Burnaway

BY JOVANNA JONES
On February 3, in front of a packed audience in Emory University’s Emerson Hall, artist Theaster Gates opened his “Black Space” lecture metaphorically in the aisles of a hardware store on the South Side of Chicago. The hardware store, such an ordinary emporium, offers “the stuff that keeps our lives together,” Gates stated. We go to the hardware store to find stuff to fix things, he explained, and the owner can tell you everything you need to know about every bolt he carries. This space “keeps the community’s parts in tact.” Gates’s talk left me wondering: where else do these spaces exist — those crucial spaces wherein place gives way to enduring community, resource, and belonging?
In Chicago, Gates’s primary location of practice, these spaces unfold at the entryways of beloved old neighborhood storefronts and in the corridors of a derelict bank building. In all his projects, Gates engages the materiality of blackness and black history. He does not do this work for artistic nostalgia, but to re-energize the cultural and economic options available to South Side residents and artists.

His most recent project, the Stony Island Arts Bank, is located near his well-known Dorchester Projects, where it all began. The Stony Island Bank building, abandoned since the 1980s, now operates as a library, community center, and contemporary art gallery. Gates purchased the structure from the city for $1 in 2012 and created various projects using the building’s decayed-yet-majestic materials.
Since the Bank is intended to serve both international contemporary arts audiences and the local community, it operates at the very edge of an age-old problem: gentrification. Often, the first sign of community displacement is the infiltration of non-local cultural economies. Nevertheless, in the project’s press release, Gates describes the Bank as an “institution of and for the South Side […] a repository for African American culture and history, a laboratory for the next generation of black artists.”
Creative methods of funding were required to realize the Dorchester and Stony Island Arts Bank projects, including gallery sales (i.e., selling the “bank bonds” at Art Basel) and philanthropic grants.
During the “Black Space” lecture, Gates mentioned his productive working relationship with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Acknowledging the current tensions concerning Mayor Emanuel’s handling of police brutality in black communities, Gates insisted that “the way business gets done” is by having necessary voices in the back rooms that can speak to and plan in service of the community. As it pertains to culturally thoughtful and equitable urban planning, perhaps the artist is that voice.
A few months prior to “Black Space,” I sat amid parents, educators, and community organizers in the gym of a South Atlanta black church. With a thick Crayola marker in hand and a large poster sheet before me, I illustrated exactly what the group members said: “Let’s plop a courtyard right in the middle…”; “How about a larger teacher’s lounge so they can get a good break when they need it…”; “Don’t forget to draw the books in the classroom…it’d be nice to have enough of those for once!” We were laughing and drawing, imagining what South Atlanta schools could be like if only they had the funding they needed. The exercise was cathartic. By the end of the activity, the group was left staring at three, brightly colored drawings of could-be schools—the imaginative reshaping of public education in South Atlanta. The schools, the church gym—all indexes of Black spaces wherein folks revitalize, challenge, and create frameworks of community and knowledge.
This shared moment is an example of what Gates encourages audiences to do: to galvanize the community through art and investment. Between Gates and the most vocal audience members, there loomed the assumption that black folks in Atlanta do not realize the value of their space. Yet, ironically, that same week, I witnessed another gathering of black parents, educators, and students confront the Atlanta Public School board to demand adequate funding so their schools can not only stay open but thrive.
That same week, I also learned about a grant-writing workshop held at the library, for many black folks with ideas that need financial support. I heard from my Lyft driver, a black tattoo artist, about how difficult it was to get a loan to start a business in the area. I walked past the former Boxcar Grocer on Peters Street in Castleberry Hill, a black-owned grocery store that I had been so excited to frequent once I moved Downtown. Just as Gates noticed in South Chicago, there has always already been visioning and planning among black folks in Atlanta. But, we no longer see these visions of Black space survive. Why is that?
When we situate Gates’s work in the context of Atlanta, it falls right into the current heated conversations about gentrification, abandoned buildings, the Belt Line, public schools, and the value of Black space. In a recent interview with Art Papers, Tim Keane (Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Community Development) said he wants “to design for the population that we want the city to become home to.” But what about those who are already here — who have been here?
Who has the power to reimagine and reshape in our society? While we all have the agency, we don’t all have the means, especially those who are systemically marginalized — a fundamental challenge that even Gates has not quite seemed to figure out, given that his restoration projects are personally and privately funded. Additionally, we have yet to see whether these projects will benefit the longtime residents and businesspeople or push them out.
Nevertheless, Gates’s attention to blackness and city planning both salvages and centers black folks’ spaces, while reconsidering what it fundamentally means to flourish in a society latent with cultural and structural issues. Gates recognizes that black people are used to “subjection plus liberation at the same time.” How is it possible to live like this? Why are cities like Chicago and Atlanta so O.K. with black folks’ systemic dissatisfaction and communal displacement?
Fully invested in “the role that the artist plays in shaping the world,” Gates requires his audience to imagine another kind of vision for society, in system and in philosophy, a society where communities can hold city officials, public artists, school boards, developers, and philanthropies accountable, and have our needs met.
Jovonna Jones received her B.A. from Emory University in 2015, with highest honors in African-American Studies. She is the co-founder of BlacQurl.com, a publication that amplifies black women’s voices in art and media, and is a current participant in the BURNAWAY Art Writers Mentorship Program.