What We Tie Together
In the rust belt's abandoned spaces, former museum workers run illegal schools in warehouses, teaching anyone who shows up how to make art from garbage—not metaphorically but literally, with motor oil and expired yogurt and the specific knowledge that comes from being fired for letting people touch what they weren't supposed to touch.
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Patricia wrote "Connection and" on the warehouse wall, then the marker died. Dollar Tree. $1.29. She threw it at the pigeons nesting in the rafters. Missed.
The warehouse had been empty since 2008. Mortgage crisis. Everyone knew the story. Now it was theirs—no heat, electricity stolen from the streetlight, rain through the roof that they caught in buckets and used to clean brushes.
They'd all been fired from the Contemporary Museum the same week. Patricia for letting a kid touch a Grecian urn. The kid had been crying—his mom had just been deported—and Patricia thought, fuck it, let him touch something beautiful. Fired. Maria for writing her own museum labels: "Bought with eviction money" under a Basquiat. True—the collector had evicted twelve families. Fired. Chen for spilling coffee on a Rothko. Accident, but the Rothko was worth more than she'd make in ten lifetimes. Fired.
Now they taught here. If you could call it teaching.
"Tie this," Patricia said to whoever showed up. Today: three kids from Jefferson High, two old women from the senior center that closed, and a banker in a suit worth more than her monthly groceries.
She handed them rope from a dumpster, wire from stripped cars, the banker's own tie.
"To what?" the banker asked. His name was David. Lost his job for reporting mortgage fraud. Nobody would hire him now.
"Whatever."
They started tying things. No explanation. The kids tied their backpacks to chairs from the demolished school. The old women tied their purses to pipes that hadn't worked since the factory closed. David tied his tie to a door that opened onto a brick wall.
"Now pull," Patricia said.
They pulled. Nothing came free easily.
"That's it?" one kid asked. Destiny. Thirteen. Her mom cleaned offices at night.
"What else would there be?"
"I thought this was art school."
"It is."
Maria brought out trash. Actual trash. A water bottle with algae growing in it. Styrofoam containers from the Chinese place that used to be here. Motor oil from the auto shop next door.
"In museums, we couldn't let people touch anything," she said, pouring motor oil on her hands. "Now touch everything."
The old women looked at each other. They'd been coming for weeks, always together. One would start sentences, the other would finish. Not planned. Just forty years of marriage to the same man did that.
"This is disgusting," one said.
"Good," said the other.
Chen dragged in more garbage. She walked with a limp—torn ACL, no insurance, emergency room wanted $45,000 to fix it. So she limped.
"Make something," she said.
"From this?"
"From anything. From nothing. Same thing."
David, the banker, picked up the styrofoam. Started stacking containers. It looked like the KeyBank building where he'd worked. Where he'd reported the fraud. Where they'd fired him for it.
"I'm making my office," he said.
"Make it honest this time," Patricia said.
He poured motor oil on it. It dissolved partway. Better.
The kids were mixing everything—yogurt (expired), paint (stolen from Home Depot), their own spit. Making something that wasn't anything but was definitely something.
"Is this illegal?" Destiny asked.
"Which part?" Maria asked. "The stolen electricity? The trespassing? The teaching without licenses?"
"Yes."
"Then yes."
More people came. Word spread how word spreads—someone knew someone who knew someone who needed somewhere to go that wasn't home or work because both were gone or never existed.
A woman brought her husband's ashes.
"He died last month," she said. "This cost three thousand dollars." She held up the urn. "Seemed like garbage to pay that much for garbage."
"Use them," Patricia said.
"In art?"
"In whatever you're making."
The woman mixed the ashes with paint. With oil. With rain water from the buckets. Made something gray and thick and impossible to name.
"He would have hated this," she said.
"Good."
By week three, the warehouse was unrecognizable. Every surface covered in something—paint, oil, food, ash. Forty people some days. Six others. Depending on weather, on arrests, on who had bus fare.
They'd stopped calling it teaching. Patricia would just start doing something and others would follow or not. Maria wrote on walls—not labels but questions: "How many hours of cleaning to see one painting?" Chen tied things together that shouldn't be tied—a baby shoe to a beer bottle, a wedding photo to a eviction notice.
"What are we learning?" David asked one night. He'd been coming every day. His suit was ruined now. Oil, paint, yogurt. He'd stopped caring.
"I don't know," Patricia said.
That was the truth. She didn't know what they were doing. Just that they were doing it. Together. In a warehouse that would probably be demolished soon. With materials that were definitely garbage. Making things that weren't anything.
The museum sent someone. A woman in heels that cost more than anyone's rent.
"We'd like to offer you positions again," she said, stepping carefully through the mess. "With proper protocols."
Patricia looked at her hands. Covered in motor oil. In paint. In ash from the woman whose husband died.
"No," she said.
"The museum could fund this space. Make it official."
"It's already official. We officially do whatever we want."
The woman left. They kept working. Making nothing from nothing. Or something from nothing. Or nothing from something. Hard to tell. Didn't matter.
Winter came. Colder in the warehouse than outside sometimes. They burned things in barrels—illegal, but warmth is warmth. The smoke mixed with pigeon shit and chemicals from the brownfield next door.
"This is toxic," someone said. A new person. Clean clothes.
"Everything's toxic," Maria said. "At least here you can see it."
They kept coming. Kids whose schools had cut art programs. Adults whose jobs had cut them. Old people whose centers had closed. All making things from garbage because garbage was what they had.
Patricia found the marker that had dried out that first day. Tried it again. Sometimes dead things came back if you waited. Drew a line on the wall. It worked.
She wrote "Connection and" again. Then stopped. Then started somewhere else. Then stopped again.
The walls became covered in unfinished sentences. Half-thoughts. Almosts.
"Why don't you finish them?" Destiny asked.
"Because finishing is a luxury," Patricia said. "We're not in the luxury business."
David had been making the same styrofoam building for weeks. Adding to it. Melting it. Adding again. It looked like every bank building and no building and something between.
"I think I'm making where I used to work," he said.
"Looks like where we all used to work," Chen said.
"Looks like nowhere," Maria added.
"Yeah," David agreed. "That too."
The woman with the ashes had used them all. Her husband was now part of twelve different objects. Or paintings. Or whatever they were.
"I spread him around," she said. "Seemed right. He was never all in one place when he was alive either."
Spring came. The warehouse leaked more. They worked around the leaks. Under them. Let the rain be part of what they made.
Someone asked if they were artists now.
"We're people making things," Patricia said.
"Isn't that what artists are?"
"Artists get paid."
"Nobody here gets paid."
"Exactly."
They kept working. With garbage. With rain. With their hands covered in whatever was available. Making things that would never be in museums. That would never be saved. That would exist until the warehouse was demolished, which would be soon, which would be never, which would be whenever the city remembered this place existed.
Patricia wrote one more thing on the wall: "We tie things together that were never meant to be tied."
She didn't add the rest. Everyone already knew it.
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What we tie together stays tied, ugly knots and all, teaching us that connection isn't metaphor but literal rope and wire and whatever's at hand, that every choice of what to bind to what is political, personal, and permanent, even when the building comes down, especially then.
