October 4, 2017

CHICAGO A COMMUNITY HEALTH EDUCATION EVENT

FREE ENTRY. FREE HEALTH SCREENINGS. FREE DINNER.

SAT, OCT 7 11:30am–11:30pm

Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th St

October 26 | 5PM – 8PM | University of Illinois Chicago Forum

As we celebrate the 5 Anniversary of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, join us for the Five Year Bash, a 12-hour arts festival featuring FREE concerts, performances, exhibitions, family-centered arts activities, handson workshops, and more. Registration recommended at tickets.uchicago.edu. th

725 W Roosevelt Road, Chicago, IL 60608

REGISTER NOW www.awareforall.org or call toll free:1.877.633.4376

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COMING SOON! lIMIted ruN StartS OCt 20

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directed by

mechelle moe

A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, this story of awakening, equality, and self-discovery shows that human connection is not simply a means to an end, but a vital part of life itself.

Oct. 13–15 Logan Center for the Arts

#LoganBluesfest

loganbluesfest.uchicago.edu

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¬ OCTOBER 4, 2017

anish Jethmalani Terri Odabi. Courtesy of artist.

The Logan Center Bluesfest is an annual public celebration honoring the South Side roots of the blues tradition with three days of concerts, workshops, film, food, and conversation.

Many of the events during the Logan Center Bluesfest are FREE. For tickets, and to make reservations for workshops, visit tickets.uchicago.edu.

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent 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. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 5, Issue 2 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Director of Staff Support Baci Weiler Director of Writer Development Sara Cohen Director of Community Outreach Jasmin Liang Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner

Politics Editor Adia Robinson Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Editors-at-Large Christian Belanger, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen Data Editor Jasmine Mithani Radio Editor Erisa Apantaku Radio Host Andrew Koski Social Media Editors Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Lizzie Smith Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang, Baci Weiler Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma Publisher

Harry Backlund

Business Manager

Jason Schumer

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. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover photo by Lee Bey

IN CHICAGO

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

IN THIS ISSUE

Forrest Claypool Gets Dunked On “#dunkedonbruh”: that was Alderman Michael Scott’s succinct tweet summarizing the September 14 meeting between Chicago Public Schools CEO Forrest Claypool and nine aldermen, and, in particular, Claypool’s exchange with Alderwoman Susan Garza (credit for the phrase goes to CTU organizer Martin Ritter). Claypool was there to answer questions about whether CPS has enough money to get through the year without more cuts. According to reports from the Sun-Times and the Reader, the meeting fell apart after Garza said that schools in her ward had lost about twenty teaching positions leaving classes with at least forty students. Claypool said her claim was false; furious, Garza told him he needed to visit the schools in her ward. Other aldermen backed her up, agreeing that Claypool should visit the South Side schools; some later said he would never accuse a male alderman or an alderman from anaffluent ward of lying like that. Garza was “so pissed. I wanted to go south-side on him. I really did,” she told the Reader. If Garza’s relative restraint led to a “#dunkedonbruh” hashtag, who knows what “go[ing] south-side on him” would have led to. In any case, many aldermen are probably frustrated enough with Claypool to wish Garza had.

seeing the future

“JoAnn is Watching” That’s what 16th Ward Alderman Toni Foulkes said of the ward’s late and former Alderman JoAnn Thompson, according to DNAinfo. And we think she is pleased.

Englewood Square, Thompson’s plan for the 63rd and Halsted Street block, celebrated its one-year anniversary this week. Anchored by Whole Foods, the square houses several other big-name businesses, including a Starbucks, a Chipotle, and, later this year, a PNC Bank. Although there are mixed perspectives among the different vendors as to how some stores are living up to their sales projections, the investment has brought to the neighborhood healthy food choices, jobs, and a place of social gathering. An area not previously regarded for growth and development is one year strong and with many more ahead.

learned from monk

Can COPA cope with losing Fairley?

It seemed for a good while that, if the entire police oversight system in Chicago was not going to be reformed overnight, that at least one agency with a significant say in the matter was staggering in the right direction: the long-disgraced Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), which existed for ten fitful years as the city’s civilian police investigatory agency. Shortly after dismissing Supt. Garry McCarthy in the wake of the Laquan McDonald video release, Mayor Emanuel replaced IPRA’s chief, the longtime Drug Enforcement Administration agent Scott Ando, with former federal prosecutor and political unknown Sharon Fairley. Under Fairley’s direction, IPRA seemed to genuinely work towards greater community engagement and improving its investigatory process, putting forward new rules and releasing critical third-party reviews of practices under her predecessors. She was simultaneously tasked with creating the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), the third iteration of civilian police oversight in Chicago, which has a broader investigative mandate and better funding than IPRA. Now, however, less than two years after being appointed, Fairley is exploring a run for Illinois Attorney General, throwing into doubt how many of her reform efforts will truly stick at COPA. If she does leave the agency this month to run for higher office, she will have been the shortest-serving head of civilian police investigations in the forty-two years Chicago has had such a system. The second shortest-serving? Current Police Board President Lori Lightfoot, who put in a tight twenty-three months as the chief administrator of the Office of Professional Standards, IPRA’s precursor.

When you see buildings in the exhibit that are taken care of, understand that, know that: that’s the hurdle they had to jump over, to get here. malvika jolly.....................................4 fresh terrain

Three years in the woods pays off for West Englewood’s Benn Jordan. ashvini kartik-narayan..................7 back to the roots of the city

“Urban agriculture is a great way to put our land back to productive use.” amy qin..............................................8 The fest’s curators brought four perspectives on the life and legacy of Monk, starting with a biographical perspective and ending with three musical interpretations. bridget vaughn...............................10

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OCTOBER 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Learned From Monk The Hyde Park Jazz Fest celebrates the pianist and composer’s centennial PHOTO ESSAY BY BRIDGET VAUGHN

I

n its eleventh year, the Hyde Park Jazz Festival drew large crowds two weekends ago. The free two-day festival offered music lovers ten venues to hear some of the best local, national, and international music on the planet.

On Saturday, the festival paid tribute to and celebrated the one-hundredth birthday of famed jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, who was born on October 10. The fest’s curators brought four perspectives on the life and legacy of Monk, starting with a biographical perspective in the afternoon, and ending with three unique musical interpretations in the evening.

Clarinetist Ben Goldberg’s solo performance “Learned From Thelonious Monk” tapped into Monk’s musical inventiveness, improvisation and creativity. The hour-long solo left the audience mesmerized.

