Reform, correct, repair, cure, heal, doctor, fix, patch, recondition, renovate, revamp, and rebuild. Oh, I could write a novel on each of these words and its necessary place at the intersection of art, fashion, and ecology. Let alone its place in our kitchens. In our gardens. In our art studios. In our communities and legislation and infrastructure.
— Katrina Rodabaugh, Mendfulness and the Long Journey to Repair
Home as the Center of Repair
Repairs are born of necessity and oftentimes must be made anywhere: in towns seeking strategies for revival and transition, in libraries reclaiming their place in the town center, in social innovations such as Tool Libraries and TimeBanks, in classrooms and in museums, at a nearly lost burial ground, and on a historic sailing ship. But perhaps the place to begin is closer at hand. As Elizabeth Spelman writes in Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World, the truest center of repair has always been in our own homes, a “veritable repair shop” for our bodies and spirits, responding to the “steady flow of crises arising from the vulnerability of the human heart and from the fragility of the web of human relationships”: skinned knees, broken toys, mended seams, busted windows, stuff that stops working, and never-ending housework. And too often, as we know, the home is also the backdrop for domestic violence.
Modern living has been steadily “de-skilling” us for decades. We demand convenience, and we all need more time. (You’ve probably seen the clever meme: “What I really need is another day between Saturday and Sunday.”) But that is changing. Millennials are now driving the demand for re-skilling, seeking opportunities to regain the knowledge that might have skipped a generation. Add to that the fact that in the United States today, single female homeowners outnumber single male homeowners two to one, and breadwinning mothers are increasingly the norm in U.S. homes. The number of how-to resources for female homeowners has grown exponentially. See Jane Drill, the DIY home improvement channel on YouTube, is a good example of what’s available — for women and for men — today.
A homeowner’s work is never done. Let’s leave it at that, and go outside, into the commons.
Positive Proximity
In 1994, Dar Williams was a talented young singer-songwriter touring the country with her guitar and an extraordinary collection of songs. Her first full-length album, The Honesty Room, was just out, and she was playing the coffeehouse circuit that had been established in the sixties, had languished from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, and by the mid-nineties was seeing a comeback. Hers was a high order of song craft, and before long Joan Baez, among others, would be recording her songs.
That circuit took Dar to just about every state in the lower forty-eight. She visited quite a few college towns, but mostly postindustrial cities that had lost their core industry and major employers a decade or two earlier and were struggling to find a way back to some measure of prosperity, and perhaps relevancy, in the twenty-first century. Dar was in each town only a day or two, and what she found were audiences tenaciously holding on to their optimism. “The towns were empty,” she told us. “The malls, the big boxes, and the exodus of factories had happened all at once, and the public square was overgrown. Nobody knew which way was up.”
Dar’s experiences inspired the images in her song “Bought and Sold,” a portrait of what’s been called “the malling of America,” leaving empty storefronts on Main Street.
Well we’re heading for a past that you can leave and not defend
Where the downtowns hold the sadness of “You can’t go back again”
It’s there you’ll find the rust and debtors
Motel signs with missing letters
Cause there’s a monster on the outskirts
Says it knows what your town needs
Then it eats it up like nothing and it won’t spit out the seeds
Dar started taking notes, and when she returned to those towns a year later, she found herself becoming more and more interested in how change happens. Soon she had evolved into a student of social dynamics. “I got to see what works, and that helped to keep me inspired,” she explained. She recalled a dinner in Charlottesville, Virginia, with friends, one of whom, Hal Movius, writes books about conflict resolution. During dinner Hal asked a question: “What do you think determines the relationships we’ll have in our towns?”
Dar said, “Values.” No.
“Politics?” No again.
“Hobbies?” Wrong.
Then Hal said, “Proximity. That’s all.”
In time, Dar began to think that visiting this collection of towns repeatedly had given her a unique opportunity to write about the social dynamic she came to think of as “positive proximity.” She describes this dynamic in her book What I Found in a Thousand Towns. In towns that are thriving, Dar found an essential ingredient, an extension of the “proximity principle” recognized in social psychology and described by her friend Hal: individuals are more likely to form interpersonal relations with people who are close by. It’s an idea so intuitive it hardly needs stating, except that…everyone is so busy, and in our wired world, real connections are not to be taken for granted.
Dar didn’t set out to write a handbook — she’s a storyteller, after all — but her book is full of instructive and insightful case studies, captured in her subtitle: A Traveling Musician’s Guide to Rebuilding America’s Communities, One Coffee Shop, Dog Run, and Open-Mike Night at a Time. She structured the book into three sections: “Place,” “Identity Building,” and “Translation.” “Placemaking” has become a familiar idea in town planning; it’s the creation of public spaces where strangers can become acquaintances, discover common interests, and have conversations that may lead to collaborative ideas. “Identity building” is about the way bridges get built from one part of the community to another — between business owners who are parents and want to see more activities for their kids; pastors, rabbis, and imams who recognize their common ground; town officeholders who aren’t in it for themselves; artists and entrepreneurs. One well-known challenge is bridging the divide between longtime residents and newcomers.
