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As an artist...
when I think about "home" for myself...
it has less to do with the house.
It has more to do with my neighborhood.
On the South Side of Chicago...
where people would normally saythis is a violent place,
or this is a placewhere beauty doesn't live,
I'm constantly surrounded by this beauty.
The problem is, ain't no cameracapturing the beautiful things.
And so it's like, "All right.
What can I make
that allows us to then be a reflectionof the beauty of everyday people?"
These spaces do that.
My history was not a history of, like, a bachelor's of fine arts
and then a master's of fine arts.
My history was a degree in urban planningand time on the job.
My dad was a roofer.
So, growing up roofing, you're learning how to cut things,
you're learning how to, like, anticipate where water falls.
But those roofing problemsthat you're solving for
are no different from trying to figure outcompositional things.
And I think that art is kind of like that.
There's something in the ideaof the seemingly small
that has, for me, the greatest potential for art.
So, it's like, all right, there's black oil painting.
There's black acrylic.
I didn't have those. I had tar.
When you think about fantastic artists, whether they are African American
or white or Latino,
Theaster Gates is in that milieu.
He is at the very, very peak.
I would describe Theaster's artas unconventional
but relatable and accessible.
He is really interested inrepurposing materials that are
maybe not traditionally consideredto be a part of the visual arts world.
He takes old thingsand gives them a refreshed look,
but then he always putssome historical relevance within them.
I remember the fire hose seriesthat he did
born out of the race riotsseveral years ago.
And that was incredibleand very significant.
And then he does the piecesthat are all in wood,
and then he works in glass and in light.
And then he does performance art.
It's hard to just pinpoint himinto one genre and say,
"This is just what Theaster does."
It's not possible.
But I think his art also transcends into
his real love, which is urban planning.
It's so interestingto try to track what happened first...
on the block.
I'll give it a shot.
When I moved to the South Sideand I bought my house,
we knew that the property valuesin my neighborhood were low.
And none of us knew about whether or notthose values would ever change.
Friends of mine who had money sensewould say,
"Don't invest all your moneyin this building,
'cause you're never gonna getyour money out of it."
And so I wasn't worried aboutor concerned about resale value.
I was investing in my life. I was investing in my block.
When you walk pastan abandoned building,
it's hard not to feel heavy.
It reminds youof a kind of failure of a place.
It starts to show youthe dormancy that happens
when a place no longer has value.
The South Side of Chicago
has the highest unemployment, the highest poverty,
the highest disinvestment,
and these same communitieshave the highest violent crime rates.
They have the highestnumber of homicides in the city.
South Side neighborhoods have becomea place where people don't want to live.
Theaster has a really great eye for
finding purpose and valuein things that get destroyed
or ignored or forgotten about.
It is saying that
there's more to these thingsthan what we maybe initially thought.
I wanted to be ableto walk down the block,
go get a nice meal at a local restaurant.
Or go to the movies.
But those optionsweren't really available where I lived...
and I just started imagining thatthose platforms could exist
not just in white space.
Great culture had a right to livewhere I live.
Where better than the hometo make some of those other things happen?
And so I just built thingswhere I could with what I had,
and I started in my first crib.
Architecture and designare not my professions.
I don't have a professional relationship, really, with a built environment.
I build because it satisfies me, it gives me joy.
It makes me really happy.
When I was just starting the renovation,
these termites had infested the place.
We had to move all my things out.
And we took the kitchen floor out,
and it revealedthis kind of two-story, vaulted area.
The proportion was so beautiful.
And we ended upjust stabilizing the walls
and building out built-ins, metal rail detailing,
bowling alley floors.
And we created this kind of vaulted space
that is now the footprint ofwhat we call the Listening House.
And while I was renovating it,
a friend of mine happened to be sellingthe building next door,
and I became motivated to buy the land
because I was interested in being ableto do more things in my neighborhood.
There's something that is definitelynonconventional about the build-out.
I'd build considering all of the layers...
and then ultimately getting back to, like, some kind of original structure.
If you pull back the yearsof underlayment and carpeting,
what do the floors look like?
If you removethe layers and layers of paint,
what do the built-ins look like?
If you were to pull out the walls, what do the bones look like?
My job is to just findthe tools necessary
to make the thing better than it had beenand then re-present it to the world
in a way that the worldhasn't seen it before.
That building eventually became known asthe Archive House.
So, between the Listening Houseand the Archive House,
I found myselfbecoming a cultural producer.
I would invite other people in and say,
"I want to builda creative space, community.
Would you like to build it with me?"
Exhibitions would happen there.
Music would happen there.
