Lessons from Chicago Civic Commons: A conversation on belonging with Theaster Gates
In March, people working on Reimagining the Civic Commons demonstration projects met in Memphis for Civic Commons Studio #5 . As part of this studio, we interviewed the demonstration project leaders about what they’ve learned over the past three years — and where they go from here. This Q&A between The Kresge Foundation’s Carol Coletta and artist and University of Chicago professor Theaster Gates, Jr. is the second in a series from these studio interviews.
Setting the context. Chicago’s civic commons work is rooted in investing in platforms, people and facilities to transform perceived deficits into cultural assets for some of the city’s most disinvested communities. Through arts and cultural production, the Chicago project is revitalizing underutilized assets on the South and West sides of Chicago, including a closed elementary school, 13 vacant lots, stables and a shuttered powerhouse, and connecting them to the radically restored Stony Island Arts Bank, creating a network of assets that fosters opportunity for all.
Carol Coletta [CC]: You’ve just been named as a participant in the Chicago Architecture Biennial with a theme of “landscapes of belonging and sovereignty.” “Landscapes of belonging” seems to be an apt description of the kinds of places we’re all trying to make. What thoughts and challenges does that theme provoke for you as an artist?
Theaster Gates [TG]: The phrase “landscapes of belonging” makes me think of a few things. One is landscape, because we’re not always talking about buildings when we are talking about place. And so landscape allows us to consider the possibilities of the terrain and spaces that we traverse, including water and what we used to call vacant lots and buildings. Landscape allows us to reflect on the way in which people live on land and the ways that make them feel more and more (or less and less) like they belong to a place.
Landscapes of belonging feels a little bit like a kind of call to arms. Do we have the capacity to make the places where we work and live, the places that we advocate for? Do we have the capacity to make them more and more the places where people want to be? I feel like there are moments when I’m asked to do that — for example, an exhibition space in a location where people run through for lunch in 20 minutes. Can I make a person want to be there 85 minutes or maybe make them want to come back, so instead of spending 10 minutes, they come back and spend another 10 minutes, then another 10 minutes? And in those kinds of minor temporal ways, can I create a place where a person wants to be? And then does that translate into a place a person wants to live or a place the person who wants to work?
The other part of belonging is that one usually doesn’t belong by themselves. Belonging has the word “longing” in it. There’s something about desire and togetherness. Last night I visited Earnestine & Hazel’s, (a dive bar in Memphis) and felt like I belonged somewhere. When we first came in, people stopped and looked at us. It was like, “Oh shit, this is the racialized Memphis that I guess I’m gonna have to deal with.” But in fact, they weren’t looking at us crazy because I was black, and the crew was mixed race. It was because it was a quiz night. And they were wondering “is this a new quiz team and why are they late?” It was one of those moments where I thought I didn’t belong for one reason, but it was actually some other stuff that wasn’t that deep. And then once we got in and we were as loud as they were, then we all belonged. It just took a moment to be. It took a moment to settle in. And we went from being our individual autonomous group to part of a larger thing, and that felt good. I felt like Earnestine’s was mine after 40 minutes, but it took a minute, that belonging.
CC: In some ways you’ve been accused of making places where certain people don’t belong, and you’ve pushed against that in a very strong way. How do you stand at the same time in that space of investing in a distressed neighborhood, becoming part of that neighborhood, increasing the value of that neighborhood and yet having people who were there in the beginning still feel like they belong? How do you imbue spaces or landscapes with that sense of belonging?
TG: I have to pan out for a second. We must consider what happens when there are laws that sanction the ability for people to really belong and they don’t want those other people to belong.
Laborers who were brought to the United States from Africa didn’t ask to be here and land was never an option for them. It wasn’t like, “oh, come visit the United States as a slave and we’ll get you a piece of property, an acre of tomatoes and some mules.” I feel like psychically in America, black people here don’t have the same kind of connection to this land because no one intended to foster that connection from the beginning. We’ve been forced into not knowing how to own shit here. And every time we tried to own; they would burn the shit down. They would tear it up if we built it.
Now, bring it back to Chicago. There are so many people who live around me who ain’t never seen a good thing made for them by people like us. It’s unprecedented that a black person who could live somewhere else would choose to live where I live, make a bank into a culture space for people that live around me- and not just for other bougie black people, or for some other person to import their resources into the neighborhood. I think my neighbors are reasonably skeptical because it ain’t happened before. So, what do you do when people, in their DNA, have an understanding that this world doesn’t want me to own land?
When a black person says to me, “Theaster, who are you building it for?” that’s coming from a good place of healthy skepticism. And so, all I can say is over and over again “I am building this for us.” And I live across the street and I like pretty things and I’m building this for me, and you can come kick it with me. You don’t have to, but I’m going to build it for me because I have a right to live here too. And that’s the other part of agency. When a white person comes in and says, “I’m building it for y’all,” that’s different than when a black person lives next door and says, “I’m building it for me and for us.” Let’s say I’m building a barbecue grill that’s 20 feet long. I only need a foot. The other 19 feet, y’all can have at it. And so, some of it is just kind of practicing making a longer barbecue grill.
