THEASTER GATES’ ARTWORK IN PERSPECTIVE: CRAFT, DISCARDED KNOWLEDGE, AND CRITICAL MEMORY by LAURA BETH THOMPSON M.F.A., University of Notre Dame, 2017 B.F.A., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2008

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts Department of Art & Art History 2019

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This thesis entitled: Theaster Gates’ Artwork in Perspective: Craft, Discarded Knowledge, and Critical Memory written by Laura Beth Thompson has been approved for the Department of Art and Art History

Brianne Cohen

Annette de Stecher

Seema Sohi

Date

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

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ABSTRACT

Thompson, Laura Beth (M.A. Department of Art and Art History) Theaster Gates’ Artwork in Perspective: Craft, Discarded Knowledge, and Critical Memory Thesis directed by Professor Brianne Cohen

Theaster Gates is an American contemporary social practice artist whose work engages with social sculpture and craft. Gates’ projects reclaim discarded knowledge, material cultures, and facilitate engagement with “critical memory.” Gates has many aspects to his expansive art practice, but this thesis focuses on his ongoing neighborhood revitalization program, The

Dorchester Projects (2009-present); the Rebuild Foundation (2010-present), a not-for-profit organization, whose stated mission is to support African-American arts and cultural initiatives; and the performative ceramic studio, the Soul Manufacturing Corporation (2012- present).

Through this thesis, I demonstrate that Gates’ practice is grounded in a reparative craft methodology through his engagement with Chicago’s history of socially engaged art, the legacy of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, and his facilitation of critical memory through salvaged and archived “discarded knowledge.” Ultimately, “Theaster Gates’s Artwork in Perspective:

Craft, Discarded Knowledge, and Critical Memory” explores the ethical ambiguities of Gates’ practice.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am deeply indebted to the tireless efforts and guidance of my thesis advisor Dr. Brianne Cohen.

Without her generous support and thoughtful criticism, this project would not have been possible. I would also like to thank my thesis committee members Dr. Annette de Stecher and

Dr. Seema Sohi. Over the past year and a half, Dr. de Stecher’s moving commitment to my improvement as a writer and junior scholar has been very meaningful to me. Through course materials, written feedback, and seminar discussions, Dr. Sohi impressed upon me the necessity of skepticism and the interconnections between seemingly disparate events. I would also like to thank my collegues: Gladys Preciado, Katie Toler, Caroline Marleton, Brianna Humbert,

Brittany Hughes, Taylor Hosfold, Carolyn Click, and Allyson Burbeck. In addition, I would like to thank Jasmine Baetz for her guidance and advice on how to engage ethically with communities and Catherine Cartwright for her commitment to the success of all graduate students. This project would not have been possible without the financial support of the

Department of Art History Scholarship from the University of Colorado Boulder (2018), the

Hazel Barnes Flat Grant from the University of Colorado Boulder (2018), and the Schwalbe

Travel Grant from the University of Colorado Boulder (2018). I would also like to thank David

Manthey, whose love and support has been vital in the final stages of writing my thesis. To my family, Steve Thompson, Jeanne Thompson, Amy Thompson, and John Thompson: I would not have survived this arduous process without all of you emotional support and advice. Lastly, I am unspeakably indebted to my dear friend, Jennifer Hanrahan, whose copy editing enabled the completion of this thesis. I could not have completed this process without any of you.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………1 Ch. 1 The Dorchester Projects and Reparative Social Practice…………………………….6 Ch. 2 The Rebuild Foundation, Discarded Knowledge, and Critical Memory……………24 Ch. 3 The Soul Manufacturing Corporation and the Arts and Crafts Movement…………46 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………..66 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………..70 ILLUSTRATIONS.……………………………………………………………………………78

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1: Theaster Gates, Archive House and Listening House , 2009…………………….72 FIGURE 2: Conservative Vice Lords and the MCA, Art & Soul , 1968……………………..72 FIGURE 3: Dan Peterman and Connie Spreen, Experimental Station , Interior, 2006………73 FIGURE 4: Theaster Gates, Stony Island Arts Bank , 2015………………………………….73 FIGURE 5: Theaster Gates, Bank Bond , 2013………………………………………………74 FIGURE 6: Laura Thompson, Graph of Theaster Gates' Financial Structure , 2019 ……....74 FIGURE 7: Unattributed, Image of Kenwood Gardens , 2016 ………………………………75 FIGURE 8: Unattributed, Kenwood Garderns, Civic Commons , 2016……..……….………75 FIGURE 9: Theaster Gates, Civil Tapestry 4 , 2011………………………………………….76 FIGURE 10: Theaster Gates, Archive House , Interior, 2012………………………………...76 FIGURE 11: Theaster Gates, Soul Manufacturing Corporation, 2013………………………77 FIGURE 12: John Cassel, Queen of Spain’s Jewelry , 1851………………………………….78

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INTRODUCTION

“I am a potter.” 1 This is the proclamation Theaster Gates makes to announce the commencement of his oration at a 2015 Ted Talk . In a speech entitled “How to Revive a

Neighborhood: With Imagination, Beauty, and Art,” Gates describes how the Dorchester

Projects (2009–present) developed and grew into a multi-city initiative to activate underserved urban communities through art and culture. Renowned for his impassioned and charming rhetoric, Gates is the ideal lector. Throughout countless interviews and speeches over the past decade, Gates often apotheosizes his potter’s identity, often drawing a parallel between clay processes and neighborhood regeneration, stating, “One of the things that really excites me about my artistic practice and being trained as a potter is that you really quickly learn how to make great things out of nothing.” 2 However, despite Gates’ ongoing allusion to ceramics methodologies, critics have essentially neglected this foundational structure of his art practice. 3

While acknowledged as a trained ceramicist, the relevance of this within his artistic and organizational enterprises is hastily dismissed as an ineffectual detail.

The significance of Gates’ potter’s identity is more than anecdotal. Rather, it is a rich, insightful inlet into his practice. Regardless of Gates’ inclusion of ceramic media, processes, and embedded ideals, this core of his practice has been focused upon only on a handful of occasions.

Given the overwhelming amount of textual material penned on the artist, it is shocking that craft

1 Theaster Gates, “How to Revive a Neighborhood: with Imagination, Beauty, and Art,” Ted 2015, (March 26,2015) https://www.ted.com/talks/theaster_gates_how_to_revive_a_neighborhood_with_imagination_beauty_and_art?lang uage=en . 2 Ibid. 3 For example, Ben Austen of the New York Times writes, “Gates was trained as a potter, but his artistic practice includes, among many things, sculpture, musical performance, installation and something that has been called large- scale urban intervention.” See: Ben Austen, “Chicago’s Opportunity Artist,” New York Times (December 20, 2013), https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/magazine/chicagos-opportunity-artist.html . 1 has been predominantly neglected. 4 Despite the resounding thrust of cross-disciplinary artistic practices that dominate the contemporary field, craft largely remains omitted from critical analysis.

The discourse concerning Theaster Gates is plentiful, ranging from small, local newspapers to academic scholarship. As a charismatic, contemporary, Chicago-based African-

American artist who engages with disenfranchised communities who have suffered from systemic racism and the decline of American manufacturing, Gates has garnered an abundance of national attention. In 2006, Gates bought a house on Dorchester Avenue in Grand Crossing on

Chicago’s South Side. 5 He personally renovated the house, making it his home. Additionally, the cataclysmic housing market crash of 2008 afforded Gates the opportunity to acquire the abandoned house next door. Along with a group of individuals, he refurbished the house and christened it Archive House, thus commencing his ongoing Dorchester Projects (fig. 1). 6 Since

2009, Gates has aquired many other houses, commercial spaces, banks, warehouses, and even plots of land both in Chicago and throughout the United States. Along with a team of assistants,

Gates guts the architectural spaces, rehabilitates them, and builds out the interiors based on the activities to be held there or collections to be preserved within. 7

Beyond Gates’ rhetoric and inclusion of clay in his practice, a ceramic methodology grounds his processes. This is visible in how he gathers and engages with materials, embraces communal engagement and collaboration, and emphasizes pedagogy. For example, akin to the

4 See: Michael Darling, “Theaster Gates: Rescue Me,” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012). See: Jackson, Matthew Jesse. “The Emperor of the Post-Medium Condition.” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House . Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012. 5 Stephanie Smith, “Theaster Gates,” Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2013), 188. 6 Michael Darling, “Theaster Gates: Rescue Me,” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012), 10. 7 Matthew Jesse Jackson, “The Emperor of the Post-Medium Condition,” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012), 20. 2 potter, Gates mines his materials from his environment. However, rather than pulling raw clay from the ground, he gathers his materials from the urban environment. He recycles these materials for reuse by transforming the gutted detritus into gallery artworks. The capital he raises from these sales cycles back into the Dorchester Projects .

The Dorchester Projects is ongoing arts-centric neighborhood revitalization program.

Within the spaces, he both organizes events, musical performances, and forums to discuss matters significant to the local community. Additionally, within these renewed architectural sites,

Gates houses archives of objects imbued with knowledge or ways of being whose value has dissipated over time. Through the interconnection of revitalized spaces, collections of discarded knowledge, and social engagement, these gathering sites facilitate what Houston A. Baker Jr. calls “critical memory.” 8

Whilst resoundingly lauded by critics as an ethically driven, socio-politically conscious, and aesthetically compelling artist, Gates’ interconnecting network of art projects have also drawn significant denunciations. Gates has been accused of fostering gentrification, manipulating economically vulnerable neighborhoods for his own gain, and of exploiting his employees.

Throughout the subsequent pages, these criticisms will be acknowledged and addressed.

It is important to acknowledge my positionality in regard to Theaster Gates and the communities he engages with. Throughout this thesis, I draw on many scholars who specialize in comparative ethnic studies because my embodied knowledge is tethered to my identity as a Euro-

American woman. While it is my stance that this should not limit my ability to analyze the artwork of an African-American man, in this case, Theaster Gates, it does limit my ability to

8 According to Houston A. Baker, “critical memory renders hard ethical evaluations of the past” as a means to resist manipulations of the past by those who seek to advance their own agenda. This term will be unpacked in Chapter 2. See: Houston A. Baker Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 3. 3 understand many nuances of his work. Therefore, I have attempted to inform my criticism not only through the scholarship of significant authors including Patricia Hill Collins, Houston A.

Baker, Lisa Marie Cacho, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter D. Mignolo, and Roderick A. Ferguson, but also the voices of local community members through local newspapers and social media feeds.

In this thesis, I engage with aspects of Gates’ practice that often go neglected. In

“Chapter One: The Dorchester Projects and Reparative Social Practice,” I provide historical context of the Grand Crossing neighborhood, which is the nucleus of Gates’ practice. Drawing on the scholarship of Claire Bishop and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, I introduce key concepts for my analysis of Gates’ artwork, including “social practice” and “reparative ideologies.” I will argue, that the rich history of social practice in Chicago, dating back to the late 19 th century, grounds Gates’ reparative initiatives. Through this discussion, I argue for the relationship between site-specific art engagement, healing processes, and the possibilities for regeneration in the face of biased socio-politico-economic systems.

In “Chapter Two: The Rebuild Foundation, Discarded Knowledge, and Critical

Memory,” I examine the undergirding structure of Gates’ entire practice: the Rebuild

Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that supports all of his art initiatives through a complex system that is intertwined with private and public entities. In this chapter, I address criticisms leveled against Gates and his arts practice, including allegations of exploitative working conditions and the role of his housing-based practice in gentrification. I also examine how the salvaged discarded knowledge that Gates preserves, contributes to facilitating critical memory, a vital force in resistance to social control. By producing spaces that hold objects embedded with historical and cultural value, particularly for the African-American community, Gates demonstrates the value of reparative remembrance and resurgence.

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In “Chapter Three: The Soul Manufacturing Corporation and the Arts and Crafts

Movement,” I argue that Gates’ artwork has been impacted by several legacies that emerged out of the British Arts and Crafts Movement, including the interest in elevating craft and architecture to expand the term art, an impulse toward social reform, and the emphasis on the craft tenet of pedagogy. By examining the pottery studio performance piece Soul Manufacturing Corporation

(2012 –present), I locate an intersection between the scholarship of feminist and craft historian

Jenni Sorkin and contemporary-art historian Claire Bishop, whose signature academic contributions are often interpreted as incompatible. In doing so, I draw connections between 19 th century Arts and Crafts champion William Morris, mid-20 th century potter Marguerite

Wildenhain, and Gates’ unique arts approach.

Through this master’s thesis, I analyze Gates’ practice in terms of how he navigates historical events and ongoing socio-politico-economic systems in order to demonstrate the complexities and ambiguities of Gates’ artworks. By focusing each chapter on a different aspect of Gates’ practice, I examine how he engages with the past, pulling threads from it that have contributed to the state of the present. Gates seeks to construct more positive alternatives to the environments and systems within which we exist. He works collaboratively with teams of artists, politicians, community members, and craftspeople to produce situations that imagine other possibilities for more productive ways of living. In this thesis, I probe historical connections, socio-political systems, and Gates’ presented alternatives throughout his expansive arts practice.

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Chapter 1: The Dorchester Projects and Reparative Social Practice

Driving through the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, it’s clear that this area had once been affluent. The neighborhood streets are wide, sidewalks line the streets, and most of the residencies on or near South Dorchester Avenue are attractive, early to mid-century brick buildings. It was not until I parked and looked around that I began to notice discrepancies among the houses, which ranged from clearly abandoned with boarded-up windows to quite well kept. Most had black wrought iron or discolored wooden plank fencing that enclosed each individual structure. The unassuming Archive House, Theaster Gates’ first renovation and home for many years, is nestled within the neat row of houses. The structure and its own fenced enclosure are covered in vertical striations of variegated reclaimed wooden planks. Unless one is specifically looking for this house, it would likely go unnoticed.

In 2006, Gates bought a house on Dorchester Avenue.9 He personally gutted and renovated the house himself, transforming the subsequent detritus into gallery artworks. 10 In turn, Gates invested the capital made from the sale of these artworks into further renovations.

Two years later the housing-market crash afforded Gates the opportunity to buy a second house when a neighboring lot went up for sale in 2009. However, rather than rehabilitate this house himself, Gates hired local, unemployed community members to renovate and rebuild the house to his specifications. 11 This launched the Dorchester Projects . Now, the Dorchester Projects is known as a network of cultural regeneration initiatives in the Grand Crossing neighborhood, including Archive House, Listening House, Black Cinema House, the Stony Island Art Bank,

9 Stephanie Smith, “Theaster Gates,” Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2013), 188. 10 Matthew Jesse Jackson, “The Emperor of the Post-Medium Condition,” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012), 20. 11 Michael Darling, “Theaster Gates: Rescue Me,” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012), 10. 6 and the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaboration. Gates intends to combat localized blight with this expansive yet concentrated project, reshaping neighborhoods through urban planning, education, and economic development. Gates fills these spaces with a variety of art and cultural programming that celebrates and promotes African-American culture and history through film screenings, art exhibitions, performances, hospitality dinners, and artistic collaborations.

Chicago has long been a forerunner in socially engaged arts initiatives, and the

Dorchester Projects continues this legacy. In this chapter, I will examine the history of the area in which Gates’ project is located and the role that socially engaged, art-based projects have had in local revitalization initiatives, including Art & Soul and Experimental Station. This analysis will provide context for understanding how the Dorchester Projects functions within the neighborhood and greater Chicago. Overall, in this chapter, I explore the historical conditions of

Grand Crossing and introduce vital concepts for the analysis of Gates’ arts practice, including social practice and reparative ideologies. In doing so, I will demonstrate the significant relationship between historically rich site-specificity and healing practices that engage with cyclical, racially fraught traumas. By utilizing housing and architectural institutions, like banks, which are tied to historical and ongoing social and financial exploitations of people of color,

Gates provides opportunities for regeneration and healing to occur. In this chapter, I explore those relationships and provide the foundation for the subsequent two chapters.

