Black Cinema House III

From late April through August, as previously reported here and here, I had been working as a carpenter on the Black Cinema House. One of the buildings in Theaster Gates' Dorchester Projects, BCH is a place to archive, study, and present films of the African diaspora. The basement has space for classes; the first floor has a kitchen, an office, bathrooms, and screening space; and the second floor is a private apartment.

Just recently, BCH finally got its final coat of paint, landscaping, and other finishing touches. Two weeks ago, they premiered the space with two screenings -- The Story of a Three-Day Pass, directed by Mario Van Peebles, and a Halloween event for neighborhood kids. This weekend, BCH and Dorchester Projects were host sites for the Art of Placemaking Conference, sponsored by the University of Chicago, the ReBuild Foundation, and the Bruner-Loeb Forum.

Black Cinema House, as it once was.

Black Cinema House II

Since the last post on the Black Cinema House, back in May, much progress has been made. 


Two weekends back, there was a a great cookout in the back of the library house, where the garden has been expanded and newly bordered in the back with a substantial brick wall. The lady and I toured the now-empty garage next to the library house, which has been gutted.


Across the street, the BCH is slowly taking shape. Finish carpentry is a painstaking craft, and the whole building is a piece of art. I feel like that is often said about buildings, usually referring to some starchitect museum complex or luxury condominiums that use imported marble and titanium cladding. This, however, really is a work of art, marked with the evidence of a dozen skilled craftsmen.


6901 Dorchester Avenue is a different, truer piece, made by hand from the bones of old buildings. Just last week I glued together a broken maple stair tread, added a piece of walnut flooring to fill it out, attached a piece of poplar to shim it up, blocked out a new structure in the stairwell, sanded it down, and re-fit it. This is not about speed, or modernity; it is about resurrecting something fractured, reuniting something split, and rebuilding with the remnants of something long since past.

The library house.

Black Cinema House

Over the last two weeks, I've shifted from the ReBuild Foundation shop down to a couple of houses on the south side, on Dorchester Avenue.  Theaster Gates lived on Dorchester Avenue for some time, and has gradually acquired a couple of pieces of property up and down the street.  The main project right now is the Black Cinema House, a two-story brick building, with generous basement, at the corner of Dorchester and 69th St.  

Front of the Black Cinema House. 

Corner, with sweet overhanging second-story bay.

Developed by the ReBuild Foundation architectural design team, it is going to be a place for the study and scholarship of black films, with space for screenings; a large kitchen; an office for archivists, students, and scholars; open programming room for events and classes; and living space for artists on the second floor.  Funded largely with an NEA Creative Placemaking grant, the project has been chronicled over at ArtPlace America.  Films, scholarly support, and collaboration will occur with the Chicago Film Archives and South Side Projections.

Gorgeous round window on first floor.

From the rear.

The ReBuilding Life

This weekend, I found myself on the South Side of Chicago, dodging rain and doing a little construction for the Rebuild Foundation.  Saturday, I was up fairly early, digesting the headlines and trying to get in the laundry room before the rest of the building snapped up the machines.  After some breakfast and chores around the apartment, I loaded my tools into the 'rolla and wound my way to the highway.  The Dan Ryan Expressway is a miserable piece of urban engineering: it slices the city in half, and, despite seven lanes in each direction, was moving at less than twenty miles an hour on a Saturday.  During the week, it is a nightmare, beat to a standstill for about six hours a day.  As Kevin Costner once asserted, if you build it, they will come -- the worst scenario for a highway, as each expansion in lane width merely attracts more traffic and compounds the problem.


At any rate, after about forty-five minutes, I made it to the Chicago HQ of the Rebuild Foundation, started by Theaster Gates, artist, educator, and all-around renaissance man.  I couldn't figure out the gate to the place (typical), and I didn't have the phone number (also typical) of my contact there, Charlie Vinz.  So, in (typically) bewildered fashion, I wandered around the alley for a minute until Charlie appeared at the fence and let me in.  I felt an immediate, powerful sense of place -- the house was a sense memory of Greensboro, radiating the same scents, sights, and scenes as my old home.  It was deeply reminiscent of PieLab, built as it was out of old lumber and odd bits of imagination.

The Dorchester Street house of the Rebuild Foundation, with facade of salvaged wood.