All posts tagged: University of Chicago

Smiling Behind the Sun: An Interview with Eric Blackmon

Published by Michael Fischer

Sixteen By Eric Blackmon 15 years, 7 months, 4 weeks, 1 day, 16 hours, and 33 minutes to be exact. 5,724 dreadful days, 137,416 and a half hours, 8,244,993 miserable minutes. And I won’t forget a second of it. I missed 66 of my kid’s birthdays, 337 holidays, 16 vacations, 14 graduations, 11 funerals, First steps, first words, all of my 20s, half of my 30s, most of my life. I lost everything. Every dime I had, four appeals, friends, family, my fiancé, my relationship with my kids. At times I lost faith, Other times I lost hope, A few times I ever lost myself, But I survived. I survived the conditions. I survived the ornery, tyrannical officers; some wolfish, vulturous inmates. A stabbing, being jumped, two black eyes, two busted lips, one chipped tooth, a busted head, 6 stitches, 1 broken nose, 1 fractured arm, 1 concussion. The suffering, the pain, the loss. But I overcame. I endured. By never hearing, never seeing, never speaking, never caring, never feeling, never loving, never resting, never …

Intimate Justice: Anna Showers-Cruser

Published by S. Nicole Lane

“Intimate Justice” looks at the intersection of art and sex and how these actions intertwine to serve as a form of resistance, activism, and dialogue in the Chicago community. For this installment, we talked to Anna Showers-Cruser in her McKinley park studio about queer identity, relationships to experimentation, and Southern hospitality.  S. Nicole Lane: I’m really excited to interview you because, obviously, I love your work. Where are you from? Anna Showers Cruser: I’m from Richmond, Virginia, and my family’s from southwest Virginia and we hail from Appalachia also. And I went to MICA for undergrad in Baltimore and lived there for a while. And then went back to Richmond, kind of was interested in that small-town or Southern city kind of art scene there, but I definitely kind of wanted to go to a bigger city for grad school. I went to UChicago and that was a cool program because it’s small and interdisciplinary but, as you know, part of a larger institution. So that allowed me to do a lot of play and exploring in my …

The Thrival Geographies of Shani Crowe, Andres L. Hernandez, and Amanda Williams

Published by Tempestt Hazel

Of the 2,240 licensed Black architects working in the United States, only 440 of them identify as Black women. While this number might increase slightly by adding those who have a degree in architecture and aren’t licensed, or who work primarily in teaching, this number becomes even more sobering when you consider the fact that there are about 109,748+ licensed architects in the entire country. My mention of these numbers isn’t simply a commentary on representation. Since architecture is a major influence on how we live and move through our daily lives, be it the spaces of home, work, school, play or otherwise, it’s unsettling to think that an overwhelming amount of spaces are likely conceived of and designed without someone like me in the room, on the team, or even in mind as the possible end user. After learning those numbers, it’s hard for me not to feel the significance of any time spent in conversation with two people who operate within that rare group. Andres L. Hernandez and Amanda Williams are architects and …

Archivist Candace Ming Preserves and Uplifts the Cultural Memory of Chicago’s South Side

Published by Ireashia Bennett

Candace Ming (she/her) is the current Project Manager and Archivist for the South Side Home Movie Project (SSHMP), an initiative spearheaded by Dr. Jacqueline Stewart at the University of Chicago. SSHMP collects, preserves, digitizes, exhibits, and documents home movies made by–mostly Black–residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. Candace regularly facilitates workshops focused on preserving digital materials and sharing ways people can create individual archives to sustain their family history, traditions, and heritage. I became aware of Candace’s work with South Side Home Movie Project while attending the Alternative Histories, Alternative Archives symposium in Fall 2017. She participated in a panel and discussed the role of alternative archives–those which exist and function outside of elitist, academic archival spaces. SSHMP is an alternative archive in that it prioritizes the personal narratives of everyday Black folks and creates a visual history of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. ‘Alternative archives’ are subjective in nature, (as opposed to “neutral”). They seek to preserve and collect materials from and about marginalized communities and historical moments. In doing so, they amplify the otherwise …

