This must be the place.

My residency at Elsewhere ended since my last post and there is much to say about my time spent there. While I had intended to be better about updating this blog, time passes quickly when you live inside a city inside a world inside a thrift store. Perhaps more updates later, but for now a brief passage from the essay that I was working on, intermittently, in fits and starts, while in Greensboro.

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North Carolina is a state with many stories to tell. American political scientist, Vladimir Orlando Key once described North Carolina as “a bridge between the Deep South and the nation as a whole.” A bridge provides passage between two distinct places, serving to both separate and connect them. It is an intermediary, a gray zone, a site of potential and negotiation. North Carolina has been characterized as “a beacon of Southern progressivism,” and yet, remains deeply entrenched in a complex racialized history—one of the last states to secede from the Union, yet a Confederate state nonetheless. The city of Greensboro is, in many ways, a microcosm that exemplifies North Carolina’s negotiated stance within American history. Greensboro’s relationship to the Civil Rights Movement illuminates these contradictions. In 1954 Greensboro became the first city in the South to adhere to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, however it wasn’t until 1971 that Greensboro officially desegregated its public schools, making Greensboro one of the last cities to comply with the federal desegregation standards. Yet during this seventeen year standstill Greensboro became known as the birthplace of the Civil Rights sit-in movement when on February 1, 1960 four African-American students from North Carolina’s A&T University refused to leave the whites-only lunch counter of the F.W. Woolworth’s department store. This event ignited a series of sit-ins throughout the country and was, in many ways, the precursor to the Freedom Riders of 1961, student activists who traveled by interstate buses into the Deep South to test the recent outlawing of segregation in restaurants and bus terminals. Greensboro’s own student activism continued well into the 1970s when the city became known as the Southeast center for the Black Power movement. During this time community organizations were formed such as the Foundation for Community Development and Greensboro Association of Poor People, organizations considered less extreme than the Black Liberation Front or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and yet, held at their core the fight for racial justice. Antithetical to the work of these organizations there was and remains a strong presence of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party in the area.   

These paradoxes are both specific to North Carolina and yet, reverberate throughout the country. There is a desire to contain these historical contradictions and complex race relations to the geographically bounded space of the American South. I was reminded of this recently during a conversation with an older mentor of mine, an activist in San Francisco and a participant in the Stonewall Riots and the Gay Liberation Front in New York City during the early 1970s. After telling her about my plans to travel to Greensboro, s he quickly remarked, “North Carolina? I refuse to go further south than Pennsylvania.” Even after sharing my knowledge of the culture of activism and radical politics thriving in Greensboro, she remained skeptical and even defiant. Despite her own involvement in grassroots organizing, nothing would convince her that there was more to the South than the history of racism and conservative politics.  

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My relationship to the South came first through geography lessons and history textbooks. Born and raised in Northern California, it wasn’t until I volunteered in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans during the summer of 2006 that I spent a sustained amount of time in the South. While this experience was certainly unique, it provided me with an opportunity to learn first hand about the nuances and complexities of the South. The mythology surrounding the South is thick. There is great danger in viewing the American South through a singular lens of its racist past and present and much to be gained in challenging these mythologies and stereotypes. If we are to see the South as a mirror, as Howard Zinn suggests in his 1971 publication, The Southern Mystique, then the history embedded within this landscape becomes indicative of currents traveling throughout the country, spanning historical and geographical space and time. In doing so, those within and beyond the South are implicated and asked to take account of our own position within a history that is as much American as it is Southern. It is no wonder that there are so many emotional charges and refusals to examine a site of undeniable injustice, suffering and disenfranchisement particularly when we acknowledge its mirrored reflection throughout the country. Yet, as Greensboro informs us, there is a rich history of strong social movements and resistance against that which gives the South its reputation. There is power in this history and in understanding the lineages you are participating within. There is even more power in activating this history beyond its site-specificity and temporality.  

Desk at Elswhere

There are important things happening in the back of the 608 building here at Elsewhere. On Thursday the most recent and last of the artists-in-residence for the season arrived from Kentucky, Shane Ward. And lucky for me, his desk is right next to mine and already we've spent hours working away, back to back, barely six inches from one another. These tight working conditions have inspired us to transform our crowded desks into a cubicle from which we run a highly professional and aesthetically clean corporation entitled, Right Here, Inc. I should give some background: each artist at Elsewhere gets a desk, which for some is just a place to temporarily store things as they head upstairs to work on installations and various other projects, but for someone like myself, a writer (ahhhhem) and for Shane, who has been working on video documentation of public projects, the desk space is key. And like all spaces at Elsewhere the desks are totally visually overwhelming: a patchwork of objects, fabrics, knick-knacks. They are passed on from on artist to the next and so there is an accumulation of things often left over from the person whose desk you inherited. When I arrived my desk had an old wooden lamp, a homemade fabric covered bulletin board, black and white fabric on the desk itself, makeshift shelves, jars with human hair inside, a small pile of fabric trim and ribbon, a slide carousel, board games and more! However, since Sunday our desks are slowly getting more and more clean and corporate. We've really toned down the place with a palette of grays and blues and are quickly gathering all the essential office supplies: clocks, time card machines, a company credit card, clip on cell phones, desk plants, awkward conversations, a broken fax machine, to-do lists, and calendars--everthing oversized, of course . We've hired artist-in-resident, Ashley Lamb as our secretary and will be holding interviews for our intern position shortly. Today, a professional photograph for our advertising campaign!

