THEASTER GATES: I found these wooden boards.
There were 5,000 of them.
And in a way I treated the wooden boards the way
I did ceramics, that I would just kind of iterate over
and over their use, stacking them as architectural forms,
thinking about them as conceptual forms.
This became a performance space where
I invited other amazing artists, including this young man named
Dawoud Bey, a photographer mainly but also
a percussionist.
And I basically temporarily rented
a space in the middle of the fashionable area
for grunge artists.
Can you guys hear me?
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
THEASTER GATES: Oh, you want some lights down.
All right, turn the lights down.
So I created this space because, at the time,
there were no museums interested in what I was doing.
But I really wanted to share this work.
So I saved up some money, rented a space temporarily,
and made my own exhibition--
seemed reasonable.
But the exhibition was part my work, and then part a platform
whereby other people's works might be shown.
Performance might happen.
Dinners might happen.
And it was like the beginning of a first pivot in the way
that I imagined my ability to create my own space,
convene a group of people who were
interested in similar things or maybe even dissimilar things,
and then maybe upend the art world so that I didn't imagine
that the only experiences that I could have
were museum experiences, but they could
be my own autonomous creation.
It is reasonable to say that the context of my making
also included the fact that the world around me
was in considerable disrepair, that there
were beautiful buildings unkept, unoccupied, not fully
owned by anyone.
And my studio was becoming a kind
of pristine place for beauty.
And I was already asking that question of,
how can the things that I do inside spill outside and maybe
have impact somewhere else?
And so for the price of something
cheaper than an exhibition at a museum,
I was able to acquire a building,
redecorate that building, gut the building.
And it was this building that, in some ways,
started to make space for me in the contemporary art world.
There's a gentleman by the name of Francesco Bonami,
an Italian curator-at-large who was doing projects
at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
He came over and I showed him this building.
[PHONE RINGING]
There's so much going on.
I showed him this building and there was nothing in it.
It was just gutted.
And he liked the building.
And he said, "Well, what are you doing?"
And I had one image of a Song dynasty
vase projected on a glass lantern slide projector.
And I said, "I can't afford to do anymore
so I've just been sweeping the building
and projecting these images."
And he invited me to be in the Whitney Biennial.
One building became three or four.
And some of these things I've talked about before.
We started to use the buildings as the only real amenity
in this neighborhood.
I was really just trying to say, OK,
I don't want to have to go to another neighborhood
in order to see a good film.
Maybe I could get a film projector,
rent a 16 millimeter film, and screen the film for myself
first.
And if I screen it for myself, I could invite some people, maybe
even my neighbors, maybe even my neighbors who
are not necessarily interested in art
but might like a good film, or might
like a diversion from their day on a Friday night.
These are my neighbors.
When I say my neighbors, these are not necessarily
my friends or my homies.
They are just people who live next to me
for whom my day-to-day reality needs them.
I need them to look out for when the parking inspector comes
and he's about to give me a ticket,
I want them to call me and say, "Hey Theaster,
the parking inspector's coming.
Please move your car."
When I didn't have an oven, I need an oven.
I want to use the oven.
And so we started hanging out, partying, barbecuing.
It was great.
We created this space called Black Cinema House where
we converted the first floor of my house into a cinema space.
We tried to do it really nicely.
But nonetheless, it couldn't fit more than 40 people.
It was just the first floor of an apartment.
I lived upstairs.
This became really tenuous, because Black Cinema House
started to take on a life of its own.
So people had access to my house.
They would come over early in the morning.
"Mr. Gates, we want to prescreen the film
that we're showing tonight."
So I moved Black Cinema House.
As this work started to grow-- let's say we're at like 2011,
2012--
the University of Chicago finds out
that I'm doing this work on Dorchester.
And then the university asks, hey,
can you do the work that you're doing in the hood over here
for us?
This building-- that's so cool.
This building here, the university owned it.
And they owned it for maybe seven or eight years.
It's in the middle of an all-black neighborhood.
If you go east across Washington Park,
this is where the University of Chicago is.
And on the west side of the park is a largely black
neighborhood.
The university thought that in the future
it might grow and expand and it would need these buildings
eventually, but they wouldn't need them for about 50 years,
they imagined.
