Since 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, CA+AP has taken many forms, such as artist talks, an exhibition, festivals, and our book, Chicago Archives + Artists Project: Case Studies in Collaboration.
Whether you’ve attended one of our lively and robust Festivals or this is your first time hearing about CA+AP, we’re excited to offer you a sneak peek into behind-the-scenes of what we do!
So much of the work that archivists and artists do goes unseen. CA+AP aims to offer a glimpse into the work behind the work, the research, the filing, the labeling, the preservation work, and all of the labor that often happens behind closed doors.
This year’s pairings reflect the overlapping practices of archivist and artist, as several of the participants could be described as either. Participating archives and collections include Honey Pot Performance, National Public Housing Museum‘s oral history collection, and Chuquimarca‘s art library. Their artist collaborators are the talented Siobhan McKissic, Dr. ShaDawn Battle, and Crystal Vance Guerra. This year we’re thrilled to also bring in a consulting archivist as a way of providing additional resources to collections that may not have a dedicated archivist, allowing us to include more experimental collections. Consulting archivist Mariana Mejía, who will be working with Chuquimarca, brings an international approach to CA+AP through her collaboration in various collections and archives in Mexico City and Chicago.
As last year’s Festival had the theme of “Embodying the Archive,” we are continuing the theme of embodiment by working with archives and artists whose work and practices lean towards performance and other forms of memory work that take place in the body. Learn more about this year’s archive + artist pairings below, and stay tuned for a deeper dive into each of their practices in a series of upcoming interviews!
2025 Archive + Artist Pairings
Honey Pot Performance + Siobhan McKissic
ARCHIVE +
Honey Pot Performance is a creative collaborative chronicling Afro-feminist and Black diasporic subjectivities amidst the pressures of contemporary global life
Honey Pot Performance enlists modes of creative expressivity to examine the nuances of human relationships including the ways we negotiate identity, belonging and difference in our lives and cultural memberships. Dismantling the vestiges of oppressive social relationships is part of the work. Through critical performance, public humanities programming, and deep community engagement, we emphasize everyday ways of valuing the human.
Following in the footsteps of cultural workers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Beryl McBurnie, Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham, Honey Pot Performance forefronts African diasporic performance traditions. We draw upon a central notion found in performance studies, black feminist discourse and sociology: non-Western, everyday popular and/or folk forms of cultural performance are valuable sites of knowledge production and cultural capital for subjectivities that often exist outside of mainstream communities.
+ ARTIST/ARCHIVIST
Siobhan McKissic (they/she) is an artist, independent archivist, and performer born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. Their library and archives work foregrounds the histories of Black people, the importance of non-textual resources in the research process, and considers how a shift away from Western-centric ideas of information literacy can create more engaging learning experiences for students, instructors, and the public. While at the University of Illinois, they were the Archivist at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library before becoming the Visiting Design & Materials Research Librarian, where they were the inaugural curator of the Ricker Materials Collection, a haptic library of architectural and design samples.
Their artwork focuses on sites of excavation related to the Black disabled body, nature, built structures, ancestral knowledge retrieval, and power. Through collage, McKissic considers their own mediated relationship with nature – a relationship complicated by their family’s history of sharecropping and journey north during the Great Migration. By weaving texturally similar images of nature, skin, technology, and architecture, their work reflects the corresponding attempts by the body and the environment to heal from human-made stressors.
Image: Siobhan McKissic smiles at the camera while in front of a bookshelft. Image courtesy of the artist.
National Public Housing Museum + Dr. ShaDawn Battle
+ ARCHIVE
The National Public Housing Museum‘s mission is to promote, preserve, and propel the right of all people to a place to call home. Our Public Oral History Archive shares and activates over 170 (and counting) stories from the people who call public housing home, becoming a source of power, knowledge, and strength in the struggles for housing justice. Our interviews are largely conducted and processed by members of public housing communities. In addition to our public online archive, we have additional interviews that are shared in limited capacities in accordance to narrators’ wishes. Our archive is activated through museum exhibitions, events, and our digital offerings such as our podcast, Out of the Archives. As an International Site of Conscience, NPHM believes that history and memory must inform social change. To foster a more just and humane society, we provide safe spaces to remember and preserve even the most traumatic memories and enable visitors to make connections between the past and related contemporary human rights issues. We also believe that everyone must repair and redress the systemic injustices of the past, leading to our commitment to creative strategies that build the social and cultural capital of public housing residents.
jellystone robinson (he/they) is a black trans agender lesbian from the Ida B. Wells Extensions on the South Side of Chicago. In his creative practice, he is attempting to retrieve ancestral memory and self actualization through due diligence, time travel, self expression, love and pleasure. This manifests in his work as a creative producer, filmmaker, poet curator and oral historian. He is currently the Assistant Curator and Registrar at the National Public Housing Museum.