South Shore: A Brief History

The Dorchester Projects is located on Chicago’s South Side in a neighborhood that has gone by different names depending on who is shaping the district street by street. While most contemporary descriptions – including Gates’ own writings – refer to the area as the Greater

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Grand Crossing neighborhood, archival materials delineate the area as South Shore. Its borders run along Lake Michigan, South Chicago Avenue, 67 th Street, and 79 th Street. Stony Island, a diagonal avenue that runs through the district, was once a main thoroughfare and commerce center.

In the late 19 th century, British railroad workers settled the district of South Shore. 12 In the 1920s and 1930s, the area began to attract wealthy residents, and a building boom commenced, including residential housing as well as banks and museums like the Museum of

Science and Industry. 13 According to the 1950 census, the area steadily grew in population until stabilizing in the 1950s at around 78,755 and was constituted primarily of Swedish and English

Protestants. 14 Beginning in the mid-1950s, African-Americans began moving into the neighborhood and by 1960 comprised ten percent of the population, although Stony Island functioned as a dividing line with African-Americans remaining west of the avenue. 15

Foreshadowing things to come, between 1950 and 1960, a major shift took place in housing occupancy. By 1960, the neighborhood had transformed from majority home-ownership to seventy-five percent renter-occupiers.

Between 1960 and 1980, the neighborhood underwent a major demographic change from a preponderance of Euro-American occupancy to a primarily African-American district. 16 Along with the dramatic demographic conversion, this time period also witnessed an economic

12 Eleanor H. Bernert and Louis Wirth, eds, Local Community Fact Book of Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 100. 13 The building was originally constructed for the 1893 World’s Columbia Expedition, which housed the fair’s Palace of Fine Arts. The museum remained vacant until it was reopened in 1933 as the Museum of Science and Industry. See: “Museum Facts,” Museum of Science and Industry Chicago, Accessed January 27, 2019, https://www.msichicago.org/explore/about-us/museum-facts/ 14 Ibid, 101. 15 Ibid, 100. 16 The Chicago Fact Book Consortium, ed. Local Community Fact Book Chicago Metropolitan Area 1980 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 119. 8 downturn. However, the area’s new residents made efforts to counteract this decline. In 1972, the

South Shore National Bank submitted an application to be relocated to the Federal Reserve

Bank, stating, “In recent years, there has been an adverse change in the residential and business characteristics of the trading area…the bank’s clientele have been leaving the neighborhood and the per capita income of the people is moving in is decidedly lower.” 17 However, the South

Shore National Bank was persuaded to remain in the financially faltering South Shore neighborhood by local leadership, including Ron Grywinski, Mary Haughton, James Fletcher, and Milton Davis, a coalition of churches, the South Shore Commission, and the Illinois

Neighborhood Development Corporation. 18 For these individuals and groups, the changing neighborhood indicated more of an opportunity than a financial liability. A small group of

African-American and Euro-American bankers banded together and bought the South Shore

National Bank with the intention of actively lending to African-American residents and business owners. Their aim was to provide an alternative to exploitative redlining practices, which systemically denies housing to individuals often based on race, either through direct refusal to sell or through price inflation. 19

In addition to preventing the bank from abandoning the community, local organizing led to more initiatives. In 1980, historian Will Hogan wrote, “South Shore is an area where community interest is coalescing to fight urban decay and its ramifications.” 20 The Chicago Area

Renewal Effort Service Corporation (RESCORP), a group of fifty to sixty saving and loan

17 Kristen Moo, “Chicago’s Shore Bank and the Rise of Socially Responsible Banking,” BMCR Color Curtain Processing Project , April 6, 2012, http://bmrcprocessingproject.uchicago.edu/blog/chicago’s-shorebank-and-rise- socially-responsible-banking 18 Frank Gibney, “Plant Your Money Close to Home,” The Chicago Journal (October 20, 1976) vol 1 no. 5, 5. 19 Moo, “Chicago’s Shore Bank.” 20 Hogan, The Chicago Fact Book Consortium , 119. 9 associations, became interested in the area. 21 Through collaborations between RESCORP and the

Illinois Housing Development Authority, a $4 million program called NEW VISTAS commenced, and in 1975 the program updated 150 units in five buildings.

Also during this period, many residents of South Shore took an interest in using the arts to revitalize the area. In 1976, the South Shore Arts Corporation (SSAC) concentrated its efforts on three projects intended to develop a base for art and cultural celebration, which included

Everyday Art, Changes, and Ebony Talents Creative Arts Foundation. 22 Everyday Art was driven by the belief that public and private art, within and outside of houses, laundromats, and grocery stores, could help regenerate a neighborhood. The organization had “ongoing projects to beautify and transform various abandoned and deteriorated lots [and] parks.” 23 As we shall see, this type of work would ground projects like Experimental Station and the social practice housing initiatives of Theaster Gates.

In 1978, the newspaper South Shore Prospects published “Alternative Futures for an

Urban Community,” a special edition of the paper that envisioned possible trajectories for South

Shore in the 1990s. 24 In the “Preface,” the authors write, “It is our conclusion that the future of

Chicago will be determined by innovative and inventive solutions to long-range problems. That means the future is in the minds of the citizens and not the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry.” 25 Throughout the special edition, various articles weigh the benefits of transitioning South Shore to a primarily consumptive or productive community, offering two possibilities as the “Bedroom Community” and the “Self-Reliant Community.” During this era,

21 Ibid. 22 Cindy Hoffman and Jessica Landman, “Art to Live with in South Shore,” The Chicago Journal , October 20, 1976, pp. 6. 23 Ibid. 24 “Alternative Futures for an Urban Community,” South Shore Prospects , 1978. 25 “Preface,” 2A. 10 the problems of South Shore were primarily cited as related to: commercial strips with high vacancy rates, dilapidated housing, overcrowded schools, and high unemployment and welfare. 26

In many regards, these problems persist in South Shore. However, various artists and community members continue to invest through a variety of community-enrichment programs, which are now categorized under the title of “social practice.” While this arts classification is relatively recent, as we shall see, it has been utilized in many respects for well over a hundred years, and

Chicago has been central within this trend.

Social Practice in Chicago

The rise/resurgence of social practice in the early 1990s has become a popular strategy for contemporary artists. While social practice and its brethren like “relational aesthetics” and

“participatory art” are often discussed as relatively recent phenomena, leading contemporary art scholar Claire Bishop has argued that these works have a genealogy that extends back to the early 20 th century.

Nicholas Bourriaud was the first critic to attempt to explain the “new” 1990s trend. In

Relational Aesthetics (2002), Bourriaud defines the arts movement in opposition to 1960s conceptualism. 27 In fact, he argues that despite visual evidence, relational aesthetics is not an outgrowth of collaborative artworks from previous generations. Rather he claims that the practicing artists’ theoretical motivation for working in this way was completely distinct from the motivations of mid-century artists. Bourriaud argues that relational aesthetics parallels the economic shift in Western nations from a goods-based economy to a service-based economy. In addition to this shift, he also argues that advancements in technology contributed to the isolation

26 “Introduction,” 1A. 27 Nicholas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2002), 16. 11 of individuals. Therefore, he claims that convivial works, like Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Pad Thai , form important micro-utopias within parallel universes imagined by artists. Essentially, the art of these works are the social bonds formed among strangers. 28

Bourriaud’s text was significant in its attempt to define an emergent trend. However, his effort to distinguish it from any sort of artistic trajectory is highly flawed, as Claire Bishop has famously argued. In “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (2004), Bishop provides a theoretical foundation for her alternative proposal, which she calls “relational antagonism.” 29

Bishop insists that Bourriaud’s argument for the so-called “new art form” is highly problematic in various ways, including his claim that relational aesthetics addresses the shift toward a service-based economy; that it responds to the digital/globalized age of synthetic interaction; and that it is a movement without conceptual lineage. 30 Mostly, Bishop takes issues with the claim that relational aesthetics is intrinsically political. She borrows the notion of antagonism developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who argue that antagonism is necessary to protect the democratic state from devolving into a totalitarian one.

Gates’ Dorchester Projects is embedded within the history of the South Shore district and the city of Chicago. In Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

(2012), Bishop articulates a theoretical foundation for participatory art—an umbrella term for tendencies in art that include humans as an intrinsic element—and presents historical case

28 Bourriaud was strongly influenced by Louis Althusser’s term “random materialism,” which argues that the essence of humanness is interconnection. He argues that it is the bonds between humans, as opposed to isolated self- ness, which defines our species. Bourriaud combines Althusser’s idea with his argument that form is an “instable and diverse concept,” which acts to create links. See: Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics , 20. 29 Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October 110, no. 110 (2004): 51-79. 30 Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 54. 12 studies in both the historical and neo avant-garde, as well as the post-1989 period. 31 Akin to her essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” Bishop probes and unsettles typical structures of analysis and demands alternative approaches. For Bishop, the examination of participatory art ought to be critically approached through the trajectories of theater or performance as opposed to painting-specific developments that tend to overshadow the contributions of other mediums. 32

Reorienting one’s approach to participatory art allows for the emergence of new observations and fruitful comparisons.

Extending Bishop’s overarching claim, art historian Maggie Taft and curator Robert

Cozzolino argue that Chicago was a site for social practice long before similar actions or events were categorized as such. In their “Introduction” to Art in Chicago (2018), they assert that female-led, community-engaged institutions such as Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull-

House, founded in 1889, were projects in line with recently recognized social practice principles. 33 The Hull-House assisted disenfranchised people with skill acquisition, specifically craft-based skills like book-binding. It also acted as a public dispensary for nutritious food, as well as a daycare and bathing facilities. 34

For Bishop, participatory art necessitates political agency that challenges what Michael

Warner calls the dominant public. In Publics and Counterpublics , Michael Warner attempts to

31 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso Books, 2012). 32 Bishop, Artificial Hells , 2. 33 Maggie Taft, Robert Cozzolino, Judith Russi Kirshner, and Erin Hogan, Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 2. 34 Paul F. Gehl, “Book Arts,” The Encyclopedia of Chicago , eds James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 2004), accessed 3/21/2019, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/156.html 13 define the notoriously elusive concept of the public and its formation. 35 Warner states,

“Dominant publics are by definition those that can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy.” 36 A question that arises is whether these artistic community- engagement spaces function as publics or if, rather, they are instrumental in forming counterpublics. One such space, Art & Soul, opened in 1968 and served as an exhibition space, classroom, and organizing center devoted to its West Side of Chicago neighborhood residents, who were primarily African-American (fig. 2). In “Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship

Between the Street and a Museum” (2015), art historian Rebecca Zorach contends that 20 th century histories of American art have harmfully neglected the works of African-American artists. 37 Zorach asserts that due to racism and a divergence from canonical Modernist narratives,

African-American art has largely been ignored. In her essay, Zorach seeks to contribute to the rectification of these lost histories by focusing on the project Art & Soul, a collaboration between the Conservative Vice Lords (a reformed street gang) and the newly opened Museum of

Contemporary Art in Chicago. Zorach argues that these spaces demonstrate an interest in social engagement as artistic labor. She also emphasizes the importance of these histories for inclusion in texts on 20 th century art. Art & Soul clearly functioned as a space to bolster counterpublic formation as it was designed to serve the needs of predominantly African-American and Latinx communities. While Art & Soul was located on the West Side, its aims overlap with more recent

South Side initiatives.

35 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 65-124, 298-305. 36 Warner, 122. 37 Rebecca Zorach , “Art & Soul: An Experimental Friendship Between the Street and a Museum,” Institutions and Imaginaries , edited by Stephanie Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 159-179 . 14

In 1993, for instance, artists Connie Spreen and Dan Peterman converted a drop-off recycling center into a multipurpose space for the community in Woodlawn—an economically struggling South Side neighborhood in many ways similar to Grand Crossing. 38 Originally referred to as “61 st Street,” it was reconstructed and christened the Experimental Station after a fire in 2001 destroyed the building (fig. 3). The multi-use space offers a variety of opportunities to serve the needs of the community. For example, since the Experimental Station was rebuilt, it has been thoughtfully developed to accommodate a variety of locally beneficial ventures, including a bike shop, a vegetable garden, The Baffler magazine, and room for small businesses and educational programming. 39 Describing the center, Spreen states, “This place is not about flashiness but forming relationships and creating real and meaningful projects and collaborations.” 40 The Experimental Station has many outreach programs, such as visiting local elementary schools and teaching children positive nutritional habits, as well as offering cooking classes in their kitchen. 41 The community center even hosts a variety of free events. For example, the Puerto Rican interactive-sculpture collective Poncili Creación utilized large gathering spaces in the Experimental Station to host the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival. 42

Additionally, in October 2018, Spreen and Peterman partnered with the South Side’s William

Hill Center for the Arts to host a showcase entitled “Environmental Concerns.” Through art

38 Jenni Sorkin, “Alterity Rocks: 1973-1993,” Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 276. 39 Sorkin, “Alterity Rocks,” 276. 40 Dawn Turner Trice, “Woodlawn’s Experimental Station Market Succeeds,” The Chicago Tribune , November 26, 2012, last accessed 3/31/2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2012-11-26-ct-met-trice- experimental-station-1126-20121126-story.html 41 Ibid. 42 Samantha Nelson, “Free-for-all: Your Guide to Free Activities in Chicago,” The Chicago Tribune , January 16, 2019, last accessed 3/31/2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/redeye/culture/ct-redeye-free-things-to-do-chicago- 20190111-story.html 15 exhibitions, lectures, and public events, this collaborative project was intended to generate conversations concerning the links between the natural and social environments. 43

The Experimental Station acts similarly to the Dorchester Project by promoting the arts, offering events for inter-community engagement, and providing opportunities for education and skill transference (the latter through Dorchester Industries). A key reason for these resemblances is that Gates was involved with Experimental Station. In an interview with Gates by art historian

Rebecca Zorach, he elucidates the origins and impetus for the Dorchester Project . He cites three significant events that were foundational to his arts practice. First, Gates discusses witnessing the

Kwanzaa events at Malcolm X College, where he first experienced the power of African-

American collectivity. 44 Second, he mentions the Velvet Lounge, where experimental jazz and spoken word were often performed. Lastly, and most significantly, Gates rented a space for years at Experimental Station and became intimately involved in the community. Gates attributes his

Dorchester Projects to Dan Peterman, who is an internationally renowned artist whose projects range from utopian to utilitarian, as a means to address questions of social justice. 45 Gates states:

“It was Dan [Peterman] who said, I think it’s time to really invest in Dorchester, where I lived at the time in a former candy store, and have a project that you can do in an ongoing way so that as your art career in the world does whatever it does, high and low, you always have a place where you can be a maker.” 46 Gates built upon the experience and encouragement of Peterman: “Dan gave me permission to take this model of the Experimental Station and other things that were

43 Jim Daley, “Concerning the Environment,” The South Side Weekly , October 30, 2018. https://southsideweekly.com/concerning-the-environment-experimental-station/ 44 Rebecca Zorach, “Artist and Arts Administrator Theaster Gates Discusses His Practice’s Rootedness in Chicago and Its Global Reach with Art Historian Rebecca Zorach,” Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 364. 45 Martin Patrick, Across the art/life Divide: Performance, Subjectivity, and Social Practice in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Intellect, 2017), 153. 46 Zorach, “Interview,” 364. 16 happening around me, to achieve those things and then root myself.” 47 Spreen and Peterman’s social engagement program, realized through the Experimental Station, has long been recognized as an enriching community space. While the Dorchester Projects has eclipsed it through mass- media attention, each socially engaged space embraces a reparative agenda.

