TED Talks Daily - The artists re-framing Chicago | Far Flung with Saleem Reshamwala

Episode Date: February 25, 2024

The Bean needs to move over — there's a new art movement in Chicago, and it's led by artists who are completely reimagining how residents think about the spaces around them. Join Far Flung host Saleem Reshamwala on a bold, creative and winding road trip to witness the power of place-based art. From abandoned homes that turn into artwork when they are painted in colors rooted in Black culture, to multimedia projects that examine segregation and connect people who live on opposite sides of the city, stimulate your soul with ideas that flow from the heartland. Far Flung is another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. For more, find Far Flung wherever you get your podcasts.

TED Audio Collective podcasts that go beyond the TED Talk and help you spark your curiosity. For more, visit audiocollective.ted.com and check out Far Flung wherever you get your podcasts. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests.

Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. AI keeping you up at night? Wondering what it means for your business? Don't miss the latest season of Disruptors, the podcast that takes a closer look at the innovations reshaping our economy. Join RBC's John Stackhouse and Sonia Sinek from Creative Destruction Lab as they ask bold questions like, why is Canada lagging in AI adoption and how to catch up? Don't get left behind. Listen to Disruptors, the innovation era, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, and stay ahead of the game in this fast-changing world. Follow Disruptors on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. it's so hard for my head to comprehend that those are actual jail bars what do you feel when you hear that um i think about um vibrations and how they have their healing properties.

You know, like there isn't a person here per se, but that they hold something. These are very old. That part of the jail was built in 1926, I believe. So, you know, I mean, almost 100 years. That's Maria Gaspar, an artist and activist in Chicago. For me, it's this way of transforming sort of the history of violence through the bars into something that maybe sounds like freedom. That sounds better. You want to do that again?

That sound is Maria striking a pair of pliers against these rusty jail bars. They're a mix of sizes, but most about two feet tall, weathered and bent all weird, lying spread across a white table in her art studio. She picked them up from a local jail that was getting demolished. She doesn't know what the final piece will be yet, but those jail bars and their sounds will tell a very distinct story about a very distinct place. I'm Salim Reshimwala, and this is Far Flung. Every episode looks at a different location

and the ideas that flow from it. And when we think about public art, we often think of murals and statues commissioned by a local government. But today, we're on the ground in Chicago looking at a very specific kind of public art, place-based art, art that's grounded in the place it's created. This kind of art often critiques the figurative and physical structures that are also its canvas. And we're going to look into why Chicago is an especially fascinating city for this kind of art right now, why there's a movement here, and how that's linked to the geography and history of the city.

And I'm not out here driving around Chicago all by my lonesome. What's up, man? Great to meet you. Great to meet you. Nice to meet you. In person. I'm with our co-producer for this episode, Carlos Javier Ortiz, who grew up in Chicago and is an artist and filmmaker. Hey, Salim. I'm excited about today. I'm going to introduce you to some of my friends who make art that's tied to Chicago.

Hey. Hi. I'm Salim. I'm Tonika. So first, I want to introduce you to my friend Tonika. And she's created a project that's really fundamental to understanding Chicago. How do you know Tonika? I knew Tonika as a photojournalist. And then years later, she started this community arts project. And it was called the Folded Map Project. I literally used Chicago's grid map to compare the same street that exists in my home neighborhood of Inglewood

to the sister neighborhood on the north and south side of Chicago. Carlos, am I right in saying that when people typically say north side, they mean white neighborhoods, and when they say south side, they usually mean Black neighborhoods? Yeah, Salim, that's right. But, you know, in reality, the neighborhoods, they're more nuanced than that. How so?

