Esperanza Spalding Has Long Dreamed of Creating a Sanctuary for Artists of Color in Her Hometown of Portland. She Needs the Public’s Help to Make It Come True.

Esperanza Spalding wants to come home.

Technically, she’s already been home for over a year. Last February, the Portland-born jazz-soul musician returned to Oregon from Massachusetts, where she teaches a course on music therapy at Harvard, to curate an artist retreat in a secluded area of Wasco County. A month later, the pandemic hit and she ended up staying—her noisy upstairs neighbors back in Boston made the move easy.

But after 20 years of bouncing between coasts, Spalding, 36, is looking to put down roots in the city that raised her.

That doesn’t mean just owning a house, although she is interested in buying some property—specifically, a three-quarter-acre parcel with farmhouse in St. Johns, which she plans to convert into a private sanctuary exclusively for artists of color.

It’s a dream she’s had since she was a child, and has been saving money for since graduating college. The plot of land she came across on Zillow looked strikingly like what she envisioned in her head all those years.

The only problem? Even being a successful, Grammy-winning Ivy League professor apparently doesn’t qualify you for a loan.

And so, after five months of getting turned down by banks and credit unions, she was finally convinced to go the crowdfunding route. Three weeks ago, Spalding launched a GoFundMe campaign in hopes of raising $300,000 to cover the other half of the down payment. It’s something of a last-ditch effort—if she can’t hit that goal by June 3, the owners are putting the property back on the market.

But, as Spalding explains to WW, now that she’s spoken her dream out loud, she’s going to make it happen, one way or another.

WW: You’ve been saving money to create this sanctuary since college. Where did the idea originate?

Esperanza Spalding: Well, in this recent chapter of my life, it was from experiencing a residency on really beautiful land, surrounded by artists who are super plugged in to their devotion. We had unstructured times to just encounter each as we were involved in our own projects, and that really opened up this understanding in me about how profoundly restorative it is to share space with other creatives when there isn’t an agenda and when we’re held by the land. But my mother reminded me recently that when I was a kid, and she was a single mom doing all these things, we had this vision of having, like, a boarding house. What I’m doing is not a boarding house, but it had already been percolating in our shared dream, of this space that people could come stay and be in a community and bond.

How did you end up finding this particular property?

I’ve had a recurring dream about some place that kind of looked like a school or like a church. It was brick, it had big cement spaces inside, and it’s like this kind of station where artists would stay for a couple of days as they were maybe on the road or traveling from here to there. So, periodically I’m searching for churches or schools for sale, and then—you know how the real estate wormhole works—you somehow end up on Zillow. I saw this property’s photos, and I was like, “That looks weird.” I saw it was three quarters of an acre, and I saw the price, and I was like, “OK, something must be wrong.” And then I started learning why it was in my price range for all that space. It’s not insurmountable, but it’s basically going to be a rebuild from the bottom to the top.

Why is it important for artists of color to have a space like this?

I’m curating this for artists that I know, and will meet surely along the way, who, like me, have had some really demeaning challenges entering spaces that are not curated by people of color. Being an artist of color in a space that is predominantly European or predominantly European American, many times I feel tokenized and on display. In a moment where the world is reeling with the reckoning of how deeply embedded racism is in arts institutions—and in so many institutions—there’s this kind of urgency to want to show up and resolve things. And in the last year, sometimes it felt like I was being brought into a space to fill this weird role of a representative or an emblem of some sort of progress being made or sought. I know we need these spaces where there’s no ask. We can just go be creators, and not feel like anyone’s going to ask us a question about race relations when we’re really just trying to work on this painting.

You plan to build a basement recording studio, so is the space going to serve that purpose for you personally?

Hell, yes! Most artists have a studio that they work out of, and I don’t because I’ve been moving so much. I don’t live anywhere right now. I’m just here and there and there and here and there. I feel a type of way about buying property in the United States, because this is all unceded Native territory. So I don’t know yet how to respond to that comprehensively as a grown-up with the privilege of buying power. But I know, as a starting space for me to be able to step into that practice of having a long-term home, I’d at least want it to be a restorative space for others.

Why are you going the crowdfunding route?

I ran into the same shit anybody who doesn’t have a massive savings or credit runs into: I couldn’t get a loan. It didn’t matter that I’m known, or that I teach at Harvard, or that I have half the down payment in my savings account. I tried three different credit unions and another bank and another bank, and something would go wrong. “Oh, actually we can’t mortgage this because of the condition of the house and we don’t do renovations.” Or, “You’re not eligible because you don’t have any credit.” We started working on this in the middle of January, and the sellers just kept giving us extensions because they really believe in the vision. But we all live in an economy, and it got to that point where they’re like, “OK, we love you. But this is the last extension.” Then my cousin was like, “Have you tried asking the community for help?” And I was like, “It’s the pandemic, I don’t want to ask people to give me money for this.” And he was like, “But you know people want this and need this. Give the community a chance to help you.”

How will you know if the project is a success?

I already know the practice of sanctuary curating is successful because I’ve been seeing it happen over the years. If everything falls through, and I’m not able to get this property, I feel that now enough people know that this is a thing I’m committed to, and if it’s not this place, which I really hope it is, something else is going to come up. I’m going to be figuring out ways to do it however I can. But it would be really nice to have that home.

GIVE: To donate, go to gofundme.com/f/esperanzas-bipoc-artist-sanctuary-in-portland.