Fighting Inequities Through Art

these predatory lending schemes back in the day. Yeah. Yeah, These landmarks are going to go in front of ten or fifteen houses on the South Side that have been legally stolen as the sign says, yeah, And it just felt it felt so perfect for us. It's it's art, but it's art that exposes injustice. It's art that's political. It's art that's demanding change. You know, I immediately wanted to talk about this. Let's do it. I'm Khalil Gibran

Muhammad and I'm Ben Austin. We're two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a historian and I'm a journalist. This is some of my best friends are in this show. We wrestle with the challenges and the absurdities in a deeply divided and unequal country. And in this episode, we're going to learn from two amazing artists who challenge us to see the world as it is. Yeah. Their art is both in museums and also in the streets of Chicago. Yep, we're going to art school, folks. Let's go get your

palette only. Yeah. So you met up with Tanica, right, yeah, yeah, to learn more about her work, to learn more about Inequity for Sale. I went to her home a couple of weekends ago and we drove around the neighborhood. Yeah. She lives in Englewood, right, Yeah, she lives in Englewood on the South side of Chicago, which is where these signs, these these placards are going to go as well. Follow me so you can listen in my car. Tunika is amazing.

She's so generous to do this. She has this humility that I think actually disguises just sort of how bad ass she is and the amazingness of her work. Yeah. Yeah, because she's been she's been actually doing a lot of other activities, including organizing in that same community exactly. She's a community organizer, she's a photographer. She's done other our projects that have really captured my attention. And you know, this neighborhood of Englewood, where she lives and works is

a really important one as well. I mean it's been kind of at the center of how Chicago is described as a violent city, precisely because of the level of community violence in Inglewood in particular. Yeah. Yeah, in an earlier episode, you and I talked about Cabrini Green, this public housing development being sort of like this mythological place, and Englewood has sort of filled that void in Chicago. It sort of exists in this realm of like horror stories. Yeah.

It's also not that far from from where we grew up. I mean it's just a little bit west west where we grew up, a little west, a little bit south. There was a ten minute drive from my place, but it might as well be light years away because it's a community that's been devastated by loss, by divestment. We stop on one of these streets and it's a block that has three of these homes that were sold on land sale contracts. And listen, man, there's like an empty lot,

there's a boarded up home. There's a really nice home that has a fence and being taken care of. Next to it as a vacant lot, there's a boarded up home and so you see crazy. It's crazy in terms of like lot by lot, what's going. Yeah, you see the devastation, you see the abandonment, you see really the absence of people too, because you know, the population in Englewood has dropped from something like ninety seven thousand in the nineteen sixties to twenty four thousand today. So there's

been black flight from this community. And you see it there too. This home right here, he's burnt up one that's some land sale contract home. This is actually one that's going to be in the project as well. So the project that she's referring to there, she's putting up these landmarks in the community, in the neighborhood. She's going to start with about ten of them or fifteen of them. And you know there are these signs. They're they're yellow in this bright yellow and she said, she said, it's

supposed to be a caution sign. It's like the yellow of a caution sign. And they say this home at sixty eight twenty three South Aberdeen was legally stolen from black couple mister and missus James and Lula Malone on October thirtieth, nineteen sixty three, in a widespread land sale

contracts scam. Yeah, that's just so powerful. And you know, these land sale contract scams were a predatory markets set up to target black people by speculators who basically sold them homes on a layaway plan, literally like they were set up to make payments. They never earned equity in the home until the final payment was made. And often these land speculators who were involved in this scheme would deliberately sabotage black people by making payments disappear or pretending

as if they didn't receive them. And so lots of people lost their homes this way, and yet the speculators made thousands and thousands of dollars on black people. Yeah, what makes an equity for sales so amazing is that Tanika researches these homes. She finds who lived there and when their homes were stolen from them. So I was just looking at that data set and I was like, they are all around me. That's crazy. And so now that you see the block that I was living on,

it was so many vacant homes. This is the data that she's talking about that. You know, there was a Duke study originally I think it was, it was in twenty eighteen. It was the plunder of Black wealth in Chicago. Yeah, I remember. I remember that. I because one of the major guys is a reparations scholar named Sandy Daretty a Duke. Yes,