Well, what do you do with these buildings in the 50 years
before the university needs them?
And so the local politicians really
wanted something that would benefit the community.
The university, of course, would want something
that benefits the university.
What's the compromise-- the arts--
the arts-- the arts--
culture-- the arts--
the arts.
You know, it's nonjudgmental.
It's nonpolitical.
If there's a problem, you can blame the artist
and not have to blame the institution.
Even when you lose or you fail, you win.
This is great.
And so I said to the university, why not the arts?
And they said, OK.
Now maybe a first or second kind of theoretical proposition,
we know sometimes that governments value the arts even
when they don't value art or artists, that developers
and construction moguls and money
people, corporate headquarters, value the arts,
even when there is no place for an artist to live
or for an arts organization to have
affordable space for their small entity,
but they want the activity, they don't want necessarily
the people.
In a way, artists are like unwanted people,
useful until they want to be at the party on the same terms
as everyone else.
I've experienced this.
Anyway, we built this space for the arts.
And we were able to say to people
who live in Washington Park that the residencies
and the exhibitions that happen here, the food that will
be served, it's all for you.
And this was a real breakthrough for the university
that a thing could be for a community that is not
the university community first, and that as a byproduct
of building it, the university will also benefit,
but that there could be a consideration of others
in advance of the university, and that that
might be something that actually works well
within the rubric of education.
But always with these--
the crime lab, the social lab, the urban lab--
all of these things are imagining our communities first
as places for testing, for occupation and research,
but never for friendship or for love or for partnership
or co-advancement.
It's always like you become a number in a survey.
And I think that Washington Park and black people who
live around the university feel this all the time,
whether it's talked about or not,
and that maybe we find really romantic words
to hide this fact.
Anyway, I found myself deeply now advancing in my art career,
and then advancing as this kind of trickster,
moving between arts administration
and the creation of the arts--
political-- and then being an artist,
maybe even attempting to be subversive,
so much so I don't know when I'm being one or the other--
that I was fully an administrator.
I was fully a politician and fully an artist,
and I was not always sure of myself.
The development bug hit me, and I
started thinking that maybe there
was a way that this brain--
it's a fairly small brain--
that the brain that I had for space
could be useful not only for my own personal pleasure.
I was making mini [TURKISH] and bath houses, film screening
spaces.
But maybe there was something that I
could do that was a little bit more ambitious.
And this was a 36 unit low-income housing project
that had been abandoned because lots of violence
happened there, because people from varying
different locations were brought to this place.
They didn't like each other.
They were from different territories.
And they would shoot each other, kill each other,
sometimes killing others in the crossfire.
It was shut down.
And then I asked the Chicago Housing Authority
if we might turn this into a kind of mixed-income artist
community.
So we did that.
I did it with the help of a local developer.
And the space that we carved out, this art space,
I decided that I would, pardon the word, curate--
please, I'm not a curator--
but that I would be really intentional
about the programmers and the programs that happen.
So that developers all the time in these low-income projects
have a community space, but there's usually
no one to really sophisticatedly run it.
So then it has some cupboards, maybe a stove, a refrigerator,
and a mop, and some folding chairs.
And that's the community space.
But what happens if you get the baddest black yogi in Chicago,
right, and say look, we will pay you and subsidize your fee,
but you bring the people and you teach them
how to be in their bodies.
And so very quickly we had this 75 person loving, you know,
black in their bodies.
These sisters were in here, and everyone's doing Downward Dog
and they're doing their Standing Trees
and their Crouching Tigers.
And then we started getting brothers
to come because they were interested in the activity
happening there.
I know that this is not art, what I'm talking
about right now, perhaps.
I keep wanting to point instead of scroll.
But there are other buildings that I
couldn't salvage, that even in my god complex,
I couldn't save them all.
And so as St. Lawrence was being torn down,
I was trying to figure out, what else could be done?
We started talking to the demolition company
and asked if we would be able to, as they were demolishing
the building, could we create a work program
on top of that where we would clean up the bricks,
palletize the bricks, and then make them
available to do other things, like maybe
new sacred spaces around?
Or these men and women could resell the bricks
and make some cash.
We ended up getting the brick and the limestone, the marble,
the slate, the steel, the wood.
That inspired me to then start making brick art.