Dar’s third ingredient for positive proximity is “translation,” the way we announce ourselves to the world and all the ways the world can find us. Dar focuses on two kinds of translation that are as old as civilization: partnership building and the role of “conscious bridgers,” people who take pleasure in connecting people. Where once we saw a town of strangers, now we see a town where almost everybody knows somebody who can. “This is social capital, and when it starts to build, it keeps building — and keeps variegating,” Dar explained, using a word that nicely combines economy with ecology. No one is saying that restoring community and repairing generation-old divides is easy; and job losses, social isolation, and the opioid epidemic, among other problems, have devastated whole communities. The challenges are huge, and towns need powerful strategies. Dar captures a fine distinction when she writes, “Some people even go from saying ‘I live here’ to ‘I’m from here.’”
There is a Repair Cafe at the library in the town next to Dar’s home in Cold Spring, New York, one at her local farmers’ market, and another one ten miles up the Hudson River in the community room of a low-income apartment building. Dar continued:
Let’s look at what Repair Cafe is doing. It’s creating a lot of face-to-face conversations. It models a citizen who has a sense of sharing and good will, which gives people a sense that where they live is populated by friendly, accommodating people, not judgmental, exclusive people. Those things add up to a sense of social trust.
Another cool thing about Repair Cafe is that it’s not saccharine and it’s not condescending. It’s not exactly “charitable” in the way we usually think. It gets people engaged with mechanics and side-by-side good gritty stuff. The opposite of division is not unity, it’s collaboration. That’s what I see at Repair Cafes.
Dar quotes her friend Beth Macy, who has written extensively about the decline of small towns in her books Factory Man and Dopesick: “Communities thrive when there is a diverse range of equal voices.” The truism of “When you’ve got your health, you’ve got just about everything” has its parallel for cities and towns: when you have affordable housing that is a walkable or bus-able distance to healthy food, you’ve got just about everything.
These are the things that build civic self-esteem, the “beating heart” that’s able to stand up to “the monster on the outskirts [that] says it knows what your town needs.” “You don’t have to do any of this,” Dar says. “It’s just that when you do these things, you will have so much more than you do already.”
Transition Towns
In 2005, Rob Hopkins was back home in England from extended travels in Asia, and he was teaching the principles of permaculture: ways to design beneficial relationships by emulating natural systems. The question that consumed him was, How can communities become stronger in a future that is far less dependent on fossil fuels? Years earlier, on a trip to the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan, he’d found a social and economic fabric that was not dependent on trucking things in from the outside world. Hopkins described his reaction: “In this remote valley I felt a yearning for something I couldn’t quite put my finger on but which I now see as being resilience: a culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its limits, and able to thrive for having done so.” But he also observed that sacks of nitrogen fertilizer and cement were already appearing, along with refined sugar products and drinks.
Hopkins and his students in England began working on a road map to help communities revitalize their local food systems, strengthen their local economy, and create a just transition to a postcarbon future. Since 2005, the Transition Town movement has grown internationally, with more than twelve hundred initiatives in fifty countries — towns where people come together to initiate positive social change. There’s an emphasis on practical projects; you want people to see what you do and be inspired by it. You want to give people different ways to get involved. You’re looking for the intersection where community needs meet the skills and passions the group has to offer.
Transition Towns have embraced the fundamental attributes of the repair movement. Sharing skills is at the core of their resilience, and sharing skills, of course, is fundamental to the repair movement. When the first Transition Town–sponsored Repair Cafe in the nation launched in Pasadena, California, in 2013, partnering with the Arroyo S.E.C.O. Network of Time Banks in Los Angeles, they learned that clothing repairs were both the most needed and the most offered skill. “The following month we held our first Repair Cafe with seven sewing machines running for three hours!” says Transition Pasadena’s Therese Brummel. “It was a huge success. The following month we decided to focus on electronic appliances. Again, a huge success. Forty-five events later, we offer just about anything you can think of.”
And so Repair Cafes are thriving alongside “blitz gardens” (planted by a small army of volunteers in a single weekend, “occupying” every part of town), re-skilling workshops, healthy food networks, and the other strategies included in the 2019 book 10 Stories of Transition in the U.S.: Inspiring Examples of Community Resilience Building. Not surprisingly, the second chapter in the book is titled “The Spread of Repair Cafes.”
