Corinne Bailey Rae first visited the Stony Island Arts Bank early one morning in 2017. The former bank building, which the American artist Theaster Gates saved from demolition in 2015 and restored as a gallery and archive space, sits on a noisy road on the South Side of Chicago.
It was once a middle-class white area, said Bailey Rae, and then it became a middle-class black area. Now it is “what they call an under-served community – there’s poverty, there’s crime, there’s gun violence, there’s a lot of mental health problems”. Later, when Bailey Rae returned for a residency at the Arts Bank, she passed a bus-stop advert for safe places a parent could give up their child within the first 30 days of its life.
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