On The Painting As A Fantasy

exhibition essay for Plugged-in Paintings, SITE 131, January 2019

Art depends less and less on physicality to exist. The painting as an unreproducible work is a symbol of longing, emboldened by the absence of tactility in our experience of the world. The institution of painting as a medium has died many deaths in the critical sphere. Still, the painting itself remains a worshipped object. Artists who make something and call it a painting thus refer to a span of fraught discussions — traditional values of the art market, environmental responsibility, classical humanism — just by making something and calling it a painting. What have they really done?

The nine artists of Plugged-in Paintings at SITE 131 bring irrevocable qualities of the painting to the fore. Pointedly large works in the show are referred to by the curators as digital paintings, an established term used to describe works on canvas that recreate traditional painting techniques through the use of computers and software. In this exhibition, manipulation of photographs and experimental modes of printing test or subvert the idea of digital painting.

Excitement generated by a painting is owed to the performance it documents. These works isolate gestures of performance from physical material, investigate both using digital methods, and return them to a canvas. By calling itself a painting, each work poses as a door to the history of what has been valued in art. To enter is to see the future.

Petra Cortright was among the first multimedia artists seen peering into a webcam in videos posted on YouTube, mimicking the experience of the viewer on the other side of the screen. She sold her work for the first time in 2008 at Dallas gallery And/Or. Cortright’s remarkable success as a post-internet, feminist artist who engages with social issues has been supported by critics and the market; her work appeared in Paddles On!, the first digital art auction by a major auction house when Paddle8 caught up in 2014.

It is both curious and fitting that her contribution to this exhibition is the most painterly. The triptych Wrestling Entrance Themes_smoke+the_weed+mp3 is part of a series based on a grey sea landscape. While Cortright is known to disassemble pointed images, like a photo of Julian Schnabel’s ex-wife’s kitchen, for her impressionistic body of digital paintings, this time the source images simply depict flowers and water that appear as such in the work. Errant lines pull motion downward in a rose-and-sage fantasy of nature and rest.

Desire for the presence of land and the corporeal appears in Plugged-in Paintings even when the artists commit to hide it. Technology melds with the structures of its users, who like to believe they are in charge. Co-curator and featured artist John Pomara began experimenting with scanners in the late ‘80s, inspired by the concept of painting’s demise in the essays of Endgame: Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting and Sculpture (1986). Pomara traced the formations of paint drips on his studio floor and slid the renderings around on a scanner, animating the refuse of his painting practice. Fascinated with images of cell structure as seen through the lens of a microscope, he fused paint to microbiology.

Pomara later made a ritual of applying oil paint atop the patterns of heavily glitched digital photographs. His contribution to this show features no paint. The subject of Red Alert is a stranger’s nude self-portrait as posted on Instagram in black-and-white. (A comment of heart and lightning-bolt emojis from Pomara’s account appears on the woman’s originally posted photograph.) After using glitch techniques to make the image unrecognizable and running the canvas through a printer multiple times to manipulate it further, Pomara offers, with the blessing of the source image’s subject and author, a bold color version in UV ink that keeps her form an open secret.

Dean Terry’s provocative Suburban White Woman #1 is his return to 2D production after almost three decades away. Dallas audiences might recognize him as the leader of the experimental performance group Therefore, with whom Terry created a testament to the raw horrors of living in the age of artificial intelligence in 2018. The Alexa Dialogues used the so-named Amazon device in the show as an improv actor.

As a co-curator and featured artist in Plugged In Paintings, Terry expresses obsession with methods of surveillance and his frustration over technology’s unkept promises. “I’m playing White Guy Yelling At His T.V. From The Couch,” Terry writes on his website to preface the piece. The layers of Suburban White Woman #1 are made with camera angles and lenses — photographs of photographs. Terry’s subject is a woman who presents as an affirming Trump supporter, pictured at a televised rally for the president immediately after then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July. Screens that see the woman’s face make their presence known with debris over the image. The artist who sees the woman through the screens imagines she is now less certain of her allegiance to the president, but for all his searching studies of her expression, he can’t be sure.  

Chris Dorland alludes to vulnerability in technology with Untitled (Apache Struts). The title’s reference to a hopeful, free, open-source system for making web apps carries the context of its downfall: a glitch that hackers can easily exploit. Dorland’s chaotic process yields a musical series of repeated lines and forms, a generative code like a (dangerous) trance.

