Preface
BY NICOLE J. CARUTH
Build Better Tables is a temporary public-art exhibition focusing on food issues to examine urban development and understand the effects of gentrification on community health and wellness. Presented by Metro Arts: Nashville Office of Arts and Culture, nine projects by local and national artists are placed at publicly accessible sites across the city, from bus stops to community centers to church lawns, advancing the aim of Metro Arts for every Nashvillian to experience a creative city. The artists’ projects include an outdoor bread oven and neighborhood hearth, a bicycle rickshaw for fresh-produce delivery and food education, seed libraries promoting community action for food sovereignty, brass-and-sugar sculptures concerning Black maternal mortality, and eating events that address the role of food in discriminatory development. Together, they prompt a critical look at the social and economic forces that influence food access and culture.
This exhibition comes at a time when Nashville is growing but cannibalizing itself.[1] Neighborhoods are experiencing rapid gentrification: the process of building or renovating homes and businesses in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, accompanied by an influx of more affluent people. Its most common symptom is the displacement of renters and, arguably, homeowners due to increased property values. While the velocity of real-estate development has boosted Nashville’s economy, attracting up to 100 new residents daily, the gap between plenty and poverty is widening. Rental rates have risen faster than the median income, resulting in a shortage of affordable housing near the city core. Nashville is a microcosm of a global problem; in cities around the world, residents of low-income or working-class neighborhoods find themselves most vulnerable to displacement. Communities of color and immigrant communities are typically hit hardest, losing housing and small businesses in a gradual process of racial and cultural erasure. Residents who are able to stay in place may enjoy the luxuries that new investments engender, from upgrades in transit, parks, schools, and streets to new coffee shops, craft breweries, grocery stores, and farm-to-table restaurants. Or, as Nevin Cohen of CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute describes, they “may suffer the loss of place as commerce, culture, civic life, aesthetics, and the people living around them become unaffordable, unfamiliar, or unwelcoming.”[2] Researchers are still coming to understand the health issues that stem from the social and emotional injury of losing one’s community.
Food establishments are often messengers of gentrification, signifying the economic status and consumption habits of new settlers or signaling that a neighborhood is changing, readying for the gentry. Food and housing are inextricably linked. A study by Zillow, the online real-estate database, found that “the typical home near either Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s costs more and appreciates twice as much as the median U.S. home.”[3] Whereas many homeowners benefit from this, most renters do not. Proximity to a specialty grocer contributes to increases in rental rates, making housing unaffordable and accelerating the rate of gentrification.[4] In contrast, fresh and affordable foods can be hard to find in neighborhoods where property values are low, an intentional gap in the food system that shapes the health of community members. In a culture where grocery stores are considered an amenity instead of a basic human right, the quality of items on their shelves are indicators of surrounding land values and, arguably, the value (or lack of it) attributed to the people occupying the land.
In recent years, food service has outpaced all other retail consumption.[5] In an experience-driven economy, food and beverage establishments are like tourist destinations, generating traffic and spending while feeding Americans’ ongoing fetishization of food. Developers have taken notice, increasingly making space for storefront and rooftop restaurants, bars, and breweries. Years ago, a commercial development might have begun with a clothing store; now, as the chef and cultural critic Tunde Wey argues, food establishments “are often used as anchors when new people enter a community, thus operating as weapons of development.”[6] Wey examines how restaurants take advantage of under-resourced areas, driving up prices and taxes and pushing some residents out in favor of others.[7] This reinforces food apartheid, “a human-created system of segregations, which relegates some people to food opulence and other people to food scarcity.”[8] Food and drink tends to engender community, but it can also be a catalyst for oppressing communities by creating zones of exclusion.
Exploring food in relation to real estate brings to light deeper truths about power and privilege in urban development. Initially, I approached this exhibition with questions about how the oft-reported gentrification of Nashville has changed the local food habits and practices. I wondered, “What might an exploration of food reveal about the changing landscape?” I was keen to explore this question with artists (a group often described as the involuntary vanguards of gentrification) and curious to see how they might respond using food as a material or subject. The nine artists and creative practitioners selected for the exhibition have realized very different projects, guided by a combination of curatorial prompts, their individual aesthetic and political concerns, and the missions or visions of their community partners. In the end, their projects reveal the complexity of gentrification: an entanglement of land rights, racial politics, economic inequality, industrial decline, and visual aesthetics that is inseparable from the legacies of redlining and Jim Crow that shaped more than a century of racist housing policies and contributed to the disinvestment of communities and set the stage for what is promoted as “urban renewal.” Art serves to illuminate these connections, bringing to light unsavory truths about American history and a vicious cycle of spatial inequality. Art also serves to soothe, creating spaces for people to gather around food, cultivate community, and share resources for the betterment of all.
The title Build Better Tables was inspired by a framed print at the entrance of the Nashville Food Project headquarters. In the image, people of different ethnic backgrounds, signified by their hair and dress, are gathered around a table filled with bowls of leafy plants, plates of fish, casseroles, and condiments. Boldface type surrounds them: “When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher wall”—an appropriate adage for the current social climate. As cranes stack luxury condominiums, punctuating skylines with beacons of prosperity, and politicians rally to build walls between countries, inequity metastasizes in the shadow of these structures, eating away at the lives of the most vulnerable. If progress means advancing our cities and growing sustainable communities, we’d do best to build better tables.
Build Better Tables was organized by Nicole J. Caruth, an independent curator and writer based in Rhode Island, and commissioned by Metro Arts: Nashville Office of Arts & Culture. The exhibition was on view from June 1–September 1, 2018.
