The Brooklyn Rail

“Cymbals crash inside the pyramids,” Frank Ocean once warned. If we allow Channel Orange to be read as a text—a practice scholars at some universities have embraced—the epic poem that is “Pyramids” evokes three eras at once. The first is Chephren’s reign (Khafre, 2558 BCE), where his monuments etched Egypt’s power into immortal stone; the second, Cleopatra’s, whose inherited knowledges became commodities seduced by Rome; and the third is a half-moon-lit world beyond our three-dimensional notions of space and time. In Chephren’s Egypt, commerce, technology, and the arts thrived. By Cleopatra’s reign, those civic visions had all but collapsed.

Today, American education feels equally precarious. Many of our nation’s most gilded universities have revealed themselves to be nothing more than well-endowed landlords, refreshing elegant buildings each year for aesthetic advertising, while the minds behind such illustrious facades starve. Our collective consciousness suffers alongside our malnourished humanities and social sciences departments—fields that still struggle to reckon with the vast achievements of Ancient Egypt. What Ocean contemplates in a voice of triumphant sorrow is the will to transcend the destructiveness unleashed upon the very people whose survival depends on culture itself.

John Mayer’s guitar solo circles toward the end of “Pyramids”—ciphers of generational losses, the desire for time regained—Theaster Gates has revisioned in brick and mortar. His latest project, the Land School, represents nine years of patient archaeology: not of ancient ruins but of ancient-future possibilities. After rescuing a former Catholic elementary school on Chicago’’s South Side from its bleak destiny of becoming a law-sanctioned parking lot, Gates has built a 40,000-square-foot cultural center focused on land stewardship—a space where art, wellness, and education function as formal technologies for cultural survival.

Since 2010, Gates has been engaged in systematic institutional archaeology. Through his Rebuild Foundation, each building he acquires becomes a laboratory for testing how knowledge can be embodied on a cellular level. The Land School mirrors Rebuild’s other property, the former Stony Island Arts Bank, also purchased from the state after a lawsuit that followed a piece of the building falling on a pedestrian, prompting demolition preparations. Gates’s aim was to create something beyond capitalism’s ensnaring logic. During a panel discussion focused on displacement with scholar Najha Zigbi-Johnson and architect Sara Zewde, Gates shared his wish not only to fully realize some of the country’s best architecture through restoration, but also the exhaustion he experienced “living in a false body in my hood.” Feverish to “dream another dream into space,” Gates alchemized the abandoned structure into a repository for being. Replete with a ceramic studio, media studies, and the sprawling Kenwood Gardens, the Land School hopes to be a hub for the best-in-class across art practices.

The question is not whether our institutions are failing—that much is evident. The question is what technologies of survival are being invented in their wake. Ancient Egypt’s genius lay not in its monuments but in its embodied systems: the cellular mechanisms of knowledge preservation that outlasted dynasties, ritual practices that bound communities across centuries, and modes of collective meaning-making that survived foreign conquest.

In 2022, when my family house went into foreclosure and I went from Hollywood Hills to homelessness, I wondered how I could transcend despondency. All I could afford to do was the daily practice of meditation, and had I not strengthened my interior life, that question might have urged me toward suicide. But lest we forget, Ancient Egyptians were inventors of interior decor, literally transforming their inner spaces into registers that uplifted life—and the book I was reading at the time of my displacement, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization by Martin Bernal, soothed horrible memories and improved my restless sleep.

Gates, too, was inspired by constructing not only a new model, but new memories. Inspired by temples and churches across Italy and Tokyo, the Land School’s intention was to reflect Gates aim to show “a space that could do nothing but offer beauty.” The medicinal qualities of such a goal are boundless, and have yet to be studied. The inaugural day began with honey extraction, followed by yoga in Kenwood Gardens, community discussions, and surging performances by D-Composed, a Chicago-based chamber collective.

Still, not everyone maintains a dreamy disposition. One attendee expressed reticence about getting too excited, noting that beloved projects like Rebuild’s cafe have a tendency to close. “I want to believe in it,” she said, “but you see things come and go in this neighborhood. There was this really good bar where we all used to meet—community meetings, birthday parties, everything. Then one day it just closed down.” Her caution reflects not cynicism but the accumulated wisdom of someone who has witnessed repeated cycles of hope and abandonment. Yet she continues to participate, drawn by something different in Gates’s approach. “But, shit, maybe that changes things.”

Others, drunk on beer and fun, wore glasses that could only see joy. Two men, strolling out in basketball jerseys and cargo jeans, were full of glitter-eyed revelry. Sharing stories before the Uber, the fun they had was written on their faces. “You know, we went to this school. Yeah, I came to this school in 1972, yeah, in second grade. Yeah, me and him have been friends since… It’s a wonderful thing what they did here. I mean damn, they’re getting it in now!”

The Land School emerges from what we might call Indigenous futurism—the application of ancestral knowledge to modern modes of survival. It recalls the Egyptian goddess of Ma’at, the principle of cosmic balance requiring harmony between divine order and social practice. Gates, speaking in the measured cadence of someone who has learned to navigate institutional power while remaining accountable to the community, sometimes veers off into eulogies. One of the most celebrated artists, architects, and professors in the world, one wonders if his greatest success is in the currency of hope he lends.

In Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids,” cymbals crash as ciphers of history rise and fall, marking transitions between worlds. At the Land School, sitting in the front yard preserved from the building’s debut, hangs a bell salvaged from the adjacent church, demolished long ago; it once rang on a regular schedule, not always signaling class, though the metaphor endures. When it rang again on opening day, calling a community back to learn, the gong seemed to declare that survival is the ultimate curriculum.