SSW 05.27.15

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. Started as a student paper at the University of Chicago, the South Side Weekly is now an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side, and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Editor-in-Chief Osita Nwanevu Executive Editor Bess Cohen Managing Editors Jake Bittle, Olivia Stovicek Politics Editors Christian Belanger, Rachel Schastok Education Editor Mari Cohen Music Editor Maha Ahmed Stage & Screen Lucia Ahrensdorf Editor Visual Arts Editors Lauren Gurley, Robert Sorrell Editors-at-Large John Gamino, Bea Malsky,

Meaghan Murphy, Hannah Nyhart Contributing Editors Julia Aizuss, Austin Brown,

Sarah Claypoole, Emeline Posner, Hafsa Razi Social Media Editor Emily Lipstein Web Editor Andrew Koski Visuals Editor Ellie Mejia Layout Editors Adam Thorp, Baci Weiler Senior Writers: Patrick Leow, Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers: Olivia Adams, Max Bloom, Amelia Dmowska, Mark Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja, Jeanne Lieberman, Zoe Makoul, Olivia Myszkowski, Jamison Pfeifer, Kari Wei Staff Photographers: Camden Bauchner, Juliet Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji, Luke White Staff Illustrators: Jean Cochrane, Lexi Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu Editorial Intern Clyde Schwab Journalist-in-Residence Yana Kunichoff Webmaster

Shuwen Qian

Business Manager Harry Backlund Executive Producer, Maira Khwaja South Side Weekly Radio The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 1212 E. 59th Street Ida Noyes Hall #030 Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly

IN CHICAGO A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes and wandering eyes of the editors

Robot Revolution at MSI The future is near. The future is now. The future is...in Chicago for the next few months. This past week, a set of dudes in suits wearing unnervingly robotic mouthpiece microphones unveiled a set of exhibits at the Museum of Science and Industry designed to showcase the cutting edge of robotics technology and speculate about the future of robot-human interactions. Among these exhibits is a full-scale robot soccer match, as well a—no, this is not a joke—a kid-friendly (and unfortunately named) interactive space called the “Drone Zone.” A robot named Baxter cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony. God help us all.

CPS Messes Up Documents obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times have revealed that Chicago Public Schools forgot twenty-two schools in its estimate of a private contract with Aramark to manage school janitors. The forgotten twenty-two buildings account for 3.2 million square feet, with the largest being King College Prep in Bronzeville. Though the private contract was expected to save the district $40 million over three years, the mistake cost CPS $7 million, an amount that CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey says would have been spent anyway had

the estimate been correct. This comes to light after a string of allegations—supported by some pretty gross photos that the Weekly has spared you—that Aramark has failed to keep schools clean anyway, as parents and teachers report everything from insufficient janitorial supplies to vermin, found dead and alive.

Home Sweet Shipping Container Home is where the heart is—and who says your heart can’t live in a giant steel box? Adrian Gutierrez, land developer and owner of Mighty Containers, is proposing a plan to convert shipping containers into homes and place them on vacant lots in Englewood.

Turning these containers into residences can be a productive way to repurpose neglected shipping containers, which often sit unused after being emptied. According to Gutierrez, these shipping container homes would be cheap and ecofriendly. Two 8-by-40-foot containers would combine to form each 640-square-foot home, with two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen—enough to house a single family. The downside? Some worry that these homes may be easy to break into, especially since they will still resemble actual shipping containers on the outside.

IN THIS ISSUE out of their league

if it bleeds it leads

As with many of the kids there, contact with the police in a friendly context was a new experience. will cabaniss...4

To cover only a neighborhood’s crime is to say, subtly but repeatedly, that bad things happen to bad people.

it takes a city

what’s in store

“We want to debunk the myth that it’s hard for a small business owner to get capital.” emeline posner...7

bea malsky...9 “We just don’t have an abundance of that type of business ready to go.” mari cohen...11

the only information i have is as follows

On the record Walt Garcia is no more than one violent crime and six instances of recidivism. willekes cronin...16 love after death

A review of Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir about the connections between love and grief eleonora edreva...17

Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

Cover photo by Juliet Elred.

MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Policemen coach youth baseball in Englewood

Out of Their League?

BY WILL CABANISS

O

n the fourth day of practice for a new Little League taking root in Englewood this spring, the grass in Hamilton Park was finally mowed. The five clay diamonds were raked and crisp white foul lines drawn in chalk, just in time to be trampled by the flood of children exiting the park’s field house.

“How many of you have been stopped by the police?” Marco Johnson asked the group of kids surrounding him as he stood on second base. Most hands went up. The light was fading fast, and this was Johnson’s final speech of the day. After nearly two hours of practice, the kids were tired and ready to go home. Someone in the back questioned why he was asking, then doubted his credentials. “You ain’t the police!” After nearly thirty years as a cop, Johnson retired a few years ago. From the experience he’s gained mentoring kids since then, he knew exactly how to respond.

He swiftly pulled out his badge, which flashed in the light of the setting sun. “How much you wanna bet?” he dared. No one replied.

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

Marco Johnson, a retired police officer, shows off his badge

The new league’s organizers have somewhat miraculously signed up more than one hundred enthusiastic children to play baseball in a neighborhood where basketball and football reign supreme. The league, however, is neither the work of upstart parents nor

photos by finn jubak

the natural result of kids getting interested in baseball on their own.

Instead, it’s part of an experiment that the Chicago Police Department is participating in: community engagement through baseball. Through a partnership with Team-

BASEBALL

work Englewood, a community center on 63rd and Halsted, and Get IN Chicago, a nonprofit incubator launched by the mayor’s office to pursue “sustainable reductions in violence for individuals and communities,” the program enlists active and retired CPD officers to coach the Little League teams.

Johnson talks a lot about the importance of authority, whether it comes from a parent, a teacher, or an officer. He went over how to answer an officer’s questions during a police stop, implying that truthful answers are all it takes to get off scot-free. “You’ve got the lead police officer in this area standing right here with you,” Johnson said, ges-

turing to Larry Watson, Englewood’s District Commander. “I’m sure he’s not gonna let his men treat you wrong.”

“T

his, on defense, is your heart and soul,” said another one of the coaches. “This is a baseball glove.” Most of the kids participating in the league had never played the sport before, so the officers had to start with the basics.

Baseball’s reputation as the quintessential American sport has never been more in question, and in Englewood the sport commands just a fraction of the social and cultural value it did when Johnson was grow-

ing up. Declining numbers of black Major Leaguers may have something to do with it, as the absence of black superstars like Hank Aaron has made it harder for Englewood’s children to see a reflection of themselves at baseball’s highest level. The sport’s status on the South Side was elevated slightly this past year with the rise (and eventual fall) of the Jackie Robinson West team that captured the attention of the country before reports of district gerrymandering surfaced.

“It does a lot to see someone who looks like you, who’s your age, on TV giving interviews and stuff,” Watson said.

The current state of the sport is a far cry from what it was during Watson’s childhood, which he spent watching the Cubs, playing baseball, and idolizing Ernie Banks.

He’s a product of Kershaw, an elementary school about ten blocks north of where he now crouched in the park’s grass, running after wiffle balls in full uniform.

Many of the coaches that day were Watson’s officers. “A lot of these guys work overnights,” he said. “But they’re taking their free time to come here and work with the kids.” Watson’s hope is that officers will eventually be able to “walk down the street and say, ‘hey, I know him and him and her.’”

The goal is to build community, but whether the police fall within the bounds of the Englewood community is unclear.

“P

olice officers help keep me safe,” the first statement on the survey read. A ten-year-old girl looked

over the boxes that followed and wrote a checkmark in the box labeled “Strongly Agree.” I was sitting in the back of the field house’s auditorium with her at the program’s orientation the week before. Like around half of the league’s players, she lives in Englewood and goes to school close by.

We listened as Glen Brooks, the CPD’s coordinator on the South Side, spoke about the program. “Be safe, and have fun,” he said at the end of his speech. She said she had never played baseball, but that she was excited. The reason she signed up? “Mostly, my mom wanted to get photos of me in my baseball stuff.”

The survey is part of the performance-based evaluation that Get IN Chicago is conducting on the program, examining exactly what kids think about the police. “In Englewood, things happen,” she said after I asked her more about her experience with law enforcement. She says she was taught to call 911 after her first birthday and that she saw a car blow up on her block at the age of four. Does she ever talk about the police with her parents or friends? Not really, she says. As with many of the kids there, contact with the police in a friendly context was a new experience.

“We’re trying to change the dialogue that surrounds police involvement with the community,” said Crystal Jackson of Get IN Chicago, the organization providing funding for the program. The point is essentially to encourage the kids, as well as the officers, to redefine the boundaries of their respective MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

BASEBALL

communities in the hopes that the personal connections created on the field, with what Watson calls “positive contact,” translate to the streets of the neighborhood.

“It isn’t just the police here,” Brooks said. “This is the community coming together, and the police are part of the community.” The Police Department has long attempted to place officers firmly within the bounds of what Chicagoans consider their communities. The Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy, or CAPS, was revolutionary in its emphasis on cooperation when it was introduced in 1993. Allowing civilians to attend police meetings and contribute to the safety of their communities, CAPS was hailed as a minor revolution in the field of crime reduction.

“No matter what you hear on TV, we’re your friends,” Johnson pleaded with the thirty kids that surrounded him, taking a break from his old school, tough-love coaching style. “Without us, you guys can’t come over here and play in the park without worrying about somebody jumping on you.”

Noticeably absent from this portrayal of police officers as protective, paternal figures, however, is an acknowledgement that the opinions of many on the South Side are shaped by the very real experiences of stops, arrests, and shootings. Kids in Englewood experience the police largely in a negative context: a review of the CPD’s contact card database earlier this year found that black people in Chicago are the subject of around seventy-two percent of all stop-and-frisks despite only making up thirty-two percent of the city’s population. Two of Chicago’s

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

three police-involved shootings in the first quarter of this year took place in Englewood. Johnson’s admission that “there are some bad cops” fails to acknowledge these disproportions.

As the league wrestles with the question of how to frame police involvement in Englewood, it will ultimately be the task of each child to reconcile promises of protection from their coaches with their personal experiences of policing and with depictions of law enforcement in the news media.

The league may turn out to be nothing more than a photo opportunity for the Police Department’s press office, or simply another community engagement program that the aldermen who speak at the league’s opening day June 24 can take credit for. But another measure of success, the league’s organizers say, will be a second survey conducted at the end of the summer, likely asking the kids similar questions about their confidence in Englewood’s law enforcement. A positive result would lead the program to much acclaim and more funding.

The first practices of the Little League felt like reclamation—the chance to take ownership of the five underused fields in Hamilton Park, and an opportunity to repossess the sport of baseball, so much a part of black Chicago’s history. It may take far longer for Englewood’s residents to reclaim that same sense of ownership and trust in their law enforcement, to feel as if the police officers who moonlight as baseball coaches are truly a part of their community. After all, the season is only a few months long.