Well, there are many races and cultures, both on the North and South side. But broadly speaking, the North side, it just seems to be a little nicer, or at least that's what people think. So an example would be 6720 North Ashland compared to 6720 South Ashland. And the bittersweet part about it is they're mostly racially and economically different from each other. So as part of the Folded Map Project, Tanika has been photographing homes with almost mirror addresses. In one of the pictures, the home on the left is of a smiling couple at the forefront of the photo. They're both white. They're standing in front of a square looking brick house. On the right hand side photo, you see a younger looking black man standing closer to the camera with a white triangle roof house in the background. The two homes don't actually look different in value. So that's the image. The context Tanika brings when she presents it is that one of the houses

costs about seven times as much as the other. The white family is in front of a home that costs around $500,000 and the black man is in front of a home that costs around $500,000, and the black man is in front of a home that costs around $73,000. Basically, Chicago is split into a north and south side, and because of the way the city is gridded, there's equivalent addresses on both sides, but not equivalent living conditions. This is something Tonika learned about up close from her high school days when she was bused from Inglewood to the North Side. I met a lot of friends that I'm still close with today who, when I first met them, you know, didn't even know people like me could be from Inglewood. And I had to learn, like, what do you mean people like me? You know, basically people who aren't like thugs or gang members. I had to be taught why the word illegal alien was bad,

because I didn't know. So yeah, I know what can happen on the other side of awkwardness, uncomfortability. So that was the first stage of her project. But as soon as she started photographing the houses, the people living in them had questions, naturally. And some of them wanted to be involved. So she brought the people together. I invited people to meet the person who lived on the same street just 15 miles away and they agreed and they had a conversation and I recorded their meetings. My name is Nanette Tucker and I live in Englewood. I'm Wade Wilson and I live in Edgewater. I'm Jennifer Channel and I live in Edgewater. That includes asking all of them the same question of how did you come to live in your neighborhood?

What's missing from your neighborhood that you'd like to see? Is your place of peace in your neighborhood? How much does your house cost or how much do you pay for rent? Yeah. And some awkward moments happened and seeing them struggle through it is the lesson. I refer to it as social justice reality TV. Because you can learn a lot just watching some other people struggle through some, you know, nuanced conversations about race and segregation. Segregation as a word on its own is kind of abstract.

But for folks in Chicago and so many other cities in the U.S., there's usually something super tangible to hold on to, like housing prices. My first purchase, I think my home was $61,000 it was 11 years ago yeah so like 2007

yeah we paid $535,000 for this house in 2009 so it was actually kind of after the downturn. She had some techniques for making this go as smoothly as possible, even in the awkwardness. One, she was pulling from willing participants. Both sides were coming in with curiosity about their twin. She'd also prep them with questions in advance and talk to them one-on-one before getting them together.

It helped set the stage for a real dialogue in a way that just throwing them in the room together might not have. And being prepared actually sets them up for discovering things that surprise them. They started talking about Nanette's garden. And Jennifer, who loves to garden and loves to do ceramics, they started talking about that. And Wade started talking about the beer walks that he likes to go to on the north side. And Nanette was saying, oh, she wished something like to go to on the north side. And Annette was saying, oh, she wished something like that could be on the south side. And then it led into them talking

about the taxes, why that isn't on the south side. And so it just kind of evolved into this really beautiful conversation of them understanding the large systemic issue that was preventing Nanette from having access to stuff that they all liked. Grocery stores within walking distance, better school system, lack of crime, more amenities I would want to see in my neighborhood, more greenery. These videos feel so organic, like a homemade video shot on one camera, which means they're all sitting close to each other, sometimes shoulder to shoulder. And this idea of BAP twins helping build those relationships is so appealing. Right when you hear it, you start thinking, oh, shoot, who's my twin? And since she launched the project, communities all over Chicago and basically all over the United States have taken it and made it their own.

I mean, I could see this being useful in Durham. I could see this being useful all over. What advice do you have for people who are artists or whether or not they use that term for themselves, who want to start these kind of conversations conversations we want to start similar projects in their hometowns well it's funny that you bring that up because um people have contacted me outside of illinois other cities other states um wanting to do a folded map there where they're at and and it's totally applicable you know I just had the beautiful benefit of using Chicago's grid map but what I explain to people is that wherever segregation exists there's always a fold always whether it's a landmark whether it's a street there is a dividing line. What I tell people is that this project has to be led by an individual who is from or represents the community most negatively impacted by segregation.