Footnotes
1. George Walker IV and David Plazas, “How New Nashville is Swallowing Old Nashville,” The Tennessean, filmed 2017, posted January 19, 2018, http://www.tennessean.com/videos/opinion/2018/01/19/documentary-how-new-nashville-swallowing-old-nashville/108809622.
2. Nevin Cohen, “Feeding or Starving Gentrification: The Role of Food Policy,” CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, March 27, 2018, http://www.cunyurbanfoodpolicy.org/news/2018/3/27/feeding-or-starving-gentrification-the-role-of-food-policy.
3. Cohen.
4. Claire Hoffman, “The Whole Foods Effect: Has Whole Foods Caused Gentrification in Jamaica Plain, MA?” Tufts University, Spring 2016, https://sites.tufts.edu/gis/files/2016/01/Hoffman_Claire_GIS102_2016.pdf.
5. JLL and International Council of Shopping Centers, “The Successful Integration of Food and Beverage Within Retail Real Estate,” https://www.icsc.org/uploads/research/general/Food__Beverage_Study_US.pdf.
6. Email exchange between the curator and Tunde Wey on April 17, 2018.
7. Conversation between the curator and Tunde Wey on April 23, 2018.
8. Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez, “How Do We End 'Food Apartheid' in America? With Farms Like This One,” AlterNet, June 12, 2017, https://www.alternet.org/food/how-do-we-end-food-apartheid-america-farms-one.
Catalog + Cookbook
Designed by Mike Fink, the limited-edition exhibition catalogue and cookbook includes documentation of the artist projects and more than twenty recipes from the exhibiting artists, including Black Bean Bisque with Fried Honey Black Beans, Chicken Feet & Peanut Soup, Collard Greens with Cornmeal Dumplings, Daikon Stew, Lactation Cookies, Malaysian Herbal Soup (Bak Kut Teh), Peruvian Anticuchos de Corazon (Grilled Beef Heart), Pregnancy Smoothie, and a Recipe for Change.
About the Designer
Mike Fink is a practicing graphic designer and the proprietor of @ilevel. He has designed brand identities, publications, posters, packaging, exhibitions, and websites for a variety of clients in the music, arts, and education fields. Mike is the recipient of the prestigious James Beard Award for his design and graphics for The Double A restaurant in Santa Fe, NM.
Press
Finalist for the Robert E. Gard Award
Build Better Tables is finalist for the Robert E. Gard Award from Americans for the Arts! The Robert E. Gard Award celebrates exemplary work at the intersection of the arts and community life. It aims to raise up projects from the last year lead by individuals or organizations working to cross the arts into other aspects of community life in meaningful, measurable ways.
The Washington Post
By Erin Blakemore
July 28, 2018
These art projects tackle community health issues
"Build Better Tables, a public art project, tackles gentrification and community health head-on. It’s the brainchild of Nicole Caruth, a writer and curator who received funding for the project from Nashville’s arts commission."
Yes! Magazine
By Deonna Anderson
This Chef Is Fighting Gentrification With Hot Chicken
“Nearly 1 out of 4 homeowners and 44 percent of renters in Nashville are cost-burdened, according to a report from Nashville’s mayor’s office. And between 2000 and 2015, there were more than 18,000 fewer units available than needed to meet demand for households with incomes below 60 percent of median household income.”
The Tennessean
By Melinda Baker
July 15, 2018 (print) /July 12, 2018 (online)
Public art exhibition tackles food access and toll of gentrification in Nashville
"Nicole J. Caruth believes that “food is a lens through which we can examine the deeper truths about power and privilege.” The Rhode Island-based curator, writer and arts administrator explores the connections between art and food and how they can be used to expose and help resolve issues of social justice, such as the widening health inequality gap between high-income and low-income Americans."
Nashville Public Radio
By Blake Farmer
June 11, 2018
Nashville’s Newest Public Art Speaks To Institutional Racism’s Effects On Health
"Nashville's newest display of public art could easily be overlooked: an antique crib and highchair, littered with baby bottles. It's in the lobby of the Lentz Public Health Center, and the artwork speaks to the ways racism has harmed public health."
Nashville Scene
By Erica Ciccarone
“Build Better Tables” Names Best Public Art Project
"When I hear the term ‘public art,’ I think of sculptures in parks and on roadside medians — hardly anything to write home about. But in summer 2018, Metro Arts showed the city how to redefine the term in a way that was fresh, approachable and relevant. With Build Better Tables, curator Nicole J. Caruth sought out locals and out-of-towners to put together a nine-part public project that addressed food security, gentrification, privilege, real estate and neighborly communion."
Nashville Scene
By Margaret Littman
Part I: Gentrification and Dinner on the Menu as Chef Tunde Wey Comes to Nashville, July 13, 2018
Part II: H*t Chicken Sh**t Addresses Gentrification in North Nashville, August 2, 2018
"There was a combination of excitement, interest and more than a little trepidation in the air July 19 at The Post East, where an audience of roughly 50 artists, architects, government workers and others had gathered. Chef Tunde Wey had emailed those with reservations to his H*t Chicken Sh**t event in advance letting them know that discomfort was on the menu."
Good Food Jobs
By Taylor Cocalis and Dorothy Neagle
July 3, 2018
"Build Better Tables is helping to bring us all together: nine projects, three months, one city."
Nashville Arts Magazine
By Donald “Tré” Hardin
June 2018
"While the exhibition intends to highlight Nashville’s challenges with gentrification and food justice, Caruth points out that working with local and national artists proves that the issue is much bigger than Nashville: “Now that I can stand back and see what the artists are creating, this exhibition isn’t about Nashville; it’s about inequality everywhere."