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MUSIC

In the first musical tribute of the night, Dee Alexander, jazz vocalist and 2008 “Chicagoan of the Year,” brought together a group of musicians to perform as “Monk and the Ladies” on an outdoor stage on the Midway. Along with Alexander, Tomeka Reid on cello, Marion Hayden on bass, Alexis Lombre on piano, and Gayellen McKinney on drums brought one of the largest crowds of the festival to their feet for a standing ovation.

OCTOBER 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Jeremy Kahn and Steve Million concluded the Monk musical tribute indoors at the nearby International House, with upbeat interpretations on two back-to-back pianos; their performance was called “Double Monk.” Kahn has played with the greats including Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Aretha Franklin, and Joni Mitchell, and Million was a semifinalist in the Thelonious Monk Piano Competition.

Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, delved into the personal and public sides of the musical genius.

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MUSIC

Fresh Terrain

A review of The Flashbulb’s “Piety of Ashes”

BY ASHVINI KARTIK-NARAYAN

W

hen the Weekly profiled Benn Jordan (aka The Flashbulb) last month, he explained that he was always most eager to share new music that sounds nothing like what his audience had heard before—and Jordan’s new album Piety of Ashes, which came out September 1, does not disappoint. Every track is its own musical journey, but each transitions seamlessly into the next to create a cohesive album that covers sounds from the crunching of leaves and the blowing wind to metallic, electronic beats, all contributing to a complex narrative of transitions and loss.

Jordan produced the album while he spent the past three years in the woods just outside of Atlanta, Georgia—a stark contrast to his roots in West Englewood, and the resulting product reflects this change in scenery. His past albums, like Compositions for Piano and Nothing Is Real, utilized, respectively, more instrumental piano or electronic house music sounds.

Piety of Ashes is a mix of these digital/ electronic and acoustic influences, effectively retaining Jordan’s signature technique while still fitting his refusal to adhere to one particular genre.

One key difference between this album and its predecessors is the electronic production: a new variety of techniques and instruments are used and shifted between within each song, and each song has a background as intricate as the main melody. Every time the drumbeat enters, the feel of the song changes completely, as he employs contrasting rhythmic and melodic lines, playing with different time signatures and allowing them to move together. The first track, “Turning Alone,” has a metallicsounding percussive background with a powerful orchestral melody at the forefront, and as the two interchange, the progression of the song intensifies.

Meanwhile, the use of instruments like trumpet and saxophone reflect the influence of Jordan’s upbringing on the South Side, where the majority of older musicians

around him were trained in jazz. In “Wind,” the fifteenth track on the album, there is a contrasting dialogue of sounds between the bells and a piano for more than a minute in the beginning, before an intricate drumtrack is added along with a saxophone melody.

The progression of each track continuously reveals more not only about the message of the song, but about Jordan’s background as an artist.

Jordan is always concerned with keeping his audience engaged, and through the complex construction that flows from track to track, this goal is definitely achieved—the experimental risks he takes in his production pay off.

Like much of Jordan’s previous work, every song sounds intentionally connected to its surrounding tracks, so much that it is sometimes difficult to tell when one song starts and another ends. This might have been the letdown of the album’s otherwise impressive progression; however, this connection actually defines its cohesiveness, and does not stop every song from having a unique sound and feeling. In “Leaves,” the thirteenth track on the album, we hear spoken words at the beginning that transition into an almost campfire-style rhythm of claps, light drumming, and acoustic guitar. The next track, “Turning Inconsolate,” picks up right where “Leaves” left off: in the beginning, in fact, it almost sounds like someone stepping on leaves. However, it then moves into an ethereal melody with no guitar at all and no clearly established rhythm. Although these two songs are completely different in style, they pair perfectly with each other and their surrounding tracks. Continuity between songs is present throughout many of Jordan’s previous albums, but this coupled with an increased usage of vocals and lyrics gives Piety of Ashes a more apparent narrative.

The lyrical presence in this album is the biggest difference between Piety of Ashes and Jordan’s previous work, and what most contributes to this bolstered narrative. Most of Jordan’s music is instrumental, and so was

much of this album, but it was refreshing to hear him explore new vocal territory in several songs. He has occasionally included lyrics in the past, but here they take new form, combining with the electronic elements to create energetic hooks and provide a clearer message for the album as a whole. In “Leaves,” the lyrics of Jordan’s spoken word experimentation inspire reflection on the implications of “ashes”: “I threw his picture away just before he died/I guess I was distracted by the specks on the wall/how small they are in comparison to the entire wall.” A simple, contemplative piano melody plays behind these words, which draws the listeners’ attention to the lyrics rather than to Jordan’s typically more layered production. This melancholy continues in “Hungry Mouth, Shut,” whose lyrics are also spoken and almost abrasive in their message: “Hey, I look like a clown, like a sad clown!/Gee, I’m really sad!” Contrasted with a robotic, muddled voice and framed by a haunting background of wave-like, windy sound, the lyrics express a distress that the production exemplifies. There is a distinct candor in Jordan’s words that makes this album far more personal, and gives clarity to the theme suggested by its title.

Jordan’s past albums include tracks that are more impressive for their production quality than their distinct emotional message. Piety of Ashes brings Jordan’s artistic

and personal background to the forefront through lyrics, while maintaining a mostly instrumental focus. The lyrics included in certain songs encourage attention and respect, or “piety,” to more melancholy feelings like loss, separation, travel, and uncertainty. In “Gray Pill,” they serve as a command: “The rain has slowed/It’s time, let’s go/At night, unwind/Leave us behind.”

The instrumental track of “Gray Pill” is also more rhythmic and pulsing, amplifying the musical journey that already occurs through the ever-changing nature of each song.

Jordan seeks to move the listener through the complex and personal thought process surrounding what we leave behind, and through these lyrics, he definitely succeeds.

The last track, “Goodbye Bastion,” is a perfect ending. Saying goodbye to a bastion, or a structure that upholds and defends, suits the album’s constant movement and change.

The breadth of instrumentation, lyrics, and electronic experimentation present in Piety of Ashes is a demonstration of how, as Jordan said in our last interview, the most growth occurs for him as an artist when he is exploring fresh terrain. As the trumpet sounds in the last line of the melody, one thing is clear: those three years in the woods certainly paid off. This story was previously published online September 4, 2017.

