Risa Puno Is Building an Escape Room to Address Social Inequality in the United States. Justine Ludwig and Creative Time Are Helping Her Make It.
The artist and the executive director of Creative Time discuss their new Kickstarter project, pushing past creative block, and the past, present, and future of their work.
Kickstarter just turned 10. This conversation between Risa Puno and Justine Ludwig is part of a series that celebrates past projects and introduces a few new ones. Read more here.
“I make artwork that you’re actually supposed to touch,” says installation and sculpture artist Risa Puno. “I especially like putting my own twist on functional objects and familiar pastimes.” Her interactive sculpture Common Picnic, brought to life on Kickstarter in 2015, is a prime example: The giant interlocking grid of picnic tables, originally installed for a summer on Governor’s Island in New York City, was meant not just to be admired but actually used by the community. A second installation, Common Ground, was later brought to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, through another Kickstarter campaign.
Puno is the first artist to be selected for a new Open Call program by Creative Time, a nonprofit that works with artists to realize large-scale public artworks that engage with social issues. Together, Puno and Creative Time will mount The Privilege of Escape, live on Kickstarter now, an immersive escape-the-room game that addresses issues of privilege and social inequity in the United States.
“Out of the 632 proposals we received, we chose Risa’s project,” says Justine Ludwig, Creative Time’s executive director. (Creative Time first came to Kickstarter in 2016 to fund Doomocracy, a political haunted house by Pedro Reyes.) “It has been fascinating to think about gameplay and this structure [of the escape room] as a perfect space to address issues of inequity. At Creative Time we believe that part of the power of art is its ability to generate dialogue and create safe discursive space, and in Risa’s project we see that illustrated so elegantly.”
As the team prepared for launch, we caught up with Puno and Ludwig to talk about the new project, how they push past creative block, and the past, present, and future of their work.
Kickstarter: Tell us a little bit about your new project, The Privilege of Escape.
Risa Puno: Together with Creative Time, I am planning to make an escape room that encourages people to think about privilege and social inequity. “Privilege” has become such a loaded and confusing word. It can trigger some pretty strong emotions, and it can sometimes be difficult to have meaningful conversations about it. So I want to create a game that is kind of an experiential metaphor, that hopefully bypasses the charged language and can act as a framework for understanding. Escape rooms are all about teamwork and letting go of assumptions and seeing things from a new perspective, so I think this format has some real potential to spark discussion and communication.
Justine Ludwig: Risa, when did the idea for this project first manifest?
Puno: The very first time I played an escape room — it was with my family over the holidays — I literally walked out and said, “I want to make one of these.” I thought that there was so much potential there. At first [I thought about doing] something silly, like “escape from a bad first date” or “escape from your in-laws at Christmas.” But I was also thinking about how it could be something meaningful. I started thinking about how the ability to escape, in and of itself, is a privilege: You have to have opportunity and mobility and means. And when I think about escape rooms, I’m like, “Jeez, it’s like you’re paying money to be given extra problems.” And it’s a room where all the resources and opportunities that you need to move forward are locked and inaccessible to you. I thought, “If that doesn’t speak to privilege, I don’t know what else does.”
Is there a particular work of art that has made an impact on what you make?
Puno: I once attended a talk at MoMA by Paul Ramirez Jonas where he discussed Key to the City, the project he did with Creative Time. That changed everything about what I thought public art could be.
There was a kiosk in Times Square where anybody could line up. There was a little ceremony where you basically bestowed a key to the city onto somebody else. It could be for literally anything — for having good grades or a nice smile or getting a promotion. But you couldn’t take one yourself. You had to give it to somebody. So people would bring a friend, or they would make friends with people in line.
You would get this physical key, and that key would open up places in all five boroughs of New York City. Sort of secret places… I think at Bryant Park there was a lamppost with a little box you could open, and [inside] there was a light switch that would turn on the lamp. Or it opened a secret door at the Brooklyn Museum to an exhibition you could only see if you had this key. I imagine it felt really special to get to be a part of that.
Instead of a large-scale outdoor sculpture that people aren’t supposed to climb, this was a project that managed to exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It took the intimate experience of individual discovery and made it something connective and public. I had never seen public art that offered that level of interaction and autonomy. I knew right then I wanted to make work like that one day.
I had never seen public art that offered that level of interaction and autonomy. I knew I wanted to make work like that one day.
What’s one thing you both wish you had known before you launched your first Kickstarter campaign?
Puno: For me it was how much work it takes to fulfill a reward. I mean, I read lots and lots of articles that said to leave time and money for reward fulfillment, but it’s really different when your apartment is covered in tote bags and mailing envelopes.
Ludwig: The Kickstarter project Creative Time ran happened prior to my time here, but I did work on a Kickstarter project with the artist Nadia Kaabi-Linke. It takes a lot of time, love, and attention to take on a Kickstarter project, and I wish I’d had more of a sense of that. But the other side of that is the amazing realization of having support from people all around the world, and their investment in your project is such a validating and beautiful thing. All these people have come together collectively to realize something you all believe in.
Puno: Yeah, 100 percent. I had that feeling too.
What inspires you or keeps you going when you’re feeling creatively blocked?
Puno: Talking through my ideas with people I trust — that’s the best. When all the stuff in my head is swirling around like soup, it helps the important stuff float to the top. Especially since I make interactive work, it’s really important for me to get feedback from other people so that I can learn more about how they construct meaning and context.
Ludwig: I’m inspired by books. When I find myself blocked I usually read. I also go and see a lot of art and try to take in a lot of different creative perspectives, and that often lets me think in different ways.
What makes you want to quit, and how do you get past it?
