Dates:
Friday, August 2: 5:30-8:30pm
Saturday, August 3: 5:30-9pm
Sunday, August 4: 10am-9pm
Location:
Experimental Station: 6100 S Blackstone Ave, Chicago, IL
Free to Attend
Masks Required
About the Festival
This year’s festival embraces the theme of embodiment. Throughout this 3-day gathering, we’ll explore the ways archivists and artists preserve the legacies of our communities via talks, performances, music, and workshops.
As the Festival will be happening in person for the first time since 2018, we are celebrating the opportunity to gather together by emphasizing the role of embodiment in archives, asking: How can an archive be embodied in a space, a person, an object, a gathering, or a gesture? How does one begin to understand an archive in order to embody it out in the world? How does witnessing and engaging with archival materials make you feel (emotionally/bodily)? What can a gathering/group do that an archive can’t and vice versa?
The festival will feature workshops, performances, panel discussions, archive unfurlings, ask-an-archivist sessions, and opportunities for artists to be introduced to archives and special collections from across the city. This is also a chance for artists to understand how they can connect with archives that preserve and care for the legacies, stories, and histories of artists, particularly those from Indigenous, diasporic, queer, and disability communities, and the long list of voices that are shaping our city’s culture but are often neglected in mainstream and historically-rooted conversations around art.
View the full Festival itinerary here.
Accessibility Info
Masks are required for those who attend and we will have HEPA air filters throughout the building and in the primary event space. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided during every panel for the event. Read more about accessibility for this venue and event in our Accessibility Guide.
About the Chicago Archives + Artists Project
Launched in 2017, the Chicago Archives + Artists Project (CA+AP) pairs artists with archives across Chicago to spark new experiments in creative interpretation, to showcase the rich histories and materials being preserved in participating archives, and to share archival practices with local artists and their communities. Over the years, the Project has taken many forms, such as artist talks, an exhibition, and most recently, Sixty’s debut book, Chicago Archives + Artists Project: Case Studies in Collaboration. Although the project continues to be reimagined based on the needs of our community, it stays rooted in our grounding questions:
- What do artists and archivists have to glean from each other’s philosophy, training, and relative process?
- What role do artists have to play in taking action to preserve their communities’ histories?
- How do archives shape artistic futures?
The Chicago Archives + Artists Festival is generously supported by Teiger Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. This festival is also part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
