Olneyville Square trash cans stir political tempest

STEEL TRASH CAN envelopes by artist Lu Heintz,  created for public display in Olneyville, have sparked  a controversy over the role of art in the community. /
STEEL TRASH CAN envelopes by artist Lu Heintz, created for public display in Olneyville, have sparked a controversy over the role of art in the community. /

The trash cans seem innocuous at first glance. Simple block text cut out of the metal panels on the sides written in English and Spanish.

Upon closer inspection the words form a “people’s history,” to use the words of the artist.

It is a history that “values disenfranchised people’s political and economic perspective,” said Lu Heintz, the independent metal sculptor contracted to create the cans by The Steel Yard, a nonprofit industrial arts collaborative that offers workshops to the public and employs artists to fabricate urban furniture, mostly for municipalities and nonprofits in the state.

The four trash cans each contain a word: colonization, exploitation, disintegration and gentrification. And beneath that word, a definition. And beneath the definition, a historical event framed from the artist’s perspective.

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The one that caused the most controversy was the one on gentrification.

Part of the text reads: “In the beginning of the 21st century, with the financial and political support of the City of Providence, private developers purchased much of the industrial property in Olneyville, creating luxury living in the city’s poorest neighborhood. How will we right this wrong?”

The Olneyville Housing Corporation, in conjunction with the Olneyville Merchants Association, selected The Steel Yard to commission 20 unique trash cans built by five Rhode Island artists to improve the streetscape of Olneyville Square. The project was funded with part of a $45,000 grant from the city’s Neighborhood Markets Program, along with a $20,000 matching grant from the developer Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse.

But upon completion, Heintz’s trash cans were rejected by staff at the OHC and the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council, who were involved in developing the Neighborhood Markets Program for Olneyville Square, because “they’re not the cans that we ordered,” said Frank Shea, executive director of the OHC, a community-based nonprofit development organization. “We saw a design and then the can was so dramatically different.”

Shea was one of nine panelists invited by The Steel Yard to discuss the situation in a forum last Tuesday.

He contends that the design originally submitted by Heintz suggested that it would contain historical facts in English and Spanish with corresponding imagery. He said the tone of the original text was very different from tone of the text on the final product.

As a result of the rejection, The Steel Yard decided to withdraw the trash cans from the order and refund the money to the OHC.

In the months following that decision, The Steel Yard has faced growing dissention from Providence’s artist community and from the Olneyville Neighborhood Association, which criticizes The Steel Yard for accepting funds associated with Struever Bros. and claims the removal of the trash cans is a form of censorship.

But Drake Patten, executive director of The Steel Yard, said the decision to remove the cans was made to protect the artist and the work so that the cans would not be split up or sold and then stored.

“That was not an easy choice,” Patten said. “We are interested in seeing them go somewhere, but we do not want them to go somewhere where they are contested, where they cause more controversy … or in any way tear this community apart.”

She added that the urban furniture concept seeks to create a new venue for public art, but that the process through which the furniture is purchased by clients is not a public art process.

“The work we’re doing here is really about experiment,” she said. “That work means we make mistakes. If I could redo this, we would have checked every piece of language with the client.”

Patten invited attendees to submit ideas for where the trash cans should be placed and, she said, The Steel Yard will consider those suggestions and then make a decision. •

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