ARTIST REFLECTIONS
(a blog)
May 31, 2015
There is an impulse to parse everything. Who took photos of themselves? Of the business owner? Who went to new places? Who expressed discomfort? Who identified their race? Is there something that all of these details reveal about who we are (as city dwellers, citizens, or people going through our days)?
The project is a register of discomforts, enthusiasms, excitement, emotion, no emotion, ordinary hours, surprise, routine.
In some ways, we find the most hopeful stories to be the unremarkable ones. Shopping at black-owned businesses as a matter of course is not a new idea to everyone, and that is wonderful. Rather than being inspired only by transformations, we are also inspired by matter-of-factness.
June 1, 2015
Things we worried about:
- being white artists making work about the black economy
- whether anyone would participate
- how the project might be misinterpreted
Things we discovered:
- each participant became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is inspiring
- each business became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is complicated
- that while we are not the authors of the stories on the site, we feel a great deal of responsibility for the voices that participated. How do we parse our role and theirs? As much as we learned about ourselves making this work, the work still isn’t about us.
- that we can trust other artists (most of them anyway)
- that we can trust ourselves
We trusted participants to carry out their agreement. They trusted that there was no subterfuge on our part. Those who pushed back believed we were listening. Participants assumed good intentions. This fact seems stunning in its unlikeliness, given the mistrust on all sides of our current national conversation about race. It makes us feel hopeful, excited.
June 2, 2015
Things we worried about:
- how the project might be misinterpreted
- if participants brought up One Large, whether the business owners would feel patronized, objectified, romanticized (we expect some felt all of these things, and more)
- the border between public and private (even in a public business)
Would a white or Asian participant, say, intrude on the atmosphere of a store where there are mostly black clientele? If a certain barbershop is a place people come to let their guard down, to get a break from the everyday microaggressions directed at them, would the project wreck that atmosphere of ease?
Black business owners in Pittsburgh told us they were used to customers of all races coming in and surmised that if there were discomfort, it would be on the part of a white person. (This proved to be the case.)
June 3, 2015
Things we discovered:
- many white people don’t like to think about themselves being white
- each person we spoke with seemed to have a unique take on the work. We imagined a few repeating themes, a sort of blanket response, and instead received a wide variety of responses, from emphatic support to emphatic critique
- sometimes people (usually white, but not always) will drop their voice to a whisper when they say “black” or “white” while talking with us about the project. Despite these sudden hushes (markers of discomfort), people want to keep talking.
One participant was uneasy that her usual way of choosing a place to eat was interrupted by the assignment of finding a black-owned business. But the project is meant to interrupt. If you are white, and in Pittsburgh, you are not likely to “happen upon” a black-owned restaurant.
We hear about restaurants, shops, doctors, day care centers through social media, a system that is not unraced. Networks of friends, friends of friends, the magazines we read, the writers who write for them, the businesses that advertise, the person at the next table whose conversation you overhear as you idly page through an entertainment weekly, sipping your drink. People filling comment boxes, checking in, doing ratings, warning, complaining, enthusing: this friendly-seeming, porous-seeming system is not necessarily porous or friendly, especially to black-owned businesses. We are kept within certain bounds without realizing.
________
Future blog entries:
Quotes: historical underpinnings of the project
Unprepared for sadness. Talking with the owner of a favorite hardware store in Pittsburgh, who read all of our materials and said: “I agree with everything here. But it’s our own fault.” Maggie Anderson, in Our Black Year, also writes of the black community failing to support black-owned businesses.
Dignity as a subject.
People asked us how to tell whether a business is black-owned. In her surprising and engrossing book, Our Black Year, Maggie Anderson describes pulling her car over and running into a drugstore to ask whether it is black-owned, then running back out to her car on her search a black-owned drugstore. She’s on a practical errand, she needs something now, for her baby, she committed to spending money only at black-owned businesess for a year’s time, so she’s carrying out the mission. If she feels awkward going into shops and asking whether they are black-owned, she does not say so. (But Anderson is black.)
The risk in not talking about the black economy, not knowing about the black economy, missing an opportunity to perceive something in our lives and our citiy.
When an unarmed young black man is shot by police, we carry out familiar forms of responding. In grief, helplessness, and frustration, we make signs, march in the street, sign petitions, attend die-ins. On an ordinary day, striking up a conversation about race is hard. Spending $10 isn’t hard. Turn in your dry cleaning.
-
At times we feel tired.
Hopeful. "I have thought more about your project than any other at Open Engagement this year, so thank you for that."
-
Ownership is rarely discussed in papers and articles about changing the economy of black communities in cities such as Pittsburgh, Ferguson, Baltimore. Employment is discussed, jobs are discussed. We propose business ownership and entrepreneurship is as important, or more important, than employeeship. We have been employees, we have been laid off, we have been at the mercy of shareholder proxies, buyouts, takeovers, wage freezes.
One reassuring thing about the project is that it’s small, and ordinary. To make an everyday transaction.
