I worked with Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler on two commissioned projects, both works about the colors with which we live at home: the first, Camouflaged History from 1991, employed an existing paint chart to repaint the exterior—the public face—of a nineteenth-century private home; the other, Eminent Domain from 1993, led to the design of a new paint chart, imagined for interiors—the private living spaces of the collaborators—but actually demonstrating the personal issues at stake in public housing.1  The artists’ processes for the two works varied accordingly: one involved the negotiation of permission to use private space for public display; the other the negotiation of ideas and issues in the public realm that influence individual lives, a process that required gaining the deep trust of a specific community and creating a true working partnership with its members.  In the two short years that separated these projects, consulting and collaborating with the people that artists’ projects affect had moved to the forefront of art practice.  As a result, contentious debate ensued about authorship, and the relationships between the art world and the everyday world, and between socially elite and economically impoverished audiences.  Thus, Eminent Domain became as emblematic of this new emphasis on audience as Camouflaged History was iconic of site-specific strategies of installation. 

Charleston, South Carolina, is a city all about home—planters owned numerous plantations as well as city mansions; Africans were taken from their homes and enslaved here; the Civil War originated here partly as a fight to protect the power rooted in homes. Today thousands have newly made the Low Country region their home and from this resettlement, issues arise that threaten the cultural and ecological sustainability of the land.  One of the city’s long-time single-family residences provided the site of Camouflaged History.   Even before Mel and Kate came to town, they knew of Dutch Boy Paints’ chart “The Authentic Colors of Historic Charleston” whose seventy-two colors, codified and imposed by the local governing body of the Board of Architectural Review, evoked venerable local stories set against a timeline of American history and architectural styles. 

But what hit them upon arriving in Charleston was the frenzy of restoration activity just six months after the disaster of Hurricane Hugo and, in that restoration, the reconstruction of history and the new demarcations between rich and poor, white and black.  They wanted to make a project that revealed more.  After visits to three neighborhood groups, they focused on the Eastside, still today a troubled, marginal area where family homes change hands as elders pass away or sell because their offspring have moved away, and opportunistic buyers eagerly await the neighborhood’s gentrification.  There a three-story single house became the location for the project; its site—at T-shaped intersection marking the southernmost border of historic district—became a signpost differences between the north and south ends of this peninsula city, between the past and the future. 

Using exclusively Dutch Boy’s “Historic Charleston” palette, Mel and Kate transformed the house with a multi-colored camouflage paint job that, ironically, brought the house attention rather than concealing it. .  Some people wanted the camouflaged house to stay; others were relieved when the project ended.  Some even interpreted it as a pro-war statement since Operation Desert Storm was going on at that time and Charleston served as a major point of troop departure to the Middle East.   At the end of the project the camouflage was painted over in colors chosen by the eighty-year-old reverend who resided there, rendering the house inconspicuous once again.

By contrast, Eminent Domain reflected the institutionalized system and big city politics of Chicago, where America’s uncomfortable relationship with public housing has played out through one of the system’s most infamous histories.  Mel and Kate wished to create a dream paint chart of seemingly infinite variation, to emphasize the lack of choice for residents whose own living spaces are controlled by the Chicago Housing Authority. The CHA alone could determine the interior color of public housing units: that color was white; they called it “Authority White.”  Mel and Kate’s chart provoked awareness by telling the history of government-subsidized housing color-by-color.  Thus, Eminent Domain was intended as a social treatise, a public information piece that would be available on store shelves, a freely available work of art that aimed to critique certain stereotypes about public housing communities. 

As in Charleston, Mel and Kate visited several housing sites.  Initial meetings with CHA officials proved unfruitful, so instead they sought out tenants whose life experience could contribute to the project.  They found the greatest cooperation at Ogden Courts, a 1950 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill high-rise complex, where they met families dealing head-on with social problems.  There, too, they met a small group of organized residents struggling to improve conditions in their apartment complex.  But the resident leaders, Arrie Martin and Elois Smith, were skeptical of the project’s relevance to their lives.  “Some of these people were very disillusioned—they’d had ‘do-gooders’ come in many times before. So what were these two doing?  When they first started there was some resistance—it was a very challenging environment. I was very impressed with their humility,” recently reflected Rebecca DesMarais, who assisted in implementing Eminent Domain after having worked with the artists in Charleston.  

Ultimately it was Kate and Mel’s warm personalities and commitment to project that encouraged the residents to embark on a series of developmental workshops with the artists.  Again DesMarais: “Mel and Kate did different kinds of sensitivity sessions. Now whenever I get paper towels that have some of these little homey things on them (houses, hearts, flowers, and so on), I always think of Mel and Kate. They would take such products with them to use in these workshops, saying ‘Here, we even have paper towels that talk about a happy home.’ That was part of their kit to illustrate what they were trying to get across.  And there were also the pies….”  The women of the Ogden Courts Tenants Council would make dinners to earn money for community activities, especially those benefiting the children.  Mel and Kate participated by baking pies together.  While sharing the artists’ belief in effecting change, hoping to better the lives of those in their community with the articulate and powerful message of the paint chart, Ms. Martin and Ms. Smith also wanted some direct educational benefit to come out of this project.  In response, an honorarium for their collaboration on Eminent Domain was used to fund the start of a number of educational programs for the children of Ogden Courts. 

The chart took the form of a U. S. map, its fifty states inspiring fifty color names that told the national story of public housing.2  Production of the chart was proposed for Tru-Test Manufacturing Company, a Chicago-area-based firm supplying paints for True Value Hardware Stores nationwide, with distribution of the chart’s colors coordinated with the company’s stock Tru-Test colors.  I believe the fact that the manufacture of the chart and its distribution in stores has not yet come to pass is a disappointment not only because a public art piece has remained incomplete, but also because of the unfulfilled promise of the project’s artist-to-community and arts institution-to-artist contracts. 

Rebecca sees it differently: “The community participants were affected. Maybe the project’s completion lies in the fact that all those people had some sort of voice in it. And maybe the Ogden Courts residents believed the paint chart was complete. I think what constituted completion was to have somebody listening and taking their concerns seriously.  And while it didn’t result in the Chicago Housing Authority adopting those colors, just going through the process of recognizing the input or decisions they would have had in their apartments was to see themselves treated as individuals.”

Eminent Domain may one day reach another phase and have a more fully realized outcome, but it achieved actuality by addressing the lived reality of others.  Perhaps even more telling is that the effects of Mel and Kate’s project are still felt in the art field now, more than a decade later.

Mary Jane Jacob

Notes  
1. These works were commissioned as part of exhibition programs which I curated: Places with a Past for the Spoleto Ffestival USA, Charleston, South Carolina, undertaken 1990-91, and Culture in Action for Sculpture Chicago, 1991-1993.  The accompanying publications devote a chapter to each of Ericson and Ziegler’s projects.   

2. The fifty colors comprising the paint chart are featured in Culture in Action (Seattle, Bay Press, 1995).