An Artist’s Responsibility (interview © 2006)

This is an article that I’m proud to say proved to be very popular among many of Play Philly Magazine’s readers. It’s about artists and their role in gentrification. Published in print and online here. — CS 14.06.2008

It really only takes one entrepreneurial artist opening a studio, a workshop — or as in the case of Aurora Deshauters, librarian and graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, a gallery — before more of their kind begin pouring in. It’s a common American story: starving artists, hungry for cheap housing, move into low-cost, deteriorated or blighted urban neighborhoods, and soon they attract higher-income residents who “rejuvenate” a section of the city hitherto written off as beyond middle-class salvation. It’s so ubiquitous a story that Americans even have a name for it: urban renewal. Yet, most people don’t bother to consider if there might not be serious consequences for those who called these neighborhoods home long before penniless painters with flamboyant hairstyles and funky clothes came knocking.