The Artist, The Good Neighbour
Theaster Gates is an artist, an activist, a community instigator and organizer, a repairman, a homeowner, and a believer in the importance of a neighbourhood. His art practice, which sits somewhere between and amongst all of those titles all at once has led to him buying an old candy store in Chicago’s South Side and beginning to renovate it into a home and a cultural anchor.
At the corner of 69th and Dorchester, Gates’ home / workspace became a hub for neighbourhood activity. He says that, “As the neighbors grew more interested, I decided to allow them to assist, when possible and have given classes, workshops, public dinners and even exhibitions in the space. Dorchester has been an informal lab for social and community experiment.”
His decision to stay and work in his city has become a catalyst for other activity, and a reason for other people to stay as well. So, I can’t help but feel that we probably need to find even more ways to turn the BCL HQ into a hub of even more activity before something else in the balance collapses and we lose the space. Maybe we need to have weekly sleepovers?
[via Art21]
![Darren, Josh, and I met with some folks from the Sandwich Community Health Centre and Maya from FedUp to start discussing community gardens. The meeting went well, serving as a good starting point to start figuring out what we might be able to do in Sandwich. The SCHC is working on a site on Prince Road, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/communitygarden-aerial-150x150.jpg "Brainstorming Community Gardens")
![I went out to the site for our proposed community garden to take some photos yesterday. It’s looking fairly likely that this will be the site for our community garden starting this summer. This park is located at Russell and Mill near the Sandwich windmill. We’re still working out all the details, but everything has [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/img_4065-150x150.jpg "Community Garden Site")
![SRSI participants hit the street today in the blistering heat to interact with passersby. Lee Rodney’s Border Bookmobile gets re-routed, Emily Colombo serves up some lunch and fixes a few bikes. The Department of Unusual Certainties is working hard planning their Speed Dating for Store Owners event on Thursday, July 8 7pm inside of 406 [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DSC_0663-150x150.jpg "SRSI, Day 26 & 27: Hot Days Outside")
![Justin couldn’t stay too long today since he had to leave for a Media City engagement. So he set us up with the things we would need then left us alone. He was showing Josh how the new design I started last week held up better and works with the magnets better too. The previously-made [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/img_5245-150x150.jpg "Planters – Take 2")
![Last night’s Noiseborder event was a success. A number of people came down to Studio A in Lambton tower and helped us collaboratively rewrite Windsor’s history using maps, time lines, and story boards. All content was digitally remixed and projected on the screen with old photos and videos of Windsor. Justin started off the night by explaining [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/michellegc1-150x150.jpg "Smorgasborder 02: Rewriting Windsor")
![In what feels like the first time in months, we got together and worked on making something (that is, as opposed to planning something). We’re getting started on what is going to be an epic project, time-wise. We’re making a bunch of large 3D cardboard letters. Collaborative Apartment Studio is very fun. Danielle and I [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/DSC_07931-150x150.jpg "A New Project Begins: Cardboard, a projector, and lots of editing")
![This morning, on one of Transit Windsor’s new hybrid buses, we saw one of the nearly 100 Text In-Transit panels (this is the first panel on this new bus, as far as we could tell anyways). I believe they will all be installed on Transit Windsor’s entire fleet in the coming days. Let us know [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/IMG_2737-150x150.jpg "Transit Windsor Panels on the Buses!")