Stony Island Arts Bank and Reparative Acts

Gates has renovated many spaces and has incorporated them into the Grand Crossing neighborhood to varying degrees of success. I have argued elsewhere that the interior spaces of the houses function as counterpublics, as they facilitate community connection, mutual recognition, and resistance to public marginalizations. 48 In this section, I will introduce the notion of a reparative analysis developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in her seminal text

Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performativity (2002). I will then adopt Sedgwick’s analysis to explore one place in Gates’ Dorchester Projects : the Stony Island Arts Bank (fig. 4).

By conducting a reparative critical exploration of the former financial landmark, I assert that

Gates engages with historical and ongoing exploitation of African-American communities through financial and monetary lending institutions. By transforming a symbol of African-

American subjugation into a platform for creativity, intellectual pursuit, and cultural perseverance, Gates advances a reparative agenda.

In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performativity (2002), Eve Kosofsky

Sedgwick proposes an alternative approach to captious scholarship. Specifically in the essay,

“Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re so Paranoid, You Probably Think This

47 Ibid. 48 See: Laura Thompson, “Theaster Gates and Counterpublic Initiatives Through Ceramic Methodologies,” essay presented in “Art in the Public Sphere,” seminar, University of Colorado Boulder December 2017. 17

Essay is About You,” Sedgwick locates a tendency for “paranoia” in literary and cultural theory analysis. She contends that this persistent form of scholarship is anticipatory, mimetic, and perpetuates defeatist effects through exclusive focus on the negative. 49 In its stead, Sedgwick advances a “reparative” reading, which is constituted by healing and relationality, thus advancing the notion that we work with what we have and salvage what we can. “What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” 50 Here, Sedgwick asserts that objects maintain ideas and values, even in cases when cultures no longer ascribe merit to said values. Below, I will apply Sedgwick’s concept of a reparative reading to Gates’ Stony Island Arts Bank (2015-present) in order to productively analyze the artist’s larger arts practice.

Stony Island Arts Bank is located just a couple blocks off of Dorchester Avenue. It has been generally acknowledged as successfully providing exhibition opportunities to African-

American artists as well as archival facilities for researchers. 51 The beautiful neoclassicist architectural design is well representative of the period in which it was built, when the South

Shore area was thriving. Constructed in 1923 and designed by William Gibbons Uffendell, the bank originally functioned as a community savings and loan institution. 52 However, the shifting demographics and economic downturn of the neighborhood led to the bank being shuttered by

49 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 50 Sedgwick and Frank, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 150. 51 When the author reached out on several occasions to the Stony Island Arts Bank to set up an appointment in order to view the archives and the space, there was no response. It should be noted that during the period of attempted contacts, the space was undergoing a transition. It is unclear if the lack of response is an indication of disorganization of the Arts Bank or some other reason. 52 “Stony Island Arts Bank,” Rebuild Foundation , last accessed: January 20, 2018. https://rebuild- foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank/ 18 the 1980s. Until 2015, when Gates acquired the space, the once vibrant building sat vacant and slowly deteriorated.

The bank itself is an important cultural symbol that Gates has wielded in multiple manners. The bank, as an institution, recalls the devastating historic and ongoing relationship that African-American communities have had with lending institutions. By repurposing the bank as an exhibition space for African-American artists, Gates signals that these communities are reclaiming institutions from a position of empowerment. Harkening back to the 1972 acquisition of the South Shore National Bank discussed above, Gates composes an opportunity for the residents of Grand Crossing to engage with the past from a position of power. This is a strategy

Gates often utilizes. For example, the first site for Black Cinema House had previously functioned as a crack house. By obtaining former sites that support harmful narratives of the

South Side and transforming them into spaces that provide a platform for African-American arts and culture, Gates combats blight. In this way, the Stony Island Arts Bank functions reparatively.

In harnessing the architectural symbol of the bank, Gates expands the purpose of the financial institution to include a living archive of culture dedicated to artisitic production and historical rememberance. It is necessary to note that while Gates has refurbished and transformed many such spaces, his cultural and aesthetic initiatives are symbolic gestures. This isn’t to infer that these sites and programs cannot have a tangible effect, but the Dorchester Projects is not a structural solution to socio-politico-economic problems.

The method through which Gates obtained and renovated the Stony Island State Savings

Bank is as significant as how the former bank facilitates engagement. According to cultural activist Lisa Yun Lee, “The bank was due to be demolished in spring 2012, and Gates convinced

Mayor Rahm Emanuel to sell it to him for $1, with the understanding that Gates would be

19 completely responsible for its estimated $3.5 million renovation costs.” 53 In order to raise the funds to do this, Gates’ team created a limited edition of one hundred marble “bonds” titled Bank

Bond (2013), available for $5,000 at Art Basel, an exclusive and prestigious art exhibition event

(fig. 5).54 The marble slabs were excavated from the bathrooms of the ruinous Stony Island State

Savings Bank and were incised with the phrase “In ART we trust.” 55 In discussing the sales,

Gates harnesses the language of social practice, stating: “The Art Bond will allow you to be a participant in the recreation of the space and secure your name on a marble wall as a founding contributor.” 56 Gates incorporates the often ignored but necessary role of arts benefactors in the realization of artworks, specifically those based on interactions. In doing so, Gates gestures to and reconfigures the relationship between financial backer and artist. By acting as bond distributor, Gates both signals his indebtedness to the bond purchasers as well as absolves himself of any such debt, due to his delivery of a valuable art object, made valuable only through its very demand and presence at a prestigious art event.

In addition to the money raised from sales of Bank Bond , Gates also secured a $2.7 million loan from the Chicago Community Loan Fund. 57 It is probable that without the donation of the building from the city, Gates’ clout, the positive publicity the bank would receive, and his independent art sales, a loan of that magnitude would not have been possible. On October 3,

2015, the building opened to the public in time to be featured in Chicago’s Architectural

Biennial, through which Gates and the project gained immense public awareness, earning a

53 Lisa Yun Lee, “Everything and the Burden is Beautiful,” Theaster Gates (New York: Phaidon, 2015), 89-90. 54 Lee, “Everything and the Burden is Beautiful,” 90. 55 “Theaster Gates: Past Exhibitions,” Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland. Accessed: January 15, 2019. https://kunstmuseumbasel.ch/en/exhibitions/2018/gates . 56 Lee, “Everything and the Burden is Beautiful,” 90. 57 “Stony Island Arts Bank,” Chicago Community Loan Fund , Accessed: January 24, 2019. https://cclfchicago.org/portfolio/featured-projects/stony-island-arts-bank/ 20 variety of awards such as the Urban Land Bank Vision Award for Adaptive Re-Use. 58 In addition, the National Trust for Historic Preservation lauded the project as one of the most successful renovations in the city of Chicago in 2016. 59

After Gates convinced Mayor Emmanuel to conditionally bequeath him the Stony Island

State Savings Bank, the two became intimately connected in envisioning the redevelopment of the city. Certainly this appears positive and progressive. An artist having the ear and backing of the city’s mayor seems like a wonderful opportunity for the population of a city to be served, particularly when the artist is committed to bolstering a long depressed sector of the city. The artist’s vision is supported, and the politician is allowed to appear invested in oft-ignored areas of his constituency without very much effort. However, this alliance prompts a number of questions: Whose vision is actually being served? Are the collaborators working on behalf of their own pursuit of power, or for the best interests of a diversity of citizens? Ultimately, is the public’s interest being served? Presumably, the answers to these questions are not simple, yet it is critical to ask them. 60

There is nothing unethical about Gates manipulation of a biased system to bolster and support African-American communities and artists. Drawing on Sedgwick’s reparative criticism, we can observe that Gates provides a productive alternative that draws directly from specific sites—like the abandoned Stony Island State Savings Bank—to collectively create something

58 “Stony Island Arts Bank,” Chicago Community Loan Fund , Accessed: January 24, 2019. https://cclfchicago.org/portfolio/featured-projects/stony-island-arts-bank/ 59 The National Trust for Historic Preservation, “Driehaus Preservation Award: Stony Island Arts Bank,” published November 16, 2016, on Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qdgEj_R4J8 60 In “Will Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Bitterly Divisive Politics Poison the City’s Cultural Renaissance,” Artnet commentator Ben Davis wrote an essay suggesting that Mayor Emmanuel’s support of Stony Island Arts Bank and of Theaster Gates’ artistic practice is essentially part of a public relations strategy to counteract h Emmanuel’s unpopular school closures in communities of color. See: Ben Davis, “Will Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Bitterly Divisive Politics Poison the City’s Cultural Renaissance,” Artnet (October 2, 2015), https://news.artnet.com/market/will-rahm-emanuel-ruin-chicagos-chance-for-cultural-renaissance-336772 21 new, something additive, and something generative. Using the example of the Stony Island

States Savings Bank, let us recall the local and historical event regarding the South Shore

National Bank. As discussed above, in 1972, when the neighborhood was primarily populated by

African-Americans, the South Shore National Bank—long an anchor of the South Shore neighborhood—submitted an application to be relocated to the Federal Reserve Bank stating, “an adverse change in the residential and business characteristics of the trading area.” 61 However, a small group of bankers collectively bought the South Shore National Bank with the purpose to actively lend to African-American residents and business owners. Such communal actions are necessary to combat redlining practices, which denies housing to individuals often based on race.62 Similarly, the Stony Island State Savings Bank—prior cite of the Stony Island Arts

Bank—had been abandoned since the 1980s. 63 However, unlike the South Shore National Bank collective, Gates chose to reimagine how the community could be enriched. As an artist, Gates saw an opportunity to provide arts experiences, opportunities, and object-collections for locals to engage with. For example, the archives housed at the Stony Island Arts Bank include the Edward

J. Williams Collection, which contains 4,000 objects and artifacts that feature racist representations of African-Americans.64 By providing mass collections of objects to the public, which encapsulate histories of American racism, the Stony Island Arts Bank functions as a bulwark against historical erasure. One strategy by those in power is to dismiss the past atrocities of a society as a means to cloak the resurgence or continuance of those processed. By

61 Kristen Moo, “Chicago’s Shore Bank and the Rise of Socially Responsible Banking,” BMCR Color Curtain Processing Project , April 6, 2012, http://bmrcprocessingproject.uchicago.edu/blog/chicago’s-shorebank-and-rise- socially-responsible-banking 62 Moo, “Chicago’s Shore Bank.” 63 “Stony Island Arts Bank,” Rebuild Foundation , last accessed: January 20, 2018. https://rebuild- foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank/ 64 Ibid. 22 transforming dilapidated, abandoned sites into spaces that facilitate cultural platforms for communities of color, Gates emphasizes generative, reparative actions and objects that embody cultural rememberance.

Stony Island Arts Bank is part of Gates’ reparative arts initiative that is enabled through the Rebuild Foundation. This Foundation, established and overseen by the artist, is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is “to demonstrate the impact of innovative, ambitious and entrepreneurial arts and cultural initiatives. Our work is informed by three core values: black people matter, black spaces matter, and black objects matter.” 65 The Rebuild Foundation arose out of the Dorchester Projects and works with its sister organizations, Arts + Public Life and

Place Lab, which are supported though the University of Chicago. This mission statement clearly alludes to the Black Lives Matter movement: a significant reference because it is created for and primarily by African-American peoples. This is often a notion that disorients, confuses, or even angers Euro-Americans as it decenters their privilege, which has been normalized through systems of power. Gates’ Stony Island Arts Bank and his expansive network of the Dorchester

Projects are led by the same guiding principles. Yet unlike Black Lives Matter, Gates does not disrupt capitalist and neoliberal systems that reinforce race- and sex-based oppressions. Instead he works with and through these structures to obtain his reparative goals. In the next chapter, I will explore the Rebuild Foundation, object-based “discarded knowledge,” and the significant role “critical memory” plays in Gates’ practice as well as the “black public sphere.”

65 Theaster Gates, “About Rebuild,” The Rebuild Foundation . https://rebuild-foundation.org/our-story/ 23

Chapter 2: The Rebuild Foundation, Discarded Knowledge, and Critical Memory

Theaster Gates’ “social sculpture” depends on the embedded histories of the objects or sites that the artist salvages and re-orients with his team of assistants. 66 These places and things often represent knowledge or ways of being, whose cultural value has dissipated over time.

While some sites, like the Stony Island Arts Bank, are powerful markers of place-based historical shifts, objects, such as periodicals, are more subdued repositories. However, both sites and objects connect to networks of linked, historical occurrences and knowledges that support a

“critical memory.” Critical memory and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative criticism each advocate for healing by employing the past to salvage the present. Buildings, like Stony Island

Arts Bank, and their historically rich contents are potent connectors to the past that also present opportunities to produce new knowledge.

The body of scholarship on Theaster Gates’ practice is primarily centered on his urban architectural interventions. 67 Generally, critics agree that the effect of his interpositions is to regenerate dilapidated spaces in service to the socially, economically, and politically vulnerable communities who inhabit them. While the Dorchester Projects was established through the domiciliary form, it has since expanded to sites associated with a variety of private institutions such as banks, restaurants, and warehouses. The Rebuild Foundation, a not-for-profit, which developed out of the Dorchester Projects , supports Gates’ other art interventions through a complex system of organizations that are intertwined with private and public entities. While the

66 Social sculpture is a term popularized by mid 20 th century artist Joseph Beuys to describe art’s potential to reshape socio-political systems. 67 See: Michael Darling, “Theaster Gates: Rescue Me,” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012). See: Jackson, Matthew Jesse. “The Emperor of the Post-Medium Condition.” 12 Ballads for Huguenot House . Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2012. See: Lisa Yun Lee, “Everything and the Burden is Beautiful,” Theaster Gates (New York: Phaidon, 2015).

24

Foundation functions as the undergirding structure of Gates’ arts practice, it is rarely considered from a critical perspective. On the rare occasion it is taken into account, Gates is framed as a

(re)developer—either positively or negatively—which is a comparison that will be addressed below. 68

In this chapter, I explore the controversies and criticisms pertaining to Gates’ practice and the Rebuild Foundation. Gates has argued that he engages with American cities outside of

Chicago to empower localized, African-American cultures by developing spaces that he intends to function as platforms for the unique artistic contributions of those specific communities.

However, he has been criticized for contributing to gentrification, as well as exploiting his employees at the Rebuild Foundation. Both of these critiques will be scrutinized. Building on this analysis, I consider Houston Baker’s notion of “critical memory” and its connection to

Gates’ concept of “discarded knowledge.” Overall, in this chapter, I analyze the role Gates’ organizations and artworks play in facilitating a link to the past and a path toward a reparative future.

The Rebuild Foundation and Labor

Gates’ practice is sprawling. It encompasses urban planning, redevelopment, craft, performance, teaching, and bureaucratic organization. In the influential text Centering in Poetry,

Pottery, and Person (1964), artist M.C. Richards argues that the act of centering clay envelops the physical, spiritual, and intellectual imperatives for inner peace, learning, and most

68 For example, see: Joe Gose, “To Theaster Gates, Art and Redevelopment are One and The Same,” Forbes (December 4, 2018), https://www.forbes.com/sites/joegose/2018/12/04/to-theaster-gates-art-and-redevelopment-are- one-and-the-same/#4dcf57367576 . Gates enters into communities that are underserved in terms of governmental support, education, and work opportunities. He then “develops” them by refurbishing existing structures and offering community programing. 25 importantly the realization that all actions are collaborative.69 Akin to Richards’ philosophical perspective, each of Gates’ processes is collaborative and depends upon the collective labor of bodies. In 2010, Gates founded the Rebuild Foundation, a not-for-profit organizational scaffold to support his growing ambitions. Initially the Foundation was created specifically to run the

Dorchester Projects , teach video production at the local middle school, and impart sewing and design skills to the neighborhood children. 70 However, it has since developed into an

organization to buttress Gates’ broader vision.

