I am inspired by Theaster Gates, one Man, a potter, has invested his time and love, and changed a place. This is great. "How to make something out of Nothing"
Reshaping,
your wheel,
your block,
your city,
any place,
your schools,
your government,
We need this now more than ever.
I listened to this. It is so inspirational.
“All my life, I’d been prepared,” he says. “My mom would say: ‘If you’re not ready when opportunity comes, then shame on you, because it may not come twice.’” Theaster Gates
Why you should listen
Theaster Gates is helping to define the future of artistic place-based efforts, in research and practice. Beginning with interventions in small-scale residences now known as Dorchester Projects, Gates’ houses in Greater Grand Crossing in Chicago have become a nexus for globally engaged experiments in structures of individual and collective living, working and art-making. Launched into the international art world at Documenta(13), the houses embodied a new system of values and celebrated both a flexible use of space and provided a way for artists, visitors and students to connect and collaborate.
The latest example of this kind of work is the Stony Island Arts Bank, set to open for the Chicago Architecture Biennial in October 2015. Gates will convert a formerly derelict bank on Chicago's south side to create an artwork -- and a communal and creative space.
At the University of Chicago, where he is a professor and the director of arts and public life, Gates leads the Arts Incubator in Washington Park. Gates also leads an urban research initiative known as the Place Lab, a team of social scientists, architects, creative professionals and business leaders. With support from the Knight Foundation, Gates and his team will create frameworks for reimagining the role that culture plays in the redevelopment of transforming African American communities.
https://ideas.ted.com/why-beauty-matters/
Quick: Make a list of the things you need every day. Your first thought is probably what’s practical: food, a roof over your head, your health. We value these things so much that we say all human beings deserve them. Artist Theaster Gates (TED Talk: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art) wants to add a new item to the list. Here, he makes the case for why we should treat beauty as a basic service, and happiness as a metric of success.
Without beauty, nothing else matters. “In my city, Chicago, I have seen firsthand what happens when a focus on, say, housing fails to account for our human thirst for beauty, for the sublime, the emotionally enriching, the spiritual,” Gates says. If we build homes without culture, without a social agenda, we’re simply creating new kinds of problems — and we won’t come close to solving the ones we have.
Beauty can change how people act. People act differently around beautiful things, says Gates. “If you’re in an environment where there’s a bunch of waste on the ground, it’s easy not to care for that place, to add your filth to the existing filth. By making a place beautiful, which often means simply peeling back the layers of what is already there, we remove the distractions. We are able to see the existing beauty more clearly, and we are able to start to begin to care.”
Small civic actions can be beautiful. “When someone walks past flowers every day, when he sees litter picked up over and over again, a sense of pride begins to seep into his soul,” says Gates, who’s worked on just such small-seeming projects in his neighborhood in Chicago. “This isn’t about giant interventions that bring in hundreds of volunteers from out of town to ‘transform’ a neighborhood. This is about daily pride at living this life, and how our joy in our surroundings might influence our neighbors and those around us.”
Beauty begets beauty. “In my neighborhood, we used to feel the constant threat of violence hanging over our heads,” says Gates. “Now, summer’s coming and instead everyone’s talking about the next barbecue, when we’re having our block party. The hunger for cultural programming, the creativity generated on our block allows people to embrace the possible. We’ve become a positive beacon shining a light to show what’s possible. And yet all we’re doing is providing a platform for the skill, talent, love and genius of those who are already there.”
Beauty should be the starting point of everything. “At every level of the human experience, we are looking for the beautiful, something that gives priority to our souls, not just our physical needs,” says Gates. “We drink in nature, we yearn to commune with the beautiful, we crave the sublime, so that’s why the starting point for everything I do is the beautiful, not the practical.”
Determine success by measuring happiness. Metrics are important, Gates acknowledges; they’re the oil that often helps projects get done. But: “Let’s think about how to value happiness. Let’s think about how we might try to measure hope,” he says. “Building a house for someone is just the start … we also need that home to be a happy place if we’re to make any difference in this world.”
Featured photo illustration by Dian Lofton/TED.
I am inspired by this man I read about this morning in the Monocle, Weekend Edition, what an exceptional person.
Theaster Gates
I’d recommend that, after their country walk, the Cotswolds bankers watch the Apple TV series Home. In particular the episode about the artist and activist Theaster Gates, whose home is the South Side of Chicago. We interviewed Gates for Monocle some years ago for a story on urban heroes. Since then he hasn’t paused and his legion of achievements is inspirational.
Gates grew up in this neighbourhood but the luck of having a good family, talent and an education that delivered meant that he could have left for a leafy outpost long ago. However, he had a commitment to place and wanted the South Side to have the things that you’d find in white neighbourhoods. But the South Side was in bad way. There was a so-called “white flight” postwar and as these residents left the inner city so did the resources and the jobs. The South Side fell into decay when people became nervous of the big, bad city.
The Dorchester Projects, and The Archive House.
https://www.theastergates.com/project-items/dorchester-art-and-housing-collaborative-dahc
Books and the Listening House
From Monocle, the Weekend Edition
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OPENER / ANDREW TUCK Banks for the memory Every week in the UK brings news of another international bank, investment firm or City institution announcing that it will never require staff to come into work ever again (Schroders) or, if they do, will force them to go into quarantine for two weeks if they dare to travel with ordinary people on public transport (the Carlyle Group). The financial world is doing a very good job of implying that the pandemic is nothing to do with them and that, if you don’t mind, they’ll wait this one out. Meanwhile there are other businesses making headlines too – the ones that are laying off staff as retail crumbles and restaurant groups stutter. These two stories are not unconnected. The chief execs running for the hills (or at least second homes in the Cotswolds) are turning their backs on myriad businesses, small and large, that in the past have taken care of their glass-tower employees via their shoe-repair shops, florists, cafés, car washes, hairdressers, cocktail bars and more. In good times companies talk a lot about corporate social responsibility and how they support the community. But now? When times get tricky then it feels as though many of them are all too willing to wave bye-bye to all that. What’s most galling is that the deserters come across as being rather smug about their decisions and oddly proud of shifts that will leave so many small businesses  |
 And all this has happened because of one person’s unwillingness to run away from adversity. Gates has used his ability to bring people into buildings and make them feel safe and wanted. And though the Square Mile is not Chicago’s South Side, it needs more people who have the grit of a Gates. People who know that crowing about never having to go to work again has brutal consequences. People who understand that we only make communities when we sit together. And that Chicago, London, Paris et al deserve better than this. |
https://artpublicsphere.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/theaster-gates-dorchester-projects/
As we start a new School year....2020-21
virtually for some,
in the classroom,
Homeschooling for others,
Books from 28 countries, what these places have their students reading.
Thanks for stopping by, Eliza
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