March 8, 2017 | The Arts Issue

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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WELCOME life practices

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 4, Issue 22 Editor-in-Chief Jake Bittle Managing Editors Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger Director of Staff Support Ellie Mejía Director of Writer Development Mari Cohen Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editors Emeline Posner, Julia Aizuss Education Editor Music Editor Stage & Screen Editor Visual Arts Editor

Hafsa Razi Austin Brown Nicole Bond Corinne Butta

Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Joe Andrews, Jonathan Hogeback, Andrew Koski, Adia Robinson, Carrie Smith, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producers Andrew Koski Daphne Maeglin Web Editor Camila Cuesta Social Media Editors Emily Lipstein, Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Layout Editors Baci Weiler, Sofia Wyetzner Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Zoe Makoul, Kylie Zane Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma, Lizzie Smith Data Visualization: Jasmine Mithani Webmasters

Sofia Wyetzner

Publisher

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. 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 illustration by Joseph R. Peterson

“It is through the quiet routines that we most completely profess our faith in tomorrow.” isaac tannenbaum...4

The Arts Issue

L

ast year’s Arts Issue opened with a story titled “The Past Keeps Happening”— and it does. A year later, we bring to you a new Arts Issue, packed with reviews and interviews, profiles and photographs. In these pages there’s history: years of hard work by our featured artists, the generations of people before them, and the historical canons that help us understand the importance of what they do. And in these histories, there lies potential for the future.

Beginning with an expanded look at where art lives, we look to Englewood artists Tonika Johnson and Adrienne Powers. They illustrate the high stakes of finding beauty within everyday routines and practices, and we hear their words echo throughout the following pieces, which range from a story about a dancer’s homecoming to a poem about the demolished Michael Reese Hospital to a constellation of reviews. They illustrate the deep connection between works that offer ideas for a different future and the deep roots that make reimagining and reconsidering possible.

By looking to the alternative education offered by “makerspace” and the dynamic communityoriented programming of Cultura in Pilsen, we see how those roots bud and blossom into creative networks across the South Side. The print gallery that closes the issue represents the diverse array of work being made within the neighborhoods we call home, and displays the immense potential of our communities and the talented individuals who compose them.

class is in session

“I’ve been in this area my whole life. I love it. I think artistically it is not served.’” emma boczek...6 the blessing of a permanent change

Vaguely futurist film noir that you can grind to. leah menzer...7 curating a new canon

A red and gold rug cohabitates peacefully with a neighboring series of lake photographs. sylvia de boer...10 a dancer's homecoming

“He just has that special ‘it’ thing about his movement style.” lauren pankin...12 art, politics, and college scholarships

“I think there’s value in making somebody ask, ‘Why is a high schooler doing that?’” sam clapp...14 at the center of trauma

“Michael Reese, you are deceased.” nicole bond...15 new space, same work

“It was very much an artist neighborhood and it’s getting difficult for people to sustain themselves.” deysi cuevas...16 sounds in south chicago

The impact of arts education on any community is revolutionary. ashvini kartik-narayan...18 building cabinets, computers, and community

“Oh, this is pretty easy, I’m just going to buy a new power supply.” eleonora edreva...20 art for all wards

“It can’t just be a top-down approach.” michael wasney......................22 a house of memories

The Chinese-American Museum of Chicago offers an alternative home for these personal histories. michelle yang...24 a print gallery

Selected works by South Side artists. .....................27 MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

TONIKA LEWIS JOHNSON

Life Practices

At Rootwork Gallery, two artists showcase the day-to-day of Englewood

BY ISAAC TANNENBAUM

T

he alarms rings once at 7:30am, disrupting the morning quiet.

Fifteen minutes and three alarms later, I turn it off. Then to shower, then to brush my teeth, to deodorize, to dress and pack up my knapsack for the day, and then to breakfast with the same two–– sometimes four––people. Such is my morning routine.

It is easy to write morning rituals off as one of the mundanities of the human condition. Monday mornings bleed into Tuesday mornings, Tuesdays into Wednesdays, so on and so forth until the beginnings of these days are timeless blurs of unconscious movement. However, just as patterns and repetition are celebrated 4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

as key aesthetic elements of visual art and architectural design, so too can they be in human activity.

At the Rootwork Gallery in Pilsen, a new exhibition celebrates the beauty found in quotidian, repetitive human activity. Artists Tonika Lewis Johnson and Adrienne Powers collaborated on this project, aptly titled "Everyday Rituals." A photographer and painter, respectively, the duo sought to capture and convey the aesthetic value of the dayto-day of Englewood’s Black community.

The impetus for this project was twofold.

Firstly, Johnson and Powers wanted to challenge the fetishized conception of Black life, especially in Chicago, as rife

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with despair and violence; they wanted to showcase the city’s average denizens, who live their lives in the best way possible.

Secondly, the pair wanted to communicate the beauty found in the everyday rituals of the Black community. These desires took shape in a series of photographs and paintings of people going about their lives in a neighborhood falsely characterized, even by the president, as a warzone.

The exhibition takes the idea of repetition and harmony in routine and expands it beyond the aesthetic and into the personal. This union, of repetition and harmony, has a rich history on the South Side, where entire neighborhoods have been built around these values. In the

early 1900s, investors sought to fulfill the needs of the expanding middle class in the city and created the now archetypal Chicago Bungalows––single family brick homes with large windows facing the street. Their design was influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, which began in England in the late nineteenth century in response to industrialization, and which sought to turn back to the artisans and artists who crafted unique pieces by hand. This artistic school is known for its focus on the beauty of nature and its use of architectural features to emphasize a building’s surroundings.

The Chicago Bungalows—uniform in their overall materials and design, but

VISUAL ARTS

ADRIENNE POWERS

made all the more beautiful through their minute variations—are models of the values of this personalized, handcrafted movement. In the same sense, the inhabitants of these homes, as well as many others across the city, find beauty in the tiny, quiet moments of the everyday.

I had the chance to speak with Tracie Hall, the founding gallerist and curator at Rootwork Gallery, about her inspiration for the exhibition. She brought together Johnson and Powers, having seen each artist’s work independent of the other’s, in order to create "Everyday Rituals." In the new show, which she helped guide and formulate, she wanted to look at “the idea of engaging in rituals that are not necessarily named or recognized.”

Through the photography and paintings of the two Chicago artists, Hall wanted to showcase the unappreciated and unacknowledged beauty in the dayto-day activities of the city’s residents, especially on the South Side. As she wrote in the exhibition description: “It is through the quiet routines: the making of beds, the washing of clothes, the combing of hair, the blessing of food that we most

completely profess our faith in tomorrow.”

Hall emphasized not only the beauty she felt expressed in these everyday rituals, but also a sense of spirituality in the traditions and rituals of Englewood’s community captured through Johnson’s camera lens. Hall also spoke a lot of the magic of the city. A Los Angeles native who spent most of her adult life on the East Coast, she emphasized how captivated she was with the beating heart of the Midwest. This exhibition, she says, captures just that.

It is not only the contents of the paintings and photographs that embody this unexpected beauty, but also the techniques and gestures of the artists themselves. In one of Powers’ paintings, Hall explained, crumbled flowers are used as a subtle accent. This element does take some effort to notice, but it represents the key message of "Everyday Rituals": the beauty of the unseen in human activity. "Everyday Rituals," Rootwork Gallery, 645 W. 18th St. Through March 19. Free. Call for hours. (917) 821-3050.

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STAGE & SCREEN

Class Is in Session Carla Stillwell on twenty-one years in Chicago theater

BY EMMA BOCZEK

D

ELLEN HAO

irector, playwright, and teaching artist Carla Stillwell knows more than a few things about Chicago theater after twenty-one seasons with Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre (MPAACT). Stillwell, a South Shore native who began acting professionally at the age of ten, is bringing her craft back to the South Side this year; she will organize MPAACT group classes starting in April and will also launch her own private theater classes out of her Woodlawn home. Stillwell is directing 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

MPAACT’s final show of the season, local playwright Shepsu Aakhu’s Never the Milk and Honey, opening April 14. The Weekly spoke with her about her new classes, her three decades of work, and the importance of theater by and for people of color.

Can you tell me about the theater classes you’re organizing on the South Side this spring and why you decided to launch them?

A lot of actors, especially actors of color,

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live south. They live south, they live west, but everything seems to be geared to the North Side, including our theater. We perform out of the Greenhouse Center.

The opportunities for artists and actors, especially actors of color on the South Side, to take classes that are convenient, affordable, and near their home are nil.

There are really no opportunities for that type of training, especially one-on-one training. I’m a South Sider, I was born and raised in South Shore, I moved to the Hyde Park–Kenwood area as an adult,

and right now I’m near Bronzeville. I’ve been in this area my whole life. I love it.

I think artistically it is not served. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to make sure I did offer my private classes and group classes on the South Side.

[The classes are] something I’ve always wanted to do. Right now there are a lot of acting opportunities in the city. There are so many shows being shot here, so many films being shot here.

There’s so much work onstage now. The stage is diversifying, so there is work

MUSIC

for artists of color. I sit in auditions— we have auditions annually—and a lot of artists are woefully underprepared for the audition process. Because my theater company is a non-equity theater company, new artists come in that are not always fully trained, and some that have been in school for a time but have never acted professionally. Making that shift from school to professional theater, there’s a training gap. I would like to help actors be more prepared.

black or brown characters. Then theater is very, very white.

I grew up on the heels of the civil rights movement. During the earlymid seventies into the early eighties, there was the black arts movement.

There was Ntozake Shange, there was Amiri Baraka, there were all of these black artists that were arts activists.

There was all of this black art that was important, that was meaningful, and that was elevated to high art, and elevated to Broadway, because it was in vogue.

“If the work is not being written by black and brown playwrights, then the work probably doesn’t include black or brown characters.”

What drew you to theater? How has theater changed since you began acting?

Theater is in many ways completely stagnant, and struggles with diversity in a way that I never thought I would see. There’s a reason that Hamilton is so successful. It is because those of us who are theater people were completely thirsty. We were dry, we were in a desert full of old white theater and the white aesthetic, and Hamilton came in and was a drink of water for the theater. This is why it’s successful, and this is why The Color Purple is successful: because there had been nothing for years. There was Dreamgirls in the eighties and then there were years where everything on Broadway was crisp, lily-white. It was a desert. Black and brown playwrights are not produced at the pace that black and brown screenwriters are being produced.