Twenty-First-Century Libraries
For generations, libraries have been an essential part of democracy in America. In 1790, Ben Franklin facilitated the first public library when he donated his books to the Massachusetts town that named itself after him, and the residents voted to make those books freely available, establishing the institutional paradigm for the sharing economy. In his book Palaces for the People, sociologist Eric Klinenberg delivers an inspiring account of the vital role libraries play in providing “social infrastructure” — informal places that enable mutual support; that allow people to become acquainted, to check in on each other, and to take the pulse of the neighborhood. A place, for example, that gives children the chance to fall in love with reading. “Social infrastructure influences seemingly mundane but actually consequential patterns,” Klinenberg writes. “It affects everyone.” It also requires attention and investment, and just like hard infrastructure, social infrastructure must be maintained. When it is not, we see the domino effects of weakening social bonds.
Librarians have emerged as champions of community repair. It offers them the kind of programming they especially value: hands-on learning that is intergenerational and that brings new faces into the library. The idea of starting a Repair Cafe at the Mamakating Library in New York’s Catskills region was an outcome of a series of discussions initiated by the Sullivan County Human Rights Commission in the spring of 2016. They called it “Dialogue2Change,” and the purpose was to inspire outside-the-box solutions to poverty in the area. Someone had heard about “these free Repair Cafes,” and Library Director Peggy Johansen was intrigued. She visited the closest one, which happened to be at another library twenty-five miles away in Gardiner. “It was just perfect for what we were trying to do,” she says. Their first Repair Cafe, with the support of the local Lions Club and the Lady Lions, got started that summer.
“I’m not sure we’re reaching enough people yet to address people’s needs across the socioeconomic spectrum of the whole area,” Peggy says, “but we’ll keep doing it. We’re all subject to the bombardment of commercials that want to sell you something that is new, new, new. In this county we have dollar stores sprouting like weeds. The mindset to think, ‘I have something worthy of repair,’ doesn’t come easily.”
Libraries have always been our “community crossroads.” You will find quiet at a library, of course, but you will also find countless invitations to learn with others and from others. Ironically, the limitless and mostly free information available online has led some to believe that libraries are less relevant, less deserving of public funding. Branch libraries, in particular, have suffered in recent years. But it is precisely in an era when we are wedded to our handheld devices that we need what libraries give our neighborhoods. Was there an era when libraries became static and lost their knack for bringing people through their doors? Perhaps, but if so, that time is long gone. Libraries are back — and if you have spent two minutes looking at the programs being offered day in and day out by your local librarians, you know that they deserve your support.
On the West Side of Chicago, at the Austin Branch Public Library, Ray Kinsey hosts summertime Repair Cafes as part of his teen program. “This is the first Repair Cafe, of more than a thousand worldwide, to locate in a predominantly Black community,” he told the Austin Weekly News. Ray says that growing up he was lucky enough to be able to tag along with older guys who could fix things. It was a bonding experience. Now, he’s giving kids the chance to learn from the older volunteers at their neighborhood library and earn community service credits for school. “You can develop a skill and patience instead of just following society’s tendency of instant gratification,” Ray says. “You can fix something instead of throwing it away to a landfill.” Ray is also a recording artist and rapper, with four albums to his credit, and he excels at offering the kids opportunities to tell their stories. “Empathy in our profession is just as important as the information. When young black boys walk in, it helps them to see a young black male librarian who raps. Libraries can help you be you in your highest form.”
Today, librarians everywhere are reinventing their spaces and their services to be “twenty-first-century libraries,” with an emphasis on learning experiences. They have become “libraries of things.” Your library is likely lending out one or more of these items: free family passes to your region’s zoo and museums, ukuleles, fishing rods, croquet sets, microscopes, mobile Wi-Fi hot spots, American Girl dolls, and sewing machines. And that’s a starter list. What’s more, Rebekkah Smith Aldrich, a founding member of the American Library Association Sustainability Roundtable, wants libraries to also be sustainability leaders in their communities. “In library-speak, we catalog items and you can check them out. But what if you could catalog people and expertise? So that if you want to know about beekeeping or furniture refinishing, you can do a search, find a book or a DVD, but also find a neighbor who’s willing to talk to you.” She says Repair Cafes and Fixit Clinics are manifesting exactly that idea in a growing number of libraries by connecting people with knowledge through other people. “I’m so excited when I see another library anywhere in the country hosting a repair program. It’s happening, and it’s empowering people to really own the world around them.”
Tool Libraries
The twenty-first century has brought on an expansion of the sharing economy, which is not only a cultural change shaped by context but also a generational change, from Millennials to Gen Z, born between the 1980s and 2010. A common value is that experience matters more than ownership, and this idea is contributing to consumer and lifestyle choices that are critical to growing the circular economy. But it was way before Gen Z, forty years ago, that a social innovation emerged that has been reinforcing the repair movement ever since: Tool Libraries.
A Tool Library is exactly what it sounds like: a place to “check out” tools — from ladders and expensive power tools to the basic staples of carpentry, painting, and gardening — just as you would check out books. You access the things you need when you need them — especially those that would be expensive to buy — without cluttering up your home. Unlike tool rental businesses, most Tool Libraries are nonprofit membership organizations (typical annual dues run about fifty dollars a year), and along with the tools, they offer expert advice, workshops, programs for kids, and occasionally parties with live bands. In short, a vibe.
