Homebody
Cam Granger is a special addition to the Atlas.
Here, he speaks on what it means to be from the Midwest, and to return to it. - Ed.
“People often seem to think of my being in Columbus as a political project, when the fact of the matter is really that Columbus is everywhere to me.” Dearest homie, favorite artist, and fellow community member Hanif Abdurraqib offered this elucidation (among many other gems) during a recent town hall-esque gathering of Columbus, Ohio creative types. Until that moment, as a lifelong Midwesterner—notwithstanding a brief, year-long stint in Queens—I’d resisted the allure that the ubiquitous Elsewhere can provide for the artistically inclined among us, but never had the language for why, though it has always tossed and turned in my heart and on my tongue.
(Before going any further, it is important to note here that I’m not from Columbus. I’m from Cleveland—Euclid, to be most precise. This is a distinction that’s important to make, because if i’m going to talk to you about Elsewhere I think it’s important to note that well, I too left home for mine.)
Columbus is the Midwestern city that made me into an artist, and not just because I went to art school here. When I flunked my senior year, it was the guidance and support of OGs like Marshall Shorts, David Butler, and Cat Sheridan that kept me from spiraling and encouraged me to go back and finish. When I was rejected from damn near every job I applied to after I got my degree, it was friends like Dionne Custer Edwards, Jean Pittman, Dom Deshawn, Tosha Stimage, and Mike and Samson at Upper Cup Coffee who gave me enough work to keep my belly full. (And I love them, so I love that which brought them to me too.) For me, making the Midwest my home isn’t done in opposition to one thing or the other. It isn’t to prove that you don’t need to live on the coasts to make it as an artist (which, for the record I don’t believe anyway), or anything like that. I’m here simply because I love being here, and I love making art here.
there is a long stretch of road just past the warehouse my homies and I used to run an art space out of where you can go 70 miles per hour and never hit a single red light, if you time it right, and every time I felt sad or anxious or like I was running out of air, I would crawl into my minivan and let down every single window I still could, and just go, man so on May 17th 2017, the night my mother told me that my grandmother had died, I followed my tears like the rivers flow and found myself on that road and I just drove and drove and drove, finding new parts my eyes had never seen, and listen, man: when I tell you I went so far down that road that the road just ran out, and it’s only now in writing this that I realize there wasn’t a single path I could have taken that night that would have gotten me to where I really wanted to go or to who I wanted to see.
“Beware of saying to them that different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities). It would be impossible for me to describe Columbus to you in a manner such as this, nor do I think I could sufficiently put my feelings into words. For, dear reader, like most cities I’m sure, Columbus contains multiple cities within cities, a unique one revealing itself to each resident, and there’s no tome of knowledge or record of events that can accurately posit all of them. For me, the city is drinking beers on the rooftop of our old warehouse artspace, the smoke from my homies’ cig tickling my nose. It’s the ice cream place that is, yes, also a gas station, that is, also yes, next to the taco truck that stays open late enough to get something good to eat after the show. It’s crying in the arms of a comrade at the protest downtown, then joining the chorus to sing them happy birthday moments later.
from The Line, by Cameron A. Granger
Every time I think I’ve got the city committed to memory, something new reveals itself. A recent work of mine, a video called The Line, explores the history, present, and potential futures of Columbus’ Near East Side, a historically Black neighborhood that was gutted by so-called urban development projects (like the 71 Highway) and racist zoning laws. It was a project I had tried to make several times before and always failed. For a long time, it was missing the essential anchor that community lends to a work like that. The nature of community, I mean really belonging to a group of people and place, took years to reveal itself to me (and I to it, for that matter).
in my ten years living in Columbus, I've had three going away parties, the first two celebrating what were to be brief leaves of absence, short term trips to Elsewhere in an effort to get closer to what I’ve been missing back home. The third time was supposed to be a permanent or longer term parting. career-wise at least, I felt like I had done I felt like I had done everything worth doing in town. even my OGs encouraged me to get out so that I could grow. so I left, and I couldn’t stop thinking about home. everytime I came back, I couldn’t stop thinking about Elsewhere. maybe that’s the nature of being human. we grow, we leave what we’ve known. making new homes in different places, leaving pieces of ourselves attached in concrete and archways in our wake. the truth is, without my expeditions to Elsewhere I doubt I’d be in the place in my career that I am now. that said, I could say the same about the time I’ve spent here at home.
