If there’s anything that perfectly captures the transformation of public housing from physical buildings and lived experience into a cultural commodity, it’s a small plexiglass box mounted on the wall of the National Public Housing Museum’s latest exhibit, “Housing As a Human Right: Social Construction,” on display at Archeworks through January 8. Inside the box there’s a pile of mint-green paint chips, blotched with brown stains and cracked like a dehydrated lake bed. For decades, the Chicago Housing Authority painted the interiors of many project apartments in this shade of green, lead-based paint. The paint in the box came from the west-side Jane Addams Homes, and the presentation captures both the history of the material’s use and a tradition of resistance against it. The wall behind the box, the floor below it, and the opposite wall are all painted in the same green, but photographs and an audio installation facing the encased relic tell uplifting stories of project residents repainting their apartments in bright colors, finding ways to personalize the institutional feel of their homes, and organizing for environmental justice.
Lee imagines the future of NPHM as not just a repository of artifacts but an “activist museum” engaged in contemporary social-justice struggles—for the building to be not just a site memorializing public housing residents of the past but employing current residents, and for its institutional voice to not just be used for reciting history but also critiquing current housing policy. More immediately, she added, there are plans to bring busloads of CHA residents to see this show and to further engage with residents in future curatorial efforts.
Sure, there are plenty of callouts: of the bureaucratic ineptitude of the CHA, the egregious behavior of police, the persistent use of lead paint (which was still in some apartments through the 1990s), the city’s lack of investment in education and infrastructure around the projects, the Plan for Transformation. But somehow none of that implicates viewers, which is a shame. Because much of what went into creating the difficult conditions for which public housing became notorious—and, by extension, residents’ myriad ways of coping with and overcoming these difficulties—has to do with the white, the wealthy, the homeowners, the people who didn’t want to live next to black people or have their kids share their classrooms, the real estate speculators and racist banks, and, more recently, the young professionals who now want to live close to downtown.
