Pictured: Samuel Love (middle) pictured with Indiana State Rep Regan Hatcher, Kym Mazelle (the 1st Lady of House Music) and Gary Mayor Jerome Prince
Samuel Love, a fourth-generation Gary resident, is a social and civic practice artist, writer, filmmaker, editor, and community organizer. His goal is fairly simple, but deeply personal – chronicle the history of his community through the eyes of the people living in it and encourage others to do the same.
History and the arts have both long been interests of Love’s – he earned a degree in history from Indiana University Northwest in 1999. However, the idea of turning those interests local formed in a somewhat surprising setting before he got his degree.
“In January of 1993, the first week of that year, I joined a garage rock band on Pettibone Street in Crown point,” Love said. “It was there and then that this idea of storytelling and putting art in the public as a do-it-yourself kind of thing really began. I was 15, and that’s when I made the jump from being a consumer of culture to being a producer of it.”
Playing in that band galvanized his desire to make a difference in his community.
“This practice, social and civil practice, bringing people together, getting them to contribute in creative ways, having people have a stake in it, all of that started from being in a band,” Love said. “It’s also about supporting other people, and ‘The Gary Anthology’ is an example of that.”
Love’s most recent large-scale project was a book called “The Gary Anthology.” It is a collection of nonfiction stories, essays, and poems from 35 local contributors edited by Love, meant to illustrate the history, life, and love of a city too often “written off as dead, or at best dying, by most commentators,” as Love wrote in the book’s introduction.
“I’ve known since I was a little kid how fascinating Gary was as a small city,” he said. “Recently, I’d noticed that writing coming from the outside about Gary was either stressing the negative, or overemphasizing the positive separated from the reality. What I strove to do with the book was to showcase the city’s complexity, and I think it feels like the Gary I’ve seen over my whole life.”
He is also working with a Gary photographer and videographer, Raymar Brunson, to create “Calumet: The Region’s River,” a documentary exploring the Calumet river system. These projects, among others, earned him a number of fellowships and grants. He is a 2019/2020 Indiana Arts Commission On-Ramp fellow, a 2019 Community Revitalization fellow with the Center for Community Progress, and was awarded IAC’s 2019/2020 Individual Advancement Program grant.
“Life is complex, and when we do history, we have a tendency to reduce that complexity and make things simple,” Love said. “It’s good to document what happened so that, hopefully, the next generation gets an accurate representation of history that they didn’t live through.”
“The Gary Anthology” is available online at https://beltpublishing.com/, and you can find more of Love’s work on www.ourgarystories.com.