Glorimar Sanchez on Puerto Rico, Film, and Disseminating Information

Published by S. Nicole Lane

Glorimar Marrero Sánchez is a self-taught, multi-disciplinary artist-director-photographer-screenwriter based in Puerto Rico. She was selected as one of the two artists in the three-month Puerto Rican Disaster Relief Residency at the University of Chicago. The residency was launched to support academics, researchers, and artists who have been severely affected or displaced by Hurricanes Irma and Maria. The program, which is a collaboration between The Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Office of Admissions, Campus and Student Life, UChicago Arts, UChicagoGRAD, The Graham School, and the Office of the Provost, provides housing, transportation, stipends, and resources.  The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.  S. Nicole Lane: Can you begin with your background in film and photography, and where you’re from? Glorimar Marrero Sánchez: I’m from the town of Barranquitas. It is in the mountains of Puerto Rico. I am a result of the public educational system of Puerto Rico. Then I went to University of Puerto Rico. I did a BA in art, concentration in sociology, in the Mayagüez campus. After that, I got a …

Retelling Lives on the South Side through Film: South Side Home Movie Project

Published by S. Nicole Lane

As a Hyde Parker, I hear about the South Side Home Movie Projects (SSHMP) frequently. I’m a hop, skip, and jump away from their front doors; I’m a short bike ride away from where their current exhibition is located. But I’m always surprised to hear that other people, in other parts of our city, are unaware of their presence, and their promising initiative to archive, collect, restore, and preserve the South side’s history. The SSHMP’s mission is to focus on the people who live here, who have lived here, and who will live here. Their process of researching and exhibiting home movies from the South side of Chicago is reinstating an untold legacy and offering access to views of life on the best side. What follows is a Q + A interview with Candace Ming, the Project Manager and Archivist at the SSHMP. S. Nicole Lane: When did you get into archiving? How did you end up at the the Southside Home Movie Project? Candace Ming: After graduating from American University with a degree in film production I became interested …

An Artist's Wonderland: The Dorchester Project

Published by Tempestt Hazel

The Dorchester Project, a highly anticipated multi-use space in Chicago, is the workings of internationally celebrated artist Theaster Gates. The space, which has a tentative completion date of 2012, is a wonderland for the artist, designer, architect, music lover and scholar with the entire former art history slide collection from University of Chicago, the remaining records that were left in the final hours of Hyde Park’s Dr. Wax and thousands of books waiting to be re-read and referenced. Gates’ right-hand woman, Dara Epison, was kind enough to take me on an intimate tour of the space, where we stayed for hours. The Dorchester Project from Tempestt Hazel on Vimeo.

Art Here Art Now

Published by Tempestt Hazel

The great thing about attending events with professional  photographer friends is that they steal your camera and start snapping great pictures.  Jabari Zuberi, an artist who has a solo show at UIC in December, acted as my personal photographer for the evening.  Last night for the Kick-off of Chicago Artists Month, Jabari and I met in Hyde Park for Art Here Art Now, a show coordinated by the wonderful Dara Epison in association with the University of Chicago.  The show featured an open-storefront studio where artists Cydney Lewis, Michelle Weber, and Marty Burns will be working alongside installations by Andre Callot, Danielle Paz and Peter Zeigler.  The studio artists were working each Saturday in October, with doors open for the public to come and take a peek into the creative process.  I spoke with Cydney for a brief moment about working in a public studio such as this one, and she spoke briefly about how different it will be to work in such an open space when people can come in to have a conversation and ask …

A Night With The Renaissance Society

Published by Zachary Johnson

On September 11, I put on my dress shoes, slacks, black dress shirt, and purple tie and took the orange line down to Bridgeport. There I joined other young volunteers, mostly UChicago and SAIC students, for Of The Moment, the Renaissance Society’s annual gala. The location of the event was East Bank Storage, a large, old warehouse that now contains artists’ studios. For the gala, the top floor had been converted into a lavish gallery, auction, and dining space. As the main fundraiser for “The Ren”, tickets to the event ran $350. Needless to say, the guests arrived in their best attire. Outside of working opening nights of NEXT, the affluent, upper class side of the art world is one I rarely see and often forget about. Monitoring auction bids and taking coats at Of The Moment, however, I got a chance to take in the unfamiliar crowd. Gallerists, art collectors, and at least one Sotheby’s employee were all in attendance at the event. I’d heard the Chicago art world was quite close knit, and …