OCTOBER 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

FOOD

Back to the Roots of the City Urban agriculture initiatives are at the center of a plan to bring healthy fruits and vegetables to South Side neighborhoods

BY AMY QIN

T

he summer of 1943 witnessed a remarkable collective mobilization: Chicagoans produced more than 55,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables in nearly 175,000 Victory Gardens, small plots of land started by citizens to mobilize food production during World War I and II. Not only was the volume harvested that summer unprecedented, but so was the number of new farmers who joined the movement. People from all walks of life started vegetable plots in empty lots around their neighborhoods.

Today, urban agriculture advocates use the success of the Victory Garden movement as a parable for how growing locally can be scaled up to feed families and bring communities together.

Longtime Englewood resident and state Representative Sonya Harper believes that urban agriculture enterprises can have similar transformative effects on communities that have experienced a food shortage of a different kind.

“In one part of my district—the part that is a food desert, the part that is known for high rates of crimes and violence, the part that has no jobs or grocery stores,” she said. “We’ve seen how urban agriculture is a great way to put our land back to productive use.”

Several recent municipal policies further promote urban agriculture in neighborhoods

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with an excess of vacant land space. A 2011 amendment to the city’s zoning code expanded the size limit on community gardens to 25,000 square feet and relaxed regulations, to make it much easier to grow and sell produce on vacant lots in both residential and commercial areas. Another amendment to the compost ordinance in 2015 allowed farms to compost donated food scraps which generate fertilizer for soil which could reduce soil costs, a large portion of operating costs for many farmers.

Harper hopes to capitalize on these developments, having introduced a bill in February that would allow county or municipal governments to create urban agriculture zones (UAZ) in areas where produce is grown, livestock is raised, or at least seventy-five percent of food sold is locally grown.

In a UAZ, the sales tax for goods sold in the zone are pooled into a fund which would help support health or farming related educational programs or provide short term loans to urban agriculture businesses.

Organizations would also be protected from property tax increases in the next twentyfive years and subject to a reduction in water connection chargers.

Harper said the overarching idea behind the bill is to jumpstart local economies by incentivizing urban agriculture initiatives in food deserts. “When you have produce

KATHERINE HILL

coming from three miles away versus three hundred miles away, that’s definitely impacting the local food economy because that’s money circulating locally versus money brought in from other markets,” said Nick Lucas, outreach coordinator at Advocates for Urban Agriculture.

Ideally, a portion of the UAZ’s pooled funds would be used to help get urban agriculture businesses off the ground as well.

Lucas is excited about more for-profit farms being established on the South Side because even as a small-scale operation, a for-profit

enterprise is self-sustaining—it wouldn’t be dependent on external funding or foundational support as a non-profit would.

One such for-profit, Urban Canopy, is structured that way because it wants to show that a socially engaged business in urban agriculture can be successful in supporting the livelihoods of individuals and families, said outreach director Kelsey Schroeder.

These policy initiatives have come hand in hand with the recent expansion of urban agriculture in Chicago said Lucas.

The Chicago Urban Agriculture Mapping

Project—an interactive map and database of community gardens and urban farms launched in 2010—now lists over nine hundred total gardens and farms across the city. Thirteen of them belong to Windy City Harvest, an urban agriculture and jobs training initiative run by the Chicago Botanic Garden. It operates six farms on the South Side that grow about 25,000 pounds of fresh produce yearly, said Eliza Fournier, its director of youth programming. Each farm grows a different set of crops, everything from cilantro to turnips to collard greens, depending on the preferences of residents in the neighborhood where the farm is located.

The impacts of the farms are wide ranging, beyond simply providing fresh produce. Windy City Harvest also offers a youth development program at their Washington Park farm that employs teens to work on the farm for a summer, teaching valuable life lessons and developing skills to grow food, run a farm stand, and engage with the community through partnerships.

Fournier said she’s seen a lot of program participants come back year after year, sharing what they’ve learned about healthy eating with family and friends.

“That’s the beauty of farming,” Fournier said. “It’s a phenomenal vehicle to teach and experience different topics like economic and youth development, environmental issues around food production and distribution, and social justice and equitable pay issues.”

Elsewhere in Woodlawn, Washington Park, and greater Englewood, overgrown lots are commonplace. To make use of these vacant lots, many residents and community organizations have transformed them into small community gardens through Large Lots, a city program launched in 2014 that allows community members to purchase city-owned vacant lots for $1.

The Bronzeville Alliance Neighborhood Garden and the Dorchester Community Garden in Greater Grand Crossing are just two of the newly minted gardens in these lots purchased from the city.

A few of the vacant lots that were not transformed into gardens are now the sites of weekend farmers markets.

Several markets in Englewood and Austin that sell fresh fruits and vegetables

to neighborhoods in food deserts are managed by Urban Canopy. “A lot of times we’re the only produce vendor for miles that offers fresh food that isn’t a corner store or a gas station where all the food is all prepackaged,” said Schroeder.

Urban Canopy brings local and organic produce grown at their farms and other Midwest farms to communities with low food access. Schroeder said that even though they would like to supply local produce first, a lot of people in low-access neighborhoods are simply hungry, and that Urban Canopy will bring in organic, nonlocal produce just so it can supplement residents’ access to fresh food. The longterm goal is to expand this model for farmers markets to more locations on the South and Southwest Sides, eventually handing over the markets to a local organization to let the neighborhoods shape how they want the market to be.

With all the local momentum around urban farms and gardens, Harper has high hopes for her UAZ bill, and thinks that the communities that it affects do too.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the main obstacles to the bill have not come from the Englewood community she represents.

In Springfield, to pass statewide legislation brings its own host of problems, one of which is that “it is all about trying to paint an accurate picture of the real problem and debunking whatever stereotypical versions of Chicago…[the other representatives] may have,” according to Harper.

Recalling a committee session from earlier this year, Harper said a colleague told her he did not understand why she was proposing the UAZ bill in the first place; he simply did not think food deserts existed in Chicago, where there were corner stores on every street. Harper had to prove him wrong, sponsoring and passing House Bill 3157, which legally defined “food desert” and required the Illinois Department of Agriculture to identify and track geographical areas in the state that are food deserts.

