Artspace Delivers A Civics Lesson

Kerry Ellington, Addys Castillo, and Orisha Ala Ochumare stand with confidence on the walls of Artspace’s gallery. As captured by Bek Andersen in her piece Power Portraits — part of Artspace’s exhibition ​“Who Governs?” running through Dec. 12 — they become the images of the leaders and activists they are. Their voices and work in reshaping the city is palpable. But just as their actual political work involves revisiting and learning from the past, so ​“Who Governs?” delves into New Haven’s past, coming up with vivid questions about how unique the moment we’re in really is. What has changed? What has stayed the same? And what does progress mean when it seems that sometimes we find ourselves asking the same questions again and again?

“Who Governs?” takes its title from a 1961 book of the same name by Robert Dahl, a celebrated political scientist at Yale who used New Haven as a case study to examine what it meant to have a functioning democracy. At the risk of brutally simplifying a classic of political science, based on a lot of real empirical research of the town where Dahl lived, the gist of Who Governs? was that a democracy is truly working when competing interest groups — that is, organized people — work to move public policy in different directions, and the government is able to mediate among them. In finding that to be the case in New Haven, Dahl’s book was a rebuke to those who put too much weight on the government, or to social elites. His view of democracy put more power in the hands of ordinary citizens — provided they could organize and marshal the resources at hand to wield it.

In that context, Bayeté Ross Smith’s piece comes across as an expression of hope, a way to use the past to move creatively into the future. The sculpture is made from cotton pulp and sugar cane — the products that enabled slavery for centuries. But Smith has used those materials to fashion boomboxes that are celebrations of hip hop, which has become the vehicle for three generations of Black artists to find their voices, contribute to the public dialogue, and create wealth.

The exhibit also contains an installation that revisits, through documents and video, a piece put together by artist Bev Richey in 1988 to celebrate the 350th anniversary of New Haven’s founding. Titled A‑mazing Bureaucratic Birthday Cake (Serving the People 3500 Pieces), Richey’s piece turned out to be a cheeky, fun, and pretty deep comment on the nature of bureaucracy and its ability to stall progress through sheer inertia. She had 3,500 pieces of cake baked by a local bakery. These pieces of cake were to be distributed for free on the New Haven Green.

However, to actually obtain a piece of cake, hungry participants had to first fill out a byzantine form, asking first what kind of cake they preferred, but then also having to defend why they needed to use a fork (the bureaucracy having balked at their use for environmental reasons). They were also asked if they had ever applied for cake before, if they’d ever been denied before, and seemingly crucially, whether they’d ever left cake on their plate.

After people filled out their forms, they had to stand in line to be approved by stamp-wielding bureaucrats. Then they could finally have their cake. People were interviewed halfway through this numbing, DMV-like process. ​“Worse than joining the Navy,” one participant said. ​“This could make us decide not to have cake at all,” said another, because it was all ​“too tedious.” Another participant recognized an acquaintance handing out cake. He jumped the line. ​“This is how bureaucracy works,” he said. ​“when you know someone you can cut through the line.” Touché, cake eater.

A cake worker even lended a Soviet air to the proceedings. ​“The cake is running out faster than expected,” she said. The piece was a funny stunt — with a very, very serious point to make about what many people’s interactions with the government are often like, whether it’s applying for benefits or filing a complaint. Power may be in the hands of the people. But the grinding gears of government so often were part of the reason that change could come so slowly, even when everyone wanted the change to happen. Has this really changed since 1988? Has it maybe gotten worse?

Meanwhile, nearly half the gallery’s space is taken up by Emily Larned’s Police Others As You Would Have Others Police You, an examination of the New Haven police department’s move toward a community policing model in the 1990s. The piece is done in partnership with Kay D. Codish, former director of training and education under police chief Nick Pastore. The piece is a grand collage of posters, documents, and training videos that shows the seriousness of the intention to move to a kinder model of policing that reformers believed would also be more effective. But in revisiting these artifacts of the recent past — posters for Take Back the Night rallies from the 1970s, police recruitment paraphernalia from the past few decades, articles from 30 years ago about racism and misogyny and the ongoing struggle for equity — it’s easy to feel the shock of recognition, that the questions haven’t changed nearly as much as we might wish, that the issues we face today are the same we faced then.

“Who Governs” is not a cynical exhibition; it doesn’t suggest we should all just throw up our hands and go home. But in its strong connections of the city’s present-day activism to the art and activism of the past, it is a reminder that there is always work to do, that progress is not a given — and that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people only truly works when people stand up and take part in it.