It can't be the other way around when it's individuals. Basically, the power dynamic could feel really off if wealthier people with more expensive homes were asking to see the houses of people whose homes weren't valued as highly. Could feel like voyeurism as opposed to an exploration. Tanika's overcoming all kinds of little challenges and building out these rules for herself and others doing these conversations. And it's not easy, but she continues to bring people together because she knows that even though the problems of power involve huge systems, the people in those systems still have agency. Racism started with individuals, and that's how it's going to end.

You know, people think the only way we're going to get out of this is policy and voting. Well, it ain't got us to where we want to be. And that's because it's the relationships and the thoughts that are systemic. And the policies and laws reflect the thoughts and biases of the people who are within those systems. And I want to help people know that that's what has to change. and biases of the people who are within those systems. And I want to help people know that that's what has to change. Thank you so much. It's been a joy to sit on your front porch,

to hear the birds, to hear the springtime in Chicago energy. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do.

And with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca slash host. Driving around with you, looking at this map, I got to ask, why do these two communities have such different access to resources? Well, you know, Salim, on some level, I think they were always intended to have different resources. Well, between 1915 and about 1970s, six million African-Americans left the South and migrated north. And in many ways, you know, this internal migration created what we consider the modern American city, and particularly in Chicago. And Black Chicagoans were big players in building the city's financial and cultural wealth, but then they were excluded from it.

And today, the consequences of redlining in Black neighborhoods, which took place, you know, about like 50-some-plus years ago, it still affects Black families' abilities to build wealth. Yeah, that's a complicated history. But the Folded Map Project is such an unbelievably clear intro to geography and place-based art in chicago you know we opened this episode with the sounds of a jail and a part of me was hesitant about that because opening with jails felt so heavy but the building that those bars were a part of is so huge contains so many lives that yeah of course it has to be included in place-based art in this

area. Yeah, that's right, brother. When I think about spaces like that and art, sometimes it's hard for me to think about how art can be done in them without it becoming a sort of cliche outside artist as savior type thing. How do people even start to approach that? Well, my friend Maria, who's playing those jail bar songs earlier, she grew up in the same neighborhood as that jail and she makes place-based art in a way that feels fresh and honest. Growing up in a little village, you know, has its softness and its hardness. And its softness is, there's a lot of that. You know, there's the radio, there's, you know, my mom, there's schools, there's the teachers, there's the activists,

the community organizations. Like all of that to me represents the tenderness of the community. But it also has the hardness, right? Like, you know, having friends shot and killed. Growing up, as she went to school, she found a canvas for an unignorable display of that hardness she mentioned. One she rode past every day, a gigantic walled building that runs for blocks. The Cook County Jail. The jail is 96 acres in size and it's equivalent to 74 American football fields. You said 74? Four football fields. It's one of those numbers where it's like, oh man, it's even hard for me to imagine that number of football fields. And it's the largest, the second largest single-site jail in the country.

So, you know, it's some, many people move through that jail. Well, to go to trial, a waiting trial, but then they might also be transferred to a prison and out of the city. The sheriff himself has said people are sometimes waiting up to seven years. One person or 13,000 people, it's important to be critical in either case. But the scale then really brings into color the way that these racist policies have created our, you know, what we call our criminal justice system.

And it's this injustice that motivated Maria to create the 96 Acres Project in 2012 to share stories from people inside the jail. It took about two to three years to get that, to get the ball rolling. And it included community organizations in the neighborhood, a public art organization, and lots of other people were involved, teachers and other artists and just people who cared about the issue, system impacted people. The 96 Acres Project ended up producing audio installations, projections, temporary murals, street parties, a huge variety of artistic output centered around the jail and the community around it. One of the biggest projects was called Radioactive. There were about 25 men who

participated in that project and we produced audio and visual content like drawings. And we recorded original stories inside of the jail room that we were working in. And those were all broadcast and projected onto the jail wall for public debut. This is WLPN LP Chicago 105.5 FM. You're listening to Radioactive, a series of radio broadcasts featuring original narratives and audio recordings made with incarcerated individuals at Cook County Jail. This work accompanies a video being projected on the north side of Cook County Jail at 26th and Francisco Avenue. Radio activity is something that I like because it spreads. Without you, you don't have any power over that.