I became really curious about, what could I do?
And I started making handmade bricks and kind
of having a conceptual response to this real thing that
was happening out in the world, that I needed to respond
to myself because there was no way that I could bring St.
Lawrence Church into the gallery,
but I wanted to talk about these things.
And there I was starting to make a kind of echo
between the things that were happening
outside the studio and things that I wanted people
to know in the art world--
in the world, , maybe in the world of art.
And so the more that I made these handmade bricks
under the auspices of a thing that I called
Soul Manufacturing Corporation, I
was prophesying the possibility of a company
on the South Side run and owned by black people
that would have the ability to manufacture
a thing from nothing to something,
and that the world would want this.
These bricks were heavy and imperfect, but cute,
conceptual, and that these palletized breaks would
help me pay for the kiln, which would allow me to make more
bricks, travel to real brick manufacturing companies,
get to know people that would then be invested
in the idea of potentially being a brick partner with me
and my crew.
Scroll.
We had a lot of wood.
There's a lot of teenagers.
And it just got to the point where
it was more fun to just look at a problem,
think about the problem in relationship
to the people who were adjacent, and then try to make something
maybe more poetic happen.
And so at this point it was like, it could be anything.
It could be anything.
It could be the creation of wood sculpture for other people
and we become fabricators.
It could be projects for me.
Or in some case we would go out and say,
of the storefronts that are on Garfield Boulevard that
don't have signage or maybe need menus in their restaurants,
could we just have some service projects
where we use the wood that we have to do this?
So we had our high schoolers would then
go fishing for new ideas, new problems to solve.
It was really cool.
I don't actually know what the next slide is,
so I'm just kind of having fun riffing this.
The city called me one day and said
that they had a problem of these 90,000 trees
that had to be torn down.
And I've been talking about this quite a bit.
But I think that this project is one
that I'm really proud of because the city wanted me only
to take two or three trees and make some art out of them.
But they still had 90,000 trees.
And so I told them what you need is you don't need an artwork.
You need a mill.
And so with these same brothers and sisters,
we decided to find some millers, introduce them
to these young people, bring the temporary mill outside.
The city dumped 3,000 trees and they
were like, all right, well if you think
you can do this, go for it.
And they dumped some trees.
And over the next year and a half,
we ended up creating a kind of milling situation
where now we can mill about a hundred trees a day.
We probably do 25 because, why hurt yourself?
We have some fun and take a long lunch.
But it is really exciting now to see some of these old--
I hate to racialize everything, but I'm sorry,
in my country things are racialized,
so please forgive me.
It's amazing to see these old, white, unioned carpenters who
are maybe retired working with these young, black students who
have maybe never thought about the idea of design
or urban planning or architecture or finish
carpentry as career paths or something like this,
and to have them in kind of deep dialogue.
And what we're finding is that you
can't be what you can't see.
You can't be what you can't see.
So it's like, a brother's out there milling
or a sister's out there milling and she's like,
"I really like this.
I never knew how a two by four became a two by four, how a 3
by 16--
I've never seen a piece of wood so wide."
Because some of the trees, you can see some of these trees.
Some of them are huge.
And so it's like you run it through this saw,
or you run the saw through the tree, it's like butter.
It's like bzzz.
And then you cut these slices and it's
like the board is this wide.
And so then we get to talk about raw materials and economy.
We talk about how the sawdust becomes a byproduct.
The bark becomes a byproduct.
All these things then we're making our own pallets
and our own A-frames, and we're making
a pellet that become fuel for our wood-fired kiln.
And all of a sudden I'm back at ceramics, which is great.
We're growing things.
And people eat it, along with Jays barbecue
chips and Powerade.
So I had a different PowerPoint, but Aditi
is very convincing in terms of the things
that I should talk about.
So I'm going to talk about what she wants me to talk about.
OK, I'm going to go forward.
This building I now call it the Stony Island Arts Bank.
It was called the Stony Island State Savings Bank, then
the Southmoore, than Guarantee Bank.
And in that bank, the partitions between bathroom stalls were
made of this kind of marble-like material--
almost marble.
And the city of Chicago was going
to get rid of-- they were going to tear the building down.
I asked if they would give me the building.
