SSW 05.28.14

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY MAY 28, 2014 ¬ ARTS, CULTURE, & POLITICS ¬ EL PERIÓDICO MÁS PADRE AL SUR DE ROOSEVELT ¬ SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM ¬ FREE

Ni Uno Más

1,200 men and women are deported each day.

These Chicagoans are fighting for change.

TOASTMASTERS, T.L. WILLIAMS, BRONZEVILLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT, GRATIFICATION

&

MORE INSIDE

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014

IN CHICAGO

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a newsprint magazine based out of the University of Chicago, for and about the South Side. The Weekly is distributed across the South Side each Wednesday of the academic year.

In fall 2013, the Weekly reformed itself as an independent, student-directed organization.

Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Deputy Editor

Bea Malsky Spencer Mcavoy John Gamino

Senior Editors Josh Kovensky, Harrison Smith Politics Editor Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Meaghan Murphy Editor Music Editors Zach Goldhammer, Jack Nuelle Visual Arts Editor Emma Collins Education Editor Bess Cohen Online Editor Sharon Lurye Contributing Editors Jake Bittle, Rachel Schastok Editor-at-Large Hannah Nyhart Photo Editor Lydia Gorham Layout Editors, Emma Cervantes, Sarah Claypoole Senior Writers Ari Feldman, Emily Holland, Patrick Leow, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Olivia Adams, Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger, Jon Brozdowski, Cindy Dapogny, Lauren Gurley,

Olivia Dorow Hovland, Noah Kahrs, Olivia Markbreiter, Julian Nebreda, Paige Pendarvis, Jamison Pfeifer, Arman Sayani, Olivia Stovicek Senior Photographer Luke White Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet Eldred, Stephanie Koch, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Ellie Mejia, Wei Yi Ow, Hanna Petroski, Maggie Sivit Editorial Intern

Zavier Celimene

Business Manager

Harry Backlund

5706 S. University Ave. Reynolds Club 018 Chicago, IL 60637 SouthSideWeekly.com Send tips, comments, or questions to: editor@southsideweekly.com For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 advertising@southsideweekly

Cover by Amber Sollenberger, using photos

by Isaac Silver and Meaghan Murphy.

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

Clinical Critical

Last Thursday, the only children’s mental health clinic in Englewood opened. It’s not a city clinic, of course—as the Weekly reported in February, the city has been moving toward full privatization of its mental health services ever since it closed six of its twelve mental health clinics in 2012—but a clinic is a clinic. This one is a new component of the Mile Square Health Center at 63rd and Lowe, operated by the University of Illinois Hospital System and the nonprofit Metropolitan Family Services. Dr. Bechara Choucair, Department of Public Health (DPH) Commissioner, was on hand to help cut the ribbon and answer questions. When a member of the Mental Health Movement criticized the DPH for underfunding and understaffing city clinics at the meeting, Choucair responded by saying that employee retirements have left clinics shorthanded. You might think that the solution to this problem is simple enough: hire new employees to replace the ones who are retiring. You’d be correct. Cheaper, though, for the city to plug its ears and to wait for foundation grants to plug its clinics’ holes.

Reading Rahmbo

Rahm Emanuel isn’t soulless. He just reads DeLillo, which is about the same thing. Such are the revelations of the mayor’s purported reading list, which was released in April by the Chicago Public Library and only recently stumbled upon by Chicago Magazine. His selections are weighty—literally. The majority of the titles are the kind of doorstop histories grandparents and Congressmen pretend to read—Robert Caro’s 3,000-page series on Lyndon Johnson and books about Lincoln and the Civil War feature prominently. Both are surprising. We were sold a no-nonsense, finger-waving, fuckyou mayor. Instead we have one that’ll wheeze at you over dinner about Gettysburg and leadership or some such hokum. Reassur-

ingly, there are a few high-fiction picks—DeLillo’s Underworld and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, for example—and, for the kids, Charlotte’s Web—a classic of children’s literature and a staple of the kinds of elementary school libraries CPS shuttered by the dozens last year.

Hail to the Chef

Hyde Park’s Chez Valois played maître d’ to the Commandeur-en-chef this past week. President Obama, on a fundraising visit to his political womb, sat down in the 53rd Street institution for a relaxed breakfast along with fellow political totem Governor Pat Quinn. Reports from the greasy spoon indicate that the POTUS’s morning culinary opus consisted of bacon and hash browns, along with wheat toast and a cup of hot tea. The bacon and hash browns are carby and fatty enough for any red-blooded patriot, but the hot tea and wheat toast has us wondering—maybe Obama really is a tea-quaffing Zionist Kenyan Muslim Socialist after all?

And The Winner Is…

In the April 2 issue of the Weekly, we followed three Kenwood Academy students as they competed in the August Wilson Monologue Competition. In case you don’t remember, junior Robert Upton came in second place in the Chicago finals, becoming the first South Side student to advance to the finals in New York. At the National Finals, Denzel Washington made a surprise appearance and presented each of the finalists with $1,000 in scholarship money. And, as if seeing Denzel weren’t enough of a prize, Robert took second place in the national competition for his performance as Floyd from Seven Guitars. In the words of Floyd, “when them red lights came on...it was like a bell ringing in a boxing match.”

And Robert did it. ¬

IN THIS ISSUE the fight for

building a green utopia

cindy pardo dreams of

a visit to the englewood

deportation law reform

in bronzeville

a crafter haven

toastmasters club

Things get complicated.

Paperwork gets lost. People get stuck.

“Imagine all these people, working right across from where they live.”

“ You can’t be a professional if you haven’t sold things. That’s sort of a basic thing.”

“If it was some people’s job to give the eulogy at a funeral, they’d probably rather be in the casket.”

meaghan murphy with cristina ochoa.....4

christian belanger............8

a review of “gratification” at mana contemporary

Raw hamburger sloughs off the artist’s face and naked body held in various poses.

stephen urchick........12

jake bittle............10

a long-awaited reunion

Matchatcha creates a strong rhythmic base on which Dibala can overlay his snaking guitar lines.

austin brown.............13

olivia stovicek.....11

a profile of t.l. williams

“Let’s get it on in this archway!”

mark hassenfratz...............15

isaac silver

Lourdes Moreno Carrero speaks out about her experience in ICE detention facilities.

Ni Uno Más 1,200 men and women are deported each day— these Chicagoans are fighting for change

BY MEAGHAN MURPHY WITH CRISTINA OCHOA

O

n May 1, 2006, 300,000 demonstrators marched through downtown Chicago as part of a nationwide protest of several restrictionist proposals to U.S. immigration policy. Within the federal government, a bill (H.R. 4437) sat before legislators, threatening to criminalize undocumented immigrants and anyone assisting them as felons.

On May Day 2014, as they have every year since, demonstrators gathered once again to protest deportations.

H.R. 4437 did not pass, but neither has any meaningful federal reform to im4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014

migration law and immigrant rights. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is deporting undocumented immigrants at a rate nearly nine times that of twenty years ago: around 1,200 people are deported each day, for a running total of two million under the Obama administration, the highest number of deportations under any president.

But Illinois is an immigrant-friendly state. And in Chicago, communities have fought for an even more inclusive set of laws, preventing the more severe ICE enforcement protocols from being followed

within the city’s jurisdiction. The laws in surrounding counties are less forgiving, but community-based nonprofits, activist networks, and individuals within educational and governmental institutions are fighting in different ways, through different means, to the same end: ni una más. Stop deportations.

I

llinois allows for undocumented residents to acquire a driver’s license without a Social Security number, a crucial provision given that the deportation pipeline often begins with a routine traffic stop.

