John Colapinto: Can a Public-Arts Renaissance Save Chicago's South Side?: The New Yorker East Garfield Boulevard, on Chicago's South Side, could serve as a background in a big-city cop drama: driving just a few blocks, you pass empty lots, a discount muffler shop, a "food and liquor" emporium, and a Tax Service establishment. At the corner of Garfield and Prairie, though, the scene changes. Next to a boarded-up Harold's Chicken Shack stands a gleaming two-story terra-cotta building, whose tall windows look into wide, airy rooms with varnished wood floors and paintings on the walls. The building, which opened last March after an ambitious renovation, is the University of Chicago's Arts Incubator. Built in the nineteen-twenties, the structure sat empty for two decades, until Theaster Gates, a Chicago-based conceptual artist whose raw materials include abandoned buildings and houses, persuaded the university to reimagine it as a two-million-dollar complex of galleries and studio spaces. One morning last November, Gates parked his Volvo behind the Incubator and hopped out. An athletically built African-American man of forty with a shaved head and a cultivated scruff of beard, he dashed up the stairs to a meeting room, where he greeted three young African-American artists selected for a ten-month residency: David Boykin, a saxophonist and composer; Andres Hernandez, an artist who says that his work "deals with space and race"; and Krista Franklin, a poet and visual artist. Taking his place at the head of a long table, where the artists sat with several university administrators, Gates said that, as the Incubator enters its second year, he was learning from mistakes. "Last year, I talked about it wrong," he said. "I told the artists, "We need to make the building work, because black folk never seen a building like this before." " The neighborhood, which is ninety-seven per cent black, has few cultural institutions. That was wrong. We don't need to make the building work. We need to support you. . . .