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The Place Lab digest is a weekly round-up of pertinent news, opinion, investigations, and explorations of the arts, architecture, and city-building in Chicago and beyond.
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Pedagogy. Place. Liberation.
Take a journey into Afro-futurism with Ethical Redevelopment Salon Member D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem
D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem is an Afro-Futurist space sculptor, performance artist, designer, writer, and educator. In this guest blog, Duyst-Akpem reflects on the methodology of liberation through the lens of Afro-futurism. Excerpt: "As a scholar and practitioner, I utilize the teaching of Afro-Futurism as a methodology of (Black) liberation. The foundation of this is exercising the visionary and imagination muscles in sculpting new futures that affirm the present and are rooted in the past."
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What Place Lab is digesting
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Donald Trump's Bulldozer Budget
Andrew Small, CityLab
Until now, we haven’t had much of a sign as to what Trump’s actual budget proposals would be, let alone how they would shape federal urban policy. But The Hill reports that his staffers have hewed to a “skinny budget” outlined by the conservative Heritage Foundation, claiming $10 trillion dollars in savings from 2017 to 2029 (if the math adds up). The Blueprint for Reform, combined with some more specific proposals in its Blueprint for Balance, also calls for drastic cuts to agencies and programs related to cities.
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Stay up-to-date on Place Lab projects, events, news, and happenings with our dedicated blog, SITE.
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New Map Highlights African-American Architects’ Work in Los Angeles
Lyra Kilston, Next City
"In architecture, I had absolutely no role model,' said Norma M. Sklarek, the first African-American woman to earn an architecture license in the United States...The challenge of visible role models is one that has plagued the field, notoriously male and white. Ted Landsmark, then president of Boston Architectural College, declared in a 2007 lecture, “'If there is any kind of profession that’s gotten away with a kind of benign neglect of diversifying itself over the course of the last 30 years, it’s architecture.'”
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'#BlackArtMatters' exhibit at Carnegie Center
Elizabeth Kramer, Courier-Journal
The center’s new exhibit includes a variety of media such as painting, drawing, collage, zines, photography, video, performance, sculpture and mixed media Several of the works on view are by artists with national reputations. Many are from Chicago, notably Dread Scott (born as Scott Tyler) whose installation artwork “What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?” brought him to national attention in 1989.
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One Connecticut town swaps a derelict mall for a 14.4-acre, community-centered green space
Olivia Martin, The Architect's Newspaper
Malls, those slumbering gray boxes marching across the American suburban landscape, are steadily going extinct. Back in 2014, the New Yorker published “Are Malls Over?” in which Rick Caruso, CEO of Caruso Affiliated, was quoted as saying, “Within 10 to 15 years, the typical U.S. mall, unless it is completely reinvented, will be a historical anachronism—a 60-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs, the retailers’ needs, or the community’s needs.”
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What are you thinking?
Is there something you'd like to see more of in our digest? Topics, interest areas, or subject matter that we're missing? Just havea couple of notes?
Let us know
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Miss last Friday's edition of the digest? Read it in the archives here.
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No deal for the arts: It’s no surprise that Donald Trump wants to tell the arts and humanities “you’re fired”
Noah Charney, Salon
According to the NEA, for performing arts funding in the U.S. from 2006 to 2010, almost 45 percent came from donations (with 41.5 percent of that derived from private sources and only 3.3 percent from state or federal governmental ones). The rest was derived from generated income or interest on endowments. That amounts to about 97 percent private funding or generated income. Corporate donations to the arts dropped steadily and dramatically from 2007 to 2010, whereas funding from foundations sharply increased in 2008 (during the heart of the recession) in direct response to the lack of funding elsewhere. Then that funding returned to its previous level and is slowly declining.
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What's Causing Chicago’s Homicide Spike?
Matt Ford, The Atlantic
The latest effort to unravel the mystery comes from a new report released last week by the University of Chicago Crime Labs. In it, researchers took an exhaustive look at a wealth of data on social programs, mental-health funding, policing strategies, criminal-investigation clearance rates, gun ownership, and more. What they found raised more questions than answers.
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New York's New Design for Public Housing Guidelines Point it Toward the Future
Ellie Anzilotti, Fast Company
The new guidelines were created by Jae Shin, the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow for NYCHA, who, after completing her graduate degree in architecture at Princeton University, spent several years working on urban community development projects in Newark. When she came on board NYCHA at the beginning of 2016, she was tasked with developing the guidelines as part of the agency’s larger strategic plan, NextGeneration NYCHA, which was released in 2015.
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Chicago can't afford to squander its blues music legacy
Crain's Chicago Editorial Board
Chicago, which perpetually claims to be a world-class city, has failed to promote its best-known cultural export: blues music. The enduring global influence of Chicago blues is widely acknowledged: Scratch Keith Richards (if you dare), and you'll find the spirit of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter lurking just beneath his grizzled surface. But to think of Chicago blues as merely a historic legacy is to overlook its worldwide following in the here and now—and to miss out on a tourism and economic development opportunity that's pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into other cities smart enough to leverage their own contributions to this all-American art form.
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Can Taxpayer-Funded Placemaking Survive Trump?
Danya Sherman, Next City
But while the [NEA] has made a difference across red and blue America, there are no assurances it will continue under the Trump Administration. The NEA is an independent agency of the federal government run by a chairman who is appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress...The NEA has long been a target of conservatives who object to the use of taxpayer money on the arts on ideological grounds and those who want to cut federal spending and see the agency as a frill. Trump himself has given no indication of his vision for public investment in the arts and according to The New York Times, is not known as a major arts benefactor in New York.
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From our bookshelf:
The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind
by Claudia Rankine
Purchase it here
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FAQS on 'The Hill' Report of a Funding Threat to the NEA
National Endowment for the Arts
On January 19, The Hill newspaper carried a troubling report related to funding for the arts in the incoming administration. The article said that transition team advisors to the President are calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities and privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
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Harlem Schools Are Left to Fail as Those Not Far Away Thrive
Kate Taylor, The New York Times
In District 3’s Harlem schools, there are no gifted and talented programs. Of the six elementary schools there where students take the state tests, only one comes close to the citywide passing rates of 38 percent in reading and 36 percent in math. At one school, only 6 percent of third- through eighth-grade students passed the most recent math tests. The children in the Harlem schools are mostly black and Hispanic and low-income, while the majority of children in the district’s other elementary schools are white or Asian, and either middle class or wealthy.
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In Theaster Gates' latest work, poignant power from the remnants of our history
David Pagel, The Los Angeles Times
Theaster Gates recycles — or transforms — just about everything he gets his hands on. And some things he doesn’t...Starting with fire hoses and floorboards, moving onto words and symbols and songs, Gates includes visitors in the list of things he transforms. His exhibition is a gift.
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