SSW 01.28.15

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

IN CHICAGO

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 Bea Malsky Managing Editor Hannah Nyhart Deputy Editors John Gamino, Meaghan Murphy Politics Editors Osita Nwanevu, Rachel Schastok Music Editor Jake Bittle Stage & Screen Olivia Stovicek Editor Visual Arts Editor Lauren Gurley, Robert Sorrell Editor-at-Large Bess Cohen Contributing Editors Maha Ahmed, Lucia

Ahrensdorf, Christian

Belanger, Mari Cohen, Emma Collins Social Media Editor Emily Lipstein Web Editor Sarah Claypoole Photo Editor Illustration Editor Layout Editors

Luke White Ellie Mejia Adam Thorp, Baci Weiler

Senior Writers Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Olivia Adams, Julia Aizuss,

Max Bloom, Austin Brown,

Amelia Dmowska, Mark

Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja,

Jeanne Lieberman, Zoe Ma

-koul, Olivia Myszkowski,

Jamison Pfeifer, Hafsa Razi, Kari Wei Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet

Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Jean Cochrane, Lexi

Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow, Amber Sollenberger, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu Editorial Intern

Clyde Schwab

Webmaster Business Manager

Shuwen Qian Harry Backlund

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 Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

Cover images courtesy of Skandar Skandal, design by Ellie Mejia.

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

Obrahma With the election around the corner and Rahm’s ratings at an all-time low, it only makes sense that Chicago’s incumbent mayor would enlist some celebrity endorsements—such as, for example, the President of the United States, soon-to-be-brought-home-? (see page 9) Chicagoan Barack Obama. You can go online or flip on the radio to hear Obama tout Rahm’s record—longer school day, higher minimum wage, the phrase “every neighborhood”—over the Spotify in-house ad music. The kicker is when Big O praises Rahm for “doing what’s right, instead of what’s popular,” as if it isn’t possible to do neither. For the record, eighty-seven percent of Chicagoans voted in November to raise the minimum wage.

Remembering Mr. Banks It’s a sad week for Chicago sports. Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs Hall of Famer and eleven-time All-Star, died of a heart attack on January 23 at age eighty-three. The shortstop and first baseman, who spent all nineteen of his Major League seasons with the Cubs, was so beloved by the team’s fans that the famously caustic manager Leo “The Lip” Durocher once said, “I had to play the man or there would have been a revolution in the street.” He was often asked to recite his signature catchphrase—“Let’s play two!”—by random Chicagoans; Banks always obliged. His bronze statue, which currently sits outside Wrigley Field, will be moved to Daley Plaza from Wednesday to Saturday so fans can pay their respects. Here’s to you, Mr. Cub.

Trouble Brewing For the second time in one week, the owners of Bow Truss, a Pilsen boutique coffee shop opened last August, were greeted on Monday morning by anti-gentrification signs. The handmade signs, left on the shop’s front windows, read: “GENTRIFICATION IS NOT Welcome here! Racism and Classism smelllls like your coffee...” and “Te Gusta leche con tu cafe? Sugar with your GENTRIFICATION?” In response, Bow Truss owner Phil Tadros has reached out to 25th Ward Alderman Danny Solis for advice on how to handle the situation, and has declined to report the incident to the police. Speaking with DNAinfo, Tadros has extended an open hand to whoever put up the signs, expressing a wish to meet with the community at his shop. “To do anything positive, or move forward, we have to have a conversation with the people doing this. We aren’t here to harm anyone,” he said. Meanwhile, on Facebook and EveryBlock, a conversation has been triggered. Commenters are weighing in on both sides, with some denouncing the signs as foolish and reductive and others expressing real concern over gentrification’s racial displacement and Bow Truss’s expansion from their original North Side locales of River North and Lakeview. Whether you choose to look at these signs as sharp commentary on change in the neighborhood or as pointless rabblerousing, it’s clear that there’s a conversation to be had regarding gentrification, artisanal coffee, and business ownership in Pilsen.

IN THIS ISSUE the audacious archive of the aacm

ssac at seventy-five

The group of musicians, and—importantly—the music itself, was “free” to begin with. robert sorrell...4

“There was a vibrancy that this particular magic art center brought to the neighborhood.”

Both “Happy Days” and a song by Tupac find their place.

bringing obama home

playing king

Parson’s staging, like all good Godot stagings, asks us to… ponder our pondering. osita nwanevu...5

The impression this campaign creates is one of a grassroots effort spontaneously emerging out of the surrounding neighborhoods. christian belanger...9

The play, each performance a largely improvised affair, is at once a poem, a song, and a prayer to the now deceased King. will craft...16

taking kids of the block

finding charley organaire

the most everything

“Daddy Charles, all these years I’ve been dancing to your music and didn’t know?” jack nuelle...12

You can’t help but feel part of something visceral, emotional, elevated—brutal.

worth the wait

“ You can only help the youth by focusing on what they need, not what you think they need.” michelle gan...6

rachel schastok...7

humor but no laughs

chloe hadavas...16

maha ahmed...16

JANUARY 28, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

MUSIC

The Audacious Archive of the AACM

“Free at First” at the DuSable Museum

BY ROBERT SORRELL

T

he DuSable Museum was a flurry of activity on MLK Day. Grammy Award-winning artist J. Ivy performed in the auditorium, family-friendly films on the civil rights movement played on repeat, docents led tours, and in one of the main galleries upstairs, a small exhibition focusing on a group of musicians from the South Side opened its doors.

“Free at First: The Audacious Journey of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians” takes up a different kind of struggle than the one most of the crowd focused on last week. The AACM constantly sought creative expression through music—jazz, to be specific. A sound that comes up through the heels of feet and bent knees, arches through the back, and explodes out of brass, wood, and steel. Fast, improvisational, momentary.

The initial premise of “Free at First” is spelled out in the title. Namely, that the group of musicians, and—importantly—the music itself, was “free” to begin with: free from creative stifling, free from institutions, and free from the traditional money-run world of entertainment.

“The only jobs that we’re going to have where we can really perform original music are concerts we promote,” proclaimed Jodie Christian, one of AACM’s founders. His words are written neatly on one wall over a photograph of him at the piano. Next to him are photos of the other founders: Kelan Phil Cochran, Steve McCall, and Muhal Richard Abrams. Above Abrams’s head appears the dictum, “We need to be remembered as representing ourselves.”

Formed in 1965, two years after King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, three years before his assassination, and in the same year as the Selma-Montgomery march, the AACM has evident ties to both King and the civil rights movement. Yet, instead of having to fight for

their rights, the AACM asserted them from the very beginning. They weren’t asking to be allowed in, but rather pushing to open the door, showing what was possible—and, after them, expected—in experimental jazz. Free at first.

The DuSable’s exhibit uses anything it can find to create a portrait of this amorphous, dynamic group, the whole thing a feeling of collage. Though there is perhaps no other way to capture a group that, in their fiftieth year, calls themselves the “oldest and most venerable organization of its kind.” A rather modest title, given the DuSable’s assertion that the AACM is the only remaining musician’s collective, a fact nearly impossible to prove.

Nonetheless, inside the DuSable exhibit’s MLK Day opening, these concerns were put aside as a mix of parents, children, retirees, and the occasional young adult wandered through the collection of photos, posters, clothing, objects, and TVs. In addition to the paraphernalia lining the walls and filling a few museum cases, in one corner stood a recreation of the famous “Hubkaphone” created by Henry Threadgill, an early member of the AACM. The DuSable’s version of the Hubkaphone, placed in the largest room of the exhibit, consists of a metal frame with three horizontal bars running through it. On these bars hang—you guessed it—hubcaps, in addition to large metal plates, cowbells, a wooden slit drum with a mallet, and other sundry metal objects that may or may not have come from an actual car.

Children and adults alike flocked to the massive instrument, testing out the sound of an old Mercedes hubcap versus a newer Chevrolet, brake disc versus cowbell. The ruckus mixed with videos of live performances, creating a soundtrack oddly fitting for the experimental musicians the exhibition at-

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

courtesy of art burton

tempts to capture.

Wandering through the rooms of “Free at First” is a bit like going on a treasure hunt.

Photos cluster together on walls painted pumpkin yellow and bright red. Looking closely, wonderful details pop out: a man playing a saxophone that must be at least six feet tall, a concert poster from Japan near an album recorded live in 1972 at Mandel Hall, just a few blocks east of the museum.

On one of the TV screens, an excerpt from a documentary on saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Closeness, plays. In one segment, McIntyre tells a story about playing with Miles Davis, who told him to stuff cotton in his ears to keep the band from blowing his eardrums. On stage McIntyre found a groove, and kept riffing on it, eyes closed until he cracked a lid to find he was the only one left on the stage. Davis and his band had left, frustrated by the sax player from

courtesy of muhal richard abrams

Chicago who wouldn’t shut up. McIntyre tells the tale with a grin.

McIntyre passed away in 2013, and most of the other early members of the AACM (not to mention the Prince of Darkness himself, Miles Davis) have passed away as well. With the AACM heading into its fiftieth year, heaps of great music and scores of nearly mythic musicians in its wake, “Free at First” could easily have been all nostalgia.

The AACM was “free” from the beginning.

And despite the slow decline of popular interest in jazz, and the equally slow but just as acidic disappearance of music venues across the South Side, maybe it still can be. After the DuSable’s entrance fee, of course.

DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl. Through September 6. $10; free Sundays. (877)387-2251. dusablemuseum.org

STAGE

Worth the Wait Waiting for Godot at the Court Theatre

BY OSITA NWANEVU

A

selection of adaptations that inspired director and Court Theatre resident artist Ron OJ Parson’s staging of Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot are singled-out on a large poster hanging in the Court Theatre’s lobby. Two of these stagings—a 1957 Broadway revival starring Geoff Searle, Mantan Moreland, and Geoffery Holder and a 2006 show by the Classical Theatre of Harlem placing the characters in a flooded, post-Katrina New Orleans— featured, as Parson’s staging does, an allblack cast, a move Parson says sits well within the tradition of draping changes over the play’s bare-bones structure to imbue it with particular meanings for particular communities.