It Takes a City

B

BY EMELINE POSNER

ad things seem to come in twos for 5 Loaves, a beloved Chatham eatery. Since its opening in 2004, fire has twice damaged the restaurant’s interior (there was nearly a third fire earlier this month when an adjacent property caught fire), and twice has the property’s copper electrical wiring been stolen.

As far as unforeseeable disasters go, fires may as well be a restaurant’s rite of passage, and wire robberies are similarly commonplace; Slate has dubbed our time the “Golden Era of Copper Theft.” But for a small, family-owned and -run business like 5 Loaves, closing for as little as a week is devastating, said Constance Simms-Kincaid, the eatery’s proprietor. “Hundreds of dollars of food go to waste, and we lose touch with our regular customers. And we spend the time closed without income.”

She found herself in what seemed to be an inescapable debt cycle: there was little that could be done to prevent the thefts–– the wiring, off property, was uninsurable, but overwhelmingly expensive to replace. She was hesitant take a loan to cover the losses because of an already low credit score.

After the second wire theft, in late February, 5 Loaves decided to keep the restaurant open to distribute its remaining food for free. There was no power, and Simms-Kincaid said that it felt as cold inside as it did out, but many Chatham resi-

BUSINESS

ellie mejia

Why Chicago’s small business initiatives matter

dents showed up. One man, a regular, sat inside with them for the entire day. Tears came to Simms-Kincaid’s eyes as she remembered his support and the generosity of a woman who brought over a check for $1,000 to go toward repairs. Stephanie Hart, owner of the nearby Brown Sugar Bakery, offered 5 Loaves money from her own register.

These gestures helped to keep the restaurant open, but they were short-term fixes. Now, Simms-Kincaid says, they’re working on the long-term. She recently joined the Chatham Business Association’s Business Builders program, which offers resources and loan assistance for small businesses. Simms-Kincaid also recently started looking into taking a credit-building loan, a kind of micro-loan designed to help small businesses boost credit scores.

Some might hesitate to call 5 Loaves lucky after the trials of the last several years.

But Simms-Kincaid stresses how lucky she is to serve a community as close-knit and supportive as Chatham. What’s more, the eatery has avoided the fate of other small businesses in similar financial straits, many

of which have fallen victim to predatory lending.

5 Loaves, caught in a tight spot with low credit, would have been an easy target for a predatory, or alternative, lender. The business-to-business loan market has been likened to that of payday loans; with misleading rates, APRs (annual percentage rates) nearing 100 percent, and hidden fees, these unregulated lenders pose a serious threat to small business owners in Chicago and across the country. But despite the loan market’s gradual recovery, predatory loans are only becoming more pervasive.

Chicago’s one-of-a-kind microlending institute and network of business associations, however, continue to develop in response to these loans and to offer a more comprehensive support system for small businesses on the whole.

T

he commercial loan market has not recovered equally across the board in the years following the 2008 recession. Though loans greater than $1 million now stand twenty-four percent above

pre-recession levels, loans of $1 million or less still lag seventeen percent below the pre-recession peak. Nationwide, independent banks have decreased in number by fourteen percent. This has left a substantial gap in the loan market in precisely the range most suitable for small and new businesses––between ten and one hundred thousand dollars.

Filling this small loan gap are business-to-business lenders that engage in merchant cash advancing. Unregulated, web-based, and requiring no minimum credit score, these lenders may appear convenient to the small business owner who urgently needs money but doesn’t have the time or credit to apply for a traditional bank loan. But the deceptively high interest rates of these loans often lead small businesses into bankruptcy.

“Business-to-business lenders are not uniformly bad,” said Mary Fran Riley, Vice President of External Affairs of Accion Chicago, a microfinancing nonprofit. “But most aren’t interested in best serving the business––they’re interested in making a profit.”

It can be difficult to tell the “good actors” from the bad. Community Development Financial Institutions and corporations such as Paypal and Square, which have recently stepped into the microlending market, generally underwrite loan packages MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

BUSINESS responsibly and offer APRs of thirty-five percent or less, and sometimes as low as seven percent. But “bad actors” bury hidden fees in loan packages and fine businesses not just for paying back a loan later than its due date, but for paying early, too.

But it wasn’t just predatory lenders who recognized a need for small loans after the recession; Accion Chicago, a nonprofit that provides counseling and microfinancing services for small businesses, did too. Accion had been active in Chicago since 1994, but in 2008 began to expand its microfinancing services before recognizing that there was a limit to how quickly it could grow as an organization.

Accion worked closely with Mayor Emanuel and the city of Chicago to create the Chicago Microlending Institute (CMI), which began operations in 2011. Combining a $1 million investment from the city with Accion’s successful microlending model, the CMI was touted as a one-of-its-kind institute. Its aim was not only to provide capital for small businesses, but also to train other Chicago-based institutions to make microloans and offer financial counseling themselves. “[Microlending] is a very tough business in itself,” Riley said. “People were assuming microlending didn’t work because organizations were taking on large loans without the strong underwriting practice necessary and going under themselves.”

With a training system and revolving credit fund in place, the members of the microlending institute proved that microlending doesn’t just work––it helps grow local business. In its first two years of operations, the CMI loaned $1.1 million through 126 microloans and created 240 jobs across Chicago.

Between the five organizations currently accredited by the CMI (Women’s Business Development Center, Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, Accion, the Duman Entrepreneurship Center, and the North Side Federal Community Credit Union), and other microlenders accredited by the national Small Business Association, the network of microlenders in Chicago offers a variety of services, including microloans, financial and technical assistance, and credit-building loans.

Despite the program’s continuing success, microlending organizations still meet with clients who have been recent victims of predatory lending. According to Erica L. King, Vice President of the Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives Micro Finance Group, there is still little awareness of the strength of the microlending program or about the 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

danger of predatory lending among small business owners in Chicago. “Business owners often assume that if they can’t go to a bank, [an online C2C loan] is the best offer they’ll find. They don’t think to turn to anyone for guidance.”

“But,” she added, “we want to debunk the myth that it’s hard for a small business owner to get capital.”

M

any of Chicago’s longstanding business associations have expanded in capacity and objective since the creation of the microlending institute. The Chatham Business Association (CBA), a community resource since 1972, has begun to offer microlending assistance within the last couple of years. Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives, too, has been around for a decade, originally going by the name Pullman Neighborhood Initiatives; only in 2010 did it change its range to “Chicago,” becoming a core CMI member

Before anything else, King said, a loan officer sits down with the client to make sure that a loan is in their best interest.

“Sometimes we find that the business just needs to do a little bit of internal restructuring to reach financial stability. And we don’t just look at the business’s credit score. We listen to their story, because we understand that divorces and other such things happen.”

Though the standard minimum credit score for bank loans is between 660 and 680, King says that 660 is about the highest credit score any of their clients have. “We have a client who has a credit score of 474 right now, and we’re making it work.”

The CNI’s average loan is between ten and twelve thousand dollars. Since 2012, the CNI has given 146 loans, totaling $590,000.

As a direct result of these loans, 194 jobs have been either created or retained, and a net $2.7 million has been directed to the businesses’ communities.

Now, 5 Loaves is looking into applying

The business-to-business loan market has been likened to that of payday loans; with misleading rates, APRs nearing 100 percent, and hidden fees, these unregulated lenders pose a serious threat to small business owners in Chicago and across the country. in 2012. Today, these groups and others are working harder than ever to help business owners become self-sufficient and aware of all of the resources available to them.

The CBA has been an indispensable resource, Simms-Kincaid said. It was through the CBA’s technical assistance that 5 Loaves developed its online and social media presence, which in turn helped to build up its customer base. And during a period of financial troubles, it was the CBA that authorized Mae Whiteside of CKL Engineers LLC to pay forward on a loan to 5 Loaves–– in other words, authorized CKL to make a loan repayment directly to 5 Loaves.

Part of what sets the microlenders apart from the larger banks is this flexibility, as well as an interest in sustainability and community development. “We’re really not just a transactional lender, we’re not a bank. We’re mission driven, ” King said of the CNI. “We certainly don’t make any money doing what we do.”

for a credit-building loan with the guidance of the CBA. Taking this loan, which can be anywhere between $500 and $2,500, would not only raise their credit score, but would likely allow them to take a larger loan out upon payment of the first. Simms-Kincaid hasn’t yet decided whether or not it’s the right fit for her business, but she does know that 5 Loaves has the support of the CBA behind it.

There are resources other than microlenders available for small businesses in Chicago, and the city has been working to expand these resources, as well as increase awareness of them. On May 19th, BLUE1647 Englewood (a new partnership between the business incubator BLUE1647 and the Greater Englewood Community Development Center) hosted a Startup Boot Camp, the first of a series organized by the city of Chicago’s Small Business Center. The event featured a financial workshop by Accion, networking opportunities, a

presentation by Google on the importance of connecting online with consumers, and speeches from 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran and Mayor Emanuel at the end of the day.

Small business resources, old and new, were the main topic of discussion. Emanuel spoke of how, in order to simplify the business licensing process, he has cut the number of business licenses down from one hundred and fifty––more than the business licenses in six other states combined, he joked––to fifty. Angie Hall of the Law Project, a nonprofit organization that offers free legal consultation for business owners, also spoke. “As business owners, not only do you need access to capital, but you need access to legal services,” she said.

Mayor Emanuel announced that the Small Business Center would be the first city department to go paperless. Going paperless, he said, means that the department will effectively be open and accepting file submissions twenty-four hours a day. “We want you with your customers,” Mayor Emanuel said, “We don’t want you at City Hall.”

Predatory lending was not discussed much at the Boot Camp itself, but the city has been proactive about raising awareness.

In January, the city announced a campaign to put up ads on the CTA and on the city website, advising business owners to call 311 or to go to the nearest Capital Access Center to seek advice before taking a loan.

Mayor Emanuel earlier this year also called on state officials to create regulations for business-to-business lenders. Riley of Accion said that there is currently a nationwide call for a Small Business Borrowers’ Bill of Rights that would resemble a “good seal of approval type of thing.” Such a bill, she said, would require regulations and transparency standards for business-to-business products such as merchant cash advances and online predatory loans.

It may be some time before regulatory legislation is passed, if only because few cities have begun to take action against the threat to small businesses posed by predatory loans and because nationwide concern has only just begun to increase. As a result, most think that predatory lending is likely to become a greater threat before it is resolved.

But through the strength of the CMI, the small business network in Chicago, and the initiative to educate business owners about the dangers of predatory lenders, 5 Loaves and many more small businesses across the city will hopefully keep their doors open long enough to see that happen.

REPORTING

If It Bleeds, It Leads Chicago has seen 146 murders so far this year.

What would it mean to cover them responsibly?