And then there was this great momentwhen the Smart Museum of Chicago
had this exhibition called "Feast."
We were part of that.
All these things that were, like, emergentwithin my artistic practice,
but they were all happening at my crib.
I want a big problem.
Like, "Oh, no one's gonna investin 69th and Dorchester."
I'm not gonna move, because I could move.
But it's like, I'm interested in the problems
that are right up under my nose.
For me, the things that happenon Dorchester
are the hottest things in the world.
It's bigger than the Archive House. It's bigger than the Listening House.
It's bigger than the word "home."
My buildings, they constitute...
a love investment.
My next renovation
was the first space for black cinemaacross the street
in what is now my house.
And I think it's a little bit of an oasisin the middle of the block.
On the first floor, we wouldblacken everything, pull the screen down,
and then watch emerging video artwork.
You know, Black Cinema Housewasn't so much about a place.
Black Cinema House was about filmmakerswho are making films--
and they don't have a place to screentheir films-- could have a place.
It was about creating a movementso that film mattered more,
and, in that sense, culture mattered more.
It was about defending the right
that a black person hasto make black space work.
And now I have these buildings
that I kind of move in between
from my crib to 6916, 6918.
In that sense, there's a kind of constellation of spaces,
and when you put those buildings together, it's a kind of an exploded home.
I don't actually needa lot of space for me.
But I do want a lot of space
so that I can seethe mad potential within my people.
What Theaster sayswhen he transforms a place
it's not just, "Fix the placeand make it look pretty."
He's saying, "We live here. We raise our children here."
For a child to have any sense of hope, he's saying,
"We don't have to move anywhere. We have to transform where we are."
We tackled the buildinginitially as an artwork.
-Right.-So, you know, all the cladding,
you know, the exchange stuff,
choosing to leave some wallsand then make new things happen,
all of that stuff felt likeit's part of my aesthetic.
-It feels good.-Dude, it's dope.
See, 'cause what happens a lot of timesis we're so hungry for representation,
we wind up having to be somethingfor everybody.
-Oh, yeah.-That's the conversation
that's a visceral conversationin our community 'cause it's real.
-We gotta make none of that up.-Yeah.
-Yeah. Yeah.-Helping one another.
-Yeah.-Yeah, that's what it's all about.
The café is back. It's alive.
-Yeah.-Yeah. It's live. It's back on.
Don't forget it.
I think Theaster's impact herehas been incredible.
Theaster comes in with vision,
and he takes a look at these buildings,
and he sees themmore than just dilapidated buildings.
He sees them with a second lifeand a third life.
That's what I think he's broughtto this community. It's a vibrancy.
69th and Dorchester is a lot likethe neighborhood that I grew up in,
and I feel like, in some ways,
doing this work on the South Sideof Chicago has to do with
me looking for richnesswithin the things that made me.
I'm sure it was very difficult for himto grow up on the West Side of Chicago
in an area that was, for all practical purposes, abandoned.
No city resources.
No light was shining on that place.
I'm the ninth child of nine.
I have eight sisters.
My sisters and I grew upon the West Side of Chicago.
We didn't have a lot, but we didn't know we didn't have a lot.
When it was time for middle school, my grades were very good.
I got bused to the North Side school.
As you went north,
the neighborhood would go from blackto Puerto Rican and Mexican
to a kind of working-classand middle-class white.
As I moved neighborhood to neighborhood, I could feel the change.
I could see the brick tuck-pointing, the grass mowed.
Whenever I saw a nice building, I assumed white people lived in it.
Whenever I saw a busted-up building,
I assumed black people lived in it.
What started to happen wasl'd go to school,
and a bulldozerwould be showing up on my block.
I'd come home, and the building would be gone.
If drugs were being sold in the buildingor the building was abandoned
we would erase the buildingas if that would make the problem go away.
We erased our architecture.
It drastically changedthe built environment
in black and brown neighborhoods.
You gotta be proximate to the problem, to the need, to change it,
and I think that's the beauty of Theaster.
With all of his relationships, with all of his exposure,
he could live anywhere.
I think that's powerful.
Fellas.
-Yo, yo.-Hey, hey.
-Hey, man.-What's happening, man?
-How ya feeling?-Good.
-How y'all been?-Good.
Where did this tree come from? Was it in the mix?
It was in the mix.
You know, the rotcould conceivably go up to here.
You might have decent woodfrom here to here.
But you could play aroundwith that rot too.
We could potentially have a high stool.
Yeah, a bar type stool. Okay.
Let's look at these real quick.
- I mean, it almost feels like a tattoo.-Yeah, right, right.
-It's dense though.-Yeah.
