In my early forties, I abruptly found myself running a non-profit art gallery in Main South, an impoverished and brown section of a post-industrial New England city. Despite its wealth of beautiful early twentieth-century brick buildings and a central location in the city, Main South has suffered for decades from unemployment, narcotics, lack of investment, and municipal neglect. While it’s far from the most dangerous neighborhood in the city, or the most impoverished, it is the boogeyman neighborhood, with a firm grip on the imaginations of white, more affluent city residents. Here, the crime is mostly lurid, not mortal in nature–think prostitution, public intoxication, or stabbings between low-level drug dealers—and it all gets breathlessly reported by local news outlets. The racial make-up of the neighborhood helps reinforce its alien status. My white Irish-German neighbor, whose clan fled their five-bedroom Victorian house there in the 1950s, told me “it’s like the UN down there,” and shuddered.
Our gallery moved there in 1999, after a decade and a half of shuttling between one donated downtown office space and another. The move to a regal 1904 brick residential hotel—once the Park Plaza of our city—was intended to kick off a well-meaning municipal plan to establish a “arts district” that was adjacent to the downtown business district. The fact that the local residents were unlikely to complain, or necessarily need to be informed of the city’s plans for their neighborhood, was an additional bonus.
When the arts district was officially located to Main South in 2000, it failed to materialize, and the anecdotal blame smells of race. “People,” I am told, meaning “white people”—don’t come to that neighborhood, there are “active gangs” in Main South, and, above all, the “local residents don’t care about art.” To this day, city planners are blamed simultaneously for not engaging the residents at all, engaging them badly, and failing to notice or care that the “neighborhood” was, in theory, either apathetic or hostile to the plan. In all of these models, of course, the assumption is that the city planners are whites who are set up in opposition to a brown and black neighborhood not sufficiently invested in their own future and in art, a binary not assisted by the ominous title of “Master Plan.” It didn’t look to me, however, like meaningful neighborhood engagement would have mattered in the end. The financial investment that the arts districts planners assumed would naturally follow the master plan failed to arrive, and, given that all this was supposed to take place during the recession of the early 2000s, probably wouldn’t have arrived at any location in the city.[1] So the visions of the large, four-color, glossy Arts District Master Plan–the artist studios, engaging creative activities for lively children, sophisticated visitors arriving for a multitude of entertainment and dining options–were never made manifest.[2]
Our art gallery was left stranded in Main South, but picturesquely so, on two floors of what was once a glamorous hotel reception area and its cocktail lounge—at approximately $2.49 a square foot–thanks to a charitable rent rate secured by the arts district planners, one of the great accomplishments of that effort. That rent rate allowed the gallery to survive the all kinds of cuts to the arts, including the Great Recession, the death knoll of so many grass-roots arts organizations—and even thrive, as this odd little oasis of elite cultural programming in a very poor neighborhood. Some 500 artists, art lovers, students—almost all of them white—visit the gallery each month, and are greeted by our tiny little staff, almost all of us white. When I took this position, the board of directors charged me to “youngify” the organization, which I did. Nobody asked me to make it less white.
My willingness to work daily in Main South occasionally interests white people I meet at cocktail parties and charitable receptions. A few women have raised brows weakened by Botox at me and murmured, “Are you afraid to be in the gallery by yourself?” One gentlemen, a civic leader wearing (without irony) a gray flannel suit, asked me if I still had trouble getting people down there, because it’s dangerous for “people not familiar with the area.” No, I respond, it doesn’t scare me, although none of us ever name what it is I’m supposed to fear.
I know what it is, though: it’s the men who hang out on the streets of Main South, of course.
Although these men do not represent the majority of neighborhood residents–ordinary people with ordinary jobs, taking their kids to school, going to the nearby grocery store–these men are inordinately visible to white gallery visitors. The unfamiliar visitor is often frightened of these groups of brown men loitering around the stoops and streetlights, with their shaved heads and tattoos. These men are different: they’re straddling small dirt bikes, and speaking Spanish. The unfamiliar visitors are sometimes right when they suspect these men (again, not the majority of neighborhood residents) of trafficking drugs. I’ve seen the occasional visitor on our sidewalk jump visibly when one man yells at his friend from across the street. The occasional addict shuffles along, as well. It’s an intimidating neighborhood for the art gallery demographic.
