All posts tagged: Hyde Park Art Center

Questions in Time: Looking Back and Ahead, Together

Published by Annette LePique

In our current moment, Chicago’s artists and creators find themselves exhaustingly entrenched within the gig economy, where artist-run spaces and projects commonly exist in liminal zones of financial and programmatic instability. Neoliberalism’s acceleration has only illuminated how the endeavor to make and create within the art economy is demarcated by racism, classism, and technological isolation, i.e. the art world’s role in gentrification, the exclusionary cost of many MFA programs, the growing scarcity of funding, and the fleetingness of social capital within the attention economy. Uncertainty and anxiety permeate our current moment; we live in a constant state of reckoning. How can one meaningfully create and work while maintaining a constructive and reparative critique of one’s own complicity within systems of oppression? In a maze of disenfranchisement, how can the art world be a roadmap for advocacy? Is such a change even possible? I do not know the answers to these questions. However, I do believe that there is something––a hint, a clue, a discovery––to be uncovered within an examination of time and how it has …

AMFM and the Lifespan of Chicago Artist-Run Spaces

Published by S. Nicole Lane

Chicago’s artist-run spaces are key players in the creative ecosystem. They stretch down all avenues in the city and beyond into the sprawling suburbs. Whether they are found in old storefronts, auto shops, backyards, or basements, some hold their space for decades while others reconstruct or retire.  Succumbing to the rise of rent and the heavy financial responsibilities that come with running an alternative venue can play a large role in the changing of spaces or changing of hands. Artist-run spaces go through fluctuations, especially those who persist for a few years. Some turn into non-profit gallery spaces, while others host a few pop-ups or begin satellite locations. Others simply shutter.  Deciding to close an artist-run space shouldn’t equate to failure. The conditions for closure—or change—are endless. The lifespans of DIY spaces don’t eradicate the work that was done. And often, the spaces simply exist in a new form. For Ciera McKissick of AMFM, that’s exactly what happened.  For over a decade, Ciera’s project—whose original form was a web magazine—has developed and transformed into various …

Artist Residencies, Collaboration, and Alternative Models of Education

Published by Christina Nafziger

In 2018, artists Julia Holter and Olivia Block came together to write and compose a new piece titled Whenever the Breeze, creating immersive sound by combining voice, instruments, bells, and recording of wind and water. The making of this piece culminated in an album recording and a live performance at the May Chapel in Rosehill Cemetery. This dynamic, collaborative piece was created during Experimental Sound Studio’s Outer Ear Residency. Artist residencies offer a place for artistic exploration, a space where artists can work and think collectively, and potentially collaborate with like-minded individuals as well. Although this environment sounds similar to a classroom, residencies often subvert the power dynamics found in traditional academic settings. Without a type of hierarchical knowledge structure, residencies often form an alternative learning space. bell hooks describes this kind of learning community in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, saying, “Since the vast majority of students learn through conservative, traditional educational practices and concern themselves only with the presence of the professor, any radical pedagogy must insist that everyone’s presence is …

Image: Installation view of "Dark Matter: Celestial Objects as Messengers of Love in These Troubled Times" by Folayemi Wilson. Catwalk with rotating NASA videos of the sun and moon. Photo by Michael Sullivan.

Space is a Place: Folayemi Wilson at the Hyde Park Art Center

Published by Tesh Silver

There’s this thing that happens sometimes when I close my eyes and focus on nothing. It’s not like the after-image that you often get when looking at an object for a long time, but something else entirely. I see daubs of light, tiny flecks of indiscernible colors that move and dance in the darkness. And frequently, there is an actual place, a room that has no apparent walls, but feels like I’m somewhere else than where I really am–an astral projection of a space for safety and reflection. This place, I believe, was made manifest when I entered the main gallery this summer at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) to view Folayemi Wilson’s latest work Dark Matter: Celestial Objects as Messengers of Love in These Troubled Times. I met Fo late last year during my stint in the Teaching Artist’s studio of HPAC. I had worked there since September 2016, and was encouraged to apply to be a resident. A couple months later, I was sharing the space with another teaching artist. Now, mind …