The state also passed its own version of the DREAM Act in 2003, granting in-state tuition rates to undocumented students, after the national bill (proposed by Senator Dick Durbin and other legislators in 2001) failed to pass.

Luis Gutierrez has had to learn how to navigate these legislative avenues. Gutierrez is now executive director of Latinos Progresando, a community-based legal services organization that he founded in 1998, when he was just twenty-four years old. Gutierrez grew up in Little Village and is the son of Mexican immigrants. He

IMMIGRATION describes his entry into immigrant-rights work as reluctant.

“My friend at UIC started volunteering with an organization to help people become citizens, and he would always call me and ask me to come volunteer,” says Gutierrez.

“He’d call me every week, ‘Come volunteer, come volunteer, come volunteer.’ And then I started to say yes.”

Sixteen years later, Gutierrez directs his own organization, offering low-cost legal immigration services, a theater arts program, and several community development initiatives.

“Our legal services and immigration projects have blown up too. We see about 450 to 500 families a month now, doing family-based petitions. They come from all over the place: Chicagoland obviously but Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Texas,” Gutierrez explains. Latinos Progresando is the largest Latino-led immigration legal services program in all of Illinois, with several staff members on hand who have passed stringent accreditation by the national Board of Immigration Appeals and are authorized to work on immigration cases without a law degree. The organization itself is also nationally accredited.

In talking with Gutierrez about the many clients that have passed through his Little Village offices—clients from Utah all the way to New Jersey—you get the sense that reputable, low-cost legal service is hard to come by. “Immigration’s one of those things that’s very difficult to deal with,” he explains. “So what happens is if you go somewhere and you get good service, then you go and you tell your sister, your aunt, your cousin, and then next thing you know we have someone calling from Salt Lake City.”

Gutierrez also notes that his clients are coming from an array of home countries in addition to Mexico. “Most of our clients, not all, but most of our clients come from Mexico. We have a bunch from Latin America; we have clients from Africa, Poland, China.”

Latinos Progresando, with its team of accredited caseworkers, specializes in family-based petitions. “Immigration is a widespread field,” he says. “What we decided at Latinos Pro was that we wanted to get really good at one thing, so we said we’re going to go after family-based immigration...we don’t do asylum, we don’t do deportation.

Just family.”

Immigration law is set up in such a way that citizens and legal permanent residents

can petition the government to recognize the legal status of their parents, spouses, siblings, and children. But everyone is different. There are waiting lists and protocols, and the law sets things up differently for citizens than for permanent residents.

“There are a bunch of different categories like that,” Gutierrez explains. “And then we have to figure out when you came in, did you submit a petition before 245(i) ended, can you do your paperwork here or can you do it in Ciudad Juárez.” Things get complicated. Paperwork gets lost. People get stuck.

Latinos Progresando has worked for fourteen years to help people through an opaque and hard-to-access legal system.

Gutierrez maintains an outlook that is both exasperated and unfailingly buoyant. In describing his motivation to move into this kind of work after managing a Burger King and bouncing around some small nonprof-

O

n March 1 of this year, a couple dozen organizers and community members gathered at Saint Pius V Church in Pilsen to hear organizers from the Immigrant Youth Justice League (IYJL) and Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD)—two locally operating community-based groups linked to national campaigns—recount some of the year’s successes and challenges.

The meeting had been organized in part to give friends and neighbors some context for one of the recent high-profile direct actions taken in Illinois.

In November of 2013, twelve activists attempted to block a bus headed from Broadview Detention Center to O’Hare Airport. The group sat with their arms linked inside PVC pipes while fifty more activists and community members from IYJL, OCAD, Undocumented Illinois and other groups rallied around them. Many

The message of the campaign is simple: stop deportations.

Two million, too many.

Not one more. its, Gutierrez goes for the big picture.

“Whenever something goes wrong in America, we have to blame someone, you know. And it’s never the right people. So in the nineties, they were blaming immigrants. Particularly Mexicans. There was this huge scare in the nineties where it was like you were going to get deported if you didn’t become a citizen.”

Despite the challenges of constant fundraising and denied applications, Gutierrez focuses on the small successes. “I felt good when we [Latinos Progresando] hit five years. I didn’t think we were going to make it to five,” he trails off there, remembering the moment when he hired the first full-time staff member. “I’m not thinking about it as an organization anymore, I’m thinking about it like, ‘How do I build an institution?’ ”

family members of the people inside the ICE bus, headed to the airport for deportation, chanted and gave speeches.

Maria Paz Perez—a small woman with a commanding presence who has since spoken out at a number of immigrant-rights marches—told Progress Illinois as her husband was deported, “You have to see the human side of this. They’re not criminals.

They’re human beings who want to be with their families. Please stop the deportations now.” The twelve protesters succeeded in stalling the bus, but were removed by police dressed in riot gear. Each was charged with disorderly conduct.

It was with this context that Rosi Carrasco explained the reasoning behind civil disobedience. Carrasco addressed the room in Spanish, and Gaby Benitez of the Latino Union of Chicago translated for a small group, “The compañeros who participate in the civil disobedience are demanding

the authorities to make a decision, they’re forcing them to make a decision. It’s either ‘Will you arrest us and deport us?’ or ‘Will you make the correct decision and stand on the right side of history, stand with the immigration community?’ ” The organizers speaking at Saint Pius V were a diverse group of women. Some were undocumented themselves, some had qualified for President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) scheme, some were citizens or legal permanent residents. Yet all had an intimate knowledge of how the threat of deportation plays out in the everyday lives of people, their families, and their communities.

“The members of the community participating in civil disobedience are undocumented. And none of them until this point have been deported. And the reason is because the community is organized,” Carrasco stressed. “While politicians are waiting to make decisions, it is not just that our communities continue to suffer.”

The message of the campaign is simple: stop deportations. Two million, too many. Not one more. “President Obama has the capacity to stop deportations,” said Carrasco. “With the power of a signature, he can give an executive order to stop deportations. Every day ICE deports 1,200 people. By the end of March, the Obama administration will reach two million deportations—no other administration in the history of this country has reached this level.”

The campaign to stop deportations is spearheaded on the national scale by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. But on the South Side, in Chicago and throughout Illinois, the campaign is taken up by many different groups looking to organize their local communities to take action against deportations. This includes the direct action at the Broadview Detention Center in November and another civil disobedience action in April, when a group of eleven protesters sat blocking traffic in the street outside of the ICE Broadview facility.

But the campaign to stop deportations also includes individual cases. Undocumented Illinois, NDLON, OCAD and others will circulate online petitions urging ICE and the federal government to grant stays of deportation to community members caught up in proceedings. These are the cases that Luis Gutierrez and Latinos Progresando could not help with, cases that are flagged as “high priority” for ICE. MAY 28, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

The way immigration law works, a case can become high priority for a number of reasons outside of just a “criminal record.”

Those who have multiple “unauthorized entries” into the country are flagged. Those who have overstayed student or tourist visas, those who have routine traffic stops even, can be put on the fast track for deportation, no questions asked. Sometimes the online petitions are successful. Sometimes they are not. Either way, they serve to illustrate the arbitrary severity of “high priority” flags within the legal system.

When asked about successes within the movement, IYJL organizer Marcela Hernandez recounts the story of a single case she worked on. “I was working on a campaign of this woman called Lourdes, and she’s a mother of four children and she was put into deportation proceedings in the suburbs,” Hernandez explains. “We were actually able to win her case and she was able to stay with her children...And she’s actually speaking at our Coming Out of the Shadows rally about her story. She was someone who at first was very shy and now she’s so comfortable sharing her story, to fight for herself and involve her community in that fight.”