Puno: For me the hardest thing about having a project-based practice is trying to find inspiration on a deadline. Because some days it feels like I’m squeezing my brain so hard that it’s like trying to get water from a stone. That anxiety can be really draining and overwhelming. But I just have to remember that some of my favorite ideas have come to me when I was down to the wire. Plus talking to people I love, especially my mom, helps relieve some of the pressure and lets me reset.
Some days it feels like I’m squeezing my brain so hard that it’s like trying to get water from a stone.
Ludwig: There are challenges in what I do that I face on a daily basis. I think part of why I love what I do is because I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment. I like facing the insurmountable and finding a way to succeed and move forward. So there is reward almost inherent within those challenges and having the ability to surpass them and move on.
Have you encountered failure in your work? What did you learn from it?
Puno: I’ve had setbacks and challenges with every single project. I’m always learning to do something new with everything that I take on. There are always things that I wish I had done differently because nothing is ever perfect. But I don’t really see those as failures. As cheesy as it sounds, I really just see those as opportunities to learn. I had to learn how to ask for help or how to pivot when running low on time. I’ve learned that letting go of bad ideas is just as important as coming up with good ones. In my opinion, you only really fail if you stop trying.
Ludwig: That’s such a good way of putting it. Perhaps what we’re framing as failure can really be a learning process. I think that’s part of what’s so interesting about being in the arts: There aren’t cut-and-dried answers to things. We have to think in different ways. Sometimes what we expect or thought we were doing ends up being radically different from what we actually were doing. And that’s part of [the process]. So what in many other fields might be seen as failure can actually be very positive and very generative for us. But it’s also about learning to be adaptive and open, and not having such a rigid goal for what we plan to achieve.
Perhaps what we’re framing as failure can really be a learning process.
What was your work or creative practice like 10 years ago? How has it evolved?
Puno: Ten years ago I was still pretty new to the art world. I was still learning about the available opportunities and trying to figure out where I fit in. I was just starting to learn about project management, and my brainstorming process was a lot more random. I mean, I still can’t make inspiration [come] faster and more often, but now I have a set of habits that I use when starting any new project that keeps me organized so that it’s a smoother transition from the conceptualization phase to production. It’s mostly nerdy organization stuff — I mean, Justine’s seen my notebook grow. I use bound notebooks so I can reorganize my thoughts all the time. Other than that I use Evernote and Google Docs, nerdy project management stuff.
But I think the biggest change is that I feel more comfortable talking about what I make and sharing my process. I used to be really nervous about it, but then I realized that my own art-making practice is the one thing I know more about than literally anyone else. Realizing that took a lot of pressure off.
Ludwig: Ten years ago I was a curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, so I was working in a radically different context but still dealing with a lot of the things that I am dealing with and working on today.
About 10 years ago I curated a project with the artist Shilpa Gupta in which countless balloons were shared with individuals in the community in Cincinnati. On those big balloons, in the artist’s handwriting, it said, “I want to live with no fear.” Those balloons flooded downtown Cincinnati, and we saw them dispersed throughout the city during the course of the day and in the days that followed. It was this performative public art project, and I think in many ways it planted the seed in my mind of wanting to work in public space and work directly with communities, and also focus on supporting artists and realizing dream projects that other institutions and other individuals weren’t going to get behind. So in a strange way, I think it was a decade ago that my path to Creative Time started.
What do you think your practice or your work will look like 10 years from now?
Puno: I mean, if you’re granting wishes, it’d be awesome to be one of those big-time artists with a big, beautiful, spacious studio and a staff to help me make work. Realistically, though, I would be thrilled if in 10 years I had more experience making public art with kickass organizations like Creative Time. And it would be great to have some permanent public installations, too. But honestly I’m just grateful for every day I get to do what I love — even on the days when it drives me crazy — because as long as I’m still making art I’ll be happy.
Ludwig: To date I’ve followed opportunities as they have appeared in front of me, and that’s led me to, for example, living in Texas before moving to New York, which ended up being one of the best experiences of my life. I don’t think that’s something I would have ever put in front of me as a life path. Now it’s led me to Creative Time and the opportunity to work with some of the most brilliant human beings I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a room with. So I don’t know what I want it to look like. I am excited to see what the next 10 years will look like, but I want to be surprised by them.
Where do you think your field is heading within the next decade or so?
Puno: I have no idea. But that’s my favorite thing about the art world — you never know what’s around the next corner.
Ludwig: We’re having a lot of really interesting conversations now around who [art] institutions serve, what our publics look like, and the issues that we need to address in this moment and moving forward — that we cannot be truly passive, that we need to take a stand, that we need to present diverse and challenging perspectives within our programming.
There’s also an unbelievable shift in younger generations that now are counting more and more on images to communicate — think of the presence of Instagram or the presence of emojis. Suddenly we’re going back to a mode where images are our way of communicating. That leads to a forefronting of images as communication, and, through that, a heightened visual literacy. I’m really curious to see how that affects art viewing and how younger generations will look at visual culture as a whole.
What creative tool or ability do you wish existed that doesn’t yet?
Puno: It would be pretty cool to have a way to transcribe my dreams. Like, this morning I woke up feeling like I had solved a problem that I’d been working on in real life, but I couldn’t remember exactly what the solution was. Other than that, I’m always looking for innovative tools for measuring stuff in the studio. Whether it’s measuring something round or measuring an angle, that’s usually what gets me.
Ludwig: On my end, I think it’s more a superpower I wish I had than a tool. I wish I had the ability to stop time, to have space sometimes to take a pause and think through ideas. Which I know is a plot for a terrible sci-fi film. But hey, it’s what would really be the most beneficial to my work and my life.
Puno: Ditto.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
The Privilege of Escape is live on Kickstarter until May 31.