In deference to fear of the neighborhood, my predecessor kept the front locked at all times. Visitors were obliged to ring the doorbell, and stand on the street, waiting to be admitted. Imagine the most foreign of our visitors: a white couple from a neighboring and more affluent town visits for the first time. They don’t normally go downtown, but her friend from her book club has a painting in the latest exhibition. They had to push by a small knot of scary-looking men to get to the door, and he’s visibly worrying about the Camry he parked on the street. She clutches a teal and purple hand-felted handbag bought from a crafts fair. Having rung the bell, they stand there nervously as I cross the entire gallery—so slowly, it seems–to let them into the safe environs of art and away from the groups of men.
It didn’t seem to me that entering the gallery like that enhanced their experience in the neighborhood, and I couldn’t see how safety was being enhanced, “safety” being the primary reason that door had been kept locked. I unlocked the door.
Robbery and rape were obviously the two criminal acts I am supposed to fear, but, to start with the first, I do not fear being robbed in the gallery, or of the gallery being burgled at all. What we do in the art gallery is of no value to potential or imaginary criminals. The cash on hand is petty in every sense, the artwork has no street value, and nobody they know is remotely involved in our operations. That the gallery and the street economy exist in totally different spheres is self-evident to me, and seemed more than sufficient reason why I should not fear the men on the street. Likewise, an attack by an imaginary sexual predator is far less likely than a car accident on the way to work, about which I also don’t worry.
It took me a while, though, to figure that it was more than common sense and statistics that freed me from fearing the men on the streets. Two men who are most familiar to me sometimes refer to me as “art lady,” which I couldn’t help but love. But one day, yet another person living on the west side asked if I was scared to work in Main South. My response came quickly: “No, I’m not scared. No one messes with the white art lady. What could possibly bring the police faster and angrier than that?” I heard myself insert that second adjective out of irritated vehemence, and then I understood better. Of course I’m safe, and feel safe. As one of the three white people who work on that stretch of Main Street, I’m highly visible, and my well-being is valued. If I were to call the police, they would come quickly, and might not hesitate to use violence in my defense. To the imaginary criminals haunting the neighborhood, I would be no more than trouble. I’m white.
A consolation for my ignorance: sometimes, I get to use my elite whiteness to have people look at art. Several times a week, I have to move people out of our doorway. Under a broad bronze portico, the doorway is set into the building, a perfect location for a quick transaction, to light a cigarette, or to stand out of the elements. So I or the program manager head out, often having to knock on our own door so that the men move away enough for us to open it. “Hello, gentlemen,” I say, “I need to ask you to keep the doorway clear. Would you like to come in and see the exhibit? It’s free, and everybody is welcome.” Ninety-nine percent of the time, the response is a group “sorry, sorry,” and a general backing away from the art lady as quickly as possible.
In fact, despite our signs, often don’t notice they are standing in front of a business at all, let alone an art gallery. My problem, as I understood it for a long time, was to get them to recognize that there’s an art gallery here, and then, of course, to come in and look at the art. I could not for the longest time understand why the loiterers might not want to come in and see the exhibitions. After all, they’re hanging out right there already, and it’s free. It took years for me to figure out it might not be such a good idea for them to be caught somewhere that they “shouldn’t be,” all alone with a white woman.
But sometimes someone takes me up on my invitation. A memory of a elementary school field trip to a museum decades ago surfaces, or they have a cousin who draws the most amazing pictures they’ve ever seen, and they could show me on their phone. I sometimes resemble the art teacher they had in school, or, once, the art therapist they had in prison. The impulse can be short-lived; the new visitor now finds himself alone in this white-walled, high-ceiling, high-cultured place, in the hands of a smiling, middle-aged white woman, seen a few things, and he’s ready to go now. “Wait,” I say, “There’s a whole different exhibition one level down. Let me show it to you.”
Sometimes a child will push on our doorbell out of sheer boredom, while their mother talks with her friends underneath our portico. To everyone’s surprise, a white woman suddenly emerges out of a doorway that perhaps they had never noticed, and invites them to come inside to see the art, urges them to accept her invitation, tells them that admission is free, everyone is welcome. Most of the time the female accidental visitors politely come in, look around, and allow me to show them the galleries. They tell their children not to touch the art, and politely accept the schedule cards for upcoming exhibits I press upon them. I’ve been doing it long enough to know that they rarely come back.