According to the Rebuild Foundation website, the Foundation is “a platform for art,

cultural development, and neighborhood transformation.” 71 The organization is comprised of many strands, including Dorchester Industries, a workforce development program; Soul

Manufacturing Corporation, a mobile, ceramic cottage industry; Stony Island Arts Bank, an exhibition space; Black Cinema House, a theater that screens African-American films;

Dorchester Art and Housing Collective, a public housing project; Black Artists Retreat, a conference for artists of African descent; Archive House, a gallery, library, and gathering space; and Listening House, an archive of records and magazines documenting African-American

69 M.C. Richards, Centering in Poetry, Pottery, and Person (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1964). While often neglected from the mid-century art historical narratives of Fluxus and Happenings, Richards existed at the forefront of experimental arts practices. In “The Pottery Happening: M.C. Richards’ Clay Things to Touch…” Jenni Sorkin argues that Richards’ 1958 one-evening event entitled Clay Things to Touch, to Plant in, to Hang up, to Cook in, to Look at, to Put Ashes in, to Wear, and for Celebration pre-empted and subsequently influenced the “happening,” long attributed to Allan Kaprow. See: Jenni Sorkin, “The Pottery Happening: M. C. Richards's ‘Clay Things to Touch’ (1958),” Getty Research Journal 5, no. 5 (2013): 197. Kaprow would infamously preform 18 Happenings in 6 Parts a year following Richards’ Clay Things to Touch . Sorkin states, “It seems that Richards, not Kaprow, organized what is arguably the second documented Happening. Moreover, its medium—ceramics—appears antithetical to the anti-object stance of the postwar performance” (200). 70 Ben Austen, “Chicago’s Opportunity Artist,” New York Times (December 20, 2013), https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/magazine/chicagos-opportunity-artist.html . I feel obliged to acknowledge the fraught and racist connotation of the title of this work. Announcing that Gates is an opportunist implies that he is dishonest, thus harkening back to stereotypes of African Americans throughout US history as a means to justify economic, social, political, and literal violence. 71 “About Rebuild,” Rebuild Foundation , accessed March 2, 2019, https://rebuild-foundation.org/our-story/ . 26 culture. 72 The Rebuild Foundation incorporates urban planning, architecture, and community programing and provides a space for both the arts and “discarded knowledge.” In doing so, Gates supports a reparative initiative that asserts the value of historical objects and art forms by providing a venue for their archival preservation. In this way, Gates wields the social symbol of the museum, while simultaneously housing these collections within discarded architectural spaces. Museological scholar and art historian Carol Duncan argues that museums, as both art and architecture, function as ritual structures that prompt a performative enactment by the visitor and frame how the dominant culture’s social and political history is absorbed. 73 By combining the socio-political function of the museum with reclaimed and restored buildings, Gates makes a powerful statement about the importance of remembrance and the refusal to abandon places and the people who inhabit them. Additionally, by centering his house-museums on African-

American arts and culture, Gates demonstrates the value of these films, paintings, sculptures, music, performances, literature, and cuisines that have long been relegated to the periphery by the majority of arts institutions. 74

Each of the aforementioned projects is based in Chicago and relies upon a network of volunteers, employees, not-for-profits, and financial donations. While the bulk of this analysis will be centered in Chicago, it should be noted that the Rebuild Foundation, led by Gates,

72 “Rebuild’s Mission,” Rebuild Foundation , accessed March 2, 2019, https://rebuild-foundation.org . 73 Carol Duncan, “Introduction,” Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1-6. 74 Many art museums still fail to exhibit a wide and diverse range of works by artists of color or women artists. Tokenism, or the symbolic effort at inclusion, exacerbates the issue. The very notion of inclusion itself is fraught because it perpetuates the idea that Euro-Americans or European men are the center. For more information on museums and representation, see: Ruth B. Phillips, “How Museums Marginalize,” Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums , Vol. 7 (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011), pp. 95-101, 329- 330. See: Jean Fisher, “The Syncretic Turn: Cross-Cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism,” Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 , edited by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub, 2005), pp. 233-241. See: Claire Farago, “Introduction: Inclusions and Exclusions: Representing Adequately,” Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum , edited by Claire J. Farago and Donald Preziosi (Aldershot, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 2004), pp. 621-628. See: Kathleen Ash-Milby and Ruth B. Phillips, “Inclusivity or Sovereignty? Native Arts in the Gallery and Museum since 1992,” Art Journal 76, no. 2 (2017): 10-38. 27 extends to other cities, including Akron, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit,

Michigan; and Gary, Indiana. 75 The Rebuild Foundation’s stated mission is “to demonstrate the impact of innovative, ambitious and entrepreneurial arts and cultural initiatives. Our work is informed by three core values: black people matter, black spaces matter, and black objects matter.” 76 However, despite this apparently straightforward objective, the Foundation has not been without controversy.

On May 23, 2017, the South Side Weekly published an editorial with the provocative title,

“Cracks in the Foundation: Former Employees of Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation Allege

Mistreatment,” which centers on accusations from former employees of the Rebuild Foundation.

The newspaper article provides a platform for individuals accusing the organization of

discrimination and the exploitation of African-American workers, retaliation against their raising

of concerns, and withholding payments. 77 Notably, this article has been condemned for being

poorly researched and implicitly biased against Gates. 78 However, a comment posted by “Felice” beneath the digital publication on June 21, 2018, is arresting. She states that she was an

75 “Knight Foundation Invests $3.5 Million to Help UChicago Expand a Model for Community Revitalization,” UChicago News (May 8, 2014), accessed March 2, 2019, https://news.uchicago.edu/story/knight-foundation-invests- 35-million-expand-community-revitalization-model . In addition, according to Place Lab, other cities engaged with include “other Knight Communities.” This likely refers to the Knight Foundation, whose listed cities are: Charlotte, North Carolina, Macon, Georgia, Miami, Florida, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, San Jose, California, and St Paul, Minnesota. See: “Place Lab,” University of Chicago , accessed March 2, 2019, https://placelab.uchicago.edu . See: “Community and National Initiative,” Knight Foundation , accessed March 2, 2019, https://knightfoundation.org/programs/communities . 76 Theaster Gates, “About Rebuild,” The Rebuild Foundation . https://rebuild-foundation.org/our-story/ 77 Christian Belanger and Mari Cohen, “Cracks in the Foundation: Former Employees of Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation Allege Mistreatment,” South Side Weekly , May 23, 2017. https://southsideweekly.com/cracks-in- theaster-gates-rebuild-foundation/ 78 On the article, Ethan Michaeli, author of The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama (2016), writes: “I have been generally impressed with the quality of journalism produced by South Side Weekly, but this article is poorly reported, poorly sourced, badly written, lacks context and relevance, and, most importantly, completely misrepresents the work of Place Lab, the Rebuild Foundation, Theaster Gates and especially his staff as I have experienced it personally.” See: Ethan Michaeli, “Thoughts on Cracks in the Foundation,” South Side Weekly , May 25, 2017. https://southsideweekly.com/cracks-in-theaster-gates-rebuild-foundation/ 28 employee of Gates for three months. In that time, her workload doubled despite a verbal agreement to part-time employment. 79 She also alleges that Gates asked her to facilitate an illegal rehabilitation of a building. When Felice raised concerns in an open-staff meeting, she contends that she was verbally denigrated. Felice states, “Theaster is unethical, disorganized, and driven by his oversized ego…[his defenders] only see what Theaster wants them to see, because he is adept at performing for white people that he can use.” It is difficult to gather if Felice’s criticism is an outlier or the standard within the organization. These concerns give reason to approach the

Rebuild Foundation from a stance of skepticism. In opposition to Felice’s allegations, another commenter upon the story, “Chris,” claimed to have attended over a dozen events in a year and a half at Stony Island Arts Bank, the Arts Incubator, and Black Cinema House. 80 He argues that the programing, films, and events serve to disseminate and encourage knowledge production through mutual engagement. He also indicates the high value of these events, being open and free to the public, which he declares is beneficial to the community because they provide sites dedicated to discussion on, for example, redlining practices. 81

Due to the array of perspectives on the Rebuild Foundation, it is difficult to determine concretely what has occurred within the organization. Given the small scale of the Rebuild

Foundation, some accusations—including the allegations that over the past year, over twenty

79 Comments made by “Felice” on Belanger and Cohen, “Cracks in the Foundation: Former Employees of Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation Allege Mistreatment,” (June 21, 2018). She writes, “ I signed the contract and sent it back to Theaster and Sheryl Papier—the Executive Director at the time. Neither Theaster nor Sheryl ever countersigned the contract. I went from working part-time the first month to working basically full-time doing a lot of things that were not in my contract in months two and three.” 80 Comments made by “Chris” on Belanger and Cohen, “Cracks in the Foundation: Former Employees of Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation Allege Mistreatment,” (May 30, 2017), https://southsideweekly.com/cracks-in-theaster- gates-rebuild-foundation/ 81 Ibid. Redlining is a practice of denying certain people from moving into a neighborhood by raising prices or directly refusing to sell. These practices have historically been enacted along racial or ethnic distinctions. Redlining has been and arguably continues to be rampant in Chicago. See: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy , first ed. (New York: One World, 2017). 29

Rebuild employees have quit—are alarming. 82 According to the Foundation’s 2016 IRS non- profit tax-exempt forms, Rebuild has twenty-two paid employees and twenty volunteers. 83

However, this level of staff turnover could have a variety of explanations.

Additionally, however, the Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition, a group formed by some Rebuild employees in partnership with the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative and the Kinfolk Collective, has lobbed another compelling criticism. 84 On April 20, 2017, the

Rebuild Foundation’s twitter handle, @rebuildfdn, posted a document of listed grievances against the Rebuild Foundation, for which the Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition claimed responsibility. The tweeted document detailed a collection of charges describing a toxic environment for the African-American workforce, an exclusionary white-managerial class, and inequities in financial compensation for employees of color. Additional commentary was also included that claimed Gates’ catch-line “ethical redevelopment” was a code word for gentrification. 85 Furthermore, the document also included a statement that directly denounced

Gates: “The Rebuild Foundation under Theaster Gates treats community development as an artistic medium to express the artist’s desires rather than a social practice/experimental strategy for neighborhood transformation.” 86 The original posting was quickly deleted, but was reposted

82 Christian Belanger and Mari Cohen, “Cracks in the Foundation: Former Employees of Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation Allege Mistreatment,” South Side Weekly , May 23, 2017. https://southsideweekly.com/cracks-in- theaster-gates-rebuild-foundation/ 83 United States Department of Treasure, Internal Revenue Service, Non-Profit Tax-Exempt 501 (c) (3) Form: The Rebuild Foundation , (Washington, DC: 2016). 84 According to the Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition manifesto posted on Twitter on April 20, 2017. See: Black and Brown Workers Collective and Kinfolk Collective, “Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition Demands,” Docdroid , April 21, 2017, https://www.docdroid.net/74GoS2c/black-artists-and-artisans-labor-coaltion- demands.pdf 85 Ethical redevelopment is a phrase Gates uses to describe his urban rejuvenation approach. See: “Ethical Redevelopment,” Place Lab , accessed April 4, 2019, https://placelab.uchicago.edu/ethical-redevelopment. 86 Black and Brown Workers Collective and Kinfolk Collective, “Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition Demands,” Docdroid , April 21, 2017, https://www.docdroid.net/74GoS2c/black-artists-and-artisans-labor-coaltion- demands.pdf 30 the following day by South Side Weekly reporter Olivia Stovicek. 87 The Rebuild Foundation responded by contending that the account was hacked (rather than committed internally) and announced that a public forum would be held to discuss concerns of former employees, African-

American artists, and neighborhood members. 88

In addition to slinging scathing criticisms, the Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition also demanded that Gates, the executive director, and Amy Schachman, the director of programs and development, step down. While Schachman did resign shortly after the Twitter tirade, Gates remained on as Executive Director. 89 According to Sheree Goertzen, the operations manager at the time, an internal report led by the Foundation looked into its effect on the community. 90

However, this report was not released externally for review, which raises concerns about the findings. In light of this, how does one reconcile the internal politics of an organization with the community-centric work that they do? Gates has expressed concern that his interventions may contribute to shifting the demographics of his neighborhood, but he maintains that his focus is on rejuvenating existing spaces rather than creating new ones. 91 However, if one is aware that one’s actions may be negatively affecting a community, what is the ethical response?

The Rebuild Foundation and Gentrification

87 Olivia Stovicek, “Black Arts & Artisans Labor Coalition’s demands to the Rebuild Foundn, publicized on Foundn’s twittr & since deleted,” Twitter ( April 21, 2017), accessed March 6, 2019, https://twitter.com/o_stovicek/status/855438743498625024 . 88 “Statement from Rebuild Foundation’s Board of Directors,” Rebuild Foundation , accessed March 6, 2019, https://rebuild-foundation.org/boardstatement/ . I have not been able to locate any evidence that this forum either did or did not occur. 89 Anjulie Rao, “Intentions and Impact,” American Craft Council (September 4, 2017), accessed March 6, 2019, https://craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/intentions-and-impact . 90 Ibid. 91 Theaster Gates, “Embedded,” Immersive Life Practices , ed. Daniel Tucker, Interviewed by Jacqueline Stewart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 152-153. 31

In her article, “Art and Gentrification,” historian of contemporary art Larne Abse Gogarty grapples with the trend in social practice to engage with housing, which she likens to an invasive abuse of communities. Gogarty takes issue with Gates’ approach, particularly his ties to the political and social elite. 92 She states, “His Rebuild Foundation is based on compliance with a system that perpetuates the social issues it attempts to improve. Put cynically, Gates’ ‘ecological system’ involves the Rebuild Foundation acting as a kind of feel-good money laundering facility for the commercial art world and corporate developers.” 93 Due to Gates’ entanglement with private and public entities, Gogarty’s criticism is reasonable and demands further scrutiny, particularly given the labyrinthine snarl of not-for-profits that support Gates’ vision (fig 6).

ArtHouse (2016 –present), an initiative Gates spearheaded in Gary, Indiana, is a “Social

Kitchen” that focuses on commerce, culinary education, and cuisine-centric convivial gatherings. 94 The project emerged from an ongoing collaboration between Gates and the city government of Gary to create a community-centered space. According to the Mayor of Gary,

Karen Freeman-Wilson, “public art—combined with design, community engagement, and private and government investment—can transform the way we imagine a city.” 95 ArtHouse is an initiative that is supported by Place Lab, an organization that describes itself as a “catalyst for mindful urban transformation and creative redevelopment for equitable transformation and livable cities.” 96 Founded in 2014, Place Lab is a partnership between Arts + Public Life, of which Gates is the director, and the Harris School for Public Policy. 97 Place Lab is in service to

92 Larne Abse Gogarty, “Art and Gentrification,” Art Monthly (February 2014): 7-14. 93 Gogarty, “Art and Gentrification,” 8. 94 ArtHouse: A Social Kitchen,” Bloomberg Philanthropies , accessed March 2,2019, https://publicartchallenge.bloomberg.org/projects/arthouse-a-social-kitchen/ . 95 Ibid. 96 “Place Lab,” University of Chicago , accessed March 2, 2019, https://placelab.uchicago.edu . 97 Ibid. 32

Gates’ vision in seeking to influence policy changes by empowering artists to become civic leaders. 98 Place Lab, Arts + Public Life, and the Harris School for Public Policy are each supported by the University of Chicago, where Gates works as a professor of visual art. While this initiative seems to be positive for Gary, it has been criticized at the local level. 99

It is vital to address Gogarty’s accusations that Gates’ work is inviting gentrification.