And it's hard to measure. You have to have a certain instrument to measure it. And the fact that they use radioactivity with your x-rays to see what's inside, you know, it's fascinating. This is Christopher Colbin. He was a collaborator with Maria on 96 Acres. I like to collaborate with Maria because she is the best in bringing out the real person. And so that's how we met and I have been latching on

ever since. In one segment of the project, huge animations were projected onto the walls of the jail. It became a massive canvas. And while those projections were shown, they held a broadcast, blasting audio of stories from inside the jail. The day of the broadcast, the streets were already full of people because the project launched on Mexican Independence Weekend. So 26th Street during that weekend is pretty nutty. You know, there's like tons of giant Mexican flags sticking out of people's car windows. There's just a lot of action and activity and celebration. And then you'll see the projected images onto the jail wall in the background. And you really kind of feel the way that these communities coexist with one another. I mean, in some ways, I think it's one community.

You know, like it is one. The jail is just, it's in it. It's fortress, but it's in the community. But, you know, they're kind of, they're interacting. They're, you know, kind of relating to one another in different ways. Many people were just walking by, biking. Families that lived a block away saw what was happening. They just, they strolled up with their lawn, again, lawn chairs keep coming up here,

but they brought their lawn chairs and just sat and watched the 35-minute animation on a loop. And the ensemble members who were incarcerated and who had since been released came and talked about their experience. It temporarily disrupted the line between inside and outside of the jail. People inside still couldn't get out, but that wall became a lot more porous. At the very least, stories and ideas were flowing in and out of the Cook County Jail in a way they hadn't before. Before I got a lawyer and so forth, I was looking at 33 years.

Luckily, I only did six months. I was looking at 33 years. But even with the thought of 33 years, I was thinking, man, I'm going to be able to get out and see what I've done here. And I'm going to be able to stand around some people who haven't been inside and they're going to hear our stories from inside. I'm going to be able to be out and see this. This is going to be like an aha moment for the world I gotta do whatever it takes to be able to get out of here so I could see that it was it

was an incentive and just that thought carried me through and then when I was able to be here oh my god God, people brought lawn chairs. I was talking about the lawn chairs too. We had music, we had food trucks. Christopher said the reach of the project had an impact on unexpected members of the community. Any guard that worked with us, their whole demeanor changed. It was like they were unhandcuffed. To guard themselves.

Yes. Like they were able to, you know, be calm. And they didn't have to worry about any retaliation or anything. They transformed as we transformed. One of the things that stands out in so many of the projects

we're talking about is something like a sense of experimentation, connection or play. Even though they're difficult topics, there's people meeting each other just because of their addresses, a sort of makeshift radio station. It's like the playfulness is another way into those topics. And, you know, when I hear the word playful, I think about Amanda Williams. I don't know her personally, but she's another artist in the community. She's good friends with Tanika, and she's best known for painting houses. And I think you're going to find out what's playful about that when we talk to her. Hi, Amanda. Nice to meet you.

Carlos. Hey, Salim. Salim, nice to meet you. Good to meet you. Thank you so much. Of course. So I was very particular when I selected the houses for Color Theory to always want this gabled roof. There's different names for them, so cottage style. These are worker houses for the stockyards. These are the sort of geometric houses you see a kid drawing.

It's the square base with a triangle roof. I knew what I wanted it to look like, and I knew that there had to be an isolation so that you really could understand this as an object. So I didn't pick houses that were in the midst of a block that were boarded up. They always were isolated, so you really could kind of understand the absurdity of this kind of landscape in a major city. Once Amanda found these isolated homes, she knew that they were scheduled to be demolished because they had a large X on them. And her plan was to paint them in gigantic, solid colors.