Black Monument Ensemble: Looking Back From Now

Published by Ireashia Bennett

“Please join me in welcoming the Black Monument Ensemble.” The crowd roars with claps, whistles, loud whoops, and yelps. Applause melts behind wind chimes and bells as the band, singers, and dancers make their way to the stage. The audience quiets in anticipation. The voice of Damon Locks resounds in the room before his body appears. “Knowing what we know now, the mind searches for reconciliation…”  Stationed behind the singers, dancers, and drummers, he stands near his keyboard speaking into a telephone receiver attached to a soundboard. His voice reverberates throughout the space, bouncing against the drum sounds and vibrations as he recites his “Statement of Intent.” The drum intensifies and reaches a crescendo. “Some things never change–Black monuments!”, Locks yells. Angel Bat Dawid begins playing her clarinet. The choir begins.  I become transfixed by the electric synergy that emits from the band to the dancers, from the dancers to the singers, from the collective to the audience. The voices of Ruby Dee, Angela Davis, and Lena Horne coil around and reverberate within our ears. Suddenly …

This image shows Anna Kunz’s exhibition Color Cast at the Hyde Park Art Center, a series of curtain-like textiles and wall paintings turn the gallery into an immersive experience of color, light, and physical sensation. Anna Kunz Color Cast installation view, 2018, at Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Photo courtesy of Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.

Anna Kunz: Color Cast at Hyde Park Art Center

Published by Jared Quinton

In her exhibition Color Cast, Anna Kunz approximates an experience of the world from the inside of a color field painting. The artist has draped the soaring central gallery of the Hyde Park Art Center with gauzy fabrics painted in a mottled palette of primary and secondary colors. The textiles echo—and in some cases directly index—a series of mural-sized wall paintings and paintings on the floor and in the corners and doorways, gently immersing viewers in a multisensory experience of color. Pulling apart paint and ground, color and surface, Kunz’s installation opens up physical and psychic space in which to consider the haptic, affective qualities of abstract painting. It also gestures towards the medium’s embeddedness in social relations and ability to reconfigure them in small but meaningful ways. Enchanting as its visual pleasures are, Kunz’s work is grounded in a rigorous concern for process. The wall paintings are actually monotypes of a sort; Kunz made them in situ by applying large pieces of porous, meshy fabric directly to the walls, then overpainting them with delicate …

This is a photograph of three copies of the book “Brea,” against a light background. Two lie flat in the left side of the frame, front cover and spine visible, and the third is upright, with only the front cover showing. The front cover image is an ink illustration of a young boy in close-up, straight-on, showing his face, chest, and parts of his arms. He wears a long-sleeved shirt and his hands are flipped upside-down over his eyes to form goggles, of sorts, with each thumb and forefinger. Courtesy of the artist.

Beyond the Page: Carlos Matallana

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. In March, I was honored to interview artist and educator Carlos Matallana about the development of his ongoing Manual of Violence project, the process of creating its fictional comic installment “Brea,” and how games, childhood, dreams, and more shape his work. Follow @tropipunk on Instagram and check out his presentation about “Brea” at the Hyde Park Art Center on Saturday, May 26, 2-4pm. This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and includes some spoilers about the book “Brea.” Marya Spont-Lemus: I guess I’d love to start by just hearing how long you’ve been making work in Chicago and what brought you here. Carlos Matallana: Well, I ended up in Chicago because I have old friends here in the city. But initially I moved from Bogotá to New York. I spent a couple of months, not even four months, in New York. I spent all my savings, and I tried …

Review: “Resilient Images” at the Hyde Park Art Center

Published by Maddie Kodat

Resilient Images confronts the viewer before one even walks through the gallery’s door. Look up slightly, and you will see Justine Pluvinage’s video installation Amazons facing out onto Cornell Avenue from the inside of the building, with its multiple panels of female subjects taking an epic, slow-motion stroll through both greenery and crumbling industrial architecture. If you’re walking with your head down through the bitter temperatures of a typical Chicago winter, you’re likely to miss this introduction entirely. For the artists, though, this might simply be indicative of the sort of resilience they are gesturing towards in their work. This exhibition is the result of a year-long artistic exchange between Hyde Park Art Center and the Centre Regionale de la Photographie Nord—Pas-de-Calais, featuring the artists Justine Pluvinage and David Schalliol. Both artists generated a site-specific work out of their respective residencies without further collaboration or dialogue with the other participant — Pluvinage travelled from France to Chicago to shoot her film, while Schalliol’s work was made in Hauts-de-France. Yet the pieces shown in Resilient Images …