Gentrification is the displacement of humans along racial and class lines to increase property values and therefore profits themselves. The problem of gentrification is a critical issue to consider in an analysis of Gates and the Rebuild Foundation because his artwork alters actual neighborhoods and their residents. It can be challenging to locate gentrification in its early stages. While there can be early indicators of gentrification—such as specific types of new businesses, like cafes, moving in and raising property values—it can be difficult to pinpoint the phenomenon in its beginning stages. However, can gentrification be detected prior to these visible markers?

In The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Leisure, Community, and

Everyday Life (2002), urban-studies theorist Richard Florida envisions a new type of city in the wake of American manufacturing centers. 100 Despite various attempts to bring those jobs back to the United States, corporations continue to locate the bulk of their manufacturing abroad. In his

2004 follow-up, Cities and the Creative Class (2004), Florida argues that as late as the 1950s, a mass migration to urban centers for manufacturing jobs signaled the death of the agricultural economy. 101 At this time, less than fifteen percent of the American population could be described

98 “Place Lab,” University of Chicago , accessed March 2, 2019, https://placelab.uchicago.edu . 99 Joseph Cruz (Chicago-based artist), “Interview with Laura Thompson,” January 21, 2019. 100 Richard Florida. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 101 Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (Hoboken: Routledge, 2004), 4. 33 as having creative careers. 102 However, he asserts that between the mid-1980s and the mid-

2000s, creativity became a propulsive force of the American economy. 103 For Florida, the creative sector includes those in the fields of science and engineering, research and development, and the “technology-based industries, in arts, music, culture, and aesthetic and design work, or in the knowledge-based professions of health care, finance, and law.” 104 Florida acknowledges that urban centers have been taken over by the creative class, which has led to great economic inequities. 105 The paradox of Florida’s optimistic neoliberal ideology is that it espouses individualism, prosperity, and development, whilst willfully ignoring how underserved communities will be able to adapt or fit into the new creative class.

Curator Nato Thompson observes that for Florida, culture is the life force of a city. It is the structural component of place, rather than something to be contained within arts-centric spaces like museums or galleries. 106 Gates’ Rebuild Foundation fits into this vision in many regards. While thus far, Gates’ arts-centered architectural spaces and education programs have been contained within buildings, new projects on the horizon tap into Florida’s prenouncement.

In 2016, Gates received $10 million from the JPB Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the

Kresge Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and individual philanthropists to support the

Chicago Arts + Industry Commons. 107 Specifically, these donations will go toward realizing an overarching revitalization program that includes converting a West Side power plant into the

102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. Florida states that in those two decades between the 1980s and the 2000s, the creative sector exploded “adding more than 20 million jobs.” 104 Ibid. 105 Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (Hoboken: Routledge, 2004), 5. 106 Nato Thompson, Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing, 2017), 99. 107 Audrey Wachs, “Theaster Gates Projects Gets $10 Million to Revitalize Chicago’s South Side,” The Architect’s Newspaper , September 9, 2016, accessed March 3, 2019, https://archpaper.com/2016/09/theaster-gates-10-million- chicago-south-side/ . 34

Garfield Park Industrial Arts Complex, described as a “warren of art galleries and the industrial arts center, surrounded by an amphitheater, café and plaza.” 108

The Chicago Arts + Industry Commons enterprise is entwined with the Kenwood Garden project, which seeks to transform thirteen vacant lots owned by the city of Chicago into an arts- centric public park (fig. 7, fig. 8).109 According to presentation materials intended to gather financial backing, the thirteen lots were acquired from the city of Chicago during summer 2016, and the property would “be converted to Space Fund NFP.” 110 It goes on to say: “Space Fund

NFP will be the recipient of funds under the Chicago Arts + Industry Commons. University of

Chicago Arts + Public Life, Place Lab, and Rebuild Foundation will receive sub-awards in accordance with their scope of work.” 111 Space Fund, Chicago Arts + Industry Commons, the

Rebuild Foundation, Place Lab, Arts + Public Life, and Place Lab each appear to be used intermittently as different off-shoots of the same organization. Each of these organizations is associated with a unique mixture of public and private support.

At the 2013 Creative Time Summit entitled “Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21 st

Century,” Rick Lowe, African-American community artist and co-founder of Houston’s Project

Row Houses, wondered if social practice artists are usurping community art. 112 In a conversation with Creative Time’s Chief Curator Nato Thompson, Lowe considered the connections among

108 Ibid. 109 “Power point Presentation: Chicago Arts + Industry Commons: Chicago, IL.” Civic Commons , accessed March 3, 2019, http://civiccommons.us/app/uploads/2018/01/Chicago-Arts-Industry-Commons.pdf . 110 “Power point Presentation: Chicago Arts + Industry Commons: Chicago, IL.” Civic Commons , accessed March 3, 2019, http://civiccommons.us/app/uploads/2018/01/Chicago-Arts-Industry-Commons.pdf . 111 Ibid,16. 112 Founded in 1973, Creative Time is a non-profit organization with the mission to support site-specific and socially engaged artworks. See: “About Creative Time,” Creative Time , accessed April 4, 2019, http://creativetime.org/about/ 35 race, place, and the difference between community art and social practice. 113 Lowe suggested that social-practice artists tend to enter areas with the intention to alter them in some way, while the labors of local community artists—typically people of color—are overlooked and often unrecognized. This is significant because recognition comes down to a question of financial resources. Lowe suggested that while community art emphasizes impact, social practice lionizes the aesthetic.

Lowe and Gates are frequently compared to one another. Each fuses aesthetic gestures with housing, each are committed to empowering communities, and each attempt to combat what

Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics. 114 Gates has indicated that Lowe was one of his prime inspirations for the Dorchester Projects , despite the two projects’ distinctions, the most prevalent of which is Lowe’s desire to remain locally focused on Houston’s Third Ward and the Project

Row Houses. 115 Since Lowe co-founded Project Row Houses in 1993 along with six renowned

African-American artists (including James Bettison, Bert Long, Jr., Jesse Lott, Floyd Newsum,

Bert Samples, and George Smith), one of his challenges has been navigating the line between

facilitating socially responsible, housing-based art and unintentionally creating housing

113 Rick Lowe, “In Conversation: Rick Lowe, Founder of Project Row Houses, and Nato Thompson, Chief Curator of Creative Time,” video, Creative Time (October 25, 2013), http://creativetime.org/summit/2013/10/25/rick-lowe- and-nato-thompson/ . 114 In “Necropolitics,” Achille Mbembe builds upon Michel Foucault’s notion of sovereignty and its relation to biopower and war. Mbembe argues that biopower is insufficient to consider the subjugation of life to the power of death. He asserts that in the contemporary era, his notion of necropower or necropolitics cues into the creation of “death-worlds” and populations as the “living dead.” This is applicable to disenfranchised communities who have been oppressed and exploited through what Patricia Hill Collins has deemed the matrix of domination and the interconnected domains of power: structural, interpersonal, disciplinary, and hegemonic. In this way, power maintains control over the entire populous through inter-class warfare that inevitably demonizes and inflicts violence upon communities of color. This is a significant reason why movements like the Poor People’s Campaign are so threatening to power, because they suggest crossing color lines to produce class solidarity. See: Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Raisons Politiques no. 1 (2006): 29-60. See: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 1991). See: Reverend Dr. William J. Barber, The Third Reconstruction: How a Moral Movement is Overcoming the Politics of Division and Fear (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016). 115 Ben Austen, “Chicago’s Opportunity Artist,” New York Times (December 20, 2013), https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/magazine/chicagos-opportunity-artist.html . 36 developments. 116 The cohort renovated a cluster of abandoned shotgun-style houses, transforming them into artist residencies and housing for single mothers. The renovation also facilitated arts-based community programming. 117 Conscientious of not crossing the line from artistic imagining to economic development, Lowe sold off all his rental properties in 2013.

About Gates, Lowe has stated, “Theaster is not unlike a wildcat businessman who has twenty kinds of companies going all at once… But I’m not an entrepreneur. It’s not my nature. It’s not how my mind works.” There lies the principal distinction between the two artists. While in many ways Gates’ and Lowe’s practices offer an apt comparison, each has a fundamentally different reparative approach. While Gates seeks to employ the arts to mime civic and cultural infrastructures (i.e. Stony Island Arts Bank) on an national level, Lowe focuses his energies on one specific area of Houston. Each artist seeks to affect meaningful change and communal healing. However, Gates’ approach tends to emphasize overarching arts experiences, rather than pinpointed pragmaticism, to which Lowe is clearly committed. This isn’t to suggest than Lowe is less committed to arts experiences, but his work in the Third Ward is more intimate given his enduring presence and support.

Given the shrinking resources in the arts, particularly social practice, Gates demonstrates a new model that gathers financial support from a variety of sources. However, some critics have suggested that such a model is parasitical. Drawing from French philosopher Michel Serres, art historian Adrian Anagnost describes the parasite as “a figure that interrupts an existing circuit,

116 Rick Lowe, “In Conversation: Rick Lowe, Founder of Project Row Houses, and Nato Thompson, Chief Curator of Creative Time,” video, Creative Time (October 25, 2013), http://creativetime.org/summit/2013/10/25/rick-lowe- and-nato-thompson/ . 117 “About PRH,” Project Row Houses , accessed March 10, 2019, https://projectrowhouses.org/about/about-prh . 37 producing disorder but also generating a different order.” 118 Anagnost suggests that parasites divert financial support away from an array of communities often severed from access to funds.

In turn, arts institutions rely upon the parasite to validate their cursory investment in local communities. 119

While Gates does receive substantial donations from public and private institutions like

Bloomberg Philanthropies and JP Morgan Chase, a substantial portion of his practice is supported through the donation of unused buildings, like the Stony Island Arts Bank. Certainly,

Gates does divert funds that could go to directly support a group of artists often neglected from large grants; however, he also develops spaces that are dedicated to the exhibition of art produced by African-Americans. While there is no shortage of criticism against Gates, it is also vital to consider the overall thrust and imperatives of Rebuild and the Dorchester Projects , which utilize material histories to access a reparative sphere.

Discarded Knowledge and Critical Memory

Throughout Gates’ practice, including the Dorchester Projects , Soul Manufacturing

Corporation , and the Rebuild Foundation, the artist’s guiding motivation is to salvage “discarded knowledge.” Discarded knowledge can be represented through both material and immaterial forms such as architectural spaces, musical mediums, and discontinued periodicals. Discarded knowledge can also refer to skills or processes no longer deemed relevant by dominant forces in society. However, in Gates’ practice, discarded knowledge is often attached to a tangible form.

Employing Sedgwick, I assert that these objects and actions function reparatively within the

118 Adrian Anagost, “Theaster Gates’ Social Formations,” Nonsite.org , July 11, 2018, https://nonsite.org/article/theaster-gates-social-formations . See: Michel Serres, The Parasite , trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 119 Anagost, “Theaster Gates’ Social Formations.” 38 context of Gates’ archival sites because they demonstrate cultural value and memory. Within each individual space that comprises the Dorchester Projects , Gates stores collections of discarded knowledge. In fact, the architecture itself also qualifies as salvaged history. Rather than demolishing buildings and constructing something new, Gates refurbishes, enhances, and aestheticizes sites. He disseminates the impact of the buildings themselves by remixing fragments from sites to compose new meaning, enriched from each item’s embedded histories. In doing so, the sites extend their living histories into the present to be drawn from and communicated with.

These restructured compositions are not limited to objects mined from the buildings that he and his team renovate. For example, Civil Tapestry 4 (2011) is a monumental wall-based work composed of vertically sewn, decommissioned fire hoses sourced from Chicago (fig. 9).120

The striations are revealed as industrial grade material through the text printed on some of the hose casings. The visuality of this piece recalls large Minimalist works of the 1960s. Through the visual referent to this iconic art movement, the hoses compel the societal recollection of the civil rights era, which is further supported through the artwork’s title, Civil Tapestry . The fire hose is both a symbol of rescue and a tool used for silencing dissension. In May 1963 in Birmingham,

Alabama, fire hoses were used on crowds of peaceful demonstrators, who marched for equal rights. 121 The high pressure of the hoses’ water broke up and, in effect, forced the crowd into submission. In this work, only three reddish-brown strips, each peripherally located, are surrounded by various shades of white or beige. This indicates that the word civil, which relates to citizens and their concerns, generally pertains to Euro-Americans and only occasionally

120 Mark Godfrey, “Theaster Gates: Civil Tapestry 4 (2011),” Tate Modern , August 2012, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gates-civil-tapestry-4-l03666 121 Ibid. 39 applies to all other peoples. Without the utilization of fire hoses and their loaded history, this work would not carry the weight of the past. In this way, Gates uses existing histories to construct new perspectives and inlets into those events.

Gates’ second housing-based investment, Archive House, is filled with collections of objects that represent what is considered to be currently disposable, including thousands of architectural books from the former Prairie Avenue Bookshop, the University of Chicago glass lantern-slide collection, and portions of the Johnson Publishing Library (fig. 10).122 While the glass slide and Prairie Avenue Bookshop collections represent important knowledge, for the purpose of this chapter, I will focus on the Johnson Publishing Library to explore the discarded knowledge Gates deems significant enough to fully archive.

Based in Chicago, Johnson Publishing Company was the largest African-American owned publishing firm in the United States, known for their two former publications Ebony and

Jet , both of which were marketed as African-American lifestyle magazines. 123 Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, Ebony was the first African-American monthly magazine to obtain national circulation in the United States. 124 Throughout its multi-decade circulation, the periodical Ebony provides insight into a variety of perspectives on complex issues in the national African-

American public sphere. American studies scholar E. James West asserts: “ Ebony helped to shape national discourses on race and black respectability, and to extend the black press’s

122 Theaster Gates, “Chicago,” Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century Season Eight, September 16, 2016. http://www.art21.org/watch/art-in-the-twenty-first-century/s8/theaster-gates-in-chicago-segment/. 123 In 2016, Johnson Publishing sold off its publication business to Clear View Group to focus solely on a cosmetic line. See: Robert Channick, “Johnson Publishing sells Ebony, Jet Magazines to Texas Firm,” Chicago Tribune , June 15, 2016, https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-ebony-sold-0615-biz-20160614-story.html 124 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Ebony: American Magazine,” Encyclopaedia Britannica , July 20, 1998, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ebony-American-magazine 40 influence over the construction and meditation of an independent black public sphere.” 125 In this way, West suggests that while Ebony became a national platform for discourse in the African-

American community, it also harnessed those conversations. 126 In order to appreciate West’s claim, it is necessary to touch upon two critical texts: Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962) and Houston A. Baker’s “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere” (1994). Each of these works contributes to an important dialogue, which illuminates Gates’ practice of collecting, preserving, and archiving discarded knowledge.

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of

Bourgeois Society (1962), Habermas suggests that the role of the public sphere is to balance the power of the state. 127 In this major work on democratic theory, he contends that the liberal bourgeois public sphere was formed through the tension between capitalism and the state in the

17 th and 18 th centuries, when a textual public conversation consistently emerged through various

Western periodicals, which strengthened the political voice of the public. 128 Social scientist and

Habermas scholar Calhoun writes:

Public discourse … is a possible mode of coordination of human life, as are state power and market economies. But money and power are non-discursive modes of coordination … they offer no intrinsic openings to the identification of reason and

125 E. James West, “A Hero to be Remembered: Ebony Magazine, Critical Memory, and the “Real Meaning” of the King Holiday,” Journal of American Studies 52, no. 2 (2018): 506. 126 The materialist approach of the magazine was criticized for promoting the harmful structures that propel social, political, and economic hardships for African-Americans. However, in spite of the criticisms, the periodical became very successful and quickly gained advertisers from Euro-American companies. See: E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoise (Glencoe: Free Press, 1957). See: West, “A Hero to be Remembered,” 506. 127 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into the Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991). 128 Ibid, 21-26. Prior to this, tensions between capitalist and state powers existed. However, for Habermas, the public sphere didn’t fully emerge until the information was regularly distributed. For example, in regards to 16 th century Antwerp, he writes, “There was as yet no publication of commercially distributed news; the irregularly published reports of recent events were not comparable to the routine publication of news.” See: Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 16. 41

will, and they suffer from tendencies toward domination and reification. State and economy are thus both crucial topics for and rivals of the democratic public sphere. 129

Since the development of the bourgeois public sphere, Habermas asserts that the ability of the public to control the power of the state has deteriorated. He purports this is due to the exponential infiltration of the state by private organizations. 130 Calhoun has asserted that

Habermas idealized the period when the bourgeois public sphere developed because it prized reason over status. 131 However, for Habermas, one could only gain access to the public sphere as a European, literate, property-owning man. 132 It is on this final point that Baker centers his discussion.