It’s just not happening. We struggle with diversity on the funding front. We struggle with diversity in terms of equity, houses, producing black and brown playwrights…and if the work is not being written by black and brown playwrights, then the work probably doesn’t include

And when people decided there was no more racism—and we have learned in the last few months that’s not true, black people knew it the whole time, but now the world knows—in the late eighties, early nineties when Bill Clinton was president, people decided we were all living well, and there were no more problems. Then there was no more push, there was no more pressure on Broadway to produce black art. And Broadway stopped producing black art.

What role does theater play in community-building?

In this current political climate, I think theater has the responsibility to create art in uncertain times, art in urgent times, art to address some of the ills of society. Theater has always been a place for activists. I think performance art in this time is important. There is some wonderful art being made in film, there are some wonderful, really strong, poignant, activist television shows, but theater kind of runs in place sometimes.

And I think empowering actors with knowledge will help more actors be arts activists. ¬

The Blessing of A Permanent Change Bottle Tree dazzles the Stony Island Arts Bank

BY LEAH MENZER

N

obody said out loud that night, on February 23, that it was the last night of A.M. Frison’s residency at the Stony Island Arts Bank.

Frison—nom de plume Coultrain— was performing a concert with his group Bottle Tree, with Tomasso Moretti on drums, Ben Lamar Gay on electric future keyboard cornet, production, and Frison both singing and songwriting.

It was the culmination of a residency that lasted over a year, during which Frison performed as Coultrain in every possible permutation every Thursday at 68th and Stony Island, singing with any number of musicians over beats from his past albums, or just as often drumming, DJing, or singing instead over a trio of young girls in matching outfits keeping time. Coultrain might read short stories and drink something out of a bag or sing poems while drinking nothing at all, but every week he’d perform with an energy that had something to it—an expansion of all time and space, maybe.

The residency is over now, but on that Thursday night something was born anew. Some sixty people went in the basement of the Arts Bank, a dusty spectacle with a gaping vault door.

Behind the band setup, the file drawers of a bank, the keeping spaces of secrets and jewels, lay askance on the floor.

The bank has been Rebuild's was built in 1923 and had closed by the 1980s, according to the website of the Rebuild Foundation, community artist Theaster Gates’s nonprofit arm for, among other things, neighborhood space-making.

Since 2015, the Bank has been Rebuild's “hybrid gallery, media archive, library and community center”—and, thanks to Coultrain, performance space.

Frison has a slew of Coultrain solo albums, including standout project Side Effex of Make Believe, but Bottle Tree is

his chance at collaboration. Ben Lamar Gay is the producer of the album and an esteemed musician on his own right.

Tommaso is an Italian drummer with a feather touch. You forget he’s playing until the beats whisper themselves back into your attention—I’ve never heard anything like it. The concert that Thursday felt hypnotically short. They played a few songs off their new album, a futuristic, uncategorizable series of songs to think about, and probably make love to. Anything Coultrain touches feels like a prophecy, a vision of a world beyond, a feeling of oneness glimpsed.

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein wrote, in the voice of Alice B.Toklas, that “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them.”

It’s hard not to think of that quote watching Bottle Tree perform.

Bottle Tree is prayerful and reverential, and their album is a refreshing cluster of complex, lyrical, intricate bangers—soul bangers? The vibe, which was possibly even more present at their show at the Empty Bottle in July 2016 than in the Arts Bank basement, is that of a storefront preacher.

“I’ve never been here, it’s so cool,” said a friend about the Bank that night.

“But it’s so far south—how do you get here?”

As if in cryptic response, Frison croons “hiding in plain sight was the world behind the world” on the second track of the record, “Another Other.”

The songs on Bottle Tree’s upcoming record remind me of Afrofuturists like Shabazz Palaces and Sun Ra—musicians that show you a trail to somewhere,

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COURTESY OF ___

that ineffable space of consciousness that dazzles. They don’t just share a jazzy complexity in their music, but also the same commitment to the radical Afrocentric literary spirit. Sun Ra was ostensibly from outer space (and wrote poetry and prose to that effect). Shabazz Palaces’s Ishmael Butler (formerly of Digable Planets) goes by “Palaceer Lazaro” for the project, walked snakes on golden chains in press photos, raps about freedom, and weaves dreamworlds somewhere between the ancient past and the far-off future. Frison hasn’t reached those conceptual heights yet, but it’s not hard to imagine that he could—he writes densely weird yet soulfully romantic lyrics, uses hooks from Sun Ra’s 1970 “The Night of the Purple Moon,” and his record label producer describes him on International Anthem (in an extreme understatement) as “an unusual dude.”

“Open Salamander,” the standout at the Arts Bank basement concert and the fourth track on the forthcoming album,

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scans as vaguely futurist film noir that you can grind to. The song feels driven by the shape of the words rather than the meaning of the words: “I’ll do anything you say, cause your mouth shoots out cosmic rays/you move like salamander.”

I don’t know anyone except A.M. Frison who would use the word salamander and make it feel romantic. It’s the way he writes the word and his dedication to describing love, or at least using love as a metaphoric tool, that can’t help but come across as uniquely sincere. Frison’s voice is a huge component of this project.

Like the best possible offspring of Stevie Wonder and Al Green, it reads as, at various different points, the smoothest, the sweetest, the truest.

“Every time I hear your name, I wonder, what are you wearing?" sings Frison on track seven, “What are you wearing?” A lascivious romanticism seems to be part of Frison’s writing persona, complemented by the dance moves of one who could summon the

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dead and the fashion sensibilities of a time-inconstant traveler taking a walk on a dirt road.

Bottle Tree is, at risk of overstatement, an instant classic, a glimpse into the beyond, and a group we should be very proud to call Chicago’s very own. Now that Frison’s residency at the Arts Bank has ended, rumor has it he is returning to his hometown of St. Louis to work through a Pulitzer fellowship for writing, but others yet say he wants to return to Chicago to continue on Bottle Tree. It’s hard not to hope for the latter: we should be so lucky as to have these artists working together in Chicago in the future.

“You’ve been cursed with the blessing of a permanent change,” sang Frison at one point. It’s eyebrow-raising now, but you’ll get what he means after you listen. Look out—the first single premiered on Afropunk three weeks ago, and the album’s scheduled to drop on April 21. ¬

MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Curating a New Canon

SYLVIA DE BOER

Artists from each of Chicago’s wards celebrate the city through its small, scattered glories

BY SYLVIA DE BOER

T

he exhibit is called “50x50 Invitational / The Subject is Chicago: People, Places, Possibilities.” The words in the title tug on a range of thematic threads, leaving a viewer of the exhibit without a concrete summary of what they’re about to see.

Visitors walk into the Chicago Cultural Center with only a vague conception of the works’ source—Chicago—and the unobtrusive guidance of a few posters hanging on the wall near the entrance.

They include a colored map of the city divided into its fifty wards, along with the corresponding names of fifty artists or collaborative teams. Beyond that, the viewer is set free; there is little linear progression to the exhibit or organization in terms of theme within the space.

Photographs of children on a street hang alongside collage-like paintings. There’s a video of schoolchildren singing “America the Beautiful,” a horn on a chair and a device that plays accompanying sound, and a red and gold rug that cohabitates peacefully with a neighboring series of lake photographs. This is not an exhibition that’s already been pieced together a certain way; its presentation asks us to be open-minded in our viewing and interpretation.

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A group of artists and curators selected works for the exhibition according to a multi-dimensional and dynamic set of criteria, according to exhibit juror Miguel Aguilar, who worked with five other Chicagoans to recruit and select art from local artists. Their goal was to represent diverse walks of life, which meant focusing upon longtime residents of the city, many of whom had little previous exhibition experience.

Aguilar, a teacher in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said this project opens up a dialogue about conventional notions of artistry and the privilege associated with being an artist. “It challenged all of us to think about how we think of ourselves as curators, but also [challenged] the notion of curating to the [art historical] canon or for the canon. I think because this was a huge conceptual undertaking around how to be as inclusive as possible, [we thought] of everybody having the possibility of being an artist and not sort of being a closed-off, exclusive setting.”

Aguilar posited these conversations as healthy, and said that sensitivity to diverse experience enriched the exhibit.

The finished product is a celebration

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of the small moments of everyday life, and an investigation into the ability of these moments to tell a broader story about life in Chicago. When asked about the intended takeaway for the viewer, Aguilar said: “There’s a fuller breadth to life in Chicago. I think there’s a good range of narratives and themes in the work that works against a lot of Chicago stereotypes for someone who might be

visiting or might not be familiar with a lot of the different areas of the city.

So, we wanted to really just accurately portray that there’s so many different facets and so many more considerations and celebrations of living in Chicago.”

Each piece of artwork speaks differently, and representations of the South Side are no exception in crossing boundaries of form, message,

“It seemed like the submissions from the South Side tended to either celebrate or investigate culture a little deeper and either through ethnicity or tradition or new culture. Almost like recasting a new form of Americana.”

—Miguel Aguilar, exhibit juror, artist, and professor at SAIC

VISUAL ARTS

gallery review and style. An installation piece by 3rd Ward residents Paola Aguirre and Sara Pooley titled “Closed Chicago Public Schools” evenly spaces out rectangular yellow boxes on an expanse of wall.

Each box bears the name of a school in stark black type. An accompanying poster provides a map of the schools and offers background for the display, reading: “Since 2013, over forty Chicago Public Schools have closed due to budget cuts, under-enrollment and low performance. This group of buildings average 68,000 square feet of indoor space per closed school—this leaves more than three million square feet of existing space to be reimagined plus hundreds of acres of outdoor space.” The display is commemorative and constructive; in the artwork of locals, a nuanced understanding and representation of complex dynamics within the city accompanies a plain hope. Other South Side pieces access the poetry in the everyday: in 6th Ward resident Rose Blouin’s 2012 black-andwhite photograph “Anointed,” a young boy holds an opened plastic water bottle upside down above his head. Water runs in rivulets down his face. In his closed eyes, the soft light on his cheekbones, and the simple title, there is a sense of reverence for a moment that could occur on any Chicago summer day and pass without artistic recognition.

