Chantelle Rytter is an artist, a collaborator, an organizer and a visionary. Above all she cares about community and play as the social cure-all. I met with her on the second of October on the rooftop a Grant Park bar and later a bike ride around inner Atlanta. This is what we discussed:
DB: When people ask you what you do, what do you tell them?
CR: I’m a community parade artist, at least primarily. I do three lantern parades and two bicycle parades here in Atlanta every year.
DB: So I can kind of imagine the bicycle parades: you’re on bicycles, wearable art, floats, puppets…?
CR: They’re pretty simple. I built three giant phoenixes—I want a flock of phoenixes—and they live in the ceiling of the bike shop, BeltLine Bikes. So they’re leading the parade and they represent the rise in ridership across Atlanta neighborhoods. I come up with some sort of easy theme, and sometimes a giveaway. Like this time it was funny mustaches. Or pinwheels on Peachtree St. There’s bicycle decorating an hour before the parade and I give them stuff that they can stick on their bikes in thirty minutes. Some people bring crazy things on their own, and they are wonderful!
DB: When I ride with my friends, they mount toy trumpets to their helmets. Mostly for ease of finding each other.
CR: Neat.
DB: So lantern parades… can you tell me a little more about those?
CR: I started being interested in things based on participation – just wide-open participation where everyone’s invited to come do this. Creative play. There is a universal desire for creative play. And I have a background in New Orleans, and those folks have a dedicated civic play practice.
DB: They get it.
CR: Yeah. Civic Play… that’s the title of my upcoming[TEDxPeachtree] talk, Civic Play – The ultimate social tonic. And we need that stuff, it’s a love bomb where we do crazy things together in our public space, and we get to be individually expressive but collaborate with our city. It’s good stuff. And lantern parades, I got clued into lantern parades around the world based on participation. So they come from Asia. They are hundreds of years old. We can’t touch Asian lantern parades. They are huge, they’ve been going on for three hundred years, they’re incredibly beautiful. They are also very organized and precise. And, in my understanding, it was in the late 80s that a group of UK community artists happened to see one in Japan and they brought the idea home. So the UK has been doing lantern parades since the early 90s. And then Australia. Australia has a really righteous one that has been happening for twenty-five years. In Lismore, Australia so it’s not like a big place. They’ve won national tourism awards. The good ones can have a nice economic impact. Like, for the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade, the economic impact on the city was $147 million.
DB: Holy crap!
CR: Right? Direct! They think that indirect it was more like $334 million. In a study commissioned by the 25 big krewes who throw the big parades in Orleans parish, they figured that they spent $25 million to throw those parades. They were self-funded.
DB: That’s a huge boon!
CR: Yeah, for a really fun thing. It does all kinds of good stuff: social infrastructure, cultural infrastructure, and cash. Anyways, lantern parades are just beautiful, and they’re my thing since they’re based in participation, and we did not have them here. There’s one in Baltimore that I’m going to go see. I saw the one in Vancouver. It was the longest running one in North America and it ended. I had no idea it was the last one. It was heartbreaking. Their participation tanked, and their spectatorship rose and it became difficult to maintain it anymore. I try to keep the language clear, it is based in participation. It’s not, ‘Come see the parade,’ it’s, ‘Come be the parade. There’s no parade without you.’ We can’t lose the language, lest people think it’s just a normal parade that you go see. So making it like the second line in New Orleans - you show up, make a lantern and walk that way. It’s really easy, spontaneous. Now that it’s gotten to the size that it has, we are thinking of ways to deal with the shear volume of people. 23,000 people. The growth of it has been crazy. It started in 2010 with the Atlanta BeltLine. We’re six years into a 25-year project: a 22-mile loop connecting the abandoned railroad tracks. Now it is, ‘Do you live inside the perimeter?’ Soon it will be, ‘Do you live inside or outside the BeltLine?’ A closer circle. It used to be the creepy place behind all the dumpsters, all the backs of the buildings. Like you would have no idea that under all the weeds and trash was a railroad track. So the route is level – it was a railroad line – which is convenient. But it’s a monster of a project. So in 2010, the BeltLine was still the creepy place behind the dumpsters, and the city needed to believe that it would be this country’s greatest urban renewal project. So it’s really perfect, to me, for a lantern parade, because holding up a light is a universal symbol for faith and support in communities around the world. And we need to hold up the light for the BeltLine for another twenty years. I’m interested in things that have the potential to become a tradition, that can become part of the cultural fabric, that can appeal across every demographic and could last for a really long time. Y’know?
The stuff I admire about New Orleans, I think other cities really need civic play, those civic traditions that you put on your calendar.