“I always say that people like to highlight my community for the violence,” she said, “but I say the real crime that is going on there is the amount of people who are literally dying simply because they don’t have access to good food.” ¬

OCTOBER 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Seeing the Future Lee Bey on conservation, preservation, and how to get fed

BY MALVIKA JOLLY

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F

or nearly a year, Lee Bey and I were neighbors in Pullman, living a few doors down from each other on the same stretch of workers’ cottages on St. Lawrence Avenue. We did not know each other then, but we must have brushed elbows, standing on the 115th Street platform awaiting the foreverlate inbound train; he can recall how he one day passed Cottage Grove Avenue to see me setting up the Pullman Free Library in the corner storefront. Only after I moved out of Chicago altogether did we become Facebook friends and piece together our neighborly past.

Lee Bey, I quickly realized, is a man in the know—whether in gaining access to the closed-and-condemned interiors of the terracotta-covered skeleton of the Schulze Building on Garfield Boulevard, or on the origins of a fossilized neon marquee sign circa the 1960s, reading “Speed Queen and Crown,” hanging

COURTESY OF LEE BEY

proudly on 46th and Ashland. Bey has made a profession as the narrator of the architectural and urban spaces of Chicago. In his tenure, he has served the city as the Sun-Times’s first architectural critic, as Richard M. Daley’s deputy chief-of-staff, as a professor at SAIC, as the best writer of the WBEZ blog, as the Goodman Theatre’s designer and orator of the Lorraine Hansberry tour of Bronzeville—and now as the DuSable Museum’s first Vice President of Planning, Education, and Museum Experience.

I spoke with Bey in his new museum digs on the opening day of “Chicago: A Southern Exposure,” his exhibition of architectural photography focusing on the South Side, on view at the DuSable through February 16 as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The show offers architecture as a kind of testimony— a paying of witness—to provide a counter-narrative to the pervasive myth of a negative South Side.

I know you informally as a man who knows the stories behind lots of different buildings. And as someone who knows a lot about a lot. So my first question is: How does a person become that way?

It has to do with upbringing, right? I grew up on the South Side, blue collar. My mother was a homemaker and my father worked for Reynolds Aluminum Company. But there was a sense that you had to be curious about your goings-on when I was a kid. Current events were always talked about around the house. It seems like everything was a question. My parents, they ate it up. They were like well, find out, read this, here’s what this is.

One thing about the South Side is—as you know—it’s vast. So you’re always driving to someplace, going to barbecues. I have like

ARCHITECTURE

nine million cousins. So it’s like: what is that?

Look at this. What is this? And, somehow, all that works to inform you.

My father was the kind of person who could see broad strokes of things. My mother could see a detail of things. Somehow, in there, something ignited.

I was born at 73rd and Kimbark, and when I was around ten, we moved to 84th and Constance in Avalon Park. It’s a bit different now. When I grew up there, particularly on Kimbark, we all were, without really knowing at the time, kids of the Great Migration.

All our parents had come from the South, twenty or thirty years earlier, when we were all growing up in the seventies.

My father was a Korean War Veteran, so there was always someone he was in the army with coming by. Like: where’s he live? He lives on Dorchester. He lives on University.

Solid working-class neighborhood.

The neighborhood was better [when we moved to Avalon Park]. It was more middleclass, but we were still working-class and so were many of my friends... Hardworking folk and people were doing really well. I remember one classmate of mine—her father was a liquor distributor. And it was like, Niiiiiiice.

Nice car. He would come pick her up in this beautiful Oldsmobile ’75. But we all went to school together, all laughed and learned.

These are neighborhoods that people don’t think exist unless you’re Black and you know they exist. Society makes us forget that when Black people came to Chicago, they came for opportunity— and expected it. What happened after that was a betrayal of that trust. Not that people came over here and decided: I’m going to come over here and start fucking up. The negative behaviors that you see are created by that trust being betrayed: “No, there are no jobs for you,” “We’re going to put you in a crappy school.”

That, in turn, wrecks neighborhoods. When I go there now, there’s a lot of vacancies, vacant lots, some houses that I grew up with either abandoned or burnt down...

And you think: This isn’t because people are evil. This was made this way.

It was Reagan.

Yeah, but before him—Nixon was no picnic either.

T

ell me a little about “Southern Exposure.”

Conceptually, it comes out of a couple things: one is, being a South Sider, I was tired of the

kind of ruin porn of the South Side and West Side that you see. And you get to a point where you can tell people are overlooking the kind of architecture you can see downstairs just to find the ruin porn, the vacant— Empty teeth.

Exactly! Right. That—plus the crime narrative. It begins to shape what people actually think of the South Side. It isn’t just beautiful, evocative pictures; it’s actually a co-conspirator in this narrative of a negative South Side. I thought: I’m going to show something different.

I wanted to show people in those pictures. I wanted to show the buildings being in use whenever I could because I wanted to address the other side of it, which is that this isn’t like Frontierland where spectators can just come through or whatever. There are people living in houses; there are people using the dry cleaners. These are neighborhoods. The solution is to invest in these neighborhoods the way we invest in other neighborhoods. So the solution isn’t to let it bottom out. And the solution also isn’t to open up a Greyhound bus full of yuppies or hipsters. But the idea is to invest in what’s there. Because these are functioning places, where there’s great architecture and people.

So that’s what I wanted to do—to the extent that photography can do anything.

T

he high school you went to is heavily photographed and featured in your show. Is it three different buildings, or is it three different sides of the facade?

Yeah, it’s three different locations in it.

It looks like three entirely different schools in the photographs!

It does, doesn’t it? It’s a huge school. It’s physically the second largest high school in Chicago. Most people see it when they’re on the Skyway and they’re leaving town, they see the side of it from forty feet up or whatever.

It’s a really straight up fantastic piece of architecture, but no one picture can really capture it.

From memory, it’s late Art Deco—so it’s different than the Chrysler Building but it’s still within the family. It’s almost Art Moderne. The architecture reflects the function of the school, which is a school that taught you how to fix things and build things. So, the machine-age aesthetic of the

architecture? It’s a nod to what’s going on inside.

So there is one picture where you see the columns, right. That’s the gym. The school is like a block or two long and, when you look at it on the 87th Street side, it’s flanked by these two monumental Greek temple-like pieces.

One is the auditorium, and the other is the gym. They’re at opposite ends, and the school itself fills in the middle; they’re like bookends to each other. So, architecturally, they treated the gym and the place of assembly and culture the same.

Which is very Greek.

Very much so! And there’s the one photograph that has the odd vanishing point? So, there were these shop wings—wood-shop, autoshop. They were built and designed sort of like warehouses— like a standalone factory would be. That photograph was one of them, and shooting it that way was a function of the sun shining on it. I was imitating the photography of the day when those places were built— the WPA [Works Progress Administration] aesthetic with its exaggerated angles.