I'm talking the whole house, trimming and everything. And she turned them into huge, bright, bold shapes that felt playful and poignant. The colors she chose were ones that she felt were meaningful to her community, the Black community of Chicago. My questions were much more fundamental about power and how it manifests in space and who has access to which spaces and what they should look like. So a lot of my work is at that intersection of creative art making and creative placemaking. Really what my interest has always been in is space. Amanda's love for art and placemaking came

a few years after she had completed a really rigorous architecture program at Cornell. After graduating, she started designing buildings, but she realized she wanted to think about space in ways other than just the construction of new buildings. Sometimes, what she's trying to get across isn't what neighbors are looking for. I found my passion for space through visual art. So there's space in these paintings. You know, you could describe this painting that we're looking at right now, this kind of candy apple green.

It's very lush and it's very atmospheric. See, the pieces she's describing was pure joy for me. Her studio is covered in all manner of color experiments, from tiny color boards with Jolly Rancher candies and meticulously painted recreations of their translucent shine to huge panels of that candy apple green she mentioned. And yeah, when you make color this big and vibey, it's atmospheric. Tell me about choosing those first colors and choosing those first houses. Color theory is just a part of the canon, the Western educational canon. So colored theory was really a joke because actually I'm very silly and a lot of the work has a lot of humor to it because the subject is so serious.

Everyone only sees the kind of seriousness of it. And it's like, don't you think it's absurd that everyone agrees that that's the pink oil moisturizer house? Like, how did I pull that off? Right. Like, who gets to decide what a color should be called? What's the audience for something as primal as the name of a color? What if colors were named in ways that tied to the lives of people around them? The initial color was currency exchange because that was the only architecture that I could imagine a color for. Because they were these just generic boxes where you'd go and cash or check.

And so then it was like, why do we have a currency exchange? It's like, oh, because we don't have any banks. And then I expanded it to think about things that I would describe the color for before I would describe the thing. And so those two hair care products came up. So if you say pink to black women, you only have to finish the sentence. You know, a certain cohort of black women in America, you say pink and they say, they know oil moisturize. They could always say it back to you, right?

It's like, and pink oil fixes everything. Any kind of hair texture, any kind of hair issue, you just put a little pink on it and it just makes it happen. And it's a Chicago based product. So I thought our understanding of pink oil was because it was local, but it's global. And then Ultrashine is this kind of companion in the color sense. These are two totally different hair care companies, but that turquoise, it has a certain smell and it has a kind of sheerness to it. To be clear, she was identifying these standalone homes that were scheduled to be demolished

and then painting them colors that came from a palette of products, right, that the Black community recognized. That's not just playful, though. Fundamentally, Black and brown bodies can be displaced, either violently, physically, their bodies, or things that their bodies occupy. And so then these houses become, again, a signifier for the people that live there.

So they're both valuable and undervalued. And so then applying this paint, which was initially me trying to test out my paint palette, really then becomes this kind of like highlighter. And I'm literally highlighting, one, don't ignore this last house before it goes down. And two, why is this like this? This is unacceptable. Sometimes what she's trying to get across isn't what neighbors are looking for. Like in one of my favorite stories, she told about the houses.

So the first ones were easy because it's like hair care and Harold's Chicken. And then we get to the more difficult products and their connection to Black communities. It was actually hard to be like, do you really want to paint a house? It's a Crown Royal bag. She decided to paint the house anyways because it was a beautiful purple. And she expected to get some backlash because the crown royal bag might not be what the community wanted representing them. But the feedback she got was something else. I painted the house. I left and was coming back at exactly the right time to get like dusk and the sunlight and just to snap it before it got demolished.

I set up to take the picture. and this guy stops in his pickup truck and he drives past first. So I'm kind of keeping swivel, right? Like, and then I see him and I see him come back and I'm like, oh boy, you know, like, where's my car? He's like, did you paint that? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, oh, I thought Prince was coming, you know? And he was like, yes. Because two things. One, I knew that that was like, the angst that I had about this representing liquor and alcoholism was like gone because this dude went straight for Prince. And two, we about to have a great conversation. So he pulls over. He used to live on the block. He tells me the whole story. And then within like 10 minutes, you know, I know a cousin's next door neighbor, and he also shovels snow in the winter, and here's the card for our house. Like a full-on,