So the first year [of the lantern parade] I would have called it a wild success if one hundred people came. I did four workshops leading up to it - and five hundred people showed up! And walked in the mud and the dirt and the weeds on the interim trail. And then it got paved, but it still wasn’t quite [there], I mean: rickety, crazy bridges that sit next to the new bridges, and every time we pass by, we’re like, “Do you remember when we walked on that thing?!” So five hundred people showed up that day and it was the largest number of people to ever stand together on the Betline. This little section is only two miles of the planned twenty-two. This teeny section connects the Old Fourth Ward, which is Martin Luther King Jr.’s district, the birthplace of Civil Rights, to Piedmont Park. Which is like Midtown, fancy, our blue-blood founding fathers, the Piedmont Driving Club, [connected] to a historically black community. It’s a nice walk between those two places for the first time in the history of the city. And the BeltLine will connects 45 other neighborhoods. People get across town completely differently. We’ve held races between joggers, cyclists and cars and the cars are losing by a long shot to get from this neighborhood to that neighborhood. It used to be all hilly when you rode your bike, but the BeltLine is a 1% grade.
DB: That’s awesome!
CR: So, it went from five hundred people to 1,250 to 10,000. [In three years.] And every year I wrote a grant… won a grant… wrote a grant… won a grant. Until finally [the year we got 10,000 people] I said, ‘you guys, why don’t we take this out of the grant system and make it permanent.’ So if people ask me whether we’re doing it next year I can say yes. I think the jump to ten thousand had to do with the BeltLine really getting its heart around the Lantern Parade. The Lantern Parade kicks off Art on the BeltLine, that’s happening now. If you have time to go poking around there’s a ton of public art on the East and West side. There an app for it. There’s a series of performances for eight weeks, there’s eight curated miles of art. Art on the BeltLine. It’s five years old now, and all growed up.
DB: So did you grow up here, and how has the BeltLine grown compared to the influx of new residents and the changing consciousness of Atlanta?
CR: No I am a transplant. I thought I was just visiting. The city has become so exciting and it’s changed so much. I moved here from New Orleans in 2001. It didn’t feel bike-able then. Our ridership has gone up 400%. There is a vote up for a bond referendum for 15% funds to go to bike lanes. But more people are simply riding their bikes, without infrastructure. Same with the art scene, it’s blown up. Was it social media, was all that going on and we didn’t know about it? Or is there just a ground level explosion of stuff? LivingWalls is amazing, a murals project that’s been going on for five years now. They bring in eighty murals a year from artists from all over. Now it’s five years in. It’s really changed the way the city looks. The BeltLine is funded by a tax allocation district, the East side of the trail where my parade is, has generated $775 million. Just right around that two miles. So all the housing around the trail was not there five years ago.
DB: So after the completion of the BeltLine, this is potentially a tens of billions of dollars development plan.
CR: Uhuh, and people want to live on the BeltLine. It’s going to take forever to finish but it’s so cool. I need to go poking around to see if there’s anything affordable to live in left. The Old Fourth Ward park was a horrible drainage problem, and the feds came down on the city to fix it, so they turned it over to the BeltLine design team and now it’s the prettiest storm drain you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s gorgeous and it cost $30 million less than they thought. We got this. Instead of another tunnel under the ground it’s this beautiful park. People love the BeltLine. They’re complaining now that it’s too crowded. Which is funny.
DB: What a terrible problem to have, ha-ha.
CR: Over on the Westside, I have heard it called the whiteline. You go over there and no one is on it. But it isn’t making a neighborhood connection yet, like, you can’t go anywhere on it, it’s sort of a dead end. They are developing it equitably, thought. The Eastside was just first, largely due to a sizeable private donation. The Westside Trail
is being built out right now. The difference between the eastside and the southwest side of town in terms of economic development is huge. It’s not been equal at all.
DB: Black and white, quite literally.
CR: Yeah almost exactly black and white, and poor. So in three years there will be a Westside Trail BeltLine lantern parade. And I will figure out how to do that. We need the Westside to hold up a light for the BeltLine. I want the eastside to go into the westside, but we certainly need the west side to light it up!
DB: So do you envision several smaller communities within the BeltLine or do you see a unified Atlanta in the future? What will it look like after the completion [of the BeltLine]?
CR: Atlanta is a city of neighborhoods. It’s very easy to come here and take the train out of the airport, stay in a hotel downtown, and miss the art museum and midtown. You would be pressed to find Grant Park or Cabbagetown or all the little neighborhoods. I think the BeltLine will be a way for visitors to get to the neighborhoods, and a way for the neighborhoods to visit each other. Because I feel like you could write postcards from the West End to the Eastside. It’s a completely different [world] even though you’re only three miles away.
DB: Growing up in D.C. I had that same feeling. 16th street separated white and black D.C. I almost never crossed 14th street, not out of any cultural fear, but I simply didn’t have any ties. And it was a weird alien feeling going three miles east and not recognizing the neighborhood at all.