It's a gray area

Shane contemplating corporate America

Right Here, Inc in progress

Today marks the half way point of my residency and I think I'm finally getting into the swing of things, feeling more comfortable here and figuring out what I want to spend my energy on. This means that the next seventeen days are going to be busy and hopefully, productive. Before I arrived I thought that the space with all its objects and installations would inspire more hands-on work. I hoped to get back to my sculpture roots and actually make something tangible and tactile, but the truth is that these days I am less of a maker in a studio-based way than a researcher and writer. On my second day here I met an elderly man named Larry Queen, a retired journalist and professor who apologized when I told him I was a writer and informed me that "there is no cure for writing yet." He's right; more and more I'm giving in to my impulses to write, despite how much I might fight them. Writing doesn't always feel pleasurable, which I think is what Mr. Queen was alluding to. In fact, the majority of the time, the actual writing is painstakingly slow in comparison to the multiple running tracks in my mind and I am constantly concerned that I'll never find the right words to communicate what I feel and think.

Chris's House 2

Jail Construction

Over the past few days a small collection of North Carolina history textbooks have accumulated on my desk. Elsewhere’s Program Director Danna Roth delivered one to me yesterday entitled, “The South” from 1977. And on our museum tour a few days ago fellow artist-in-residence, Cyrus W. Smith pointed out a book with teal binding and yellow text that read “North Carolina” on the bottom shelf of a bookcase on the third floor. That book dates from 1949 and was used in Raleigh's public schools. In the section, “A Few Words To The Pupil” author Jule B. Warren writes to his intended 5th grade reader, “History is a story of the past. If you enjoy stories you, no doubt, will enjoy history. You study history, not merely because you like it, however, but to help you look forward to the future. Imagine, for the present, that you are a doctor and the state of North Carolina is a patient to be examined. As a doctor you will have many questions to ask. This book will answer the questions for the patient. It will tell you many things that have happened during the past 350 years. Many of the answers will be given as stories.”

North Carolina

If we can set the awkward doctor analogy aside, the history-as-story-telling is actually a comprehensive teaching strategy; one that is antithetical to the strict and factual Where? When? and Who? method of approaching history lessons. However, the question then becomes whose story is being told and whose stories are absent. As I said in my first post, the stories recorded within these textbooks offer an incredibly limited perspective, one that propagates a xenophobic version of history and has me thinking a lot about the way that places can become static.

In addition to collecting history textbooks, I’ve started taking daily walks around the South Elm Street area. There are two sites in downtown Greensboro that are really interesting to me, both of which I was aware of before arriving but have committed myself to researching more thoroughly while here. The first is the F.W. Woolworth’s building at 132 South Elm Street which was the site of the first lunch counter sit-in, an event that initiated similar direct action throughout the country during the Civil Rights Movement. The building is currently under construction and after much delay and controversy will be transformed into the International Civil Rights Museum. The sit-in at Woolworth’s is currently memorialized through a plaque outside the museum and footprints of the four A&T students who demanded to be served on February 1, 1960 are consecrated in bronze on the sidewalk outside. A portion of the lunch counter is on view at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. While the context of the Smithsonian makes sense for a relic from the Civil Rights Era, it strikes me as odd that something like the lunch counter would be removed from its original setting – like a memorial misplaced or no longer at home. The second site is the proposed location of the new Guilford County jail. In May 2008 a $114.6 million bond was passed in a 51%-49% vote to build another jail that will be constructed adjacent to the current facility on Eugene Street and Blandwood Avenue. The site is currently a parking lot for law enforcement vehicles and is as unremarkable as any other parking lot with its stretch of concrete and white paint designating spaces for cars.

These two locations are within walking distance of each other and within walking distance of Elsewhere. While the geographical distance between them is short, there are years of history that separate and also connect them. The proposed jail site feels like an appropriate way to make the history of the Civil Rights Movement current as there are similar threads of social justice and civil rights that surround the politics of both places. I'm also interested in the fact that both sites are in flux; one is currently being gutted and transformed from the inside out and the other is, at this moment, just a blueprint, the actual site contains no visible signs of construction.

Greensboro section

To supplement the research material I’ve been finding in Elsewhere’s collection I’ve been making trips to the Greensboro Public Library and immersing myself in the local history section and newspaper archives. The local newspaper once known as the Greensboro Daily News and now the News & Record are all archived on microfilm, which, I must say, is a fascinating way to do research. I started by looking at the newspaper from February 1960 and the months following to get a sense of the way that the activities of the Civil Rights Movement were written about in the time and place they were happening. Then I checked out the front page of every February 1st newspaper for the decade following the Woolworth’s sit-in. Similar to the discussion about the International Civil Rights Museum, I am interested in the way that this local event was and has been memorialized and commemorated.

I’m hoping to find a way to activate the history and space in between the site of Woolworth’s and the new county jail, between the Civil Rights era and the political and social context of today. Since the majority of the textbooks I’ve been flipping through end before the 1960s, I’m thinking about a way to update the information at Elsewhere and create some kind of running dialogue for the Greensboro of yesterday and today.