I did remember that, you know. And so they started looking into the effects of these land sale contracts, and you know, Tanika got interested in this, and she asked whether she could actually see the homes, the specific data to track it right down to the street level, and they were like yeah, And so she is working with researchers and others to find these and now they've put together this list, a map that shows each of the homes, and so we're just driving around and she's like, there's

five on this block, there's three on this block, a couple blocks over, and it seems like they're in clusters, but they're also all over the place. Okay. So, so in the in the nineteen fifties, in the nineteen sixties in particular, you know, black people could not get mortgages. They couldn't get federally back mortgages. Yeah, exactly. And you know why because in the nineteen thirties, when the federal government decided to support homeownership, because of the Great Depression,

homes weren't being built. There was a massive housing shortage. The government basically took the discrimination the private market that had already existed and enshrined it in new federal policy. White people got to buy homes because the federal government said black people were too much of a risk in most places, and therefore they use this color coded scheme where red was used as the designation for black people in the areas of the city where they live, like

the whole South Side of segregated Chicago. Like if you look at a historical map, it's redlined. Yeah. So the federal government and then banks lenders are justifying this by saying this is a risky loan and it's essentially entire

black communities that you're you pointed out. You know, people often think about this era of redlining or now land sale contracts as a predatory lending moment in a little bit of abstraction, right, But one of the things that the Duke's study pointed out is that four billion dollars

was pluillion. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I said four billion. Yeah, I was just I wanted other people to hear that, like crazy, right, So four billion dollars is taken out of the black community, talk about theft over a twenty year period, two decades in the fifties and sixties, and and so you know, the estimates are that upwards of seventy five percent of all homes purchased by black people in Chicago were on land sale contracts, purchased in quotes,

because you're not really purchasing it. The reason that I picked this specific block is so people can see how it changes, how it changed this block today, like literally an abandoned home and two vacant lots are on this block because of that period, and having vacant lots and abandoned homes on your block depreciates the value of the

people who live here. And now these communities where there's so much abandonment and vacant lots are often you know, understood by the outside world as the evidence of black pathology and dysfunction. And black people don't care about their neighborhoods. And that's what's so powerful, not only about the data set, but also Tanka bringing the story to life in this art project. Yeah, and driving around with her, it was unmistakable.

What makes crime even like profitable is when you have an environment where you don't have traffic, where you don't have people watching you, Like that's a key to a successful crime business. If you don't have any eyes on you, then that means you could do whatever it is you're doing. In these blocks that don't have homes lived in and have vacant lots, that's the perfect scene for anybody who's

crime involved. Yeah, So this art project, Inequity for Sale is fascinating, and it's just it's just I wish I were there with you in Tanka. But looking at one of the signs and seeing up close, I mean, she's calling out one that it's legal, this predatory land sale scam, like like like people could do this legally, but she calls it a crime and she wants people to know that a crime happened here and no one has been

punished for it. And and she said that they're they're painted bright yellow, which isn't a typical color for a landmark. She said, it's it alerts you to danger, that's what it typically does. And there's an image at the top of these of essentially like a man running off with a bag of money, you know, a representation of theft, right, and then also a piece of me, not even a piece, a huge chunk of me was just getting pissed off,

like like I was just imagining being my family. Like, man, if I found out my family was stolen from, I'd want someone to pay, like, you know, because I just thought about the fact that it's literally because my grandmother purchased the house that I grew up in that I was able to even like have that kind of stability, you know. I'll just point out that that Tanika is

working with a large group of people. There's a designer for the plaque ards and historians and researchers, and on the back of the plaque ards, on the back of the sign, there's a map of the neighborhood where you can see the hundred homes in Englewood that were land sale contracts, so you can understand this history, the scale, the scale and enormity. There's a QR code where you can sort of, you know, see all this information and a link to a website which tells it's fast history.

So it exists within a larger context. It's like the anti citizen app, right, because you know, those are apps that basically warn people to stay out of neighborhoods like Inglewood, you know, And here it is saying like you need to be warned by this system of oppression and the air that we all breathe because of it. So there's one other thing that's on these landmarks that is really important to point out, and it's both explaining it as

art and I think as activism. At the bottom of the landmarks that says, this crime was never brought to justice. Reparations are due, I know, right, reparations that I do that is so powerful. Yeah, And Tanika, when I asked her, like, well, what reparations, she said, listen, I'm the artist. There are other people who are going to help figure this out.

She didn't necessarily have prescriptive ideas. She did say that she hoped that maybe the community would own one of these homes and turn it into a community center and art center, but she talked about this more. My goal and hope is that this project will encourage or challenge people to think about reparations differently or maybe just different than what they have been told it can and should be.