“I am not here to change the play, maybe just deepen some of the issues found in the play by having the cast represented with the bodies and actors I cast,” he says in an interview featured in the show’s program. “I wanted to do something the Black community could get involved in— but not in the most stereotypical way.”

Later in the interview, he makes reference to the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown as indicative of a deliverance that the African-American community in particular has long awaited even as it seeks answers to the questions that trouble all humanity, or so the play argues.

The play’s lead characters—Vladimir and Estragon, two hobos who implicitly stand in for all humanity—wait for the duration of the play for the arrival of a man named Godot, whom, from its very first staging, has been understood as a catchall symbol.

He is an absent embodiment of the answers to our deepest questions, our queries about existential meaning. The value of

interpersonal relationships. The existence and nature of God. The selection of an all-black cast both broadens and grounds those questions.

Audiences, Parson suggests, can imagine a black Vladimir and Estragon waiting for justice, equality, and dignity in the firm here and now even as they look to the heavens and down the road for all the rest.

But although race relations are likely on the minds of this staging’s viewers

oppression more than a white Pozzo with a black Lucky might have. The tendency of men to exploit others and the kinds of pontifications used to justify or obscure that tendency—which Smith delivers in a stout and sonorous voice that betrays his experience as a voiceover artist—are both universal, despite the particular alignments of oppressors and oppressed played out in our history. As is the temptation to succumb to both, as Vladimir and Es-

Audiences, Parson suggests, can imagine a black Vladimir and Estragon waiting for justice, equality, and dignity in the firm here and now even as they look to the heavens and down the road for all the rest. even before the first crack of the whip of Pozzo—a proud buffoon who drives a man named Lucky in front of him like a mule—Parson’s staging retains the opacity and thematic ambiguity of the play as written. He’s avoided certain unsubtle moves.

A black Pozzo, played with bombast and bravura by A.C. Smith, who was recently seen in both The Misanthrope and Tartuffe at Court, invites viewers to examine the nature of pure power and de-racialized

tragon’s playful flirtations with exercising authority demonstrate.

The risk of succumbing is embodied

by Lucky, who, as Vladimir exclaims in a brief attack of insight and indignation, is a human being stripped of his humanity by Pozzo and circumstance. Though Lucky is mute through most of the play, the rigid expressions of actor Anthony Lee Irons and his trembling anger at being ordered around speak volumes. At one of the play’s

most memorable moments—after Lucky is ordered to “Think”—Irons is a revelation, convulsing frenetically and bandying across the stage and into the audience while delivering Beckett’s absurd stream of consciousness monologue. His performance is at once frightening and funny; audience members should prepare to join in an ovation as soon as Lucky finally comes to rest.

The play’s other two leads are decent in their roles. Alfred H. Wilson and Allen Gilmore nail the physically comedic and evocative parts of Estragon and Vladimir as a Laurel and Hardy-type pair. Gilmore, who plays Vladimir, has a sadness to his face that lends certain scenes extra poignancy. His despair at the second visit of Godot’s boy near the play’s end ensures that audiences leave as moody and contemplative as Beckett intended. Gilmore and Wilson play their roles with a naturalistic chumminess that makes the open questions they pose fit with their more ribald and banal banter. This may well have been what Beckett intended: an illustration in their characters of our inclination to squeeze thoughts about the great beyond and ourselves into minds already crowded with frivolities. Of our willingness to place our musings on God and man on a shelf between our fart jokes and favorite songs. Parson’s staging, like all good Godot stagings, asks us to examine that shelf more closely. It asks us to ponder our pondering—our willingness to wait for Godot, who or whatever it might be.

Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. January 28–February 15. $55, $49.50 seniors, $41.25 students. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org

JANUARY 28, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

EDUCATION

T

Taking Kids Off the Block

he Kids Off the Block Youth Center on the corner of 117th Street and Michigan Avenue only recently reopened its doors. It had been closed since the end of the summer for repairs after the ceiling collapsed, and the organization is still in the process of reorganizin. However, while the center’s floors are scuffed from water damage, its walls tell a different story. Every inch, hand-painted by community youth, is covered in framed articles, plaques, and certificates documenting the achievements of the organization and its founder Diane Latiker, who has been honored as one of CNN’s Top Heroes of 2011 and a BET Award Honoree. All the work on the center, including the ceiling repairs, has been done by community members.

Even the Kids Off the Block (KOB) sign at the entrance, which features a portrait of Latiker, was a gift from the youth when

the programs she had started.

“I invited those kids into my home, not knowing what to do. I was a mom: I knew kids, but I didn’t know other people’s kids,” Latiker said. Despite early hesitations, Latiker realized that the first step was to get to know the kids.

“One of the keys to young people is to listen, so you can find out what they’re going through. You can only help the youth by focusing on what they need, not what you think they need.” It didn’t take long before she had heard countless stories about how these kids were being chased by gangs and failing school, and how their academic struggles stemmed from a fear for their own safety as well as domestic distractions.

Latiker has resolved countless conflicts in the last twelve years, including one where she stood between the barrels of two guns in a living room filled with sev-

“For those young people who think nobody cares, to see somebody...and you don’t know them, and they care? Changes lives.

Can’t nothing touch that.”

KOB moved into the building in 2010.

enty-five teenagers. Conflict is not uncom-

paying particular attention to their health, education, and social networks.

Latiker first opened the doors of her home to youth in her Roseland community in 2003, wanting her thirteen-year-old daughter Aisha and her friends to have a haven away from gangs. A safe space for a few teenagers rapidly grew into a refuge for seventy-five kids, most of whom Aisha did not know at all, but who had heard of Miss Diane’s open offer of kindness to anyone looking for it. Kids slept on her dining room floor, ate at her table, and showed up at all hours of the day and night. That same year, Latiker left her job as a cosmetologist to devote herself full-time to developing

these issues and achieve its goal of helping as many youth as possible. Although Latiker started this program on her own, she’s quick to point out that “no man is an island.” Today, she works with a team of seven youth advisors, full-time volunteers who plan KOB’s programming and growth. In addition to them, Latiker also has a core team of about twenty-five volunteers who work on planning KOB’s special events.

Latiker’s programs began informally before developing into today’s formal organization. “I had no idea at the beginning,” she says. “I knew the boys liked basketball, so I took fifty-nine dollars and bought a rolling basketball hoop. Before I knew it, I

its mission statement, Kids Off the mon among the youth at the Center, and Diane Latiker BlockIndescribes itself as a nonprofit organi- she explains that, “[Conflicts] escalate bedesigned “to provide at-risk, low-in- cause they are already upset about what is grows her after- zation come youth positive alternatives to gangs, going on with life, at home, and at school, truancy, violence, and the juvenile and they take it out on each other.” school programs in drugs, justice system.” It does so by offering a Since KOB’s earliest days, it partnered myriad of services that address the issues with people and organizations both inside West Pullman young people face on a big-picture level, and outside the community to address

BY MICHELLE GAN

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

had fifty boys from everywhere coming to play ball.” That hoop has since transformed into a full outdoor basketball court in the vacant lot across the street from the center.

Latiker did far more than offer a space to shoot hoops, however; she worked to help the students feel safe so that they could participate in school, offering tutoring services to boost their grades and providing recreational activities to foster their passions. Eventually, she expanded their academic services to include a focus on higher education. “They told me about how nobody in their family was going to college. So I started working with organizations to get them into college,” Latiker said.

She pointed out two young men of KOB with special pride. They recently graduated college and are now launching their own tax preparation service. Their offices are housed in the KOB community center, and in return, they will teach youth interested in entrepreneurship how to prepare taxes. Exchanges of that kind are common in KOB’s history. Youth give back however they can in a number of ways, whether as full-time volunteers, music instructors, or members of the planning committee for the Feed a Team event every Thanksgiving.

“This year I’m taking a leap of faith,” Latiker said: her future plans for KOB involve investing its limited funds to boost its strength as a career resource. “Jobs are fine, but careers are different, trades, something they can do when times are hard,” she explained. To work toward this goal, she planned workshops with multinational corporations like Nike as well as with individuals who teach trades like carpentry and coding.

In fact, Latiker and her team are currently applying for grant funding in the hopes of expanding programming, hiring a full-time staff, and purchasing a permanent facility. A few of the volunteers are taking grant writing classes.

Despite KOB’s wide scope of programming, Latiker maintains that mentoring is KOB’s first priority and its most successful program. As she summed it up, “For those young people who think nobody cares, to see somebody actually care, and you don’t know them, and they care?

Changes lives. Can’t nothing touch that.”

Get involved with Kids Off the Block by contacting Latiker and her team of volunteers at www.kobchicago.org.

VISUAL ARTS

rachel schastok

SSCAC at Seventy-Five A conversation with executive director Maséqua Myers

BY RACHEL SCHASTOK

T

h e South Side Community Art Center is located in a beautiful 1893 Georgian Revival house, the former home of a wealthy grain merchant. Its galleries and the row of arched windows in its third-story ballroom overlook a calm stretch of South Michigan Avenue in Bronzeville. SSCAC’s collections include federally commissioned art from the 1940s, works from the Black Arts Movement and the AfriCOBRA collective of the 1960s, as well as pieces by present-day artists.

The South Side Community Art Center turns seventy-five this upcoming December. In preparation, the Center will host a number of fundraisers this year, including a reproduction of the famed Artists and Models Ball held to raise money in 1939. While some of the building’s upstairs rooms, including the ballroom, are in rough shape, plans for this year also include moving forward with plans to renovate the mansion to its original grandeur. SSCAC board member and University of Chicago art history professor Rebecca Zorach is leading a new initiative to digitize the center’s historic records and works—I’m one of the assistants working on that project.