DB: So I’ve got to ask about your early life. Were you always a community parade artist?
CR: No, I’m sure I could have stayed in New Orleans and joined a krewe and been happy doing that.
DB: A crew? An arts crew?
CR: No, a krewewith a ‘k’. So Mardi Gras isn’t thrown by the city of New Orleans, it’s thrown by the Krewes. I’m the captain of the Krewe of the Grateful Gluttons here. I founded my Krewe in New Orleans and used it as a ruse to get my Atlanta friends to come to Mardi Gras. And then a divorce ran me out of town and I came to Atlanta, because my favorite people are here. But being displaced from this thing that I love… What I didn’t like about Atlanta became opportunities for me. I wandered off into civics. Previously I owned rental property, worked in restaurants, catering. Nothing that I really loved.
DB: It sounds like you found your passion and something you’re very good at. What is your day-to-day operation like as an organizer and an artist?
CR: Certainly no day is the same. Today I need to practice my TedxPeachtree talk a hundred times and turn in the slideshow. I have a lantern parade in the works for Grant Park. The workshop attendance is terrible and I need to figure out how to improve that. I’m going to hang out with the sponsors, the Grant Park Conservancy. Tonight we’re going to put together lantern kits. The workshops are sweet. People meet each other, and then at the parade it’s like seeing a long-lost relative. “You! I love you! Look what you did to your lantern, that’s gorgeous!”
DB: I guess you have picked up quite a few things about getting people together.
CR: Really, connecting people to place. People needed to fall in love with the BeltLine space. If people were in love with [Grant Park], they would care about it more. So the parade – when we lay down joyful blessings on a space and we love that space much more.
DB: I love this vocabulary. It’s so very foreign to me. It’s new and exciting to me to talk about people, place, identity and development.
CR:
How to get people to fall in love with where they live. Because it changes everything when they love it.
Half the time the difference between the good and bad neighborhoods is the damn trash on the ground. Why do some people have pride and clean that up? [It’s about] people’s ability to care, outside of their yard, outside of their neighborhood. And can you care about the city? The state? Can you care about the country? It gets vague as it drifts out. What does our capacity for caring look like? It definitely changes when people love a thing.
DB: Were there people of particular influence for you when you were around 25?
CR: I would say the people in my Krewe. I found my Atlanta friends in my 20s and I’ve pretty much been operating as this large group since. We want to hang out together all the time. In my recipe for happiness I would say great friends, time to play with them and gratitude. I talk about this in my TED talk: that our private parade play, what we do as friends, is an embarrassment of riches. It is such good stuff. How do you extend that out into the world? I can’t imagine not having that in my life. You know that social isolation is one of the number one things that’s killing people. And, I don’t know how to fix the transportation issue. I do know how to fix some social isolation. Like what can you do to make the world better? There’s plenty that you can’t do, but… you should probably just go start a krewe. Do you have a bunch of friends? Great, do stuff together a lot, be grateful for it and appreciate it. If you don’t, then find them. Find your people. I think that community is really important and it enriches our lives. I can’t imagine not having a lot of great friends.
DB: When you first said ‘krewe’ I thought, ‘Is that a gang?’
CR: Sometimes we are. I should have worn my Krewe shirt to show you. Yeah we have shirts.
DB: Do you go around Atlanta spray painting walls and skateboarding?
CR: Nah, it’s modeled after the New Orleans thing. Except in absence of other Krewes [in Atlanta] I changed it. Some of them actually recruit, they pay dues, they’ve got to raise money to do those crazy parades. So the Krewe’s membership isn’t open, but come do the thing, you don’t need to belong to do that.
DB: Yeah, it sounds like a club, structured and organized, a little bit of high school [clique], but it also sounds like the opposite. Open and comfortable.
CR: Yeah everyone’s welcome. One of the greatest things we do is the Gnome March. Seven years we’ve been doing this. We made it a world record attempt to make it clear that everyone is invited to dress up like a garden gnome and help bring global attention to important gnome issues…
DB: [snorts and laughs]. Yeah
CR: Gnomes have a lot of issues… fighting gnomophobia and legalizing weeds. About 200 people do it every year. We have never won the [world] record but there is no place like gnome.
It’s just a really fun day. And that baffles people: “Why do you do this thing?!” ... For fun.
People tend to think that anything fun can’t be important. Is fun not the most important thing?! As kids, we live for fun. The rest is just waiting… waiting for the next time you get to play.
DB: [sarcastically] What about accountability, responsibility, duty, honor, place in society? What about these things? Love? Family?
CR: When it’s good, it’s fun. I think our country suffers from time impoverishment.
