Art at a Time Like This: “A Cycle of Renewing Energy”
Disco ball decorations in ARTSPACE at PUBLIC. Photography by Danté Crichlow/BFA.com.
Art At A Time Like This, an online-based collaborative curatorial project centering art with social and political urgency, recently threw a vibrant party celebrating its fifth anniversary. Hosted by the PUBLIC’s ARTSPACE in the Lower East Side, the fête offered a heady, funk-filled celebration of this innovative project, which has been developing online and public exhibitions of contemporary art since 2020. The organization’s focus is on supporting artists and growing artistic unity and resilience in response to global crises and threats to human rights.
Soon after, I sat down with founders Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen for an interview about the five-anniversary, the trajectory of ATLT, and their upcoming exhibition in partnership with the National Coalition Against Censorship and Don’t Delete Art, DON’T LOOK NOW.
Art at a Time Like This co-founders Anne Verhallen (left) and Barbara Pollack (right). Photography by Danté Crichlow/BFA.com.
ETT: Congratulations on five years of ATLT! This project started partially as a response to the pandemic and the social and protest movements of 2020. What has changed about ATLT’s mission since then?
AV: When we started, we didn't necessarily intend to start a nonprofit organization. I engaged Barbara with an idea of an online exhibition, and Barbara immediately said yes, and said it should be called “Art at a Time Like This.” So I think our goals changed quite rapidly in the first few months, as we then founded it as a nonprofit and continued with our mission. I think, since then, our mission and goals have stayed somewhat the same throughout these five years.
BP: Yeah, when we started, actually, the title of the exhibition was “How Can You Think of Art at a Time Like This?” We invited leading artists and emerging artists to respond to that question. And within a week, we were amazed at who wanted to respond. So we got Ai Weiwei and Lynn Hershman Leeson and Judith Bernstein and Marilyn Minter and Deborah Kass and Dread Scott and it went on and on—it really hit a chord. One of the things that motivates us as an organization is to respond really quickly, so we do things as rapidly as possible. That complicates getting funding, because most institutions run on a schedule where things are planned two years in advance. But we say yes, and artists love that, since they don't have to wait till the idea is passé in order to show it.
ETT: How has the virtual format opened up new avenues for supporting artists in the absence of a permanent physical space?
AV: Since we don't have a physical space, we have a lot of freedom to activate and create platforms for artists to express their artistic response to current situations. Our first physical show was called Ministry of Truth: 1984/2020 (2020), which addressed the state of the US political state in 2020 on 20 billboards across New York City.
That was our first sort of manifestation in real life. From there, we've done other billboard projects. But the functionality of online exhibitions is really convenient, because not everybody lives in the United States and we prioritize immediate response. And so we’re able to work with people virtually wherever they are. And same for other shows that we've done, like our project with Jamaica Art Society. Their fellows are artists of Jamaican descent, and it's very interesting to have that digital tool for certain projects.
BP: We think of the digital space as the biggest public art project.
AV: It’s the ultimate public art space, essentially.
BP: We've done billboard projects, we've done online projects. We've done many panel discussions, a lot of activation. Last year, we did panel discussions about the global rise of censorship at places like Independent Art Fair and at BRIC. The key to being able to work this way is collaboration. We always do grassroots collaboration with an organization that's already been working on the issue.
AV: Our interest in collaboration is twofold: we don't just highlight artists who address these types of subjects, but also activists. So. We find it important to include the activists—the non-arts organizations that we want to engage—so that they can also supply our audience with information on the issue. If someone gets engaged because of the artwork, it leads to the goal: to get people engaged with the subject. They can then find more information or figure out how they could potentially support or make change. And then the other fold is that we've done a lot of projects outside New York, and it's very important to highlight local artists, communities, and local arts organizations. We always have half local artists, half more widely recognized artists, and this sort of brings together the local audience and the global audience for a conversation.
Shirin Neshat speaking at Dangerous Art, Dangerous Artists summit, 2024. Photo courtesy of ATLT.
ETT: Your most recent online project was the summit Dangerous Art, Dangerous Artists in June 2024, which highlighted artist responses to censorship. That topic feels especially prescient now, and especially in the wake of the Trump administration. How has that project grown and evolved into current efforts to support artists in the act of dissent?
AV: It’s a subject that we're fully focused on this year. We started working with the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) several years ago when we did a show with nine Afghan artists, and as ARC saw the growth of the censorship, we decided that the Dangerous Art symposium was very much needed.
BP: We've been committed to freedom of expression from the very beginning. The idea is that our platform protects artists’ freedom of expression, whereas other institutions might be more fragile about it. We're devoting this year to our first gallery exhibition of censored artworks.