In August 2014 Maséqua Myers became SSCAC’s new executive director. She’s a registered nurse, but has always been involved in the arts as multidisciplinary artist with projects as diverse as filmmaking, media consulting, and producing the Teen Talk Radio Theater program on WHPK 88.5FM. I sat down with Myers in her bright second-story office at SSCAC to talk about the Center’s storied past and where it’s going from here.

How was SSCAC founded?

The South Side Community Art Center was created because of a lack of opportunities for African-American artists to display their works. In the 1930s, Peter Pollack was a Jewish gallerist in downtown Chicago. He was instrumental in founding SSCAC because he was the only one who would display African-American art. He was an officer with the WPA Federal Art Project, and he championed the cause of the SSCAC and led to it being one of the recipients of that federal funding.

JANUARY 28, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

VISUAL ARTS Before that, African-American artists exhibited their art, but not in established galleries. Art was displayed in churches, YMCAs, or any place where the public could gather to appreciate art.

Dr. Margaret Burroughs, one of the hardest-working, longest-living founders of the organization, worked tirelessly to raise the $8,000 that it took to buy this building. She had the Trail of Dimes, like what a lot of people still do. They went to certain corners of our city with that little cup and give the spiel about who they are. That’s primarily how the monies were raised to buy this building. We are the first African-American art center in the nation and the only art center out of the 110 [WPA-FAP art centers] that is still operational.

In May 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt gave the dedication speech in what is now called the Burroughs Gallery on the ground floor. When she spoke, the streets were filled with people, from 37th Street all the way down to 39th Street. Thousands of people wanted to be as close as they could to such a historic moment. Before the Depression, Michigan Avenue was lined up and down both sides of the street with mansions, but it became difficult to keep up those homes. The home had been vacant about fifteen years before SSCAC acquired it and was in need of remodeling.

How does SSCAC affect the community around it?

Art brings vitality. It gives us an opportunity to express ourselves in creative ways—people get a chance to view something as safe as the way someone paints a flower or a building, or the reality of how they’re living. Art also fosters communication and healing. As a result of that, there was a vibrancy that this particular magic art center brought to the neighborhood.

I’ve heard stories from elders in their eighties who were young when the Center was founded. They would stand outside, they say, and look at all of the energy from the people who came into this building and they would say, “One day I’ll be old enough to go in there.” That gives you an idea of the spirit and the vitality and op-

portunity that this center created at that time, and still does.

SSCAC is doing something different. It’s not just an art center, but also a center for social change. We don’t see a separation between the two. This center becomes like a town hall meeting-place, so people can come in and talk about social issues of the day, and how to address them as a community member or as an artist. That’s something that sets us apart from other art centers and galleries: we don’t just have art for art’s sake, but we also have art for education and social change.

Grants can be an iffy situation too. We’ve had some highs and some lows, but obviously the lows have not been low enough, I’m proud to say!

ple in the community to see that there are other ways to express yourself than in a violent manner.

How do you select artists and plan exhibitions?

Let’s talk about the future of SSCAC. Do you have a particular vision or things you’d like to see happen?

We have artists that are always seeking us out because of our name and community presence, but we also like to seek out artists that we find are saying something.

We want to stay relevant to the times, but that doesn’t mean all the art has to be contemporary. It means we want to affect life and improve it. So if someone is trying to

I’d like to see us educate the city and country at large about the value of African-American art. Another vision would be to continue SSCAC’s role as a place to educate young people in the arts, to continue having multidisciplinary classes and to be a premier place to develop emerging artists.

Do you have a favorite story or person from SSCAC’s history?

“I believe one of the reasons SSCAC is still here is because it’s filled a void for the AfricanAmerican community—it provides a place where African Americans can display their art.”

I believe one of the reasons SSCAC is still here is because it’s filled a void for the African-American community—it provides a place where African Americans can display their art. There are so many more galleries now that are accepting and welcoming of African-American art than there were in the 1940s, but no one else has the specific mission that we have: we conserve, preserve, and promote the legacy and the future of this art while we educate the community of the value of this art and culture.

Has the Center ever run across hard times?

Yes! As a matter of fact, we’re probably in one right now. A lot of it has to do with where the country is at the time. We’re a nonprofit and rely on donations and art sales. If the country’s not flourishing economically, that’s going to affect us.

8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

express themselves, then we like that. It doesn’t mean we won’t accept flowers or landscapes, but we’re open-minded and will take paintings that depict issues like gun violence or discrimination, whereas other galleries may not want to do that.

Has SSCAC organized any special programming in the last year in response to national issues of police violence?

One of our biggest projects in the last year was called “Paint the Block.” It was an event where we partnered artists with a younger person from the community.

We had these wonderful large pieces of plywood and everyone from the community would come, dip into paint, and express themselves. It didn’t matter if you were an artist or just someone who wanted to participate and engage. Then the artist would take everything and tie it together with their talents. It allows peo-

Well, Dr. Burroughs is a given. I actually met her when I was a teen. I took and observed classes here, with OBAC [Organization of Black American Culture], which was a quite respected poetry group in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s that held their meetings here, and Kuumba workshop, which had African dance classes here. And Dr. Burroughs was my Humanities 101 instructor at Kennedy-King College. I’ve had a direct experience of her ability to invigorate you, to make you feel very good about who you are and the importance of your culture as an African American. And I’ve learned from her that you don’t need to dislike anyone else to love yourself—as a matter of fact, it’s counter-productive.

There’s also Gordon Parks [a photographer who had a darkroom in the basement]— my family grew up on Life magazine, and he was the first African-American photojournalist. I remember seeing his work and hearing older people talk about his works and how wonderful it was to have this black photojournalist shooting for Life magazine.

And there was Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black poet laureate of Illinois. Some of her poems just hit home—”we real cool, we left school...” One of the stories I’ve heard is how she would sit at the west window of our gallery at the piano, and use that moment of watching the sun and write her poems. Sometimes I come in here, when no one’s here, and I believe I can feel her spirit filling the room.

POLITICS

Bringing Obama Home?

What it means to support the presidential library on the South Side

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

julie wu

E

ven before Rev. Dr. Leon Finney rose up to speak in support of a presidential library at the first of two public hearings last week, members of the audience, scattered across the packed auditorium at Hyde Park Academy, stood and cheered for him. The well-known South Side pastor began his speech softly, slowly swelling into a booming voice, until halfway through his allotted two minutes, the rest of the audience arose from its lethargy and hundreds of people in dark

blue t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Bring it on Home” stood up to voice their full-throated, rapturous support. Ending with the words, “It’s time to bring President Obama back to Chicago,” Finney’s was a dazzling display of choreography that worked to its fullest effect; when the next speaker came up, he quipped, “Well, I don’t know if I can follow that.”

Rev. Finney is not officially affiliated with the University of Chicago’s bid; he is not even a member of the Community

Advisory Board the school put together to aid in its creation. Nevertheless, he is one of countless community leaders who have thrown their support behind the bid as the UofC quietly organizes for the library behind the scenes. Over the course of the past year, the school has created an extensive campaign of support for its two bid sites in and around Jackson Park and— less controversially—Washington Park.

With the help of Carol Adams, former president of the DuSable Museum and a

member of the aforementioned board, the UofC has produced countless videos of local residents cheerfully reciting “Bring it on Home,” even enlisting renowned local rapper Rhymefest to perform a minute-long freestyle in favor of the library.

The impression this campaign creates is one of a grassroots effort spontaneously emerging out of the surrounding neighborhoods. The hearings, meant to solicit community input on the specific issue of using public parkland, often seemed more

JANUARY 28, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

julie wu

like an opportunity for local leadership to drum up an emotional defense of the library that would further confirm a vision of unequivocal support (the UofC touted the hearings as a chance to “come out and show your support” for the proposal).

The reality, of course, is more complex.

Among many residents who fully support the idea of a library, there still exists a deep unease, rooted in a worrying institutional history, about the potential consequences of such a change.

“The developers are coming in, and it’s not going to be affordable for people living here,” says Alfredia Little, assistant program director at the Washington Park center of the Chicago Youth Programs, an organization dedicated to providing programs for youth. Little was raised in the Washington Park neighborhood and recalls using the parkland as a child.

“I might want to move back in if it becomes a great neighborhood,” she continued. “People are afraid. A lot of peo-

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

ple that have been living around here for years are afraid of losing their properties.

But I think it’s a great thing. I really do.”

T

he UofC has a long legacy of harmful expansion into neighboring areas. In the mid-twentieth century, it enacted and encouraged policies to remove African Americans from Hyde Park and prevent more from moving in. Those policies resulted in the current disparities between the area immedi-

ately surrounding the UofC campus and the neighborhood just west across Washington Park, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. As of 2010, the median income in the neighborhood was just over $21,000, less than half the city average.

In the 1960s, Woodlawn residents made the University pledge not to build south of 61st Street, for fear of the type of urban renewal that had completely transformed Hyde Park in the preceding decade. Though it operates a charter

POLITICS

school on 63rd Street, the University is still committed to honoring that pledge, according to Jeremy Manier, the UofC’s news director. As it happens, The Woodlawn Organization, one of the groups that led the anti-University effort, was headed in the 1960s by Rev. Finney.

People still distrust the University and its capacity for expansion. At the public hearing, one older man stood up and told the audience, “The University of Chicago has historically not been a good neighbor. Colored folks, Negroes, blacks, whatever you may call it, the University of Chicago won’t give you anything. Don’t trust the University of Chicago.”

Younger members of the neighborhood sense some of this animosity. “I think a lot of the people who are opposed to development have been here for generations, and they don’t think that people like them will be able to afford to live here if it gets a lot better,” said Emmiko Beathea, who moved into Washington Park two years ago, while walking in the park. “[The library] is a good thing for the community. It’s good for the less privileged and the more privileged.”