Liz Trosper is a careful investigator, fundamentally interested in texture and the elemental. She translates the feel and touch of studio process to digital images. Squeezes of acrylic paint and a hue of cardboard in Accumulation 2 create a desire in the viewer to put their hands in, situating them at a supposed first gate of artmaking when materials arrive in the mail. The limits of 2D media are reinforced when all the viewer can do is witness what has not yet begun and join the artist in her studies of color.

The religiosity of minimalism doesn’t work for Zeke Williams, whose collage-like digital works are too playful to fall into that tradition and too experimental to be considered graphic design though he uses tools like Adobe Illustrator, traditional for an industrialized image-maker. The stripes you see in Klymene are emblematic of his design sensibility, and the patterns repeat across his body of work.

Lucas Martell is the only artist in this exhibition who calls themself a traditional painter. He adopted a new way of working to make Light Weight. Scavenging for mundane, small objects to photograph and feed to Photoshop, he began to see himself as an extractor; where painting with watercolor, for example, had been a kind of push, the modes required for digital assemblage were a pull. The result evokes arid earth and primitive sculpture, punctuated with an image of a die like a souvenir of this experiment.

The land peeks out again with incidental woodgrain patterns in Matthew Choberka’s Sounding Board. The artist connected with co-curator John Pomara through Instagram. As an analog painter from the Studio School in New York, he picked up a tablet and the painting app Procreate first as a kind of mobile painting studio. His iPad setup was a way to investigate color while he was traveling. Later when he tried the Apple pencil, his practice began to shift. Choberka's contribution to Plugged In Paintings carries a sense of humor about coming to digital tools from New York School traditions. This is the first time Choberka has shown in Dallas.

Lorraine Tady uses dream logic to make maps that express the motion of specific places and how she remembers traveling through them. Octagon Vibration Series, Frequency Piccadilly Circus is made of tactile dry point monotypes whose parts she re-images and re-appropriates. In this way Tady makes a place for the analog printing process in digital painting and, tenderly, allows rough edges to preserve the one-take life of printmaking. In this piece, London’s public transportation and the Thames river walkway are treasured with a grid. The orange strokes stand for the so-colored poles in Piccadilly Circus tube station.

For all the ways painting has been decentralized, the painting’s insistence as a supreme object is powerful inasmuch as its language is still used to validate new modes. Whether that validation serves the artist in the market or complicates a work of conceptual art as a symbol, the painting finds ways to demand attention.

"To be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore." Yve Alain-Bois attributed this quote to Roland Barthes in his essay "Painting: The Task Of Mourning,” which appears in the Endgame collection Pomara read before harvesting those paint drips on his studio floor for the scanner. That line can be found other places, attributed to Barthes, but the original text source remains elusive. Another proclaimed end carries a challenge. The gesture is a loop.

— Lyndsay Knecht



Hello-o! A(nother) Dallas Cultural Plan Update

The information-gathering phase of Dallas' quest for a comprehensive arts policy continues. And so does the Office of Cultural Affairs' messaging campaign, which communicates the city's urgency to support the arts with a formal Cultural Plan, one meant to provide guidance on how to allocate public resources like money and physical venues to artists. Many questions remain, but the city's concept of what art is— and how to decide what to support— is becoming less vague. 

Headington Companies, which owns The Joule and the lion's share of successful new restaurants in downtown and the Design District, was represented on a public panel sponsored by the Office of Cultural Affairs Monday. The company's president, Michael Tregoning, was onstage at Moody Performance Hall for what was billed as the headlining discussion of the year among scores of dialogues and huddle-ups also presented by the OCA.

The Dallas Creative Conversation became an annual convening ritual in 2013 for the mayor's Dallas Arts Week, which has since morphed into Dallas Arts Month. A hype machine for the emerging Cultural Plan is well into overdrive; spirited invitations for public comment at hallmark museums and cultural centers dotted fall calendars like map pins.

