# Creating Heat - The Artist as Catalyst: Theaster Gates at TEDxUNC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlq5ilsfoSo

[00:23] Good morning, everybody.
[00:25] How y'all doing?
[00:27] How many artists do we have out in the audience?
[00:30] Right on. Right on.
[00:30] How many people want to change the world?
[00:35] Right on.
[00:35] I think this morning I'm going to talk about um how artists change the world.
[00:42] Uh for the last several years um I've had the great opportunity of sharing uh my artistic practice uh in museums around the world.
[00:53] Uh museums would ask me uh to think about a particular space in their museum and uh they'd say, "Wow, you know, we really love this urban planning mapping stuff that you do. Can you um can you share some of that?"
[01:05] And what I found was that there's a way in which, because of my training as an urban planner and my interest in sculpture and in performing and visual arts, that I wanted to um have opportunities to both do these poetic things that happen in museums like, you know, kind of put a
[01:24] fire truck in and think about the history of civil rights and these things.
[01:29] But there were also moments where I wanted my creativity um to expand outside of the museum to take uh to to take on real problems that that happen in the world.
[01:40] And so uh today I'm going to think a lot about uh that.
[01:45] Uh what I found was that in most of the cities in the Midwest, I'm a Chicagoan, in most of the cities in the Midwest, we have uh a problem with abandoned buildings.
[01:54] And a lot of you guys know that uh in 2008, there was this huge people talk about a market bursting or the bubble bursting and this but really it was it was this moment when um the world's greed um and our ability to kind of inflate the value of say housing stock, it it got to a point where no longer made sense.
[02:16] And uh the response was that that banks no longer had the capacity and people no longer had the capacity to take on these things that
[02:26] were kind of making tremendous amount of money, but off often not giving anything back.
[02:32] And it's really at that moment that I started to shift the way I thought about my artistic practice and thought, maybe there's a way that this problem of abandoned buildings could offer a poetic and pragmatic solution to the needs for poor people and the need for culture in neighborhoods.
[02:50] So this first uh this first slide you're looking at is really kind of like how my brain works uh in relationship to um the issue of housing and culture in poor neighborhoods.
[03:01] That that I'm an artist who thinks about uh communities, but I understand that in order to really create a a healthy uh thriving community, that it's it's not just about artists moving to a neighborhood and painting a building and putting some stuff up, but it also takes a willingness to work with educators and developers, uh uh policy makers to think about how how systematic and creative change happens in a place.
[03:25] And so I'm
[03:27] going to walk through my little scenario.
[03:29] of kind of being an artist and thinking about um places in the in the Midwest.
[03:35] Uh one of the things that became really clear was that uh as an individual,
[03:41] you know, we can do a lot, but there are reasons why these uh uh legal structures that are called corporations and not-for-profits, there's a reason why they exist.
[03:48] And part of the reason is so that individuals with good ideas could not only grow and expand their vision, but they could have a team of people that can grow that vision with them.
[04:00] And so uh over the last 5 years, I've spent time uh slowly thinking about single-story and two-flat buildings, two-story buildings in the Midwest and thinking, "How could I not just turn those buildings into um a revenue stream like my dad says, 'Oh, you know, son, if you get that building, you can uh make $750 a month and you can can house some people.'"
[04:27] But I thought, "Dad, is it possible for us
[04:29] to think about these building types as an opportunity to create cultural spaces throughout our different cities?
[04:36] And so I started doing this in St. Louis, in Omaha, Nebraska, and in Chicago.
[04:46] Three places where in the Midwest, there uh is uh an amazing amount of variety and need.
[04:53] And also there there are really amazing people already doing great things um often without the venues necessary.
[05:00] And so how could I, with my interest in creativity and culture, really think about this one specific thing, that if Chicago used to be um the blues and jazz capital uh of of our country and that great people came through there and had all these venues, what happened to the venues?
[05:18] And now where do you go in St. Louis when you want to hear good jazz music or when you want to hear good gospel music?
[08:09] Like what happened to those those where better than a neighborhood that's struggling with its architecture to to reimagine creative design?
[08:19] So we had two buildings.
[08:20] Then there were a couple of larger uh pieces of property available in the space like a uh a 36-unit uh former low-income housing project that was now abandoned.
[08:32] A huge eyesore, uh a very bad memory in that neighborhood and I thought, "Man, it would be great if uh we could think about how the arts could play a role in the reestablishment of the space."