“When parts of the neighborhood are gentrified, you’ll be displaced, and they’ll tell you, ‘Come back later,’” said Ernest Tucker, who lives just north of Washington Park, while walking his dog on parkland. “What’s the purpose? Who can afford to stay there?”

While the UofC has been relatively covert with the more specific details of its bid, its extensive marketing of the proposal as a locally supported boon for the surrounding neighborhoods stands in contrast to the approaches of other universities vying for the project. Neither Columbia University nor the University of Hawaii have public websites for their bids, while the University of Illinois at Chicago, in an attempt to partner with the neighborhood of North Lawndale, has adopted the slogan, “A shared destiny of transformation,” and released the full details of its bid to the public. In this context, the UofC’s public relations push is more understandable: it is the only contender that seems to have to sell its bid not only to the President, but to the residents of the neighborhoods that could end up housing the library.

The UofC has, however, garnered the staunch support of Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In late December, it was leaked that

the library foundation had concerns with the UofC bid’s reliance on parkland it did not own. Emanuel has worked hard in the past weeks to ensure that the parkland is made available for the bid as quickly as possible, recently sending a formal land transfer ordinance to the city council.

Curiously, Emanuel has done little to address what those same leaks said was holding back the UIC bid—the uncertainty of recent administrative leadership—though the school’s incoming administration recently released a letter confirming its “unequivocal support” for the bid.

If the UofC’s Washington Park bid goes through using public parkland, it

acres. Manier declined to comment on the comparison to the Kennedy Library, but said that the UofC feels that building on the parkland will make its bid more competitive as well as minimize the effect of the building on local residents.

The UofC has also promised a net gain of parkland after the entire project is finished, although Emanuel has said the city would not necessarily hold itself or the Foundation to that promise.

Of course, the Foundation could also choose not to use the land already owned by the UofC as part of the offer, paving the way for other University-sponsored developments in the same vein as the

“A lot of people that have been living around here for years are afraid of losing their properties. But I think it’s a great thing. I really do.”

Alfredia Little, assistant program director at the Washington Park center of the Chicago Youth Programs stands to profit from development on the six acres of vacant land the UofC owns across from the park, which it began to acquire (along with the land that the Arts Incubator now occupies) a couple of years ago, in preparation for the failed 2016 Olympic bid.

Manier says that the University made a total of about eleven acres of contiguous land available across from the parkland in its bid (apart from the land the school owns there were also parcels made available by both the city and CTA). The belief that so much space was necessary stemmed from a study of existing presidential libraries, which tend to have a three- to five-acre building at their center surrounded by twenty to twenty-five acres of open space, although the Kennedy Library, in Boston, consists of a three-acre building on a lot of just ten acres, and the Columbia bid would place the Obama Library on a Manhattanville satellite campus that is, in its entirety, only seventeen

recent Arts Incubator and Currency Exchange Café. And it is likely that outside developers, who understand the potential economic benefits of a tourist attraction like the presidential library, would be quick to buy up properties in the surrounding area. A study commissioned by the UofC estimated that local earnings from the library would total around $56 million annually.

“If they [the University] want to put the library across the street from Washington Park, just condemn the houses they need to condemn,” John Vinci, an architect who spoke at the hearings, said in a phone interview, “because they would get condemned anyway once they’re taken by hotels and stores.”

An employee of one of the businesses along Garfield Boulevard near the Green Line, who declined to be named because he didn’t want to be seen as opposing the library, expressed concerns about the consequences of the bid for locals, and also

suggested that properties surrounding the UofC’s proposed library site could be bought up by the city using their powers of eminent domain.

Though it may seem counterintuitive to suggest that the municipal government can use eminent domain powers to transfer private land to a private entity for the purposes of economic development, it has explicitly been legal since the Supreme Court ruled on the matter in 2005 in Kelo vs. City of New London. (The last properties Columbia acquired as part of its satellite campus were taken through eminent domain.) While Illinois did revise its eminent domain laws in the wake of that decision, the new laws still allow for seizure of private property in “blighted areas,” a designation determined by vague, subjective criteria like lack of community planning or excessive vacancies, that could arguably be met by either of the University’s two sites. Though widespread backlash would probably prevent largescale takeovers on the basis of eminent domain, the city could theoretically force residents in either Washington or Jackson Park to transfer their land to private businesses for the express purpose of economic improvement.

Reached for comment, the Mayor’s office simply stated, “None of the finalist sites chosen by the President’s foundation require any use of eminent domain.”

L

ee Hogan, who owns and operates Ms. Lee’s Good Food at Garfield and Indiana Avenues, pointed to the wall of her store when handing over a bag of (immaculate) grilled catfish: “Imagine that wall as a glass window, two stories high, where you can eat your food and look out at the surroundings,” she said, imagining the effects of improvements on her own business. The beloved restaurant, which has been at its current location for the past sixteen years, looks worn down: it’s carry-out only, there are only a couple of chairs scattered around the front, and orders to the cashiers are made across a pane of bulletproof glass.

“I think the library would bring the neighborhood up. The kids around here need something,” Hogan says, sounding hopeful. Still, her optimism is tempered.

“I do fear displacement. I don’t own this building, so it could be put up for sale. That would be a slap in the face— where do we go? I don’t know.”

JANUARY 28, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

courtesy of feel the rhythm reggae club

Finding Charley Organaire

How one superfan is relaunching the career of a forgotten reggae pioneer

BY JACK NUELLE

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

MUSIC

T

he man dancing at the edge of the stage moves with an energy rare for his seventy-plus years.

He dips and bobs, a harmonica pressed to his lips. It’s December 2014, and the man plays for an excited crowd at the Mayne Stage theater in Rogers Park. Behind him, the much younger members of his backing band play with a kind of long-suffering acceptance, aware of how overshadowed they are.

Charles “Organaire” Cameron was in his early thirties when he arrived in the United States in 1976, leaving Jamaica with a musical legacy already established there. A performer from his earliest days, Cameron is best known as a session musician for some of reggae’s most famous faces, including Jimmy Cliff, Toots and the Maytals, and Bob Marley.

Amid the political unrest of the early seventies in Jamaica and his personal frustrations with the politics of Jamaican music labels, Cameron made the jump to Chicago. He established a separate life and career, one that has spanned over thirty years, in a city where he never intended to stay. Cameron is considered a “foundation musician” in Jamaica, having helped create the genres of both ska and reggae. Yet he never gained much traction as a solo star in the country known for his music, and in his adopted country recognition for his past contributions has been basically nonexistent.

But now, with the help of a superfan, Cameron is making a resurgence, becoming known in his own right as co-father of a genre, whose two lives—one Jamaican, one American—are finally converging.

S

itting in a Hyde Park coffee shop, Cameron talks about his musical beginnings, voice moving in the same stutter-start time of the music he has carried with him since Jamaica. He holds himself in an easy manner, slightly stooped, with worn hands and an open, friendly face. The corners of his eyes crinkle as he paints a picture of his history. Next to him sits Skandar Skandal, the owner of Colibri Records and a Chicago-based artist who helped rediscover Cameron in 2012. Last year, Skandal and Colibri put out a limited-edition record of Cameron’s new tracks.

Born in Jamaica in the early forties, Cameron picked up a harmonica at age

five and has hung onto it ever since. “I always liked the sound of it,” he says. “I have a bunch of guitars, and I still don’t play. I still haven’t played a guitar.”

Soon he was performing in local talent competitions, where “there was a prize for the winner, and they booed for the losers. Fortunately I didn’t get too many of the boos.” From there he progressed to nightclubs around the island, playing, he recounts, “everything.”

“Jamaican musicians play every music,” he says, laughing. “You know, I don’t put a limit on music. There’s always something nice in the music, so I listen to everything.”

Soon he was playing regularly with several other foundation musicians— Arkland “Drumbago” Parks, Theophilus Beckford, Jah Jerry. These and others also provided instrumentals for Jamaica’s main ska and reggae music producer, Studio 1, part of a series of studios reminiscent of Detroit’s Motown, both in influence and sheer scale of production.

“We got paid for each side,” Cameron says. “So we tried to get as many as we could.” By his estimate, he appeared on over three thousand sides of records between 1962 and 1969.

This means that Cameron and others turned out a vast number of tracks at an incredible rate. “The way we recorded them, is everything live,” he says. “We had one recording studio, and each producer recorded in the same studio. One finished, then the other took over. So we start at 9pm to 3am. We [didn’t] know the name of the song, especially instrumentals. The producers are the ones who put the title in there. The only ones we know the titles on are the ones where people sing.”

Skandal adds an important tidbit: “The session was live. Just a mic and a two channel mixing track. If they missed [a track], which they did occasionally because they were experimental musicians, they had to start again.”

Cameron essentially provided the soundtrack of a nation and the barebones of a genre, but couldn’t tell you the titles of the vast majority of the tracks he soloed and performed on.

Despite this prolific output, Cameron and other session musicians were often shortchanged by their producers. “The record producers weren’t treating us right,” Cameron remembers. “For example, you

Cameron essentially provided the soundtrack of a nation and the barebones of a genre, but couldn’t tell you the titles of the vast majority of the tracks he soloed and performed on. work for someone, they have the money in their pocket to pay you, but they feel important—super important—so they tell you, ‘Come back tomorrow.’ ” In this landscape, Cameron took matters into his own hands. He created his own label, named it “Organaire Records” after a childhood nickname, and began self-recording, producing, and releasing original music.

It still wasn’t enough. He remembers

a time when, despite having a popular solo record, a track called “Elusive Baby,” he failed to get any airtime in Jamaica. The producers, angry at his unwillingness to play by their rules, pulled Cameron’s songs from the radio.