Secret number three: I’m afraid of getting it wrong.
Here’s a truth all too familiar to people working in this field: galleries, museums, and arts non-profits are dominated by white employees, white management, and white artists. Black and brown people are grossly underrepresented in the MFA programs, internships, and other professional pipelines that could correct this imbalance. It starts earlier than that, of course. While access to arts education has declined in pubic systems across the nation, public school students in impoverished black and brown neighborhoods rarely had more than “art on a cart” even before No Child Left Behind. The “gallery system” itself is historically an institution of the white and the affluent, and requires of an artist who trying to enter it many things: disposable income, reliable transportation, and decent control over one’s own time. The whole operation carries an array of social, educational, and cultural codes that were invisible to me for a long time.
Almost all of our exhibiting artists are white, which became painfully obvious when a local curator and I called for black and white artwork. The exhibit theme had been determined in the spring of 2014, a few months before the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The artwork, however, was submitted well after the fact, and some of it engaged images and ideas about race. A secret, if not a full confession: months after the rise of Black Lives Matter, I was white enough to be surprised to receive artwork about race. I genuinely wasn’t expecting anything but monochrome.
Some of the work about race was sophisticated, some foolish, but it was made very earnestly and entirely by white artists, and a few of them inadvertently gave offense to our all-too-rare black gallery visitors. With the expertise of others, most notably the sole black full-time visual arts faculty member in our college town, I hastily compiled a “resource list” of materials: race and the visual arts, the underrepresentation of minorities in MFA programs, and links from #museumsrespondtoferguson. I printed it as a handout in the gallery and posted it online. While such a valuable resource is nothing I was required or asked to produce, it was a coward’s move. I couldn’t imagine our lily-white organization trying to host some public dialogue on race. But with an irreproachable resource list, I could acknowledge the racial content in the exhibit, while not actually engaging anybody myself or having a risky conversation.
A final secret: I have let people touch the art because I am stupidly made anxious by my own whiteness. Sometimes, when a non-white visitor comes into the gallery, one who feels to me like they are uncomfortable inhabiting the space, or at least unfamiliar with what’s supposed to happen there, I let them violate the traditional do-not-touch rule of museums and galleries. I fear that if I tell the visitors not to touch the art–who are, after all, doing exactly what I hope they will do, engaging with it– no matter how pleasant and lighthearted my correction might be, it would make them more uncomfortable, and ensure that they would not return, nor enter any other similar space. I’m scared of scaring them off.
This post felt incomplete, self-indulgent, and dissatisfying before Trump’s election, but now feels dated in a rather pleasant way. The project of trying to make the gallery consistently look more like our city is ongoing. The attempt to write about my most everyday experience with race in an American city, unsurprisingly, taught me how much I have to learn. A wiser woman than me read a draft and adjusted my thinking with such astounding gentleness that I didn’t realize how thoroughly I’d been schooled. I pondered the professional risks of publishing these musing. Now, all those anxieties feel fabulously dated. I worry less about how the men on the street appear to anxious gallery visitors and more about how they might look to immigration officials. If there is any silver lining to the change in our political landscape, more and more visitors are coming down to Main South since January. It would appear that the appreciation of free, creative expression and culture can overcome anxieties about the wrong neighborhood and imaginary fears about it. We all have much more to fear in real life now.
[1] As I write, grass roots efforts are working to turn another one of our immediate neighborhood’s beautiful brick buildings into an arts facility of many purposes. Another one venture, of a more private nature, has taken root in a building a few blocks over, and a particularly beautiful building in the neighborhood is rumored to being considered for a return to its original function. There’s a case to be made that the Arts District Master Plan was simply two decades before its time.
[2] The success story of the original arts district actually took place off of its northern-most border, the renovation of an old vaudeville theatre into a highly successful musical and entertainment venue. Much energy on the parts of city planners migrated with that success, creating a new Master Plan for the Theatre District, where there is currently one theatre, but soon to be two.
The Splits 