Skip to main content

Home/ aad301/ Group items tagged row

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
John Fenn

Chicago's Opportunity Artist - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...icagos-opportunity-artist.html

shared by John Fenn on 12 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • What’s far more interesting,” he says, “is what compels someone known for making art to want to do this and how savvy they have to be to get it done and what sort of difference it makes.
  • Gates sometimes describes his work as reimagining the possibilities of “black space.” Could a block of decaying two-flats well beyond the city’s cultural and economic hubs be converted to form a new creative cottage industry? Could artistic types be drawn there and made to think of themselves not as gentrifiers but as entrepreneurs with a stake in the African-American community?
  • Gates may be performing the archival functions of a major academic institution, the social programming and physical redevelopment of government (his team hired 14 guys from around Dorchester to carry out the gutting of the bank), but he’s doing this in a way that satisfies his own aesthetic appetite and follows the peculiar byways of his imagination
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The art practice most akin to what Gates is doing, and to which he often refers, is Project Row Houses. In 1993, Rick Lowe and several other African-American artists renovated a string of abandoned shotgun-style homes in Houston’s Third Ward, turning them into artist residences, setting up community-arts programming and later opening transitional housing for single mothers. They based the enterprise on the German artist Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, the idea that a work of art could be a practical social action
  • Gates believes the “cross-training” has helped expand his thinking about what art is.
  • There are the teenagers on the block paid to clean up, the ex-con who began as a denailer of salvaged wood, Gates’s nephew apprenticing at the workshop. Rebuild Foundation, Gates’s studio and the University of Chicago Arts Incubator together have a full-time staff of 20 — most of them in their own right artists, curators, art historians — and those people manage others.
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page