Strange Fruit

It's Idea Festival time in Louisville, and that means cool people who do cool things descend on our city to talk about the things they're doing! We chatted with one of those folks, Juan Williams Chàvez, this week about his work, and what it means to do social activist through art. One of Chàvez's big projects, the Pruitt-Igoe Bee Sanctuary, takes place on land that was once home to one of the country's most notoriously awful housing developments. Built in the mid-1950s, the 33-building, high-rise complex fell into almost immediate disrepair, and was described in a Missouri History book as "something out of a Charles Dickens novel." It was eventually demolished in the mid 1970s. Today, thanks to Chàvez, it is home to a bee sanctuary, where members of the community learn about urban agriculture. The decision on how to use the land wasn't incidental. "Bees function as a community," Chàvez explains. "Pruitt-Igoe was designed for community. I wanted it to kind of go back to community."