In early 2018, Tessa Vierk, who has a background in culinary arts, decided that Chicago needed a Tool Library. She started by researching existing “tool institutions” for best practices and inspiration. Both Tessa and her cofounder, Jim Benton, are in their thirties and are Midwest natives who moved away for a few years and then came back. They feel fiercely rooted. Their language is threaded with intention:
Tessa: I want to create a space for self-directed learning, self-sufficiency, and resource equity.
Jim: All people should have access to the things they need to thrive.
We wanted to know why their generation has embraced Tool Libraries. “People are looking for ways to ask critical questions about how they’re living their lives,” says Tessa. “They’re thinking about their waste, and existing structures don’t offer a lot of solutions to that. People in our generation are more familiar with the idea of group ownership, and they don’t feel they need to have something all to themselves.” It’s also simply practical. There’s no room in an apartment for tools. Her friends in the city don’t have houses with garages, and “space is money.”
THE “GREAT TOOL LIBRARY SHOUT-OUT”
On the Chicago Tool Library’s Instagram page on five consecutive days, Tessa Vierk profiled the Tool Libraries upon whose shoulders they hoped to sit. Here’s how the feed reads:
Day 1: The Tool Library in Downstate Bloomington, Illinois
Our first Tool Library friends! Check out just 3 of their awesome initiatives among many: When you volunteer to fix bikes, you earn a bike of your own! College students build benches for bus stops! Their “Veggie Oasis” provides free healthy food!
Day 2: “BPL DIY,” the Tool Lending Library at the Berkeley Public Library in California
One of the granddaddy tool institutions, with a tool inventory we dream about — helping people get their hands on tools since 1979. And it’s a real public library! You can check out a tool just as easily as a DVD of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Win!
Day 3: Denver Tool Library
Model missionaries for the tool library gospel because, dang, do they make it look fun! We aren’t totally convinced that anybody can beat their silly vibes, but we’d really love to be wrong. We are inspired by the welcoming, playful space you’ve created — a true community gathering place.
Day 4: HNL Tool Library in Honolulu
Inspired and impressed by their commitment to the tool library as a vehicle for environmental activism and as a stronghold for circular economies. They are great about educating the public about how sharing tools redirects waste and prevents needless consumerism.
Day 5: Baltimore’s Station North Tool Library
Like us, they set out to explore and experience as many tool libraries as possible before deciding on a system best for Baltimore. Unlike us, they did this on a motorcycle trip across the country. We aspire to be that swashbuckling. We are also starry-eyed over their inclusion of textile arts in their tool library. They have a loom, knitting classes and natural dye classes!
Coauthor John visited the Chicago Tool Library in July 2019, a month before they opened their doors, and helped Tessa and Jim build shelves. The Tool Library is located in a renovated industrial building that’s home to a variety of creators and fabricators, lending instant community and neighborly support. Their ground floor space has high ceilings, cement floors, and perhaps best of all, a loading dock. The kick-off party, with tacos, Lagunitas, and music, was the week before Labor Day. By then, Tessa and Jim had attracted a core of volunteer tool geeks, run a crowdfunding campaign to add to their start-up nut, and received donations of more than three hundred tools of all types. All of this was communicated by Tessa in more than a hundred Instagram posts that set a creative and engaging tone. “The amazing thing about Chicago is that there’s a huge artist and fabricator population of a younger generation. I’m confident we’ll grow a network of experts for all the trades and crafts that we can draw on.”
Tessa and Jim want their policies to be welcoming to families with young kids. They consciously designed their logo without tool imagery, so no one would think of this as a you-better-know-what-you’re-doing-when-you-come-in-here kind of place. They want it to be an “Oh, you have a question? Come on in!” kind of place, like a public library. In fact, their dream is to be acquired by the Chicago Public Library. “Chicago is very segregated racially and socioeconomically by neighborhood. We want to make this replicable because we want other neighborhoods in Chicago to have one too,” Tessa says. “Every tool library is a product of the community it calls home.”
Repair in the Classroom
A middle school science teacher I know delights in telling this story about the mechanical advantage of using simple tools: She presented her eighth-grade class with a wooden board with a nail partially driven into it. She then held up a carpenter’s hammer and asked for a volunteer to remove the nail. Hilarity ensued as the student tried to use the “claw” part of the hammer to “unscrew” the nail. The class coached him on how to remove the nail by using the hammer claw as it was intended, as a lever. Similarly, a surprising number of kids have never actually seen a hammer or a screwdriver in use. And so we arrive at a key observation: many young people simply don’t realize that things can be repaired. What they know of the world is that when something breaks, you throw it away and get a new one. Practically speaking, a shift toward sustainability and the circular economy requires an increase in “repair literacy” — people’s basic ability to maintain the things they own. This awareness may build over time, but as a report by the Repair Café Foundation concludes, “the real change will come when the learning of repair skills gets a place in education again.”