Monday's discussion was a parade at the intersection of commercial success and creativity. Tregoning was joined onstage by Lola Lott, the principal and CEO of charlieuniformtango, a Dallas advertising and production company known for a streak of ads aired during the Super Bowl; Kelley Lindquist, the president of Artspace, a nonprofit developer of arts facilities focused on affordable housing; and Kimi Nikaidoh, the artistic director of the Bruce Wood Dance Project. Lott and her husband Todd bought a historic Winnetka Heights church and founded Arts Mission Oak Cliff in an area originally zoned for residential, just around the corner from LULAC. It is now a year old.

The mayor was not part of the panel, nor was Joy Bailey Bryant of Lord Cultural Resources. Both appeared before the discussion to cheer the interactions at earlier input meetings and voice congratulations for Dallas arts as a whole. Rawlings big-upped the Dallas Theater Center for its Tony Award—an example of the kind of excellence we have here already in Dallas, he said—and reminded the crowd of his appearance in The Tempest last year for DTC, with a laugh.

It was then, just after the Tony joke, when I thought I heard someone yell. "Hello-o! Hello-o!" echoed a voice from the crowd. A woman rose from her seat and hurried toward the doors; the sound came from her phone. The interruption was perfectly timed. Is the Tony Award still what's freshest on the mayor’s mind when it comes to DTC, and, for that matter, all of the other arts institutions operating within Dallas that he could have mentioned? What about the more recent catalyst for the center's place in the headlines: abuse of power by a senior staff member that went on for years before his firing? Is the value of arts groups being assessed by accolade and monetary value alone? Well, yeah, the mayor suggested with his choice of opening reference. Well, yeah, said the applause after the joke. Hello-o, said a phantom dissenting voice.

Defining success is important; it is perhaps the most important barometer to clarify when it comes to building a sustainable arts ecosystem and determining how to assign public resources.

As the city looks forward during events like Monday's, there are current needs going unmet for the smaller groups the city is also supposed to serve. A meeting of the Cultural Affairs Commission last month saw arts administrators scrambling to find space for performances at city-owned cultural centers.

OCA director Jennifer Scripps said fitting together everyone's calendar is like a “Rubik’s cube,” simply a matter of logistics. For David Lozano, a space shortage could mean a season cut short for his award-winning Cara Mía Theatre Company, which has focused on works conceived and grown in-house. Cara Mía uses the city-owned Latino Cultural Center as a performance venue and often plans productions from their conception based on the space.

"We just want what the Latino Cultural Center has been providing Cara Mía Theatre for the past several years; 16 weeks in the theatre to produce our full seasons," Lozano told me recently. The city recently limited groups like Cara Mía—defined as “core groups” in city parlance—to 10 weeks in public buildings like the Latino Cultural Center. Lozano has protested that decision, and is in discussions with the city to walk it back.

Artist and former South Dallas Cultural Center manager Vicki Meek was inspired after the city floated that 10-week cap to write about the racism implied by the city's value system and how its definition impacts arts groups run by people of color.

The presence of arts organizations that depend on the city's cultural centers was scant at Monday’s talk—it wasn't billed to be about them, after all—but when they were mentioned, it was telling. Take the first question Dallas Morning News arts writer Michael Granberry asked the mayor in that intro session.

"Small arts organizations are increasingly vocal about, 'I need to be taken care of,'" Granberry said.

The mayor acknowledged broadly how difficult it is to satisfy all parties involved when resources are finite. That Rubik’s cube deflection frustrates advocates for the arts community in Dallas because they remember the $15 million spent to bail out the AT&T Performing Arts Center’s construction debt. The city has not discussed its issuance in context with the many needs of smaller arts organizations. 

“[Making it all work] is like making a piece of art or a piece of music,” the mayor said Monday.

What that piece is starting to look like, via the ongoing Cultural Plan crusade, is becoming less amorphous. People will see its results differently. To me, it looks like an advertisement, a logo with a paint splatter, economic development for creatives. Tregoning, though, sees art.

"There's a place for people like us in these discussions," he said at one point.

Success for consumers of art as Tregoning seemed to define them is simple: they are able to find and buy the things they want to buy. Tregoning noted that Headington Cos. does buy a lot of art in Dallas, but said it is hard to find. There is no cohesive market here, Tregoning argued, adding that Dallas must be a tough place for artists to make a living.