Farmers used to use it for fence posts. It's good outside.
It feels good.
I love it.
I really do love it.
In 2014, I received a callfrom the Department of Cultural Affairs.
They told me
that the city was in the processof having to cut down a lot of trees.
They wanted meto consider making an art project.
When they explained to me the numberof trees that was being torn down,
I immediately thought like,"You don't need artwork.
You need a bigger intervention.
You need a mill wherethese 90,000 trees could be processed."
And maybe my artistic interventionwould be to build the mill.
What I found in our millis that three things are happening.
One thing is that trees are being cut
and people are learning how to mill trees.
That's great.
The second thingis that we're creating products.
We're making tables, we're making hardwood flooring,
and we're making art.
Then this third zone is, the by-product of the wood
feeds our wood kiln.
So, we've createdthis kind of closed loop
between the offshootsof the milling process
and the energy or the fuel neededin order to fire our kilns,
which makes reallyexceptionally beautiful ceramic objects.
But I also think that there arethese other things like
this kind of philosophical arm of the mill
that's like, "What can we do to make lifeon the South Side more rich?"
I think that the morewe can start to demonstrate
what can be done with these pieces, the better.
So, if we know that we have
400 pieces of Osage like this, or 800 pieces of ash,
it then starts to allow us to think about,
"Okay, what could a house look likethat's all ash?"
The wealth is in the excess of woodthat we have
that we're getting very cheap.
This is great. These are beautiful boards.
It's not about trees.
It's not about abandoned buildings.
It's do we have the ability, the drive, the faith
to make Chicago home?
I think that there are several messagesin Theaster's work.
His messages are about culture.
His messages are aboutthe African American community.
His messages are about how he grew upand what he perceives.
This is wherel think he finds inspiration.
As I got older,
I was trying to figure out a way
to stop the hemorrhagingthat I saw happening in my neighborhood.
And so I studied urban planning.
I had taken a buildings permit class.
I was learning more about mapping.
And at some point, it shifted...
and I started being taught
that black and brown peopleare the challenges of cities.
And it's because they're lazyand they don't want to work.
And that whole ideawas rubbing up against...
who I am.
And I just rememberthis feeling that I had of, like,
"This world does not care about the poor."
It just doesn't.
So, I started to realize that...
the most savvy urban planners...
are not neighborhood advocates.
They're not social activists.
There could be solutionsto some of the challenges of the city,
but one actually has to have a vision.
And so someone has to decide
that land is gonna be usedfor a particular mission.
And I'm committed to making sure thatthat land serves...
people who need the opportunity.
I had been living on the South Sidealready for six or seven years,
and I had, you know, driven past this bank building.
This building was an amazing building,
and I found out from a friend
that the bank was about to be demolished.
In the '60s,
this building was testament to
the brightness and the wealthof South Shore.
And in the middle '70s,
new migrations started to happen.
That's when white flight occurred.
And so you had the white people
moving out of the inner cityto the suburbs.
As they moved out, the resources moved with them.
The bank buildingbecame a representative of
the flight of investmentaway from the South Side.
The demise of the bank
was really also a demise of, you know, my neighborhood.
So, I had a meeting with the mayor,
and I asked the mayorto not tear down the building.
I was in over my head.
I didn't know how my historyof learning urban planning
would directly relate to this building,
and it felt like those thingswere worlds apart.
And so I found myself...
enthused...
confident and ignorant,
and that there was somethingmaybe necessary
that was the right set of ingredients
to keep me plowing forwardwith the renovation.
I knew that I wanted to celebrate
the continued existence of the buildingas a kind of act of resistance.
That there would besomething fighting against
what felt like constant decay--
that we would just fight that
with the insistence of makinga great building great again.
So, we started making sketchesand making plans and saying,
"The first floor is gonna bean exhibition space with live music,
and the second flooris gonna have this library.
Third floor is gonna be offices."
And no one really believed in it.
I would tell people my vision, I'd walk them through the space,
and people would just say,"Yeah, this is gonna break you.
It's just not worth the money and effort."
I'm born and raised in Chicago,
so I've driven past that bankfor decades,
and for decades, it was nothing.
It was just crumbling.
And so when Theaster took me over there,
it was in complete disrepair.
And I'm like, "Now, how in the worldare you going to fix this?
This is a huge undertaking."
But I trusted Theaster.
Linda came over, and she invited me to Johnson Publishing,
to the seventh floor.
And it was their research library.
Johnson Publishing Companywas started by both of my parents,
John and Eunice Johnson.
This is where Ebony magazine was born
and where Jet magazine was born.
I said, "Listen.
We've gotta move out of here, and I've got this library of books."