In “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” Baker contends that “black modernity” in the United States is negotiated through the parallel rhetorics of nostalgia and

“critical memory.” 133 Drawing from Habermas’ conception of the public sphere, Baker re- conceptualizes this notion to address the unique needs of the “black public sphere.” Baker calls attention to the implicitly racist bias of Habermas’ public sphere within the American context by indicating the difficulty, or inability, for African-Americans to own property or gain access to literacy throughout American history. 134 Additionally he observes that Africans arrived to the

“New World” as property of the bourgeoisie. 135 Baker writes:

129 Craig Calhoun, “Introduction,” Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1992), 6. 130 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , 209. 131 Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere , 17-21 . 132 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere , 85. 133 Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 3-33. Throughout discussion of this text, I used the lowercase version of the word “black” in keeping with the choice of the author. 134 Ibid, 9. 135 Ibid. The term “New World” is implicitly flawed as it indicates that prior to European landfall, the landmass was uninhabited. This narrative supports harmful assumptions about European superiority and dominance, as well as infers that Indigenous peoples were simply a part of the land. However, here I have chosen to use the same term 42

Historically, therefore, nothing might seem less realistic, attractive or believable to black Americans than the notion of a black public sphere. Unless, of course, such a notion was meant to symbolize a strangely distorting chiasma: a separate and inverted opposite of a historically imagined white rationality in action. 136

However, Baker declares that reorienting the terms of appearance within the public sphere can empower African-American peoples, rather than function as exclusionary. He contends that this can be achieved by carefully parsing the distinctions between nostalgia and “critical memory.”

In this context, Baker describes nostalgia as a (re)construction of the past that advances a particular perspective, which supports the agenda of the dominant power, i.e. Euro-American property-owning elite men and their allies. This is attained through a process that, first, frames civil rights as an obtained goal, and then, replaces actual, prior events with an allegorical past.

Alternately, he contends that critical memory, “renders hard ethical evaluations of the past … and is the cumulative, collective maintenance of a record that draws into relationship significant instances of time past and the always uprooted homelessness of now.” 137 Baker asserts that the black public sphere necessitates the embrace of critical memory and the focus on historical continuity of “black majority efforts.” 138 In doing so, radical histories can be protected by the people and used to stave off manipulations by rival factions, who seek to advance their own objectives.

Baker uses in his essay. See: Deborah Doxtator, “Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of Difference: Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History, and Change,” Decentering the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700, edited by: Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 33-47. See: W. Jackson Rushing, “The Idea of the Indian/ Collecting Native American,” Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism. 1st ed (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), pp. 1-12, 195-198. 136 Ibid. Baker continues: “Such a black upside-down world could only be portrayed historically as an irrational, illiterate, owned, nonbourgeois community of chattel—legally barred from establishing even conjugal families— sitting bleakly in submissive silence before the state. It was to be precisely what white America has so frequently represented in blackface: the “b,” or negative, side of a white imaginary of public life in America.” 137 Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 3. 138 Baker, “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” 31. 43

The connections between discarded knowledge, critical memory, and the black public sphere are vitally present in Gates’ artworks. As a social practice artist, his works exist as physical objects that facilitate interaction among individuals. The bodies of knowledge that he seeks to reclaim risk subsiding into obscurity due to a myriad of factors, including technological advancements or shifting trends. This isn’t to suggest that Gates is single-handedly rescuing histories, but he is attempting to create accessible space for objects that support a reparative critical memory. In “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Sedgwick asserts that “What we can best learn from…are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” 139 This is powerfully applied to Gates’ discarded knowledge. On a national level, the black public sphere emerged through magazines like Ebony and public figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. However, the development of such an extensive public prompted counterpublic formations. These discourses have been recorded through many media types, including periodicals like Ebony and Jet or music that disseminated messages of the Black

Power Movement, for example. Through these material records of events, a critical memory is enlivened. This isn’t to trivialize the importance of an oral tradition, often passed down generationally through families and/or communities, as personal accounts of events are vital to remembrance. However, some objects transcend their physicality, meaning that they don’t merely represent histories, but that they encapsulate them.

Gates’ Dorchester Projects embraces discarded knowledge objects and acts to advance a collective critical memory. By archiving the multi-decade collections of Ebony and Jet in

Archive House, Gates facilitates the continuity of reparative remembrance. Akin to criticisms

139 Sedgwick and Frank, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” 150-151. 44 against Ebony , the Rebuild Foundation has been legitimately lambasted by various counterpublics who claim that Gates is contributing to gentrification and is not supportive of his

African-American employees. These criticisms complicate how Gates’ practice and organizations can be interpreted. However, the ambiguities do not fully detract from his contributions. Gates’ Rebuild Foundation could easily be read as a neoliberal initiative due to his imposition into vulnerable and underserved African-American communities throughout the

United States. Moreover, while Gates may rely on the capitalist system to realize his many projects, their functions implicitly do not. Each of his spaces offer events and programming that are free and open to the public, with the intention of providing opportunities for engagement, conversation, and arts expression. In providing free arts, performance, and gathering spaces that preserve material objects embedded with discarded knowledge, sites such as Archive House provide opportunities to both produce new knowledge and engage in critical rememebrance.

In the next chapter, I explore one iteration of an ongoing artwork entitled Soul

Manufacturing Corporation (2012- present). As a performance of ceramic processes and production, the artwork engages with site-specific histories and impulses from the British Arts and Crafts Movement. By locating a functioning ceramic studio in a posh London gallery, Gates raises further questions concerning discarded knowledge as reparative process and the role of the public sphere.

45

Chapter 3: The Soul Manufacturing Corporation and the Arts and Crafts Movement

Visitors to the exhibition The Spirit of Utopia (2013) at the Whitechapel Gallery in

London were met with a wide variety of experimental, socially engaged artworks. The group exhibition, comprised of works by ten artists and art collectives, was intended to function as a platform for artists whose work is committed both to fostering concrete changes within often specific communities and to the formation of physical objects, thereby bridging participatory and traditionalist art practices. 140 The curators of the exhibition sought to organize a cohort of international artists who “speculated on alternative futures for the economy, the environment, and society itself, asking ‘what if?’” 141 This guiding statement was apparent in pieces such as art collective Wayward’s Improbable Botany , which meditates on humanity’s theoretical relationship with agricultural procedures in the wake of the impending climate crisis. Other works such as Pedro Reyes’ Sanatorium offered free therapy for the urbanite as a means to contemplate “the science of art and healing society.” 142 While each of the works exhibited in The

Spirit of Utopia deserve attention, the focus of this chapter is on Theaster Gates’ Soul

Manufacturing Corporation (2012-present), which ruminates upon the notion of “utopia” through a performance of production that honors the laborer. In this way, Soul Manufacturing

Corporation demonstrates an alternative to toxic corporate structures that exploit their workers who often suffer from precarity (fig. 11).

140 Information taken from notes of a brainstorming meeting at Whitechapel Gallery on the exhibition in the early stages of development. Whitechapel Gallery Archives, accessed February 5, 2019. 141 “Whitechapel Gallery,” Wayward , accessed February 15, 2019, http://www.wayward.co.uk/project/whitechapel- gallery . 142 “The Spirit of Utopia,” Whitechapel Gallery , accessed February 10, 2019, https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/the-spirit-of-utopia/ 46

Soul Manufacturing Corporation is an ongoing project within Gates’ expansive arts practice. Similar to its first gallery installation in 2012 at the Locust Projects for Art Basel in

Miami, the Whitechapel Gallery iteration of Soul Manufacturing Corporation manifested as a functioning ceramics studio, complete with two potters wheels, an electric kiln, wedging tables, clay, drying shelves, and a plethora of potter’s tools. The studio was enlivened with three ceramic masters and three apprentices. Through the duration of the exhibition, a veritable multitude of skills were imparted upon the novices, which generated an ongoing performance of labor. Given that Gates designs the particular ceramic forms that the potters produce, the work avoids a narrative of spontaneous creativity and explores the act of learning complex skills, which bonds the participants through such an intensive process.

While the Soul Manufacturing Corporation has been exhibited in many contexts, the

Whitechapel Gallery installation is the most compelling because it evoked particular, site- specific histories, most notably the Arts and Crafts Movement. In this chapter, I argue that the

Soul Manufacturing Corporation , as well as Gates’ overall artistic practice, parallel many of the

Arts and Crafts Movement’s principles. However, while this movement was a reaction against the negative effects of the British Industrial Revolution, the Soul Manufacturing Corporation is a critique of neoliberal privatizations of traditionally public spaces and the effects of multinational corporations that financially exploit vulnerable communities in the global south. 143 To further enrich this argument, I begin this chapter by unpacking the history of the Arts and Crafts

Movement and the links between its driving principles and the Soul Manufacturing Corporation .

Secondly, I assert that the Soul Manufacturing Corporation acts as an intersection between the scholarship of Jenni Sorkin and Claire Bishop, both of whose signature academic contributions

143 These exploitations include unjust labor practices such as long work hours, unsafe working conditions, and low pay. 47 are often understood as incongruous. Lastly, I analyze the connections between William Morris and Marguerite Wildenhain’s rural counterpublic communes and Gates’ Soul Manufacturing

Corporation in order to determine how issues of the public sphere arise in the Whitechapel iteration. Through this chapter, I examine the links between the Soul Manufacturing Corporation and its historic and ongoing context as a means to determine the more critical undercurrents of this seemingly utopic artwork.

Arts and Crafts Movement and Soul Manufacturing Corporation

In order to appreciate the contextual richness present in the Whitechapel’s iteration of the

Soul Manufacturing Corporation , it is imperative to examine the history of the Whitechapel

Gallery itself and its ties to the Arts and Crafts Movement. Canon Samuel Barnett, a Church of

England cleric and social reformer, championed Whitechapel and christened it, although the gallery was initially without a dedicated space. In 1881, Barnett began holding arts exhibitions in three schoolrooms behind St. Jude’s Church.144 However, Canon Barnett longed to establish a permanent location for his curated displays that would rival the National Gallery. As an advocate for East London, he continued to imbue the local populous with appreciation for Whitechapel.

By 1894, mass acclaim from his goodwill campaign provided Canon Barnett the opportunity to wield the public’s support and raise the financial capital necessary to develop a permanent home for Whitechapel, and construction on the project commenced three years later in 1897, helmed by architect Charles Harrison Townsend. 145 Townsend designed a structure that portrayed the stylistic tenets of Art Nouveau, which emphasizes nature and curvilinearity. 146 This is perceivable through the vegetal reliefs on the upper half of the architectural façade. Significantly,

144 Thomas, “Whitechapel Gallery.” 145 Ibid. 146 Art Nouveau is widely known to have evolved out of the Arts and Crafts Movement. 48

Townsend was a member of the Art Guild, an organization founded primarily by young architects who advocated for the equal footing of fine and applied arts. Art Guild was heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement, which emerged in the mid-19 th century.

The Arts and Crafts Movement’s origins are situated within the social and moral backlash against the negative effects initiated by the British Industrial Revolution. During the 19 th century, the disposition of London was altered significantly; industrialization attracted many rural laborers to the city, which was not prepared for such a rapid influx. The population surge led to overcrowding, substandard housing, and unregulated working conditions, which resulted in low pay, long hours, and a dangerous environment. 147 These negative effects were borne of the technological advancements of industry. However, demands for the latest fashions prompted the establishment of several specialized arts and crafts schools by the mid-19 th century to train product designers. 148

Reflections of societal ills became embedded within the visual culture of the time. The growth of the middle class created by industrialization was both the product of and catalyst for the new market of luxury goods. Manufacturers eagerly produced stylish objects and appeased purchasers’ desires. For example, many of the large manufacturers of ceramics chose to generate increasingly ornate objects for mass consumption. Prior to industrialization, intricately designed objects had only been obtainable for the wealthy. However, streamlined processes soon produced the conditions for such wares to be accessible to larger swaths of the population.

Some 19 th -century social critics accused makers of mass-produced, opulent objects of contributing to the demise of society. One of the first men in England to publicly criticize the

147 Emmanuel Cooper, “The Arts and Crafts Movement: Great Britain, North America, Germany and Austria, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Hungary, Italy,” The Ceramics Reader , ed. Andrew Livingstone and Kevin Petrie (London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2017), 92. 148 The Royal Academy of Art is a good example of this, as it was focused on the practice of art and design. 49 effects of industrialization on social and aesthetic values was John Ruskin. In the mid-19 th century, Ruskin, an art critic, draughtsman, philanthropist, and well-regarded social thinker, championed a return to pre-Raphaelite ideals. 149 For Ruskin, the arts, and especially architecture, had a powerful influence on social and political behavior. Disillusioned with contemporaneous trends, Ruskin advocated for a revival of Gothic architecture, which he argued recalled an idyllic era defined by piety, well-observed morality, and a healthy environment. 150 In the second volume of The Stones of Venice (1853), Ruskin extols the virtues of the individual hand as representative of the human soul, desirable in its imperfection and how it reflects the interior moral life. In line with this reasoning, Ruskin promoted craft as a bulwark against the dehumanizing and ruinous effects of mechanization.

Ruskin’s early denouncements of industry and his emphasis on the redemptive value of handicraft helped lay the framework for the Arts and Crafts Movement. However, his conviction did not mature into an influential philosophy until London’s 1851 Great Exhibition. 151 The extravagant spectacle, known as the first world’s fair, celebrated the advancements and achievements of the Industrial Revolution. While the Great Exhibition was widely lauded for the innovative architecture of the Crystal Palace and an array of attractive international products, a strong contingent of critics emerged. One critic, Karl Marx, who had published the Communist

Manifesto with Friedrich Engels a mere three years earlier, condemned the Great Exhibition as an emblem of the capitalist “fetishism of commodities.” 152 Akin to Marx’s assertion, other dissenters, like author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, disparaged the producers of manufactured objects

149 Cooper, “The Arts and Crafts Movement,” 92. 150 “The Arts & Crafts Movement,” The Art Story , accessed 2-10-2019, https://www.theartstory.org/movement- arts-and-crafts.htm . 151 It was his experience at the Great Exhibition that laid the foundation for The Stones of Venice . 152 Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 24. 50 for being primarily concerned with ornament, rather than function. 153 They argued that a decline in moral fortitude was entwined with an exponentially growing obsession with surface, rather than utility. This is apparent in the contemporaneous periodical The Illustrated Exhibitor (1851) published by John Cassel. In this illustrated text, extravagant objects are sumptuously depicted, capturing the veritable cacophony of visual delights. For example, a bejeweled headdress is lavishly drawn and accompanied by a text reading: “The diamond may be nothing more than a bit of bright charcoal; the pearl a mere shining bead, the product of a miserable diseased oyster

… and yet, in spite of all, they become objects of attraction and ambition (fig. 12).” 154 This excerpt encapsulates the entire catalogue, which fetishizes the material objects that were on display at the exhibition. Denouncers identified this materialist development, however, as one that was preventable through the promotion of objects and architectural structures that emphasized use and handcraftsmanship.