But just a way to repair the damage that has been done and bring to justice something for these families, but specifically the larger community because this this crime impacted those families as well as their neighbors, the entire neighborhood. And that's the ripple effect of systemic injustice. It doesn't just harm the individual it was perpetrated on, it harms everyone around them. Yeah, it's just so fascinating as an our project because you know, I can imagine some people

listening like is this really art? I mean, did she just design these activist signs and put them in this neighborhood to call attention to the need for reparations. I think that's a fair question. So art that exposes a history of justice that makes people see it in a new fresh way, and then also calls for change in the world, tries to catalyze something, tries to bring something else about and we could and we, you know, to

be fair to her. The signs are material object like a photograph, like a painting, like a sculpture, and so you know, she's engaging in a form of art practice and expression that carries this weight and an intervention in a community. I mean, it's in the neighborhood. It's not in a gallery, it's not in a museum. They're in the neighborhood where the scam happened and where she wants to bring about change. In fact, with all of that, you might even ask the question, I mean, where's the line.

Where do you draw the line? Yeah? Where is the line between art and activism? And and you know, we talked about this and immediately we thought of another artist to bring into this conversation. Amanda Williams. Yeah, yeah, I can't wait to talk to her. She's awesome. Amanda also does art on the South Side of Chicago. She's put up art in those very same neighborhoods in Englewood. Yeah, yeah, man, is great. I'm so happy that we're going to be

talking to her. She's going to have a lot to say to help us think about this question of the line between art and activism. I couldn't think of anyone smarter about this topic, about about thinking about what can art do as far as correcting injustices. Amanda Williams, Hey, Hey, Austin, how are you? Thank you for being my friends? Are yes, yes, we are so excited. This is a huge honor. So

your art project. Colored Theory took abandoned homes in Englewood, the same neighborhood that Tanika lives in, and you painted them. You you, you gave them love, You made them stand out in these dramatic ways. And the color as you chose where you could say culturally relevant colors. Um, it was stunning. How light have you been? She she painted the home Carold Chicken Chicken Shay Crown Royal. Yeah, like that's right, I mean culturally relevant. Come, I love it? Like,

what is the color? It's like, Sian, is that what it is? No, it's ultrachine. You've been hanging out with me too much, all right, if you want, if you want to technically, it's it's a turquoiscious green side of science. You know. I was just trying to give a little bit of context to our listener who may not know what ultracine is. And Harold's Chicken Shack is read right for the listening audience, brilliant color of red. Yes, so we grew up on Harold's Chicken in Chicago. It's a franchise.

It's known or it's mild sauce, which is red. Khalil and I have both seen pieces of that work and museums here in Chicago and at the moment in New York. And uh, you know, you're that our project was picked as like one of the twenty five most significant works of architecture posts in the post war era. I mean that's incredible. That's a huge post war You've been commissioned with another artist to make the Shirley Chisholm sculpture in

Prospect Park. Correct, And you did this Ted talk about color theory, and my daughter listened to it in our our classes and that's something all the students did. That's black. You're touching lives. So, Amanda, we've been talking about Tanika Johnson's work and specifically Inequity for Sales, and you know, we want to hear you talk about art as activism

and what that means. And you know that we've been wrestling with this question in terms of Tanika's work of like, you know, what what role can art play and bringing about social change. I'm so glad that you guys are having this conversation because is actually one I've been having by myself but had then started to have with Tanika.

I think her prior project folded map is one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen, and really, I would say is the closest thing I've seen is something that really emerges art and whatever way you want to define it, high art, community art, low art, you know, whatever metric you want to use, and an idea about activism and maybe even policy and social change. Even more so, I would say than color theory. So I did color theory from twenty fourteen to I think about twenty sixteen.

The totality of the work, the conception of it, the production of the painting of the houses, and then the photographing of that and then presenting that documentation. And so something like colored theory starts to help you see the residue of redlining. So it helps you understand that these things that were done to maps in the nineteen thirties and forties to decide who could get a loan and who couldn't, and who could live where and who couldn't.

