IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME(LESS)
May 30, 2021 - 1-3pm
"public art can be a vehicle for the sharing of life-affirming thoughts" - bell hooks
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Join me to engage tourists and invite them to recirculate some of their wealth by sharing AVL housing statistics and living wage info. and the realities of extractive tourism.
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Beginning in the late 1950s, Asheville and other cities across the United States displaced an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 families each year — most of them Black — in what white city officials called urban renewal, but which the writer James Baldwin called “Negro removal.”
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At the Jan. 7 2021 meeting of the City of Asheville Affordable Housing Committee, they discussed the “sobering statistic” that right now, in Asheville, there are less than 20 homes for sale under $275,000.
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There are currently around 550 chronically unhoused people in Buncombe Co. and during the Pandemic the volume of people who are unsheltered doubled due to COVID protocols such as creating distance between beds, dedicating rooms as quarantine space for incoming clients, and requiring negative COVID tests for entry.
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I’ll be hanging some public artworks intended to spark conversations about property ownership, displacement, and the persuasive language used in tourism and realty marketing propaganda. The site was chosen because it is the center of town, in front of a monument to an enslaver who denounced Northern abolitionists, adamantly opposed emancipation, and argued against civil rights. The day was chosen because it is slated to be one of the heaviest tourism days Asheville has seen since the start of the pandemic.
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We’ll be asking tourists for donations to @avlsurvival, @ashevilleforjustice, @belovedasheville, Asheville Buncombe County Land Trust and others. (Please dm me if you have other suggestions).
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What we’re doing: handing tourists info and telling them why we’re talking about cost of living , asking for donations to housing initiatives.
What to bring: posters with your own housing info (what % of your income you pay in rent is a good place to start), flowers, noisemakers, banners, water, sunscreen, snacks.
If you can’t attend in person (or even if you can!): make an IG post or story with your own housing stats, make a donation, share this post, fill out the housing survey linked below.
zine PDF below, feel free to download and circulate tomorrow and beyond. Be in touch with any edits for future versions.
The questions center on rent/income% and availability of resources. Positionality is asked for but not required, and responses will be anonymized. Data will be used to create infographics and dataviz about the realities of housing in the region.
To contribute to wealth reclamation in Asheville:
https://linktr.ee/avlsurvival // @avlsurvival IG + Venmo
https://linktr.ee/ashevilleforjustice // @ashevilleforjustice IG + Venmo
https://abclt.org/
ABCLT is a nonprofit that seeks to establish permanently affordable residential, commercial, and community spaces that empower Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and low- to moderate-income residents to build social, economic, and cultural capital.
www.belovedasheville.com/ // @ belovedasheville IG
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www.differentwrld.com/ // @differentwrld IG
Black-led space for creatives opening 2021
www.engagingcollections.org // @engagingcollections
Publication and Art Residency uplifting omitted voices from archives and special collections.
Other Resources:
Antiracist Praxis, American University - Segregation and De Facto Segregation by Olivia Ivey
The Color of Law, A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Open Floor Plan was a constellation of exhibitions of sculpture, installation, photography, and time-based media shown in multiple locations across several months in SPRING 2021.