totally Chicago black moment. I explain the project. He doesn't quite get it. I explain it again. He gets it. I tell him the other colors, tell him where it is. He's like jazzed. And then the end, he nods, he gets in the truck and he was like, but I still think Prince is coming, you know, and then he drives off. So it was just like so great. He still held the dream. And then he owned it. It's a project that's been written about internationally, led to a TED Talk, all the big things. But it's also part of an ecosystem of art in Chicago. And yet, the audience includes folks driving by,

praying for prints to show up. What makes Chicago a really interesting place for this place-based art? If someone were to think about where to visit to see place-based art, it seems like this might be an interesting spot. This is it. Why?

This is history. As Jay-Z would say, this is history in the making. I mean, it seems like this might be an interesting spot. This is it. Why? This is history. As Jay-Z would say, this is history in the making. Yeah. I mean, it's a confluence of things. And I usually like to start with the Astor Gates. The Astor started out as a ceramicist, but quickly moved on to community-based art that sometimes incorporated performance. Like turning the 95th Street subway stop into a massive public art

project, including artwork made of decommissioned fire hoses and an active DJ booth. And the scale of his projects keeps getting bigger. And part of this process included buying real estate to create spaces for community members to collaborate and build skills. He lives on the south side of the city. And as his art became more famous, the neighborhood also got more money. I came back as right when Theaster was beginning to explode. And I actually literally sort of watched, you know, he was like, you know, he's so animated.

He's like, and then, and then I'm like, oh, this poor guy, he's not going to do all of that. It's so sad, but it's exciting that he thinks so. That's so great. And then each time you see him, he's like, oh yeah, I bought that. It's so sad, but it's exciting that he thinks so. That's so great. And then each time you see him, he's like, oh yeah, I bought that. And you're like, what? And you're like, oh yeah, I did that. You know, and so seeing that kind of possibility and him paving the way in certain respects

for just people understanding that all of this is possible as art form or creative form making. I was going to make this work regardless. I just didn't think anybody would care. And so then all of a sudden I too am a voice. I too am equally articulate. And it's like two brown people being able to talk about creative placemaking. Then you insert Emmanuel. Then you insert Tanika. Then you insert Maria. Then you insert Edra Soto. Then you insert Hans Fuentes. And so then you think about like Harlem Renaissance. So you think about some other moments.

It was actually not so strange or like even the kind of European painting masters. You know, oftentimes I'll look at museums and be like, they're all using Cerulean because we just found out they all went to the same bar. It's something I've always been fascinated by. How's a scene, a real scene scene that you might read about in a textbook someday, how does it get started? Some of that is by the work and ideas overlapping. And when you look at the place-based art in Chicago as a scene, there's a huge range of coverage. People are covering so many different scales from Tanika's work connecting individuals to Maria's blurring of lines between inside and outside of jail walls to Amanda's current thinking on how to really directly affect legislation. So we can be in some ways a case study for how art and policy works. I think

because we also have such a regimented political system, largely historically corrupt, but that too lends itself to like a way you can enter into that. It hasn't quite happened yet. And I tend to want to try to figure out how to keep kind of gently integrating into the seats of power, the formal elected seats of power to kind of bring change. So can they be kind of being brought along at exactly the moment where something that seems controversial or whatever, that it's like, we could just pass an ordinance? Does that feel like it's working?

Not yet, but I'm going to keep going. There you go. I'm going to keep going. There you go. I'm going to keep going. Thank you. Noise for TED. Our producers for this episode are and Our production staff includes Our fact checkers are Julia Dickerson and Hana Matsudaira.

Ad stories are produced by Transmitter Media. This episode was mixed and sound designed by Kristen Muller. Music and production support by Avery R. Young. Our executive producer is

Eric Newsom. I'm Salim Rashidmwala. That is the sound of a smarty being unwrapped at the end of an interview. The art is being eaten. And now later, the smarty and the wine candy, also known as Jolly Re-entry.

Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family? TED now has games designed to keep your mind sharp while having fun. Visit TED.com slash games to explore the joy and wonder of TED Games.