Nato Thompson

Artistic Director, Creative Time

Nato Thompson is Artistic Director at Creative Time, one of New York’s most prestigious and exciting arts organizations. Thompson has organized such major Creative Time projects as The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign (2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others.

Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions, including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004), with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press.

His writings have appeared in numerous publications, BookForum, Frieze, Artforum, Third Text, and Huffington Post among them. In 2005, he received the Art Journal Award for distinguished writing. For Independent Curators International, Thompson curated the exhibition Experimental Geography with a book available from Melville House Publishing.

His has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life which was published in January 2017.

The Present

Why It’s Getting Harder to “Stick It to the Man”

Nothing reflects the complex mood of our era like gaming, says Nato Thompson, where the establishment has worked its way into the anti-establishment ethos.

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Nato Thompson