Schools are more than brick-and-mortar buildings children attend during the day to learn; for many families, they’re community centers, too. So when a city closes one, people often experience a particular sense of grief and upheaval, as well as uncertainty about their government’s commitment to equitable education. Over the last decade, Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia have shut hundreds of public schools—frequently leaving behind vacant buildings in impoverished neighborhoods and raising questions about lawmakers’ motivations. (Last year, four independent education organizations in Louisiana, Illinois, and New Jersey filed a Title VI complaint asking the U.S. Justice and Education departments to investigate racist or otherwise discriminatory practices in state closings.) It’s against this backdrop that contemporary artists are using the empty buildings to explore the emotional toll that school closures take on residents—entering the fraught education debate whether they intend to or not.
Artists have long realized the emotive power of abandoned places, from the 18th-century French painter Hubert Robert (known as “Hubert Des Ruins”) to the 20th-century conceptualists who recognized that neglected buildings can articulate complex social issues. One such example is Gordon Matta-Clark, who in his 1974 project, Splitting, famously sawed an ordinary, suburban New Jersey home awaiting demolition down the middle. As the New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff put it: Splitting encapsulated “the growing sense that the American dream was evaporating.” (A few months later, the house was destroyed.) Similarly, the husband-wife team Bernd and Hilla Becher are known for their powerful photographs of the declining industrial era. Taken across Europe and North America, the photos feature abandoned plants and factories whose functions, like those who once worked there, had become obsolete.
But a growing body of contemporary artists are putting forth the idea that a shuttered school can be more poignant than a decaying factory or boarded-up home. As the artists interviewed for this article explained, a deserted school and its remnants are at once more universal and personal than are other objects because they represent both a collective childhood experience and a deeply private one. Generally, there are two approaches in this field of art. First, there are artists who document the sorrow and frustration felt by parents, students, and teachers, either photographing empty schools or constructing exhibits from the abandoned furniture and supplies inside them. Then there are the artists who engage in an art form called social practice: They tackle policy questions more directly—urging residents to reimagine derelict schools and engage openly with city leaders.
Either way, there are various possibilities for abandoned art as an agent of social change. Ai WeiWei, arguably one of the world’s most famous activists, offers a strong precedent for American artists. In his 2009 piece Remembering, Ai used 9,000 backpacks to spell out the words “She lived happily in this world for seven years” on the side of a Munich museum, criticizing the Chinese government after thousands of students perished in their shoddy classrooms during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Heaps of dead children’s backpacks were found at the site of the demolished schools. Although Chinese authorities initially censored Ai for publishing the names and birthdates of 5,212 student casualties, the government released a tally of student victims—5,335—a year after the quake and months of obfuscation. Today, many credit Ai’s backpack installation and ensuing media coverage for the switch in China’s policy. When it comes to shut-down schools, perhaps the haunting images of a crumbling auditorium or a jumble of discarded desks help officials empathize with their constituents and better judge neighborhood impact in the future.
The artist Pepon Osorio’s latest project for its part responds to the recent state of Philadelphia school closings. A professor of community art at Temple University and a 1999 recipient of the MacArthur “genius award,” Osorio is known for merging conceptual art with civic engagement to create highly personalized installations. For his current show, “reForm,” he salvaged chalkboards, lockers, and chairs from nearby Fairhill elementary, one of the 24 Philadelphia schools shuttered in 2013, and reinstalled them in the basement of Temple’s Tyler School of Art. Every morning, Osorio said, he would bike past the Fairhill building, struck by the chained doors and what he describes as “the heavy feeling of abandonment that seemed to surround the place, like an architectural ghost”—but also by a sense of urgency. Where did all the children and teachers go? What does this abandoned building cost the neighborhood?
And so his idea of an art show to portray the effects of school closures was born. Funded with a $300,000 Pew Center for Arts and Heritage grant, Osorio encouraged former Fairhill students to cover the walls of the Tyler classroom with written accounts of their own experiences, transcribed on oversized lined paper to resemble school notebooks. For example, 17-year-old Jacob Rodriguez, who attended Fairhill student from kindergarten through eighth grade, penciled: “Whenever I see the school and the ruins, I wanna break into tears.” There’s also a video loop of students’ oral testimony—conveying the fears that, without a neighborhood school, they and their friends are more likely to land in jail.
According to Osorio, reForm is more than art—it’s both a place for displaced students to gather and define their future on their own terms and, hopefully, a catalyst for Philadelphians to discuss their city’s wave of school closures. “The objects are secondary to the stories of the people I work with,” said Osorio, who’s a product of Puerto Rico’s public schools. “My work is political. There’s no way around it. But at the same time, I’m interested in the real grief and pain these students feel.”
Some art goes even further, aiming to sway public policy by providing the city with their own proposals for how to repurpose its empty school buildings. This fall, using an increasingly popular art form that focuses on civic and communal engagement known as social practice, an artist project, the Stockyard Institute, has issued an open call to Chicago residents to develop site-specific design proposals for their city’s abandoned schools. Early next year, the Stockyard Institute plans to present a catalogue of ideas—Reimagining Abandoned Schools—to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office.
“Our goal is to present the mayor and the board of education with a map of social change and possibility,” explained Jim Duignan, a DePaul University art professor and Stockyard Institute’s founder. “We have all of these abandoned schools around Chicago now, what would first graders do with them? What about an architect or designer or teacher? Does the neighborhood need a women’s health center? A vertical garden?” Although, he asked, during one of our interviews, guess what a group of students at John Hay Elementary proposed for the best use of an abandoned Chicago school? A school.