A few years ago, Creative Time, the nonprofit responsible for some of the most interesting public contemporary-art programming in New York, shifted gears. After long limiting its mission to producing art events in the Big Apple, the 36-year-old organization began venturing beyond the city to undertake projects like Paul Chan's staging of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, Jeremy Deller's Iraq–themed performance/pedagogy tour "It Is What It Is," and Pae White's installation at last winter's Art Basel Miami Beach. Now, Creative Time is about to expand its purview once again — this time by going global. With an innovative international residency program for artists and plans to support art projects in far-flung — and sometimes forbidding — locales, the restless nonprofit may just also be reconceiving the traditional role of an art organization.

According to Creative Time director Anne Pasternak, previous efforts to expand an art nonprofit's purview have involved franchises, such as the Guggenheim's strategy under Thomas Krens to create museum satellites around the world. Creative Time, she says, is "taking baby steps" toward creating a new model. This month, as the first of those steps, the organization is launching a new Global Residency Program, which takes artists out of the studio and into the world. The six inaugural residents — Maya Lin, Walid Raad, Emily Jacir, Judi Wernthein, Sanford Biggers, and K8 Hardy — were asked to come up with a "burning question" they had about the world today; they were then given grants to travel to whatever international destination they felt necessary to answer those questions.

Along with Pasternak, the driving force behind these new globally-focused initiatives is Nato Thompson, a young curator at the organization who has become known for politically engaged programs like "The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice," a colloquium of figures from artists Alfredo Jaar and Yael Bartana to curators Okwui Enwezor and Maria Lind that he convened at the New York Public Library last fall. "Throughout its history, Creative Time has been doing politically relevant, timely social projects," says Pasternak. "But Nato is helping to bring this to a whole new level of intensity and intelligence. He's the right curator for this organization at this time."

Like many of the organization's initiatives, the global residency arose through input from artists. Last year, Pasternak organized a series of dinners and invited both emerging and established artists to ask them what was on their minds. "I was interested in this idea of the artist as a global citizen," she says. "Artists have been traveling all over the world in recent years. I wanted to find out what was the nature of their engagement with the places they traveled to." What she discovered was that, "Lo and behold, artists were a little exhausted from the racetrack of the art market."

What these artists craved, they told Pasternak, was a break from the art-world circuit that would allow them to delve into their ideas rather than constantly having to respond to this or that biennial, or gallery, or museum commission. "What came up over and over again was their desire to make work that is important," says Pasternak, and conveys "a sense of participation, of community, and understanding the times we live in." According to Thompson, who came to Creative Time from MASS MoCA three years ago, the residency program they created in response is "like a Fulbright, but without as much paperwork."

Each selected artist is given a travel stipend of $25,000, with the money provided in full by the Rockefeller Foundation's New York City CulturalInnovation Fund. Of the six artists selected for the first round, Biggers is going to Brazil and other regions of South America; Werthein will travel to a remote area of China where there was once a language, now lost, spoken only by the region's women; and Jacir will study underground political movements in Italy as a way of exploring larger Leftist movements in Europe. Raad and Lin, meanwhile, have decided to use their grants to take an entire year off and travel with their families — Raad to the Arabian Gulf to study the emergence of a new visual-arts infrastructure there, and Lin to tour the Everglades, China, and Poland's Bialowieska Forest to observe and document disappearing species. So far there has only been one hitch: K8 Hardy's planned June trip to Chile to investigate feminist communities there has been postponed because of the recent earthquake.

While the residency program is Creative Time's first venture onto the international stage, the organization already has plans to expand its purview globally in other ways as well. One way is to lend a hand to artists whose projects take them to areas of the world where a Creative Time-type organization doesn't exist. It has already assisted, for example, Jacob Boeskov, a New York-based Danish artist who became fascinated by the film industry in Lagos, Nigeria, known as Nollywood, and wanted to make an action movie there called "Dr. Cruel." Creative Time found him a director to work with and helped him obtain housing and visas, as well as some funding. The film, which Boeskov describes as "a mix between the Beastie Boys and an al Qaeda kidnapping video gone haywire," will have its New York premier May 6 at a downtown club, and will be included in the African Film Festival.

Far more ambitious projects are on the horizon. Though Pasternak and Thompson say it is premature to provide specifics, sometime in the next year Creative Time plans to begin working with a major humanitarian organization in a site of conflict. According to Thompson, the fact that they will soon be engaging with NGOs in crisis-struck parts of the world is just another sign of a wider shift in the zeitgeist that is bringing art to the forefront. "Cultural production is more a part of the fabric of lived existence than it ever has been in terms of politics and daily life," he says. "So the implications of working with contemporary artists now can exceed the terrain of just contemporary art, and have relevance for organizations in a myriad of fields." He add that the degree to which some NGOs and humanitarian organizations "get what Creative Time is doing" has been "mindblowing." 

Central to how Creative Time is approaching the idea of going global, Thompson says, is not to replicate "biennialism," where "artists fly in, have about a week to react to a site, bang out a project and move on." Creative Time's current global ambitions are predicated on the fact that the art community is now looking for a deeper engagement with the world, he says. "Artists are increasingly interested in complicating the idea of who their audience is, and what the impact of the work can be," he says. "A lot of artists are even ambivalent about using the word 'art.'"