How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art

I'm a potter,

which seems like a fairly humble vocation.

I know a lot about pots.

I've spent about 15 years making them.

One of the things that really
excites me in my artistic practice

and being trained as a potter

is that you very quickly learn

how to make great things out of nothing;

that I spent a lot of time at my wheel
with mounds of clay trying stuff;

and that the limitations
of my capacity, my ability,

was based on my hands and my imagination;

that if I wanted to make
a really nice bowl

and I didn't know how to make a foot yet,

I would have to learn how to make a foot;

that that process of learning
has been very, very helpful to my life.

I feel like, as a potter,

you also start to learn
how to shape the world.

There have been times
in my artistic capacity

that I wanted to reflect on

other really important moments

in the history of the U.S.,
the history of the world

where tough things happened,

but how do you talk about tough ideas

without separating people
from that content?

Could I use art like these old,
discontinued firehoses from Alabama,

to talk about complexities of a moment

of civil rights in the '60s?

Is it possible to talk about my father
and I doing labor projects?

My dad was a roofer, construction guy,
he owned small businesses,

and at 80, he was ready to retire
and his tar kettle was my inheritance.

Now, a tar kettle doesn't sound
like much of an inheritance. It wasn't.

It was stinky and it took up
a lot of space in my studio,

but I asked my dad if he would be willing
to make some art with me,

if we could reimagine this kind
of nothing material

as something very special.

And by elevating the material
and my dad's skill,

could we start to think about tar

just like clay, in a new way,

shaping it differently,

helping us to imagine what was possible?

After clay, I was then kind of turned on
to lots of different kinds of materials,

and my studio grew a lot
because I thought, well,

it's not really about the material,
it's about our capacity to shape things.

I became more and more interested in ideas

and more and more things
that were happening

just outside my studio.

Just to give you a little bit of context,

I live in Chicago.

I live on the South Side now,
I'm a West Sider.

For those of you who are not Chicagoans,
that won't mean anything,

but if I didn't mention
that I was a West Sider,

there would be a lot of people
in the city that would be very upset.

The neighborhood that I live in
is Grand Crossing.

It's a neighborhood
that has seen better days.

It is not a gated community, by far.

There is lots of abandonment
in my neighborhood,

and while I was kind of busy
making pots and busy making art

and having a good art career,

there was all of this stuff
that was happening

just outside my studio.

All of us know about
failing housing markets

and the challenges of blight,

and I feel like we talk about it
with some of our cities more than others,

but I think a lot of our
U.S. cities and beyond

have the challenge of blight,

abandoned buildings that people
no longer know what to do anything with.

And so I thought, is there a way
that I could start to think

about these buildings as an extension
or an expansion of my artistic practice?

And that if I was thinking
along with other creatives

-- architects, engineers,
real estate finance people --

that us together might be able
to kind of think

in more complicated ways
about the reshaping of cities.

And so I bought a building.

The building was really affordable.

We tricked it out.

We made it as beautiful as we could
to try to just get some activity happening

on my block.

Once I bought the building
for about $18,000,

I didn't have any money left.

So I started sweeping the building
as a kind of performance.

This is performance art,
and people would come over,

and I would start sweeping.

Because the broom was free
and sweeping was free,

it worked out.