Keeping It Real
Photographer Wing Young Huie ventures into uncharted territory (again) with The Third Place.
By Stephanie Xenos
Imagine a young man is stabbed just outside your door over a pair of athletic shoes that happen to be the wrong color. A makeshift shrine sprouts up practically overnight, an expression of profound communal grief. Fights erupt on the sidewalk between young men paying their respects at the street shrine, bottles of Colt 45 in hand. The situation is tense. How do you respond? The incident in question occurred a few months after Wing Young Huie moved into his new space, which he named The Third Place, in May. “I nearly stumbled over the body when I came out of my apartment,” says Huie. “It got a little scary for me. … It’s still volatile.”
So how did he respond? He invited the people outside in.
Those familiar with Huie’s photographs know that he has spent years at a time documenting parts of the Twin Cities—Lake Street, Frogtown and most recently University Avenue. He seems impervious to the self-imposed boundaries most of us throw up in the face of cultural and socio-economic differences. The incident rattled him, but true to form, Huie engaged the “others” outside his door. What he found was a spectrum of communal sentiment from a desire for reconciliation to outright rage. Huie asked Steve Floyd, a fellow photographer who has extensively documented street culture, to facilitate, using his own photographs to spark conversation. The neighborhood showed up.
It would hardly be right to call such a turn of events providential, but it was important. Given the premise of The Third Place as an experiment in creative community interaction, says Huie, “the fact that [the community] showed up and talked with candor … spontaneously, and not in an official capacity, was important.”
The gallery/community space/arts hangout is located on Chicago Avenue near 38th. The large windows at the front of the space look out on an empty 1950s-era building most recently a discount furniture liquidator, and the new Chicago Avenue Fire Arts Center. The neighborhood teeters uneasily between raw and refined.
Huie got the idea for the name during a conversation with friend and occasional basketball partner Richard Lee, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. “[Wing] has located his work in the community and reflecting community, but it was always his work. With The Third Space he is providing an actual physical space letting people in for a sort of exchange between him as an artist and the community. . . . It’s not just a gallery like any gallery. [Wing] is trying to make more of a living space, a living art in some ways.”
Before making the move this spring, Huie had a gallery on Franklin Avenue for almost a decade. He was frustrated by the disconnect between his art and his life. “I wanted a place that’s like an extension of my projects,” he says. Unlike home and work (“first” and “second” places), third places revolve around interaction with “the other,” those we might not otherwise encounter. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg argues that the relationships built on those interactions are key to a civil society. Particularly in an increasingly self-curated culture of “likes” and “+1s.” “We live in these worlds. We go from one island to another,” says Huie. “[In my work] I try to give glimpses.”
With The Third Place, he’s hoping to provide an opportunity for those worlds to intersect in an authentic way he describes as “not artsy, but arts-driven.” Huie’s take on the conversation that happened after the killing outside his door gives form to the theory. “If you frame it as a gang thing it’s not your problem.” But, he says, if you really look beneath the surface of things, the potential for violence is everywhere.
“We often think in very dichotomous or binary ways,” says Lee. “You are either this or that. . . and much of that narrative is already set and influences how we do things, feel things, interact with one another. The idea of a third space challenges that.” In a third space individuals and communities of people have an opportunity to work through who they want to be and how they want to be represented. A third place, as conceived by Oldenburg, overlays that idea onto physical space. “It’s about what happens, ideally, when you bring people together in a common space and challenge them to think outside the dominant narrative, step outside their comfort zone and imagine new ways of engagement,” says Lee.
Huie has lived in the neighborhood for more than a decade, most of that in the Purity Baking building. Now, he has a flat above a gourmet coffee shop that recently opened in the same building as The Third Place, a building that had been unoccupied for nearly fifty years.
The space acts as a draw for arts lovers from outside the neighborhood, too. Each month, Huie hosts a salon and other informal gatherings that draw a diverse crowd. Some come for the featured artist, some for ping pong and karaoke in the basement afterward. The basement is a room decorated in what might be described as shabby chic with a Superman motif. The ethos of the place stands in direct opposition to the exclusivity cultivated by many artists looking to move up the art world food chain.
“Art hasn’t shifted in a while,” says Huie, who points to the focus on biennials as one example of stilted, conservative culture. “The art world likes to think of itself as way ahead of culture, but it’s usually two steps behind. . . . Civic engagement is the buzzword, but how do you do it authentically?” It’s an open-ended question, and a fraught one. At what point does an artist cross over into, say, being a sort of creative liaison for community? “If you are creating a space for this new way of engagement, when does it move from art to something else?” says Lee. “Maybe it challenges the whole notion of what is art and who defines that.”
Huie seems untroubled by the potential for confusion or that his new venture might somehow diminish his standing as an artist with a capital A. “I’m an artist, but I think that however people define what I do is correct.” Still, creatively engaging community around a particular incident is one thing. How do you sustain that momentum? “I think it’s a challenge to do art that really involves the community rather than plopping down in a community and waiting for people to come to you,” says Lee. “That’s part of the challenge Wing is going to work through.”
Recently, an African-American man in his 60s stopped in—one of the “originals,” as in, original members of the Bloods in the neighborhood. They talked for a while. At first the man seemed critical, but gradually the mood shifted. “He got kind of emotional,” says Huie. “He said ‘I’m not sure why I even came in here. I just appreciate that this place is here.’ ”
[...] His reaction to gang violence outside his studio merits my rock star designation. An article from Quodlibetica describes one such event: “ Imagine a young man is stabbed just outside your [...]