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I'm a potter,
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which seems like a fairly humble vocation.
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I know a lot about pots.
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I've spent about 15 years making them.
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One of the things that really
excites me in my artistic practice
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and being trained as a potter
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is that you very quickly learn
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how to make great things out of nothing;
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that I spent a lot of time at my wheel
with mounds of clay trying stuff;
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and that the limitations
of my capacity, my ability,
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was based on my hands and my imagination;
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that if I wanted to make
a really nice bowl
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and I didn't know how to make a foot yet,
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I would have to learn how to make a foot;
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that that process of learning
has been very, very helpful to my life.
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I feel like, as a potter,
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you also start to learn
how to shape the world.
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There have been times
in my artistic capacity
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that I wanted to reflect on
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other really important moments
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in the history of the U.S.,
the history of the world
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where tough things happened,
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but how do you talk about tough ideas
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without separating people
from that content?
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Could I use art like these old,
discontinued firehoses from Alabama,
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to talk about complexities of a moment
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of civil rights in the '60s?
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Is it possible to talk about my father
and I doing labor projects?
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My dad was a roofer, construction guy,
he owned small businesses,
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and at 80, he was ready to retire
and his tar kettle was my inheritance.
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Now, a tar kettle doesn't sound
like much of an inheritance. It wasn't.
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It was stinky and it took up
a lot of space in my studio,
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but I asked my dad if he would be willing
to make some art with me,
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if we could reimagine this kind
of nothing material
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as something very special.
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And by elevating the material
and my dad's skill,
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could we start to think about tar
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just like clay, in a new way,
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shaping it differently,
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helping us to imagine what was possible?
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After clay, I was then kind of turned on
to lots of different kinds of materials,
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and my studio grew a lot
because I thought, well,
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it's not really about the material,
it's about our capacity to shape things.
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I became more and more interested in ideas
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and more and more things
that were happening
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just outside my studio.
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Just to give you a little bit of context,
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I live in Chicago.
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I live on the South Side now,
I'm a West Sider.
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For those of you who are not Chicagoans,
that won't mean anything,
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but if I didn't mention
that I was a West Sider,
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there would be a lot of people
in the city that would be very upset.
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The neighborhood that I live in
is Grand Crossing.
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It's a neighborhood
that has seen better days.
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It is not a gated community, by far.
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There is lots of abandonment
in my neighborhood,
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and while I was kind of busy
making pots and busy making art
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and having a good art career,
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there was all of this stuff
that was happening
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just outside my studio.
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All of us know about
failing housing markets
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and the challenges of blight,
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and I feel like we talk about it
with some of our cities more than others,
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but I think a lot of our
U.S. cities and beyond
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have the challenge of blight,
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abandoned buildings that people
no longer know what to do anything with.
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And so I thought, is there a way
that I could start to think
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about these buildings as an extension
or an expansion of my artistic practice?
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And that if I was thinking
along with other creatives
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-- architects, engineers,
real estate finance people --
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that us together might be able
to kind of think
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in more complicated ways
about the reshaping of cities.
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And so I bought a building.
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The building was really affordable.
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We tricked it out.
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We made it as beautiful as we could
to try to just get some activity happening
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on my block.
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Once I bought the building
for about $18,000,
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I didn't have any money left.
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So I started sweeping the building
as a kind of performance.
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This is performance art,
and people would come over,
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and I would start sweeping.
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Because the broom was free
and sweeping was free,
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it worked out.
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(Laughter)
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But we would use the building, then,
to stage exhibitions, small dinners,
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and we found that that building
on my block, Dorchester,
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we now referred to the block
as Dorchester projects,
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that in a way that building
became a kind of gathering site
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for lots of different kinds of activity.
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We turned the building into
what we called now the Archive House.
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The Archive House would do
all of these amazing things.
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Very significant people
in the city and beyond
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would find themselves
in the middle of the hood.
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And that's when I felt like
maybe there was a relationship
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between my history with clay
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and this new thing that was
starting to develop,
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that we were slowly starting
to reshape how people imagined
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the South Side of the city.
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One house turned into a few houses,
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and we always tried to suggest
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that not only is creating
a beautiful vessel important,
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but the contents of what happens
in those buildings is also very important.
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So we were not only thinking
about development,
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but we were thinking about the program,
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thinking about the kind of connections
that could happen
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between one house and another,
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between one neighbor and another.
