In the Mall (Mr. Ducke / flickr)

by Daniel Lawlor

Providence Place Mall could be one of the great repositories of public art in the Northeast. It is not. Yet whenever I walk through the mall, and see the blank canvas that is the ceiling, the lining between floors, the tall columns that support the inner infrastructure, I wonder what could be.

True, the mall would still be a site of consumption. Yet, it could be beautiful – it could provide jobs to local artists, offer spaces for reflective commentary on the changes that Providence as a city is facing during the early years of the 21st century.

In 2007, a local artist was arrested for having created an alternative space within the mall – essentially a secret apartment in the buildings parking lot. There is no official record of that.

In 2006, there was a riot in the food court prior to the release of the film Get Rich or Die Trying. There is no record of that.

Since its opening, several individuals committed suicide in the mall itself, including jumping to their deaths. There is no record of that. No signs for a helpline. No booths for outreach. No memory or acknowledgment.

The mall is built on a site that once housed the University of Rhode Island, as well as a 19th century prison complex. There are no memories of those buildings, no plaques to recall what was before.

The “Nonplace” Mall – if I may borrow a term from Auge, is unique in some respects. Its exterior, designed by Vincent St. Florian of the national World War II memorial fame, echoes the streetscapes of Providence’s long gone downtown department stores. The glass bridge that connects the state side and city side portions of the mall affords beautiful vistas of the downtown, and the empty factories- some now lofts- that once employed Providence’s workers.

The yellow sky bridge connecting the mall to the Westin Hotel, providing a walkway over the highway exits, continues to allow views of the outside. Once in the hotel, a walker may head down a hundred thousand plus escalator, designed so that street people and shoppers don’t easily interact with paying hotel goers using the other escalators a few feet away.

To adopt the line of thinking from Sungyung Lee, who are the “stakeholders” in the “mediated landscape” that is Providence Place Mall? Who has a claim to its development- who, to paraphrase Lee, has access to the space, who shares the values put forward by the space, and who is producing the space. Clearly, any person in the city- consumer or not- has access to the mall. If sharing values is defined as consumption, thousands of visitors each year participate in the consumption or production of sales and goods within the mall’s space, and the design is produced- echoing Charles Elvasky – by mall operations manuals, local satellite offices of larger national and international chains, and anyone who defaces designs within the space.

In some ways the mall experience is a series of commercial studios, offering goods, conforming to different store cultures, organized within the framework of a grand super-structure of consumption.  Does art belong in such a space? Why should it not? Why should not the residents who paint have a claim to represent their understanding within this large private/public space. The space is ultimately produced and coordinated by the store owners, who in many ways are only able to exist because of the large web of individuals who frequent and work within the commercial studio space of the mall.

Nonplace Mall could hold public art that reflects the desires and struggles and experiences of people interpreting the space and those within it. It could hold plaques honoring history- the painful and the quirky. So far, nonplace does not offer official space to paint, advice to encourage second thoughts, or words to remember.