Eminent Domain, 1993, color chart [Enlarge in New Window]

Mel Ziegler: Eminent Domain

Anyone who's ever painted their apartment is familiar with those innocuous-looking paint charts you pick up at the hardware store. Each one offers a rainbow of colors the clerk can mix up for you right behind the counter. And they have such wonderfully evocative names: "Colonial Blue," "Williamsburg Red." Use this color, the charts seem to say, and you're not only sprucing up your home; you're accessing our country's great historical and architectural traditions.

"Those charts are often very idealized," says artist Mel Ziegler. "They frame themselves within history, but only a certain kind of history." You'd never expect to see colors with names like "Urban Renewal Lime," "Fannie Mae Lilac," or, simply, "Homeless." But that's precisely what you'll find in the paint chart Ziegler began developing in Chicago in 1992/93, in collaboration with his longtime partner Kate Ericson and Ogden Courts Tenant Group, a collective of public housing tenants. The project was put on hold due to Ericson's illness and death in the mid-1990s; now Ziegler is completing it as a memorial to her.

Eminent Domain, as this paint chart is so pointedly titled, references more than a century's worth of public housing and related legislation in the United States--the gritty sort of history that other paint charts gloss over. Each color name corresponds to a small paragraph on the chart explaining its meaning and significance to the lives of real people. Select "Cabrini Green," for example, and you can read about the eponymous high-rise public housing projects built in Chicago in the late 1950s, now infamous for the way in which they left residents feeling alienated and confined by gang violence.

It's a far cry from Colonial Williamsburg, in other words--but right in line with many of Ziegler and Ericson's projects over the course of their nearly 20-year partnership. In Camouflaged History (1991), for example, they used the 72 "authentic colors of historic Charleston"-- as designated by the Charleston Historic Society--to create a camouflage pattern covering the entire exterior of a house in the city's historic peninsula. "That project related to issues of historic preservation and gentrification, the way that people are slowly being pushed out of the peninsula," says the Austin-based artist. The pair's collaborations have appeared in (and around) galleries and museums across the country, from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., to Sculpture Chicago's "Culture in Action" project, to the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Once all the Eminent Domain paint charts are produced, you won't have to go to a museum or gallery to see one. You can simply head over to your local True Value hardware store. The national chain has agreed to carry the 150,000 charts the artist is printing in its 6,000 retail outlets across the country. "We used their paint deck," Ziegler explains, "so you literally will be able to go in and order colors like 'Eminent Domain' and 'Home Loan'--and paint your house with them."

It's a project with all the sly subversiveness of a good joke. But Eminent Domain offers plenty for serious contemplation, too. The public housing residents with whom Ziegler and Ericson collaborated were only too aware of negative stereotypes commonly attached to people like them: "They felt as if they were looked at as 'different.' So one of the things we wanted to do with this project was to point out that there are all kinds of ways in which the federal government gives subsidies to all kinds of people." Take the tax breaks that suburban homeowners get for making home improvements. This is another form of "public assistance," but one bearing none of the social stigma Ziegler and Ericson's collaborators felt so keenly. This sort of double standard has guided much of the history underpinning the way we live today, Eminent Domain reminds us. Think where and how you live are simply matters of personal taste, as simple as choosing yellow over red? Think again.

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Visual > Public Art | Products & Consumerism | Labor | Politics | Southwest / Pacific | 2000