They said that they would give it to me on the condition
that I would do what became about $550,000 worth of repairs
before they would give me the deed.
It was said that the building was given to me for $1.00,
but nothing is ever given to a person for $1.00.
If anyone tries to sell you something that seems like it
has more value than $1.00 for $1.00, don't take it.
But I thought that this building was
the last of a particular kind of building in my neighborhood.
This is 68 and Stony Island, 12 blocks further south
of the University of Chicago.
It may as well be a plane ride away
or a universe away, that people are often
told when they join the faculty or staff or even
young students, don't go past 63rd Street.
And I am five blocks past 63rd, which
means I am in the lower levels of hell.
Nonetheless, the building was a beautiful one and kind
of worth saving, I thought.
It was not in such good shape, but it was at this point
when the windows were put back in the building
and they were no longer boarded up,
and we had done a first cleaning of the building,
people started to drive past and slow down.
They would drive past and slow down.
And then over time, people would slow down and if I was outside
they'd say, "Hey, my dad used to bank at that building."
These would be like old Jewish men and women.
"My dad used to bank."
And then I'd see a brother.
A black man would go by with a funny hat on.
He would say, "Hey, when I was young,
the honorable Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam
used to own this bank, and they used to bank here."
And all of a sudden just from cleaning up the building,
there were all these stories waiting to happen.
Like in a way the preservation was
a trigger for this other spiritual activity,
and that if someone would just like,
[CLAP],, just make the first strike,
then all these other things might
happen, that it was a tiny demonstration of care.
It felt like the building was a painting.
Cars which slow down the way you'd
want to slow down at a painting, and just kind of observe,
just kind of be present with it, and maybe
be greater because you're standing
in front of the painting.
I like this.
But this is what the building looked like on the inside.
And so I would bring people in.
And I'd be like, "Oh my God, I'm so excited.
This is going to be the library.
And down here we're going to have our music thing.
And over here, the vault, we're going to like, I don't know,
have raves.
And it's going to be awesome."
And it was hard for people to see.
And I realized that maybe this is where maybe I
am really an artist or just really crazy,
where I had to both speak it into existence
and maybe see it.
But because it was difficult for other people to see,
it was hard for them to want to also offer their support.
It was just a difficult time trying to convince people
that the thing that I saw in my mind might be realized,
and that in a way this was not a blank canvas,
it was like negative blank.
It was blank negative.
That first to get it--
you all know what I'm saying.
But at the same time that I had acquired the building
for $1.00, I was starting to collect these other things.
Now I should say all these things were made possible
because I have an appetite for junk
and other people's problems.
I have an appetite for other people's problems.
I love material culture.
But I mean, I could find more tidy culture.
But I think today we went to--
how do you pronounce it, "Se-squee-ti"?
AUDIENCE: "San-skreet-ee".
THEASTER GATES: "Sans-skreet-ee", yeah?
I mean this is bad.
Like I have bad English already, so forgive me.
We went to Sanskriti, and there's
a space called the Museum for Everyday Things--
Objects.
AUDIENCE: Art.
THEASTER GATES: Museum of Everyday Art, nice.
And I think that I was maybe in dialogue with this,
but I didn't have a name for it, that I
wanted to convince other people that the everyday things
of their lives had value.
And the way that I was going to do this was I
was going to take those everyday things
and put them in such a nice case--
I would just clean them up and just
put them there and then change the light,
just shine the light.
And that thing that we didn't pay a whole lot of attention
to, like the shoes we used to wear
or the glasses our grandfathers and grandmothers
had or the skillets and the pots and pans
and the knives, or the little colonial
objects that we made to make fun of the white people
when they came, that all of those things would have value,
and that I would collect them wherever they were.
And then the bank would be the repository
where people might deposit their cultural goods, let's say.
While this was happening, things started to be donated to me.
So this beautiful woman, Linda Johnson Rice,
told me that she had some books.
She knew that I liked books and she had some books.
And she gave me a lot of books.
And we ended up creating this library, which
is essentially 26,000 books about the black experience,
1850 to 2000, thereabouts.
And it's become kind of the heart of the building.
In a way, nothing else needs to happen in the building
except this library exists.
And it becomes a kind of declaration.
It's its own manifesto that black things matter.
And these are books.