So Cameron came to Chicago. When he first arrived, he settled on the South Side, near 95th Street and South Avalon Avenue in the Burnside neighborhood.

Cameron played everywhere he could, including Greek restaurants and Jamaican

JANUARY 28, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

MUSIC

parties, but especially for the city’s Latino population: the Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican clubs. Cameron recalls a South Side filled with performance venues, including the Bamboo Club, across from the South Shore Cultural Center.

With the help of Jayde Enterprises, one of the first black-owned talent agencies in Chicago, Cameron began getting booked for larger events around the city.

He played for mayors Jane Byrne and Harold Washington and at events such as ChicagoFest, an annual music festival in the seventies and eighties.

But that, mainly, was it. There was no fame, no great wealth, and most importantly, no real recognition of who he had been in Jamaica. Laughing, he says, “Now I’m stuck here, and now I have a family here.” He never rose higher in prominence, certainly never to the level of a pioneering member of one of the world’s most expansive and influential musical genres. He became a member of the Chicago Painters Union. During the day he painted building exteriors, and at night he gigged, for thirty-odd years.

T

his is where Skandal comes in.

An artist based in Logan Square, Skandal produces paintings and murals, as well as vibrant artwork for Chicago publications (his work has been featured in the Weekly). He has a rabid appreciation for old Jamaican music, and has spent much of his life collecting archival ska and reggae records. The label he started in Mexico City, Colibri Records, comes from the Spanish name for a species of hummingbird endemic to Jamaica.

It moved with him to Chicago when he arrived four years ago.

Skandal first remembers meeting Cameron in 2012 at a celebration commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Jamaican independence in Kenosha, Wisconsin. After hearing Cameron’s name from a Chicago connection who was familiar with the scene in Jamaica, Skandal took a bus, a train, and a cab just to meet Cameron. Back in Chicago, Skandal presented Cameron with the first record Cameron ever put out, from 1963. As Cameron puts it, “He said, ‘Charley Organaire.’ I said, ‘Well you know something

about my history.’ So we started talking.”

It turns out that “Cameron,” the name he had been performing under in Chicago, was unrecognized in Jamaica. He had performed under “Charley Organaire” when he lived there, after the childhood nickname given to him by a neighbor based on Cameron’s ever-present mouth organ. This meant that to many fans of his old music, including Skandal, he was dead—or, at least, had not performed since the early seventies.

Cameron, leaning back in his chair, eyes twinkling, tells about how a bass player who had played with him for years in Chicago didn’t know about his Jamaican roots. “One day he said to me—he called me Daddy Charles—‘Daddy Charles, all these years I’ve been dancing to your music and didn’t know?’ ” Skandal’s mission, then, is to reunite both sides of Cameron’s musical past. As he explains it, “Charley is one of the Jamaican pioneer musicians from the islands. One of the most well-known reggae musicians is Bob Marley, but Bob Marley would be considered third generation.

Charley is the first.” There is a deep desire on Skandal’s part to make the world aware of this. “What we have been doing is trying to rescue his old stuff.”

He pauses to pull out the first record his label, Colibri Records, has made with Charley. It’s one of only five hundred pressed, with the intention of making it a collector’s item for diehard fans like Skandal. “This has been aimed at the public that has been following Charley since he was recording in the sixties,” Skandal says.

On the inside is a photograph of Cameron in a porkpie hat, straight out of his days in Kingston. The tracks are all new, written and arranged by Cameron and Skandal.

They’re recorded in an old-school style, an attempt to capture the sound in the music Cameron put out in the early days of reggae. The record is also Cameron’s first recording on vinyl since the sixties.

Skandal’s mission is clear: to share, and add to, Charley’s legacy. But he has his work cut out for him. “Charley is very humble and he doesn’t like to talk about himself,” Skandal admits.

However, with his two names finally combined, a just-completed European

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

It’s the union between Cameron’s past and present that affirms his staying power. tour with Minnesota backing band the Prizefighters, and more recordings and performances slated for 2015, Charley “Organaire” Cameron isn’t in danger of fading into obscurity anytime soon.

The Mayne Stage show last month was part of a series designed to expose Jamaican foundation music to a larger audience. Chuck Wren, the owner of the Jump Up! record label that put out another Cameron record, this time with the Prizefighters accompanying, organized the show and comments on Cameron’s influence: “Charley’s presence at our shows

made the Jamaican singers feel comfortable…[there’s] nothing like seeing an old friend after decades.” Wren is quick to add, “It’s funny, I think his true Chicago legacy has only begun.”

It’s this union between Cameron’s past and present that affirms his staying power. Plus, he’s surely stuck it out. “I’ve been here a long, long time, he says. “But you never know. When the right time comes, it’s the right time, doesn’t matter when. The thing I always do is just to continue what I’m doing. Never stop.”

SCREEN

courtesy of jesse malmed

Yes to Humor, No to Laughs Untitled ( Just Kidding) at the Logan Center

BY CHLOE HADAVAS

I

am watching “Do Voices,” the last piece in Untitled (Just Kidding), a collection of short video works by artist Jesse Malmed. During the video’s final minutes, singing voices chime in at various points around me. To my left I hear a scratchy Irish accent, and behind me to my right I can discern a timid woman’s voice.

Malmed, the star of the evening, is present, both orchestrating the voices and singing with them.

The scattered chorus is made up of five people in the screening room, singing along with the text on screen. The work concerns navigating cultural differences and cross-cultural participation. As the song progresses, all five in unison sing the lyrics “We sing alone,” followed by one individual singing “We sing together.” Eventually, they all do sing together, and “Do Voices” comes to an end.

Jesse Malmed, thirty-one, explains that his background is in performance-based art, and he now strives “to bring a sense of liveness to a cinematic space”—especially in “Do Voices.”

The video also shows clips of Robin Williams, an actor Malmed admires.

Williams flashes across the screen in segments from his stand-up comedy routines, and as Mrs. Doubtfire explaining—and demonstrating—that his special talent is that he can “do voices.” “What he did is so responsive to people, to the energy in the room,” Malmed says. He hopes to achieve a similar sense of dynamism, and so chose to end Untitled (Just Kidding) with a theatrical performance that “activates the cinema.”

Housed at the Reva and David Logan Center, the exhibition is co-presented by the Hyde Park Arts Center’s Ground Floor, a program that brings together artists from Chicago universities. Now in its third year, Ground Floor has this year recruited twenty artists from university classes of 2013 and 2014. Malmed, a 2014 graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Moving Image Program, will also perform at HPAC on February 18.

With about fifty people in attendance, Malmed showed seven works ranging from three to eighteen minutes long. Many feel particularly like responses to Internet culture; monumental emoticons cycle on the screen as a candy-colored patchwork background slides by. Spliced into the clips of

Robin Williams are scores of imitations from fans on YouTube. The mood is often light and musical, and the videos invoke the staccato of Internet browsing, veering from subject to subject. Both “Happy Days” and a Tupac track find their place.

Aside from “Do Voices”, the work that stands out the most is “IN3DIA,” from 2007, the only video in the program that was not made in the last two and a half years. Meant to embody the memory of travel, “IN3DIA” is a silent work that consists of 1,200 photos Malmed shot when he was in India. They flash across the screen in alternating colors of cyan and red, reminiscent of the old-fashioned way of creating a 3-D image.

Since “IN3DIA,” Malmed has prefered to make more complex pieces addressing multiple themes. Humor is an important element. One woman told him she felt numerous times in the evening that she was privy to an inside joke.

Malmed responded that humor is something he consciously inserts into his videos, but not in an effort to provoke laugh-out-loud responses. Although there were a few chuckles throughout the perfor-

mance, Malmed searches for ways “to instrumentalize jokes in a way that does not effect responses of humor as laughter.” He explains, “There’s something kind of satisfying of thinking that something is funny without the bodily response.”

While he doesn’t oppose laughter, Malmed’s approach to humor is tied to his use of not-quite-3-D effects; he seeks to transmit an awareness of the response-eliciting mechanism rather than the response itself.

While Malmed stresses the importance of the performance-based aspects of his work, only two of the seven pieces contained live performance. One of these consisted only of Malmed shining a flashlight on the screen and the nearby walls for thirty seconds. At the beginning of “Do Voices,” he brought a chair to the front of the screen and stood with his back to the audience, making wildly exaggerated flourishes with his arms and hands as a choral piece played in the background. In a room of mixed emotions, from furrowed brows to half-smiles, it seemed that Malmed, a cheeky “self-trained conductor,” achieved his goal of bringing cinema to life.

JANUARY 28, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

STAGE/MUSIC

Playing King The Most Everything

A review of Haki’s Big New EP

BY MAHA AHMED

S

outh Side thrashers Haki have found their groove in their latest release, Haki’s Big New EP, which, despite its fifteen minutes of playtime, is unexpectedly big, full of doom, and eerily cool. With lyrics that are maybe brilliant but also maybe terrible and senseless, you can’t help but feel part of something visceral, emotional, elevated—brutal.

The EP opens with an intergalactic fifty-eight seconds of unintelligible noise.

The sounds would verge on a mangled dubstep were it not for a brilliant lead-in into the second track, “Shoot.” Here, as on other eye-melting, migraine-inducing tracks like “Oh Man, Oh Boy” and “Fishtank,” vocalist Kelsey Ashby’s throaty, sometimes-grating-sometimes-soothing sounds are equal parts riot grrrl and deadpan—the band tags all of its records on Bandcamp with “spoken word,” alongside “doom punk” and “experimental rock.”

Each song feels like a minute or two inside an unspecified narrator’s head—the ups and downs, the bigness and smallness sound like a stream-of-consciousness rant.