[08:43] So we approached the house the local housing authority and said, "Look, this had been a low-income housing space. How about it become a space uh where artists of all kinds could come and it would be a mixed-use uh uh opportunity for artists?"
[09:01] So they said, "Great, that would be awesome uh and there's resource available and we can help you think about how that happens."
[09:08] And what I found was that all of a
[09:10] sudden we went from one building to thinking about 40 buildings in one city, then thinking about 60 buildings between these three cities.
[09:19] And I found that uh uh in order to have a healthy community, you can't just have housing.
[09:23] So I started thinking about other kinds of spaces like, could I find uh cultural spaces, old warehouses, empty storefronts?
[09:31] Could we start to have a kind of campaign not only for um artists living in spaces, but also artists uh working and thriving in spaces?
[09:40] Could we could we create new economies so that as we were working on uh the school system, we would also be working on the housing piece, we'd also be able able to think about a creative labor force.
[09:51] Then we could start to think about the possibility of restaurants, small cafes, grocery stores, that it was a I kind of incidentally found myself helping to restore a neighborhood just because I had an itch for old buildings and I was pretty good with a hammer and a real desire to see culture happen in
[10:13] the place where I live and the most beautiful things in a city happen instead of having to go downtown or to the north side of Chicago.
[10:19] I wanted those things to happen in in the hood on the south side.
[10:25] And so I started thinking about these buildings as a kind of constellation in inside of one square block or four square blocks.
[10:31] There was like 40 new housing units.
[10:33] There's some commercial space.
[10:35] There's a big old venue that's been abandoned for a long time and I started to understand that if I were to talk to other people that were actually really good at uh creating new space, talk to developers and architects, that maybe they could be uh partners partners in this work.
[10:52] And so that's what we did.
[10:54] We started thinking about, wow, maybe there's uh something here that if we could find some five some some private resource that could think about these buildings, invest um that money into those buildings, then have a not-for-profit that could support um the program that happens in that space and the
[11:13] Not-for-profit could with sweat and love encourage other people to think about that space that the space would become active again.
[11:22] Money plus an abandoned building equals an active building, right?
[11:24] But then we thought that there's something also that has to do with what are the what are the structures by which artists can be really successful at being change makers in a neighborhood.
[11:36] And we found that sometimes it's good to partner with organizations that are already doing cool stuff like Habitat for Humanity or in Chicago we have an organization called Architreasures where they train architects to think about um uh places that uh that don't normally get good design uh influence or professional support.
[11:58] And we've been kind of working on that.
[12:00] And so now these buildings in in these varying cities, they do lots of different things.
[12:05] They think about the visual arts.
[12:06] We have book readings.
[12:08] We have lectures.
[12:08] And people are wanting to now adopt those spaces as important cultural sites around the country.
[12:16] We also found that uh while my primary interest was in making sure that my neighbors in that neighborhood had a a new library resource or had a a Sunday brunch spot where they could listen to their favorite jazz album, that the more that we did this work, the more that people from all over the city wanted to participate in this work that we were doing.
[12:40] And so uh where my neighborhood Greater Grand Crossing had been stigmatized as a place where no one wanted to be, now some of the hottest jazz readings, poetry readings, uh jazz ensembles were coming that people were starting to come to this place and we were creating heat.
[12:56] That artists have the capacity when we gather to do things that nobody else in the world can do.
[13:00] We can like out of a series of nothings, a series of abandoned buildings, uh out of detritus, little paper, like things that that people would discard, artists have a way of connecting belief and ability and a willing to like work
[13:18] at a thing longer than most would so that uh there is heat.
[13:24] And it's cold right now in in North Carolina.
[13:25] Wherever there's heat, you kind of want to be around it.
[13:29] And what we found is that people wanted to be wherever artists were.
[13:34] And that if artists could uh manage some of that cultural capital that we had, that we could be the real transformers of communities.
[13:42] And so I've been trying to figure out like, is there a model in this?
[13:43] Is there a way that we could think about um these connectors, these buildings as being the sites where um things happen and then this thing kind of becomes a model whereby um in Durham, uh in Raleigh, uh in in other parts of the northeast and the southwest, like are there other ways that we could take this model and share it with others?
[14:09] I believe that there's a way in which folk who are creative like us, combined with really practical skills and like learning a lot about um how buildings are financed, how
[14:19] how banks work, if we could take that creativity and pragmatism, uh we could do things throughout throughout the country and throughout the world.
[14:28] That I really believe that artists have the capacity to change the world and I hope you guys will join me in changing communities.
[14:34] Thanks so much.