In the last few years there has been an outcry in some quarters about the fact that shop class and home economics have all but disappeared from our public high schools. The feeling is that perhaps we’ve lost something of value. It was in 1908 that Ellen H. Richards founded the American Home Economics Association, culturally right in step with the thrift movement. The association reached its peak of influence during the 1950s, with the expectation that women would learn to be housewives and homemakers. In the 1990s, “home ec” became known as “FCS” (family and consumer sciences), and classes teaching “Life Skills” continued to reflect the times.
The concept of sustainability was introduced to these courses in the early 2000s, but in the decade that followed there was a drop of nearly 40 percent in the number of students taking FCS classes. This decrease came with the advent of the Common Core curriculum in public education, when programs that weren’t amenable to test scores — especially those that required a budget for materials — were being reevaluated. High school–level short courses that introduce life skills that children are not learning at home (sometimes called “adulting classes”) are popular in many parts of the country. Topics include cooking and textiles, healthy living, family life, personal money management, and “anything else that touches the home and heart.” But these programs often lose out to computer literacy and STEM classes in the competition for funding.
The story of shop class is different. Beginning in the 1980s, there was a steady decline in high school–level “trade-related” classes due to state funding cuts and the push for more students to enter degree programs. But the picture that Matthew Crawford presented in his 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft, of a public education system providing few opportunities for hands-on learning, has fortunately evolved significantly. There has been a nationwide expansion of vocational high schools and tech schools, offering a wide range of career pathway programs — jobs that pay well and that we all depend on. Training for the renewable energy sector — building wind and solar systems — is also driving these programs. Still, we can acknowledge that when high school students separate into different tracks, they lose the opportunity to learn basic skills along with the classmates they’ve grown up with, as well as the healthy male mentorship that shop class teachers traditionally provided.
In the Netherlands, a curriculum called “Repair in the Classroom” has been developed, with corporate support, for three age levels between six and twelve years old. It is available to anyone in multiple languages through the Repair Café Foundation. The plan provides two prep lessons to be taught by the teacher, after which a “practical” lesson brings repair coaches from the community into the classroom to work with the kids on broken things they’ve brought from home. Volunteer repair coaches are asked to guide the troubleshooting process and encourage curiosity. Imagine kids you know responding to these class discussion questions:
•What happens at home if something breaks?
•Do your parents sometimes repair things?
•If you throw away broken objects, what happens to these things? Where do they go?
•Where do new things come from?
•What is necessary to make all these things?
•Do you think it’s possible for everyone in the whole world to have as many things as you do?
In the United States, public schools can’t often accommodate repair as a classroom activity, but in independent schools, where teachers have the time and latitude to incorporate innovative programs, it is embraced. At the Waldorf School of Saratoga Springs, New York, Michael Whitney is the practical arts teacher. He’s been a carpenter, designer, and artist all his adult life. “I fix things for people so they will tell a story about how somebody fixed it,” he says with a smile. A couple of years ago, he decided to offer “Tinker Week with Mr. Whitney,” a class for his eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-grade students. It was five days of fixing things from the school classrooms and community, to save money for the school and to prove to his kids that you don’t always have to “just buy a new one.”
Mr. Whitney’s idea caught on. “After we presented the hundred or so items the students fixed that week, the twelfth graders, who were not part of this opportunity, came to me and asked if they could do it too. A few minutes later, the idea of ‘the Fix-it Club’ was born.” The club meets after school on Fridays to fix broken items like wooden trains from the kindergarten classrooms and broken seatbacks from the campus lecture hall. Now the club is ongoing and has an eager student following. “I could talk for hours about the fun we’ve had in Fix-it Club.”
Jump to the Culture of Repair Project in Berkeley, California, which collaborates with the Transition Berkeley Repair Café and the Fixit Clinic at the Berkeley Public Library and was instrumental in helping both programs get started. Vita Wells, who founded the Culture of Repair, is from south Texas, “hailing from a long line of fixers and doers.” The fact that she holds degrees from both Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Management will give you an idea of the depth she aspires to: ethics and social structures that will be subversive enough to compete with consumer culture, and seductive enough to revive the fixer and doer mentality she grew up with. Culture of Repair is “working to transform our culture into one that more readily repairs than it purchases,” she writes. “A culture that repairs because that’s just what you do.” Wells is working toward a repair sensibility that is deeply embedded, as cultural values always are.