Aguilar believes that the diverse array of artistic moments is ultimately daring, even revolutionary. “It seemed like the submissions from the South Side tended to either celebrate or investigate culture a little deeper and either through ethnicity or tradition or new culture,” he said. “Almost like recasting a new form of Americana. The art of “50x50 / Invitational” does not ask to be read or interpreted in terms of thematic sequence or story, it asks only to be seen. In its inclusion of a diverse range of art from Chicago’s fifty wards, artistic styles and forms intertwine—there’s an abstraction of the concept of narrative to its most nebulous degree, and the viewer leaves with more questions than answers.

But maybe that’s the point. ¬

4th Ward Project Space

COURTESY OF 4TH WARD PROJECT SPACE

BY MICHAEL WASNEY

“I

n the absence of light, darkness prevails.”

Heather Mekkelson told me that “the urban landscape is the primary impetus” for her latest installation “Absentia Luci,” currently on display at Hyde Park’s 4th Ward Project Space.

Hers is the only work in the room.

Paracords bisect the blank white space of the gallery like telephone lines, staunch and powerful in their ability to demarcate the human experience from above. Each cord has been toned with what Mekkelson called “a lightpollution mauve,” a pastel purple evocative of the city sky, which is itself a combination of natural light and that cast by Chicago’s sodium vapor street lamps.

Light, pollutive and otherwise, is

as important to Mekkelson’s sculpture as it is to the urban dweller. “I associate it first and foremost with living in the city,” she said. “I think I’ve been here over twenty years now, and that color is very unique to our location.”

She described her conceptual square one when planning “Absentia Luci” as “what it would be like to have all of the light erased,” making the 4th Ward Project Space’s exhibition room ideal for the piece. The room has no windows; it is austere, unadorned, and thus devoid of the constructive and destructive interaction of light sources that characterizes the urban experience, giving it a functional similarity to a “blank canvas” for Mekkelson.

With this canvas, Mekkelson has constructed a multi-material sculpture

that absorbs its viewers. Walking into “Absentia Luci” is like walking into the middle of a spider web— once in the gallery, you find yourself inside of the piece itself, quite literally incorporated by it. By entering, the observer becomes privy to a view of the city that may have formerly gone unnoticed. “There’s a lot of landscape around urban settings that kind of just gets passed over, [like] the visual cacophony of the city up above us,” she said. “But actually, there’s some really poetic, formal aesthetics that exist up there.”

“Absentia Luci,” 4th Ward Project Space, 5338 S. Kimbark Ave. Through March 26. Saturdays, 1pm-5pm, and by appointment. Free. (773) 203.2991.

4wps.org

“50x50 Invitational / The Subject is Chicago” is on display at the Chicago Cultural Center downtown through April 9.

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A Dancer’s Homecoming

South Sider Solomon Dumas returns to Chicago with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

BY LAUREN PANKIN

S

olomon Dumas is nervous about dancing in Chicago.

As a new member of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, based in New York City, the twenty-eightyear-old Dumas did not get stage fright on a recent European tour, where he performed in Denmark and Switzerland, nor in the other cities where he performed on a nationwide domestic tour that has brought him, finally, back to his roots.

But as a South Sider making his first homecoming performance on March 22, 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

there is much more at stake. This time, Dumas has to fill the shoes of the dancers who inspired him to pursue his artistic passions fifteen years ago.

Founded in 1958 by dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey, the Ailey Theater performs modern works focuses on the beauty of Black heritage, Dumas said. Fifty years later, in 2008, a U.S. Congressional resolution designated the Ailey ensemble an American cultural ambassador to the world.

Famed for his 1960 work, Revelations,

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Ailey choreographed dozens of dances for his company, combining the fundamentals of blues, spirituals, and gospel with elements of “codified” techniques such as ballet and jazz. As of this year, the Ailey company has performed for about twenty-five million people at theaters in seventy-one countries, according to the ensemble’s official website.

Ailey, raised among sharecroppers from rural Texas, believed in the healing power of exposing people to different cultures through the arts—even at a time

when segregation was rampant in the South, Dumas said.

“Mr. Ailey comes from a period that when [the dance ensemble] traveled across the country, it was dangerous,” Dumas said. “If you went to a certain place, you wouldn’t be able to walk through the front door or use the same bathrooms [as whites].”

Ailey’s last mission was to create a camp for inner city and underserved children who would not otherwise have an opportunity to take dance classes,

STAGE & SCREEN

Dumas said. This dream materialized as AileyCamp, which has a chapter in Chicago. At the age of twelve, Dumas was introduced to dance through Chicago’s summer AileyCamp. He has now become the first AileyCamp student to perform in the main Alvin Ailey ensemble.

Encouraged and supported by his single mother to pursue dance, Dumas said he “busted his behind” seven days a week to realize his dreams.

“I was very inspired by Mr. Ailey’s story,” Dumas said. “He was raised by a single mother. I wasn’t born in the South [like him], but I have roots in the South.”

After spending his days learning about the rich Black experience before slavery at the Betty Shabazz International Charter School, Dumas would head to the dance studio to perfect his ballet, modern, and jazz dance techniques. He trained at the Chicago Academy for the Arts and the Russell Talbert Dance Studio in Bronzeville until moving to New York, where he studied at the Ailey School and joining the Ailey II ensemble.

He eventually became a member of the Evidence dance company, directed by Ronald K. Brown, in Brooklyn.

Between 2010 and 2016, Dumas auditioned for the main Alvin Ailey dance company multiple times. He was working five jobs when he finally was accepted in the spring of 2016.

“I experienced what it was like to be a starving, hustling artist,” Dumas said, “but I’m from Chicago, so I know how to hustle. I saw people in the South Side selling shea butter, incense, CDs—people working hard to make ends meet with three or four jobs.”

Though Dumas loves the South Side and its strong sense of community, he said he wanted to journey outside of the city, despite the uncertainty of his future in dance.

“I didn’t know we had dance as an outlet,” Dumas said. “Dance can take you around the world, and I looked at the dancers who had a sophistication about them. I knew that I love where I come from and the South Side, where I was born and raised, but I knew that I wanted to see the world.”

While in New York, Dumas worked as an independent contractor for the Department of Education. He said his work with inner city children inspired him to continue following his own aspirations.

“I remember teaching my kids that they had to shoot for their dreams and not give up,” Dumas said. “As I am telling them to work hard and shoot for their

dreams, I have to do the same thing.”

Dumas said he sees an element of his own inner city childhood experience in his favorite work of the tour, Untitled America. Through Kyle Abraham’s choreography and interpolated sound bytes of interviews, the work loosely explores the impact of mass incarceration on the family.

“It’s a piece that’s personal,” Dumas said. Growing up on the South Side, Dumas said he knew friends and neighbors with incarcerated relatives, and he saw how that affected the family structure when so many fathers, uncles, and brothers were absent.

“We’ve all been able to experience some sort of emotion that’s attached to longing for a family member, longing for a lost family member, longing for someone you can’t communicate with,” Dumas said. “I think it’s something that everyone will be able to relate to, but if people haven’t experienced that, it will give them a little bit of information on how this affects African-American families, especially with all of the media attention the South Side has been getting in the past four years.” Dumas said the South Side depicted in the media (and by the president) as a “war zone” isn’t the vibrant community he remembers.

Former AileyCamp Chicago director Lisa Johnson-Willingham has known Dumas ever since he attended camp and took a class with her. She said that even as a teenager, Dumas had an older spirit and was attuned to what he had to say through dance.

“When you watch him [Dumas] move, he just has that special ‘it’ thing about his movement style,” JohnsonWillingham said. “I’ve watched him develop that. He speaks to the audience with his authentic self, as he became more comfortable with who he is, and as a black man from Chicago.”

Johnson-Willingham attributed her former student’s success not only to his determination, but to the “spirituality” of the South Side and the artists who influenced, trained, and supported him.

“My expectation hasn’t changed for Solomon,” she said. “I think it will be an extraordinary homecoming for him, for him to give his community a gratitude performance.”

Dumas said he hopes that his success as a dancer will show that black men can thrive and be role models as artists and not just as athletes, even though he acknowledges that dance combines the two disciplines.

“I would hope that young men from the South Side can be inspired,” Dumas said about his Chicago performance. “I would hope that parents can encourage their children to become artists.” ¬

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Auditorium Theatre of Roosevelt University, 50 E. Congress Pkwy. March 22–March 26.

Wednesday–Friday, 7:30pm; Saturday, 2pm and 8pm; Sunday, 3pm. Starting at $33.

(312) 341-2300. auditoriumtheatre.org

gallery review

Hyde Park Art Center

BY JAKE BITTLE

C

ommunity-oriented galleries like those in the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) are founded on the idea that encounters with art can be educational. Now, with a new exhibition called “Public School,” the gallery is exploring the possibility that education itself— meaning pencil sharpeners, cubbies, and swing sets—might be an object of artistic interest.

Artists Jim Duignan and Rachel L. S. Harper, respectively of Chicago-based arts education organizations Stockyard Institute and Seen + Heard, have collaborated to transform HPAC’s central gallery into an environment that is half learning center, half sculpture garden. Dominating the room is a decommissioned school bus with the words “UTOPIAN CENTER FOR CIVIC LOVE” printed on its side; the seats have been pulled out and arranged in rows on the floor while the bus interior has been repurposed as a “theater.” A podium made of found wood and painted with “MR. DUIGNAN” stands atop a large wood dais surrounded by small chairs. In the corner of the room, a cage full of functional radio broadcasting equipment (to be used in on-site workshops) stands beneath two swings that hang from the high ceiling.

The exhibition’s resistance to being seen as simply a collection of things to look at is intentional: “Public School” will host months of workshops, screenings, and conversations. The gallery brochure says the space intends to “[highlight]

the technical learning resources nestled in [the city’s] neighborhoods.”

At publication time, one of the gallery’s walls was already covered with screen-printed posters, made at a Sanctuary Poster Screen Printing workshop on February 26, declaring the importance of sanctuaries for immigrants and refugees. In the foyer outside the gallery, the Humboldt Park-based Read/Write Library has set up a community library filled with books, local publications, and other items of interest.