BY BEA MALSKY

O

ne of DNAinfo’s first projects was also one of its most ambitious: a timeline of every murder within city limits. When the hyperlocal website launched its Chicago branch in late 2012, they hoped to raise the standards of local crime reporting. “The idea is to do oldschool reporting in a new medium,” the Reader reported. “Knocking on doors. Shoe leather.”

Darryl Holliday, who is on the Weekly’s Board of Directors, was one of about five reporters working the homicide beat in the outlet’s first years. They refined a routine: each shift would have someone in the office, listening to the police scanner in one ear and the fire department scanner in the other, and a second reporter out as the runner.

The runner would drive over when the scanner reported a shooting or other violent crime, often arriving within twenty minutes of its first mention and finding a body in the street. The office reporter would call the Chicago Police Department to confirm details while the runner would take pictures and try to talk to those present. “Witnesses are hard to come by,” says Holliday, “but people always tell you how many shots they heard. They’re usually wrong.” The runner would follow up with family and neighbors over the next few days. Shifts would often last eight hours or more.

DNAinfo’s murder timeline raised the bar for crime reporting in Chicago, but also raises some fundamental questions: Why should we tell isolated stories about violent crime? Do reports of shootings serve impoverished neighborhoods or illuminate institutional violence? What, to put it simply, is crime reporting for?

Sitting outside a Logan Square coffee shop this month, Holliday reflects on his years doing this kind of reporting full-time.

“In the beginning it was really hard. I used to have nightmares all the time. There really isn’t anything that can prepare you.” He

grows more solemn, pausing.

“Two years ago, if we were having this conversation, I’d probably end up at a point where I was just screaming with frustration,” he says. Holliday describes a disquiet and rage without object, the psychological wear and tear of a job that brought him in contact with people on the worst days of their lives—a job that meant asking grieving parents for comment over the bodies of their dead children, repeated exposure to the city’s darkest manifestations of system failure.

Holliday himself has wavered on how crime should be reported. “Over the three years we were really doing it seriously, I think there was a response in the media.

There was more coverage,” he says. “But the funny thing is, I’ve come to think the opposite: maybe it’s not worth it to cover every single shooting, every single death.”

D

NAinfo brings more time and compassion than most to the daily crime report. Chicago’s largest newspapers, the Sun-Times and the Tribune, rely heavily on CPD press releases and statements to write up their regular coverage.

Doing original reporting on crime is tough; in an area where there’s just been a shooting, those closest to the trauma aren’t necessarily eager to talk to the press. When they’re written mainly from a CPD report, the standard tales of violence have recurring characters—the gangbanger, the grieving mother, the innocent child—with often-unsaid markers of race and class.

The narrative seduction of violence is no secret; “if it bleeds it leads” is as much an editorial truism as “sex sells.” Crime reporting can pathologize black and brown communities in Chicago’s poorer, disenfranchised areas, the same areas that have seen a retraction of resources in the past decades— with closed public housing facilities, mental

ellie mejia and Zelda Galewsky

health clinics, and public schools among the most visible. Impoverished neighborhoods receive impoverished coverage, cultivating an awareness not of suffering but of danger.

To cover only a neighborhood’s crime is to say, subtly but repeatedly, that bad things happen to bad people.

“In most crime coverage, you’ll see the constant representation of communities of color as crime-ridden places, and that takes the eye off the fact that there are people everywhere trying to make incredible change and transformation on their own,” says Susan Smith Richardson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Reporter. The Reporter doesn’t have a crime beat. Instead, they have a police section and focus on accountability and institutions that surround crime, like the court and prison systems.

The relationship between the CPD and the city’s media outlets is complicated, if not broken. “To me, one of the fundamental problems with crime coverage, getting past the spectacle of crime and the racialization of it, is this: to be effective, police reporters have got to get a good relationship with police officers,” says Richardson.

“We get caught in this crazy loop,” she continues. “Police are the official source when it comes to crime stories, yet at the same time you find out later that they’re involved in covering up crime. The very people you have to go to as the official source can turn around and be the ones you really need to be investigating. It’s a real inconsistency that journalists have yet to come to terms with.”

L

ast October, after Officer Jason Van Dyke shot seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald sixteen times, the Sun-Times and the Tribune reported from the police union spokesman that McDonald had “a strange gaze about him” and had punctured a squad car’s tires before lunging at officers with a knife.

CPD press releases take a certain tone when the hand that pulls the trigger belongs to an officer. “They always say, ‘The police officer, fearing for his life, drew his weapon,’ ” says Holliday. “That’s how it always ends, because that’s the crux of the legal definition for whether it’s justified or not: whether or not you feared for your life.”

MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

REPORTING

In the case of Laquan McDonald, witnesses later said that he never lunged. Initial reports obscured the number of shots fired.

Jamie Kalven, a journalist and civil rights activist who in recent years has focused his efforts on examining police brutality, read the blurbs about McDonald but didn’t initially follow the story.

“It was only because of a source inside the city who reached out and said, ‘Look into this case. There’s video, the kid was shot an extraordinary number of times. I think they’re going to cover it up,’ ” Kalven says.

Suspicious and worried there would be no substantial investigation, he put out a public call through his investigative group, the Invisible Institute, for the city to release the CPD’s dash-cam video from the scene of the shooting.

Kalven tracked down a witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but recounted that McDonald had tried to run and that policemen immediately attempted to clear the scene, threatening bystanders with arrest. “The cover-up began right away,” Kalven says. He obtained the autopsy through a Freedom of Information Act request and in February released its details in Slate, describing each of the sixteen gunshot wounds and highlighting inconsistencies in the police report. In April, the city awarded McDonald’s family a $5 million settlement to preclude legal action.

“They settled a case that wasn’t even a case yet, and that’s a measure of how powerful this video is,” says Kalven. Officer Van Dyke is under state and federal investigation, but the footage of McDonald’s shooting—despite an additional call for its release last month from the editorial board of the New York Times—has yet to be made available to the public.

Kalven’s advocacy for McDonald is part of a larger project to examine “how we register, understand, and code violence.”

Kalven is working with newly released police complaint records—he calls the CPD’s internal system for tracking these records “a system for not knowing”—and with the Invisible Institute he has been part of the Youth/Police Project for the past four years, giving teens the chance to speak on easily forgotten injustices.

“Our ability to create spaces beyond the pale is associated with our attribution of violence to particular categories of people,” he says. “Very little that happens in journalism pushes back against that or offsets it, and a lot inadvertently reinforces it.” The reliance of most crime reporting on CPD statements leaves a blind spot in covering police brutality and a hole in day-to-day 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

coverage, obscuring an essential dimension of the wider system of violence in Chicago.

Without Kalven, the Invisible Institute, and their anonymous tip from inside the city, reports on McDonald’s shooting could easily have ended last October.

“I

t’s easy to think you just have crime.

Crime appears! But crime is a factor of education and employment and mental health services, and a lack of all those things. And a disinvestment in communities—a history of disinvestment in communities. That’s where crime comes from,” says Holliday, who now covers Logan Square and Humboldt Park for DNAinfo.

“We’re conditioned, as reporters, to think that any violent crime, any gunshot is a story,” he goes on. “When it comes to white collar crime, property crime, high interest rate bank crime—these things are not things we automatically think we need to dig into. But every single shooting that ever happens is supposed to be an event that affects the entire city.”

On one level, violence is always an event that affects the entire city. Death and suffering are always news, always bring new pain and grief. Those closest have never already heard it, and the trauma reverberates.

But to look at atrocity is not necessarily to ascribe it meaning; to mourn the repetition and routine of violent crime in Chicago, and especially its impoverished neighborhoods, is not necessarily a step toward making things better. It is only to say: I see this.

What sort of looking might let us see past the narrative charisma of violence to view it on quieter, more systemic levels?

When it comes to rates of crime and police brutality, the biggest news is their regularity.

“I think part of our challenge as reporters is that if we call it a crisis we’re going to get it wrong; a crisis is a departure from the status quo,” says Kalven. “How you report on conditions of structural violence that are part of the ongoingness of the society is a real puzzle.”

Making violence matter, along with the lives it claims, is a process for which one-off reporting isn’t the first step. Groups like the Reporter and the Invisible Institute work to illuminate context, but they are small and the exceptions. Rendering the totality of violence legible, including crime committed by those meant to enforce the law, is a huge and ongoing project. The task, one too often neglected by daily coverage, is to trace the invisible threads that let much of Chicago’s senseless violence make sense.

RETAIL MUSIC

What’s in Store?

What will the new Whole Foods mean for Englewood?

BY MARI COHEN

O

rrin Williams recalls that, during his childhood in Englewood in the fifties and sixties, there was a corner store at 61st and Stewart owned by “Mr. Thomas.” Mr. Thomas also sponsored the local Little League and Coney League teams, and Williams and many of his peers played for Mr. Thomas starting at around age nine or ten.

“We spent our quarters, nickels, and

pennies back in those days with him, which allowed him to return that money to the community in the form of supporting and sponsoring youth baseball teams,” said Williams, now Director of the Center for Urban Transformation, a community development planning organization focused on social and environmental justice. He described Mr. Thomas’s store as having a slightly wider variety than the convenience-store-type of-

ferings of today’s Englewood corner stores.

But a lot has changed in Englewood since the days of Mr. Thomas. Williams held up his story of the community-focused, baseball-coaching store owner as an example of the local, black business economy that once thrived on the South Side, but has since, in his words, “collapsed.” Nowadays in Englewood, few corner stores are owned

by African Americans; Englewood is often

courtesy of sweet water foundation

called a “food desert,” and its poverty rate is forty-two percent.

In summer or fall of 2016, however, a Whole Foods Market will open in EnglePhotos by Juliet Eldred unless otherwise marked. Counterclockwise from top: The future Whole Foods site; the colorful business accelerator space across the street from the Whole Foods site aims to support local businesses; a sign placed in front of future Whole Foods site; the Perry Ave. Community Farm is one part of Englewood’s up-andcoming urban agricultural district.

MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

wood at 63rd and Halsted, the site of the historic Englewood Mall, once the second-most-visited shopping district in Chicago. The store was announced in September 2013 by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and late 16th Ward Alderman JoAnn Thompson.

Right now, the future Whole Foods is just a construction site: piles of dirt accented by debris and the occasional orange cone, surrounded by a high green fence, with caution tape blocking the sidewalk wherever there’s a break in the fence. But while the physical building might not exist yet, community members and Whole Foods representatives are already beginning to prepare for the store’s arrival, constructing an image of what having a Whole Foods Market might mean for Englewood.

Right now there are no major retailers, and few thriving local businesses, around the site of the future Whole Foods.

While Whole Foods seems eager to present their Englewood market as just another of its stores, many community leaders hope Whole Foods will catalyze change in Englewood, by providing fresh food, empowering fellow small businesses, and luring visitors as well as future retail developments to the area. But there’s also a sense in which Whole Foods is arriving on an already changing scene: it’s invested in Englewood’s up-andcoming urban agriculture district, which includes twenty-two neighborhood acres zoned for urban agriculture thus far, and has been in the works for ten years.