The Coming Out of the Shadows rally is an annual event, started in Chicago in 2010, during which undocumented youth publically gather on campuses all over the country and at Chicago’s Federal Plaza to declare that they are “undocumented and unafraid.” This year’s rally was a miserable, sleeting Saturday in March, but the members of OCAD and IYJL turned out strong.

Marcela Hernandez addressed the crowd gathered at the Federal Plaza downtown. “And that is why we get together here every year, rain, snow, whatever the weather, we are all here because we believe in the stories and in the power of the stories to create political change,” she said. IYJL members led a series of simple, bilingual chants: not one more. Ni uno más. Undocumented, unafraid. Unapologetic. Julio Zanchez, an exuberant young man with a megaphone, urged the crowd to jump up and down, joking: “Whoever is not jumping is ICE. El que no brinque es migra.”

The rally’s speakers were an intergenerational group. Young people spoke of their parents’ struggles living through the reality of undocumented status, as well as their own realities, like being denied federal financial aid for college. Maria Paz Perez spoke out about her husband’s de6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014

portation. Lourdes, the woman whose case Hernandez had worked on, spoke about her chilling experience in detention and about her children, whom she would be forced to leave behind if she were deported: “That day marked my life, when my nightmare began; I was on my way to work and never returned. And today, thanks to God, and the mobilization of the people I got out of that hell. My story does not end here; I am still in deportation proceedings but I am no longer afraid.”

T

anya Cabrera is in a unique position to advocate for undocumented students’ rights and opportunities, working both with an academic institution and a community-based organization.

Through her work at Illinois Institute of

of different community demographics and student needs.

Cabrera’s work as chair of the Illinois Dream Fund requires her to be a little more crafty. The Illinois Dream Fund is a notfor-profit organization that was set up in 2011 as part of the Illinois Dream Act, a state law that increases immigrant access to college. Though the fund is state-created, the onus of fundraising falls on the Dream Fund Commission, the cohort of volunteer stakeholders to which Cabrera was appointed in 2011.

Illinois is one of just twenty states with these kinds of “Dream Act” laws on the books, allowing for undocumented students to pay in-state tuition rates at public colleges and universities. The Dream Act, in many forms and at both the national and

“Today, thanks to God, and the mobilization of the people I got out of that hell. My story does not end here; I am still in deportation proceedings but I am no longer afraid.”

Lourdes Moreno Carrero

Technology (IIT) and the Illinois Dream Fund, Tanya Cabrera has learned ways to stretch the resources normally available to undocumented students facing the dilemma of paying for college without access to federal financial aid, government loans and grants, or work-study programs.

Cabrera grew up in the Little Village area and attended multiple Illinois colleges.

She is a former college and career advisor at Benito Juárez Community Academy and now works in higher education. In her role as Dream Fund commissioner, she comes across as the perfect combination of a sympathetic guidance counselor and a drill sergeant.

At IIT, Cabrera primarily works in outreach to the undocumented student population. She has travelled throughout Illinois, to California, Florida, Alabama, New York, and elsewhere, to get a sense

state levels, has been on the radar since the early 2000s. The act itself has a long history within the immigrant-justice movement, but Cabrera points out that the original problems that prompted action around the Dream Act, in Illinois and throughout the country, are far from resolved.

Luis Gutierrez remembers encountering the same problems of college access back in 2001 that Cabrera, IYJL, and so many others are now starting to make gains on, over a decade later. Gutierrez confides, “You just have to give people bad news all the time. And that sucks. But what’s worse is when people are like, ‘Well, I’m fine but I have my kid and they’re at this high school, what can we do for them?’ But then we’re getting them into colleges, and there’s no financial aid.”

That seeming last step of financial aid is the problem that Tanya Cabrera works to

redress. Cabrera is the muscle behind the fundraising efforts, but she also must work diligently to keep up a strong rapport with the students applying to and benefitting from the Dream Fund. In the program’s first year, there were 1,437 applications; that number grew to 2,337 applications this past academic year.

The relationships that Cabrera has established with “the kids,” as she calls them, are very private and very honest. She has no qualms telling the students what they are eligible for and what they are not, and explaining unfortunate realities when she must.

“I’m not trying to come off as evil, but I am letting them know, ‘You have to think long term,’ and that it’s okay to start off at a community college.”

As Cabrera explained it, a big problem for undocumented college students is the fact that they don’t have proper access to all of the information that they need concerning their immigration and financial situations. Oftentimes these students are incorrectly categorized as international students, or are told by colleges that they will qualify for subsidized loans or other government grants. Cabrera struggles in telling them that they won’t be able to receive the money in the end because they don’t have an international student visa or legal permanent residency in the states.

Cabrera’s goal is to “make sure that they know the game ahead of time. With papers or without papers.” As she tries to explain to her students, “You guys have access to school. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

But the process of actually putting together the money is a dizzying one, an endless game of paperwork which many undocumented students have real difficulty navigating. Are they DACA eligible? Even so, a work permit and Social Security number won’t translate into an application for federal financial aid. Does the state have an in-state tuition law on the books? What can a two-year or community college offer?

Are they looking into private, high-interest loans? How are they planning to pay off that debt? As Gaby Benitez and many other young organizers have put it, for an undocumented student caught between college acceptances and financial aid denial, it all comes down to a lack of that “nine-digit number.”

But yet another big problem facing Cabrera and the Dream Fund is financial

IMMIGRATION

isaac silver

Community members gather at the Federal Plaza for Chicago’s fifth annual Coming Out of the Shadows rally. constraint. Cabrera explained how, when the Dream Fund was first started by the state, the team was expecting a lot more support than they have ended up receiving.

It is a constant game of cat-and-mouse between Cabrera and potential donors, who range from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other politicians to private businesses.

When asked how she reaches out to donors to put pressure on them to donate, Cabrera said bluntly, “I stalk them,” and whenever donors choose not to donate,

donate less than what Cabrera thinks they can, or even rescind an already promised donation, she is not shy at all to publically disclose those names. She knows that she “is burning bridges,” but at the end of the day her goal is to get the money for her students, and she accomplishes it any way that she can.

The ultimate obstacle that Cabrera identifies, though, is the fact that federal immigration reform has yet to be passed.

And, in her mind, it certainly won’t be

passed this year. Donors are always saying that “legislation is going to pass,” so they don’t donate. And legislators and politicians are always saying, “something will pass.” Cabrera’s response: “If you’re saying ‘something’ and not what is on the table, then what does that mean?”

For Cabrera, that “something” must be more than “DACA for all,” which provides no path to citizenship, and more than a work visa for which immigrants have to re-apply and pay for every year, again with

no path to citizenship. “Why not pass immigration reform? Why not make it universal not only for students, but for parents?” she asks. “It’s just something that needs to happen...and I think that it’s up to the people to raise arms, and raise voices. We need action.” Action is indeed needed, it is all a question of how, when, and from whom it will come about. Cabrera has certainly volunteered herself to be a fighter. “Sometimes,” she says, “you just need a little crazy.” MAY 28, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

DEVELOPMENT

Building a Bronzeville Cooperative An agricultural utopia struggles to find its footing

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

W

alking down Oakwood Boulevard in Bronzeville, Danielle Kizaire-Sutton seems to know every house we pass. “That one’s just been renovated,” she says, pausing to cheerfully greet a passerby. “And the family in there helped organize the block party last year.”

Finally, she reaches her destination—an abandoned Commonwealth Edison building situated near the corner of 40th Street and Langley Avenue, next to an abandoned railroad embankment that spans nearly seven acres and runs the length of Bronzeville’s 3rd Ward, butting into the 4th Ward at its eastern end.