“Shoot” is masterfully divided into three parts: two angry, indignant, vengeful sections (“I’m so glad to know how it aches inside you;” “Fucking dry-headed / You never understand”) frame a crooning, jarringly self-aware aside (“I want out / Of this process / I dig deep to understand / I’ll make a mess”). Ashby wrestles with her unspec-

ified object of discontent, backed by guitar, drums, and bass thanks to all-stars Yusuf Muhammad, Ruby Dunphy, and Connor Tomaka.

On “Oh Man, Oh Boy,” one of Big New’s standout tracks, Haki explicitly recalls quintessential pop punk. The song evokes a live basement show full of head-thrashing, effervescently dancing showgoers—a show you’d leave with the song’s simple, angsty lyrics (“I want to be confused / By you / You make me make sense / Why you?”), catchy guitar riffs, and banging drums ringing in your ears on the cold walk home. The killer cowbell from Haki’s past hit “Weigh Me Down” shows up again in the dynamic, confusing “Spliff,” full of funky guitar and groovy beats—at least until thirty seconds in, when the music expands into big sounds and loud, familiar screams.

Pre-release, guitarist Yusuf Muhammad told the Reader that Big New was going to be the “most punk rock” thing the band has ever put out. But the thing about Haki is that no familiar music descriptor feels like enough to describe the eclectic mix of sounds they produce—one inevitably comes away from the EP’s last distortion thinking, “Of course they’re obviously a mix of ‘doom punk,’ ‘experimental rock,’ and ‘spoken word.’ What else could they be?”

Big New is not just “the most punk rock” thing Haki’s made—it’s big, it’s new, and it’s the most everything.

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

In a powerful performance, Roger Guenveur Smith explores the troubled legacy of Rodney King

BY WILL CRAFT

O

n the night of March 3, 1991, Rodney King became a household name. After leading the police on a high-speed car chase through Los Angeles, King was pulled over and savagely beaten by four members of the LAPD. The beating was caught on video. By the time an all-white jury acquitted the officers of police brutality, causing the city to erupt into the deadliest riots in modern American memory, King was already becoming a polarizing figure, heralded as a civil rights hero by some and condemned by others as a drug addict and criminal.

In his recent one-man show at the DuSable Museum, Roger Guenveur Smith eschewed the easy labels applied to King and explored the full extent of his legacy, examining him both as a troubled man and as an unwitting focal point of race relations in America. The events surrounding King ignited a national conversation about police brutality and racism that put King at the center of a historic moment but obscured and transformed the man himself.

The show, by contrast, delivers a deep portrait. With wit, irony, and anger, it paints King as a complicated individual grappling with his place in history and his addictions.

The play, an improvised combination of historical anecdotes and lyrical rhythms, is at once a poem, a song, and a prayer to the now-deceased King. Its clearest emotion is anger. Yet Smith never makes clear the object of his anger. Part of it seems aimed at King: we want our heroes to be heroes, and we want their victimhood to be framed by sainthood, but King never fit that image. He struggled with drug addiction, alcoholism, and the weight of being placed at the center of racial tension.

Smith, in turn, struggles with King’s duality as an individual and as a symbol. He casts Rodney as both “a second-generation alcoholic” and a caring man who wanted everyone to get along. At the same time, it is obvious that Smith has a deep respect for King, and his anger is not focused solely on the man himself. He casts his profound anger at the irony of injustice, at the system of power that put King beneath those police batons, and at the lives lost to racism, while bringing home the reality of King’s inability to bear the torch that was handed to him.

At a particularly emotional moment of the performance, Smith quoted some of the looters, who were shouting, “This is for you, Rodney!” He then turned to King, saying, “But it’s not all about you, Rodney,” and began narrating for King the stories of several people who died in the riots following the police officers’ acquittal.

Smith further emphasizes the importance of the conversation beyond King by embedding his story within a larger cultural narrative. In the final scene of the play, Smith reenacts King’s death by drowning in his swimming pool in 2012. Gasping for air, saying “I can’t breathe,” Smith echoes the refrain of Eric Garner, whose death at the hands of the police mirrored King’s beating in a number of ways.

The reality of police brutality and antagonism toward people of color is a phenomenon with deep and persistent historical roots, something Smith highlights in his performance. By breathing life into the story of Rodney King, Smith shows the stark difference between black and white justice in the United States, rekindling a discussion we are all part of.

CALENDAR BULLETIN Lessons From Ferguson Following the tragic deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of the police across the country, the need to address longstanding problems with policing and the justice system has been made clear. However, these issues are complicated and multifaceted, sitting at the crossroads of such issues as race, poverty, gun control, law enforcement, and the role of government. “Lessons From Ferguson,” a panel hosted by the Institute of Politics, seeks to identify what can be done to bring together communities and the institutions that are meant to help them. Issues ranging from race and poverty to gun control, law enforcement, and the role of government are likely to be discussed. University of Chicago Law School, 1111 E. 60th St. January 28, 6pm-7:30pm. (Akanksha Shah)

Cornel West: “The Radical King” – Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture Annual Lecture Martin Luther King, Jr. is widely celebrated for the pivotal role he played in the Civil Rights Movement as a powerful advocate and leader who became the standard for social change through non-violent, peaceful protest and civil disobedience. What is less well known is the extent and breadth of his radicalism. At this year’s public lecture hosted by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at UofC, Dr. Cornel West, a prominent intellectual, activist and author, will discuss King’s politics as portrayed in his most recent book, “The Radical King,” a compilation of twenty-three selections written by Martin Luther King Jr. that reveal the underemphasized radical politics of one of the most influential figures in American history. As Dr. West writes in the introduction, “This book unearths a radical King that we can no longer sanitize.” Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave. Sunday, February 1, 2pm. (773)7028063 (Sophia Sheng)

25th Ward TIF Town Meeting Tax Increment Financing (TIF) is a process through which property taxes over a certain amount are channeled into projects for what the city calls “development.”

These funds go towards businesses and economic development, but take money away from other city services like transit and schools. Proponents argue these projects help fuel economic activity, while opponents argue that, without public oversight, TIF funding may not help district citizens. In cooperation with the Pilsen Alliance, the TIF Illumination Project hopes to shed light on the issue and share what citizens of the 25th TIF Ward can do about TIFs in their community. Rudy Lozano Library, 1895 S. Loomis St. Thursday, January 29, 6pm-8pm. civiclab.us (Akanksha Shah)

STAGE & SCREEN Remembering Harold Washington Harold Washington is renowned for being the first African-American mayor of Chicago and the namesake of a city library, park, college, and cultural center, but one may pause to wonder precisely how, or even whether, Chicago was transformed by his tenure. Black Cinema House, in partnership with South Side Projections, presents three disparate screenings exploring Washington’s legacy: Running with the Mayor (1984), Why Get Involved (1983), and an excerpt from Chicago Politics: A Theatre of Power (1987). The three screenings, followed by a conversation with Javier Vargas (contributor to Running with the Mayor) and Bill Stamets (producer of Chicago Politics), provide not only a narrative that examines Washington’s campaign trail, first election night in 1983, and tragically brief second term, but also an opportunity to discuss and consider Washington’s ideas and power in speech, his racially charged opposition, and his impact on race relations and the future of Chicago. Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Sunday, February 1, 2pm. Free. blackcinemahouse.org (Felicia Woron)

Do the Right Thing Racial tensions rise with the heat in Brooklyn’s predominantly black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing. Set on the hottest day of the summer, the heat and angst is palpable as the mélange of people from Bed-Stuy’s community band together to boycott Sal’s, a local white-owned pizzeria.

An Academy Award-nominated film that is not only thematically but also cinematographically vibrant, Do the Right Thing explores and warns against the dangers of social violence—a message that reverberates even twenty-six years later. Presented in conjunction with University of Chicago Professor Jaqueline Stewart’s course “African American Cinema Since 1970.” Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark. Friday, January 30, 7pm; doors open at 6:30pm. Free. RSVP encouraged. blackcinemahouse.org (Itzel Blancas)

The Long White Cloud The newest film of internationally-acclaimed performance artist and UofC Visual Arts faculty member William Pope.L, The Long White Cloud, is more than just a movie: produced as part a larger project in Auckland, New Zealand, it was filmed after open rehearsals, performed live, and then turned into a site-specific installation of the film in the space where it was created, detritus from the performance and all. Pope.L explores the supposedly “post-racial” cultures of New Zealand and the United States, questioning what such a culture feels like, if it even exists at all, as well as whether a person can ever fully relate to someone else’s life. After the screening at Black Cinema House on Thursday, he will be there in person, along with Marco G. Ferrari, who co-edited the film, for further discussion. The film includes explicit images and adult subject matter, so viewer discretion is advised. Black Cinema House, 7200 S. Kimbark Ave. Thursday, January 29, 7pm. Free. RSVP recommended. blackcinemahouse.org (Kirsten Gindler and Olivia Stovicek)

Hearts and Minds Hearts and Minds is the definitive documentary of the Vietnam War, examining the effects of the war on the Vietnamese people and American culture. Filmed for a year at a cost of only $1 million, the film was released in 1974 at the beginning of the collapse of the war and won the 1975 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Directed by Peter Davis, a journalist, filmmaker, and author, the film documents the war through various interviews with military officers and soldiers along with footage of the war itself. The film will be screened on February 2 by the UofC’s Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, which seeks to “develop a new model for graduate education in American culture” and sponsors a variety of courses examining American culture. Accompanying the film will be a post-screening discussion with Davis, Mark Bradley, and Bernadotte E. Schmitt, a professor of international history. Cochrane-Woods Art Center, 5540 S. Greenwood Ave. February 2, 6pm. Free. americanculture.uchicago.edu (Clyde Schwab)

Hyde Park Bank High School Performance Festival On February 23, scenes and monologues from the August Wilson Century Cycle will be presented at the Court Theatre by students from several South Side high schools. The Century Cycle, also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, is a series of ten plays, each set in a different decade, that chronicle the experiences of African Americans in Pittsburgh. According to Wilson, the plays seek to show the similarities between the lives, passions and pains of African Americans and white Americans.

