CTHQ
co-curated with Diya Vij & Gervais Marsh
Creative Time
New York, NY | 2023-2025
CTHQ is a gathering space supporting artists working at the intersection of art and politics as they continue to plot, orchestrate, and recharge from cultural, political, and social organizing work.
Rooted in a legacy of art and activism, CTHQ emerges from the rebelliousness of artist organizers in the Lower East Side, where a critical network of neighborhood art, health, and education centers, experimental theater, protest collectives, and community-owned housing, cultural, and green spaces self organized to claim and shape space for artistic and political production.
CTHQ sits within Creative Time’s historic and ongoing work to gather artists to share tactics for political change most notably through the Think Tank, Summit, and Reports. Growing within a lineage of visionary and transgressive creative moments, CTHQ serves as a hub for today and tomorrow’s community of socially engaged and politically oriented artists in the neighborhood, citywide, across the country, and around the world.
In 2025, gatherings at CTHQ were organized around the Sonic Commons: the texture of sounds (and silences) that form the urban landscape. Sound shapes our atmosphere: the ways we interact with each other, what we hear and don’t hear, how we listen and to what or who. What are the sounds of community, of history, of power, of industry that make up our city? How does sound shape the daily experiences of the cityscape, and what social actions emerge from sonic interactions? In the context of increasing political turmoil, unpredictability, and authoritarianism, we explored how the politics of sound can be explored as metaphors and tools to help us listen, decipher, decode, and move past tumultuous moments. In a sonic commons, what is shared corresponds to what is heard, what is silenced and what is amplified within our public spaces and our culture at large.
Programs and ideas were organized around a growing list of sonic fragments found in public space, including (but not limited to):
the summer anthem, the high heels clicking on the street, the catcall, the cackle, the small talk, the spontaneous street conversation, the shit talking, the lo-rider, the birdsong within city greenspaces, the protest slogan, the call and response, the collective song, the impetus to speak out, the notion that voices are heard (but is the hearing ever translated into action?), the censored voices, the scream, the shout, the catatonic scream, the silence, the stillness, the saying something when seeing something, the public address, the sign language, the signage, the place names modified for colonial tongues, the codes, the slang, the diasporic dialects, the endangered languages, the underground codes, the busking, the rhythm of urban infrastructure, the phone sounds played out loud, the personal speakers, the thunder, the bass, the noise pollution, the noise ordinances, the alarms, the sirens, the screeching of a halt, the struggle to breathe deeply in a polluted cityscape, the right to breathe, air, the obstruction of breath, asthma, indigenous sonic agency, the noise, the rumbling, the telephone game, the prank call, the rumor, the encrypted group chat, the urban legend, the rumors, the hysteria, the call to prayer, the call to action.
