Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank will take the park gazebo where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by police in 2014, local media in Cleveland, Ohio reports.
The news came after a Cleveland City Council meeting at which Councilman Matt Zone said the gazebo’s ownership will soon be transferred from the city to the Tamir Rice Foundation, and will within six months move to Chicago, Illinois, to be displayed at Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank.
It is unclear whether Stony Island will install the gazebo permanently or for a temporary exhibition. Gates’s Rebuild Foundation, which runs Stony Island, declined to comment at this time.
Rice was shot by police offers responding to a 911 call that described the boy pointing a gun at pedestrians at the Cudell Recreation Center, though the caller said the gun was “probably fake”. It was in fact a toy. Rice’s family sued Cleveland for the wrongful death and settled earlier this year for $6m.
The gazebo’s fate has been in limbo after the shooting. The city planned to demolish the structure earlier this year, and the victim's family supported the decision to remove a grim reminder of the event, with the hope that a memorial to Rice be built in its place. This was delayed in May, when a miscommunication led to incorrect reports that the Smithsonian's soon-to-open National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, was interested in preserving it.