A scenic design exhibition by the high school students will accompany the performances. Participating schools include Kenwood Academy, Robert Lindblom Math and Science Academy, Neal F. Simeon Career Academy High School, Sullivan House Alternative School, and the William Rainey Harper High School. Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Tuesday, February 3, 5:30pm-8pm. Free, reservations encouraged. (773)753-4472. courttheatre. org (Clyde Schwab)

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Laurence Ralph: Renegade Dreams Laurence Ralph aims to put into words the gang violence that many Chicagoans on the West Side of the city experience every day. Often misunderstood and far removed from the public eye, the tragedies that happen in these neighborhoods have become the crux of Ralph’s new anthropological work, Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, and on January 29, he will discuss his book at the Seminary Co-op. An assistant professor in the departments of Anthropology and African and African-American Studies at Harvard, Ralph has worked tirelessly within this West Side community to bring to light the individual stories of its inhabitants.

His goal is ultimately to paint a different picture of this and many other gang-controlled neighborhoods and show that they are communities with hopes and dreams for change, and not just billboards for poverty, addiction, and violence, while also interrogating the implications of his outsider status for the effects of his work. Seminary Co-op, 5751 S. Woodlawn Ave. Thursday, January 29, 5pm.

Free. (773)752-4381. semcoop.com (Cristina Ochoa)

Waiting for Godot This season, Court Theatre takes on absurdist play Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The story follows two moody vagrant men, who are (you guessed it) waiting for a mysterious Godot. The tragicomedy has been interpreted in countless ways since its 1953 premiere. Court’s interpretation comes from accomplished director Ron OJ Parson, and the cast includes regulars A.C. Smith, Allen Gilmore, and Alfred Wilson. After Parson’s work on Seven Guitars in 2013, audiences will be waiting to see his returning direction at Court, whether or not Godot shows up in the end. Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. January 15 through February 15. $35–$65, discounts available for seniors and students. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org (Sammie Spector)

Mana Contemporary February Open House For some, Sunday afternoons mean lox, bagels, and cream cheese. For others, football. For you, it could be the February Open House at Pilsen’s Mana Contemporary Chicago. Wander the enormous building, designed

by Chicago architect George Nimmons. Explore more than fifty art studios (all open to you!). Admire the relatively large oil paintings of postmodern Icelandic artist Erró, who trained in all the standard European ways but has arrived at a style marked by his assemblages of public figures—artists, politicians and despots, etc.—and a heavy-handed use of American comic book imagery. There will also be performances and exhibitions from a variety of foundations, funds, and societies.

The fourth floor of the building will be utilized by one of Chicago’s premier dance crews, THE ERA, for a footwork workshop. Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St. Erró exhibiton until April 30, 2015. Reception Februrary 8, 1pm-4 pm. Open Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.

Free. (312)850-0555. manacontemporarychicago.com (James Kogan)

The Aesthetics of Struggle Chicago artist Raymond Thomas brings forward a collection of his recent works in his upcoming exhibition “The Aesthetics of Struggle,” an exploration of the idea of art as its own form of activism. Exhibited at the United Foundation for Arts and Technology, these mixed-media presentations seek to understand the connections between identity, religion, race, politics, and culture in the twenty-first century. Drawing inspiration from the impact of AFRICOBRA and the Black Arts Movement of the sixties and seventies, Thomas analyzes collective social existences of our times. United Foundation for Arts and Technology, 1833 S. Halsted St. February 13-March 6.

Opening reception Friday, February 13, 6pm-10pm. Free. ufat.org (Lauren Poulson)

Missing Pages Lecture Series Did our high school history textbooks cover everything we needed to know? The DuSable Museum doesn’t think so. Aiming to reveal the people, places, and events that haven’t gotten proper credit for shaping history, the lecture series “Missing Pages,” which started November 20 and runs through March, is designed to address larger themes of politics, culture, race, and personal identity. The largely unknown figures and topics will be presented and discussed by nationally known speakers, and while their subjects never received much recognition in common memory or the media, now they take center stage. All this series asks of its audience members is that they remain open to what they might not have known and be willing to pick up a pencil and fill in history’s forgotten pages. DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Through March. Various Thursdays, 6:30pm. $5. dusablemuseum.org (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)

VISUAL ARTS Migrant Files Life exists in transitory setting—we find ourselves in different places for different reasons, and sometimes not by choice. “The Migrant Files” presents three studies of the forced mobility imposed upon the modern lower class. Through video, Austen Brown transports viewers to the oil fields of North Dakota, where laborers work on short-term contracts and live in mobile homes, simultaneously transitory and stationary. Billy McGuinness takes us to the kitchen floors of Cook County Jail, where he painted three monochromatic canvases. And, finally, Jaxon Pallas shows us the aesthetics of abandonment in his print works on the great falls of the American economy. ACRE promises an expanded public program to supplement this exhibition. Catch the exhibition before it moves on; travel in discomfort through America. ACRE Projects, 1913 W. 17th St. February 8 through March 2.

Opening reception Sunday, February 8, 4pm-8pm. Sundays and Mondays, 12pm-4pm. acreresidency.org (Kristin Lin)

Bridgeport Art Center’s Third Annual Art Competition At the Bridgeport Art Center, January means submissions for the third Annual Bridgeport Art Competition.

Prizes will be awarded to the artists behind the eight most noteworthy pieces—as selected by artist-jurors Amanda Williams and Monika Wulfers—on the exhibit’s opening day. The gallery will remain open for the following month, showcasing all submissions in a celebration of Chicago art. Expect to hear the names of artists unfamiliar and established alike, and to see a wide array of photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, and mixed media compositions. Entry fees must be postmarked, electronic applications submitted, by January 31.

Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St. February 28 through April 5. Monday-Saturday, 8am-6pm; Sunday, 8am-12pm. Free. (773)247-3000. bridgeportart.com (Emeline Posner)

Nuestras Historias From ancient Mesoamerican artifacts to contemporary artwork from both sides of the border, from neon pink protest art reading “Make Tacos Not War” to a sculpture about laborers made from a lawnmower, the latest exhibit at the National Museum of Mexican Art seeks to challenge the idea that there is a single history that defines Mexican identity in North America. “Nuestras Historias” draws an amazing range of pieces from the NMMA’s world-class permanent collection, creating a display diverse in both medium and narrative. The exhibition also features folk art, ceramics, and items from the colonial period, as well as a section devoted to artists from Chicago dealing with themes such as immigration, gentrification, and incarceration. National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Through November 30.

Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm. (312)738-1502. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org (Akanksha Shah)

Wxnder Wxrds Gallery 5 at the Hyde Park Art Center currently features recent work by Mexico City-based artist Nuria Montiel. Pieces included in the exhibition, titled “Wxnder Wxrds,” were produced during Montiel’s 2014

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Jackman Goldwasser residency at HPAC, during which she brought her mobile printing press—La Imprenta Móvil—to various public sites around Chicago, including Sweet Water Foundation, Hull House, and the National Museum of Mexican Art. Monteil engaged visitors at each site in conversations on art, politics, and civic life while making her prints, which transform bits of collected dialogue into abstract visual poems. Through public production and installation of the prints around the city, Montiel’s project explores the relationship between art and social participation. “Wxnder Wxrds” exhibits Montiel’s prints and installation documents, as well as reflections on the artist’s community-centered creative process. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through February 21. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free.

(773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Kirsten Gindler)

The sky is falling. The money’s all gone.

Ever wondered what it would be like to actually manage late-stage capitalism’s assorted problems? Lucky Pierre, a collaborative group working in writing, performance, and visual forms, is out to counter neoliberal economics’s hard belief in the merit of “growth” and face the fragile social, environmental, and economic conditions it has begot. In the interest of reevaluating the ways artists respond to worldly despair, Lucky Pierre is hosting a tenweek, five-session collaborative seminar in which its participants and Lucky Pierre facilitators will troubleshoot what it calls “the new collapse.” Students of the Lucky Pierre Free University will sketch plans for a different future in what can only be expected to be a fantastic multi-disciplinary artistic exploration. LPFU will also be a short academic course, complete with required reading, writing prompts, and a final presentation. So kind of like school, but for another type of real world. MANA Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St. February 7 through April 17. Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. Free. (312)850-8301. manacontemporarychicago.com (James Kogan)

the intrigue of this show, for these aren’t your typical nine-to-fives. In photos selected from a larger collection, you will see President Kennedy in a motorcade, the unseen kitchen hands of Chicago, Muddy Waters, and James Cotton playing music, dancers, mechanics, and many others on the job, all frozen in an almost eerie moment of monotonous movement. Take a break from your own job and visit “People at Work” to witness first-hand how beautiful everyday life can be. Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Through February 6. Closing reception, 6pm-9pm. Additional hours by appointment. (312)8527717. uri-eichen.com (Dagny Vaughn)

Mathias Poledna The Renaissance Society is currently celebrating its hundredth anniversary. Their most recent showcase, the finale to this first century, not only celebrates the past decades of audiences and artists galore, but also considers, and dismantles, the very structure of the Renaissance Society’s gallery. Literally. Los Angeles-based, Viennese artist Mathias Poledna has removed the gallery’s steel truss-gridded ceiling, an emblem (and tool) of the space since 1967. He is the first artist to physically alter the gallery, asking viewers to consider both iconoclasm and the nature of material property.

This altering of the gallery will be supported by a 35mm film installation. The Renaissance Society’s invitation to Poledna to demolish the iconic grates, as well as the co-production of his film, stems from its readiness to enter its second century as a leading modern art gallery.