Even as Whole Foods appears willing to work with and reach out to members of the community, some people in Englewood worry that the store is a sign of gentrification, a signal of the swift development that can dramatically change a community and push low-income residents out. Everyone knows that Whole Foods won’t be Mr. Thomas. But what will it be?

I

n the 1950s, when Williams’s family moved into Englewood, the neighborhood was in the midst of change. As more black residents began to call Englewood home and white flight followed, the community went from eleven percent black in 1950 to sixty-nine percent in 1960.

Englewood, as it became an African-American community (ninety-nine percent black by 1990) also began to fall prey to racist policies of redlining and disinvestment. The neighborhood, home to nearly 100,000 people in 1960, now has a population of around 30,000, and many buildings are gone. Williams, whose family moved to Chatham when he was thirteen but contin12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

Whole Foods representatives visit the Perry Ave. Community Farm site on 59th & Perry. Photos courtesy of the Sweetwater Foundation.

ued to return and visit Englewood throughout his life, witnessed the change himself.

“I found a picture the other day of my mother where we lived in Englewood,” he said, referring to the 300 block of West 60th Place, once full of houses. “Now all those buildings are gone. There are no houses left on the side of the street we lived on.“ Englewood’s 63rd and Halsted shopping district changed along with the neighborhood. Pictures from the 1950s show a street packed with well-lit businesses, full of cars parked bumper to bumper and pedestrians streaming out of stores.

“At the time, when I was a kid, when I came to Englewood for those kinds of things, it was the place to come,” said Perry Gunn, executive director of Teamwork Englewood, an organization that focuses on

bringing the community together to work on development and improvement, referring to the 63rd and Halsted area in the 1960s.

“It was the place to be. It was the retail center for a lot of people in the city of Chicago.

When I wanted to buy shoes, when I wanted to buy a certain type of clothes, when I wanted to go to the show, when I wanted to have a nice time out eating, I came to Englewood.”

As part of a new five-acre Englewood Square development, the Whole Foods Market inherits that legacy, a fact proudly touted by developer DL3 realty on its website. And Whole Foods won’t be alone: Englewood Square will also include two “outlot parcels” for more retailers, and is part of a larger thirteen-acre development at the intersection, the rest of which will be devel-

oped by the nonprofit Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives Inc. Multiple sources said the rest of Englewood Square could include a Chipotle and a Starbucks, though Leon Walker, manager of DL3 realty, did not respond to the Weekly’s requests for confirmation. The city council voted in April 2014 to give $10.7 million in tax increment fincancing (TIF) funds to the property to subsidize the development.

The neighborhood has already been in the midst of another change. In 2005, Perry Gunn’s organization, Teamwork Englewood, created a “Quality-of-Life Plan” to chart a course for improving life in Englewood. Gunn wasn’t director back then, but he said that 650 people contributed to developing the ten strategies, focused on areas including education, economic development, safety, environment, and crime. The fourth prong of the first strategy reads, “Develop an urban agriculture district to provide business, job training and employment opportunities while improving the availability of fresh produce.” Gunn said the plan also included the goal of bringing a full-service grocery store, like a Whole Foods, to 63rd and Halsted.

According to Sonya Harper, executive director of Grow Greater Englewood, an Englewood coalition of groups involved in food production and community outreach, the urban agriculture district was originally just an idea for community leaders. However, it was then taken up by the city as Englewood became a target of the city’s Green and Healthy Neighborhoods Plan, which hopes to appropriate vacant land for urban agriculture, industrial activity, housing preservation, and more.

Now, Englewood’s urban agricultural district means that there are twenty-two acres that the city has zoned for urban farming use, according to Harper. However, Harper said it’s not just about farming; rather, they think of it as a food-production district, including the other businesses necessary to support farms, including harvesting, transport, processing, packaging, wholesale, and retail.

Harper said they are still working on putting together the district. Currently operating farms include Growing Home on 59th and Honore and 59th and Wood—which has worked closely with Whole Foods since the city announced the store—and the Perry Ave. Community Farm, which, at 59th and Perry, is slightly more removed on the other side of Dan Ryan.

The nonprofit Growing Home’s two farms are the only certified organic farms in Chicago. They sell produce at a farm stand at

RETAIL the Englewood site and at North Side farmers markets. But they also use the farm as a training program for people who face what Director Harry Rhodes called “barriers to employment,” such as criminal records and homelessness. Growing Home’s students work on the farm for fourteen weeks and then are placed in food service jobs.

“Growing Home was brought right after they did that 2005 plan,” Harper said.

“They took some vacant land that nobody wanted, along an abandoned railway that’s also going to be turned into a linear park... but they transformed that area, they used it to address food access, and more importantly they used it to address jobs and jobs training in the area. I think that’s a perfect example of what residents were thinking when residents had the idea for this urban agriculture district.”

An urban agricultural district thus provides a convenient landscape for Whole Foods, which could stock local produce from in and around Englewood at its stores.

“We certainly want to help develop any sort of urban agriculture initiatives in a city like Chicago, Englewood, and beyond,” said Keith Stewart, a marketing director for Whole Foods.

According to Harper, in the weeks leading up to the Whole Foods announcement, Rahm Emanuel visited the Growing Home farm several times and learned about the community’s efforts to use food as a tool to economic revival. Then, one day, he brought the Whole Foods team with him, and shortly after that announced that the store was coming to Englewood.

Right after the announcement, Whole Foods donated $100,000 to Growing Home to help them build a greenhouse and hire interns. Rhodes said Growing Home has continued to be active in the process of bringing Whole Foods to the community and has attended all of Whole Foods’s community meetings.

“Since we’ve got started, we’ve looked for people, for organizations, for companies that have similar values and Whole Foods is one of them,” said Rhodes. Growing Home has been working with Whole Foods to hire the people they train. So far, Whole Foods has hired two program graduates with non-violent backgrounds for their store in Streeterville. Rhodes said it has been more difficult to get people with non-violent backgrounds hired for the Englewood store, but they are in talks with Whole Foods about developing a training program for these individuals.

Whole Foods has also been in discussions with the Perry Ave. Community

Above,the business accelerator space includes movable furniture and whiteboards, numerous Windows computers, and an attached conference room; Below, Whole Foods is interested in selling some of the produce grown by the Perry Ave. Community Farm.

Farm. Williams’s Center for Urban Transformation partners with the Sweet Water Foundation to oversee this farm. Across the street from the Metra tracks on Perry, they currently have a farm and a community garden, on a block surrounded by greened-over lots: hardly an urban space. The farm also includes the “Think-Do house,” a renovated foreclosed home used as a vibrant community meeting space. The house has chalkboards and whiteboards for walls, adorned with various quotes and diagrams on urban agriculture in colorful chalk, and bright photos of kids and families at the farm fill the space.

Williams said they want to expand the farm into what will be called the Perry Market District, bordered by 55th and 63rd Streets and by the Dan Ryan and Wabash. It’s an

attempt to create a community with urban agriculture but also various types of housing and commercial development.

Williams wanted to dispel any concerns that the urban agriculture district was about taking over all of Englewood with farms.

While the Perry Market District would be part of the urban agriculture district, Williams said other proposed spaces include other parts of the 59th Street corridor and some farming around 71st and Princeton.

However, he said that it’s a small percentage of the total six-and-a-half square miles that make up Englewood and West Englewood, and that much of it is near the unused rail lines on the 59th Street corridor. He noted that people in Englewood might not want all of their land taken for farming, and that

he’s aware of that. Urban farming, in his eyes, is meant to be just one aspect of community development.

“We feel that way as well, we were raised in the community,” he said. “That’s not something we would want to see be dominant by every stretch of the imagination. But we also think it’s something that should and could be part of new communities and redeveloped communities.”

Emmanuel Pratt, executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation, the other operator of the farm, said that the foundation has been involved in roundtable discussions with Whole Foods since 2013, including a visit to learn about the Whole Foods store in Detroit. Whole Foods Market is interested in selling some of the farm’s produce, such as kale and chard, and Pratt says that the foundation is interested in selling their surplus (beyond what they already use for community work) if Whole Foods will be willing to help them with training staff in supplier tasks like harvesting, processing, and packaging, and job placement for youth involved in Sweet Water Foundation’s programming. Pratt sees it as an opportunity to train farmers in working with market demands.

Euan Hague, a professor of geography and sustainable urban development at DePaul, said it will be interesting to see how Whole Foods ends up working with local growers.

“That’s a really interesting model, it’s sort of a relatively new way of thinking about linking a major food retailer with the production from urban land,” he said. “Some of these things are so relatively new that we haven’t seen how well or how poorly they work yet.”

W

hole Foods’s efforts to work with urban farms and sell their produce is just part, however, of their larger plan to get the products of various local small businesses into their Chicago stores, and many such partnerships are in the works as the store’s 2016 opening inches closer. While it’s typical for Whole Foods to host vendor days and seek local business suppliers when they open a store, the Englewood process was something new.

A three-day workshop for small businesses that included information on how to work with Whole Foods took place in January. “[Whole Foods’s] assumption is that the vendor is already ready to do business.

Here, most of the businesses that we came across, probably sixty percent, they don’t have certain basics in place,” Jennipher Adkins, marketing director of the GreatMAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

er Englewood Community Development Corporation (CDC), said. The CDC suggested a workshop series to Whole Foods and Whole Foods agreed wholeheartedly.

The three-day workshop included information from the city on business licensing and other aspects of small-business development, as well as Whole Foods’s stringent requirements for suppliers. At the third workshop, on January 23, Whole Foods met with about forty local businesses.

Adkins said that now twenty-seven businesses are now in the process of becoming Whole Foods vendors, and five have already become vendors. Whole Foods offers most businesses other Chicago stores where they can sell their products right away, though all will have products in the Englewood store.

Adkins said there will probably be another workshop next year.

However, none of the businesses chosen to work with Whole Foods so far are actually Englewood-grown. The series attracted businesses from around the Chicago area, and some on the list Adkins gave me of businesses who met with Whole Foods don’t operate on the South Side. Others are based on the South Side, but not in Englewood.

“In Englewood, there’s really nothing in terms of being ready to sell to a national retailer,” said Adkins. “There are very few people who are able to do that without assistance. We just don’t have an abundance of that type of business ready to go.” She said that the three Englewood businesses that came to the workshop didn’t get far with Whole Foods because they lacked certain necessities like EPC codes and formulas.

Throughout the workshop series, Adkins and the Greater Englewood CDC noticed that Englewood businesses and some other South Side businesses didn’t have basic technology and other necessities such as wraparound services, insurance, accounting and more. So they partnered with innovation center BLUE1647 to start a business accelerator, which includes technology, meeting space, and coaching support from the Greater Englewood CDC for twenty-five dollars a month.

