Podcast #189: Theaster Gates c/o New York Public Library

Overview

Envisioning the archives of the future with the Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates, who was joined by Nettrice Gaskins, director of the STEAM Lab at the Boston Arts Academy, and Greg Carr, a professor at Howard University

Key Insights

On using the body and space to retain and restore culture:

“So I live in Chicago, I live and work largely in Chicago. So often when people migrate there's a shedding that has to happen cause you can’t take it all. And whether that’s a migration from Mississippi, or a migration from Haiti, or from the West Indies back to London. Whether it’s by invitation or a forced migration, that it feels like one of the things we’re constantly grappling with is how do we continue to make meaning from the stuff we have left.

I feel like one part of the South for me was being brought up in a missionary baptist church in Chicago and finding that that church experience is exactly like the black church experience we would have in Yazoo City, Mississippi or Silver City. Not unlike Ifa being preserved better in Puerto Rico or Cuba or Brazil in relationship to a kind of Nigerian diasporic experience. 

And so one part of this is, ‘What do we carry?,’ and this is a shoutout to Leslie Hewitt, ‘What do we carry in our bodies that allows our bodies to function as an archive?’ The songs, the dances, the handshakes, the braiding of hair, the cooking, how can those things kind of retain. But what happens if we then have the possibility of, like other cultures, the accumulation of our things that reaffirm the histories of who we are? It’s one thing to not have the opportunity to carry these things, it's another thing when you ask, ‘Well how can we get sophisticated and get past that migratory moment and then actually claim the need for space so our things can reaffirm who we are, and who our kids are, and who are our grandkids are?’ And so I've been committed to space, in a way, more than these things, cause space has been the thing that black people have struggled with owning the most. We're always in our bodies and we always got our stuff, but do we own the buildings that we rock in? And so often we don’t. And so if I got to go down as the real estate mogul so that my daughters and granddaughters can be the keepers of things and their bodies, at least we will have a place to rock.” —Theaster Gates

On the role of place in recovering history through archiving:

“The process of archival recovery now must be something that’s a convened space where everybody is committed to the community. I have no interest in people going into collections like that and writing books for their career. That kind of vulgar careerism is antithetical to why John Johnson put that collection together. That’s why we take people to the place. You’ve got to come to the place, and stand in the place, and before you come to the place i want a 150 words on why you want to go, and then when we come back i want another 200 words on what you thought, and now we can get to work because you will forever connect this training to the place itself.” —Greg Carr