“Look at that tile work,” Kizaire-Sutton says admiringly, adding that the inside looks even more beautiful. Though she does not yet own the building, Kizaire-Sutton, who, along with husband Charles Sutton, runs the Bronzeville Urban Development nonprofit, has long wanted to use it as a center for environmental education in conjunction with BUD’s bigger plan: to put solar panels, greenhouses, and a mushroom farm on the railroad embankment, creating a hub for locally grown, sustainable, urban agriculture in one of Chicago’s poorest areas.

Like much else about the project, though, acquiring the building has its costs. ComEd refuses to tear down and sell the space until BUD has paid for the cleanup. Not only is BUD opposed to this course of action on principle—their stance, essentially, is that the energy company should clean up its own mess—it also lacks the money to actually clean up the space.

Kizaire-Sutton and her husband first began to contemplate the embankment project about fourteen years ago, though it took them until 2009 to track down the owner of the property. The owner of the embankment lot—whom Kizaire-Sutton wouldn’t name because of potential issues with back taxes—had acquired it in the Conrail bankruptcy proceedings, and sold it to them for one dollar, though the couple still owes around $50,000 in back taxes.

Then, in 2011, at a conference for en8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014

vironmental law and policy, Kizaire-Sutton managed to speak briefly with Susan Hedman, an Environmental Protection Agency administrator for the Great Lakes region, which serves six states in the Midwest, including Illinois. Within days, the EPA had given them a $145,000 grant and sent a team out to assess the area. Though the team used all of the grant to begin an ecological risk assessment, Kizaire-Sutton is hopeful that BUD can get $200,000 to $300,000 more from the EPA next year, to help them fund the removal of brush on top of the embankment.

Once the EPA confirmed that BUD had passed the risk assessment, the organization began to work with Interprofessional Projects Program (IPRO), a program of Illinois Institute of Technology that match es students with real-world projects. As a cheap way to get both man power and design services, the IPRO doesn’t seem like a bad idea: the engineering and architecture students from IIT have not only begun to clear off some of the vegetation from the embankment, but have also designed greenhouses and viaducts, begun to check the soil for contaminants, and created a land-use plan—complete with intricate models of the finished project. According to Blake Davis, an adjunct professor of sustainability and urban agriculture at IIT, who worked on the project, BUD was one of the most dedicated organizations he’s partnered with. “They took a very handson approach, and came to almost every class,” he says.

BUD plans to focus on developing aquaponics—the practice of growing plants and animals symbiotically in an aquatic environment—within its greenhouses. It hopes to produce enough fruits and vegetables to eventually create a sustainable workers’ cooperative within the community. Kizaire-Sutton wants to model this workers’ co-op on the Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland, where workers are encouraged to buy into the cooperative after an initial apprenticeship period, creating an incentive for investment in both

courtesy of bronzeville urban development

the community and the organization.

BUD says it wouldn’t discriminate against non-violent criminals when hiring, creating a space where ex-convicts can return to work. In addition, the entire southern wall of the embankment would be covered with solar panels, and Kizaire-Sutton wants to find a way to harness wind power.

There are other, more far-fetched ideas as well: she mentions the possibility of growing filbert trees using geothermal power, from which truffles can be cultivated and harvested. Kizaire-Sutton also wants to have mural competitions along the entire length of the embankment.

The enterprise would also give BUD the opportunity to provide supplementary education to local community members, which Kizaire-Sutton sees as a way of combating neighborhood violence. “We can occupy children who right now are resorting to violence because they have nothing else to do,” she says.

BUD is attempting to wring every possible project it can out of the space it’s been given. Along with the workers’ cooperative, Kizaire-Sutton wants to institute a farmers’ market that would sell the locally grown fruits and vegetables to

Bronzeville residents on a sliding scale.

In this way, BUD sees itself as fighting the encroachment of larger companies, like Walmart, that have increasingly been moving into the neighborhood in a manner that Kizaire-Sutton, who has lived in Bronzeville for all of her sixty-seven years, calls “raping and pillaging.” Of BUD, on the other hand, Davis says, “This could easily be a project divorced from the community, but they’ve been very sensitive about making sure nothing impinges on the people from the community.”

Other factors have taken a toll on the organization. Both Kizaire-Sutton and her husband lost their jobs and house following the economic downturn, and they now live off Social Security in a Washington Park senior citizens’ home (Kizaire-Sutton maintains it’s still part of Bronzeville). They are struggling to pay $1,800 in attorneys’ fees, and by press time their fundraising effort on the website Crowdrise has raised only $240 of its $35,000 goal—money that would be used to retain their attorneys to help set up the cooperatives.

In general, financing the project is a major issue for BUD; an energy company they brought in gave them an estimate of

$60 million for the full scope of their plans, though an independent assessor, in a separate estimate, later said that price would only be around $3 million. Another option Kizaire-Sutton floated during the course of our conversation was the development of just one section of the embankment first; though she was unsure of the exact price, she hopes that the revenue from selling the crops produced on part of the property could be used to develop the rest of the area. While almost any figure might seem too much for the organization, they’re still exploring several avenues of potential funding. One of the more promising right now is the University of Chicago, where they’ve met with Wendy Walker-Williams, executive director of the South East Chicago Commission, who, according to Kizaire-Sutton, seemed very excited about the project. (Their second meeting took place last Friday.)

This would appear to be a mutually beneficial transaction—BUD would receive funding for its project, and the UofC would make some headway in rehabilitating its image on the South Side.

Kizaire-Sutton proposes that the UofC

could then function as a sort of “anchor institution” for the project, providing financial support in return for fruits, vegetables, and other products that would be grown there. Another potential financial source is TIF money; BUD has an early-June meeting with Alderman Pat Dowell, of the 3rd Ward, about securing funding from the city. Kizaire-Sutton will also be traveling to San Francisco in late August, where she has been invited to give a presentation to the Commonwealth Club, a Silicon Valley nonprofit with over 16,000 members.

Meanwhile, back at the ComEd building, Kizaire-Sutton is still trying to figure out how she can acquire the abandoned structure. She looks at a wall that her husband and a team of students painted last summer, now peeling and punched full of holes, while children run around on the sidewalk in front of a row of identical gray homes. “Imagine all these people, working right across from where they live,” she says, gesturing toward the embankment. Turning, she walks through the tall grass of the lot where she envisions the farmers’ market will be one day, to catch the #3 bus back home. ¬

MAY 28, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

CRAFTS

luke white

Cut from a Different Cloth Hyde Park quilter Cindy Pardo seeks to found a home base for South Side crafters

BY JAKE BITTLE

C

indy Pardo’s attic—brimming with textile squares, sewing equipment, and pattern swatches—is the mark of an intimate, lifelong relationship with fabric. Pardo has worked as a studio artist, making and selling original quilt designs, for three decades now; with her patterned shirts and dexterous hands, she appears quite at home wading through her attic’s cluttered sea of fabrics. But she is also concerned about providing other artists, specifically those on the South Side, with a place to show the world their own handiwork.

For the past few years, Pardo operated the Fair Trader, a shop on 55th Street in Hyde Park that sold clothes acquired through Fair Trade USA, a global organization that buys and resells, at what they believe to be nonexploitative prices, clothing made by farmers in countries such as Ghana, Bolivia, and Sri 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014

Lanka. The Fair Trader, Pardo says, initially grew out of a small Fair Trade practice run by the First Unitarian Church on 57th Street.