Though you can feel it if you're from an area like this, you can literally see it, because the vacancy is so strange and odd, but we've normalized it. So then when they became the very saturated, it looks like Arkansas. Yeah, people don't know how rural that that parts of the south Side look because there's so much abandonment, abandonment that that homes have been clear that the isolation. Yeah, and so it really was this kind of oddity where you're like,

is that where is that? It's like that is sixteenth in state? Is where that is? That is right in the heart of the city. This is not the outliers or you know, this is this is a demonstration of what it looks like when entities benefit from systemic ways in which people have been isolated and segregated. And so the saturation that kind of the out of context use of those colors. On the one hand, you know, it's it's a pink house, right, it's a flame in hots

orange house. You know, like the starkness of that compared to that empty landscape was something that got people's attention, even living in those areas of neighborhoods. And so I think for me, I thought it was just going to kind of highlight literally the oddity of this geography. One we would cut the lawn and cut down that kind of overgrown brush, me being my husband, and so people were like, you guys, did you guys buy the house. It was like no, It's like do you own the house?

It's like no, did your cousin live there? No, So just the showing of some kind of love to a structure that everybody had kind of cast off for dead also was very striking to people. And I didn't expect that because they had not used to anybody caring for anything for no reason, and so these are the things people connected with, and so it gave value to something that had been deemed valueless. And people felt that and they felt a kind of appreciation that I didn't seem

to have some alternate agenda. Khalil and I have been trying to figure out this relationship between art and activism, and really this question on the art side of like what can art actually do to bring about change? So I like to always kind of dispel some romanticized myth that this work like change the community or I came in and I transformed what the possibilities of Inglewood are is asking what can this do right now with what

we have instead of trying to change everything? So is it equally impactful that like one person came and did something they'd never done before and they felt empowered. Is that more or less empowering than if I get the aldermen to I don't know, change some street sign law or something I don't know, right, So, in terms of scales of participation and activism, where does it fall on that it's a catalyst. That's where I operate a catalysts.

I'm trying to just spark something that somebody else will do. I love what you just said about art as a catalyst, and so you know, I want to circle back to Tanika's work and this project Inequity for Sale. I mean, it seems to me this is so perfectly in conversation

with the work you've already done. Yeah, and I think this newest work then literally pinpointing, she's like taking a Yahoo map with those points as she's brought it to physical life, with these stanchions that sit so that you can visually see the kind of ubiquity of how many people were victims of this situation, but also physically then understanding why a landscape looks a certain way. This is stuff that reparations can come about for. This is official apologies,

This is accountability. This is bringing people that don't believe this is a problem to the physical space. So for me, the ability for this as a visual kind of creative art form to then have clear potential impact in an activist sense is super clear in a way that I think most artists operating today that would call themselves social practice or social artists. It is a little fluff, you know, a little bit. There's no you can't you know, if

it's a science experiment, you couldn't recreate it. This you can recreate is an accountability. I mean, I know a great deal of what draws me to your work or Tanika's work is that it is actually on the streets. It's in the neighborhood, and it's not in a museum, and literally there that's where the practice is happening. And what does it mean to be in those spaces? What does it mean in terms of the audience that you reach,

in terms of the goals and the effect. Yeah, when I'm making art that's engaged in an area where people maybe don't really even care about art, then what am I doing it for? And how do I make sure that it is having the same residence? And so part of that also is an equality or an understanding of like, I'm not coming to like impart some knowledge or some wisdom,

or I'm not coming from on high to enlighten. It's like, no, I have a question, and I can have a different conversation and get different kinds of answers when I can have that question with people from the neighborhood I grew up in, or I can have with my classmates at Cornell or lab or where you know, wherever these other moment or wherever these other spaces that I exist in.

And so for me, the challenge is always making sure the work is true to whatever that audience is and also expansive enough so that I'm not assuming what the audience might or might not be able to receive. So

that's pretty complicated in addition everything we've talked about. But you know, you've been part of this exhibition of other architects and designers, and you know the title of that show was Reconstructions, Architecture and Blackness, and and you know, your particular contribution not only is very much about this history of redlining, but it's also about how black people

defied the boundaries that were prescribed for them. And you know, you have this amazing poem where you describe blackness in so many configurations and contradictions. I mean, it's just it's basically like black doesn't follow the rules period, right, because the rules weren't met for us correct to begin with. That is correct, So why are you worried about following them or not following them? So Mama published a book of this show that Stephanie and I saw last year,

right when the museum reopened. They're ten artists featured in this show. Every artist was given a commission to create a work of an object of futurity, of a vision of blackness that could be both historically rooted and future oriented, or could be all about the future. But it's just

an incredible show. And in the catalog for the show, which I am holding right now in my hand, in your essay, the middle of your essay, there is a page in the book that is literally upside down, like you cannot read the left side and go to the right side. You have to turn the book right side up in order to finish the page. What's up with that? Because because why do you need to read the book the right way? This was another fight I was the