Poledna’s work—highly concentrated film stills and their contextual contemplations—creates a dialogue between the historical legacy of the Renaissance Society and the avant-garde artworks within it. The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 8. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)7028670. renaissancesociety.org (Sammie Spector)

Ground Floor

Using sound, 16mm video, and architecture, the artwork of award-winning filmmaker and installation artist Melika Bass blends morbid and magical elements to reveal a fractured fictional view of American life. “The Last Sun is Sinking Fast,” currently up at the Hyde Park Art Center, features a spatial narrative that delves deeply into the psyche of characters in Bass’s previous film, while also introducing new characters. By redesigning the gallery space, Bass leads the viewer through a poignant memory of place and transports the viewer into a society of lost souls in a haunted world. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through April 19. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm.

Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Adia Robinson)

Marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hyde Park Art Center, “Ground Floor” features artworks from prominent Chicago MFA programs, creating a biennial showcase of emerging talents so new they haven’t even begun their careers yet. The twenty artists, selected from over one hundred nominations, represent a wide range of mediums, forms, and universities: Columbia College, Northwestern, SAIC, the UofC, and UIC. These artists have also had the chance to exhibit at September’s EXPO Chicago in HPAC’s booth. This unique program, showcased throughout the entirety of HPAC’s ground floor gallery space, offers the chosen artists a helpful push toward a career in the art world; “Ground Floor” alumni include two artists who have recently displayed artwork at the Whitney Biennial. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through March 22. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Sammie Spector)

I Am American

Lands End

This land is your land, this land is my land. From sculpture to paint, from first-generation immigrant to Native American, twenty-five artists explore the different dimensions and definitions of American identity. “I Am American” is a traveling exhibition that, by virtue of its destinations across the U.S., challenges viewers to reflect on their own place in the nation and what it means to inhabit a space with people who may not share the same answer. In Chicago, the exhibition will be housed at the Zhou B. Art Center. Go with questions about the exhibition’s title. Chances are, you’ll emerge with more than twenty-five answers. Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Through February 14. Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm.

(773)523-0200. zhoubartcenter.com (Kristin Lin)

Walk to the Point, to the edge of the rocks, where Lake Michigan meets your toes. “Lands end. They all do,” claims a new exhibition, curated by UofC alumna Katherine Harvath and faculty member Zachary Cahill. Starting this Friday, the Logan Center gallery will feature the work of thirteen sculptors, painters, and performance and installation artists from lands across the world, contemplating the role of landscape in contemporary life. On February 16, Logan will host a panel discussion with Brian Holmes, Claire Pentecost, and Dan Peterman, all featured in the exhibition. Come explore old lands through new eyes. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. January 9 through March 15, Tuesday-Saturday, 9am-8pm; Sunday, 11am-8pm. Opening reception Friday, January 9, 6pm-8pm. (773)702-3787. arts.uchicago.edu/landsend (Kristin Lin)

Melika Bass: The Last Sun is Sinking Fast

People at Work Michael Gaylord James has captured the workday tasks of people around the world in photographs taken over the course of fifty years. Beginning in Chicago, James carried his camera everywhere from Cuba to Ireland to the late USSR, snapping pictures of the glamorous and the not-so-glamorous on the daily grind. Though this might seem like a mundane topic, beware of underestimating

Exodus Exodus: the triumphant escape from slavery into...into what? Into the desert for forty years? A collaborative new show featuring the works of Alexandria Eregbu and Alfredo Salazar-Caro, “Exodus” plays with and inverts the themes of liberation and migration in vivid multimedia.

CALENDAR Eregbu’s installations employ curious combinations of industrial materials to probe the meaning of identity, belonging, assimilation, and alienation, drawing on her own Nigerian-American heritage. Salazar-Caro’s interactive installation, titled “Border Crossing Simulator Beta,” features a video game narrative of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. His digital work complements Eregbu’s physical constructions while challenging the viewers with disorienting touches, demanding that the viewer engage with the world presented in “Exodus.”

This installation was chosen as the winner for Arts + Public Life’s 2015 open call for proposals. Arts Incubator Gallery, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Through March 20.

Tuesday-Friday, 12pm-6pm; Thursday. 12pm-7pm. Free.

(773)702-9724. arts.uchicago.edu (Lillian Selonick)

Free at First The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an experimental jazz collective founded in 1965 by Chicago musicians and composers interested in developing a radical infrastructure to support their unconventional style. Since its inception, AACM musicians have made monumental contributions to the development of free and experimental jazz.

“Free at First: The Audacious Journey of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians” at the DuSable will take visitors on a journey through the early years of the AACM and the sociopolitical context of the musicians who liberated themselves through their genre-defying musical pursuits. In addition to archival photos, performance artifacts, and a musical soundscape, the interactive exhibition will feature a scavenger huntstyle game and a working recreation of AACM member Henry Threadgill’s “hubkaphone,” an instrument made of hubcaps. DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Through September 6. Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. $10 general admission; $8 Chicago residents; $7 students. (773)947-0600. dusablemuseum.org (Kirsten Gindler)

Boys Will Be Boys There aren’t many things in this world sadder than the sight of a stripped Christmas tree shivering by the dumpster in January. While the smell of pine may linger on the pillows and curtains for a few days, most would say it’s time to move on from last month’s jolly excess and consumption. With an on-site installation featured at the Ordinary Projects, however, Kasia Ozga brings the Christmas tree back into the New Year with commentary on the events of the year past. Her giant sculpture of fifteen Christmas trees will challenge the ordinary conception of those skimpy green branches to trigger reflection on ties between consumerism and racism in America, including recent events of police brutality.

After an encounter with “Boys Will Be Boys,” you might never look at your Christmas tree’s “unchanging leaves” the same way again. Ordinary Projects, 2233 S. Throop St., fifth floor. Through February 6. Gallery hours TBA. ordinaryprojects.org (Amelia Dmowska)

Level Eater 5.0 Take up thine sword, young hero. The halls of the Co-Prosperity Sphere beckon thee toward a stop on your epic quest to fill your goblet with specialty-brewed ales courtesy of 3 Floyds and Marz Community Brewery, or to feast upon Dönerman Food Truck vittles. Limited-edition Level Eater hoodies will be available and add +15 defense when equipped. Art from all across the realm, curated by Ed Marszewski and Nick Floyd, will be on display for your inner nerd’s pleasure. The dungeon will house a secret band, which is much better than the traditional troll or ogre. Admission price will include a complimentary Level Eater beverage. Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219-21 S. Morgan St. Saturday, January 31, 5pm-10pm. $15. (773)837-0145. leveleater.org (Mark Hassenfratz)

MUSIC Scotch Hollow A staple of the roots scene throughout the Midwest and Northeast U.S., Scotch Hollow is a band grounded in old-school delta blues and traditional finger-pickin’ country. The Chicago-based band formed when Mark Verbeck and Carley Martin met in college, where they both realized that Verbeck’s guitar and ukulele music were a perfect match for Martin’s full-range vocals. After a regional tour, a stay in Nashville, musical redirection, an unfortunate illness, and the addition of Albert Dingus (really) on upright bass, Scotch Hollow is back with a new band, a new sound, and a new EP. Along with The Local Martyrs and good friend Mikey Classic & His Lonesome Spur, they’ll be gracing the Reggies stage with country blues covers and original Americana music that will make you feel like you’re wandering the Appalachian Mountains. Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Wednesday, January 28, 7:30pm. $5. 21+. (313)949-0120. reggieslive. com (Shelby Gonzales)

Captain Crayon and the Fuzzy Bastard For west suburbanites Chris Warner and Matt Vice, it’s always been about the music. When the duo first took the stage as Captain Crayon and the Fuzzy Bastard at Crossroads open mic night in Wood Dale, Illinois, how could they have known that just two years later, they would be headlining a red-hot experimental punk rock show at Reggies? The boys have, uh, made it, propelled by a passion for rock, folk, and “improvisational wackyness” [sic]. The Captain and the Bastard will be joined by buddy T.J. Mikutis on drums, and followed by vaguely-punk peers Sushi, Seed Socket, and War Wizard. With a sound described by Warner as “different things flying through your eardrums,” there can be no losers—only fools too uptight to appreciate the experience. Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Saturday, January 31.

8:30pm. Free. 21+. (312)949-0120. reggieslive.com (Olivia Myszkowski)

Punk Rock and Donuts Q: What do you get when you cross libraries, punk bands, and donuts? A: The second installment of the “Punk Rock and Donuts” concert series, coming to Bridgeport’s Richard J. Daley Library this Saturday.

Organized by library director and former punk-rocker Jeremy Kitchen as part of an effort to increase community involvement in library events and expand punk show access to music fans of all ages, this free matinee will feature performances by weirdo art-punks Toupée, fuzzdrenched sludge monsters Den, and the psychedelic garage group Radar Eyes, plus free coffee and donuts from nearby Jackalope Coffee and Tea House. Says Kitchen: “Bring the kids...and bring earplugs.” Come Saturday, this library is going to be anything but quiet. Richard J. Daley Library, 3400 S. Halsted St. Saturday, January 31, 2pm; doors at 1:30pm. Free. (312)747-8990. chipublib.org/ locations/14 (Juliet Eldred)

Tigran Hamasyan The Tigran Trio will soon perform in Hyde Park as part of the UofC’s “Jazz at the Logan” series. The trio features pianist Tigran Hamaysan, drummer Arthur Hnatek, and bassist Sam Minaie. Hamaysan, born in Armenia and a piano player by training, was something of a child prodigy. His creative output has only increased over the years as he’s established himself on the international jazz stage. Hamasyan is influenced by a broad spectrum of artists and styles, including Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, folk music, and classic jazz. In recent decades, he has proved himself repeatedly in contest and festival performances to be a musician of the highest caliber, and his recent trio endeavor should only serve to underscore that reputation. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, February 13, 7:30pm. $35; $5 UofC students.

(773)702-2787. chicagopresents.uchicago.edu (Elizabeth Bynum)

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