“What happened at the [Unitarian church] was we had our annual Christmas clothing bazaar, and we had gotten in some Fair Trade items. They sold out like crazy.

People said, ‘This would be wonderful to have all the time. We like to feel good about what we’re buying.’…It just grew from there, as far as the Fair Trader was concerned.”

It was through the Fair Trader that Pardo made the transition from making and selling her individual art to serving as a judicious merchant of other people’s textile products.

After several years in business, however, the Fair Trader was forced to close due to increasing rent prices in Hyde Park, which Pardo sees as partly the result of the increasing development of Harper Court on 53rd Street.

“We were forced out at the Fair Trader,” she said, “because our rent was too expensive.

[Harper Court] didn’t do anything bad, they didn’t say, ‘We want to get you out of there,’ but realistically, the rent in this neighborhood is pretty high. You lose these small places.”

Despite the closing of the Fair Trader, however, Pardo has not given up on serving as a conduit for other artists and craftspeople.

With Handcrafted/South, her new project, Pardo wants to gather together the numerous craft artists on the South Side and offer them a place to showcase their art (Pardo is still searching for a piece of real estate). Each artist who wants to sell their art in Pardo’s space will pay a portion of the place’s rent, and the building will serve as a sort of bazaar for all the handcraft artists on the South Side who would otherwise have no permanent place to present their work to the community.

The project is still in its early stages, but Pardo says she’s formed relationships with talented South Side artists and has a few dedicated partners willing to work on the project with her.

“Most artists don’t create just for the market,” Pardo says. “But I think if you’re going to say you’re a professional, you can’t be a professional if you haven’t sold things. That’s sort of a basic thing.”

“That’s what this project is: a way to give [South Side crafters] an outlet for the work they’re already doing,” she said. “Most of the people who’ve contacted us are already artists.

They’re looking for a way to sell their art without setting up a tent in ninety-eight degree weather.” ¬

TOAST

The Confidence Project Behind the podium at the Englewood Toastmasters Club

BY OLIVIA STOVICEK

“I

came in second,” says Sherri Allen-Reeves, stepping out from behind the lectern, “and most people who come in second and not first would feel defeated.” Her voice is powerful, but not too loud. Each word is measured, patiently delivered. “But I felt like I had come in first because for the first time in my life, I competed. I stepped out of my comfort zone, and I did something I had never done before.”

Her tone crescendos as the address continues, commanding the room’s attention. “Every time I stand up here I come in first. I take charge of my life, I take control of my destiny.” Allen-Reeves’s speech is a natural pitch for joining the Englewood Toastmasters Club.

To describe Englewood Toastmasters as just a public-speaking club would sell it short. Members hone their speaking abilities at every meeting, and some compete in speechmaking competitions against their comrades from around the state, the country, and even the world—Englewood’s club is one branch of a huge international organization, with 14,350 clubs in 122 countries.

Club president Charles Brooks has been a member of Toastmasters for almost twenty years—he was once a district governor within the larger organization’s leadership—but he is no less enthusiastic than his greener colleagues. Brooks emphasizes that, though initially drawn to Toastmasters by the prospect of competition, he “got sidetracked with leadership.”

They may come for the practical skills, with ideas of getting ahead at work or addressing a fear of public speaking, but the club’s members stay for something else.

The hook lies in the way Toastmasters helps build confidence, self-possession, and self-esteem—and then provides immediate

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opportunities for their use, giving both the fledgling speaker and the self-possessed veteran the rush of empowerment.

Allen-Reeves, who embodies the club’s Word of the Day—“loquacious”— speaks of coming to see herself in an entirely new way through her involvement. “I always knew I had the ability to talk,” she says, “but I was never comfortable talking in front of people. Now, I see that there’s a conference coming up, and the first thing I think is, do I have something to talk about?”

The club takes an incremental approach, stressing improvement by small

steps. The group that Brooks leads and teaches today, gathered on the second floor of the Kelly Library, is small; only a handful of people fill the tables arranged in front of the lectern, but members pop up and down to manage different parts of the meeting, their predetermined roles neatly indicated on the agenda. Everyone has the chance to take responsibility for something small, and guests are prompted to join in and speak up, to introduce themselves and take part in time set aside for extemporaneous discourse and chit-chat.

The Toastmasters avoid pressuring the timid, but that doesn’t make their hospi-

tality any less persuasive—it only takes a few minutes for them to get me up to the lectern, talking off-the-cuff.

Inherent in this dance between a concern for participants’ comfort and an attempt to get them to step out of their comfort zones is the recognition of how serious the fear of public speaking can be.

At one point, Brooks notes, “If it was some people’s job to give the eulogy at a funeral, they’d probably rather be in the casket.” It’s a funny line, but it’s also likely the experience of at least one person in the room.

Newcomers talk about needing to building their courage, and one quiet neophyte maintains a sheepish expression for the entire meeting, declining a turn at the lectern. Nevertheless, she’s made rapt by the skillful speaking before her and the thorough feedback process. By the end of the evening, she is one of two people talking seriously with Brooks about joining.

The Toastmasters frame the fear of public speaking as something to be overcome not in isolation, but as a part of a larger project to improve confidence and self-esteem, an endeavor they strive to help others with. Allen-Reeves has just started a Toastmasters club in Bronzeville, and she hopes to help residents of the supportive housing program run by the Renaissance Collaborative, the nonprofit she works for, find a sense of empowerment through public speaking.

Brooks, too, feels the need to pass on that sense of transformation. He became president of the Englewood Toastmasters, he says, because he knew there were people in Englewood who could use these skills.

“But it has to be there for them to find,” he insists. “We’re there, and we’re going to continue to be there.” ¬

MAY 28, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

VISUAL ARTS

Of Need and Fulfillment “Gratification” at Mana Contemporary

I

t’s something captured by a war reporter; it’s lifted from a horror film.

Raw hamburger sloughs off the artist’s face and naked body, held in various poses.

Photography flash-freezes four individual moments of sloppy decomposition. The resulting pictures are part of “Gratification,” a joint exhibition between six artists out of the School of the Art Institute (SAIC), hosted in an intimate space at Mana Contemporary, in East Pilsen. Artist Leonard Suryajaya produced a second skin with repurposed hamburger-product. His grotesquerie flaunts “Gratification’s” title, like many of the works at this exhibition, turning the aesthetics of food on its head. He spits at the title’s implied wish fulfillment with an image that reads like burn damage or radiation scarring.

Each portrait follows the next in close succession, mounted an inch off the wall to produce a dropped shadow. The hand pressed to Suryajaya’s chest in the first still demonstrates a gravitas, an inner peace with his seeming disfigurement. His upturned eyelids, opened mouth, and grasping hands in the second suggest a barely suppressed moan. His beefy chin slides out of his right hand, his head visibly bulges where his left hand applies pressure. The third print looks documentary—anatomizing ripples of matter along his shoulder blades as he tentatively attempts to run. The fourth is almost classical, his serpentine body and generously exposed thigh aligning with the statesmanlike dignity of the first photo in the series.

Suryajaya subversively misappropriates the bloody gore we euphemistically purchase as ground meat. He claims that the politics of objectification and the queer body in the “Beef ” series opens the work up to a productive intersection of violence and sexuality. Suryajaya is either deliberately obscuring himself in a grisly process, or desperately clawing away at a false surface.

Both actions access the anxieties inherent to discovering a new identity, a new place in life’s relationships. Hamburger itself consists of cuts that have been cast away, chewed up, and spit back out. Suryajaya’s art punningly reproduces appropriate rhet12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014

BY STEPHEN URCHICK

stephen urchick

oric for people who are wrongfully used and abused at the margins of gender.