How was it going to high school there?

What did you study?

It’s kind of funny. I learned how to operate a printing press. Until I saw a computerized printing press at a trade show at McCormick Place. And I’ll never forget this. There was still a strong printing industry in the South Side in the eighties. I remember going there and there was this curtain that said, “See the Future!” I was like, “I wanna see the future,” so I saw the thing: this guy’s at a computer and he types a thing, and there is a series of connected spaces with the printing press at the end, and it comes out, a printed thing, and he did it in, like, a minute— which, now, I know is forever, but back then it was really fast. I remember telling this guy, like, look at this! This thing can do everything we learned in the last two years. So I was terrified!

Couldn’t have been more than a week later that I was in my English class—and I’m a senior, so I’m almost out the door—my English teacher says, “You write well. Have you ever thought about journalism?” I go “Jooooooooournalism.” So, just like that, on a dime.

So when I see those pictures and think about CVS, it saved me. It put me on a road that otherwise I wouldn’t have been on.

B

ey’s next step to journalism was college—two years at Chicago State University, since he couldn’t afford Northwestern or Columbia College, and then two years on scholarship at Columbia. Work at the CSU and Columbia school newspapers led him to the City News Bureau, starting the day of graduation. From there he went on to the Daily Southtown, where, on his insistence, the paper’s coverage of the Southwest and Southeast Sides included Black neighborhoods for the first time.

In September 1992, he started at the Sun-Times.

And there you covered architecture?

Well, I was there nine years. First four or five years, I was general assignment and then ended up becoming investigative reporter.

And then went to architecture, because we got a new news editor and I was tired of investigative reporting. I was married then, and we’d just had a baby... Took some time off and thought “Ugh… I want to do something else!” And when this architecture beat came up I remember—it was crazy—I asked for it thinking that the editor would say no and give me something else, because I knew beans about architecture. And he calls me into his office— Nigel Wade—I’ll never forget— from London—and he said: “Chicago is a city of great architecture. We need someone to cover it. You’re a writer. You write well— beat’s yours.” And that’s how I started.

So how did you get your beans?

How do I go from bean-less to bean-full?

Or how did you go from knowing beans to knowing more?

Luckily, there’s probably no better city to learn architecture in than Chicago. Firms opened their doors when the word got out that the Sun-Times had an architecture critic, cats like Helmut Jahn and Adrian Smith were like, “Come on, let me show you what we’re doing.” I could ask questions. I read books. I remember being up all night trying to figure out stuff. But also the politics of it— particularly preservation. What buildings get saved and which ones don’t. Especially the stuff in the South Side. There was a lot of demolition going on. Landmark-quality buildings. And all that gets swept up into the mix.

That’s something I wanted to touch upon: what is preservation and conservation and the politics of it like in the South Side right

OCTOBER 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

the situation here. If played the wrong way, as the South Side goes into its next chapter, the question of Well then, Who moves in? becomes the issue. And you have to be really well off, which tends not to be—in the numbers it used to be—people who are Black and brown. It tilts the favor onto the side of white people who have the capital to come in.

And that’s a problem.

W

ord on the street is that you were doing this show and then what came out of that was that they offered you this job, and you kind of tripped into it.

That’s exactly what happened.

How is it so far?

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now? Because you have people like Theaster Gates, who does a lot of work based off of reuse of old buildings, like the Stony Island Arts Bank. But what is not being conserved that should? And what is something that you wish had been preserved?

It becomes like what in law school is called Fruit of the Poisonous Tree, right? Which means that if you get evidence in a funky way, anything that comes from that evidence is tainted. So if I raided your house illegally to get that bag of heroin—and there I am trying to put you in jail for it—I can’t.

But you can.

I guess now you can—but I ought not to if the law works correctly, because I got it in the wrong way. So, even if I know the heroin is yours—if I can prove it’s yours—it screws everything in the chain. And the same thing happens in preservation in the South Side.

The city’s preservation mechanism is both the city’s and the nonprofit ones, and when they decide what buildings in Chicago are worthy of preservation (and this goes way back to the sixties), they tend not to choose South Side buildings. Almost four to one. As a result, there were and still are fewer landmarks in the South Side and the West Side when all these catastrophic things begin to happen in 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ OCTOBER 4, 2017

urban life. Tearing up neighborhoods to build public housing. Tearing down public housing to build other neighborhoods. Widening the roads. When this begins to happen, all this architecture is seen as expendable. It puts in the DNA of the city that these buildings are less than.

Then you lay on top of that the crazy role that finances play, that banks and insurance companies play. So, [for example,] that modernist house, the Ingram House— that house sells for [$150,000]. But if that house was in... [the] North Side, North Suburbs—you could put another zero behind that house... They devalue these houses and these places, so it makes it hard to get credit. It makes it hard to raise the alarm that a building is in trouble. If a building has a history that tracks with white history— Frank Lloyd Wright designed it, George Washington slept here. If the history is Black history—unless it’s jazz!—it gets ignored.

There’s this building that I posted on Facebook, on 76th and Saint Lawrence. I shot it with my camera-phone as I was going someplace else. Circular crazy building from the early seventies. I forgot this crazy building existed and hadn’t seen it in a long time. I got tons and tons of likes and comments, people remembering this building, that kind of thing. And, given that this building is going to be fifty years pretty soon, you know, you

could begin to think that maybe it belongs in a city registry—maybe it becomes a city landmark!

But because the history is not a whiteconnected history, it’s harder to get the preservation mechanisms to help you do that.

And if it’s not an accepted Black-connected history—Quincy Jones wrote his first song here, whatever. All of that makes these buildings harder and harder to save.

If I can’t get private financing to fix these buildings, what do you do? Then the philanthropic comes in—and that’s what Theaster does well—but the question there is: is it sustainable? If it takes a load of foundation money to make these buildings work, how do you make money from it? How do you sustain it? Is the Lee Bey Foundation gonna come back in five years and bestow another x amount of dollars on it, or am I off to the next thing? So that’s the question.

To sweep over something of an answer: these places are historically maltreated. But the other part of it is that when you see buildings in the exhibit that are taken care of, understand that, know that: that’s the hurdle they had to jump over, to get here.