William Morris, a Ruskin enthusiast, was a luminary in the Arts and Crafts Movement who advocated for, and produced, handcrafted objects. His texts and lived example anchored the movement and garnered increasing support for the Arts and Crafts ideals. Morris championed the use of local materials and the return to pre-industrial crafts processes. Additionally, Morris argued that the category of art should expand to include architecture, handicrafts, and applied arts. He also insisted that artisans should adopt simplified designs. 155 Significantly, Morris, and subsequently the Arts and Crafts Movement, advanced the notion that the category of “art”

153 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999) 207. 154 “The Queen of Spain’s Jewelry,” The Illustrated Exhibitor (London: John Cassel Press, 1851), 278. 155 Cooper, “The Arts and Crafts Movement,” 93. Significantly, the Arts and Crafts Movement’s interests overlap with the contemporaneous Aesthetic movement. The key difference, however, was that the Aesthetic movement tended to exalt artists justifying their contributions under the doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” which diverged from the ideal within Arts and Crafts that utility ought to be prioritized in design. However, each movement supported the idea that the category of art needed to be expanded to include everyday objects. 51 should be expanded from painting and sculpture to include everyday objects. For him, the dissolution of the art and craft divide was essential. He supported a return to a “craft-based system akin to that of the medieval guilds and argued for the artisan again to be involved in all aspects of production.” 156 In other words, Morris advocated for a return to prior systems that would combat the plague of mass production.

As a socialist, Morris’ political leanings affected many of his ideas. He formed a craft co- operative initially to construct and furnish his home. However, this venture evolved into a manufacturing and interior decorating business with the name of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner &

Co. 157 Morris and his colleagues sought to reshape the field of English design. While their production covered all manner of furnishings and domicile decoration, the high quality of the objects was costly. Thus, mass design was not meaningfully changed by their efforts. This paradox is the crux of the Arts and Crafts Movement. While Morris and his brethren produced fine utilitarian objects, they remained outside of the market, which produced the very conditions they condemned. Nonetheless, the Arts and Crafts Movement was borne of the frustrations of some social critics and arts practitioners. They observed the detrimental effect of industrialization and noticed the connections between declining social welfare and mass consumerism. Figures such as Morris imagined a societal shift that valued simple handmade objects and a return to processes that didn’t harm the masses.

The Soul Manufacturing Corporation is also a reaction against contemporary socio- political shifts. Neoliberal privatization has steadily gained international favor, partly due to its rhetoric, which celebrates freedom, independence, and progress. Commitment to these ideals has

156 Cooper, “The Arts and Crafts Movement,” 94. 157 Ibid. 52 certainly led to innovation and economic prosperity in many places. However, these ideals also intersect with tragedy, oppression, and exploitation.

In The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), historian Lisa Lowe argues that the history of modernity is constructed from global and interlocking networks of liberalism and colonialism, which propel Western narratives of progress and development. 158 Industrialization and neoliberalism are embedded within the histories of modernity and their narratives sanctify progress and development, while purging cultural memory of their negative effects. Walter

Mignolo has persuasively argued, “modernity is a complex narrative whose point of origination is Europe; a narrative that builds Western Civilization by celebrating its achievements while hiding at the same time its darker side, ‘coloniality.’ Coloniality, in other words is constitutive of modernity—there is no modernity without coloniality.” 159 Here, Mignolo asserts that not only are modernity and colonialism interdependent, but they are also constructions borne of European greed. Akin to Mignolo, Lowe contends that the liberal human tradition, which celebrates notions of freedom, liberty, and equality, is responsible for and intertwined with exploitive labors of the (primarily) global south and non-Anglo peoples. Lowe determines that not only are the histories of modernism, capitalism, liberalism, colonialism, slavery, and indentured labor interwoven, but also that they are dependent upon each other.

Gates’ nucleus artwork, the Dorchester Projects , more obviously touches upon themes of neoliberalism and the historic and ongoing exploitation of the African-American community, especially through housing developments. However, as an offshoot of this work, the Soul

Manufacturing Corporation mimes capitalist global systems of production. On its surface, the

158 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 159 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization , 2 nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 2-3.

53

Soul Manufacturing Corporation may appear to be a utopic and convivial performance of labor, but within this work I locate an undercurrent of neoliberal commentary. The question that remains is: does this work simply imitate neoliberal practices, or does the Soul Manufacturing

Corporation critique them?

Social Practice and Craft

In order to locate the meaning of the Soul Manufacturing Corporation , it is essential to understand its place in larger theoretical conversations. As a performance of craft, this work is often interpreted as emphasizing art-as-process, which in turn challenges the art/craft divide. In A

Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression (2007), craft historian Howard Risatti argues that the term “aesthetics” was initially defined as “the science of sensitive knowing” in the writings of Alexander Baumgarten. 160 Risatti states, “Unfortunately for craft and other functional objects, Immanuel Kant, in his 1781 Critique of Pure Reason , shifted the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ toward the transcendental study of objective preconditions of judgment of taste concerning the beautiful.” 161 The age of empiricism valued the hierarchal classification of all things as an avenue to understand them. Kant’s determination to locate the aesthetic experience led to the widely accepted dismissal of utility. While various moments throughout the past two centuries have witnessed a revival of craft appreciation, Kant’s division maintains its stronghold.

Additionally, despite separatist thinking, throughout the 20 th and 21 st centuries, the arts have become increasingly interdisciplinary. Some such artworks date back to the late 19 th century and emphasize the engagement of people. However, only within the last twenty years has

160 Howard Risatti, A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 161 Risatti, A Theory of Craft , 71-2. 54 this type of work been categorized and periodized. Artworks that are contingent upon the participation of humans have been labeled variously, including: relational aesthetics, collaborative art, participatory art, socially engaged art, and social practice. Each name is imbued with particular meanings and allusions. For example, relational aesthetics, coined by French curator and art critic Nicholas Bourriaud, emphasizes conviviality and social bonds as the artwork, rather than the objects used or created. 162

Likewise, scholars Jenni Sorkin and Claire Bishop have each attempted to frame the history of social practice from distinct vantages. In Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and

Communities (2016) , Jenni Sorkin, a feminist and revisionist craft historian, argues that 20 th century craft induced nonhierarchical and socially engaged experiences, presuming an alternative narrative from the generally accepted assumption that social arts practices emerged from modern art. 163 Claire Bishop, an advocate for the latter, traces the provenance of participatory arts practices from the European historical avant-garde to its 1960s resurgence. 164 Bishop infers that

“political upheaval and movements for social change” cause the shift toward the social in art. 165

She locates three European historical moments that incited this shift: 1917’s war-torn Europe,

1968’s protests, and 1989’s fall of communism. 166 Bishop states:

Triangulated, these three dates form a narrative of the triumph, a heroic last stand and collapse of a collectivist vision of society. Each phase has

162 Bourriaud, Nicolas . Relational Aesthetics , trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with participation of Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du reel, 2002. Bourriaud’s work is significant as it began an important discussion on trying to define the resurgence of socially engaged works. However, his argument has been routinely deconstructed by the vast majority of contemporary scholars writing on this category of art. See: Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October , vol. 110 (Fall 2004): 51-80. See: Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011). See: Grant Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2011). 163 Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Communities (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1. 164 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Arts and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 10. 165 Ibid, 10. 166 Ibid. 55

been accompanied by a utopian rethinking of art’s relationship to the social and of its political potential—manifested in a reconsideration of the ways in which art is produced, consumed, and debated. 167

While The Spirit of Utopia curators sought to avoid overtly activist work, the connection to the political is not contested here. It is clear that the Marxist vision of a collectivist formation of society has acted to provoke conflict, and along with it, a reactionary reflection through the arts, as the exhibition demonstrates. However, while Bishop locates the Italian Futurist and Dadaist street-performances as the genesis of social art, Sorkin asserts that ceramic, pedagogical practices from the same period through the mid 20 th century act as the true foundation of socially engaged artistic practice today. 168

The division between Bishop’s and Sorkin’s narratives can be understood through the long-immovable disjuncture between art and craft. While this demarcation has been justified within aesthetic discourse dating back as far as the mid-18 th century, Sorkin argues that it, rather, derives from the political sphere. Sorkin states that craft is typically associated with fiscal policy

(labor, production, skill), which affects the economy, whereas the avant-garde is understood in regard to social policy. 169 Thus, the inference is that art affects social change, while craft perpetuates the economic system. Sorkin contends production is centered on use due to the materialism of craft and its role in community building. 170 In this way, Sorkin asserts that craft actually operates to bolster utopian and communal values due to its being a “service-based discipline.” 171

167 Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Arts and the Politics of Spectatorship , 10 168 Ibid, 12. 169 Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community, 2. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid. 56

Sorkin’s observations recall not only the tenets of the Arts and Crafts Movement, but also the rhetoric Gates espouses in discussing the Soul Manufacturing Corporation . Gates has stated that galleries “should be an open space that questions modes of production, systems of power, and access to the imagination for everyone.” 172 For the Whitechapel iteration, Gates emphasized the leitmotif of utopian labor by inviting poet Zena Edwards to orate on craft and labor.

However, Edwards’ poems diverged from being a veneration of craft itself and transformed into an opportunity for her to produce something personal for the makers. According to curator Sofia

Victorino, Edwards generated an exchange or alternative gift economy by imploring the potters to offer themes on which she would fluidly riff. 173 In so doing, the ceramic performers become both audience and muse, thereby forming a complex scene wherein the potters, poet, and gallery visitors interacted and affected one another in a relay of exchange.

Soul Manufacturing Corporation is both theatrically performative and centers on ceramics, which Sorkin asserts undergirds social practice. In this way, the ongoing work ties to transatlantic transmutations of the Arts and Crafts Movement, originally an anti-industrial socialist initiative imbued with notions of collectivism and non-hierarchy in Britain. Once Arts and Crafts migrated to the United States, its practitioners only embraced the British aesthetic, while discarding the political overtones. While British Arts and Crafts embraced some socialist tenets like communalism, it remained tethered to capitalist systems. Certainly, the Whitechapel iteration of Soul Manufacturing Corporation dons utopic garb, but beneath the performance lies critical attention to a global economy that has led to the exploitation and oppression of many

172 OBE Iwona Blazwick, Daniel F. Herrmann, Kirsty Ogg, Sofia Victorino and Nayia Yiakoumaki, “Theaster Gates: Soul Manufacturing Corporation,” Whitechapel Gallery , April 2013, http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/wpcontent/uploads/2014/10/Exhibs_SpiritUtopia_InterpPanels_x8_5mmFoamex _25JunePRINT.pdf 173 Sofia Victorino (Whitechapel Gallery Curator who worked with Theaster Gates for The Spirit of Utopia ), “Interview with Laura Thompson,” February 6, 2019. 57 based on sex, race, gender, and nationality. Corporate craft, decorative arts, and clothing production are closely tied to oppressive labor practices that target vulnerable populations primarily in the global south. These systems of production have become vital to maintain profit margins for multinational companies producing a neocolonialist network. By installing a mobile cottage industry within a gallery, Gates signals a rejection of these systems. By populating an

American-based “corporation” with an English, primarily white workforce, this piece inverses production systems that exploit laborers’ nationality, sex, race, and gender. In addition, this workforce was employed to produce collections of ceramic vessels that celebrate “traditional

African-American foods.” 174 The potters in the Whitechapel iteration of the Soul Manufacturing

Corporation produced these forms—which Gates designed—for communal events held at the

Dorchester Projects in Chicago to venerate African-American culture. In this way, the ceramic forms themselves function to compel critical memory.

Houston A. Baker argues that critical memory is the “collective maintenance of a record that draws into relationships significant instances of time past and the always uprooted homelessness of now.” 175 While the ceramic vessels may appear to be inconsequential, they are actually the embodiment of a living history of peoples torn from their homes and forced into labor. “Traditional African-American foods” and the vessels used and designed to hold them have been determined by this history. Colonialism lives on in these forms, however Gates’ manipulations of these systems provide a compelling commentary. Therefore, the Soul

Manufacturing Corporation subtly critiques global power dynamics that have been intensified by the mechanisms of neoliberalism. Therefore, rather than reproduce a performance of precarity,

174 Stephanie Smith and the Smart Museum of Art, Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, 2013), 188. 175 Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 3. 58 the Soul Manufacturing Corporation harkens back to other historical moments of art collectives defined by their resistance to the dominant public. In the next section, I will explore how the

Soul Manufacturing Corporation functions within public and private spheres, and how it draws on historical enterprises.

Soul Manufacturing Corporation and the Public Sphere

More than anything, Gates is a facilitator. Certainly, the intellectual labor of conceptualizing an event or an architectural space, as well as his aesthetic sense, is not to be dismissed. However, Gates’ primary interest is in crafting situations and possibilities. While

Gates’ practice relies upon the creation of objects for galleries or museums, the crux of his pieces are the social situations he facilitates. Gates has claimed that the focus of his work is the transformation and reclamation of discarded knowledge. While this often refers to eroded ways of knowing represented through concrete objects, in the Soul Manufacturing Corporation , the discarded knowledge of craft processes is combatted through a reparative skill transference.

The first iteration of the Soul Manufacturing Corporation was installed at the Locust

Projects exhibition space for the 2012 Art Basel. While the aesthetics, components, and processes of the Miami and London installations are consistent, Miami was distinct in that the entire space was dedicated to Gates’ artworks. Alongside the Soul Manufacturing Corporation were two- and three-dimensional objects created from materials sourced from Chicago and

Miami, whereas in London the exhibition included many international artists. 176 At Whitechapel,

Gates incorporated brickmaking to reference the history of the neighborhood, which is

176 “Theaster Gates: Soul Manufacturing Corporation at Locust Projects,” Miami Art Guide (2012), accessed March 26, 2019, https://www.miamiartguide.com/theaster-gates-soul-manufacturing-corporation-at-locust-projects/ . 59 colloquially known as “Brick Lane.” 177 From the 15 th to 18 th centuries, the area surrounding

Whitechapel became a brick and tile-manufacturing district due to the local clay deposits. 178

While the character of the neighborhood has since gone through many iterations, the name Brick

Lane and its history has persisted.

In June 1881, Arts and Crafts leader William Morris established a craft production commune outside the urban center of London. Morris & Co. took up home at Merton Abbey

Mills, a seven acre complex in the rural community of Merton. 179 Originally a site developed for

Huguenot silk-throwers in the 18 th century, the compound included several buildings, some of which were equipped with dyeing facilities. 180 According to Morris biographer Arthur Clutton-

Brock, at Merton Abbey, “he found some disused print-works close to the River Wandle, the water of which was suitable to his dyeing, and with the works’ seven acres of land including a meadow, an orchard, and a garden.” 181 Significantly, Morris refused to demolish the buildings on the land, opting instead to alter them. Soon Morris adapted the buildings to his purposes of stained-glass making, furniture construction, and textile production. Away from the pollution and crowds of London, Morris & Co. was able to thrive for a short while in the pastoral, rural plot. 182

Half a century later in the United States, women were taking similar courses of action.