If Suryajaya attempts to discuss marginal gender, Billy McGuinness stands up for those crowded out of the American dream. McGuinness stretched a 37x39 inch canvas across the entrance ramp to a soup kitchen in Wicker Park. At the end of five months, he retrieved the canvas and now presents it—unstretched and unframed—as a tacked-up tapestry of all the tenderness free food, counseling, and laundering represent. McGuinness does, however, still frame “Five Months of Love” inside “Gratification’s” context. By exposing the obstacles that, for some, complicate relationships of need and fulfillment, he challenges the fanciful stylization and blatant understatement of a right to eat as one of simple “wishes granted.”

The final composition on display is the result of random chance: steps, spills, errant gum wads. Just as he has, to some extent, ceded authorial influence and “lost control” of his production, visitors to the soup kitchen experience similar feelings of tenuousness and tentativeness. (His art-

ist’s note cites some 15,000 meals and 800 showers provided over the installation’s duration.) McGuinness uses canvas, the medium of painting, but his painterly gesture is utterly absent, invisible. He accordingly cites the “blind eye” turned to homeless people collecting change on the streets. In making these points, he revitalizes charity’s seriousness—thoroughly dismantling the thought that it is mere “gratification.”

Hyounsang Yoo responds to a not-dissimilar division of high and low with, of all things, Spam. According to curator Nhung Walsh, Spam assumed special significance in Yoo’s Korea, as well as in Walsh’s own home country of Vietnam. “Spam turned into a kind of historical reflection on how people perceived military experience,” she said. During times of U.S. intervention, Spam became a status symbol, difficult to obtain from behind the gates of military compounds. Meditating on this, Yoo built two low trapezoidal walls out of concrete elements cast from Spam cans. The work, “1987-present,” channels the drab prefabricated construction of the army camp with its gray, rounded, modular bricks. Yoo re-

states the checkpoint’s terms of inside and outside, exclusivity, and suspicion.

Yet Yoo’s work, despite the apparent robustness of its material, runs into tension with its constituent fragility. “1987-present” would never hold back protesting masses. It would, in fact, tumble noisily to the floor at the slightest errant step. It intimidates viewers only insofar as they gingerly tiptoe around the sculpture. The barrier thus disrupts gratification in two senses. It is difficult to gratify the gourmand’s lust for Spam locked behind the implied reinstated barrier, and outright impossible to gratify the base commander’s need for security and protection with this same pathetic implication. By turning this fetishized foodstuff into dead concrete, Yoo perpetuates “Gratification’s” mode of making the edible inedible—turning sustenance into substance.

Snatching figurative food from the mouth, he unites with the exhibition’s other artists to hint at different social conditions that, in one way or another, remain ungratifying and undesirable. ¬

Recreating the Equator Matchatcha and Dibala at West Point Baptist

BY AUSTIN BROWN

D

espite the visible age of the West Point Baptist Church in Bronzeville, there’s a sense of vitality there, of coming together. Fluorescent bulbs plugged into old chandeliers and other recent renovations give a sense of the reinvigoration of the old, of the rekindling of extinguished flames in new ways. That’s something the South Side African immigrant community wants to promote with the long-awaited return of Diblo Dibala and his current backing band, Matchatcha, to Chicago.

Matchatcha and Dibala play a style of music known as soukous, from the French for “to shake”, secousse. The goal of the music, as the name implies, is not to impress the audience or display virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake, but rather to make them feel the music, both emotionally and physically.

Matchatcha creates a strong rhythmic base on which Dibala can overlay his snaking guitar lines, whose interplay with the keyboard creates an atmosphere of energy and exuberance. The rhythms have their origins in the Cuban rumba, which itself is an amalgamation of traditional African dance and Spanish influences. The return of Afro-Cuban rhythmic and melodic structures to an African musical setting gives soukous a well-traveled aesthetic, a kind of homecoming after a long time away.

Dibala and Matchatcha are well known among the attendees: one mentions that this is his fifth time seeing them, although the last time was in 2007.

Indeed, this is a long-awaited reunion with the band for those present, most of whom immigrated to the United States, from Nigeria, Angola, and Kenya, among others. The immigrants were able to construct a community for displaced Africans in the nineties through a club called Equator, a hub of African music owned and managed by Emmanuel Egwu, also the organizer of the concert. Equator, which opened its doors at 4715 N. Broadway in 1990, was the only Chicago club that specialized in African music. Equator brought together people of different nationalities

through concerts by famed African artists, such as Fela Kuti, Thomas Mapfumo, and Dibala himself.

The Equator club closed down years ago, but the memories of times there are still strong in the audience at West Point Baptist. “I used to go there almost every Saturday night,” says one man. His sentiment is reflected in the connection that still exists here among those in attendance.

They seem eager to renew the sense of companionship they had at Equator and to bring it to new and greater heights.

For Egwu, however, this is a return to familiar business. Egwu, through Equator, introduced Dibala to Chicago, but it’s been years since Egwu has been in the business of running a club, having decided instead to focus on his family and friends. This is an unexpected return, and, for the half-full church of former clubgoers, a welcome one.

According to Paulo Bombe, a curator of African arts and longtime colleague of Egwu’s, “Egwu excels in the business of bringing people together and making them happy,” whether it’s through music or simply a place to gather. Bombe mentions that the event would probably not have happened without Egwu, who seems to have a knack for the business side of entertainment, but doesn’t lose sight of the underlying goal of a positive group experience.

For Egwu, this is a preview of things to come; he hopes that this will be able to happen again, once or twice a month, possibly even weekly. The goal is a new community center, where African immigrants across generations will have a chance to connect over shared cultural experiences.

Watching the reactions to Dibala’s cascading melodies and passionate attitude, the performers’ enthusiasm becomes undeniable. The dedicated friends and acquaintances who have by now left behind their clubbing days are swept up in the music, and soon they’re dancing like they’re at Equator once again. This first reunion is an encouraging sign of more gatherings to come. MAY 28, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

ARTS CALENDAR VISUAL ARTS Ruthless Powers

The dead are rising at the antena project space in Pilsen.

Artists Liz Born and Victoria Martinez will use dead plants, trash, and roadkill to attempt to answer the question, “How does a body become a monument?” Their works address decayed bodies, both architectural and biological, and the footprints they leave behind in the world of the living: the exhibition will feature portrayals of abandoned buildings, artificially preserved corpses, and the like. Born makes chiefly woodcuts, while Martinez creates found object assemblages that are inherently narrative. Art creates life, death creates life, and life creates art and death creates art. antena, 1755 S. Laflin St. Through June 13. Saturdays, noon-5pm. Free. (773)3403516. antenapilsen.blogspot.com (Emma Collins)

Continuum

Prospectus, an art gallery in Pilsen that chiefly features Latin American art, will be displaying a collection of works by artist Ginny Sykes, created from 1993 to 2013. Sykes’s approach to art is multifaceted: she makes collections of abstract paintings that are tied together by common color schemes, public murals and mosaics, and even an outdoor sand installation called “Healing Grounds.” Prospectus will curate a selection of her work, in what is sure to be a vibrant and varied show. Prospectus Art Gallery, 1210 W. 18th St. Opening reception Friday, May 9, 5pm-10pm. Through June 27. Wednesday-Sunday, noon-5pm; Monday-Tuesday by appointment. prospectusartgallery.wordpress.com (Emma Collins)

Shovel, Spoon, and Braid

What happens when a trio of artists relocates to a rural valley in central Wisconsin? An upcoming show at ACRE, “Shovel, Spoon, and Braid,” answers this question, and explores themes of sustainable living in intentional communities and coexistence with natural environments. Artists Adam Wolpa, Josh Hoeks, and Charlotte Wolf are collaborating for the show: Wolpa and Hoeks will be displaying visual evidence of their radical lifestyle change, including carved wooden spoons and diagrams for rural construction projects, and Wolf will be showcasing her photography, which documents the relationships of women to natural environments.