Programs like the mentor match-up sponsored by New York City's New Museum, which pairs artists with businesspeople, would be helpful, he said. Nikaidoh expressed gratitude for charlieuniformtango for the sizzle reel it produced for her dance company, a resource any growing organization of that genre needs to promote itself.  The scale of need among all these groups, and the city’s role in helping them meet those needs, has been neatly quarantined into separate panel discussions. That scale truly varies, and the city must keep that in mind as its cultural plan comes together.

When developer Tim Headington needed more space for his art, he knocked down a few historic buildings. The ones that rely upon the city's resources will have a tougher time.

Aquamarine and Gold: The Statler, Dallas' Work In Progress

For five years, the blue glow of the abandoned Statler Hotel on Commerce Street defended its sleeping base across the street from Main Street Garden. It was a guarded blue that streamed 19 stories down: saturated, primary, synonymous with goodwill for the police and the Chase bank logo, meant to keep loiterers away.

While cranes and trucks add constantly to Dallas' downtown cityscape, this blue has been quietly subtracted from it. Now a few bright spots checker the hotel's curved facade in the windows of guest rooms and residences. At the top of its Y-and-T structure the words STATLER HILTON are restored to the mast in cooly lit Helvetica. Inside, the hotel is open, but it’s not finished. Would-be sunbathers on Thanksgiving weekend weren't let up on the elevator to the forthcoming rooftop garden and pool. Anyone who got to peek was a construction worker or friend of the bartender. The future gift shop is an empty shelf, around the corner from gold-metallic phone booths that looked ransacked of their handsets and cords. Sunday at brunchtime people streamed in and out of the hotel’s airy diner past construction in progress; casually, ladders and plastic sheets peeked out from dividers made of aquamarine glass.  

This color, the idea of water as expressed on most classroom globes, is everywhere in the Statler, and somehow, suddenly, noticeable outside it. This is at least as unlikely as the hotel’s successful renovation. Powers that be in this city haven’t exactly played for team mid-century-aquamarine. A tower at 211 North Ervay with alternating azure and aquamarine panels— origin 1958— was called an eyesore and almost drew the punishment of a good demolishing at Mayor Laura Miller’s directive in 2004. Preservation Dallas moved to keep it safe by including it on a list of Dallas’ Most Endangered Historic Places. It was the first such list ever made by the coalition. One could say many a Dallas building owes its life in part to 211 North Ervay and its uncommon bursts of that hue, a standout amid shades of gunmetal and sand.

Now, in the Statler, you can see aquamarine dance with slate blue and gold in the broad strokes of paintings hanging on guest room walls, on the key cards. And from rooms with city views there’s the aquamarine tinges in the facade of the redone Mercantile building. Downstairs in that diner, the restaurant’s name, Overeasy, is spelled out in aquamarine LED that echoes through the glass that joins it to the lobby, and the street.  

The Statler’s presence in Dallas when it officially opened in 1956 wasn’t striking for the newfangled less-is-more attitudes of mid-century modern design, per se. Dallas was already well behind other cities in shedding weight to embrace the trends of the fifties.  A semblance of progress was just a matter of time, and the Statler chain was known for current fashions. It wasn’t what the Dallas incarnation had that surprised critics and guests. It was what it seemed to lack. There were no signifiers of what New York Times critic Paul J.C. Friedlander referred to as “Texas nationalism.” Where was the exorbitant cost, the ostentatious gold and thick walls of its neighbors, the chunky Baker Hotel and the stately Adolphus, an elder to both?

“The building doesn’t appear very much at home in the middle of downtown Dallas architecture, such as it is,” Friedlander wrote.

He’d arrived to find an outlier, a stranger to the street. The light inside was gentle but, as an amused Friedlander wrote, style mavens of Dallas kept their sunglasses on at the grand opening.

“Lightweight Aluminum-Glass Facade Cuts Construction Cost by a Third,” read the subhead on his piece, in a poem decidedly foreign to the city.

The Statler’s accessible personality was notable on a scale outside the city, too. The ballroom, for example, where later the Jackson Five would play, struck Friedlander as the biggest open hall in the South “without a pillar to obstruct anyone’s view.”

Today the restored room is just the same, totally wide open, and covered completely with a dance floor. At a capacity for 3000 people it’s slightly smaller than The Bomb Factory in Deep Ellum. The women’s restroom closest to that space is the most gilded corner of the new Statler Hilton — even the trash can is gold. In the art on the walls, a bottle of Chanel perfume and a hairbrush alternate with soft metallic patterns. In its newness groups of all genders are coaxed by staff to enter the pink lair and just come on in, look around.