In 2018, Culture of Repair began collaborating with Agency by Design in Oakland, which has a well-established maker-centered professional development program for teachers with Maker Ed, an organization supporting maker-centered learning across the country. They’ve developed “hands-on learning routines” that focus on three core “maker capacities”: the ability to look closely, explore complexity, and find opportunity. For example, in 2019, Shraddha Soparawala, a math teacher, created a class called “The Art of Repair” at a charter school in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. The student population reflects the demographics of the community: 10 percent are in special education, 70 percent are multilingual learners, and 92 percent receive free and reduced lunch. The kids watched YouTube videos of different kinds of repairs, and Shraddha devised repair projects for them to try. “It is very easy for them to get discouraged and want to move on to a different project,” she says. “I want to gear their experiences so that they are getting more ‘at bats.’ This will build their expertise and their confidence as repairers. In my view, ‘failing forward’ is a critical component of developing a repair mindset.”
These are classroom experiences that excite Vita. “This is just the beginning,” she says. “I’m confident that the combination of the momentum behind Maker education, combined with the imperative and urgent momentum behind addressing environmental issues, will draw repair into mainstream education relatively quickly.”
HOUSTON, WE’VE HAD A PROBLEM
If there is one story about repair that captures the imagination of middle schoolers, it is the story of how the Apollo 13 spacecraft was fixed 248,655 miles from home. In April 1970, as the spacecraft’s command module neared the moon, an oxygen tank exploded, and mission commander Jim Lovell calmly radioed back home: “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” He and fellow astronauts Fred Haise and Jack Swigert were in immediate peril. There was a critical loss of oxygen and electrical power. The decision was made to leave the command module and move into the lunar module as a “lifeboat.” But that craft was designed for only two people.
Maintaining the balance in the “atmosphere” inside a spacecraft is a major design consideration, and the filter that absorbs CO2 is a critical part of that design. The three Apollo 13 astronauts, now crowded inside the lunar module, absolutely needed the additional air filters from the command module. But the filters were not interchangeable; the command module filters were rectangular, while the lunar module filters were circular. With very low power, in a very cold cabin, with oxygen falling and CO2 rising, the astronauts worked with engineers on the ground on the fix: a makeshift adapter fashioned from plastic packaging, an air hose from a spare spacesuit, a tube sock, and yes, you guessed it, duct tape. The repair was actually much more complicated than it sounds, and it worked. For the rest of the seventy-two-hour return flight, all systems held steady, barely. For a long stretch the entire spacecraft was running on about the same amount of electricity as it takes to run a toaster. Apollo 13 did not reach the moon, but the legacy of the flight is told and retold as NASA’s “successful failure.”
This prompts the not-so-trivial question: Why are the jokes about duct tape being able to temporarily fix almost anything…actually true? The secret of duct tape lies in its versatility and tensile strength. Sandwiched between the poly coating and the adhesive layer is a strong layer of cotton mesh, which reinforces the tape in the same way rebar reinforces concrete. Yet because the threads are uniformly horizontal and vertical, duct tape can be easily torn by hand — no tools needed. Duct tape was standard equipment on Apollo space missions beginning with Apollo 11, and it would be called on again for a critical fix to the Lunar Rover on Apollo 17.
When Repair and Design Futures opened in the fall of 2018 at the RISD Museum (part of the Rhode Island School of Design), its purpose was announced as you entered: “This exhibition investigates mending as material intervention, metaphor, and call to action.” The curator, Kate Irvin, says the idea for the exhibition began to take shape when she noticed that students who visited the museum with their classes were most interested in items you might find at the bottom of the collection drawers in most other museums — the neglected, messily mended, or even sweat-stained items. One student told her why: “It allows me in.” Kate intuitively understood their impulse to seek out well-worn, mended, and sometimes humble items. “That’s where the excitement is bubbling up. The ‘back’ is what they want to see. It’s where you might find a clue to the mysterious history of a piece.” Kate sums it up simply: “They recognize a good story.”
At about the same time, Brian Goldberg, who teaches in the RISD Department of Architecture, was becoming interested in how repairs are carried out in everyday life. He was bothered by the way the discipline of architecture tends to repress, or at least downplay, the work of cleaning, maintaining, and repairing. In architecture, Goldberg says, a “build it and move on” mindset often predominates. He and Kate began to consider what an exhibition about repair could encompass.
Kate had recently acquired an example of traditional Japanese boro textiles (boro translates to “tatters” — and boro garments are made from various saved pieces of fabric patched together). Kate says, “I was seeing the design world paying a lot of attention to these mended, broken, and loved garments with deep, deep narratives, and I wanted to understand this fascination. What is this moment?”
Brian continues: “And I thought to myself, this is remarkable. Kate’s actually invested in and highlighting all the conditions that I think of curators as working to repress and hide — the signs of wear and use and mending and affection. The experiences and marks of time.”
Anna Rose Keefe is a twenty-something conservation assistant for the museum. She saw that the exhibition would present a very different kind of interaction with the past. “As conservators we are encouraged to train the visitor’s eye away from the damaged place.” Anna Rose is very aware of that delicate balance — the tension between the goal of making sure something is around for the next century and “meeting the object where it is.” It is heavily context dependent.