They're just everyday books, some Zora Neale Hurston,
some Toni Morrison, some James Baldwin,
I mean, just everyday things, things
that other people have in their library,
even if they don't read a lot.
And that maybe if they see that same book in my library
and they look at the dignity and the aesthetics of this library,
that they would go home and imagine
their books differently, that they might even
read as a result of the library being sexy.
Or maybe they just want to be in the library more
because the library's sexy.
And they might even invite someone else
to be in the library.
They might even change their behavior,
because the library feels good and makes them
want to be a better person.
This is maybe now when art meets something
like the divine for me, that one would be changed
as a result of the encounter.
So we started having shows, important artists
doing great things.
And I was trying to figure out--
I spent some time studying in other places,
and I was really deeply trying to consider, what could I
contribute to the conversation of preservation,
or maybe conservation?
And in the US, if there is an old house--
and very old, like 80 years would be old in the US--
the house is old, the roof caves in.
And then the house no longer looks old.
It becomes a new house.
They change all the clapboards.
They change the door.
And they say this is the same period door,
but the thing is new.
But there's no trace.
There's no trace of anything old.
And they've painted it lily white.
So it's a new lily white building,
which sounds like America to me, kind of a new lily
white building.
America's a new lily white building.
And so I was really committed to allowing some of the decay--
it's OK.
It's OK.
Just roll with me--
allowing some of the decay of this building to be evident.
But when people would come in, they would say--
they could say two things, either,
"That looks like a stain.
Why didn't you paint it?"
Or, "That's really beautiful."
And they were trying to imagine, what's
the difference between beauty and the stain?
And is it possible that sometimes the stain
is adding value?
Maybe some might say you become even more aware of the beauty
through the stain because of the whiteness of the plaster
adjacent to it, that it's actually
the finish of the plaster next to the stain
that makes this thing even more beautiful.
If it's just the stain, just deterioration, uninteresting.
Just the lily white house, uninteresting.
But when those things come together, maybe something new
happens, I'm proposing.
Not theoretical-- wherever the building failed,
we needed new drywall.
It became white.
Wherever the building was surviving,
we stabilized the things that were there.
So we found ourselves with a home.
And then we found ourselves with things--
well, a white home for black things.
And I'll stop right there.
I'll just stop.
I'll stop.
I'll stop ladies.
I'm sorry.
But I'm going to just talk about some of these black things.
So Linda, in addition to giving me her books,
there were all these other periodicals that were there.
Johnson Publishing produced Ebony magazine, Jet magazine,
a magazine called Hue, Negro Digest,
which was the black version of Reader's Digest.
Ebony was the black version of Life magazine.
And one might ask, why do you need
a black version of a thing?
Why would one make a new--
if there's already the thing, why
do you need a black version of the thing?
And this is where John Johnson was genius.
The truth is, Life magazine was not the American experience.
It was only the white American experience.
It's a truth.
And say if I were an aspiring middle-class dentist in 1943,
the only aspiration I would have through Life magazine
would be a white aspiration.
In fact, I never saw myself, so I may not
know that there are other dentists who
look like me in other parts of the country.
John Johnson was attempting to unify these parts,
to let people know that they weren't alone
in their loneliness, in their stewardship,
in their academic pursuit, in their intelligence,
in their mobility.
And so Johnson mimicked--
he appropriated the Life magazine structure
for black people.
And it was like, why stop at black America?
Let's do it in Zimbabwe.
Let's do it in South Africa.
Let's do it for the Caribbean.
And he was trying to have more and more
specific stories that would help people
understand that they were part of a diasporic aspiration.
Ebony magazine was about aspiration.
Anyway, I had these things and I'm not a librarian so
I decided to try to, I don't know, make some art out of it--
mix them up, change the colors, put them in things,
hang them, do things.
And it didn't work so well, that those things really
wanted to be a library.
And they really needed an archival care.
And so we got more and more serious about it.
And I found myself kind of falling in love
with houses for books.
And I just kind of keep making them over and over.
The books were going well.
And then we started getting records.
This is a collection of albums from the Frankie Knuckles
Foundation.
Frankie Knuckles was an important house music
DJ, died 2 and 1/2 years ago and needed to create an estate.
His friends who were caring for his things
needed to create an estate and didn't know how.