By filling the space again and again with learning and work, “Public School” redefines not just what a gallery can be, but what a school can be. Throughout the months of March and April, HPAC will be hosting the Chicago Home Theater Festival, in which activists and organizers will create “field guides” for their neighborhoods, as well as a series of podcasting workshops. On March 12, Duignan, Harper, and a series of collaborators will host a daylong series of workshops “for people ages 0 and up.” The events and programs will continue through June 25, which should be shortly after the end of the CPS school year, unless the state’s endless budget woes make summer break come early.

“Public School,” Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through June 25. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. See website for workshop information. Free. (773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org

MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

VISUAL ARTS

COURTESY OF ILLINOIS HIGH SCHOOL ART EXHIBITION

Art, Politics, and College Scholarships Chicagoland high schoolers show off their artwork at Zhou B Art Center

BY SAM CLAPP

O

n Sunday, February 26, the airy an honor for the hundreds of students interior of the Zhou B Art whose pieces made it into the show.

Center hummed with activity. Teachers from across the state chose Student artists mingled with peers, their classrooms’ best work for selection parents, and school staff in a showcase by the IHSAE. Extra bragging rights of the state’s best artwork by high school were conferred to sixty-six students who students. This was the general exhibition received IHSAE awards (amounting to for the Illinois High School Art over $15,000 total in cash and prizes), Exhibition (IHSAE), thrown every year seventy-seven students offered Early at the Bridgeport gallery by an association College Scholarships (totaling over of Illinois art teachers to recognize the $150,000), and 200 offered college state’s outstanding student artists. tuition scholarships expected to total over Standing near his first prize- thirty million dollars this year. winning entry in the photography This year’s event was poignant for its section, a surreal homage to the tornado contrast with recent cuts to arts funding scene in The Wizard of Oz, Mario in schools and programs across the state.

Garnello, a senior at Lake Park High “Education funding in Illinois has School in the western suburbs, conveyed become such a concern that even school the exhilaration, surprise, and sense of leaders who acknowledge the importance possibility shared by many of the exhibit’s of the fine arts feel like they have no participants. other option [than to cut budgets],” said “It feels really good,” he said. “This is Christopher Sykora, Assistant Director actually the first art show I’ve ever done. of the IHSAE Board. In Illinois, where I’ve never entered one. I’ve never won state senate president John Cullerton one. So this was all new to me.” has called school funding reform the Just being selected for inclusion was “defining crisis of our time” and Chicago’s 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MARCH 9, 2017

school board is suing Governer Bruce Rauner over unfair allotment of state funds, nonprofits like the IHSAE are poised to play a central role in fostering the careers of young artists. But even the privately financed IHSAE may have a rocky road ahead. The group just completed a grant application with the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency the Trump administration is threatening to axe.

But the group will persevere, Sykora contends: “Artists are always innovatively responding and adapting to their environment.” Already the IHSAE is stepping up with its first-ever Teacher Grant, awarded to South Side elementary teacher and art therapist Rochele Royster. She will use the award to expand her heART Project, which encourages students to craft dolls for victims of gun violence in Chicago.

The student work at IHSAE showcased the talent of Illinois student artists. The gallery featured a cinematic photograph of a shotgun house enveloped

by a light-polluted Milky Way; a dynamic shot of bronzed toast leaping from a toaster; meter-long cocoons lit from within through slits. The really arresting pieces included a Trump-themed Monopoly game featuring electoral votes for sale; a portrait of the artist as a sixtyfive-year-old man; and a beige smock with eerie accessories—muzzle, strap, headgear—attached.

This last piece, a “relational garment” designed to yoke three people together, was created by Deerfield High School senior Cassidy Jackson, who won Best in Show in the fashion division. Jackson, who will attend the Pratt Institute in New York in the fall, explained her motivation.

“Earlier, I was standing by my piece, and a guy walked by and said, ‘That’s weird,’ and kept walking,” she said. “I thought that was fantastic. Obviously, I love it when people stand there and actually give it a chance, but I think there’s value in making somebody ask, ‘What is that?’ and, ‘Why is a high schooler doing that?’ ” ¬

LIT

poem

At the Center of Trauma

BY NICOLE BOND

I

n last week’s issue, the Weekly cited a DNAinfo report about a large-scale planned development on the site of the old Michael Reese Hospital. The city has issued a request for development proposals on the site and is expected to make a decision next month. Our Stage & Screen editor Nicole Bond, in the tradition of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “verse journalism,” wrote the following epitaph for Michael Reese in 2012. We reproduce it here as a testament to the passing of time.

High Holy Rabbinical Original ghetto’s claim to fame.

Low income statistical Current ghetto’s badge of shame.

Once a mighty giant An innovator, a speculator, inventor of the incubator.

A beacon of care and South Side comfort for all the world to see.

Now a hovel of bricks, memories and ghosts, Haunting prime lakefront property.

Bought and sold. Bankrupt gold.

Medicare-Medicaid swaddled the young; soothed the old—as it should, When inhumane Humana one of the first to acquire turned out to be a liar Did not continue the traditions as they said they would.

The doctors, the nurses, technicians in the lab, the custodial staff All came to work but still could laugh.

They were a close-knit family; a neighborhood, Proud, happy, dispensing philanthropic charity.

The neighborhood changed but never their mission.

Caring for all regardless of creed, color or condition.

Since 1881 generation after generation thrived Among marble floors and clean glass doors With friendly smiles in well-lit aisles.

Even I wore really nice shoes and Went to Catholic schools and Ate a lot of steaks and My car got new brakes Because of you.

Cummings, Kunstader, Baumgarten, Dreyfus honestly, Truly you kept folks alive just being there...

Even the homeless man found a place.

He stayed inside your shuttle bus shelter space And was never ever pushed away – just like all of us he needed to be safe You had a Friend Pavilion.

Since 1959, each time, The Crystal Ball proved the money wasn’t gone The cotillions gave millions and millions for physicians to stay on

JASMIN LIANG

But gentrification is this generation’s brand new song.

And now the mighty giant, High Holy Rabbinical is gone.

From the high-rise windows of Prairie Shores We stood there tearful watching your doors Crumble and fall with blow by blow of the wrecking ball.

The nerve, the indifference, the gall!

Olympic Village was the vision But the IOC thwarted that decision.

Na-na nana na.

But what happens now? I don’t know...

A prison, a mall, maybe a casino...

Still no trauma center for me to go...

Mercy has no mercy.

A St. Bernard is a dog.

U of C won’t see me.

Northwestern is sequestered.

Rush isn’t in a hurry.

And U of I will kill you, don’t you worry.

Oh (yawn) Michael Reese you are deceased...

I don’t mean to yawn But it’s a long ride in this ambulance That’s going all the way to Oaklawn.

Christ.

MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

New Space, Same Work

DEYSI CUEVAS

Cultura presses on with art, activism, despite organization’s uncertain future

BY DEYSI CUEVAS

C

ultura in Pilsen, a grassroots gallery and arts organization, is in transition. Displaced from its original space and unsure of where it will end up, the organization is now striving to continue being a gathering place for Pilsen artists and activists.

Cultura was founded in 2014 as a joint project of two Pilsen-based publications: Contratiempo, a Spanishlanguage arts magazine, and Gozamos, an independent online magazine. For years it has run a diverse calendar of events 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

reflecting the equally diverse needs and interests of the Pilsen neighborhood.

The organization was formerly located at 19th and Carpenter in the former space of another community organization named Calles y Sueños, which had been there since 1994. In 2014, a year after moving into the venue with Calles y Sueños, contratiempo and Gozamos created Cultura in Pilsen.

Ilene Palacios, an editor at Gozamos and one of Cultura’s co-managers, explained that Calles y Sueños “left the

¬ MARCH 9, 2017

space due to funding and availability, reasons that prevented them from being able to continue their programming at the space. Calles y Sueños, Cultura, and the other organizations under Cultura’s umbrella are all volunteer-run nonprofits, so funding ourselves is a perpetual struggle,” she said.

In the Carpenter Street space,Cultura was able to host events and connect with other community organizations that share its mission to educate and empower the Latino community. Some of Cultura’s

partner organizations include the Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights (CCWR), which helps build leadership strategies to fight against labor rights abuses, and Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), which organizes against unfair and inhumane immigration enforcement practices.

Palacios said that Cultura was established as an independent organization to give the location its own identity. All of the partner organizations, which at one time included Calles y

VISUAL ARTS

Sueños, operate independently as part of Cultura.

But in August of 2016, Cultura was forced to leave their space after their rent was nearly doubled to $2,500 dollars per month, which was an unattainable amount for the organization.

getting displaced from this neighborhood, getting priced out,” she said. “It was very much an artist neighborhood and it’s getting difficult for people to sustain themselves.”

If Cultura does make a move outside the neighborhood, they would be moving

Garcia says the Cultura-hosted workshop allowed members of the LGBT community to come together to discuss their concerns about the recent immigration policies.

“We’re all volunteers,” Palacios said.

“We had suggested donations for events and occasionally we sold tickets, but we wanted our events to be affordable or free.

Occasionally we put in our own money from our full-time jobs, and we definitely put in a lot of labor and time to make these [events] happen. It’s not a way to make money.”

“Objectively, gentrification and real estate speculation resulting in increased property values and rents are major concerns for many in the Pilsen neighborhood, as there has already been displacement of business and families,” she continued.

While Cultura’s decision to leave the space was a difficult one, Palacios explained that it also led to a positive, if unexpected, outcome. In October 2016, Cultura began an ongoing residency at La Catrina Cafe, located just a block north at 18th and Morgan.

“A lot of people know La Catrina Cafe as an important hub in the neighborhood to have informal meetings or larger gatherings or events,” said Palacios. “There’s a little stage, so there’s been concerts here. So there [were] a lot of similarities between the kind of stuff Cultura was doing and what La Catrina also does.”

Nevertheless, Palacios says Cultura in Pilsen is looking for a permanent location for future events. They have been searching outside of Pilsen, too, fearing they won’t find a location in the neighborhood due to the rising rent prices.

“We’ve been seeing a lot of people

into a less expensive space, meaning into an area with lower rent. However, with this comes the realization that they, too, could be contributing to the spread of gentrification by making the move.

“There’s definitely a responsibility there,” Palacios said. “Even if you have the best intentions, you have to be aware of what ripples out.”

