Gunshots in the Garden: Art, Reuse, and the Racialized Landscapes of Leisure

Outside Theaster Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank on the South Side of Chicago is an object that was removed from a park in Cleveland, disassembled, and then reassembled in a new location: the gazebo, formerly standing near the Cudell Recreation Center, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police. In this talk, Rebecca Zorach addresses the gazebo as an object in relation to discourses of public art, monuments, and appropriation, placing it in the context of the political trajectory of gardens and garden structures in American cultural history, racialized landscapes of the city and the nation, and Atlantic histories of race, land, and leisure.

Organized by the Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University.

This lecture is free and open to the public; registration is not required.