NEW YORK—In the midst of such a tense, highly charged election season, it’s hard not to have politics on the brain. “The future of democracy is really in question,” says Anne Pasternak, the director of Creative Time. “It is time for us to pay attention, become knowledgeable, and participate.”

Pasternak used these remarks to contextualize “Democracy in America: The National Campaign,” her organization’s largest ever public art initiative, at a recent press gathering. Ongoing since March, the program began with town hall talks with artists in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York; since June five national commissions and two mobile art projects have come to life, including a Waterboard Thrill Ride at Coney Island, a reading of queer love letters by gay rights activists during the national conventions in Denver and Minneapolis, and protest song karaoke in Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens. As befitting a big performance, “Democracy in America” will culminate in a big finale, which is on view at the Park Avenue Armory from September 21 to 27, from noon until 10 p.m. daily.

The Convergence Center, as the weeklong exhibition is aptly titled, will round up all of the projects created in the past seven months and place them (or documentation of them) in the Park Avenue Armory alongside contemporary artworks by roughly 30 other artists. And if that isn’t enough, Nato Thompson, the Creative Time curator who conceived the whole campaign, has secured original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights to flank the entrance to the armory's 55,000-square-foot Drill Hall.

ARTINFO spoke with Thompson last week about the aims of the massive public art project and the connection between art and politics.

Nato, how did the concept for the “Democracy in America” program come about?

With the elections coming, it seemed apropos to do a project based on the democratic process, in particular because George Bush would be leaving office. It also seemed that a lot of artists were interested in interrogating the process of democracy, in terms of both topical politics and historic strategies.

Have you noticed any recurring themes among different artists’ projects?

Yes, definitely. A number of projects deal with what is referred to as the “state of exception,” the moment when the U.S. foregoes basic ideas of law and promulgates certain political actions on people that go beyond the realm of human rights — examples, of course, being rendition flights or torture.

Like Steve Powers’s Waterboard Thrill Ride.

Yes. Also, Rodney McMillan and Olga Koumoundourus did a project on the prison industry and capital punishment. They’re interested in the fact that if you put a map of the U.S. that shows where capital punishment happens the most today on top of a map of where lynchings happened throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the geographies are very similar. The idea is that the state of exception has historic roots entrenched in racial and political questions that have troubled American democracy for a long time.

Another theme that’s come up is historical reenactment, something that’s been out there but seems to have higher political stakes with this show. People are interested in rethinking the iconography of protest as well as civic action and what it means to be an American. Sharon Hayes has done a lot of reenactment projects, looking at the gay rights movement of the ’70s and trying to draw from its political speech; similarly, Mark Tribe’s been doing reenactments of the New Left and trying to think how one can take the most effective parts and deploy them for audiences today.

The yearlong program culminates in the Convergence Center, which is open for only one week. Did you consider having it converge for longer?

I like to think of this as a counter-convention, a political happening; everyday there are events, speeches, and activities. The Park Avenue Armory is an enormous, almost exotic space; it's full of history, and it has this drill hall that is almost like an airplane hangar and can hold a lot of people. So we figured, to go with the spirit of generating a critical mass, the more the merrier. Plus we’re in convention mode right now, with the recent RNC and DNC. We’re drawing on those traditions.