Walking Through Change with Deep Time Chicago

Published by Nina Wexelblatt

It’s an unseasonably warm December morning and I’m driving cautiously through a Chicago warehouse district, south on Ashland Avenue past an overpass of the Stevenson expressway. The slice of the interstate makes this patch of the city feel like a peninsula, jutting timidly into a convergence of two stretches of the Chicago River. My directions lead me down a small road innocuously named Marketplace Access, past the slick corporate bulk of the QTS Data Center campus, and I’ve arrived. I join a group of about forty light-jacketed companions at Canal Origins Park for a walk through the city’s history of timber extraction with Deep Time Chicago, a collective of ecology-minded artists who want to retrain our awareness to our surroundings, and the artists Sara Black and Raewyn Martyn, whose joint installation Edward Hines National Forest is on view at the Hyde Park Art Center. The park commemorates the point where the Illinois & Michigan Canal once connected the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River drainage basin. It’s an impressive sounding spot, but if I’ve ever …

Adrienne Ciskey: Invisible Illnesses and the Power of Play

Published by Christina Nafziger

If you suffer with a chronic illness, specifically one that others cannot see, the anxiety of  whether or not others take your pain seriously, on top of the endless physical battle with your own body, is very real. There is a hierarchy of illness in our culture based on assumptions of “seriousness” that is rarely acknowledged or discussed. A social judgment of validity is made about an illness, and if you are a woman suffering from an illness that is not only invisible but also widely unknown then the legitimacy of your pain dissipates quicker than the “no” you hear from the doctor when you ask if there is any known cure for your pain. Living with hypoglycemia and hyperthyroidism, I am no stranger to the slight eye rolls when I vocalize my symptoms and  I often find myself suppressing my needs, emotional and otherwise,  for the sake of avoiding skeptical responses from others. The question I ask myself time and time again is: How can others recognize something like an invisible illness? This question …

Shared Work: Ryn Osbourne on Empathy, Relationship Building, and Transparency

Published by Emily Breidenbach

Ryn Osbourne is a visual artist and arts administrator originally from Ohio and based in the Midwest.  Osbourne has worked in direct service as an educator and mentor, facilitating arts-based activities with youth of all ages. As co-manager of MINT Collective (2015–present) in Columbus, OH, Osbourne has helped carry out multiple community programs including “Junk Dada Super Sunday” for the Wexner Center for the Arts.  She has worked with VISIBLE:INVISIBLE, a program which hosts studio art workshops for homeless youth in Columbus, OH, and AXIOM: A Judgment Call for the Arts helping to organize artists to participate in art making workshops with inmates of Merion Correctional Institution in Ohio and providing project direction aligned with ethical community practice. After relocating to Chicago, IL in 2016 to pursue her M.A. in Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Osbourne has worked with the Hyde Park Art Center as an education and programming intern assisting with community focus group research, has provided administrative support for Gary Lights Open Works, a social practice project based in …

Institutional Garbage: Archiving the Emotions of Art Institutions

Published by Sabrina E Greig

Scrolling, swiping, and clicking are the only tactile skills required to engage with Institutional Garbage, a web-based exhibition produced by Sector 2337 and the Hyde Park Art Center. These actions, performed by a mouse, keyboard, or the tap of a finger, make a ritual out of interacting with exhibitions presented in the digital sphere. Co-curated by Caroline Picard and Lara Schoorl, Institutional Garbage conceptually tears down the institutional walls of the art world, from elite academic spaces to donor-run museums, to showcase “the administrative residue of imaginary public institutions.” [1] As the title insinuates, the show makes a point to draw attention to the seemingly imperfect “trash” of 41 artists, writers, and curators. Lara Schoorl, a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and current publicity manager at Sector 2337, states that the exhibition aims to “elevate the connotation of trash,” attempting to understand it as a crucial component of the creative journey through the art world. Schoorl described in detail how this innovative rendition of a virtual exhibition initially “started …

Inferno, Purgatory, or Paradise: An Interview with Sabina Ott

Published by Melissa Potter

I call Sabina Ott “my eyes and ears to the Chicago art scene.” Her endless ability to wow with her art, which was on view from August 30 to January 4 in the huge-scale “here and there pink melon joy” at the Chicago Cultural Center, is matched by her commitment to present and support artists. She is intellectually and materially ambitious, and over the years I’ve developed a deeper understanding of her sensibility. Profoundly influenced by her mother, her work as an artist, teacher, and presenter is informed by a feminist ethic and explores the complicated, and at times ecstatic, space of transformation. Melissa Potter: What inspired you to become an artist?  I know your mother was a big influence on your work. Sabina Ott: I was always aware of my position as a woman artist—even if my response to cultural bias against women was sometimes confused. As a child, I wanted to have what I now call the privilege of the authoritative I: the privilege to access my subjectivity with the freedom that men seemed …