One piece in the exhibition is a hunter’s tunic from Mali. The exhibition catalog tells us it was made by Fode Keita, an important hunter and historian/storyteller. “Every time he wore this,” explains Anna Rose, “he believed it made him stronger, because of the supernatural energy of the hunt. It is dyed with a bark used for medicinal purposes.” Keita repaired the tunic himself with materials at hand — including pink plastic to patch a hole. Typically, art conservators would have worked to adhere the pieces to make them stable. But, says Kate, “in this we see the accumulated power in the rawness of the patches, and it’s not our job to interfere with that.”
Lisa Z. Morgan, who teaches apparel design, takes us to see a pair of stockings included in the exhibition: calf-length cotton knit stockings owned by Ann Katherine Kittredge Taylor, a Victorian woman, wife, and mother born in 1834. Lisa speculates that they appear to have been a treasured pair — perhaps Kate’s only pair of like stockings — because of the repairs we see: repeated darning at the toes, with whole patches added on the heels, made over a period of years. “For me,” says Lisa, “what is really beautiful is envisioning it on her legs, because from ankle up it’s going to look quite immaculate, but then, in taking off the shoe or boot, you’re aware of how much work she’s having to do to keep up appearances, of what’s hidden. What we reveal on the surfaces of ourselves, what we present, can be very different from the upset or the discourse and discomfort we might be having to navigate every day.”
Brian looks down at his own well-worn boots. They are not yet part of the museum’s collection, he jokes, although he has promised them as a gift. Brian’s boots are both practical and biographical. As soon as he grew big enough, his father handed down a pair of his own shoes, along with instruction for their regular cleaning and polishing, plus one oddity: his father believed that shoes should be worn only every other day in the belief that they need a day to dry out. As an adult, Brian has continued his father’s habit. He owns two identical pairs of boots, which he alternates and wears nearly everywhere. “I long ago lost track of how many times they’ve been resoled. In use and wear they have recorded and marked time, situations otherwise unnoted and forgotten. Maintaining their utility and purpose has become a covenant.” Brian sees in the work of maintenance and care a respect for what the object has supported or made possible, and he’s also aware of “the energy embedded in its form,” from the cow to the cobbler to the store, “the entire system of production, distribution, and consumption that allowed me to exchange paper money for a pair of boots.”
The future of museums is inside our own homes.
— Nobel prize–winning novelist Orhan Pamuk
Kate walks us across the gallery, showing us three framed scenes made from scraps of cloth in bright reds, yellows, greens, blues, and browns. These are arpilleras — appliqué-style pictures made by Chilean women during the 1970s and 1980s, the era of General Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. The pictures are full of people, and at first look they are not so different from the folk art tourists brought home from Chile before Pinochet. “But look closer,” says Kate, “All three arpilleras document protests by women who carry posters with the faces of missing husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers. They are raising banners of opposition at a prison, at a closed factory, at a TV station taken over by the government.” Kate explains that the authorities paid no attention to this folk art made by poor women and had no clue that each arpillera was a subversive statement or that the pieces were being secreted out of Chile and brought to activist meetings and fundraisers around the world. “That is their beauty and power, and the reason they are here,” says Kate. “This is social repair. This shows the power of the stitch.”
Meanwhile, the Long Island Children’s Museum in Garden City, New York, features an award-winning hands-on exhibit called “Broken? Fix It!” which invites children and adults to “get inside the repair process.” One item in the exhibit is a plastic dinosaur accompanied by a sign that reads: “Plastic toys often break. Glue can bond pieces back together, but adding a dowel makes for a stronger fix. A pencil makes a good dowel.”
A boy learning about repair culture through a repaired plastic dinosaur at the Long Island Children’s Museum.
A Hard-Working Boat
The Clearwater is a 106-foot-long, bluff-bowed, shallow-draft, gaff-rigged, single-masted Hudson River sloop. The keel was laid in South Bristol, Maine, in October 1968, and the Clearwater was launched in May 1969. It was Pete Seeger’s singular vision to build a historic-looking boat so that people could experience the Hudson River, learn about it, and care about it. He’d first seen the sloops in a book published in 1908. This type of sloop evolved from an original Dutch design, specifically for navigation on the Hudson River. Alexander Hamilton wrote the first of his Federalist Papers while taking passage on one. None had survived the advent of steamboats and railroads for moving cargo and passengers on the river between New York City and Troy, and the Clearwater was the first Hudson River sloop to be built in more than a hundred years.
After not quite seven summers of “sailing in the industrial sewer” the river had become, the Clearwater needed its first major restoration. From that point on, the sloop’s captain and crew put into place continuous and rigorous preventative maintenance measures. In 2004, the Clearwater was added to the National Register of Historic Places for its role in “articulating, publicizing and defining the American environmental movement.” Two years later, the foredeck and the rigging were replaced. All of this work was led by Jim Kricker, master shipwright. “A boat like the Clearwater, it’s a hard-working boat. You just have to anticipate at some point, or at several points, much more than routine maintenance during the course of its life. You’re going to have to do major rebuilds on it.”