—

Though the first Statler was open in the winter of 1956, that hadn’t been the plan; it was supposed to be ready for the fall of 1955. When the Hotels Statler Company, Inc. announced it would open a property in Dallas it was riding high on its best gross income and net profit in the outfit’s fifty years. (In between that announcement and the hotel’s opening, Conrad Hilton bought the chain. He was, incidentally, a Texas person, and a hard partier.)

There isn’t much information about what the activity was like before the stylish grand opening – if guests could stay there before it; if its historically sweeping restaurant served meals before January 22nd. For the past month, the new Statler has been open to stumblings-upon in a beautiful conversation with the street outside. This is due mostly to Overeasy, billed and laid out like a diner, just with refined levity and mid-century modern furniture.

The common reach of a hotel’s food programme is often what endears people to it as a public space, or doesn’t. You don’t find city dwellers, for example, meeting at the Magnolia for coffee to feel special (its café feels very separate from the main hotel), and The Joule’s Weekend Coffee is prohibitively small and precious. Overeasy at the Statler and its glass storefront feels as much a part of the hotel as it does the burgeoning scene around Main Street Garden Park, a feat of design unmatched by any other hotel downtown. It doesn’t hurt that the food is delicious and oddly summative, culturally; the biscuits carry a heartiness like cornbread but stay fluffy, and new-school vegetarian dishes mimic comfort favorites, like the meatless moussaka with its fake bolognese sauce. (There’s a little gold in that décor, too, albeit in the form of an art piece on the wall that looks like a pyramid of bicycles welded together).

But you don’t have to eat onsite at the Statler to feel like you’re getting a comprehensive Statler experience, and that’s what struck me most about this breakout phase of downtown that the new hotel defines in form and function. The Saturday after Thanksgiving my friends and I walked ten minutes from the Statler to Mirador, the rooftop spot across from the Joule. That restaurant is also encased in glass, breathing in the outside; in the morning, thinking back on a blur of a night, I remember the walk to and from. We stopped also at the Midnight Rambler, underneath the Joule, but it all seemed a trip through one cohesive space, even the sixth-floor room looking out onto old buildings made new. We pushed a button to open and close the curtains.

There’s been an amount of death and abandonment in the Statler’s history between these two openings. It was vacant for 17 years, and for a time its dominant characteristic as a neighbor downtown was the smell brought on by failed plumbing. That part is, astoundingly, so easily to forget in the calm of all the Statler’s schemas and its lens to the city. The capture it offers of what Dallas is becoming, as a visual message, is seen even in the courtyard opposite the diner. LED lights make stripes on the stairs. That same aquamarine glass is there, separating the courtyard from a forthcoming lounge, and the vista of overlapping buildings reflects in it that calm blue; and those lights on the stairs stay on in the daytime, not as a warning, but a welcome.

In Lieu of Reciprocity, A Recipe For South Dallas

an essay adapted for this Dallas Morning News piece on Tisha Crear and her juice bar, Recipe Oak Cliff:

It’s a Sunday night outside Oak Cliff Cultural Center last year, jacket weather in March. Dallas artist Lauren Woods is sipping wine from a plastic cup. A circle of women surround her with a warm greeting.

One of them I have never seen before. She is tall, her ebony skin glowy, her hair closely cropped; there’s a knowing look on her face that makes her seem older, though her smile is young and kind of mischievously playful. She’s low-key in the group, which feels big for the early part of the night. “How do you know Lauren?” I ask Tisha, who I assume is there to support Lauren while she emcees a show.

Tisha pauses, shy; Lauren laughs, disbelieving. “More like, how do I know Tisha,” she says.

Lauren starts to explain Reciprocity with wide eyes. It was this poetry spot — the poetry spot — in the ‘90s. Turns out Tisha's also the Cultural Programs Coordinator for the Oak Cliff Cultural Center and has quietly worked for the City of Dallas in some capacity almost all of her adult life. She founded a cultural business incubator called SuSu, and shares with makers and merchants her education in business; she earned her Masters at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Tisha’s not the one to tell me any of this, however. Before slipping out early that night, she does mention there’s something in the works, a kind of sequel to Reciprocity. I take her to mean that it’s another poetry venue. This excites me to no end, and I tell anyone who might care until we speak again and she clarifies that no, no poetry yet. First, food.