ACRE Projects, 1913 W. 17th St. Through June 9. Sunday-Monday, noon-4pm. acreresidency.org (Emma Collins)

Model Pictures Artist Ross Sawyers built and subsequently photographed scale replicas of unfinished model homes, (in) complete with holes in the walls and plastic in the windows. The photographs presented in “Model Pictures,” his first major Chicago solo show, highlight current housing and economic crises by way of images of these unfinished and empty new houses. Haunting and uncanny, the model model homes bridge the surreal and the (unfortunately) real. Unlike life-sized abandoned model

homes, though, Sawyer’s models are swiftly destroyed after their insides are documented. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through June 13. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm.

(773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Katryce Lassle)

STAGE & SCREEN

Coast to Coaster at Cobalt Studio

That underappreciated object, the coaster, selflessly protects tabletops from the threat of chilled beverages and pesky rings of condensation. How many coffee tables has the coaster rescued from watermarks? How many messes has it stopped in their tracks? Hasn’t this humble guardian earned some recognition? An upcoming exhibit at Cobalt Studio features the coaster as an artistic medium. Pieces made on or out of coasters will be on display, some functional and some, like Chicago-based artist Keith Camion’s work—made with upraised glass shards and metal spikes—quite clearly non-functional. Other artists include Nick Depeder and Antonio Martinez.

The gallery is still accepting submissions that meet these simple specifications: must be creative, must involve coasters. Whether you’re interested in designing or you simply need a more aesthetically interesting place to set your mug, join in on Cobalt Studio’s coaster craze in the coming weeks. Cobalt Studio, 1950 W. 21st St. June 13-July 13. Opening Friday, June 13, 6pm-10pm. Free. (773)6641163. cobaltartstudio.blogspot.com (Rachel Seebach)

Fault Lines

It’s often said that we walk on shaky ground, but sometimes that seems a little hard to remember. This June, the Beverly Art Center will present “Fault Lines,” an exhibition by artists Jennifer Mannebach and Brian Dortmund that makes that shaky ground explicitly visible. The artists take complete, constructed visuals and distort them, revealing the chaos that, through the creative process, gives way to and consequently underlies objects of beauty. For Mannebach this means taking a clean surface, like glass, and adding common detritus like tape and graphite. Dortmund creates landscapes that appear worn by the scars of age. In addressing the chaos of both creation and destruction, Mannebach and Dortmund’s works in “Fault Lines” remind us of the fragility of our constructed world. Beverly Art Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Through June 22. Monday-Friday, 9am-9pm; Saturday 9am-5pm; Sunday 1pm-4pm. Free. (773)445-3838 www. beverlyartcenter.org (Austin Brown)

Propeller Fund Project Space Launch

Since 2010, the Propeller Fund has awarded grants to Chicago-based artists to promote art in the city. On May 24, the exhibition for the 2012 Propeller awardees opened to the public at Mana Contemporary. Visit the gallery to see exhibitions by local, Propeller-funded artists and art organizations, like The Franklin, Art Patch Project, and Bad at Sports. Pieces on display include artistic studies of the Constitution, underground cinema, and independent comics. One video installation even utilizes the classic Chicago television programs Studs’ Place and Bozo’s Circus. For art that is current, local, and

WHPK Rock Charts WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station at the University of Chicago. Once a week the station’s music directors collect a book of playlist logs from their Rock-format DJs, tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to popularity that week.

Compiled by Andrew Fialkowski and Dylan West Artist / Album / Record Label 1.Animal Lover / Guilt / Learning Curve 2. Sea of Shit / Sea of Shit 10” [Rerelease] / Diseased Audio 3. The Spies / The Battle of Bosworth Terrace / Siltbreeze 4. Ryley Walker / All Kinds of You / Tompkins Square 5. Klauss Johann Grobe / Im Dinne Der Zeir / Trouble in Mind 6. Iron Reagan / Spoiled Identity EP / Magic Bullet 7. Cracked Vessel / The Wayward Path - Live on WHPK / Hip Kid 8. Flesh Panthers / Flesh Panthers EP / Tall Pat 9. GLOV / GLOV Demo / Triple Bypass 10. Dopelord / Black Arts, Riff Worship, & Weed Cult / Self-Released 11. Earring / DS0012 / Public House 12. Swans / To Be Kind / Young God/Mute 13. Satan’s Satyrs / Die Screaming / Bad Omen 14. Habibi / Habibi / Burger 15. Johnny Noise / The Day is Coming / Siltbreeze

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014

unapologetically entertaining, don’t miss the Propeller Fund launch show. Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St. Through August 31. Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm.

Free. (312)850-8301. (Amy Harlowe)

Cabaret

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome to a revival of the 1987 revival of Cabaret at the Logan Center. For three nights only, director Dani Wieder and her ensemble of UofC students will bring the grit of Weimar Germany’s nightclub scene to the significantly less seedy Theater West, recreating a time of unrest for both the world and Berlin’s seedy underworld. The musical, currently starring Alan Cumming and Michelle Williams on Broadway (where tickets are a lot more expensive), follows the showgirls and Emcee of the Kit Kat Klub as the song and dance leaks off the stage and mingles with the club’s multifarious clientele. Join this scantily clad troupe on a dimly lit journey filled with love, lust, jealousy, and heavy eyeliner. Remember, don’t tell mama! Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. June 5-7. Thursday-Friday, 7:30pm; Saturday, 2pm and 7:30pm. $6 in advance; $8 at the door. (773)702-2997. arts.uchicago.edu (Bess Cohen)

Chicago Freedom Summer 2014

This summer marks the fiftieth anniversary of Freedom Summer, a momentous moment at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement. The Social Justice Initiative at UIC, in partnership with several Chicago organizations, is taking up the task of commemorating that watershed event.

The three-day Chicago Freedom Summer 2014 conference will look both forwards and backwards, featuring a keynote speech by SNCC cofounder Julian Bond, conversations with participants in Freedom Summer, and sessions that address contemporary problems in social justice and organizing. The conference will also host the Chicago premier of new PBS documentary Freedom Summer from filmmaker Stanley Nelson. UIC Student Center West, 828 S. Wolcott Ave. May 28-30. Free, donations accepted. Registration and event schedule online. (312)3555922. chicagofreedomsummer.org (Rachel Schastok)

Jacob

“And Jacob was left alone, in his luxurious high-rise in downtown Chicago.” Timothy Gregory, actor, director, playwright, founding artistic director of Provision Theater, and host of HGTV’s New Spaces, has wondered what every Chicagoan-with-a-luxurious-high-rise wonders to themselves when looking from their sweeping windows at the bustling loop below: what if I were to wrestle with an angel until the breaking of the day? From this, he brings to us Jacob, a new production at Provision Theater that brings Genesis’ tale of Jacob wrestling the angel to a modern Chicago. Therefore, to this day, the people of Chicago do not eat the sinew of the thigh that is on the hip socket, even when piled beneath dripping peppers in Italian beef sandwiches. Provision Theater, 1001 W. Roosevelt Rd. Through June 15. (312)455-0065. provisiontheater.org (Isabel Ochoa Gold)

M. Butterfly David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award-winning play, M. Butterfly hits the Court Theatre to close out the season.