The accelerator, which opened officially on May 1, is located at the Greater Englewood CDC offices, on the fourth floor of a bank building with a pillared facade across the street from the Englewood Square site.

The space is bright and modern, with green and orange squares in the carpet, movable furniture and whiteboards, numerous Windows computers, and an attached conference room. When I arrived to meet Adkins, she was in the midst showing off the space 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

to two women, one of whom sold hair care products. I heard her ask one of them if she had been at the Whole Foods workshop.

Adkins said that most businesses working with Whole Foods will be using the space. She also hopes that after working with the Englewood businesses and having several more workshops, by the third year there will be a “meaningful number” of Englewood and black-owned South Side businesses with their products in the Englewood store. The idea is that shoppers could put money back into the community by buying locally-owned products on Whole Foods’ shelves, and those businesses could then hire more people.

Perry Gunn of Teamwork Englewood said they are also considering creating a commercial kitchen space in the firehouse behind the Whole Foods development for food businesses to share.

Gunn said the store could also increase traffic to local establishments, like

to make a claim to Englewood prior to what Whole Foods was doing.” But now, she said, Whole Foods would encourage “others who are larger companies who have the capital to invest, make a stake too, make a claim to Englewood.”

But Whole Foods, interestingly enough, seems opposed to singling itself out as a catalyst.

“We’re not the catalyst of that, we’re just part of it,” Stewart said of Englewood Square. It’s hard to believe him, though, considering the mass of attention that Whole Foods has generated since its announcement. While much of the press coverage has centered around whether Whole Foods’s prices will be viable in a low-income area, Whole Foods has also caused a stir because it’s the first retailer of its kind to move into the area in recent memory.

According to Williams, the idea that it’s a necessity to bring an “anchor store” is part of the traditional, mainstream devel-

“Because right now it seems like ‘Oh, there's just so much land, we have to get this into the private market or figure out what to do with it.’ But soon there will be none left, and whatever is left will be super expensive.” the Dream Café just a few blocks away at 61st and Halsted. Howard Bailey, owner of the Café, which opened in January, said he is anticipating more business when the Whole Foods comes, because otherwise, he said, there’s not much attracting people to the area, besides the recently-added Kennedy-King college campus on 63rd and Halsted.

“It’s like any time you bring a nice anchor store to the community, more people will come,” Gunn said.

In fact, Whole Foods is often described as a “catalyst”—a word used independently by many of my sources—for conversations about food access, for attention to small business development, but especially for other development in the area. Many see Whole Foods as encouragement for other outside businesses, like Starbucks and Chipotle, to come to Englewood. Jennipher Adkins sees this as the main result of the store coming in.

“That’s really what Whole Foods is bringing, it’s bringing that opportunity for turnaround,” she said. “No one was willing

opment model. Williams said he personally wishes it was possible to predicate development on a different model: he pointed to Andersonville, which he said worked hard to keep out chain stores and still kept the economy thriving.

“Personally that’s the kind of development I would opt for,” he said. “I would opt for not bringing more mainstream corporate entities into a community. I think that local businesses contribute far more into a community than multinational type corporations that typically suck the money out.

And the research proves that out. But that said, we know how politics works in this day and age.”

Williams isn’t necessarily against Whole Foods, but he wishes that Whole Foods would be part of a “broad-based food environment,” with a wide variety of food purveyors among which residents can choose, as he says exists on the North Side.

While Englewood actually has several farmers markets that have appeared around the urban agriculture movement (and Jennipher Adkins hopes to start another this

summer across from the planned Whole Foods site), as well as a few discount grocers—an Aldi a few blocks from the site and a Food 4 Less in West Englewood— it’s missing locally-owned grocers. Williams said his group is working on including a locally-owned entity, like a benefit corporation or worker-owned co-op, in the Perry Ave. Market District, but planning is still in the works.

E

ven as Whole Foods attempts to get involved in the neighborhood, it’s not an easy task for a store like Whole Foods to enter a severely disinvested area like Englewood and bill itself as a space for residents.

“Whole Foods will have to do a lot of community outreach, so that folks know it’s for them and not for some unseen outsiders or for the gentrifiers only,” said Mary Pattillo, a professor of sociology and African American Studies at Northwestern University who has studied development in South Side neighborhoods.

The store is in the process of working on that outreach: it has an advisory team made up of stakeholders and residents, according to Sonya Harper of Grow Greater Englewood, which is part of the advisory team.

According to Harper, the advisory team has worked with Whole Foods on the physical aspects of the store, since residents wanted the store to artistically represent Englewood somehow. Notes posted online from the Whole Foods community meeting on February 16 suggested that the advisory team was discussing including images of the old 63rd and Halsted development in the decor. Harper said they were also especially interested in having Whole Foods include a free community meeting space in the store, since Englewood has few. The meeting notes indicate community members were also concerned with having Whole Foods be open to hiring people of various backgrounds, contribute to small business development, and partner with the community on nutrition education, among many other items. One line item even reads, “Whole Foods Market must dispel rumors of what Whole Foods Market is so that the community will embrace Whole Foods Market,” speaking to the suspicion generated by Whole Foods’s pricy reputation.

So far, Whole Foods seems to have been making a good impression about its willingness to work with community members.

“I for one am a little impressed at the approach of Whole Foods with Engle-

wood,” said Harper. “And that they do seem to be very sincere and working very slowly but carefully in trying to really forge genuine relationships with people, and not, like some folks, ‘Oh, let me just get you to sign off on community support so I can bring a store here.”

Gloria Williams, founder of the resident committee Voices of West Englewood, was similarly pleased.

“The reason I think why I feel that it’s going to work out is because, you know, in Englewood you’ve got organizations sitting down at the table with the Whole Foods and they are listening and we’re coming up with solutions to address issues within the community,” she said.

However, even Whole Foods’s good impression on community engagement hasn’t completely overridden confusions and concerns around the store, including why it’s coming and whether it will result in gentrification.

According to Pattillo, Whole Foods is especially interesting because its announcement followed the opposite pattern of how commercial development often plays out on the South Side. In most cases, she says, residential transformation precedes an influx of retailers like Whole Foods, which occurred in North Kenwood, Oakland, and Bronzeville. Because that stabilization of housing stock hasn’t yet occurred in Englewood, she’s “baffled” as to why Whole Foods has decided to come.

In the past, Whole Foods has been noted for its ability to predict when areas are on the cusp of gentrification, and even to contribute to that gentrification itself. Salon, reporting on Whole Foods’s opening a store in Midtown Detroit in 2012, said that the “retailer has made a science of putting down roots in urban locations at what often seems to be just the right moment.” While Whole Foods doesn’t usually raise property values of its own accord, it signifies to other retailers that the neighborhood is investment-worthy, and it generates data on its success that other retailers can use when trying to get a loan to come to the area. Even though there hasn’t been any gentrification in Englewood as of yet, and Englewood is different than any neighborhood Whole Foods has entered before, the mention of the potential trio of Whole Foods, Chipotle, and Starbucks is enough to raise concerns.

“I say that this is the moment to start planning because no one ever in the beginning of neighborhood change foresees the completeness with which a neighborhood will change,” said Pattillo. “Things like community land trusts are super duper im-

RETAIL

Above, a vacant lot sits across the street from the future site of the Englewood Whole Foods.Below, Whole Foods is interested in selling some of the produce grown by the Perry Ave. Community Farm (photo courtesy of Sweet Water Foundation).

portant to maintain the land at low prices to be able to build affordable housing or for whatever uses the community deems most important. Because right now it seems like, ‘Oh, there’s just so much land, we have to get this into the private market or figure out what to do with it.’ But soon there will be none left, and whatever is left will be super expensive. And that, we have seen historically, again and again and again.”

If that is Englewood’s fate, even good community relationships with Whole Foods might not be enough to ward off this type of change.

Williams says the Center for Urban Transformation and the others working on the Perry Ave. Farm are taking steps to safeguard against gentrification. They’re already planning to pursue the community land

trust that Pattillo mentioned.

“One of the things we’re concerned even with our project is we don’t want to be a catalyst for that gentrification and so that’s why we’re paying attention to affordable housing, things like community land trusts that puts land or properties into trusts so that they don’t become subject to the whims of the typical market,” he said.

Despite her excitement about the new development, Adkins, too, said she understood there were “huge concerns” about gentrification and how Englewood might look in five years. She said the Greater Englewood CDC’s stance is to accept the new store if it’s bringing in good things like new jobs, but to try and keep as many people in the neighborhood involved as possible.

“This is why we have the three series

workshops, this is why we have the whole liaison thing of making sure that everyone gets to know each other,” she said. “That’s the Greater Englewood CDC’s job.”

Adkins also said that while many people don’t understand why pricy Whole Foods is entering Englewood, Emanuel and Thompson had also asked other food retailers—like grocery chain Jewel-Osco, which used to operate in the area—to come to the development first, but they said no.

Just as community leaders like Adkins, Williams, Gunn, and Rhodes have varying ideas about Whole Foods’s entrance, so too do other Englewood residents. Some don’t want to talk about it, some just say, “I think it’s a good thing” and leave it at that, while others point out that the prices would be too high.

Englewood resident Angela Doss, walking near 67th and Halsted this past Saturday, said she’s excited about the store.

“I think it would be a good experience to have some fresh food,” she said, adding that she hoped the prices would be reasonable. She said she thought the location was a good choice, easy to get to. When I asked her about the possibility of the Chipotle and Starbucks coming as well, her face lit up.

“That’d be a treat,” she said, referring to Starbucks.

Ricardo Perkins, who I met walking on 63rd Street on the opposite side of the street from the Whole Foods, said that people he knew were confused and worried about the store coming.

“Well, the consensus around the hood is, they never put a Whole Foods in communities like ours before. We’re kinda leery and wondering why,” he said. “My thought is that someone must’ve told whoever owns Whole Foods, ‘Don’t worry about the community, it’ll look completely different in ten years.’ ” Perkins says he knows that Whole Foods is healthy, but he and many others can’t afford to shop there.

“I don’t know who it’s for,” he said, “but it doesn’t seem like it’s for us.” “ ‘There are all types of mixed reactions,” said Harper, “but I would say as a whole people are excited about our opportunities increasing. We have basically a lack of opportunity currently, especially as it relates to getting access to anything healthy and affordable... So folks are excited that it’s going to definitely increase their access.

They’re not saying, ‘oh, this is the savior, or this is exactly what I wanted,’ but they do recognize that it is one thing, one tiny step, towards trying to solve a larger problem.”

MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

VISUAL ARTS

The Only Information I Have is as Follows

Noelle Garcia’s “LÁLDISH” at Ordinary Projects

BY WILLEKES CRONIN

O

n August 19, 1955, nineteen-yearold rodeo cowboy Walt Garcia shot and killed another man in Elko, Nevada’s city dump. From that day until his death in 1999, Walt spent the majority of his life in prison: he was paroled seven times, but was always readmitted promptly (usually within a matter of months and never longer than two years). Walt is the inspiration for “LÁLDISH,” his daughter Noelle Garcia’s new exhibition at Ordinary Projects. The description of the exhibition consists of an email exchange between the artist and the Nevada Department of Corrections: “The only information I have is as follows.” On the record Walt Garcia is no more than one violent crime and six instances of recidivism.

Beyond the official documentation, Walt’s existence is just as fleeting. There are a few dozen blurry Polaroids and his children’s distant memories of a few visits to the prison yard. And as Noelle makes painfully clear, these unofficial records are slowly, quietly disappearing. The first thing she showed me was a candid photo of a group of men: she identified one man wearing a cowboy hat as her father. The decades since the photograph was taken have faded his shadowed face into an impenetrable black silhouette. As I struggled to distinguish facial features that were simply no longer there, Garcia told me that she couldn’t remember her father’s face herself.

Garcia is a member of the Klamath tribe through her father, and though she spent part of her childhood on a reservation, she has always maintained ambivalence toward the traditions of her cultural heritage.

“LÁLDISH” finds Garcia coming to terms with two obscured heritages, familial and ancestral, presences that exert undeniable force on her own history and identity even as they recede from view and factual interrogation.

As a young artist, Garcia disdained “traditional” Native-American craft methods in favor of canvas painting: she wanted to be an artist, not a Native-American artist. As 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

photos courtesy of the artist

she matured, however, she realized the necessity of confronting ancestral techniques, not to brand herself as an artist-of-color, but as a meditation on a cultural legacy that many Native people willfully shun, as her own father did when he used cowboy tropes to define himself.

Her beaded “Stapler” follows the tradition of beading one’s own mass-produced commodities—lighters, wallets, bottle openers—to personalize them. In Garcia’s case, the beads (picked to be as “gaudily ‘Indian’ as possible”) render her industrial stapler, which she used to pin stretched canvases, entirely inoperable. In effect, the traditional personalization defies her former desire to claim independence from one tradition by substituting a second (Western painting).

The trajectory of tradition, though, is jumbled by the history of beadwork. Despite the stereotypes, glass beads were introduced to

Native Americans by Western settlers, and the distinctive characteristics of American beading did not emerge until after colonization: participation in this tradition is far from a straightforward engagement with a “pure” ancestral heritage.

Another colonial export, tobacco, was first cultivated in the Americas and was used for ritual purposes, but its sixteenth-century popularization in Europe bears no small pressure on the oppression of Native people over the following centuries. In the present day, Cigar Store Indians, American Spirits, and the extreme prevalence of tobacco use among Native-American men (greater than any other demographic group) suggest that smoking, while not a point of pride, is in some way distinctive of Native-American culture. Garcia’s glass beaded cigarettes, scattered in a pile next to “Stapler,” bear witness to this complex interrelationship,

but they also emerge from a much simpler impetus: the artist wanted to improve her beading technique, and a cigarette was the perfect shape for repetitive practice.

These familial and the cultural histories explicitly converge on the exhibition’s centerpiece: a fake leather jacket covered entirely with beer bottle caps. Native-American women traditionally make jackets of the sort for their male relatives, and Garcia thought the bottle caps appropriate for a jacket dedicated to her father, a prodigious drinker. In a performance which she will repeat on May 30, Garcia dons the jacket and dances the only traditional dance she remembers from childhood: one, fittingly, dedicated to the dancer’s deceased relatives. It is at times an awkward production, and its ungainliness is not something Garcia tries to hide.

Garcia plans to continue to practice her dancing, like her beadwork, as a way of connecting with her father, her ancestors, and herself, but as she develops she is content with her imprecision. In its concern with process rather than perfection, Garcia’s dance exemplifies the main conceit of the show: the past, distant or immediate, is not simply a given to be discovered through historical research but a body of practices repeated and reinterpreted through time.

And even in the absence of fact, engagement with traditions and faces in the shadows lays a strong foundation for the constant reproduction of personal and cultural history.

Love After Death

Poet Elizabeth Alexander reads from The Light of the World

BY ELEONORA EDREVA

E

lizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World, a memoir about coping with her husband’s death, opens with an explanation of how to understand beginnings: “The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story.” Within this understanding, the story of Alexander’s loss began with her husband’s death on a Wednesday evening in early April 2012; it began when they met by chance at a café in New Haven in 1996 and fell in love instantly; it began when their mothers were each pregnant with them in the winter of 1961, thousands of miles apart.

But while love is the pervasive theme of the memoir, Alexander didn’t realize she was writing a love story until midway through the book. At a recent reading at Hyde Park’s Seminary Co-op, she talked about the process of writing The Light of the World, which came out last month. The audience was filled with old acquaintances from her Hyde Park days—she taught at the University of Chicago for several years in the 1990s, leaving Chicago when she met and settled down with her husband Ficre in New Haven—and as she sat down at the front of the bookstore, backlit by the view of a rainy Woodlawn Avenue, she prefaced the reading by addressing the faces before her with a smile: “I’m not even focusing on all of you because there’s just too much story.

I need to blur you all out so I can do my work.”

Alexander, a long-time poet, never imagined that she would write a memoir.

After a long break from writing following Ficre’s death, she began writing again to give a name to her pain and to fix in place her memories of life with her husband.

While the book was initially intended as poetry, she explained “it came from the same place where poetry lives and then went and moved in another direction.” She is, however, a poet at heart, and the memoir is written in a series of short essays, sometimes un-

related and sometimes overlapping—what Alexander calls “poet’s chapters.”

In The Light of the World, love is as inevitable as death; Alexander understood early on that “loss is not felt in the absence of love.” Her husband Ficre’s death at age fifty from a sudden heart attack was unavoidable: “the heart inside of him beat all the beats it was allocated.” But the love of the two also “began in an instant and progressed inevitably;” their lives were fated to converge, and remain forever intertwined. A love story that began with a chance encounter in a café in New Haven, brought about “a three-day, three-night vortex” of passion, and ended with Ficre breathing his last breath as she kneeled over his dying body, is enough to convince one of the existence of star-crossed lovers.

The book—and the love between them—also takes as a recurring theme the African diasporic culture Alexander shared with her husband. Ficre was born in Eritrea on the brink of the country’s three decade-long war for independence, and spent his young adulthood living amidst the realities of warfare. Those experiences strongly influenced the paintings he started to create after he fled his home country as a refugee and settled down in New Haven. Alexander’s poetry is also deeply influenced by her African-American roots—race and historical memory are two of the main themes running through her poems. Their marriage became a combination of their favorite parts of each of their diasporic cultures: recipes were shared and influenced by each other, stories and music were exchanged and experienced together, and a large network of extended African family from throughout the world came together under the rooftop of their New Haven home for a shared Easter meal for each of the fifteen years the two were married.

When asked by an audience member how writing the book affected her grieving, Alexander was quick to distinguish between the grieving process and the writing process.

“I think of them as two processes that went on at the same time and sometimes overlapped,” she admitted. Both, however, consumed her during the three years between Ficre’s death and the book’s release. “I had no idea I had this much in me,” she confessed, looking down at the finished product in her hands.

CALENDAR BULLETIN

MUSIC

Deportation Defense 101

Africa and Maggie Brown at the Promontory

The landscape of immigration never ceases to be highly contested and changeable, as deportation remains an imminent threat for countless families across the country. Deportation Defense 101 is a training session from Organized Communities Against Deportations, an organization that supports mobilization, advocacy, and education as tools for preventing deportations. Tania Unzueta, an undocumented queer organizer born in Mexico City and raised in Chicago for the latter half of her childhood, is also conducting the session under on behalf of Not1More, an ongoing campaign that responds to unjust immigration laws. Targeted at community members and organizers, this session is for individuals who seek to combat deportations, and will offer avenues for getting involved in deportation defence work in Chicago. A similar workshop will be held in Spanish the following week. Cultura in Pilsen, 1900 S. Carpenter St. Saturday, May 30, 11am-1pm. Registration at bit.ly/ocadtraining (Darren Wan)

Few have had such a profound influence on Chicago’s cultural landscape as jazz musician Oscar Brown III. Known for his protean style, Brown was born and raised on the South Side and his work extended to poetry, theater, education, and civil rights. Now, on the eve of his honorary street naming, Brown’s daughters Africa and Maggie keep his legacy alive in performance. The sisters, both vocalists, and Chicago pianist Miguel de la Cerna will perform a short program, followed by comments from city officials and colleagues of Oscar Brown. Celebration of Brown’s legacy comes fifty years after the civil rights movement and the Black Arts Movement, making reflection on the visionary’s work even more important. Join Africa and Maggie Brown and Miguel de la Cerna this Friday to see them bring Brown’s brilliance, insight, and humor to life. The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. W. Friday, May 29, 7pm. Free. promontorychicago.com (Clyde Schwab)

Building Blocks: A Foundation of Social Change Are you interested in social change? Have you always wanted to be an entrepreneur? Come to Building Blocks, hosted by SydneyMalcome LLC, a networking event for people committed to social change. You’ll be able to network with professionals, get consultations on various aspects of business (law, technology, branding), and hear from successful business owners. SydneyMalcome is a consulting firm that helps businesses and individuals enact their vision for social change. The company has hosted this event for three years now. This year, they will also be launching their new Ashley S. C. Walls Foundation—created in honor of one of the company’s co-founders—to support emerging leaders and nonprofits. Room 43, 1043 E. 43rd St. Sunday, May 31st, 3pm-8pm. Free. sydneymalcome.com (Akanksha Shah)

Getting to Work: The History of the Labor Movement and Our Rights Today The School of Social Service Administration at the UofC is hosting a talk by the Chicago Freedom School on workers’ rights, the eight-hour workday, and the history of the labor movement in Chicago and America at large. As a youth-focused social activism movement, the Chicago Freedom School should provide colorful commentary on labor and its many intersections. One Facebook commenter sums it up nicely: “To start talking about the history of labor, we must start talkin about the history of colonization, the history of capital, of racism, of speciesism. Fuck the HIS-story, lets talk about the story of the forgotten.” University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, 969 E. 60th St. Wednesday, June 3, 12pm-1:30pm. chicagofreedomschool.org (Sam Stecklow)

We Need Our Buses!