problem sild with the designers. It's like I want you to be able to turn the book upside down and read it backwards. So everybody go get a copy and then turn the book upside down, and my essay reads perfectly backwards and forwards and thinking of Tannika's work, which is very much future thinking. So you do this show, you help to coordinate, you're like the lead artist that helps to bring all of this together to MoMA, and

you issue a manifesto. I wanted you to talk about the manifesto because I think that's in direct conversation with Tannika and thinking about the future and what is old. Well, I want to take full credit. Sean Anderson and Mabel Wilson were the curators that really have the vision. But this is the first show at Moment, one of the first shows ever that directly contends with an idea about

architecture and blackness. So we developed this group called the Black Reconstruction Collective, made of the original ten of us that were an exhibition, and so this group was basically going to say, we refuse this idea that we have to make the work in this way that we can't advocate for ourselves, and we send it back to Moment, and this starts a storm of a legal department and the someone's department to developed department, And so then we

understood a kind of power and collectivity that we knew intuitively, but we didn't really understand how big of a deal this was going to be. And so then we had to stand firm on this idea that we need to formulate an entity that doesn't allow this to happen again to anybody else that looks like us. And we want to be a steward of making sure that other people that want to have ideas about black people in space

don't have to deal with this part of it. I want to read just two sentences from the manifesting statement, because I remember seeing it on the wall and I thought to myself, this may be one of the most radical things I've read anywhere, let alone entering a gallery of an elite art museum. And so here's here's just two sentences from the second paragraph. You guys write, the Black Reconstruction Collective commits itself to continuing this work of

reconstruction in Black America and these United States. We take up the question of what architecture can be not a tool for imperialism and subjugation, not a means for aggrandizing the self, but a vehicle for liberation and joy, and that it's just so so much encapsulates Tanka's work and your work of liberation and joy enjoy and so many of the other artists who appeared in that show. We are we are just blown away by you, your work, all that you have done and will do. Thank you.

This has been a huge honor. I'm so excited for Tanika's work. It actually it actually launches this month, November twenty twenty one. So some of my best friends are is breaking news here for these landmarks to be all over the place in Englewood, and you know, to point out this this injustice that has happened, to bring attention to this theft of property, and you know, to help us think about what might come next. What do you

do with this information? Well, I mean again, what Amanda so graciously embraced is that there's all kinds of ways to express things. And it can be abstract in the kind of painting something in colors that evoke redlining, which was all about different colors of which homes deserved support and financing which homes didn't. And in Tanika's work there is this you know, invitation to passers by to come and learn something about what they're actually seeing through this

art expression, through these landmarks, through these signs. It's just it's just I learned so much and also so inspired by how how much artists play a role in teaching us and telling the truth about the society we live in. Yeah. Yeah, I love that their work is in conversation with our hometown, with our city of Chicago, with journalism, with history. You know, it's fabulous. So yeah, yeah, I'm glad we got to talk about this and look at it. That's right, and

I think we should. We should definitely nominate them to be some of our best friends. Oh man, they're they're already in right, all right, man, love you, love you too. Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalildebrod Muhammad and my best friend Ben Austin. It's produced by Sheriff Vincent and edited by Karen Shakerji. Our engineer

is Martin Gonzalez, our associate editor is Keishell Williams. Our associate producer is Lucy Sullivan, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias. Our executive producers are Leta Molad and Mia La Belle. Special thanks to Tanka Lewis Johnson and Amanda Williams Man. They are both fantastic artists from the South Side of Chicago. We are so happy to have learned from them and to be in conversation with them, and also special thanks to the National Public Housing Museum, where Tanka is an

artist as instigator. We're ready for our next class at Pushkin thanks to Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, and Jacob Weisberg. Our theme song, Little Lily is by Fellow Chicago and AVERYR. Young from his amazing album Tubman. You will definitely want to check out more of his music at his website averyar Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at Pushkin Pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm.

To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. If you love Some of My Best Friends Are and any of the other shows from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions. And so next time I'm home, Harold's Chicken on me?

Which which one? You have to say the number? But you know what, that's funny because I don't actually remember. I don't remember the one on fifty third? What's what's the number? One? Fifty third and kimbark. Then it doesn't have a number. Actually, I don't think. Yeah, is it still there? It is still there. I don't think it has a number.