Somebody is not going to beg the commission of financing to fix his house. If he’s fortunate enough he’s putting together enough private capital to make it work, which is a heck of a hurdle to leap. So that’s

Job, so far, is good. The idea is to improve the exhibits here, the shows that are here, and improve the discussion and programming around those shows. My president actually wants me to do a film series, because I like film. Some of it is playing traffic cop. I think a lot of people—no matter where they’re from—they kind of treat the DuSable as Well, I can always screen my film there. I get last-minute calls. Essentially what they don’t want to say is: We were told we needed someplace Black to screen it, so how ‘bout y’all?

So I just say: No, no.

I say: Unless I can structure a curriculum and programming around it, can’t do it.

So, call me with this next year.

And it’s not been popular—but it’s been working. You wouldn’t come to the MCA and do that. So the idea is really to lift the offerings and the stature of the place. And on the architecture side, I’ll be playing some kind of role in figuring out the Roundhouse Expansion. But, on the day-to-day, it’s looking for the kind of exhibits that make sense now.

We were talking earlier about Fabiola JeanLouis coming this November. Here’s a young Black woman who’s doing these exciting things—mix of Afrofuturism and garments.

My first impression when I walked through my first week is that the history here is really male. Really male. And if there is a women’s story here it’s almost as an adjunct to the male: Here the men fought in World War I, and by the way, here’s what the women were doing. But the clientele is almost seventy percent women, Black women. And I thought: there needs to be something here for y’all. So we’re going to have the pendulum almost swinging completely in that way to

ARCHITECTURE

balance things out.

It takes money to make exhibits change, but things like discussions and programming and film series, these are things we can do right now. For instance, there was a queer women’s film series happening here once a month. And it was really good—and I didn’t know about it! Until the woman who organized it came and sat exactly where you are sitting, with one of the directors. And I was like: I didn’t know this was happening...

And I say: Well, you start it back up, put it back in there, and let’s get some velocity around it! We’re working out things with Channel 11— talking about cool finds within the archives and collections, and we’ll be sharing things with them as well. So these are things we’re going to do right now.

Are you finding that there’s a kind of respectability politics that you are engaging or are pushing against?

Thankfully not. My job as vice president— thank god I’m not President—is to push it until I find that wall. So we have talked a lot about bringing more challenging fare to the museum. Because, you know, we made a hire a couple weeks ago, and we were all talking, and I said: I have a lot of knives in my drawer, even the dull ones.

But the dull ones I don’t use.

I don’t throw it away, but I don’t use it.

My fear is that museums, particularly Black museums, by trying to be respectable all the time, trying to be respectable places, go to that place. So you come here because you have to—like it’s Stations of the Cross, right—but do I want them to come in because they have to, or do I want them to come in to get fed? To get challenged. That’s really what I want.

Because the times really require it.

Black people need safe spaces, yes, but also challenging spaces, but also spaces that are uniquely ours. It doesn’t mean it has to exclude anybody; the door is open, twist it for anyone who comes. So… I probably shouldn’t say this…

No, I’ve said it publicly. I’ll say it again.

I have a thing against Madea movies—I hate ’em! I think they’re awful. And, oftentimes, they get shown. Not here, not inside, not as a part of educational programming—but they get shown through other means. Get outta here with that! There are so many films out there [and] filmmakers who challenge what’s happening. Let’s show that.

This is why the movie—and the

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discussion—is important, and I’m throwing out people who are just like, “Show my movie,” and don’t give me a chance to form a discussion around it. Because I need the two of them to be in concert.

Because that’s when you digest.

Exactly. [In 2014] I screened a movie at Black Cinema House—first time it’d been shown in Chicago for forty years—movie called Uptight. I want to show it here. It’s a remake of John Ford’s The Informer (1935), which was set in Northern Ireland. Jules Dassin, the director, takes that story of these cats trying to inform on the IRA and brings it to what was then modern-day Cleveland, and it becomes this story of the struggle of whose side are you on? Is it the We Shall Overcome side or is it the Black Radicals side? And it’s filmed at a time—1968, in fact the footage of Dr. King’s burial, his funeral, is in there. It’s that contemporary to the times that they’re watching it on television!—when that question was not easily answered. Now, even two years after it was originally made, it would not side with the radicals. It would not give them the voice. But this movie really does. And when I showed it at Black Cinema House, I remember thinking: No one is going to go see this except me and a couple of my buddies. We’ll drink some beers and we’ll see it. [But] we packed that place out. And they

all sat still on a February night.

I saw a movie with Billy Dee Williams from the seventies [The Final Comedown (1972)] where it’s almost the same thing.

He’s kind of a go-along-get-along brother who joins the Black Panther Organization and although the ending is kind of crazy— they couldn’t figure out how to end it so they ended it with a gun battle—it really says some interesting things about Black destiny, Black identity, Black belonging, Black love.

These are the kinds of things that are important to screen. They may be imperfect, but still masterpieces nonetheless. And, of course, modern-day films that touch upon the same themes—I definitely want to get at.

W

hat is your favorite thing or place—just something you can tell me to go check out in the South Side?

A building—or just anything?

Anything. Something really juicy.

Let’s see... Do you eat meat?

I eat everything.

Well then Lem’s Bar-B-Q on 75th is—it’s a Yes, yes. So it’s a yes to that.

You know, there’s a house I’m thinking

about—it didn’t make this exhibit because I just ran out of space. There’s a house on 38th or 39th and King Drive [ed. note: 3656 S. King Dr.]. It’s where Lu Palmer—he was an activist and a journalist and helped fashion Harold Washington’s first campaign—it’s the house where he lived. You can’t miss it— it’s this great eruption of red brick house right on the Northwest corner of the block. See it from a block off, go to the next house, and you’ll still see it. And it’s in horrible condition— well, potentially horrible condition. It’s a masterpiece of architecture and history. It’s one of those things that should be a landmark, but isn’t. That might be something that… well, if preservation forces in the city don’t coalesce around this house, then I know what time it is.

When I go by the house and stop any longer than a few seconds, people come out and [ask]: Is anything happening? What’s happening? Did you buy it?

No, no. I’m just looking at it.

So, people in the neighborhood know what’s up. But if the people who can save this house and could raise the alarm don’t— then I know what’s up. A longer version of this interview can be found at southsideweekly.com.

Malvika Jolly is from the South Side. She lives in New York and tweets @dinnertheatrics.

