Programming at the Council stokes the cultural life of the city with art, ideas, and imagination. We encourage art where it’s least expected, stimulate conversation around the ideas of the moment, and continually burnish and tarnish the links between culture and capital from our location in New York’s Financial District.

We curate, produce and commission a wide-ranging array of art installations, performances, and symposia — from the popular summer performance series, Sitelines, to the hard-hitting Cities, Art and Recovery summits, from the nomadic lecture series, Access Restricted, to the downloadable Public Art Walking Tours and developing and launching Re:Construction's site-specific art installations in downtown construction sites.

Poems & Pints

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Poetry Society of America present Poems & Pints, six evenings with premier American poets at the historic Fraunces Tavern in downtown New York City. Each evening, two poets read their own work and favorite poems by others. The selection of highly distinguished participating poets include current and past U.S. Poet Laureates as well as winners of the Pulitzer, Bollingen, and T. S. Eliot Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, and recipients of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and McArthur “genius” grants.

Access Restricted

Access Restricted is a free nomadic lecture series that opens rarely visited and often prohibited space in Lower Manhattan to the public. Once inside the space, the audience is treated to a site-specific lecture and discussion addressing a range of topics — from architectural history and social geography to ethics and urbanism. The aim of the interpretive tours is to foster new perspectives and understanding by encouraging the public to view locales and situations throug the various lenses of architecture sociology, ethics, urbanism, curtural anthropology, and political science.