Liú (they/them/tā) is a queer, trans non-binary, disabled, and Abolitionist cultural organizer, descended from the islands of Taiwan and Ireland. They are currently the Senior Program Manager of Oral and Narrative History at the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago and an Adjunct History Professor at Loyola University of Chicago. In 2023, they completed a Fellowship in Residence with Chicago United for Equity, applying participatory and equity-focused strategies to the museum’s archival infrastructure and staffing. Liú views storytelling, narrative history, and popular education as key strategies for thawing trauma, empowering connection, and creating radical change. Their personal work focuses on anti-imperialism, queer/trans liberation, the heterogeneity of Asian identities, Asian & Black intersecting histories, and the textures of silence and absence. Liú’s master’s thesis about Asian trans kinship can be heard at www.tidalflats.xyz.
+ ARTIST
South Side of Chicago native, Dr. ShaDawn Battle is an Assistant Professor of Critical Ethnic and Black Studies at Xavier University (Cincinnati, OH). She considers herself an artivist, often harnessing Black artistic expression in the service of social justice. Dr. Battle earned her PhD in literature from The University of Cincinnati. Her research interests include African American Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Black Feminist Studies, Critical Race Epistemology, and Hip-Hop Studies.
In October of 2023, Dr. Battle was named as the Artist as Instigator Resident for the National Public Housing Museum. Dr. Battle’s project, Place, Space, Werkz, used the art form Chicago Footwork to examine Chicago’s history of housing injustice through various examples of housing violence. It was a three-phase project that culminated in a production, where six youth drew from their political education experience to tell the stories of housing violence through their dancing bodies and other forms of Black artistic expression.
Image: A portrait of Dr. ShaDawn Battle smiling in front of a bookshelf. Courtesy of the artist.
Chuquimarca + Crystal Vance Guerra + Mariana Mejía
+ ARCHIVE
Chuquimarca is an art library participating in the making and exchanging of art knowledge and language by gathering art books and organizing cohort-led programs. The library values and prioritizes material and immaterial art resources related to diasporas, the Global South, and Indigenous perspectives.
Chuquimarca is organized by John H. Guevara, a Chicago curator and writer. They were recognized as one of Chicago’s Art Top 50 Visual Vanguards in 2022 by Newcity Magazine. They have participated in residencies at Chicago Artist Coalition, Independent Curators International, and No Lugar Arte Contemporaneo in Quito, Ecuador. Their writings have been published in Chicago’s Newcity Magazine and The Latinx Project’s Intervenxions. In 2019, they founded and currently direct the art library project Chuquimarca, in which they have programmed with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Depaul Art Museum, Mana Contemporary, and Hyde Park Art Center. They are the founder and director of Chuquimarca.
+ ARTIST
Crystal Vance Guerra is a chicana poet, historian, and educator based in and between Chicago and Mexico City. Her art is latinamericanist at root, often spanglish in expression, and written to be read out loud. She is the founder of Chicago’s only poetry slam in Spanish, Slam Diáspora. Now in its third year, this slam brings together Latinx poets in the U.S. and poets across Latin America to foster unity between our poetic communities despite borders.
Throughout her poetic journey she has participated in numerous poetry slams, festivals, and residencies on both sides of the Rio Bravo, while developing workshops focused on encouraging the exploration of sound, languages, and embodiment in poetry.
In addition to her poetic craft, Crystal has worked as a freelance journalist and researcher, with her work published in Yes! Magazine, The Guardian, Truth-Out, and AREA Chicago. She holds a B.A. in Africana Studies and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Brown University and an M.A. in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Image: A photo of Crystal Vance Guerra. She smiles at the camera in front of a pink wall. Photo courtesy of the artist.
+ CONSULTING ARCHIVIST
Mariana Mejía, born in Mexico City, is a curator and arts administrator focused on cultural exchange across the U.S. and Latin America. With a background in both arts administration and international cultural policy, she brings a cross-disciplinary approach to her roles as curator, archivist, and arts administrator. She has worked in embassies, museums, universities, and community organizations across the U.S. and Latin America.
Her approach to archives includes teaching the studio-seminar Artist Archives and Legacies in the Historic Preservation Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she engaged students with diverse archival collections as teaching resources. She also piloted Open Archive Sessions, a participatory model designed to expand accessibility to artists’ archives, presented at the Hyde Park Art Center and the Staple & Stitch Book Fair. Mariana holds an MA in Arts Administration and Policy from SAIC and a BA in International Relations from ITAM (Mexico City).
Image: A photo of Mariana Mejía smiling at the camera while leaning back on a bench. Photo courtesy of the artist.
A project of Sixty Inches From Center, the Chicago Archives + Artists Project highlights Chicago archives and special collections that give space to voices on the margins.
CA+AP is co-curated by Kate Hadley Toftness, Tempestt Hazel, & Christina Nafziger.