For almost two decades, people from the neighborhoods along the route of the old 31 bus—including residents of Little Village, Bridgeport, and Chinatown—have agitated for the route’s reinstatement. In 2012, residents of North Center and Lincoln Park neighborhoods found themselves in a similar situation, when the 11 route down Lincoln Ave. was severely curtailed. Since the restoration of both of these lines depends on the same stretched CTA budget, the two campaigns might seem to be natural opponents; instead, at this event and other opportunities to lobby the CTA, North Siders and South Siders lobby together for a revitalized public transit system. Chicago Transit Authority, 567 W. Lake St. Wednesday, June 10, 10am. facebook.com/31stAndLincoln (Adam Thorp)

Jody Watley at The Shrine Hailing from Chicago, Grammy Award-winning Jody Watley was one of the first female African-American artists to bridge gaps and create ties between music, dance, fashion, and even exercise. Her signature was “waacking,” a freestyle dance style she describes as “showing the music.” Watley became a master at creating an all-encompassing experience of the senses, both as a sight on stage and a voice through the speakers. She may have made her debut in the eighties, as a stage-stunner on Soul Train and the lead female in the breakout group Shalamar, but since then she has collaborated with numerous groups, including the French Horn Rebellion, and has also had a robust solo career. Even after thirty years in the industry, this self-described “not just a dreamer, but a girl always trying to do and be something” still has the music and moves to make you want to jump up and dance—and you will have the chance to do so next Saturday. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Saturday, May 30, 9:30pm. $30. 21+. (312)753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Cristina Ochoa)

Beenie Man and Shawnna at The Shrine Erstwhile dancehall king Beenie Man and famously filthy Chicago-bred rapper Shawnna will be playing The Shrine on May 31. Beenie Man, best known for both his rowdy dancehall and his violently anti-gay lyrics (as well as numerous back-and-forths in the press about whether or not he’s apologized for them), hasn’t released an album since 2006. Since becoming bogged down in the PR battle over his lyrics, his only notable semi-recent appearance was being sampled on Kanye West’s “Send It Up.” Shawnna, similarly, hasn’t released anything since the 2012 mixtape She’s Alive.

Here’s hoping they both try out some new material. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Sunday, May 31, 10pm. $35. 21+.

(312)753-5681. theshrinechicago.com (Sam Stecklow)

Yvonne Gage at Mo Better Jazz This four-hour set hosted by South Shore jazz promoters Mo Better will feature Yvonne Gage, a prominent 1980s pop vocalist who has used her pipes to support the likes of R. Kelly and Celine Dion, among numerous other superstars, stars, and almost-stars. Her only album, 1984’s Virginity, was noted for its cover, which featured Gage in a risqué posture holding a sealskin coat. Its highest-charting single was “Doin’ It in a Haunted House,” which should be reason enough to catch this industry veteran when she reappears in her hometown. Mo Better Jazz, 2423 E. 75th St. Friday, June 5, 7pm. 21+. (773)741-6254. mobetterjazzchicago.us ( Jake Bittle)

Songhoy Blues To call the story of Songhoy Blues unusual would be an understatement—the group formed after Oumar Touré and

MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

Aliou Touré, brothers living in Gao on the Niger River who grew up obsessed with hip hop and classic rock, were forced to leave because of growing unrest in Mali and decided to turn misfortune to their advantage. They subsequently formed a band with drummer Nathanial Dembele and Garba Touré. The group became popular in Bamako, the town where they were relocated, and has recorded with Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Named after the Songhoy, one of the most prominent of Mali’s ethnic groups, the Songhoy Blues celebrates the history, beliefs, and traditional music of their displaced people. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Friday, June 5, 8pm, 7pm doors. $12 in advance. thaliahallchicago (Clyde Schwab)

This is Pilsen: Bohemian Past, Latino Present at Thalia Hall Eastern Europe meets Latin America in this celebration of global pathways converging on Chicago. Once a predominantly Czech neighborhood, and now home to a large Latino community, Pilsen will honor its past and present through a concert and art exhibit featuring music and art from both cultures. Set to play at the concert in Thalia Hall are Ondřej Havelka and His Melody Makers, playing popular songs from Pilsen’s Czech past; the fusion band ¡ESSO! Afrojam Funkbeat; and singer-songwriter Vivian García.

Thalia Hall will also host the art exhibit, featuring paintings

by Chicago and Prague artists and photographs from Pilsen’s history, which will be open through July 31. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Wednesday, June 10, 8pm concert, 6:30pm exhibit. $15-$22. (312)526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com (Hafsa Razi)

Lalah Hathaway at the Shrine On June 11, the Shrine will be graced with the classically trained, Grammy-award-winning, alto voice of Lalah Hathaway. Better known as the First Daughter of Soul, Hathaway made her first foray into the world of music at the tender age of one, providing background wails for her father Donny Hathaway’s single “The Ghetto.” However, she’s better known for her more recent releases like Self Portrait, and singles “That Was Then” and “Something,” a collaboration with Snarky Puppy. It would be a shame to limit your experience of the artist who describes herself as “enamoured with colour, space, and the evolution of music” to just her records.

The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Thursday, June 11, 9:30pm.

First fifty tickets $32.50; otherwise $40. 21+. (312)753-5700. theshrinechicago.com (Emeline Posner)

STAGE AND SCREEN Vanessa Bayer at Thalia Hall Famous for her uncanny impressions of smiley teen princess Miley Cyrus, a geeky “Jacob the Bar Mitzvah boy,” and a frightening Hillary Clinton, Vanessa Bayer has charmed audiences with her charisma and talent during her five-year stint at Saturday Night Live. This week, Bayer returns to the birthplace of her comedic career (she trained at Second City and the ImprovOlympic, now known as the iO Theater) in what is sure to be a memorable stand-up performance. Opening for her is the absurdist Chicago comedian Adam Burke, who was voted best stand-up comedian in Chicago by the Reader in 2014. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport Street. Friday, May 29, doors 8pm. $30. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com (Lucia Ahrensdorf )

City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis Few things capture the spirit of our time as well as stories of urban life. In City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, a collection of essays published by n+1 magazine and edited by Keith Gessen and Stephen Squibb, a new generation of writers works to document the cities they call home. Exploring everything from a tale of smalltown Alaska to reality television stardom to the lingering

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 27, 2015

political corruption in Providence, Rhode Island, the essays capture the shifting dynamics and forces at work in the everyday successes and heartbreaks of American citizens and cities. Take refuge from the maelstrom of urban living at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore this Saturday and listen to a presentation by contributing essayists Sam Biederman, a Hyde Park native currently writing and living in New York, and Ben Merriman, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the UofC. Seminary Co-Op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Saturday, May 30, 3pm. (773)752-4381. semcoop.com (Lewis Page)

famous children’s book The Secret Garden. Like the Bible, but aimed for a younger audience, The Secret Garden is a well-loved story that features a dynamic cast of characters, a mysterious old house, and a blooming garden. The precocious protagonist is a surly little girl named Mary who moves to a new home in Yorkshire with a magical secret.

Come for the childhood memories, stay for the weirdly talented child actress. Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. May 21 through June 21. Fridays, 8pm; Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 2:30pm and 7:30 pm. $48 general, $43.50 for seniors, $23 for children, $18 for UofC students. Ages 4+. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org ( Jake Bittle)

Saving Mes Aynak

Susan Giles: Scenic Overlook

An adventurous archaeologist. A sacred, 5,000-year-old Buddhist site of worship. An intrepid filmmaker willing to put his life on the line. These are the stranger-than-fiction ingredients of the true story told in Saving Mes Aynak, the new film from Chicago documentary powerhouse Kartemquin. The Chicago premiere of the acclaimed documentary will kick off the Music Box’s Docs at the Box summer documentary series. Director Brent E. Huffman and producer Zak Piper will be in attendance, as well as a group of panelists including Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute at the UofC. In an interview for MovieMaker magazine, director Brent E. Huffman said, “Saving Mes Aynak is a film I believed in so deeply I repeatedly risked my life to make it.” Make sure Brent’s life wasn’t risked in vain—come watch the thrilling tale of a true-life Indiana Jones on a noble mission to save an ancient city. Music Box Theatre, 3773 N. Southport Ave. Tuesday, June 2, 7:30pm. $10. (773)871-6604. musicboxtheatre.com (Lewis Page)

In Susan Giles’ new exhibition, “Scenic Overlook,” one can view some of the world’s tallest buildings from above. Giles’ installation consists of large wooden sculptures modeled after the four highest observation towers in the world, the Tokyo Skytree, Canton Tower, CN Tower, and Ostankino Tower, all held up horizontally by steel structures. Giles takes advantage of the two-floor gallery space to allow observers to view these famous architectural wonders from above. Giles, a professor of art at DePaul University, got her MFA from Northwestern in 2009 and is known for her large-scale installations in venues across Chicago, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Elmhurst Art Museum. Visit the Hyde Park Art Center to witness Giles’s exploration of the power of perspective, tourism, and architecture. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Avenue. Sunday, April 19 through Sunday, July 26.

Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Clyde Schwab)

Stop Making Nonsense: Japanese Surrealist Films, 1960-1964

Old Wicked Songs

Surveying the experimental films during the wave of avant-garde cinema in Tokyo during the 1960s, the Center for East Asian Studies will sponsor a screening of four Japanese surrealist films. The series features films made by members of the famous “Group of Three,” including Obayashi and Limura, directors hailed for their eclectic productions made with the 8mm format. The first film is Obayashi’s Complexe, which focuses on a man whose mundane walk turns into a surreal dreamscape representative of the manic pace of modernity, a theme complemented by Obayashi’s use of stop motion animation. Second is Jonouchi’s Pou Pou, which documents a burial ritual performed by children. Next, Limura’s Ai, is comprised of close-up shots of fragmented body parts and features sound by Yoko Ono. Last is Obayashi and Fugino’s An Eater, a macabre comedy about cannibalism. Afterwards, programmer Harrison Sherrod and SAIC graduate student Kara Jefts will host post-screening discussion to help provide context for the Japanese avant-garde cinema movement. Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Thursday, June 4, 7pm. Free. southsideprojections.org (Clyde Schwab)

First produced in 1996 by Jon Marans, Old Wicked Songs is the story of an aging Viennese music professor and his prodigal but burnt-out piano student. In a story that takes teacher and student to emotional extremes while discussing the ramifications of the Holocaust in Austria, Old Wicked Songs shines as a valuable lesson that reflects the importance of healing, music, and remembering one’s past. The play closely follows the “Dichterliebe” (A Poet’s Love), a collection of songs by Robert Schumann. The play is presented by Provision Theater, a Chicago company that broke into the scene in 2004 with an acclaimed production of Cotton Patch Gospel. Provision has since followed with productions including Smoke on the Mountain, the Boys Next Door, and Gospel. Provision Theater Company, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd. April 29-June 7. Fridays, 8pm; Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $10-$32. (312)455-0066. provisiontheater.org (Clyde Schwab)

VISUAL ARTS Effigies

Sins of the Father at eta Creative Successful blues singer Calieb “Tigereye” Hamilton suddenly returns home to his adult son and aging father after a nine-year absence. However, the joy of his homecoming is quickly clouded over by family secrets past and present.