![I spent the better part of the day on Saturday doing some more basic research into connecting an Arduino and LCD for this ongoing project. For the most part, it’s pretty basic and following the wiring diagrams and tutorials online is fine. I ran into a problem with getting text on two lines, which I’ll [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/IMG_6480-150x150.jpg "Getting Things to Talk: Arduino + LCDs")
![Tuesday night’s Broken City Lab Office Hours were successful, but as usual, all too short. Spending the majority of the time in Lebel’s wood shop, we started working on our LED sign, but still have a long ways to go with it. We cut plexiglass, drilled holes, and started soldering—I think we’ll continue next Monday [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/img_2074-150x150.jpg "LED Sign Construction")
![In preparation for our upcoming contribution to the We Like Music Festival happening at The Magic Stick in Detroit, we are brainstorming a running list of reasons why we like Detroit. This blog post will be the spot where we can bounce ideas back and fourth through comments to use in our projection of text [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/MajesticTheaterDetroit-150x150.jpg "Reasons Why We Love Detroit")
![This week’s Office Hours were busy, hectic, and (I think) productive. There we some new faces around the table, which is always great, and lots to do in terms of planning and organizing. Breaking into groups made sense and we pushed forward on a bunch of things in parallel, but I’m looking forward to the [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/3308590586_1efbff37ed_o-150x150.jpg "Group Work")
![We spent the better part of Day 2 of our Extended Field Trip #001 in Peterborough at the wonderful Artspace talking to some new people, synthesizing some questions from our broad understanding of the city so far, and trying to get a sense of what if anything there is to change about this place. We [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/IMG_3499-150x150.jpg "Extended Field Trip Day 2: Mapping")
![Monday night marked the last Broken City Lab meeting of the year!!! We’ll be taking a brief break over the holidays and then gearing up for a series of events starting at the end of January. For anyone who has been wondering how to get involved or if we’d ever hold open office hours again, [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/IMG_72891-150x150.jpg "Last Meeting for 2009!")
![The Eco-House was bumpin’ Friday night! Amongst a slew of other undergoing projects, Michelle, Rosina, Josh and I we’re all hard at work, trying to get everything organized for our upcoming event and final installment of Save The City that’s taking place this Friday at the Art Gallery of Windsor! Rosina and I tackled the Save The City [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/IMG_4835web-150x150.jpg "Getting things done!")
![From what I understand, Google Maps updates once a year or so (I’d guess even less than that). So, I think now would be a good time to start on a project like this, as according to these maps, Caesar’s Windsor is still under construction. That parking garage on the corner of Park and Pelissier [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/parkinggarage-web-textroof-150x150.jpg "Annotating Windsor")
![Mondays always seem to be the best studio days. Maybe it’s because the weight of the week hasn’t set in, or that the last Thursday is just far enough away that we’re motivated to try to get more work done. Whatever it is, yesterday was a particularly good example of getting things done at CIVIC [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/wpid20679-IMG_3069-150x150.jpg "Monday in the Studio: Rubber, Plaques, T-shirts")
![Friday night meetings have been hard to pull together over the last little while. Managing to fit together six different schedules can seem next to impossible sometimes, so it’s all the more fun when we can actually pull it off and all be in the same room at the same time. We caught up on [...]](http://d1ugx41kvdwavn.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_8008-150x150.jpg "Imagining Borders in Other Places")
i’m a fan of weekly sleepovers! it sucks when your travel time is greater than the time spent at an event, so the longer i’m at my destination, the better : )
i was in the library the other day browsing medical and social science books, and i found this one book from the 80s called City Safaris. it’s geared toward parents who want to help their children explore their city around them, so some ideas are pretty basic, but others are great and would probably be relevant for future walking tours/scavenger hunts and helpful for discovering the history of windsor better. the book also has some silly/somewhat non-pc vocabulary that is fun to read. it talks about “foreigners” and “oldtimers” a lot.
there’s one section of questions to ask yourself when you’re on a bus (ie how many foreigners are there? can you hear anything that isn’t english? what are most of the people doing: sleeping, singing, listening to the radio, eating, smoking? SMOKING? ON A BUS? that was pretty weird to read, but it was a different time back then, i guess, lol.)
anyway, i figured you and the group might like to look at this book, so i checked it out and i’d be happy to share it : )
Samantha,
It’d be AWESOME to get to see this City Safaris book!! Is it illustrated?
Is there any place that’s more convinient for you to meet rather than at BCL HQ? Or are there any days that you’re already going to be around that we might be able to catch up?
Michelle, great to catch up with you the other day, looking forward to seeing what you do with the micro-residency!
“So, I can’t help but feel that we probably need to find even more ways to turn the BCL HQ into a hub of even more activity before something else in the balance collapses and we lose the space.”
As if I wasn’t pumped enough RE my micro-residency! If successful, I’d hope that the environment I create – even temporarily – could be an inspirational space in this very spirit; an attraction, however fleeting, to spur on action.