All posts tagged: Threewalls

Beyond the Page: Regina Martinez & Threewalls’ In-Session

Published by Marya Spont-Lemus

“Beyond the Page” digs into the process and practice of writers and artists who work at the intersection of literary arts and other fields. For this installment, I interviewed Regina Martinez, Threewalls’ Artist and Artistic Engagement Manager, about the In-Session program — a critical interdisciplinary salon that incorporates reading, conversation, and performance together, now entering its third season. I spoke with Martinez in late July about the ideas and values behind In-Session, the theme she chose for its coming season, sensitivities of working between artists and institutions, and Martinez’s own path to and through this work. Check out In-Session’s third season, themed “The Art of Memory.” Find Threewalls @threewalls on Twitter and @three-walls on Instagram. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Marya Spont-Lemus: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me about In-Session! I’m so glad I went to Udita Upadhyaya’s In-Session event in March, because I think this program has such a great premise and I’m excited to hear how other artists engage with it. Especially for readers who may …

Reflections of the ECLIPSING Festival

Published by Sasha Tycko

I’ll begin at the end. Arms raised, knees levering, booties popping, we danced to the beats served by DJ Hijo Pródigo in the Currency Exchange Café, which had turned into a bar for the night, serving up cocktails loaded with activated charcoal. We had an hour before been perched next door on stools and benches for a reading at the BING art books store, and an hour before that stood chatting with cheese cubes on napkins in the Arts Incubator gallery. Nearly a festival in itself, it was the closing night of the monumental ECLIPSING festival: three months that included a performance series, a group and a solo exhibition, workshops, a vegan market, and a “performative lecture” in four arts venues around Chicago. The festival, whose full title is ECLIPSING: the politics of night, the politics of light, was organized by Amina Ross and took place between January and March. The word Ross used to describe the robust programming is “holistic.” An eclipse is a drama, a shifting in the relationships between the looker, the looked-at, and the …

Black To The Future Series: An Interview with Cauleen Smith

Published by Tempestt Hazel

Using a title borrowed from an essay by cultural critic Mark Dery, the Black To The Future Series is a sequence of interviews with artists whose practice has started to define a new generation of work in the realm of afrofuturism and afrosurrealism. Using a pointed series of questions, these interviews have been conducted to spark conversation, to hear various points of view on something that is constantly changing and transforming, and with the hopes of allowing the practitioners to be at the center of determining what these movements are. This week we get some insight from artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith.  Cauleen has spent the past two years in Chicago researching and digging through the Alton Abraham Papers at the University of Chicago and music archives at the Experimental Sound Studio to find gems from the life of musician and philosopher Sun Ra, a key figure in the conversation around afrofuturism.  The results of her investigation can be seen in A Star Is A Seed, an installation and series of short films at the …

The Art of Cultural Fusion: A Conversation with Gitte Bog

Published by Tempestt Hazel

The art world is a small world. As we move through it, it tends to shrink more and more. This was made clear when I found myself in conversation with Danish artist Gitte Bog. She was in town for two days completing two ongoing projects with parts that started in Chicago more than a year ago. Curious about her request for a sign that read, “I am looking for participants for two art projects relating to Chicago”, and her request for permission to sit at a table in the lobby of the Chicago Cultural Center, I asked her about her projects. While she described the one which was done for last year’s Vers10n Fest at the Zhou B Art Center, I realized that I had participated in it. My wrapper with its shot-in-the-dark translation of a Danish word into English was floating in the sea of colorful wrappers that she had collected over the years. Centered around language, taste and things lost in translation, the candies project is a perfect illustration of what is at …

A Mayoral Engagement: What Does Art in Chicago Mean to You?

Published by Nicolette Caldwell

It is a Mayoral Engagement at The Chicago Urban Art Society. Join SIFC at Chicago Urban Art Society (CUAS) this Friday February 11th, 2011 for the Mayoral Meet and Greet for the Arts! SIFC will be asking, “What Does Art in Chicago Mean to You?” This is a great opportunity to engage in conversation and dialogue with other arts-minded people, local arts organizations, artists and arts educators. All mayoral candidates have been personally invited! On Friday, we are turning the SIFC photobooth into a videobooth confessional and asking one question all night long, “What does art in Chicago mean to you?” Help CUAS and the rest of Chicago’s art advocates in this extra campaign effort get ART elected!