Starting in 2009, three entire winters were devoted to reconstructing the hull and replacing all the wood below the waterline at the sloop’s home port in Kingston, New York. The work was beautifully documented in the film Restoring the Clearwater, where you hear from the crew and the craftspeople doing the work — some experienced, some apprenticing.
At what point do we recognize that all of this repairing, restoring, and maintaining rises to another level? At what point is it sustaining? Pete Seeger’s Clearwater has long since become a symbol of something much bigger than a sailing ship. “The nucleus is the boat,” says longtime Clearwater member and ship’s captain Steve Schwartz. “My God, the thing is so beautiful, so lovely, that people will do extraordinary things to be connected to it and keep it going.” Over the last fifty years, by virtue of the nonprofit organization Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, thousands of people from all over the world have come to see her, to sail on her, to learn about the river from her, to crew on her, and even to learn from Jim Kricker how to rebuild her. “I have seen many people who started on the crew just as volunteers, who have come up and who I now consider to be master craftsmen, able to carry on the tradition to build and rebuild. Having artifacts and objects in museums is great, but unless you can preserve the skills that went into making those, you’re missing half the picture.” All of these activities are sustaining a way of life: the life of the river and the river towns, and by extension, the life of our world. On the day in 2004 that Clearwater was named to the National Register of Historic Places, Pete Seeger, then eighty-five years old, told a reporter something important about the legacy of a wooden boat that has been sailing for thirty-five years. He may have helped plant the seed to build the boat, Pete said, but “you should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.”
Sacred Space
The city of Kingston, in Ulster County, New York, is one hundred miles north of New York City and sixty miles south of Albany, where the Catskill Mountains meet the Hudson River. It was burned by the British in 1777 and was the first capital of New York State. By 1790, there were about thirty thousand people living in Ulster County. Ten percent were enslaved Africans.
Several currents are now affecting life in this city. After three decades of economic stasis following the closing of IBM’s Kingston campus, people are moving up from New York City, along with developers, and gentrification is underway. Rapid changes in this small city have prompted a discussion about affordable housing and creative forms of collective land ownership. In 2018 the Kingston City Land Bank was established to maintain a range of affordability in the city’s housing stock and to guide the development of neighborhoods. It is in the process of converting thirty-seven properties to affordable housing, with more to come. A tenant’s union has organized, city and county policies are in place to protect the rights of immigrants, and there are questions about who will actually benefit from a multimillion-dollar “uptown” development.
In the midst of these changes, a small private property was in pre-foreclosure proceedings in a neighborhood near the oldest part of the city: an uncared-for stucco house on Pine Street with a nondescript backyard, 70 by 225 feet. Few knew that starting in 1750 or so, this plot without grave markers or tombstones had served as a burial ground for enslaved and freed Blacks. Church burials had been denied to enslaved people in New York since 1697, and instead, “common ground” sites like this one were designated for their use. By the late 1800s, the burial ground on Pine Street was forgotten, the house was built, and there was even a plan to pave the yard for parking. Then in 1990, Ed Ford, the city’s historian, noticed some script on an 1870 map, designating the site as a “coloured burial ground.” Archaeological analysis confirmed it, but the property remained in private hands for nearly thirty years. In 2019 the property was listed at auction, sparking a community-wide effort to reclaim it. Through the efforts of many, including Harambee (a new community organization whose name means “all pull together” in Swahili) and preservation nonprofit Scenic Hudson, the Pine Street African Burial Ground was finally purchased and protected by the Kingston Land Trust. A paid educational program enabled city youth, ages fourteen to eighteen, to learn about and then teach the community about their local history and culture, and to help establish the burial ground as an interpretive site.
The Pine Street land protection effort has been held up by many as a tangible act of repair at the heart of the community’s aspirations for restorative justice. In her book Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition, legal scholar Katherine Franke makes the case for community land trusts as a way to bring “substantial reinvestment in communities that have essentially been abandoned by modern society,” and as one model for reparations. Micah Blumenthal, a community activist involved with all of these efforts, agrees.
Right over there on Pine Street is proof of the people who worked this land, who were forced to work this land — an honest recognition of our history and a way to repair the holes in our collective memory, just as we would for any form of sickness. Can we recognize the history of harm, especially when it’s gone unacknowledged and unrepaired and is still causing harm? We love to talk about freedom as a nation, but freedom and responsibility are intertwined. Maybe we have the responsibility to recognize that harm was done and to say, “What am I going to do about it?”
Micah reflects, “What we move toward is a more even distribution of not only wealth but, more importantly, power. That’s the world I want to see, the world I want to live in.”