There’s something to be said about “belonging” to a place. To what extent do the places we hold dear hold us? What is it that place owes us? And what do we owe to it? In Invisible Cities, his landmark text (if this artist may say so himself), Italo Calvino likens the city to something akin to an organic being. If the city is like a body, then what are the components necessary to creating a sustainable, healthy ecosystem for those of us keeping the body going?
Here in Columbus, there’s a citywide marketing initiative called “Columbus Makes Art, Art Makes Columbus,’” highlighting various creative types (some of who are dear friends of this particular artist) and putting their faces on billboards, webpage banners, brochure ads. Things like that. In a city undergoing development and gentrification as rapid as Columbus is, it's hard not to see this campaign as developer bait, or some version of what folks call “artwashing,” especially when the last handful of years have seen the artist-run space community all but disappear due to a lack of financial support. Our only arts writing outlet had to close its doors for the same reasons.
from The Line, by Cameron A. Granger
What’s more, I've seen so many talented people leave for various other Elsewheres, due to a lack of resources and support for the work that they’ve been doing. What does it take to make artists feel like they can stay and grow in a city, and feel invested enough to see its community grow and thrive in turn? How can we ensure that when a city says art “makes” it that it backs that up with real, material support for the artists working there, and their well-being? I’ve seen so many of my peers making groundbreaking work burn out while having to work multiple jobs just to make rent for the month.
I love this city with all of my heart, and I love making art here, but I’d be lying if I said that, even with all of the amazing work that folks are doing, i’m not worried for the future as I watch rent prices rise and material support get more and more concentrated in one place outside of many. With the odds so stacked against us, when we’re constantly fighting against the tide, how could I blame anyone for leaving to find safety in their own Elsewhere?
when I moved back to Columbus after a year and a half away, I took a trip to the art museum. there was a retrospective of Aminah Brenda-Lynn Robinson’s work on view: one of my favorite artists, a MacArthur Genius, and a Columbus legend. the exhibition, one result of an incredibly generous gift she left to the museum when she passed in 2015, cataloged her work and life from her days in art school (Robinson and I share the same Columbus alma mater, unfortunately she was unable to finish due to financial constraints), all the way up to the months before her passing. it was a dense, expansive exhibition that demanded multiple viewings.
a section at the end featured a number of interviews with friends, collectors, and community members. one common thread was how hard she worked. Aminah would stay up well past the point of exhaustion working on her craft. she’d crank out bodies of work in weeks. this work ethic of hers was something celebrated almost unanimously through the testimonials, but it just made me sad.
upon my exit, I decided to take a walk to one of my favorite spots in the city: a mural, not too far from the museum, painted by students as a direct recreation of Aminah’s “A Street Called Home”. it’s a large, vibrant image of Columbus’ Near East Side as she saw it: vibrating, dense, and unfurling in front of you, in a way that constantly reverals something new to whomever takes the time to stand before it and bear witness.
when I arrived at the spot, the mural was no longer there. it was demolished along with the building it had been painted on. paved over for an extension of an auto insurance firm’s parking lot.
Kristine Schramer
The more cynical side of me, attuned to the ever-fraught relationship between those who make a city’s policies and those (us) who bear the weight of them, wants to say that this is what the city means when it says that art makes it: another piece of pavement on the road to expansion, and maybe some veneration in death, if you’re lucky. But I've recently tasked myself with learning how to work away from cynicism whenever I can. So instead, I will leave ya’ll with this: in her passing, another gift that Aminah left behind was her home. She wanted it to become a residency for artists both local and across the country. So now, every year artists come from their own corners of Elsewhere and make her home theirs, for a time.
I think this is what it comes down to: what is it that we can give each other when the places that we come from fall short? For some time now, any hope I hold in the future has come in the form of my communities. Institutions and policy makers will not save us. It’s us that must see each other out of The Fire This Time, and it will be the homes we make for and inside of each other that will lead the way.
