The concept and practice of private property will be dissolved. Every person will have a place to live. Some of the projects in this exhibition trace the shortcomings of our current systems of real estate, land use, and housing, as well as  the groups and individuals that control them. Others imagine possible alternatives, drawing on past precedents or following intuitions for different configurations, arrangements, and relationships.

I decided to organize this exhibition around my new film Committee of Six because many artists (alongside many many people) are feeling the pressure of the broken housing system in this country like never before, and are responding to it in their work. And yet of course it’s happened before; we are in a (predicted) cycle of worsening financial crises, in which each successive wave further panics the owner class and devastates the renter class. The housing market is “up”, inflation is up, rents are up. Housing is a fundamental right systematically denied. Lenapehoking / Philadelphia has been a stage for some of the more egregious examples of abuse (e.g. the MOVE bombing) as well as some of the more inspiring examples of organization and activism (e.g. the Houseless Encampments in the summer of 2020), and I’m very excited to bring this exhibition to this place, and to hear the conversations that I hope it can prompt. We all live on stolen land, and the land belongs to everyone. Land back.

-Fred Schmidt-Arenales

Contributors to this exhibition include:
David L. Johnson
Kevin Kenjar
Tali Keren
Theo Loftis (Curatorial Advisor)
Vikram Patel
Fred Schmidt-Arenales
Elizabeth Shores
Alex Strada
Willie Udell
Sophie White

Committee of Six (TRT 39 min) is an enactment of archival meeting minutes held at the University of Chicago. The meetings took place in 1955 between community leaders and University officials for the purpose of creating an “Urban Renewal Program" for the neighborhood of Hyde Park, situated in the south side of Chicago. The film documents the process of a group of performers, academics, residents, and activists interpreting the archival documents, inviting comparison between the language of the past and the contemporary reality of gentrification and racist real estate practices in Chicago.