Seeing the Unseen: An interview with Jeremy Bolen

Published by Kate Korroch

How do we visualize what we cannot see; things that are scientifically proven to exist but are unable perceive with the naked human eye? Photographer, Jeremy Bolen uses his photographic process, a combination of science and art, to explore the unseen realm. In this interview we discussed his interest in the unseen, a bit of physics, some visual theory, and much more. Kate Korroch (KK): What inspired your interest in artistically documenting the unseen? Jeremy Bolen (JB): I guess it kind of began with an interest in exploring the apparatus. To create a site specific apparatus that could have a more intrinsic relationship, or collaboration, with the space or non- space. From the very beginning photography has been about capturing the unseen, about creating a different way of seeing, a new mode of observation and documentation. I have been rethinking the potential of the document and trying to create a more comprehensive, poignant document- a document with greater presence, a document incorporating the ontological. I spent some of my childhood living near Fermi-Lab, and when …

Reflections on the Critique with Kerry James Marshall: Everett Williams

Published by Tempestt Hazel

On September 10, 2010 three artists participated in the Open Crit sessions at Hyde Park Art Center. As always, the session is mediated by photographer and HPAC board member Dawoud Bey, and led by an invited artist. This particular session had Kerry James Marshall as the guest critic. Chicago artist Everett Williams was one of the artists that participated in this session and as a follow up to the critique, I asked Williams some questions about his experience. Tempestt Hazel: It takes a lot of courage to present your work in an open forum such as the one you participated in at Hyde Park Art Center, let alone put it in front of a master artist such as Kerry James Marshall. What did you expect to get out of this experience, and why did you think that at this point in your career it was a good idea to do this? Everett Williams: I want my work to be seen with the best, so at this juncture of my career I need feed back from those …

Sixty in 60: Episode 1 – Hyde Park Arts Center

Published by Andrew Roddewig

Sixty in 60. Hyde Park Arts Center from Andrew Roddewig on Vimeo. Clarion New Media, who is sponsoring the current Media Match Drive has produced the first in a continuing web-series entitled “Sixty in 60”. Sixty in 60 is a series focused on Organizations and Institutions that are incubators for the arts in Chicago. Every episode takes a look at a specific place to discover what makes them unique. Our goal is to highlight and promote the organizations and institutions that help the Chicago art community thrive and grow. We are only able to create specials like Sixty in 60 because of support from our community so please donate to the Media Match Campaign, so we can continue to bring art to the center. Episode 1: Hyde Park Arts Center. Located at 5020 S. Cornell Avenue; Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) has a clear mission to stimulate and sustain the visual arts in Chicago. They have accomplished this mission for over 70 years through exhibitions, education and outreach. As one of the oldest alternative spaces …

Reflection on the Critique with Kerry James Marshall: Frederick Owens

Published by Tempestt Hazel

On September 10, 2010 three artists participated in the Open Crit sessions at Hyde Park Art Center.  This particular session had Kerry James Marshall as a guest critic.  Chicago artist Frederick Owens was one of the artists that participated in this session and as a follow up to the critique, I asked Owens some questions about his experience. Tempestt Hazel: It takes a lot of courage to present your work in an open forum such as the one you participated in at Hyde Park Art Center, let alone put it in front of a master artist such as Kerry James Marshall.  What did you expect to get out of this experience, and why did you think that at this point in your career it was a good idea to do this? Frederick Owens: There were many things that I hoped to achieve by participating in the crit.  I’m searching for an answer to the question: “What is good art and how do I make it?”.  I know as an artist what I am setting out to create …

Et Cetera: Soundsuits, The Dorchester Project, SSCAC, Intuit, and KJ Marshall Speaks Truth…again.

Published by Tempestt Hazel

This past weekend there were intimate places in the city where amazing art conversations were being had–all of which you will see in more detail when the Sixty Inches From Center: Chicago Arts Archive and Collective Project is launched in October.  The first of those places was at the Hyde Park Art Center Open Crit with Kerry James Marshall and Dawoud Bey.  Now, much of what KJM said were things that fester in the back of my mind regularly, but how clearly and effectively he articulated the function of art made these ideas come crashing to the forefront of my thoughts.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from the Open Crit on Friday, Sept. 10. “The truth is the artwork that matters to me, and that matters to the Hyde Park Art Center, is work that’s in conversation with other artwork.  With other painters.  With the history of painting. That’s what really matters.  If its just to satisfy you, if it satisfies your friends, the people in your family, then by all means keep …