Just today, we talked to Andil Gosine, whose show got shut down in Washington last month from the Art Museum of the Americas. He was so thrilled that we reached out to him because he had worked on that exhibition for three years, and they just canceled it because of fear of the new executive orders governing the NEA. There needs to be a spotlight on that entire issue in the New York art world. People tend to be ignorant about what's going on until it's their particular organization.
DJ Fly Hendricks. Photography by Danté Crichlow/BFA.com.
ETT: Your upcoming project DON’T LOOK NOW sheds light on specific cases of censorship in the visual arts in recent years by making them accessible in a physical gallery space. Has ATLT always worked towards a physical gallery exhibition, or has the idea evolved out of circumstance?
AV: I don't think we ever talked about doing a physical show—I think we just felt that it was the right format to be able to showcase these works. For a lot of our public art shows, we've commissioned work, or they've been specifically made for these activations. So it seems like the most appropriate way to present works that didn't make it into an exhibition.
I think a lot of people think that the works being censored must somehow evoke a lot of violence. If you look at those works, they’re really quite innocent—you would be very surprised what didn't make it into a show.
BP: We also have a deep belief that even if people see a lot of these works circulated in the media, they don’t really get to see and judge them for themselves. And I feel like some other kind of mystical interchange happens when you are confronted by the actual artwork, the physicality of it.
BP: Artworks with a lot of subtlety, that aren’t just didactic, but that are artworks. They’re artworks, not political banners.
ETT: That physical encounter with the artwork is so crucial. I noticed that Mel Chin’s Actual Size (2023), which was intended to go up in the 8x5 Houston show, is among the works included in DON’T LOOK NOW.
AV: That was a work that we commissioned for our 8x5 Houston show, part of an ongoing project that we've had on mass incarceration in the United States.
BP: It was specifically made to go on a billboard.
AV: We did two activations in Florida, and then we did an activation in Texas. We've always worked with the same billboard companies, and we were about to go into the contract with the same billboard company and they pulled out at the last minute. We had to pivot very quickly and find a poster company that would put it up as ad space. But if you look at that work, it just states the truth.
ETT: You’ve mentioned the implied or unofficial censorship that happens in museums and galleries through the opinions of curators and collectors. In DON’T LOOK NOW, you are explicitly inverting that power dynamic by using previous censorship as a selection criterion. Do you think this strategy can or should become a more widespread practice in museums and galleries?
BP: There’s a difference between connoisseurship and censorship. No one has a constitutional right to show in a museum. A lot of selections take place before they're even publicly announced, and we try to have as open a platform as possible, but we do make selections. But that's a whole different thing than making selections based on fear. Making selections based on wanting it to be the best show possible is what museums are supposed to be doing. But between board demands, government demands, corporate sponsorship demands, museums increasingly make decisions based on fear.
AV: Art should always be provocative and should evoke dialogue. The power of art is to create dialogue and spark questions. Even if you don’t agree with the content, you should be able to have a conversation. Culturally, we are at a moment where that’s very difficult. We always think about polarization, and the idea of how to come back to a point where conversation can be had.
ETT: Despite polarization, there has to be an attempt from all angles to actually have a conversation, otherwise there’s no meeting place.
BP: That’s why we always have panel discussions along with each of our projects so that there’s some amount of dialogue. Tiana Webb Evans said it well the other night: “We know art has power. They wouldn’t be coming after us if it didn’t have power.”
Anne and I both work at other full time jobs while running this. We get very little money out of ATLT, and it’s really really a project of love. It’s saving my life, because we feel we can do something about the things going on. This keeps us connected to people and activists all over the world. It’s an antidote to dismay.
ETT: It feels sometimes like the pace of repression is becoming impossible to keep up with, but certainly that’s one of the most important roles art plays. What about ATLT has been so antidotal for you?
AV: I think community is very important. It’s very important that people don’t feel alone. Especially because everyone, different marginalized groups, is getting attacked from different angles, and it’s important to feel that you’re not alone in it.
BP: Especially since dividing us is a tactic of the administration—community is a form of resistance. Just having a party is a form of resistance. It keeps spirits up so we can take action.
ETT: You are building a lot of momentum, do you have a sense of what to do with that energy?
AV: We’re doing it! That cycle of renewing energy is the most important way to keep this going.
Left to right: artist Jennifer Wen Ma, ATLT co-founder Anne Verhallen, board member Kerry Gaetner, advisory board member Tiana Webb Evans and ATLT co-founder Barbara Pollack. Photography by Danté Crichlow, courtesy of ATLT.
DON’T LOOK NOW will open in fall 2025. ATLT is also re-activating its online projects: the upcoming show What Can Art Do Now?, curated by Janna Dyk, launching April 15, will feature nine socialite engaged artists. A War Like This?, curated by Gregory Volk and launching June 1, will highlight Ukrainian artists in the Trump era.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