Regardless of these concerns about its future, Cultura remains committed to its present work in Pilsen. On Sunday, January 29, Cultura hosted the organization Vives Q Labs at La Catrina Cafe for an event called “Cafecito con Queers.” Vives Q Labs is a monthly community gathering for queer and trans Latinx people. Attendees can share information, and skills and build a dialogue with the community. The lab featured an immigration “Know Your Rights” training with Vives Q Lab Organizers and Nebula Li, Staff Attorney at Community Activism Law Alliance (CALA).

Emmanuel Garcia, one of the organizers of Vives Q Labs, stressed the importance of organizations like Cultura and of its current residency at La Catrina Cafe.

“This coffee shop is a staple in Pilsen,” said Garcia. “It’s important for our community, especially the LGBT community, to know that they have a home here in Pilsen and are also part of our community.” According to a report by the Williams Institute, members of the LGBTQ community are more vulnerable to economic inequality. They are also more likely to face employment discrimination

and lack health insurance, and some are also undocumented.

Due to the Trump administration’s extreme anti-immigrant sentiment, many undocumented immigrants are now afraid they will be deported or separated from their families. Garcia said the Culturahosted workshop allowed members of the LGBT community to come together to discuss their concerns about the recent immigration policies.

“Right now, especially with the way the Trump administration has targeted the undocumented community, it was important for us to share a ‘Know Your Rights’ training,” said Garcia. “A lot of the information that was shared was what to do if you are stopped by the police, how do you interact with detention, and what are some things you can do as an individual to support the undocumented community?”

Pilsen community member Dania Cordova said organizations like Cultura are important because they allow groups like Vives Q Labs to have a space to create relevant and useful programming.

It is also important because “people come and network, connect, and they gain information so you can share it with relatives and other members of your

community,” she said.

Palacios noted that Cultura is not the only organization in Pilsen that supports local activism, artists and performers.

Other organizations exist that work towards similar things: Pilsen Alliance, for example, advocates for quality public education, affordable housing and immigrant rights.

As Cultura has transitioned into its residency at La Catrina, facing uncertainty about its future, it has dabbled in all kinds of work: art, music, activism, organizing, community-building, and more. Palacios and Cultura’s organizers see all these efforts as intertwined and of equal importance, and they strive to make Cultura as layered and complex an organization as Chicago’s Latinx communities.

“Many times it happens out of necessity and out of the passion and love people have for their community and wanting to give something to it because it gives them so much,” Palacios said. ¬

For more information on upcoming Cultura events, visit culturainpilsen.com

MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

L

ELLEN HAO

Sounds in South Chicago

JoVia Armstrong brings music education to her neighborhood

BY ASHVINI KARTIK-NARAYAN

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MARCH 9, 2017

ike many musicians, JoVia Armstrong’s journey began early: she went from playing on pots and pans as a kid to becoming an accomplished percussionist, as member of the band JC Brooks & the Uptown Sound, and an experienced teaching artist. JoVia is now onto her latest project: a music school that she runs out of her own apartment called Sounds About Write, which she started last September. Students can take lessons in a variety of instruments and sound technology, both in groups and oneon-one sessions. With different lessons taught by different teaching artists, the lessons range from guitar to songwriting to conga drums, and nearly anything in between. The school aims to make music education more accessible, and to instill a passion for the arts in every household.

Armstrong has been studying percussion since sixth grade and began learning Afro-Cuban music as a freshman in college. Since then, her involvement in music performance and composition has led to an illustrious performing career and teaching experience that earned her the 2011 3Arts Siragusa Foundation Artist Award. But it was through her work at YOUmedia, the arts program for high school students that originally started in Harold Washington Library, that Armstrong learned the innovative teaching methods that she now uses with Sounds About Write. “At YOUmedia, it was just whatever we can do to get to these kids,” Armstrong said. “It allowed me to make a super creative curriculum.”

Sounds About Write is a culmination of all this experience. “The school started because I was struggling,” Armstrong explained. She had worked for several nonprofits alongside her performance work, but many of those organizations encountered funding issues that limited their ability to provide consistent employment. The instability of nonprofit work spurred Armstrong to utilize her own space and experience: her loft with three bedrooms that she had originally gravitated towards because it gave her room to practice and her years of teaching music in new and innovative ways.

Armstrong was also compelled to start Sounds About Write because she noticed a gap in the community of students she was teaching. As a mentor for Street-Level, a youth media education program, at Jane Addams Elementary School, Armstrong

MUSIC

interacted with several music and arts teachers who gave her a better sense of the state of arts education in and around South Chicago. “The music teacher [at Jane Addams] was the one who told me there’s a gap here, you know?

Music is not being taught in this area,” Armstrong said. Students who wanted to learn music were forced to either go to the North Side, learn with the limited resources they had at school, or never receive formal training. But her work at different elementary schools had shown

lives in Orland Park and is seventy-three years old, had tried to play instruments when he was younger but never had the time to devote to it completely. He saw Armstrong perform at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival two summers ago, and subsequently became her first student.

“When I retired, I had some time on my hands...and so now I play conga drums,” Redmond said. Redmond had taken some group lessons on conga drums before, but Armstrong’s teaching gave him infinitely more experience, filling in

“We’re not showing them how to play Bach or Beethoven. This is, bring in your favorite song. I don’t care if it’s by REM, I don’t care if it’s by whoever, Sting, whoever, but bring it in and we’re going to teach you how to play that.”

Armstrong just how strongly music can impact a student’s overall behavior. One eighth-grade student had a history of disrespecting his teachers, but since Armstrong introduced him to music in Street-Level, he has become incredibly focused. “He’s skipping lunch to make beats,” Armstrong said. At this point, Armstrong realized that she had both the means and the space to make a difference. “And so I decided, maybe it’s time. I’ve always talked about it, maybe it’s time to start my own school,” she said.

Sounds About Write is open to all ages, but currently, all of Armstrong’s students are adults. Many of them had lost touch with music over the years and were excited to return. “After my shows, a lot of people walk up to me afterwards saying, ‘I wish I had stuck with it, I wish I had just hung in there, I gave up playing my instrument,’” Armstrong said. “I’ll always try to encourage them and say ‘Hey, you know, it’s never too late.’”

For Larry Redmond, a Sounds About Write student, that sentiment definitely rings true. Redmond, who

the technique that he was missing.

Sounds About Write is most successful, Armstrong believes, because of the instant gratification and stress relief that it provides students in comparison with the boredom that can come from being sent home with a scale sheet. “When I was growing up, that was what every class did. You’d take the scales, go home, and learn it,” Armstrong said. “And if you mess up then you lose points.” The curriculum that she has developed for Sounds About Write is intended to allow for student exploration, in the same way that YOUmedia provides a space for students to hone their passions. “Everyone knows you can’t learn music overnight,” Armstrong noted, so motivating students to practice on their own is key. “We’re not showing them how to play Bach or Beethoven,” Armstrong said. “This is, bring in your favorite song. I don’t care if it’s by R.E.M., I don’t care if it’s by whoever, Sting, whoever, but bring it in and we’re going to teach you how to play that.” As a result, students find their own sites of inquiry, creating knowledge that they

can easily retain.

Most importantly, Sounds About Write has further supported a growing arts community in South Chicago, which Armstrong describes on her website as a “forgotten neighborhood.”

“No one—and when I say no one, I mean very, very few people from Chicago—know about South Chicago,” Armstrong said. The youth arts program SkyART sits across from Armstrong’s apartment, but it primarily focuses on visual arts, whereas Armstrong’s goal is both to introduce more music to the neighborhood and to introduce more people—particularly artists—to South Chicago and the South Side as a whole. That is why, outside of Sounds About Write, Armstrong opens up her apartment as a rehearsal space for artists and music groups in the surrounding Chicago area: when artists visit South Chicago, they are drawn to the potential of the community and see the neighborhood in a different way.

“The community doesn’t seem to be very interested in having big box stores coming, and that’s what I really love about it,” Armstrong said. “I think that’s what is going to help this community grow, these artists coming down here.”

If the neighborhood is more defined by the unique projects it implements than the influence of overbearing corporations, Armstrong believes it will create a stronger sense of identity: “I feel like the school is introducing more people to South Chicago, and I feel like we’re presenting it in a positive light.”

Both Armstrong and Redmond agree that the impact of arts education on any community is revolutionary. “The gap that I’m trying to fill is more dealing with the psychology of where our community is right now, to deal with the tension and the stress that we’re under,” Armstrong said. Redmond added that music is indispensable in providing a reprieve from daily life: “Many of us do not get these opportunities,” he said.

“When we go to work, we’re so stuck in the groove that the employer wants.”

Armstrong hopes that Sounds About Write will, above all else, make music more prominent in her neighbors’ lives. “My focus is just for people to have music in their households, to turn to music or the arts in general,” she said. As Sounds About Write expands to meet the needs of South Chicago residents and youth, a thriving arts culture should continue to grow and make the neighborhood unforgettable. MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

Building Cabinets, Computers, and Community

COURTESY OF THE MUSEUM OF SCIENCE & INDUSTRY

In community workshops, South Side “makers” get to work with their hands

BY ELEONORA EDREVA

T

he weekly member meeting of the South Side Hackerspace (SSH) begins with a call to those in the room to “gather around the TV.” The TV in question is facedown on a table with its back wide open and its internal hardware exposed. It’s the electronic centerpiece of a table cluttered with wires and circuitry.

“That’s not what most people mean when they say ‘let’s sit around the TV,” said the man tinkering with its wires, “but we do things a little differently at 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

South Side Hackerspace.”

SSH, located in Bridgeport, is one node in a citywide network of spaces for “makers,” amateur craftspeople who work on personal creative projects with a variety of materials ranging from wood to wire. For a fee, these spaces allow makers to use communal tools and equipment, attend workshops on crafting techniques, and learn from each other as they build.

The meeting at SSH starts with introductions; each person present says their name and affiliation with the space,

¬ MARCH 9, 2017

many adding a “by day I am” before stating their occupations. Most members hold day jobs working with computers or technology in some form, with just one man reluctantly admitting to a standard office job, an embarrassing truth in a culture centered around working with your hands.

The space is entirely volunteerrun: no one profits from its existence, including “the board,” a group of seven members elected by the larger member base of around thirty. This emphasis

on community operation is a big part of the hacker ethos—the facilities and equipment of each space like this are a direct reflection of the desires, interests, and contributions of its members.