There's probably, I don't know, 10,000 or 15,000.
She said, "You can have the books."
And I just couldn't believe it.
The collection is probablyone of the most significant
single collections of black booksgathered.
The mission of both publications
really was to show African Americansin a successful light.
Her gift couldn't have been more timely,
because the booksbecame kind of the heart,
the main artery of the space.
The library createdthis kind of black calling card.
And so I started thinkingabout the bank, like,
could the bank bethis kind of part archive,
part cultural hot spot?
A year later, I got this call from
the executor of Frankie Knuckles' estate.
Frankie Knuckles createdthe Chicago house music tradition,
a kind of launching padfor old-school disco,
early African drum and bass.
We worked out a deal where I wouldfunction as the steward of the archive
for the next decade.
It wasn't importantthat people look at the albums.
It was important that house musiccontinued to get pumped.
Another collection that we managed to land
was by a brother named Ed Williams,
who was a banker who lived in Chicagoand collected,
we call it "negrobilia,"
but it's essentially derogatory imagesof black people in paper form,
paintings, sculptures.
But often he was buying these thingsto take them out of circulation.
You have this thing, which is a marker of history...
and then you have John Johnson's library
as a kind of counter-narrativeto everything
that the Ed Williams collection had in it.
So, the bank becomes a visualization
of a complicated black experience,
and that if peoplewould spend time with these things,
they would have a more nuancedunderstanding of either themselves
or the people that livedin the neighborhood where we are.
The opening day of the bank,
there was a line of about 400 peoplewaiting to get in.
And I don't remember ever
seeing a line of 400 peopleon the South Side for very much.
All these people waiting in anticipation
for this sleeping giant to wake up.
The opening of the Stony Island Arts Bankwas incredible.
You had artists from all over the countrythat came,
African American artists especially.
They came because of Theaster.
The word "art" wasn't quite big enoughfor what had happened.
We just woke the community up and said,
"Hey, great things can still happen here, and they will."
It's just a powerful statement of renewal.
It reinvigorates a community.
Something that used to bea grand boulevard,
slowly coming back to life.
It's become really clear to me
that when peoplebelieve in the place where they live,
beautiful and amazing things can happen,
and that beautyhas the right to live everywhere,
even at 68th and Stony Island.
Thank you all for being here.
Besides the bank, one of the projectsthat I'm really excited about
is St. Laurence Elementary School.
It's 40,000 square feet.
People in the neighborhoodwent to that school,
and so the stakes are very high.
For the design process,
we had to board it upand kind of stabilize the building.
And then we worked with a local artist
to do these abstract forms on plywood,
signals to the communitythat great things are happening
but it's happeningfor people who live here.
Let's look at the overall buildinga little bit.
So, the plan still is
to, you know, have the main entrycome through the front of the building.
My fear...
is that the formality...
would keep people from wanting to...
-Just wander in.-...wander.
You know, it feels as formal as the bank.
This is a place for joy and loveand happiness and community.
We want peopleto feel really comfortable hanging.
In terms of the interior of the building, the building will become a maker space.
So, one of the thingsthat I'm hoping to do now
is raise the resources necessary
to build traditional artist studiosthat are intentionally large
so that individual artistscan have space to have big ideas.
The goal isn't to just dream.
It's to, like, to see threeor four more projects completed by June.
My hope is that Chicago
will be a place that's knownfor artists who decided to stay,
artists who hadmore and more opportunities
to do more and more where we live.
I just need for usto kind of get one step further,
so that we can get this community involvedin what's gonna happen on those lots.
I want artiststo be able to be from Chicago
and feel like they will alwayshave permission to make Chicago home.
Theaster's work proves thatthe work that is being done here
and the storiesthat are sort of existing here
deserve to be seen, understood on a larger scale.
That, to me, makes the workthat he's doing so valuable.
I think that Theaster
is trying to give peoplea sense of oneness.
You can take what others see as garbageand make it useful.
You know, what Theaster did is he sort ofshined a light on this community.
Buildings can come and go,
but what has been built up over a lifetimenever disappears.
And now, in this immediate proximity,
we have the Archive House,
the Listening House,
Black Cinema House,
the Currency Exchange Café,
the Mill,
and the Stony Island Arts Bank.
Those forces togetherare the beginning of a town.
And so I feel like, you know, poor placesare always making richness happen.
But we have to believe in themin order to see that richness.
And I feel like, you know...
one of the unexpected by-productsof believing in the South Side
and believing in Chicagois that it's allowed me to have
one of the most amazing art careersl could have ever imagined
and allowed me to feel safe...
and free...
and home.
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