement and that of others. His work is autobiographical, referencing his migration to the United States due to the Salvadoran Civil War and explores how harsh systemic realities against immigrants physically manifest in the body. Maravilla’s work has been exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, and Socrates Sculpture Park. His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
 

 
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.
 

 
Project support for Guadalupe Maravilla’s Creative Time commission is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
 

 

TOWARD SANCTUARY EVENT CALENDAR