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This building became what we call
the Listening House,
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and it has a collection of discarded books
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from the Johnson Publishing Corporation,
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and other books from an old bookstore
that was going out of business.
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I was actually just wanting to activate
these buildings as much as I could
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with whatever and whoever would join me.
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In Chicago, there's
amazing building stock.
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This building, which had been
the former crack house on the block,
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and when the building became abandoned,
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it became a great opportunity to really
imagine what else could happen there.
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So this space we converted into
what we call Black Cinema House.
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Black Cinema House was an opportunity
in the hood to screen films
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that were important and relevant
to the folk that lived around me,
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that if we wanted to show
an old Melvin Van Peebles film, we could.
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If we wanted to show Car Wash, we could.
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That would be awesome.
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The building we soon outgrew,
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and we had to move to a larger space.
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Black Cinema House, which was made
from just a small piece of clay,
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had to grow into a much larger
piece of clay, which is now my studio.
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What I realized was that
for those of you who are zoning junkies,
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that some of the things
that I was doing in these buildings
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that had been left behind,
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they were not the uses by which
the buildings were built,
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and that there are city policies that say,
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"Hey, a house that is residential
needs to stay residential."
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But what do you do in neighborhoods when
ain't nobody interested in living there?
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That the people who have
the means to leave have already left?
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What do we do with
these abandoned buildings?
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And so I was trying
to wake them up using culture.
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We found that that
was so exciting for folk,
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and people were so responsive to the work,
that we had to then find bigger buildings.
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By the time we found bigger buildings,
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there was, in part,
the resources necessary
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to think about those things.
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In this bank that we called the Arts Bank,
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it was in pretty bad shape.
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There was about six feet
of standing water.
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It was a difficult project to finance,
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because banks weren't interested
in the neighborhood
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because people weren't interested
in the neighborhood
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because nothing had happened there.
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It was dirt. It was nothing.
It was nowhere.
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And so we just started imagining,
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what else could happen in this building?
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(Applause)
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And so now that the rumor
of my block has spread,
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and lots of people are starting to visit,
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we've found that the bank
can now be a center
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for exhibition, archives,
music performance,
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and that there are people
who are now interested
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in being adjacent to those buildings
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because we brought some heat,
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that we kind of made a fire.
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One of the archives that we'll have there
is this Johnson Publishing Corporation.
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We've also started to collect
memorabilia from American history,
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from people who live
or have lived in that neighborhood.
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Some of these images
are degraded images of black people,
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kind of histories
of very challenging content,
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and where better than a neighborhood
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with young people who are constantly
asking themselves about their identity
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to talk about some of the complexities
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of race and class?
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In some ways, the bank represents a hub,
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that we're trying to create
a pretty hard core node
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of cultural activity,
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and that if we could start
to make multiple hubs
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and connect some cool
green stuff around there,
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that the buildings that we've
purchased and rehabbed,
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which is now around 60 or 70 units,
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that if we could kind of land
miniature Versailles on top of that,
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and kind of connect these buildings
by a beautiful green belt
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-- (Applause) --
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that this place where people
never wanted to be
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would become an important destination
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for folks from all over
the country and world.
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In some ways, it feels
very much like I'm a potter,
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that we tackle the things
that are at our wheel,
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we try with the skill that we have
to kind of think about
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this next bowl that I want to make.
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And it went from bowl to a singular house
to a block to a neighborhood
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to a cultural district
to thinking about the city,
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and at every point, there were things
that I didn't know that I had to learn.
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And I've never learned so much
about zoning law in my life.
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I never thought I'd have to.
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But as a result of that, I'm finding
that there's not just room
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for my own artistic practice,
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there's room for a lot of other
artistic practices.
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So people started asking us,
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"Well, Theaster, how are you
going to go to scale?"
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"What's your sustainability plan?"
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(Laughter) (Applause)
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And what I've found is that
I couldn't export myself,
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that what seems necessary
in cities like Akron, Ohio,
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and Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana,
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is that there are people in those places
who already believe in those places,
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that are already dying
to make those places beautiful,
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and that often, those people
who are passionate about a place
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are disconnected from the resources
necessary to make cool things happen,
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or disconnected from
a contingency of people
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that could help make things happen.
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So now, we're starting to give advice
around the country
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on how to start with what you got,
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how to start with the things
that are in front of you,
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how to make something out of nothing,
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how to reshape your world
at a wheel or at your block
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or at the scale of the city.
