Name: 【TED】Theaster Gates: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art (Theaster Gates: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art)
Uploaded: 2017-03-07T13:05:17.000Z
Duration: 16 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

which seems like a fairly humble vocation.

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

is that you very quickly learn how to make great things out of nothing;

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

and that the limitations of my capacity, my ability,

was based on my hands and my imagination;

that if I wanted to make a really nice bowl

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

I would have to learn how to make a foot;

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

you also start to learn how to shape the world.

There have been times in my artistic capacity

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

without separating people from that content?

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

to talk about the complexities of a moment of civil rights in the '60s?

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

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

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

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

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

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

if we could reimagine this kind of nothing material

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

could we start to think about tar just like clay, in a new way,

shaping it differently, helping us to imagine what was possible?

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

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

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

I became more and more interested in ideas

and more and more things that  were happening just outside my studio.

Just to give you a little bit of context, I live in Chicago.

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

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

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

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

The neighborhood that I live in is Grand Crossing.

It's a neighborhood that has seen better days.

There is lots of abandonment in my neighborhood,

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

there was all of this stuff that was happening

All of us know about failing housing markets

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

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

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

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

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

And that if I was thinking along with other creatives --

architects, engineers, real estate finance people --

that us together might be able to kind of think

in more complicated ways about the reshaping of cities.

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

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

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

This is performance art, and people would come over,

Because the broom was free and sweeping was free.

But we would use the building, then, to stage exhibitions, small dinners,

and we found that that building on my block, Dorchester --

we now referred to the block as Dorchester projects --

that in a way that building became a kind of gathering site

We turned the building into what we called now the Archive House.

The Archive House would do all of these amazing things.

Very significant people in the city and beyond

would find themselves in the middle of the hood.

maybe there was a relationship between my history with clay

and this new thing that was starting to develop,

to reshape how people imagined the South Side of the city.

that not only is creating a beautiful vessel important,

but the contents of what happens in those buildings is also very important.

So we were not only thinking about development,

thinking about the kind of connections that could happen

【TED】Theaster Gates: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art (Theaster Gates: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art)

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【TED】Theaster Gates: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art (Theaster Gates: How to revive a neighborhood: with imagination, beauty and art)

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