---

The desire to create a place of health and becoming with Reciprocity came from a need for that place she herself felt - and, later, found outside of Dallas.

“Growing up an African in Grand Prarie, you get a lot of different ideas about who you are. A lot of the times they’re very negative,” Tisha says. “Even though I was broken in a lot of ways as a child, I always came off as very confident.

“Back in the day, I used to hang out with the little punk rock kids. At the punk rock clubs. I used to run into Deep Ellum when there were nothing but skinheads. I didn’t give a damn.  I would go down there and kind of try and challenge the skinheads, when Theatre Gallery was still around. Later I would ride my skateboard in New York - (“A  longboard?,” I ask) - “not a longboard, a shortboard, like a skate Betty! I would be at those little punk shows in Dallas, like Loco Gringos,” Tisha laughs. “But there’s still this identity crisis, of your blackness. So being in New York resolved that for me because I began to understand historically, you know, I come from a legacy, from a lineage, of all kinds of greatness, and weirdness and coolness and rebellion-conformity - all that stuff.”

Though her move to New York in 1989 wasn’t really about school - “school was to the side,” she says, her voice smiling - she concedes that an African Studies course taught by Cheryl Keyes was a turning point.

“She showed a film, it was showing some black folks in the South building the railroads, she was an ethnomusicologist - she made us listen to old black people sing in the South and then played somebody in West Africa, and we would be like, ‘OH MY GOD IT’S THE SAME SOUND,” Crear remembers, getting loud on the phone. “And it just blew my mind - hums - and it was the same tone, oh my God it’s amazing,” she says.  

“This was crazy to me, and to bring it all home, she was asking the people, all the students about singing devotion. Now my grandfather was a Baptist preacher out in East Texas. I grew up in the church. She was asking them, do y’all know about the devotions - none of them knew! I knew exactly what she was talking about. I was way in the back of the class. So the devotion is like - [sings] “Guide me, oh guide me,” - the deacon would usually call it out:

Guide me oh God, great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land

and the whole congregation would sing, on their note -

Gu-ide, Me-e-e, oh guide me oh God ...

So that call and response, they didn’t know it. I KNEW IT. And I was like, ‘Wow, I’m culturally rich!’ That was a type of transformation I wanted to be able to provide for others to experience.”

Ashley Wilkerson was 14, in the second semester of her 9th grade year at Booker T., when she started hanging out at Reciprocity. Ashley's 20 year-old sister dropped her off most every Friday night at Reciprocity for three years, where she listened to poets and performed her own work. Except for children of the attendees who were there sometimes, she was always the youngest.

Ashley Wilkerson with Erica Wright, who became known as Erykah Badu. Baduizm, her debut album, came out in 1997, the same year Reciprocity opened. (c/o Ashley Wilkerson)

Ashley Wilkerson with Erica Wright, who became known as Erykah Badu. Baduizm, her debut album, came out in 1997, the same year Reciprocity opened. (c/o Ashley Wilkerson)

Ashley Fly and Mama Teetah at Reciprocity. (photo c/o Ashley Wilkerson)

Ashley Fly and Mama Teetah at Reciprocity. (photo c/o Ashley Wilkerson)

“It was like a library - when you walked through the door it was kinda smoky, incense were burning, there were all types of essential oils, the smell of Emmanuel [Gillespie’s] ‘s vegan cookies,” Ashley remembers. “Reciprocity was more than just a poetry venue where people read and performed, it was a place where you came and studied. You were taught - you were students, in addition to being performers, artists and activists and entrepreneurs,” she says.

Ashley refers to Tisha by her nickname, “Mama Teetah,” when remembering all the time she spent with her. It was Tisha who first showed her the work of poet Sonia Sanchez, which changed her. Ashley stopped caring so much about the competitive aspects of slam poetry culture and focused on refining and deepening her work. At 15, she changed her diet, eating only whole foods, and threw out meat altogether. (Crear was 14 when she became a vegetarian.)  

Now an actress based in Los Angeles, Ashley says she owes her confidence in the city, and in her career, to Tisha and Reciprocity.