OCTOBER 4, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

BULLETIN Alternative Histories, Alternative Archives Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Thursday, October 5, 9am-5pm. Free. vdb.org Join the Video Data Bank, an experimental archive at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and twelve panelists—including Neil Taylor of Humboldt Park’s Read/Write Library, Brian Belak of the roving Black Film Center Archives, and Candace Ming of the South Side Home Movie Project— spread across three sessions for a free, daylong symposium, complete with breakfast and lunch. (Sam Stecklow)Gwendolyn

16th Annual March Against Domestic Violence Bessemer Park, 8930 S. Muskegon Ave. Friday, October 6, 4:30am–8am. Tables at 4:30am.

Rally at 5:30am before the march and vigil begins at 6am. (312) 747-5493. bit.ly/DVMarch In honor of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Family Rescue, an agency that provides services for domestic violence survivors, is organizing its annual march in collaboration with CPD’s 3rd and 4th districts. Previous marches featured CPD’s Mounted Units leading the procession as marchers showed their strong stance against domestic violence. (Yunhan Wen)

Brooks Poetry Awards Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Saturday, October 7, 11:30am-1:00pm. Free.

(312) 422-5580. www.ilhumanities.org Marking the start of a twelve-hour arts festival in celebration of its fifth anniversary, the Logan Center for the Arts will host the winners of the Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry contest. Everyone is invited to watch the winners perform, and to honor Brooks’ legacy of cultivating youth poetry. (Abigail Bazin)

2nd Annual Black Man’s Expo 2017 Harris Park, 6200 S. Drexel Ave. Saturday, October 7, 10am–3pm for registration, vendor mall, plenary and workshops. AKARama Foundation Service Center, 6220 S. Ingleside Ave. Saturday, October 7, 5pm–8pm for the 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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closing event ceremony. RSVP for each time slot at bit.ly/BlackmanExpo Black Man’s Expo envisions a forum for Black men of all ages to gather and share the challenges that they face every day. The first half of the event focuses on facilitating discussion, while, on a lighter note, the second half is a closing event ceremony featuring entertainment and food. (Yunhan Wen)

Pullman 44th Annual House Tour Pullman National Monument Visitor Center, 11141 S. Cottage Grove Ave. Saturday and Sunday, October 7–8, 11am. $17 Seniors, $20 adults in advance on their website, $20 seniors, $23 adults at door. (773) 785-8901. pullmanil.org/housetour.htm Once a year, Pullman invites visitors into private spaces that double as architectural markers of the neighborhood’s history.

On this self-guided tour, glimpse into the restored and reimagined interiors of today’s residences while peeking 130 years into the neighborhood’s past. (Sara Cohen)

Englewood Speaks: The Things I Learned While I Was Teaching Kusanya Café, 825 W. 69th St. Monday, October 9, 12pm–1:30pm. Free. RSVP at sonnyspeaks.com/englewood-speaks.html Englewood Speaks, the yearlong series of storytelling from residents of Englewood, is presenting its second episode, adding the voices of teachers to the conversation. The Things I Learned While I Was Teaching invites audiences to look at education and community from new angles. (Yunhan Wen)

VISUAL ARTS Beverly Art Walk Several locations, including Western Ave. Corridor, 103rd St. Corridor, and 99th St. and Walden Pkwy; check website for more information. Saturday, October 7, noon–7pm.

Free. bit.ly/beverly-art-walk-2017 At the fourth annual Beverly Art Walk, more than sixty venues in the neighborhood will be showcasing everything from photography and painting to musical performances and craft beers. Two hundred artists will be participating, some of whom will be opening up their home studios to

Art Walk visitors—look out in particular for Best of the South Side pick Boundary, a gallery space housed in a garage. (Adia Robinson)

Stations of the Elevated with Gabriel “Flash” Carrasquillo, Jr. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Sunday, October 8, 1:30pm–3:30pm. Free.

(773) 324-5520. southsideprojections.org The commanding music of Charles Mingus and Aretha Franklin fill a void of voices as graffiti-inscribed subway cars pass by in Stations of the Elevated, a film documenting a now-forgotten New York. Local graffiti artist and historian “Flash” hosts the postscreening talk. (Sara Cohen)

CYBERDELIC: From Pilsen to Pluto, Yollocalli’s 20th Birthday Celebration Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Friday, October 13, 6pm–10pm. Free. (773) 521-1621. nationalmuseumofmexicanart.org Yollocalli Arts Reach is celebrating its twentieth birthday with an exhibit featuring art from the past two decades, installations, and more. An initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art, Yollocalli was created to provide opportunities for young people, especially those in the Pilsen area (and now Little Village), to explore their artistic talents. The word comes from the Aztec language and means something like “heart-house.” Yollocalli has evolved to include an open community center in the heart of Little Village with a computer lab, radio production studio, and an art library.

It also has regular shows on Lumpen Radio.

(Adam Przybyl)

“I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter” Book Release National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Friday, October 20, 6pm–8:30pm.

Free. (312) 738-1503. bit.ly/ErikaSanchezBookRelease Erika L. Sánchez, a second-generation Mexican American and Princeton professor, has come back to her native Chicago to read excerpts of her debut novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. Sánchez, who also published the poetry chapbook Letters on Expulsion earlier this year, will talk about how she wrote her first novel around a pair of sisters, parental expectations, and an

unexpected tragedy. ( Joseph S. Pete)

MUSIC The Dojo Presents: 1234!

The Dojo, message on Facebook for address.

Friday, October 6, 6pm–1am. $5 donation. facebook.com/thedojochi Come to the Dojo Friday night for: a good time; a workshop at 6:30pm with the F12 Network on transformative justice; music provided by six bands, from Jollys, who play “slop pop for the mop tops,” to Jen Dot & The Dawgs, who promise a lot of Ramones covers; hosting by Beverly Rage; and, maybe, to find out why this event is called “1234.” ( Julia Aizuss)

La Santa Cecilia Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Saturday, October 7, 7:30pm doors, 8:30pm show. $15 students, $20 general admission.17+. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com Named after the patron saint of music, the “musical phenomenon” La Santa Cecilia comes to Thalia Hall with their boundary breaking music about “love, loss, and everyday struggles.” The band recently made waves with their visual album of Mexican and Latin American music Amar y Vivir, which was released this January. (Adia Robinson)

Hymen Moments Olivia’s Garden, 10730 S. Western Ave. Friday, Saturday, October 7, 5pm. All ages.