And so we worked out a way of making
an estate for his things.
And the albums are licensed to us for the next 10 years.
So when you come to the Arts Bank,
we try to play house music all the time.
Do you guys know what house music is?
So who doesn't know what house music is, no offense?
So house music is like club music.
And in Chicago, it was music that
was really the origins of which were in the '70s disco
movement.
So I have some favorite songs--
(SINGING) burn baby burn, disco inferno, burn baby--
car wash, working at the car wash yeah--
real funky, real funky.
And that music, disco music, would then
be combined with what became kind of more like just beat,
just beats, just rhythm, jungle house, Detroit techno,
and so and so.
So we party and we read, like you guys.
That's what I hear about the [? Delhi ?] Center, that you
party as hard as you read.
Here's a good example, just this here.
When you're working out the costs of the renovation
with your construction crew and they're telling you, "Theaster,
we can gut the whole building for $75,000.
But if you want to do this selective remediation,
it's going to be $150,000 to $250,000.
It's just harder to do.
It would be easier to just go in and take it all away."
But these moments became opportunities
where I could teach a team of people how to plaster,
and that we could commit to a kind of plastering
that would have been the plastering that
was done in 1923.
A little more lime, maybe there's
a little bit of hay in the plaster,
making a stronger, more fibrous body
that would help it last through rains and the bad conditions
that this building went under.
And so I thought, no, let's do the selective remediation.
And then instead of your plastic contract,
my guys will do the plaster.
And I was creating a problem within a solution, which
means more time and more money.
But the problem was one that was manageable,
and we could say, hey, we need a team of men and women
who are interested in plastering.
We have three months to train you before we get to the point
where we need to plaster.
Then we have eight weeks to get the plastering done.
If it goes beyond eight weeks, then I
got to let my general contractors do it
because we'll be behind time--
but looking for problems that people in my neighborhood
could solve.
The bank has never been broken into.
There's never been any defacement.
Bad things happen around us all the time.
But the people who protect the building now
are the people who laid the plaster
during the bank's development.
And even if they, for reasons of the building's architecture--
which feels colonial in a particular way,
or at least exclusive.
Even if they don't immediately feel like the bank is theirs,
there's something about having worked
in the bank that makes them feel like they're part of it.
Even though they go in and the art looks weird,
it's like, well I did the walls on the third floor.
I buffed the floors.
And not to be pejorative, but to say
that in a place where class dynamics are complicated,
even if everybody in the neighborhood is black,
those become the moments that call us back
to a place that says, you built it, therefore you're welcome.
Or you're building it and you're welcome.
Some brothers-- it's good to have
some brothers in the pictures.
They were building the library.
Says Gaylord and brother Mike, some glass
slides from the University of Chicago that eventually became
one of the cherished things.
Gaylord's very handsome.
He's an urban planner.
He'll be on my next trip.
That's Devin.
He's smart.
But all of this construction is really
just trying to get to the care of these objects.
There's a kind of co-working between the objects
and these little things.
Beautiful images of people in a space where
people can get down, do their little dance classes,
build things.
Aditi mentioned that the Obama Center's near me
and I'm working with them.
These things that are in pink are
buildings that we worked on over the last six, seven years.
And it represents about a mile, mile and a half.
And we're really proud.
Where it says University of Chicago here,
Stony Island Arts Bank, University
of Chicago, the library is going to go somewhere in between.
The Obama Center, that's what they call it.
They don't call it a library.
That's important, because the same people
who told me that the bank wasn't worth investing in--
they called it an albatross.
I didn't even know what albatross met.
They were like, "This is an albatross."
And I was like, "Whatever, you're an albatross.
Yo momma an albatross."
They now call me a real estate mogul.
They're like, "Oh my God, Theaster, your timing
was brilliant.
How did you know that the wind would sway the Obama
Center toward Jackson Park?"
And I mean, this is where it gets spiritual again,
that when you commit to the thing
that you're supposed to do, sometimes it works out.
That's nice.
Now I'm just bragging.
This is just like, I'm just bragging.
This is my last slide.
All of these buildings were abandoned.
All of them were valued less than they
should be because they were in the wrong neighborhood
at the wrong time.
And with some concerted effort, people now
want to live there again.
Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
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