Can Art Turn Forgotten Real Estate Into Cultural Capital?
Real estate has a vocabulary for almost everything except imagination. A building is occupied or vacant, improved or distressed, stabilized or transitional, as though the fate of a place could be deduced from a spreadsheet and a sufficiently expensive aerial photograph. Culture is usually introduced later, once the architects have finished and someone notices that the lobby requires a mural. Theaster Gates has spent much of his career reversing that sequence. His work on Chicago’s South Side begins with the proposition that culture is not an amenity added to real estate after value has been created; culture can itself be one of the mechanisms by which value is created. Few projects make that argument more vividly than the Stony Island Arts Bank, the former Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank at 6760 South Stony Island Avenue, a once-vacant building that Gates acquired from the City of Chicago in 2013 and transformed into a hybrid cultural institution devoted to exhibition...