Damon Rich

With Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center (2009), I tried to transform several galleries of the Queens Museum of Art into a place to explore how our society pays for housing, how the system has broken down, and the arguments over fixing it.

Developed between 2006 and 2008 at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the work included video conversations with mortgage investors, homebuying counselors, bankers, financial justice advocates, and government regulators; a model of the city’s foreclosure geography using the Museum's famous Panorama of the City of Newark; the inhabitable head of a real estate appraiser; a sinister forty-foot interest rate graph; bus-stop-style posters on the history of mortgage institutions; and puppet shows about mortgage scams and how to avoid them.

Even with this physical setting, the life of the exhibition as a learning center -- not just a conceptual model for one-depended upon connections beyond the gallery, allowing the museum to play a distinct role as part of a larger democratic discussion, providing an aesthetic and abstracted supplement to the concrete but disassociated facts of the news and the disciplined and goal-oriented work of community advocacy.

While artists like Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, and Hans Haacke have focused art audiences on the limitations of the institutions that show their work (including class and race biases and their role in the self-legitimation of the powerful), few institutions have built upon these critical insights to develop the organizational capacities to overcome them. Which organizational capacities?

Part of Damon's Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center (2009) exhibition

For example, the capacity to identify, mail, email, and phone hundreds of New York City housing organizations with invitations to the Red Lines Housing Advocates Thank You Party, "to thank New Yorkers who devote their careers to improving housing in our city," featuring cocktails (free for housing advocates) and a public discussion featuring celebrated historian of urban disinvestment Ken Jackson and housing and fair lending advocates Sarah Ludwig of NEDAP (Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project) and Michelle O'Brian of Housing Here and Now.

Or, the capacity to oversee arrangements for two bilingual off-site Housing Teach-In/Speak-Outs, each involving nearly a dozen housing organizations, elected officials, neighborhood groups, and service providers in a public discussion of housing and foreclosure issues in Jamaica and East Elmhurst, Queens. Most of all, the humble persistence to slowly and patiently win over those who answer the phone skeptical of how an art museum might help them do their job of fighting to improve their community.

Collaborating organizations in Damon's exhibition

As an artist, working on these events with the museum's curatorial, education, and most importantly, public programming and community organizing staff brought additional complexity and interest to the work, embedding it in the social world that is its subject: the Jamaica-based group CHANGER (Communities, Homeowners, and Neighbors Gaining Economic Rights) bussed members to the museum to lead their own tour of the show and organizing workshop about financial consumer protection, and PBS NewsHour used the exhibition as a visual backdrop for a story about the foreclosure crisis.

As a museum, the project initiated relationships that have already been carried beyond their original agenda: NEDAP held a friendraiser event around the Panorama, Neighborhood Housing Services of Northern Queens and Rebuilding Together NYC co-sponsored a block rehab event with the Museum in Summer 2010, and CHANGER signed up to organize their own exhibition in the Museum's partnership gallery this year.

Thank you to Larissa Harris, Alexandra Garcia, Prerana Reddy, Tom Finkelpearl and everyone else at the Queens Museum, Jae Shin and Rana Amirtahmasebi of the Red Lines project team, Meg Rotzel of the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, and the many others critical for realizing this project.

This text was originally published in the brochure "QMA Community: What Happens When We Step Outside of Our Galleries."