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Thank you so much.
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(Applause)
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Moderator: Thank you. So I think
many people watching this
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will be asking themselves
the question you just raised at the end:
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how can they do this in their own city?
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You can't export yourself.
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Give us a few pages out of your playbook
about what someone who is inspired
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about their city can do
to take on projects like yours?
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Theaster Gates: One of the things
I've found that's really important
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is giving thought to not just
the kind of individual project,
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like an old house,
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but, like, what's the relationship
between an old house,
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a local school, a small bodega,
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and is there some kind of synergy
between those things?
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Can you get those folks talking?
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I've found that in cases
where neighborhoods have failed,
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they still often have a pulse.
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How do you identify the pulse
in that place, the passionate people,
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and then how do you get folk
who have been fighting, slogging,
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for, like, 20 years, reenergized
about the place that they live?
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And so someone has to do that work.
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If I were a traditional developer,
I would be talking about buildings alone,
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and then putting
a "For Lease" sign in the window.
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I think that you actually
have to curate more than that,
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that there's a way in which
you have to be mindful
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about what are the businesses
that I want to grow here?
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And then, are there people
who live in this place
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who want to grow those businesses with me?
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Because I think it's not just
a cultural space or housing:
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there has to be the recreation
of an economic core.
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So thinking about those things
together feels right.
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Moderator: It's hard to get people
to create the spark again
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when people have been
slogging for 20 years.
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Are there any methods you've found
that have helped break through?
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TG: Yeah, I think that now,
there are lots of examples
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of folk who are doing amazing work,
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but those methods are sometimes like,
when the media is constantly saying
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that only violent things
happen in a place,
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then based on your skill set
and the particular context,
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what are the things that you can do
in your neighborhood
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to kind of fight some of that?
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So I've found that
if you're a theater person,
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you have the outdoor
street theater festivals.
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In some cases, we don't have
the resources in certain neighborhoods
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to do things that are
a certain kind of splashy,
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but if we can then find ways
of making sure that people
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who are local to a place,
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plus people who could be supportive
of the things that are happening locally,
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when those people get together,
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I think really amazing things can happen.
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Moderator: So interesting.
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And how can you make sure
that the projects you're creating
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are actually for the disadvantaged
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and not just for the sort of
vegetarian indie movie crowd
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that might move in
to take advantage of them.
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TG: Right on, so I think this is
where it starts to get into
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kind of the thick weeds.
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Moderator: Let's go there.
TG: Right now, Grand Crossing
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is 99 percent black, or at least living,
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and we know that maybe
who owns property in a place
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is different from who walks
the streets every day.
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So it's reasonable to say
that Grand Crossing is already
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in the process of being something
different than it is today.
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But are there ways to think about
housing trusts or land trusts
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or a mission-based development
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that starts to protect
some of the space that happens,
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because when you have
7,500 empty lots in a city,
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you want something to happen there,
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but you need entities that are not
just interested in the development piece,
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but entities that interested
in the stabilization piece,
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and I feel like often the developer piece
is really motivated,
-
but the other work of a kind
of neighborhood consciousness,
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that part doesn't live anymore.
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So how do you start to grow up
important watchdogs
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that ensure that the resources
that are made available
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to new folk that are coming in
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are also distributed to folk
who have lived in a place for a long time.
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Moderator: That makes so much sense.
One more question:
-
you make such a compelling case for beauty
and the importance of beauty and the arts.
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There would be others who would argue
that funds would be better spent
-
on basic services for the disadvantaged.
-
How do you combat that viewpoint,
or come against it?
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TG: I believe that beauty is a basic service.
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(Applause)
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Often what I have found is that
when there are resources
-
that have not been made available
to certain under-resourced cities
-
or neighborhoods or communities,
-
that sometimes culture is the thing
that helps to ignite,
-
and that I can't do everything,
-
but I think that there's a way in which
if you can start with culture
-
and get people kind of
reinvested in their place,
-
other kinds of adjacent
amenities start to grow,
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and then people can make a demand
-
that's a poetic demand,
-
and the political demands that
are necessary to wake up our cities,
-
they also become very poetic.
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Moderator: It makes perfect sense to me.
-
Theaster, thank you so much
for being here with us today.
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Thank you. Theaster Gates.
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(Applause)