“Any new equipment we get or thing we add is a result of somebody thinking, ‘I want there to be something here, nobody really disagrees with there being something here, this is a positive change to make, and I’m not moving anyone else’s things that were here to put something here,’ ” said Christopher

VISUAL ARTS

Agocs, the space’s member-at-large.

Agocs is the board member responsible for representing the needs and concerns of the member base. Much of SSH’s equipment is used, donated, or belongs to individual members who leave it in the space to share with everyone. The downside of this is that when things break, they don’t often get fixed quickly.

“The laser cutter’s power supply was down for months because no one had the funds or desire to get another one,” said Agocs, “and it only got fixed when one member was like, ‘Oh, this is pretty easy, I’m just going to buy a new power supply’.”

The growth of the space reflects this ethos—it has often progressed randomly rather than in a singular direction. Agocs says that when new members come on, “we try to be very upfront about the fact that just because we have these things now doesn’t mean they’ll always work, and doesn’t mean that in six months everything might not be completely different.”

SSH’s lack of stability is not suitable for every maker, nor is its focus on work with electronics. Luckily, those who want a space to work on hands-on projects without all the responsibility of shaping an organization will find exactly that at MAKE! Chicago, a “makerspace” founded by Joseph Budka and located in the same building as SSH. While makerspaces and hackerspaces share the same goal of getting people excited about working with one’s hands, they differ in their approach to leadership. Unlike a hackspace, makerspaces are typically run in a hierarchical structure, with a select number of people making decisions about the future and direction of the space.

“Ten years ago, people would finish up art or trade school and then have to spend thousands of dollars on equipment just to start making stuff,” said Budka. When he heard about the makerspace movement, he realized that he was already doing a very similar thing by sharing his equipment and space with studio-mates. He decided to “rebrand and start running a makerspace with a capital ‘M.’ At MAKE!, $150 a month will get someone twenty-four-seven access to a wide variety of wood- and metalworking tools, a space to work on large projects, and a community of people to learn and collaborate with. “Camaraderie is a healthy thing—some people go to a

knitting circle, some people come and build furniture,” Budka jokes.

MAKE! is a unique makerspace because of its commitment to focusing primarily on woodworking and metal fabrication. Budka sees it as “filling a very specific niche—people come to us who are artists, retirees who want something to keep their minds and hands active, and people who want to work on wood or metal projects but don’t have the space for it at home.”

MAKE!’s website boasts “hundreds of tools!—Chop saws, table saw with multiple blades and dado set, Grizzly 20” industrial planer, several scroll saws, spindle sander, disc sander, lathe, band saws, drills, drill press, circular saws, jig saw, reciprocating saw (lots of saws), belt sanders, orbital sanders, palm sanders, MIG welder, oxy-acetylene torches, clamps, metal chop saw, angle grinder, etc.”

Budka is the sole proprietor of the space and has big dreams about MAKE!’s future: he soon hopes to move into his own building and expand into digital fabrication and sewing.

A

lthough the makerspace movement has grown in popularity over the past few years, individuals like Dan Meyer, the manager of the Wanger Family Fab Lab at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI), have been involved in Chicago’s making movement for years. A fab lab, such as the one Meyer runs out of the MSI, is a makerspace with a more academic bent.The trend originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003; fab labs now number at over one thousand globally. Every fab lab has a set of standardized equipment, and is constantly in communication with the others about how to best serve the educational needs of each space’s audience.

MSI’s Fab Lab caters primarily towards are museum guests and students.

There are hour-long ticketed workshops that run every day, and similar programs targeted at Chicago-area students.

The fab lab works with schools who do not currently have the capabilities to provide engineering, machinery, or design programs, and help them build up their own makerspaces back in school, or at least think of ways they can use what materials they do have in creative, maker-oriented ways.

“You don’t always need all of this equipment; you could just use what

you already have at the school, which sometimes is just a set of computers and regular paper printers, and you can do a lot of work with that,” Meyer said.

“You can learn digital design, print out a pattern on a regular paper printer and trace that onto a piece of cardboard or foam to make something in 3D.” The workshops held at the Wanger Family Fab Lab introduce thousands to “making” every year, influencing them to join other makers spaces throughout the city. Meyer describes the maker and hacker scenes both throughout Chicago, specifically those on the South Side, as a sort of “ecosystem,” with each space serving a specific role for its members.

The employees and members all know each other, often moving throughout the network. Meyer himself spends his evenings and weekends teaching classes and working on his own projects at the two hackerspaces he’s a member of, while also helping direct newcomers to the spaces that will best serve their needs and interests.

“If you want to do woodworking you go to MAKE! Chicago and see Joe [Budka], and if you wanted to get access to 3D printers 24/7 you go to South Side

Hackerspace,” said Meyer. “And if you want to learn how to get into all of this, then you come to our space and get a really quick introduction and then move on to the other spaces.”

Once one enters the network, there’s no telling where their path might lead and what types of skills and knowledge they might accumulate along the way—that freedom is part of the joy of the community. While different spaces focus on working with different materials, nearly all individuals at any of the spaces cite the agency involved in the making process as the best part of being involved in the community.

Acquiring these skills means developing the power to disrupt one’s cycle of consumption, which Dan Meyer views as a very exciting prospect in such a readymade, consumer-oriented culture.

“We have these industrial machines where ‘things’ are produced and manufactured, and normally we never see them—they’re run by technicians and machinists—and …our idea is that we can do this as individuals,” he says.

“Anyone can design and make their own things.” ¬

MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

VISUAL ARTS

Art for All Wards

The city undertakes an ambitious public arts commissioning program that aims to reach the whole city

BY MICHAEL WASNEY TURTEL ONLI

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crowd gathered in Daley plaza on August 15, 1967 to witness the unveiling of the "Chicago Picasso." The installment was an unprecedented one—up until then, Chicago public sculptures had mostly taken the form of commemorative statues.

The "Picasso" would signify a new direction for Chicago city art away from the commemorative style. Later installments like "Cloud Gate," which are now entrenched parts of the downtown landscape, exemplified this artistic shift.

Twelve days after the "Chicago Picasso," a different gathering took place on the South Side of Chicago. It was a celebration around the recently completed Wall of Respect at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue. The Wall was unprecedented for its own reasons: its theme of “Black Heroes” (Malcolm X, Muhammed Ali, and Marcus Garvey, to name a few) made 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

it a rare piece of public art that celebrated African-American culture and resistance movements. A fire in the TV repair shop next door partially destroyed the mural in 1971, which gave the city leeway to pursue its redevelopment plan for the area and raze the building containing the mural. But the effects of the Wall were more permanent: the mural inspired similar community-driven murals and art projects in cities across the country.

1967 was an important year for public art in Chicago. The legacy of the "Wall of Respect" and the "Picasso" is in particular relief in 2017: Mayor Emanuel and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) have designated it the “Year of Public Art,” five decades after the two works’ unveiling.

“There are definitely some lessons to be learned from the "Picasso" and the "Wall of Respect" in shaping how we are endeavoring to do this massive project,” said Erin Harkey, projects

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administrator for DCASE, about the 50x50 Neighborhood Arts Project.

The 50x50 program—whose name alludes to the fiftieth anniversary of the two historic installments and the fifty Chicago wards—is an important facet of the City’s multipronged celebration of the anniversary. The celebration includes, among other things, a collaborative marketing campaign designed to facilitate cooperation between DCASE and other government agencies, the establishment of the Public Art Youth Corp, and a host of exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center.

Under the 50x50 Neighborhood Arts Project, DCASE and the mayor’s office incentivize all fifty of Chicago’s alderman offices to commissioning public art installations in their ward. The program allows aldermen to dedicate a portion of their 2017 menu allotment to commission public art; DCASE will match up to ten thousand dollars of that dedication. “It can’t just be a top down approach,” Harkey said. In that way, the

program takes after both 1967 pieces: like the "Picasso," the 50x50 program combines city and private grants in creating foundational public art. As with the "Wall of Respect," the intention for the Neighborhood Arts Project is an intense focus on community identity, and engaging residents and engaging communities in the development of the art works.” The deadline for local artists to submit proposals is March 10.

The city of Chicago has history of commissioning public art, before and after 1967. According to DCASE’s Chicago Public Art Guide, the highest concentration of major public art installations is in the Loop, where there are fifty-one pieces. There are also thirty pieces on the North, Northwest, and Northeast Sides, eight on the West Side, and thirty-nine on the Near South, Southwest, and Southeast Sides. This list includes works not only in open spaces, but also some in city-owned facilities like libraries and CTA facilities. Much of this art was brought to Chicago via the

Percent-for-Art program, initiated in 1978 by an ordinance which set aside 1.33 percent of the annual construction budget for the commission and acquisition of artwork.

But the 50x50 Neighborhood Arts Project is new for DCASE. If the agency succeeds in bringing installations to all fifty wards, that will increase by nearly forty percent the public art projects that exist in Chicago. As of now, thirty-eight of the fifty wards have confirmed their participation in the 50x50 program. A list of which wards comprise this thirtyeight is, at the moment, unavailable to the public. The nature of the program’s funding, in which alderman first have to

wards will require alternative assistance from the city government. Speaking broadly, Harkey said this assistance could take several forms: “It might be that we bring a performance to that ward, or we identify an arts organization that’s already working there, and we’re able to provide additional resources to help promote that event...so we’re still working out how we can supplement the 50x50 to make sure that we are reaching those wards, even if, for whatever reason, they are unable to contribute to have a neighborhood arts project.”

On a ward-by-ward basis, it’s hard to tell how the Year of Public Art Program will unfold,although DCASE is optimistic

The legacy of the Wall of Respect and the Picasso is in particular relief in 2017: Mayor Emanuel and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) have designated it the “Year of Public Art,” five decades after the two works’ unveiling. set aside a portion of their 2017 menu allotment before the city will match it, may limit certain wards from participating due to their own budgetary constraints.

Normally, aldermen use their menu allotments for infrastructure maintenance and improvements in their wards—like paving roads and fixing streetlights. At a budget hearing in 2015, Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld noted that the menu allotment couldn’t always “cover the needs in your wards annually," as the Sun-Times reported.

