Eating with the Enemy

We stop in front of a multistory home like so many in Chicago, red brick, except this one has the unusual detail of a dark-green door. “This is the first home we lived in [when we moved to Chicago],” he explains, “and the reason I’m showing you this, the crazy thing about it, is that the door is the same green that my grandfather’s company’s identity was built around,” the first nod I will get toward a past that colors so much of his present. The door is forest-green, or hunter; even a simple decorative decision, I realize, can reference faraway roots.

To walk with artist Michael Rakowitz is to relinquish any sense of urgency and embrace interruption. Conversation is punctuated by digressions from his historical, personal, and contemplative memory, which makes sense, given the multilayered nature of this work. I’ve met him in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago, where he has lived for over ten years since he began teaching at Northwestern University, and at almost every block Rakowitz has stopped to say hi to a proprietor. As in many Chicago neighborhoods, there’s a visible mix of international communities—it is a stimulating match for Rakowitz, who is obsessed with displacement and diaspora. But it’s an early morning in January, snow is falling, I can’t feel my toes, and I’m giving up on my hopes of ever getting warm.

He continues, “I had just opened up Davisons & Co. in New York, and that storefront happened to have that green, and this door had the same green, and the food truck we also painted this green.” He’s given me a preface to the rest of the day, and a peek into the openness to serendipity that characterizes his work.

“You get a couple of those magical moments, but if you go looking for it you fuck everything up,” he says with a smile, as we turn back to the main road in search of a warmer place to talk.

It’s impossible to describe Rakowitz’s work without delving into his past. Multiple themes course through his various projects—heat and its invisible power, displacement of many forms, loss—all of which are inextricably connected to people, those he’s known, others he’s only heard of, some he can only imagine. Above all these, and connecting them, is perhaps an idea of fate, and accidents that can bear unpredictable meaning.

Born in 1973, Rakowitz spent the first three decades of his life in the Northeast. He is the American-born child of an Iraqi-Jewish mother and a father descended from second-generation Ashkenazi Jews, and grew up in Great Neck on Long Island, near his maternal grandparents. He attended college at SUNY Purchase and went to MIT for a master’s degree in visual studies.

An MIT-organized trip to Jordan led to a turning point in his career. This trip marked the first time anyone in his family had been back to a country in the Middle East other than Israel since emigrating to the states. He was fascinated by the living structures of the Bedouin, a nomadic people who reconfigured temporary tents every night in response to the shifting wind patterns of the desert. With the desert still on his mind, he returned to winter in Boston and saw a homeless person sleeping under a building vent expelling hot air—a nomad of different circumstance interacting with another kind of wind.

In 1998, created , an ongoing series of inflatable shelters now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), with the needs of homeless individuals in mind. The earliest renditions were made of discarded plastic and packing tape; these semi-sheer, polyethylene tunnels with white corded bands that inflate with