Field Notes from Gentrified Places

2014 Column Contest Winner

Vinson Cunningham has always been fascinated by America’s signature brand of whiteness: a weird, haphazard collage made pretty by a series of artful, often barely perceptible thefts from black people. Call it flattery, call it appropriation, call it inevitable—things, and places, are always changing hands. Field Notes from Gentrified Places is the record of Cunningham’s visits to the sites of these transfers—geographical, cultural, and otherwise.