That people are living with a poverty of time. I think a lot of that is self-inflicted. A lot of people think play time isn’t legitimate. But leisure is the basis of culture!
We need some time to kick around with friends. If you’re not being productive... blah blah blah. It’s okay.
DB: In college my friends were constantly riddled by anxiety because if they weren’t being incredibly productive with their time, they saw it as a waste and that they would reap the negative consequences of that. I’ve seen people get serious issues from not allowing themselves any leisure time. For not forgiving themselves for their unachievable objectives. I guess I see what you mean.
CR: I didn’t make up ‘leisure is the basis of culture.’ It’s this book that’s in my bathroom. It’s making a case for it, based in Greek philosophy. They believed that you need time to come up with stuff, take a walk, talk to others, play with your dog.
DB: I was in D.C. last summer looking for those places. When I was in South America there were those places where people just sit and look at other people, looking at them! Y’know? It’s very odd but it’s so good. I was looking for those places and I could only find them in the black or Latino neighborhoods [in D.C.]. And even those were being gentrified. I used to see the plaza, the park as the stoop where people loiter and mill about. But I realized, ‘that’s the most valuable public space, not the restaurants or shops.’ It’s hard to catch myself with those judgments.
CR: We are the richest country with the least amount of leisure time.
DB: Have you ever been to burning man?
CR: Yup.
DB: How’d you like it?
CR: Oh, I loved it. It’s a lot of work, fun work, but it’s not easy.
DB: It sounds a little dangerous too. There are real risks in going!
CR: Oh yeah, and it’s exciting. I was interested in learning metalworking. I did a workshop with this metal artist in town, Charlie Smith, and I got to help them build a burning man project. The workshop ended, and they were like, ‘well we’re doing it again tomorrow, you wanna hang out?’ I was definitely the least skilled person on this krewe but I loved it. It was hard, you have to wear head-to-toe clothing to weld… in July. You’re in the ceiling of this hot-as-shit warehouse. Sore from yesterday reaching to weld something you can’t reach. I’m like, ‘What are you doing Chantelle? What are you doing with your summer?!’ At some point they asked me if I wanted to come [to burning man]. Finally I was like, ‘Yes, I’d be crazy not to.’ We built these giant fire birds. I couldn’t not see them in their final form. And these people had been doing it for years, so it was like traveling with royalty. Their camp was this beautiful circus-grade tent with a living room and a bar in it. Everyone in the camp brings a handle of something. We were right on the front of the circle, and they could gate off our camp, they built a giant observation platform in front of it, so you could look out at all the stuff going on. They had friends at crane camp, I got to go ride up in a little loveseat that’s on a crane platform that they raise into the air.
DB: Oh! I was thinking you meant the bird!
CR: No, cranes! And they play with them! Like, if something good’s happening, you can tell because all the cranes go out there and circle it.
DB: [laughs], anthropomorphic machines. I don’t think I could handle myself out there. Other people seem to be so well adapted to that environment. One of the things I’m into is sculpture, kinetic or otherwise. Whenever I go to a new city I look for cool pieces that are notable. When I was a kid I loved marble rolls. There was this iron kinetic sculpture in my dad’s office building that I loved as a kid. I would sit there for hours and watch it go. Part of me is closing off that interest in creativity and expression, just because it’s not on my platter in these pre-designed career tracks. It’s hard to envision myself embracing it in my future life. But [expletive]!
CR: Big sculpture is really cool. Requiring engineering.
DB: Yeah! That’s kind of what’s sexy about it to me. It’s problem solving and expression all in one.
CR:
I love to build big shit. It’s really fun.
DB: Recently I’ve been disillusioned with national involvement and activism. A lot of my friends are doing really good work in a more local capacity. It’s turned me on to working locally, either in local politics or in community non-profits and activism.
CR: I think it’s more rewarding because you can see it. On a national level you hope that it trickles out.
DB: Is that cheating? That you want to see the fruits of your labor?
CR: No. I try to keep politics out of my art projects, just because they’re so divisive. Ugg. I had an article published in the Atlanta Business Journal last week as a guest columnist. So I write the thing, send it to the PR firm, they send it back with a bunch of edits, I take most of the edits out and send it back to them. They promise they won’t change anything in it. I say thanks and they publish it. It comes out, “Chantelle Rytter, community parade activist” and I go, “No, no no!” People call me wanting me to lead marches. Maybe I’ll feel differently some other time in my life, but that’s not what I am into right now. I did bring my skeleton puppet to the Capital when Georgia arts funding was cut. I gave her a sign that said “Died of embarrassment from living in Georgia”. The funding was restored. I go to Georgia Rides to the Capital, supporting cycling in Georgia. If local politics impact my fun – that’s different!
--Check out Chantelle's recent work on her website, or videos of events on YouTube!