One such figure is former Bauhaus-trained potter Marguerite Wildenhain. Revealing its Arts and

Crafts influence, Walter Gropius, the first director of the German art school Bauhaus, described

177 Robert Bard, Whitechapel & Stepney Through Time (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2014), https://books.google.com/books?id=4w_XAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT145#v=onepage&q&f=false . 178 “Stepney: Economic History,” British History Online (London: Victoria County History, 1998), https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol11/pp52-63 . 179 Linda Parry and the Victoria and Albert Museum, William Morris (New York: Abrams, 1996), 57. 180 Ibid. 181 Arthur Clutton-Brock, William Morris (New York: Parkstone International, 2012), 144. https://www.scribd.com/book/282454084/William-Morris . 182 Elizabeth Wilhide, William Morris: Décor and Design (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1991), 30-31. 60 the school as “a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” 183 After immigrating to the United States to escape the effects of WWII in Europe, Wildenhain quickly became disenchanted with sexist institutions and gender-biased publics. Despite impressive recommendations from Gropius, for example,

Wildenhain struggled to obtain employment. 184 Eventually in 1953, however, Wildenhain developed the Pond Farm pottery workshops in rural Northern California. 185 A pottery campus,

Pond Farm focused on communal labor through skill acquisition. 186 Wildenhain embraced an anti-object stance, which redirected the intention of the community from making things to a question of process. Working with a Bauhaus methodology, she taught students ceramic techniques, although her former students insist that she used pottery to teach them how to live. 187

Communities such as Pond Farm flourished in rural settings, spaces in which the driving tenets of participatory engagement, egalitarianism, and education could be fully realized in an immersive environment. 188 Wildenhain is part of the Arts and Crafts legacy through her tutelage at Bauhaus, which was crafted in the image of Morris’ driving principles. While Pond Farm was anti-object and Merton Abbey was decidedly in support of object production, a similar impulse to escape the dregs of urban life centered each of these ventures. In each case, the Arts and Crafts principle that everyday objects and processes are aesthetic experiences foundationally influenced both communities.

183 Michael Delahoyde, “Bauhaus,” Washington State University , Accessed February 21, 2019, https://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/20th/bauhaus.html . 184 Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community , 80. 185 “Marguerite Wildenhain and Pond Farm Pottery,” Pond Farm Pottery Video , http://www.stewardscr.org/cms/pages/austin_creek_pond_farm_pottery.html. 186 Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community , 60. 187 Marguerite Wildenhain and Pond Farm Pottery,” Pond Farm Pottery Video , http://www.stewardscr.org/cms/pages/austin_creek_pond_farm_pottery.html. 188 Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community, 8. 61

Gates’ Soul Manufacturing Corporation is indebted to each of these histories, both the legacy of the Arts and Crafts movement as well as the influence that Wildenhain’s texts and pedagogy had over ceramics education. However, unlike Pond Farm and Merton Abbey, Gates locates the Soul Manufacturing Corporation in galleries within large, populated cities.

Elsewhere, I have argued that the Dorchester Projects facilitates the formation of counterpublics. 189 In Publics and Counterpublics , Michael Warner attempts to define the notoriously elusive concept of the public and its formation. 190 He defines a counterpublic as one that is in conflict with the norms of a dominant public sphere. A counterpublic is not only aware of this conflict, but also has self-awareness of its subordinate status.191 Warner states:

Dominant publics are by definition those that can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy. Counterpublics are spaces of circulation in which it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely. 192

There are two publics against which counterpublics are formed in the Gates’ Dorchester

Projects. On the one hand, a counterpublic is created in response to the systemic racism rampant in civic institutions that perpetuate cycles of violence within some South Side neighborhoods. 193

On the other hand, neoliberalism and the impulse to redevelop sections of the South Side

189 See: Laura Thompson, “Theaster Gates and Counterpublic Initiatives Through Ceramic Methodologies,” Presented in the seminar “Art in the Public Sphere,” University of Colorado Boulder December 2017. 190 Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 65-124, 298-305. 191 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 119. 192 Ibid, 122. 193 Wesley G. Skogan, Police and Community in Chicago: A Tale of Three Cities (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 272-275. Skogan discusses the corrupt and racist history of the Chicago Police Department. Although, Skogan argues that the implementation of Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) has improved relations between predominately African-American communities and the police. However, the events of the past twelve years since the publication may push back against this conclusion. 62 threaten neighborhoods like Grand Crossing and their inhabitants. 194 While gentrification is not an action imposed by any singular force or institution, the dominant mentality that urban improvement is caused by erasing markers of the past and out-pricing current residents with new, attractive buildings is a powerful force to which counterpublics often form in resistance. The

Borough of Tower Hamlet in London’s East End, the segment where Whitechapel is located, and

Grand Crossing are incredibly different. However, the Soul Manufacturing Corporation functions similarly as the Dorchester Projects , in terms of counterpublic formation. In both locations, exterior locations—traditional public spaces—generally lack protections for civic engagement and expression. Each neighborhood also maintains greater freedoms to resist the controlling force of power in interior spaces. This points to a larger concern and taps into multinational or global structural problems that chip away at the rights of the people by making public acts of resistance more difficult to carry out and increasingly punishable by law.

London’s exterior spaces have become increasingly privatized. Over the past sixty years, neoliberal ideologies have slowly gained favor over the social welfare state, with the former supporting mass privatization. However, the governmental police state often joins with the private sector to “keep the peace” or squelch public demonstrations. Neoliberal ideologues assert that democracies are built upon agreement and docile compromise. In contrast, in Eviction: Art and Spatial Politics , art historian and critic Rosalyn Deutsche argues that democracy is founded upon the dissolution of certainty. 195 Thus, democracy is at its core a politic of discord. The presence of the “other” threatens society’s ability to become positive and thus whole. It is that

194 David Wilson, Chicago's Redevelopment Machine and Blues Clubs (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 161-166. I originally made this argument in a seminar paper labeled, “Theaster Gates and Counterpublic Initiatives through Ceramic Methodologies.” 195 Rosalyn Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics . (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996), 272. 63 antagonism that is foundational to democracy and keeps society uncertain. 196 Deutsche considers the dissonance between normative notions of democracy and Lefortian views. Deutsche’s scholarly contributions have led to impassioned discussions on what constitutes “public art” and furthermore, what constitutes a public space. 197 Significantly, mid-century rural ceramic communes like Pond Farm and Merton Abbey did not internally function in an antagonistic fashion. Rather, they behaved as convivial spaces of collaboration and education, not sites of political resistance. Despite the conviviality, each commune facilitated the formation of a counterpublic in response to external social forces. In the case of Pond Farm, a sexist public disallowed Wildenhain to locate an appropriate position. Morris formed Merton Abbey in contrast to the industrialization of manufacturing processes and its negative effects.

Given the increasing privatization of urban spaces and the public access to Whitechapel, it is tempting to declare the gallery a public space. It is open and free to the public, and acts as a refuge for expression and engagement, unlike the increasing privatization of outdoor spaces often considered to be public. Unlike the Dorchester Projects , the Soul Manufacturing

Corporation is already inhabited with a functioning (counter)public. While potters may engage with viewers, the studio is not enterable by gallery attendees. Rather they may only observe from beyond the demarcated space. This dynamic recalls the pedagogical imperative of Pond Farm and mid-century potter M.C. Richard’s contention that pottery is an implicitly non-hierarchal educational medium. 198 The viewer watches a demonstration of ceramic skills in process within a studio-like space. Often such spaces are reserved for practitioners. However, in this case, the intimate workspace is exposed to Whitechapel visitors. Significantly, the workshop is not formed

196 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October , vol. 110 (Fall 2004), 67. 197 Deutsche, “Agoraphobia,” 272. 198 M.C. Richards, Centering in Poetry, Pottery, and Person (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1964). 64 for demonstration purposes. Rather it is an enclosed site dedicated to skill transference and production. Recalling the intersection of Sorkin and Bishop’s arguments, here on display is a performance of labor and ceramics social practice.

Many parallels lie between Morris and Gates. Each leader seeks to present an alternative to socio-politico-economic structures they see as harmful. For Morris, the toxic effects of industrialization suffocated the environment, eroded moral fortitude, and ruined human connection to the land. For Gates, neoliberalism and racism have denigrated communities of color and their artistic contributions, thereby cyclically depressing generations of individuals.

While Morris pushed against these oppressive systems, he also navigated through them and ultimately depended upon them. Similarly, Gates also manipulates these systems as a means to an end. Like the paracite, the artist seeks to quietly protest against the dominant systems, while sustaining himself off of their bounty. Gates’ dependencies may complicate the manner in which his legacy will be interpreted, but like Morris, he produces compelling attempts to reorient how humans relate to their environments.

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CONCLUSION

Theaster Gates and his practice are somewhat paradoxical. When I began the research process for this thesis, I had certain expectations as to what I would find. Prior to conducting this research, I was familiar with Gates and his artistic practice. Initially, I was quite taken by the conceptual and aesthetic qualities of the Dorchester Projects. Within Gates’ expansive project, I identified communal, utopic, and socialist tendencies that emphasized the formation of support networks for neighborhoods suffering from cyclical precarity—specifically African-American communities. Over the past year however, I began to become suspicious that Gates was merely manipulating situations for his own benefit, despite the effects upon the communities he altered.

To gain insight, I scoured local sources to determine the influence Gates’ projects had on people in various geographic locations. After two research trips—one to London to mine the

Whitechapel Gallery archives on the Soul Manufacturing Corporation and the other to Chicago to gain an experiential sense of the Dorchester Projects and to navigate rich collections on local histories —I have yet to come to a definitive conclusion on his impact.

Much of the information I have gathered from newspaper articles, academic scholarship, organization tax records, census documents, interviews, and observations is ambiguous at best in this regard. However, in retrospect this is not surprising. Gates’ artworks are social sculpture.

Through his aesthetic and cultural gestures, he seeks to transform, or imagine an alternative to social and economic structures. The scale of such an ambition deters immediately recognizable effects. Rather, such work takes decades to reveal a significant impact. Akin to structural trends like the neoliberal turn in economic policy, social sculpture may manifest some immediate consequences. However the deeper impact of such a project necessitates a longer incubation period.

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Therefore, owing to temporal restraints, in this thesis I have opted to explore the relationship among aspects of Gates’ practice and their connections to historical events and their ongoing effects. Gates uses social practice and craft methodologies to engage with socio- politico-economic structures that have harmfully been perpetrated against African-American communities for centuries. He engages with neoliberal ideologues and capitalist bureaucracies in order to gain access to financial resources and opportunities. Gates works with and through the very systems he critiques. However, by embracing a reparative methodology through a theoretical ceramic guiding foundation, Gates is well positioned to both reap the benefits of capitalist forces while facilitating a collectivist space of empowerment.

Similarly to William Morris, Gates seeks to provide an alternative to draconian social and economic systems. Morris sought to venerate nature and pre-industrial ways of being. He did so by creating a rural craft community and producing handmade goods. Likewise, Gates attempts to push back against neoliberalism by demonstrating how local communities can come together to create something of significance from what already exists in their vicinities. Gates’ housing- based initiatives, supported through the Rebuild Foundation, refurbish and reclaim sites and objects whose values have dissipated through time. In salvaging these discarded knowledges,

Gates facilitates a reparative critical memory and provides a space where the public sphere can become enlivened though critical discourse, knowledge production, and arts engagement. Akin to Morris, in looking to the past by observing one’s surroundings, Gates is able to present opportunities for reparative engagement.

As Claire Bishop has argued, social practice and the participatory arts are often conceived in the trajectory of the modernist avant-garde; however, she posits that this arts tendency ought

67 to be aligned with performative media. 199 However, drawing on the scholarship of Jenni Sorkin, I have advanced the notion that craft and specifically ceramic principles are entwined with these developments as well. Thus, while Gates is often read through the lens of social practice, his works benefit from the accompanying interpretation of reparative ceramic methodologies. Gates wields this approach to create sites that facilitate the production of culture through dense, multivalent historical and ongoing events.

In this thesis, I have chosen to focus on three spokes of Gates practice: Stony Island Arts

Bank, the Rebuild Foundation, and the Soul Manufacturing Corporation . Each aspect feeds into the others formulating a dense network. Gates has discussed how he is interested in demonstrating civic engagement within disenfranchised communities. As I have established in chapters one and three, Gates’ work has benefitted from the legacies of both the Arts and Crafts

Movement, as well as community art projects and social reform initiatives in Chicago. In this way, Gates interweaves histories of neighborhood-based African-American resistance to personal and systemic prejudices with transoceanic craft-based rejections of megalithic social and economic shifts. While the criticisms leveled against Gates complicate how his practice and organizations can be interpreted, these ambiguities do not negate his contributions. Gates’ artworks integrate material objects and critical memory by tapping into discarded knowledge to produce new knowledge and provoke critical remembrance. By filling aesthetic sites with objects that represent something significant or enjoyable to the local communities, Gates makes an important statement that such objects and their embedded histories are valuable and deserve to be treated as such. In doing so, he advances a reparative approach through his artworks that focuses

199 68 on individual and communal healing. For me, that is the most significant aspect of Gates’ practice.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Theaster Gates, Archive House and Listening House , 2009. Architectural Materials. Image Credit: Sara Pooley, “The Dorchester Projects in Chicago,” The New York Times (December 20, 2013), http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/22/magazine/chicagos-opportunity- artist.html .

Figure 2: Conservative Vice Lords and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Art & Soul , 1968. Architectural Materials. Image Credit: Ann Zelle. “Art & Soul exterior with Rainbow mural by Sachio Yamashita.” Art Journal Open . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

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Figure 3: Dan Peterman and Connie Spreen, The Experimental Station , Interior, 2006, Architectural Materials. Photo Credit: Unattributed, “Overview,” Experimental Station , Accessed February 19, 2019.

Figure 4: Theaster Gates, Stony Island Arts Bank , 2015. Marble and Building Materials. Image Credit: Unattributed, “Stony Island Arts Bank,” Open House Chicago , 2017.

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Figure 5: Theaster Gates, Bank Bond , 2013. Marble. Image Credit: Rebuild Foundation, “Intentions and Impact,” The American Craft Council (September 4, 2017). https://craftcouncil.org/magazine/article/intentions-and-impact#&gid=1&pid=5

Rockefeller Foundation

JPB Foundations

Kresge Foundation

Gary Economic Development Corporation and Department of Commerce Led by Mayor Karen Freeman Wilson

Chicago Arts and Industry Commons The City of Chicago Arts + Public Life Garfield Park Industrial Arts Project

Civic Commons Learning Network

UChicago Arts Independent Philanthropy/ Donations Bloomberg Philanthropies

ArtHouse

JP Morgan Chase University of Chicago Place Lab Gary, IN 300,000 donation Theaster Gates

Independent Businesses

Space Fund Better Block Foundation Independent Organizations

Harris Cultural Policy Center

Knight Foundation, independent of University Rebuild Foundation

Dorchester Projects

Figure 6: Laura Thompson, “Map of Theaster Gates’ Financial Structure,” Coggle , March 3, 2019. For better image, go to: https://coggle.it/diagram/XHsAKn9tHczTVq-N/t/theaster-gates

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Figure 7: Kenwood Gardens, as of January 2019. “Chicago Arts + Industry.” Summer 2016. “Power point Presentation: Chicago Arts + Industry Commons: Chicago, Il.” Civic Commons . http://civiccommons.us/app/uploads/2018/01/Chicago-Arts-Industry-Commons.pdf

Figure 8: Kenwood Gardens, Image Presented in Pitch. “Power point Presentation: Chicago Arts + Industry Commons: Chicago, Il.” Civic Commons . http://civiccommons.us/app/uploads/2018/01/Chicago-Arts-Industry-Commons.pdf

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Figure 9: Theaster Gates, Civil Tapestry 4 , 2011. Fire Hose Casings, Vinyl, and Wood. 1828.8 x 4876.8 x 76.2 mm; Tate Museum, London.

Figure 10: Theaster Gates, “The Dorchester Projects , Archive House, Interior,” 2012-2014 Prize Winner: Theaster Gates and Dorchester Projects: Vera List Center For Art and Politics , http://www.veralistcenter.org/engage/project/1994/20122014-prize-winner-theaster-gates-and- idorchester-projectsi/ .

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Figure 11: Theaster Gates, Soul Manufacturing Corporation, White Chapel Gallery , 2013. Ceramics, Wood, Tools, People. Image Credit: Sofia Victorino.

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Figure 12: John Cassel.“Queen of Spain’s Jewelry.” The Illustrated Exhibitor (London: John Cassel Press, 1851) 278.

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