Free. bit.ly/beverly-art-walk-2017 Even though Olivia’s Garden closed last spring, you can still stop by the former greenhouse this Friday during the Beverly Arts Walk 2017 to catch Chicago’s only “all lady Misfits tribute band dedicated to community,” who always donate one hundred percent of their proceeds. Can’t make it Saturday? Fear not, they will also be opening for The Old Comiskeys at Reggies the following Saturday. (Andrew Koski)

The Old Comiskeys Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Friday, October 13, 7pm. 21+. $8-$10. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com As their name might suggest, The Old Comiskeys are a South Side punk band.

EVENTS They’re having a record release show at Reggies with some great Chicago-based openers—Nightcap, No Dead Heroes, and Hymen Moments—that shouldn’t be missed. (Andrew Koski)

Tony! Toni! Tone!

The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. October 13, 7pm doors, 8pm show, and 9:30pm doors, 10:30pm show. $38-$78, all ages. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com If It Feels Good knowing It Never Rains in Southern California, it will feel even better hearing the trio who penned these songs sing them live next week at The Promontory.

The Oakland family trio will perform these classic chart-topping songs for an all-ages show with something for everyone. Enjoy laid-back front row VIP table seating or make the night an R&B dance party in the standing lounge. Cousin Amor Khalil, now on lead vocals since Raphael Saadiq’s departure, will not disappoint; at first glance you will even think it’s him. (Nicole Bond)

Benjamin Booker Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Monday, October 16, 7:30pm doors, 8:30pm show. $20 in advance, $22 at the door. 17+. (312) 5263851. thaliahallchicago.com Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Benjamin Booker comes to Thalia Hall with a sound that has been described by the Tribune as “a raw brand of blues/bougie/soul.” The Virginia-born, Tampa Bay, Florida–bred artist’s most recent album Witness was released in June and written primarily in Mexico City. (Adia Robinson)

David Archuleta The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Monday, October 30, 7pm doors, 8pm show. $17–$150. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com David Archuleta “doesn’t like attention, but deserves yours,” proclaims the description of Archuleta’s upcoming show on the Promontory’s website, which goes on to outline a career that remarkably makes no mention of his attention-bringing stint on American Idol. You will be able to give him even more attention if you pay for the $125 VIP experience of the concert; either way, fans will be able to head to the Promontory, where he’ll be singing “about the struggle of finding your own voice.” ( Julia Aizuss)

STAGE & SCREEN Chicago South Side Film Festival Studio Movie Grill, 210 W. 87th St. Opens Friday, October 6, 6:30pm; events through Sunday. $16-$40. (773) 420-4475. filmsforthepeople.com Watch movies old and new about the South Side, such as Hoop Dreams, Love Jones, Stony Island, The Interrupters, Cooley High, and Mahogany, starring Diana Ross. South Side native and film buff Michelle Kennedy produced the fest at the Alamo Drafthouselike Studio Movie Grill in Chatham to show Chicago’s best side. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Various Artists Independent Film Festival Film Row Cinema of Columbia College, 1104 S. Wabash Ave. Saturday, October 7–Sunday, October 8,11am–5:30pm. $15 one-day ticket, $25 two-day festival pass. variousartiststv.net The culmination of a yearlong selection process, the VAiFF will screen finalist films in categories ranging from animations to TV pilots. Stay for Q&A sessions, judging and award ceremonies with decorated industry professionals, and an after-party with VAiFF. (Sara Cohen)

vocalist Cassandra Wilson at the Parkway Ballroom in Bronzeville. (Nicole Bond)

eta Family Theatre Initiative: The Tiger Who Wore White Gloves eta Creative Arts, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Friday, October 20–Saturday, December 23. $40, discounts available for seniors and students. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org Nora Brooks Blakely’s musical adaptation of a book by her mother Gwendolyn Brooks was already a fitting choice, in the year of the Brooks centennial, to start off eta’s 2017–18 season. Even more fitting, given Brooks’s dedication to youth poetry, is that the musical will launch eta’s partnership with the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation. The initiative will encourage Chicago students to read the book and then to see the musical. ( Julia Aizuss)

Peacebook Festival Hamilton Park, 513 W. 72nd St. Thursday, October 5, 7pm; Friday, October 6, 7pm; Saturday October 7, 5pm. Free. collaboraction.org

This citywide festival collaboration of over two hundred performing artists exploring the theme of peace comes to Englewood.

Music, dance, spoken word, and short theater sketches examine how loss, violence, justice, resilience, setting an example, and peace all intersect. Artists of all ages, with many from the South Side, are featured.

Prior to the Saturday performance at 5pm is the Dome of Dance competition at 3pm, and a community meal and peace panel discussion at 4pm. (Nicole Bond)

Five Guys Named Moe Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through Sunday, October 8. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Five guys named, yes, Moe—Big, FourEyed, Eat, No, and Little—are the side characters comforting lonely, blues-singing Nomax in this musical tribute to saxophonist and songwriter Louis Jordan. Directed by Court Resident Artist Ron O.J. Parson as well as associate director (and frequent Court actor!) Felicia P. Fields, this is sure to be a soulful start to Court’s 2017-18 season. ( Julia Aizuss)

CHICAGO CULTURAL ALLIANCE PRESENTS

Third World Press Fiftieth Anniversary Gala Events Various locations throughout the city.

Through October 7. For the complete schedule of events, locations and ticket prices, visit thirdworldpressfoundation.com Come make history with Third World Press. The acclaimed publishing house is celebrating fifty years with multiple events around the South Side featuring scholars, stage, and screen. Some highlights: this Wednesday, catch screenings of Riding, Striding, Reaching and Teaching, a short film of a day in the life of Gwendolyn Brooks, and the Shahari Moore film Brooks People, at Studio Movie Grill in Chatham. Meanwhile, at the Betty Shabazz Academy Auditorium further north in the neighborhood, see Chicago Soul in Action, featuring the words of Gwendolyn Brooks and the music of Curtis Mayfield, by Lucy Smith and Cheryl Corley. Thursday, Jessica Care Moore presents her one-woman show at the Kennedy-King College Theater in Englewood. The closing gala on Saturday features an evening concert with guest

A citywide, intercultural festival of art, ideas and performance at neighborhood cultural centers and heritage museums.

CELEBRATING OUR PAST, EMBRACING OUR FUTURE.

OCTOBER 1-29, 2017

Reserve your tickets at InheritChicago.org #InheritChicago @ChicagoCultural

Anonymous

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