Harkey said the city has taken this into account while creating the programs for the Year of Public Art. “It is our desire, and actually our mandate, to make sure something happens in all fifty wards,” Harkey said. “If the alderman has not opted into the 50x50 Neighborhood Arts Project, we are looking at a number of different ways to engage with all fifty wards.” The artist selection process is still underway, so it’s too early to tell which

about including all fifty districts in some way or another. The city itself looks to use this as an opportunity to reformulate its relation to public art. “There’s both policy and strategy that needs to come out of this large investment this year,” Harkey said. She said that heavier collaboration between city agencies, aldermen's offices, and community organizations is a part of that. “We’ve also engaged stakeholders in conversation about the development of the Chicago Public Arts plan,” a document slotted to come out sometime this summer, and which will chart the city’s engagement with public art in years to come. 2017 therefore looks to be as important a year as 1967 for Chicago public artworks from the standpoint of both policy and the actual commissioning of installations. The 50x50 program may serve as a litmus test as to whether this shift will be felt equally in all wards of the city, including those with little cash to spare. MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23

A House of Memories

The Chinese-American Museum of Chicago reflects the community’s past, present, and future

BY MICHELLE YANG PHOTOGRAPHY BY DI DELGADO PINEDA

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tanding among some quiet residential buildings on 23rd Street and tucked not far from Chinatown’s cluster of restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores on Wentworth is the Chinese-American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC). Even with its doors flanked by two stone lions, hand-carved by artisans in China’s Fujian Province and donated to the museum

by Chinese officials, CAMOC is pretty inconspicuous, and you might miss it if you aren’t looking for it. CAMOC is about as small as museums get, but contains much more than one might expect.

Before its establishment, there were no museums in Chinatown, according to Dr. Kim K. Tee, one of the members on CAMOC’s Board of Directors. A meeting in 2001 between Dr. Tee and the then-heads of the Field Museum’s Department of Anthropology, Dr. Bennet Bronson and Dr. Chuimei Ho, along with the question of why there was no museum in Chinatown, birthed the idea for creating CAMOC. With a group of community members, Tee, Bronson, and Ho formed the Chinatown Museum Foundation in 2002. Lacking funding for a brick-and-mortar museum, they decided to initially hold a monthly lecture series on Chinese culture at Chinatown’s public library. After thirty-three lectures, they were able to raise enough funds to build the museum, which finally opened to the public in 2005. The current iteration of the museum re-opened in 2010, after most of its collection was decimated in a fire in 2008.

CAMOC’s first floor fetures rotating exhibitions. In January, it housed “Rites of

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Passage,” an exhibit that detailed Chinese customs pertaining to four stages of life—birth, marriage, longevity, and death.

Starting from the right and circulating around the room, visitors were able to move chronologically through the stages, encountering related artifacts and objects on the way. Currently, “What We Wore: Celebrating Chinese Fashion Heritage” is the first-floor exhibit, showcasing clothing from imperial robes to those from the twentieth century.

However, make no mistake: the museum is not and does not attempt to be an authoritative voice on the experiences of Chinese people in America. Instead, it opts for a more personal touch—one that is, in many ways, more reflective of the community.

“The reason for forming the Chinatown Museum Foundation was... to build a museum in Chinatown [and] preserve the Chinese and ChineseAmerican culture and history, because there are many residents [of Chinese descent] in the Midwest who are aging,” Tee said. “Some of [the younger residents], when their parents die...do not want their objects and [would have] thrown them in the dumpster.”

The museum offers an alternative home for these personal histories. Many of the objects in the museum came from donations or loans from community members and people in the surrounding areas, and that shows in what is displayed, from family photos to personal jewelry sets.

The community focus is also apparent in the permanent exhibit,

VISUAL ARTS

located on CAMOC’s second floor. Some particularly interesting sections include one with trilingual (English, Spanish, Chinese) information panels that tells the stories of Chinese immigrants, with a special regional focus on Chicago.

One panel is dedicated to discussing the Chinese transnational adoptees that contributed to Chicago’s Chinese population, a group not mentioned in many Chinese-American museums and history books.

Museum visitors can also learn about the history of Chicago’s Chinatown through a timeline detailing how the original settlement has moved and grown, as well as the different waves of immigrants that have passed through it—from the primarily Cantonese and Taishanese in the South Loop during the late nineteenth century to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians on Uptown’s Argyle Street today. Opposite the history of the neighborhood is a history of its inhabitants. Framed photograph portraits matched with tiny info cards line the walls like family pictures. The people and experiences depicted here are varied: there are those who came as children; those who came as husbands and wives; and even those who fought in World War II, their war badges displayed next to their photos.

There are those who were in the Chinese Wah Mei Junior Drum and Bugle Corps during the sixties, those who were born in China, America, or even the Caribbean. It is clear that there is no single, monolithic Chinese or Chinese-American identity or experience, and CAMOC does its best to demonstrate and embody that.

As a neighborhood that is too often seen as a tourist destination only for dim sum, bubble tea, and cheap trinkets, what is all too easily forgotten are the people and histories there, and the diversity of their identities and experiences.

Chinatown is undoubtedly shifting, with an influx of new immigrants and new storefronts, and with that inevitably come those who will leave the neighborhood.

CAMOC preserves a memory of the past Chinatowns while being open to what new Chinatowns may arise, providing not only a chance for later generations of Chinese-Americans to learn about their heritage and history, but also a means for Chinatown and its people to tell their story on their own terms, in their own way. MARCH 9, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 25

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A Print Gallery SkyART

URI-EICHEN

ACRE

Project Onward

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Zenith Paper

SAIC Homan Square

South Side Mural Project

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SkyART

WATERCOLOR SILKSCREEN PRINT ON PAPER, NOVEMBER 2016 7.5 X 9.5” STUDIO PROGRAMS AT SKYART STUDIOS JORDAN, 13 YEARS OLD COMING TO SKYART FOR 4 YEARS

SOUTH CHICAGO: NONPROFIT VISUAL ARTS PROGRAMMING FOR YOUTH

THREE COLOR BLOCK PRINT ON FOUND BOOK PAGE, FEBRUARY 2017 5.25 X 8.25” SCHOOL PROGRAMS WORKSHOP AT BAKER COLLEGE PREP JON, 25 YEARS OLD ANIMATION MAJOR AT MALCOLM X COMING TO SKYART FOR 1 YEAR

WATERCOLOR & INK PRINT ON PAPER, DECEMBER 2016 9 X 12” STUDIO PROGRAMS AT SKYART STUDIOS DOMINIQUE, 19 YEARS OLD GRAPHIC DESIGN MAJOR AT ILLINOIS INSTITUTE OF ART CHICAGO COMING TO SKYART FOR 14 YEARS

URI-EICHEN

FRANCES LIGHTBOUND UNTITLED (NIMBY), 2017 LASER CUT COTTON, STARCH 44 X 70"

PILSEN: INDEPENDENT SPACE FOR ART AND COMMUNITY-BUILDING

LOUIS KISHFY "ASHTRAY", 2017 EPOXY PUTTY, RESIN, PIGMENT, SPRAY PAINT 7" X 7" X 5"

ACRE

SILVIA GONZALEZ BODY OF WATER | BODY OF EARTH, 2017 COLLAGE 17X11"

PILSEN: ARTISTS’ COOPERATIVE RESIDENCY AND EXHIBITIONS

SILVIA GONZALEZ MITOS | MEMORY, 2016 PHOTOGRAPH 18X22"

Project Onward

BRIDGEPORT: STUDIO AND GALLERY FOR PROFESSIONAL ARTISTS WITH DEVELOPMENTAL DISABILITIES

FERNANDO RAMIREZ "RAINBOW BEACH" FOR THE OBAMA PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION

Zenith Paper

BRIDGEPORT: CHICAGO’S ONLY PAPERMAKING STUDIO

CLAIRE REYNES ABERRATION, 2016 COTTON RAG FIBERS, LIQUID AND POWDERED PIGMENTS AND DYES, HOT GLUE EMBOSSMENT CLAIRE REYNES ASCENSION, 2015 KOZO, ABACA, AND COTTON RAG FIBERS

CLAIRE REYNES HAND, 2015 HANDMADE ABACA PAPER, EMBROIDERY THREAD, COLORED PENCIL

SAIC Homan Square

MULTIMEDIA HUB FOR ART AND COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

BLUMEN PAVILION A HORTICULTURE PAVILION MADE BY SAIC STUDENTS THAT USES GROWTH LIGHT TO BOOST GROWING AND PROVIDES NIGHTTIME SAFETY WITH ADDED PUBLIC LIGHTS. ARTIST IN RESIDENCE MASHAUN HENDRICK'S "CRIME PAYS" CAMPAIGN

South Side Mural Project

COLLABORATION LINKING MURAL ARTISTS AND COMMUNITY GROUPS

The South Side Mural Project was founded in 2016 as a way to bring community members together to create vibrant, meaningful spaces on the South Side. In the summer of 2016, we began working with groups in Englewood including R.A.G.E., the Hamilton Park Advisory Council, and the Englewood Community Cultural Planning Council to get stakeholder input for the mural design. In November, we had over fifty volunteers, ages three to seventy-five, come out and paint the "Work Hard, Play Hard" mural at Hamilton Park.

EVENTS

BULLETIN Talleres de Defensa y Resistencia | Defense and Resistance Workshop 2329 S. Troy St. Saturday, March 11, 11am–1pm. Free. Interpretation available / Interpretación disponible. bit.ly/OCADtalleres Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD) has been holding a series of workshops to support people in the detention and deportation processes; this Saturday OCAD presents its seventh workshop in this series.

Against institutional bullies, OCAD says, prepared and organized communities are your best defense.

(Yunhan Wen)

Chicago Seed Swap and Share OTIS Fresh Farm, 2616 S. Calumet Ave. Saturday, March 11, 1pm–3pm.

Free. RSVP online. (773) 747-1761. bit.ly/chiseedswap As spring grows nearer, it's time for Chicago's backyard farmers and horticulture hobbyists to get ready for gardening season! Come learn about everything from compost to worms and BYOSeeds to swap, share, or give. Seedless? Bring a new or used gardening tool to donate to city gardeners. (Emily Lipstein)

Campaign for a Community Center in Pilsen La Parada en Pilsen, 2059 W. 21st St. Saturday, March 11, 2pm–4pm. Free. chisocialistparty.org Join the Chicago Socialist Party for the next organizing meeting in their push to build neighborhood institutions and bring a community center to Pilsen. A community center in the neighborhood, the party says, is vital to preventing the spread of gentrification and preserving Pilsen’s character. (Adia Robinson) 36 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Mental Health, Mental Illness, and the Criminal Justice System Teach-In Access Living, 115 W. Chicago Ave. Wednesday, March 15, 5:30pm–8pm.