An arresting reimagining of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly through a post-colonial lens, Hwang’s play chronicles the affair between French diplomat Bernard Boursicot and the male Chinese opera singer Shi Pei Pu. Under the direction of Charles Newell at Court, M. Butterfly takes an aggressive look at sex, espionage, and imperialism.

Hwang is a masterful and adventurous playwright and he offers a deconstruction of his source material’s Orientalist angle that is both playfully imaginative and downright powerful. Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through June 8.

See website for show times. $15-$35. (773)702-7005. courttheatre.org (Shanice Casimiro and Meaghan Murphy)

MUSIC Ravi Coltrane Quartet

Sporting one of the most familiar names in jazz history, Ravi Coltrane comes to the Jazz Showcase with his own take on the instrument his father made legendary. A prolific performer in his own right, Coltrane released his seventh solo album, Spirit Fiction, in 2012, his first on

the Blue Note label. Classified as a “post-bop” performer, Coltrane treads the jazz landscape transformed in the wake of his father’s heyday. With a soothing saxophone tone, Coltrane excels as both bandleader and soloist, leading his quartet as he squeezes out meandering sonic explorations. Coltrane is not to be missed as one of the new fathers of the present day jazz scene. The Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Ct. June 5-8, 8pm and 10pm. $25; $40 VIP. (312)360-0234. jazzshowcase.com (Jack Nuelle)

Maggie Brown’s LEGACY

Maggie Brown, jazz singer, songwriter, and music educator brings her one woman show, LEGACY: Our Wealth of Music to the Chicago Theological Seminary for a look back through the storied past of African-American culture and music. The critically acclaimed show spans a huge variety of African-American musical genres and influences, from African chant, to early ragtime, jazz and modern blues. Brown, the daughter of late composer Oscar Brown, Jr., has spent the last 19 years touring her show, which aims to educate and inform as much as it does entertain. Armed with a powerhouse voice and a mission to impart the vibrant, rich, significant scope of African-American music to a wider audience, Brown is a Chicago favorite, and not to be missed. Chicago Theological Seminary, 1407 E 60th St. June 1. 3:30pm. $5 Youth; $20 Adults. (773)896-2400. ctschicago.edu (Jack Nuelle)

Chicago Women in the Blues Festival

A boisterous blues revue comes to Reggie’s in the first weeks of summer. This show highlights some of the best female blues singers in the city while still keeping a hearty grip on Chicago’s rich blues past. A rotating cast of performers keeps each show different, while special guests abound. These women are a group of powerful voices, instrumentalists, and performers, several of whom have performed with blues greats such as Ike Turner and Jimmy Smith. Billed as an almost mini-festival happening at the same time as the larger Chicago Blues festival, this “bevy of blues-belting bombshells” will be sure to keep things nice and nostalgic in the South Loop.

Reggie’s. 2109 South State. June 13. 7pm. $10-15. 17+ (312)949-0120 reggieslive.com (Jack Nuelle)

CyHi the Prynce

Hailing from Georgia, CyHi the Prynce is a hip-hop artist who is currently signed to Kanye West’s record label, G.O.O.D. Music, as well as Def Jam Recordings, Akon’s Konvict Muzik, and Bu Thiam’s BuVision. CyHi first appeared on the hip-hop scene in 2010 after being signed to G.O.O.D. Music and making an appearance on West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy that same year. Since then he has self-released five mixtapes, been included on G.O.O.D. Music’s compilation album in collaboration with Kid Cudi and John Legend, and received writing credits for West’s Yeezus (2013). His latest mixtape, Black Hystori Project (2014), was released this past February and is described as a “conscious hip hop concept album focusing on the history of black people in America.” It also happens to be a great showcase for this gifted storyteller.

The Shrine, 2109 S.Wabash Ave. Friday, June 13. Doors open 9pm. $30; $300 for VIP table. 21+ (312)753-5700. theshrinechicago.com (Shelby Gonzales)

Black Flag

Without Black Flag, punk rock would not exist. Well, that’s not totally true, but it would be a lot lamer if they didn’t. The band is nothing short of revolutionary when it comes to the creation of hardcore punk, mixing elements of heavy metal into their violent, clangy, anti-authoritarian noise sound. They are also innovators of the punk DIY aesthetic, which they applied to their famous underground recording. Formed by Greg Ginn in 1976 in Hermosa Beach, California, Black Flag have earned themselves a substantial cult following form constant touring in the US, Canada, and Europe. Unlike many punk bands, they managed to break away from the standard three-chord format of punk rock, creating a stylistically diverse discography. And, true to their punk nature, they’re still rockin’. You’ll mosh your pants off to Black Flag at Reggie’s on their VITIMOLOGY TOUR. Highly recommended to those who are brought down by the establishment. Reggie’s,2105 S. State St. June 17th, 2014. 7pm. $20-$25. 17+ 312-949-1020 reggieslive.com (Mark Hassenfratz) ¬

So Awesome It Blows the Brains Out the Back of Your Head A profile of T.L. Williams

BY MARK HASSENFRATZ

T

.L. Williams was shorter than expected, with an air of barely contained excitement. Perpetually wide-eyed, he looked like he might break out into song at any moment. Williams grew up in an extremely musical family, and spent his childhood surrounded by song. With the aid of arts and music programs in his education, it seemed only natural that he mastered five instruments. He quickly became a master trumpet player, and even studied under Wynton Marsalis.

Williams’s lifetime love of music is seen everywhere on his new album, Life in Your Mid-20’s. The album showcases a signature musical mingling of R&B, pop, and rock that has earned him his name in the Chicago music scene.

Williams performed at a recent gathering for music industry veteran Gus Redmond’s birthday party. Redmond is responsible for the production of nearly six hundred hit records from the sixties and seventies onward. His birthday party was celebrated in Chicago’s Home of Chicken and Waffles. Williams played Gus’s favorite song of his, “Gettin’ Mo’ Money Than You.” “I gave him the gift of song!” beamed Williams. At first glance Williams’ constant exhilaration seemed to translate into overconfidence. (That, and he mentioned his own name as a brand multiple times in a before-concert interview.) From the outset, it wasn’t clear that Williams could deliver the “so awesome it blows your brain out the back of your head” performance he had promised.

In the end, though, he came pretty close.

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Playing live trumpet lends itself to what Williams calls “luxury problems.”

The management often does not think to provide a mic stand for Williams’ trumpet, but he makes the best of it. To applause from the audience he brought on a “human mic stand,” or a woman kind enough to hold the mic in place for his trumpet. “That happened a lot when I was starting out.

Sometimes they, [the human mic stands] start dancing,” he said after the show. “I’m like, ‘I love that you’re excited, but stand still! They can’t hear me.’ ” Williams has the winning trait of making the best of iff y circumstances. The restaurant didn’t have a stage, which didn’t seem to bother him in the slightest. Taking his spot in a small archway next to the kitchen, Williams took command of the show instantly. He took the opportunity to announce “Happy 127th birthday Gus!” before proclaiming, “Let’s get it on in this archway!” He demanded the DJ bump up the track, and barreled into his performance. His trumpet playing was distinctively pop in its bouncy, upbeat sound, but elements of jazz and soul merged emerged in its smoother tones. The bass on the track was undeniably funky with an R&B feel.

His smooth voice played into the mix very well. So did the audience’s. Williams had the crowd on their feet dancing and singing along in matter of seconds—even the wait staff joined in.

After the performance, Redmond clapped Williams on the back and said, “I’ve been working in the music industry for fifty-three years, and T.L. is my superstar.” MAY 28, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY ¬ MAY 28, 2014