And then it takes time. There’s the community process. One could choose process to create integrated moments. We keep our neighbors informed, but I don’t have multimillions of dollars to spend on process. I got multimillions of dollars to do the work. And then at the end of those millions of dollars, I ain’t got no money left cause I’m not a foundation and it’s not an endowment. So, I got one hit. What do I spend my money on, process or land? I spend my money on land and then I have to help people understand that this is about “us.” But I’m going to be there for the next 40 years, so I just take my time.
So, all I can keep saying is this is still for us. The incubator is still for us. The cafe is still for us. The Bank is still for us. And I’ll have to say that ’til I die because the truth of racism and slavery and disempowerment is it’s just that long. It took 200 years of complicated rewiring to make people feel disenfranchised, maybe it’ll take 200 years to get us to a point of utter efficiency and self-reliance.
We deserve beautiful things, we deserve dope situations, we should enjoy a good life. Then, we must assess what our shackles are. Why don’t you believe this is for you? We need mental health care agents. You need mental health next to placemaking. You need therapy. When we talk about gentrification, we need therapists in the room. We’re immediately afraid that some unknown white force is on its way to take something from us. White forces have been taking things from us for a long time. We need therapy to imagine that there might also be some black investors in that white capital fund management company who used to live in the neighborhood and who also want to see good things, but they only know how to do it from their particular role.
I’m now understanding that people aren’t afraid of gentrification, they’re afraid of the continued truth of invisible forces taking things that belonged to us. You just don’t know where it’s coming from. You just know one day there’s a bulldozer and then another day there’s a new shiny thing and then there’s a lease sign and then there’s a use that doesn’t seem useful for your life. And all those things are just kind of passing in the landscape, making you feel less and less like you belong.
CC: Let me go to a very tactical thing on the Arts Bank. When you opened Stony Island Arts Bank you chose an expensive model, open all three floors and everything was free. You’ve made some change over time. How do you balance the narrowing of the access with this notion of wanting people to feel like they belong?
TG: When I opened the [Arts Bank] building, I felt like “institutions are open six days a week.” This building looks like those institutions. In my head I’m thinking to myself that the funders and everybody will be really impressed if I’m open for free for six days a week and maybe they’ll keep giving me programmatic or operational money to stay open. So, I started acting like an institution. But the grant only covered the program. It didn’t cover the operations. We would always have these deficits.
But when we look at the numbers, we get 30 people on Tuesdays, 20 people at night, and then we don’t have the capacity for the marketing budget to get the other people to turn out. So why don’t we just open on Sundays, reduce our team, deeply invest in Sundays and when people get out of church, we can blow it out the water. But it took us many iterations.
I’m not an institution. I don’t want to be an institution. I want to do this thing on the South Side when people are off work and when they are really going to come, which is Sundays. To have a 30,000 square foot building open six days a week, it wasn’t reasonable for where the neighborhood is.
CC: It seems like your focus is really in making art. Are you still interested in the social practice part of your work that manifests as community revitalization, community building and building transformation?
TG: When I talk about the work that I’ve done on the block, it’s important that I say what inspired that was the fact that I was an artist, first. I was an artist and at some point, I felt like I had to go away from art to make it fit into this thing that was being developed called placemaking. But the placemaking parts were tools for people who didn’t necessarily have the skills that I had on the art side. I do have skills as a planner. I know how cities work. I love the fact that I’m cross trained in that way, but beauty was guiding me, spiritual stuff was guiding me. It was not the reallocation of TIF dollars that was driving me. It wasn’t business. I’m actually better when I’m an artist. I’m a better placemaker than any planner when I’m an artist.
CC: Are there things you still want to learn from this work?
TG: I want to finance things like the Crosstown Concourse. There’s something in the mix when all the buildings we have left are the huge buildings that nobody knows what to do with. People know what to do with a one flat, a two flat. People don’t know what to do with a million square foot building. But that’s the truth in Akron, in Detroit, in Philly, we got these behemoths.
CC: This work is hard. It’s expensive. Do you ever imagine yourself monetizing the work you’ve done in Dorchester and moving on?
TG: it’s not exactly about a monetizing as much as it is moving on. Yes, I can imagine that the buildings that I own, if we thought of them as energy, that energy could get converted. But I haven’t built my life so that I have to monetize those buildings.
It’s actually kind of fun to think, what could that energy produce if it shifted from my leadership to other leadership or from my possession to a land trust? We’re exploring the legal implications of that. If I keep thinking about the land as art, then the way that I would think about the land is different from how developers think about land. I’m super invested in considering what have we learned from these years of artful space practicing. What did I learn from space as my studio? And now that I’ve learned those things, how can others have a direct benefit and a perpetual benefit? Those are fun questions that are like the next artwork.
Reimagining the Civic Commons is a collaboration between The JPB Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation and local partners.