“Teetah set a standard, she’s pretty regal. So there was a standard of excellence when you walked in that door. She taught us about ownership- the artist as a businessperson, the artist as a healer.”

Reciprocity was born when Tisha finished school at NYU and returned to Dallas. A poet herself, Tisha's theatrical performance art became leaner and more direct as friends from Booker T. Washington High School For The Performing Arts who’d stayed connected as Soul Nation took separate paths. Anyika McMillan helped Guinea Price found Soul Rep Theatre Company. Erica Wright became recording artist Erykah Badu.

In 1997, the same year Wright released her debut album Baduizm, Tisha opened Reciprocity with her partner Emmanuel Gillespie. Third World Press founder Haki R. Madhubuti, natural health expert Queen Afua, and other internationally renowned artists and thinkers brought poetry and politics, healing and business knowledge to Tyler Street at the height of performance poetry in the United States. The venue was one of many for poets in Dallas at that time; it was distinct for its open mic nights, holistic health program, and market co-op. And if you ask the thriving performers and teachers who sat on the floor in that space what made Reciprocity different, they’ll tell you about Tisha.

---

I’m so jazzed to meet Tisha Crear for our initial interview on Earth Day last year that I wear a long dress, and listen again to her speak about leadership in a Womanar video on the drive to Oak Cliff.

She calls me, says we need to meet instead at the city permit office on Jefferson Blvd., near the cultural center where she’s working. She tells me she’s had the flu for a month. She can barely speak above a whisper, still feverish in business attire. But this can’t wait. She has to get her building permit amended so she can get a full kitchen for the juice bar.

Her architect has already been to the office three times, her contractor three more. We sit and wait at the first desk she’s called up to. People with rolls of drafting paper enter the space behind the desk and reemerge, on other projects.

Finally, she’s told there is no building permit and nothing to suggest anyone has been to the permit office to talk about 1831 S. Ewing, though Tisha has the documents to prove the application for the amendment and revisions to it.

We watch one city employee hug a woman carrying her paperwork on a clipboard.

“I wish somebody would hug me like that!” she says, laughing. “Just, you know, put their arms around me and that would be that.”

We go from desk to desk for four hours, and every single time the person sitting across from us addresses me while speaking. Not once does anyone ask why I am there, though I’m sometimes mistaken for a teenager at bars; meanwhile, Tisha is asked repeatedly to clarify that she is, indeed, the building’s owner. Which, she does, calmly, each time.

Arborist Clay Walker strongly suggests that Crear sue the original owner for selling the building to her without a completed permit. Crear asks again and again what she can do to repair the baseline problem - which is a needed 4 additional feet of concrete between her building and the parking lot next door - and is told that the board of adjustments is out of town, that it will take too long, that it will be too expensive.

It’s not until Crear arrives at the desk of Senior Green Building Plans Examiner Eddie Small that someone seems interested in her succeeding.

“We’re supposed to be pro-development,” he says, and smiles.

----

With help from the Real Estate Council, Tisha was able to call a meeting and get past that initial hurdle. There were many more; Earth Day was just one day in Crear’s ongoing journey to opening the juice bar. That day, though, was also the 17-year anniversary of a hit-and-run accident in New York, after which she received a large settlement and returned to Dallas. Doctors told her she would never walk again. She took the money and, in conceptualizing Reciprocity as a larger development, tried to find a block to buy, much like the proprietors of Kalachandji’s acquired space for a restaurant, temple programs, and a school in East Dallas.

“Imagine being 28 and jumping out of a Land Rover saying, ‘I want to buy your building. I can pay cash,’” Tisha says. “And they look at me, saying, ‘Who are you?’ And this isn’t just white people. This is black people too who give you the same look, in our city.”

This round, for Recipe, Crear got a loan from the Embrey Family Foundation after they heard her speak at a Dallas Faces Race event. It’s a loan she’ll have to pay back. This will be the challenge: to make the shop profitable by also drawing patrons from other parts of the city, to this neighborhood where Recipe is the liveliest business for miles. But the area won't be sleepy for long, as the mayor's Grow South initiative edges further southward, promising economic development in untapped areas. 

“I’m doing this to build - to show … I’m hungry. Like right now, over here, I’m hungry. It’s a food desert and I want to be able to build the neighborhood - clears throat - the way we want it.”