(a blog)
May 31, 2015
There is an impulse to parse everything. Who took photos of themselves? Of the business owner? Who went to new places? Who expressed discomfort? Who identified their race? Is there something that all of these details reveal about who we are (as city dwellers, citizens, or people going through our days)?
The project is a register of discomforts, enthusiasms, excitement, emotion, no emotion, ordinary hours, surprise, routine.
In some ways, we find the most hopeful stories to be the unremarkable ones. Shopping at black-owned businesses as a matter of course is not a new idea to everyone, and that is wonderful. Rather than being inspired only by transformations, we are also inspired by matter-of-factness.
June 1, 2015
Things we worried about:
- being white artists making work about the black economy
- whether anyone would participate
- how the project might be misinterpreted
Things we discovered:
- each participant became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is inspiring
- each business became a site of performance/art/engagement, and that is complicated
- that while we are not the authors of the stories on the site, we feel a great deal of responsibility for the voices that participated. How do we parse our role and theirs? As much as we learned about ourselves making this work, the work still isn’t about us.
- that we can trust other artists (most of them anyway)
- that we can trust ourselves
We trusted participants to carry out their agreement. They trusted that there was no subterfuge on our part. Those who pushed back believed we were listening. Participants assumed good intentions. This fact seems stunning in its unlikeliness, given the mistrust on all sides of our current national conversation about race. It makes us feel hopeful, excited.
June 2, 2015
Things we worried about:
- how the project might be misinterpreted
- if participants brought up One Large, whether the business owners would feel patronized, objectified, romanticized (we expect some felt all of these things, and more)
- the border between public and private (even in a public business)
Would a white or Asian participant, say, intrude on the atmosphere of a store where there are mostly black clientele? If a certain barbershop is a place people come to let their guard down, to get a break from the everyday microaggressions directed at them, would the project wreck that atmosphere of ease?
Black business owners in Pittsburgh told us they were used to customers of all races coming in and surmised that if there were discomfort, it would be on the part of a white person. (This proved to be the case.)
June 3, 2015
Things we discovered:
- many white people don’t like to think about themselves being white
- each person we spoke with seemed to have a unique take on the work. We imagined a few repeating themes, a sort of blanket response, and instead received a wide variety of responses, from emphatic support to emphatic critique
- sometimes people (usually white, but not always) will drop their voice to a whisper when they say “black” or “white” while talking with us about the project. Despite these sudden hushes (markers of discomfort), people want to keep talking.
One participant was uneasy that her usual way of choosing a place to eat was interrupted by the assignment of finding a black-owned business. But the project is meant to interrupt. If you are white, and in Pittsburgh, you are not likely to “happen upon” a black-owned restaurant.
We hear about restaurants, shops, doctors, day care centers through social media, a system that is not unraced. Networks of friends, friends of friends, the magazines we read, the writers who write for them, the businesses that advertise, the person at the next table whose conversation you overhear as you idly page through an entertainment weekly, sipping your drink. People filling comment boxes, checking in, doing ratings, warning, complaining, enthusing: this friendly-seeming, porous-seeming system is not necessarily porous or friendly, especially to black-owned businesses. We are kept within certain bounds without realizing.
________
Future blog entries:
Quotes: historical underpinnings of the project
Unprepared for sadness. Talking with the owner of a favorite hardware store in Pittsburgh, who read all of our materials and said: “I agree with everything here. But it’s our own fault.” Maggie Anderson, in Our Black Year, also writes of the black community failing to support black-owned businesses.
Dignity as a subject.
People asked us how to tell whether a business is black-owned. In her surprising and engrossing book, Our Black Year, Maggie Anderson describes pulling her car over and running into a drugstore to ask whether it is black-owned, then running back out to her car on her search a black-owned drugstore. She’s on a practical errand, she needs something now, for her baby, she committed to spending money only at black-owned businesess for a year’s time, so she’s carrying out the mission. If she feels awkward going into shops and asking whether they are black-owned, she does not say so. (But Anderson is black.)
The risk in not talking about the black economy, not knowing about the black economy, missing an opportunity to perceive something in our lives and our citiy.
When an unarmed young black man is shot by police, we carry out familiar forms of responding. In grief, helplessness, and frustration, we make signs, march in the street, sign petitions, attend die-ins. On an ordinary day, striking up a conversation about race is hard. Spending $10 isn’t hard. Turn in your dry cleaning.
-
At times we feel tired.
Hopeful. "I have thought more about your project than any other at Open Engagement this year, so thank you for that."
-
Ownership is rarely discussed in papers and articles about changing the economy of black communities in cities such as Pittsburgh, Ferguson, Baltimore. Employment is discussed, jobs are discussed. We propose business ownership and entrepreneurship is as important, or more important, than employeeship. We have been employees, we have been laid off, we have been at the mercy of shareholder proxies, buyouts, takeovers, wage freezes.
One reassuring thing about the project is that it’s small, and ordinary. To make an everyday transaction.
