A Late Question From the Audience, My Thoughts on Theaster Gates in Conversation with Bill T. Jones at the MFA

Since artist/activist Theaster Gates came to the GSD as a Loeb Fellow in 2011 and I saw his introductory lecture to the GSD community I have been a big fan. He sang rather than spoke the words to his speech, while showing visuals in a slide show of the spaces he had converted in blighted neighborhoods using art (refurbished shoe shine chairs) to finance his projects to rebuild the economic infrastructure. Occasionally he paused and spoke like an erudite professor, before breaking into street slang, and then bursting into song again. It was unexpected, riveting, mind blowing, thought provoking and dynamic. This man powerfully expressed the pain of excluded and alienated people, and announced at the same time that he had arrived to the heights of academia and that his intellect was a lethal weapon conquering and overcoming the obstacles of oppression. I have not missed an opportunity to see him since then, and was really looking forward to his conversation with famed dancer, choreographer, and AIDS activist Bill T. Jones.

What I encountered at tonight's lecture were two esteemed African American artists with an easy rapport having a very elevated and mostly polite intellectual conversation about artists as fertilizers of a community, using the worm and the elephant as a metaphor, the worm being the artist who digests and breaks up the ground, and the elephant, I suppose being the entity that has the capital to finance art projects that will benefit the community. They discussed an artistic collaboration they had worked on, but showed only stills, no video, no song, no motion! Instead, they used words and conversation to discuss each others roles in creating and defining space, the importance of ownership of space for agency to express oneself artistically, and to invite others in, and the importance of funding art to revitalize communities. The element of race occasionally entered the conversation, but not racism, which seemed to be ignoring the "elephant in the room," given the nationwide and international protests against police brutality playing out in the media. Even Drew Faust, the President of Harvard University tweeted a photograph of herself wearing a "Black Lives Matter" T shirt this week.

When the time came for questions from the audience my thoughts were percolating, but I didn't know what to say. A professor in the audience raised an observation of the two of them playing out the roles of the wise elder (Bill T. Jones) passing down knowledge to a disciple (Theaster Gates), but how Theaster Gates quickly reversed the roles in conversation coming up the the level of his elder. Another person asked a question about coping with being an aging dancer, and passing down the art to others, and another audience member asked a question relating to compassion. I was tongue tied until I left the lecture and wandered into the gallery upstairs to see Theaster Gates' work on display, entitled "Sweet Land of Liberty" a framed wall hanging composed of fire hoses used by the police against civil rights protesters in the 60's, an item made from material representing the fabric of society's infrastructure used to suppress marginalized black people fighting for inclusion.

As I left the museum my question came to me: "what do you think the role of the artist is as an agent of social change?" After all, his many accomplishments in that role were extolled and highlighted in the description of the lecture on the MFA site. I'm sure the audience would have been all ears, but it never came up.

http://www.mfa.org/programs/lecture/theaster-gates-the-artist-and-cultural-spaces