What dark truths must be revealed in order to save this family? And will they be able to forgive each other? Family drama and moody ballads prevail in Synthia Williams’s four-man production, Sins of the Father, a part of eta Creative’s 2015-2016 Season of Plays. eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Avenue. April 17 through June 7. Friday, 8pm; Saturday, 10am; Sunday, 3pm. $35 general, $25 for seniors, $15 for students. (773)752-3955. etacreativearts.org (Dagny Vaughn)

Secret Garden at Court Coming off an acclaimed adaptation of another popular book, the Bible, Hyde Park’s dependable Court Theatre will continue its successful season with an adaptation of the

New paintings from Abraham, a Chicagoan otherwise known as Brahma Brand, arrived at the NYCH Gallery this spring. In his new collection, Abraham leads the viewer down dark tunnels of horror and sadness. Abraham unites our personal tortures and tragedies into a common despair-–a pain Abraham works on to ensnare the on-looker. With rough brushstrokes on a stark canvas, “Effigies” is a showcase that allows one the solace of being engulfed by true and universal melancholy. NYCH Gallery, 643 W 18th St. Through June 5. 585-208-4593. nychgallery. com (Cristina Ochoa)

explore and entice their chosen media’s physical matter to bend and build three-dimensional objects to their liking.

The sculptures, which are created from found objects and fabricated resources, prompt viewers to consider their own sense of personal identity, existence, or transcendence.

Curated by Sergio Gomez, Swan’s portraits of the self will be at the Zhou B Art Center until June 13. Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. second floor gallery. Through June 13.

Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm. (773)523-0200. zhoubartcenter.com (Alex Harrell)

No Longer Art What really is art? What isn’t? Can a piece of art ever stop being art? The exhibition “No Longer Art” is a collection of “salvaged art”: pieces of work removed from museum and gallery circulation due to accidental damage and complete loss of market value, but still culturally significant and relatively intact. Founded by the New York artist Elka Krajewska, the Salvage Art Institute (SAI) serves as a shelter for salvaged art and a stage for discussing the work’s cultural, visual, and—perhaps most importantly—fiscal value. “No Longer Art: Salvage Art Institute” is presented at the Neubauer Collegium Exhibitions in partnership with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry with support from the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory. The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, 5701 S. Woodlawn Ave. April 23 – June 26. Monday-Friday, 11:00am5:00pm. (773)702-6030. neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu (Alex Harrell)

Windy City Breakdown Ayana Contreras—DJ, radio show host, record collector, producer, blogger—was one of the Arts Incubator’s Artists-in-Residence during 2014-15. Her culminating exhibition, “Windy City Breakdown,” features locally-sourced records from her own personal collection, and will explore Black Chicago at the height of the Black Power movement, alongside its intersections with art and entrepreneurship.

Contreras hosts and produces a weekly show on Vocalo called “Reclaimed Soul” that is all about “taking old materials (records, buildings, ideas, et al) to push us all forward.” With Contreras being the all-around sound and audio Renaissance woman that she is, her exhibit is sure to be an unusual foray into Chicago, black resistance, and history. Not to mention, it’ll have a great soundtrack. Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Through May 29. Artist talk May 19, 6pm-7:30pm. Free. (773)702-9724. arts.uchicago. edu (Maha Ahmed)

The Ghost of Slavery in Corporate Chicago Buried deep in Section 585 of Chicago’s Municipal Code is the “Slavery Era Business/Corporate Insurance Disclosure,” which mandates that contractors with the city disclose any and all profits gained from slavery. Yet after two hundred years, several major Chicago companies have yet to disclose their profits from slavery. “The Ghost of Slavery in Corporate Chicago” spotlights the skeletons in these companies’ closets. In an exhibition of photographs and documents regarding the businesses’ hidden histories, images of corporate success and human suffering collide.

The exhibit is the first in a larger series at Pilsen’s URIEICHEN Gallery, entitled “40 Acres and a Mule: A Series of Visual Arts Shows and Discussions about Reparations for Slavery,” which will run until September. URIEICHEN Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Through June 5, by appointment. (312)852-7717. Uri-eichen.com (Hafsa Razi)

Cosmosis Seductive Material The art of seduction isn’t limited to just sex; the laws of attraction beguile anything and everything we want or need in life. Similarly, a painter must manipulate—or allure—the canvas and paints to do what is desired.

“Seductive Material” showcases sculptor Angela Swan’s minimalistic, abstract pieces and examines how artists must

Though most visibly a muse for artistic creation in the last few years with feature films and literature, outer space has mystified and inspired humanity for centuries. In the new exhibit at the Hyde Park Art Center, artists attempt to visually represent the deeper resonances of the cosmos through its intersection with different fields such as philosophy, anthropology, and physics. The exhibition examines

CALENDAR

the significance of space travel to modern culture as well as the role Chicago-based artists have had in interpreting this significance. This event promises to be full of thought-provoking discussion and haunting images of another world. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through August 23. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm;Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Lucia Ahrensdorf )

.de.ma.rc.at.ed.

The main idea of this month-long showing in a new Hyde Park gallery is this: art does not exist in a vacuum, and neither does anything else. The work of Alberto Aguilar, presented at the 4th Ward Project Space with support from the UofC’s Arts + Public Life Initiative, explores the way different boundaries—art and artist, home and world, owner and object—work, both in themselves and in relationship to one another. This particular show, titled “.de.ma.rc.at.ed.,” decontextualizes functional household objects and presents them as “monuments” for the viewer to interpret. 4th Ward Project Space, 5338 S. Kimbark Ave. Enter on 54th St. Opening reception Sunday, May 3, 4pm7pm. Through May 31, 1pm-5pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

(773)203-2991. 4wps.org ( Jake Bittle)

Gabriel Sierra Swing by the Renaissance Society right after breakfast to see Gabriel Sierra’s “Monday Impressions” at ten in the morning. Visit right before your midday nap around two to experience “In the Meantime, (This Place Will Be Empty after 5:00 pm),” or maybe take in “Few Will Leave Their Place to Come Here for Some Minutes” around four, right before the gallery closes. The title of the exhibit changes each hour, but the work of the architecturally-trained Colombian artist will be consistently compelling. An interactive exploration of the ways in which the human body relates to and experiences temporal and spatial environments, Sierra’s installation consists of a series of constructions made with natural materials that have been isolated, processed, and domesticated. The exhibit emphasizes the presence and experience of the visitor, begging to be walked over, stood in, and experienced firsthand, whatever the time of day. The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. through June 28, Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org (Lewis Page)

Mirrored Infinity Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” visual artist John Whitlock inquires into existentialism, spirituality, and reproduction through black and white collages that are scanned and crafted into mixed media compositions. These are accompanied by a video feed of evolving geometric patterns on an infinite loop. The work uses simple shapes to create elaborate and semi-religious iconography, gold—with its connotations of preciousness and implication of age—and geometric distortions. Whitlock works primarily in collage and assemblage and is influenced by the surplus of stimuli in our culture and society, particularly in popular graphic images. Join Whitlock at the Chicago Urban Art Society’s debut in its new McKinley Park space in a show “about finding yourself in the search for another.” Chicago Urban Art Society, 3636 S. Iron 6:30pm-11:30pm through Saturday, June 27. Free. (773)951-8101. chicagourbanartsociety.com (Clyde Schwab)

ARC 40th Anniversary Exhibit An show in honor of the 40th anniversary of ARC, one of the oldest female-run art galleries and exhibition spaces in the country, will begin this Friday at the Beverly Arts Center. The show features over 120 current and former artists from the co-operative gallery in Chicago. Founded in 1973, ARC provides exhibition opportunities for emerging artists based on “excellence of artwork” and without discrimination regarding gender, race, class, and other factors.

While ARC is an internationally recognized exhibition space, it also serves as an educational foundation, providing opportunities for emerging artists. Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Friday, May 31, 7pm-9pm through May 31.

(773)445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org (Clyde Schwab)

Imaginary Landscapes Returning to a space of your past is the best way to wipe away the rose-colored nostalgia tint from your glasses.

Through Imaginary Landscapes, Mana Contemporary presents an exploration of the relationship between space, time, and memory. Four Midwest-based artists delve into the uncertain space at the nexus of the three, and the result is a collection of sculptures and images gathered by Chicago-based curator Allison Glenn. Lisa Alvarado’s work features elements of shamanism as she critiques cultural appropriation and assimilation; Assaf Evron toes the line between photography and sculpture; deconstructing the mundane, Robert Burnier explores failed utopia; and, last but not least, Caroline Kent harnesses narrative and storytelling to ruminate on what it means to be an outsider in another country. Delve into the uncertainty that spans space and time. Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St., 4th floor. through May 31. Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. (312)8500555. Free. manacontemporarychicago.com (Kristin Lin)

Nature’s Matrix Like many of their fellow artists, Charles Heppner and Diane Jaderberg have turned to nature for inspiration.

Instead of capturing the astonishing might of an ocean or the tranquility of a peaceful sylvan landscape, they channel elements from nature and turn them into visual motifs, repeating and abstracting them to create pieces that are not just strange but nearly unrecognizable. Also important for their work and their new installation is the interaction between technology and nature, which is mirrored in Heppner’s use of digital media and computer software to create prints. Their joint exhibition, “Nature’s Matrix,” is taking place at the Hyde Park Art Center, where the two have been studying and creating since the mid-2000s. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. through July 5. (773)3245520. hydeparkart.org (Robert Sorrell)

From the Hearth: A Home of Art, Education, and Community for 75 Years In 1940, the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project funded the creation of over one hundred centers for the arts nationwide. Seventy-five years later, the South Side Community Art Center in Bronzeville is the only one that remains. Awarded Chicago Landmark status in 1994, the Art Center continues to serve as a symbolic and historic site of the legacy of African-American art in Chicago. In collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Center presents a retrospective of a seventy-five-year history of art, activism, and community-building. Curated

by Lamar Gayles and Kara Franco—two young artists under the mentorship of the MCA assistant curator and the former director of SSCAC—the show will include the works of artists such as Archibald Motley and Margaret Burroughs as well as discussions on the past and future of the SSCAC as a place of constant reinvention and innovation. South Side Community Art Center, 3831 S. Michigan Ave. through June 16. Wed-Fri 12pm-5pm, Sat 9am-5pm, Sun 1pm-5pm. Free. (773)373-1026. sscartcenter. org (Lewis Page)

The Break Age Having received his M.F.A in sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Benjamin Zellmer Bellas makes art that is, according to Slow gallery, “Art and not art at the same time.” His upcoming show at Slow in Pilsen touches upon themes of faith, mystery, and the origins of life, but also science, domesticity, and technology.

Though progressive in nature, the show draws upon traditional art-making processes. Bellas emphasizes that each of his works of art embodies its own transformation—who knows, maybe “The Break Age” will also change you. Slow, 2153 W. 21st St. through June 13, 6pm-9pm. Free. (773)6458803. paul-is-slow.info ( Juan Toledo)

MAY 27, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19