Free. (312) 640-2100. bit.ly/teach_in_2n8 At this teach-in and discussion, learn about the ways mental illness and the criminal justice system interact, including how lack of access to mental healthcare helps drive the prison system. The event is organized by Next Steps, a nonprofit that seeks to amplify the voices of people with lived experiences of mental illness, homelessness, and the criminal justice system to change policy. It is being held in coordination with Uptown People’s Law Center and Mothers United Against Violence and Incarceration.

(Olivia Stovicek)

VISUAL ARTS Bearing: object, body, and space LeRoy Neiman Center Gallery, 37 S. Wabash Ave. Through March 23. Monday–Friday, 11am–6pm; Saturday, 11am–3pm. (312) 8995131. saic.edu/sugs Spanning creative practices from performative video to painting, this exhibition showcases the practices of artists Santina Amato, Lindsay Hutchens, and Michelle Marie Murphy. They reflect on the issues impacting women and bring the body into the forefront of the conversation. (Corinne Butta)

Meaning and Material Kent Hall, 1020 E. 58th St., room 120. Thursday, March 9, 6pm. Free.

(773) 702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

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Whether we realize it or not, the creative process is often equal to the inspirational one. Join artists Geof Oppenheimer and Virginia Overton for a panel discussion exploring the overlap between their own practices and Robert Grosvenor, whose selftitled exhibition will be on view through April 9. (Corinne Butta)

EXPANDED Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St. March 9–10, 11am–5pm; March 11–12, noon–4pm. Free. (312) 8500555. manacontemporarychicago.com Gallery Weekend Chicago collaborates with Mana Contemporary in presenting "EXPANDED," a showcase of twenty-five rising and established Chicago contemporary art galleries.

Each gallery will represent a pocket of Chicago’s diverse and ever changing art scene. "EXPANDED" has a unique collection of pieces and galleries, and will be sure to wow.

(Bridget Newsham)

Semblance of Order Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted St. Opening Friday, March 10, 6pm–10pm. Through April 7, by appointment. Free. (312) 852-7717. uri-eichen.com What does Big Brother look like?

Artists Michael Rado, Frances Lightbound, and Louis Kishfy show us in their latest exhibition opening at Uri-Eichen this week— and it’s not what you think. They take a hard look at the materials and architecture of authority and ownership through a photography series on designed objects and urban spaces. (Bridget Newsham)

What Lies Beneath Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted St., Suite 100. Opening reception, Friday, March 10, 6pm– 9pm. Through Friday, March 24, by appointment only. Free. (312) 7254223. chicagoartdepartment.org

Charles Heppner displays paintings developed around understanding the String Theory of quantum gravity alongside works by Gunjan Kumar, concerning Eastern philosophies and non-duality.

The exhibition delves deep into the elemental forces that shape creation. Landscape artist Kevin Benham joins the collaboration and accompanying installation. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Witness: The Artist’s Response Elephant Room Gallery, 704 S. Wabash Ave. Opening reception, Saturday, March 11, 5pm–9pm.

Through April 1. Wednesdays– Thursdays, 1pm–5pm; Saturdays, 11am–5pm; or by appointment. Free.

(312) 361-0281. elephantroomgallery.com Chicago artists including Robin Rios and Brian Dovie Golden show work that bears witness to the unprecedented present political climate in this group show in the South Loop. They tackle political, cultural, and social constructs in their art, and will each donate ten percent of the sales of their work to a nonprofit of their choosing. ( Joseph S. Pete)

STAGE & SCREEN Non-equity Auditions Auditions by appointment: March 25, 3:30pm–6pm; March 26, 3:30pm– 6pm. Callbacks March 26, 6pm–8pm, directly following the last auditions.

That Was A Show Theater Co. is seeking African-American male and female actors for their May 7 production of Once on This Island.

Rehearsals start Tuesday, March 28, and run through May 7. Actors will be paid. Please submit your headshot and resume to thatwasashow@gmail. com for an audition appointment.

(Nicole Bond)

THE PUBLIC NEWSROOM Once a week, City Bureau and the South Side Weekly turn our Woodlawn office into an open space where journalists and the public can gather to discuss local issues, share resources and knowledge, and learn to report and investigate stories. We bring in guest speakers and host hands-on workshops on things like how to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain government records, how to find and analyze public data, and how to tell your own audio/video stories.

For working journalists, the public newsroom is a place to find and shape stories in direct conversation with readers. For the public, the newsroom is a front-row seat into how journalism gets made, and a chance to impact the way your community is covered in the media.

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS Thursday, March 16

4pm–8pm: Public Newsroom is open

6pm: Workshop: Games as Storytelling Led by Ashlyn Sparrow and We Are Chicago Thursday, March 23

2pm–8pm: Training: Google Tools for Journalists Led by Mike Reilley

The #PublicNewsroom is always free and always open to the public.

CITYBUREAU.ORG/PUBLICNEWSROOM THE EXPERIMENTAL STATION 6100 S. BLACKSTONE AVE

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EVENTS

THE PASSION OF REMEMBRANCE

The Marriage of Bette & Boo

Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N State St. Thursday, March 9, 6pm. $11; members $6. (312) 846-2800. siskelfilmcenter.org

University Church, 5655 S. University Ave. Friday and Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 3pm. Through March 12. $12 online, $15 at the door. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org

This 1984 first feature film from the politically-minded Sankofa Film and Video Collective, which included Maureen Blackwood and Isaac Julien, examines issues of gender, race, sexuality, and generational conflict against the backdrop of England’s inner-city riots during the eighties. (Nicole Bond)

One Earth Film Festival Various South Side and other locations.

Check website for details, now through March 15. oneearthfilmfest.org This Chicago-area film festival creates opportunities for understanding climate change, sustainability, and the power of human involvement through sustainability-themed films and facilitated discussion. Honorable mentions: Food Frontiers, encouraging the healthy food access dialogue; Power to the Pedals, consdiering how cargo bikes might replace trucks; and Chicago’s True Nature, exploring the vast flora and fauna of the Cook County Forest Preserves. (Nicole Bond)

The Hard Problem Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. March 9 through April 9; showtimes vary. $38–$48. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Acclaimed playwright Tom Stoppard, whose long list of credits includes Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare in Love, has a new play. The Hard Problem, directed

by Charles Newell, concerns a young psychologist who’s grappling with some of the biggest philosophical questions about human consciousness. ( Joseph S. Pete) 38 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

For two weekends, Hyde Park Community Players will present an “acidic, ironic” dark comedy about marriage, mental illness, alcoholism, and the many, many difficulties of family relationship. ( Jake Bittle)

Intersectional Women’s Issues at Applied Words Columbia College, Conway Center, 1104 S. Wabash Ave. Tuesday, March 14, 7pm. Free. (877) 394-5061. guildcomplex.org March’s installation of the “Applied Words” series of critical conversations, hosted by Guild Literary Complex, will focus on the representation of women in media and the impact these representations have on young women. Dr. Nicole Spigner, a professor of AfricanAmerican literature at Columbia College, will moderate the discussion. ( Jake Bittle)

By the Apricot Trees eta Creative Arts, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Fridays at 8pm, Saturdays at 8pm, and Sundays at 3pm through Sunday, April 2. See website for prices. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org eta’s new production, written by Ntsako Mkhabela, follows the story of TK, the only girl arrested in a famous series of protests led by black South African schoolchildren in 1976. The children took to the streets of Soweto, a town outside of Johannesburg, to protest the introduction of Afrikaans as the official language of schooling. They were met with a brutal response from the police. ( Jake Bittle)

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MUSIC Daniel Villareal Punch House, 1227 W. 18th St. Sunday, March 12, 9pm. 21+. Free.

(312) 526-3851. punchhousechicago. com Daniel Villareal is best known for his work with the Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquestra, a grassroots Chicago cumbia ensemble that grafts groove to psychedelia and grabs listeners by the throat (or at least the hips). Villareal will be gracing Pilsen’s Punch House in a slightly different capacity on Sunday, though—there, he’ll be spinning the best Afrobeat, dub and Latinx music the city has in its crates all night. (Austin Brown)

Colin Hay Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Friday, March 10, 7pm doors, 8pm show. All ages. $29–$65. (312) 5263851. thaliahallchicago.com Colin Hay, the frontman and songwriter of Men at Work (of “Down Under” fame, not to be confused with Men Without Hats of “Safety Dance” fame), released a solo album in 2015 and will perform it this Friday at Thalia Hall. According to the event description, this album is “the work of an artist who is a true master of his craft,” full of “open-hearted songs with catchy melodic hooks that underscore deeply insightful lyrics”—just about everything you could ask for from pop. ( Jake Bittle)

Mac Sabbath My God, this event is actually real: Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Saturday, March 11, 8pm. 17+. (312) 9490120. reggieslive.com I wrote my first music calendar blurb for the South Side Weekly in October 2013, a few weeks after moving to Chicago and just days after meeting the former editorin-chief. I don’t remember what it was about, but I do remember how seeing it in print made me feel. It was some combination of dumb joy, the feeling of being famous, and a slight regret that I had used so many commas and em-dashes in fifty words of text. Now, more than three years later, I’m still writing them, but after this week I’m going to take a break and let younger, more energetic editors take over the stewardship of this wonderful journalistic institution. And I can’t think of a better blurb with which to end my long tenure writing blurbs and doing other things than this blurb, about a parody death metal band whose members dress up as Ronald McDonald (described by one reviewer as a “coked-out clown” who engages in “off-key wailing”), the Hamburglar, and some other purple monster I can’t identify, plus some “demented props” (LA Weekly), and perform metal songs with lyrics mostly about corporate fast food, consumer culture, and dead-end food service jobs. It’s called “drive thru metal,” and it’s one of thousands of things I’m so glad I learned about by being a part of this newspaper. “They’re actually really good,” says Paste Magazine. If you don’t trust Paste Magazine as much as you trust the South Side Weekly, we’ll offer an endorsement too: Mac Sabbath are fucking amazing. And the South Side Weekly is amazing. Goodnight. ( Jake Bittle)

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