Pratt invited Hill's cooperative to be on its community advisory board in order to address the art school's isolation from its neighborhood. "Pratt's building, and the land it's on, is owned by the city," Hill tells me. "So the government is supporting this mostly white school. How does that look to the black neighborhood?" I suggest that it smells of gentrification, and Hill smiles hugely. "It sure has that ethos, doesn't it? It has that truthos."
The fruits of the Pratt/Nu Tribes partnership will be seen this summer: a weeklong arts camp in Pratt's park, culminating in a full-blown arts festival. During the arts camp, kids will scavenge materials from around the neighborhood and think and talk about how to install a site-specific sculpture in a way that speaks to the nature of the site: its location, its population, its intent, its actual use. It's the perfect combination, Hill feels, of thinking about the community and thinking for yourself.
Despite the happy rhetoric about how arts can heal communities, Hill knows that it rarely works this way. "There are people in the black community who only want to complain--no opportunities, white people trying to control and dominate art. I'm like, 'Everybody who's in art should be trying to control and dominate their particular art!'"
This is one reason I've always enjoyed talking to Hill--he's all over the map: advocate, activist, artist, egoist, communitarian. It's impossible to keep him to one subject. At times, he contradicts himself wildly. And these contradictions delight him; he lives, as you would utterly not expect, in Duvall with his wife and daughter, and he seems to enjoy the double takes he provokes--a black vegan Eastside artist. On the other hand, he's not the least bit interested in representing all black people with his art, or even with his activism--a frequent claim of identity-based projects. But you can see how his energy and intensity translates into keen success in arts activism: He is very hard to resist. And this is why government and corporations--the City of Seattle, Group Health, Safeco--are giving him grants, not just for art but for other community projects--children's gardening, for instance.
He seems amused by this, and he should. It's a long distance from the first incarnation of Nu Tribes, a cooperative for nonwhite artists. "It began sort of unintentionally," Hill says, "in 1999. We didn't really know each other: Theaster [Gates], from Chicago, Antjuan [Oden], Sultan Mohammed from Project 416, other people of color from these other arts groups that had lost their spaces. We all met when these things were falling apart." The cooperative's name refers to common ground for people from different tribes. The point was to provide space for emerging artists, exhibition opportunities for artists of color, and some arts programming for kids.
Which all went swimmingly for a few months until Nu Tribes was evicted, in a long, arduous process, from its space at 23rd and Jackson. The members drifted apart, and went on to different projects. Their experience with Nu Tribes had turned many of them into accidental activists; Hill himself started Arts 411 (an arts education and resource collective) and is involved with the Consortium for Artists of Color, which organized the Unequal Access/Unaccessed Opportunity forum in fall 2001.
"I didn't know anything when I started," he says. "I was as flaky as anyone else. I wasn't listening. But then I started listening, and I started talking to everyone, asking questions. Now I've got a business license, I'm an LLC. I need artists to run this thing at Pratt--installation people, archivists-- and I get to hire them." He gives me that crazy smile again. "I'm calling the shots. And I'm finally mature enough to do it."
