"Scorched Earth" (2006), The Artist pictured in Foreground

So, I am totally late on this one… which is inexcusable really, because I was at the Opening of the exhibition.  Least I could have done is pub it.  But, alas….

Mark Bradford‘s Exhibition currently on view at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art is a Retrospective that really gives a sense of the artist’s use of layers to establish history and depth in his work.  A number of the pieces displayed (like “Strawberry”, [pictured below]) feature small square wrapping papers (the sort used in beauty parlors to augment rollers) as a medium.  One particular work utilizes sun faded wheatpaste movie posters.  A good measure of his materials are, in fact, well known residents of his neighborhood, and his work whispers of larger community-based issues. Some of his work even echos Topographical maps.

In part due to his works’ scale, and in part due to his use of texture, his work needs to be seen in person, rather than in print or on a screen.

On the Collaborative tip, during this past year, the Artist was Skyping and Zipping back and forth between his homebase of Los Angeles and our fair city working with youth from both Lindblom Math and Science Academy in West Englewood and the YOUMedia Program at the Harold Washington Library culminating in a well received Pop-Up Gallery exhibition of the Students’ work.  The exhibition (a part of the MCA-backed Mark Bradford Project) dealt with issues of community and mapping, while using a variety of mediums.  Many of the students agreed that they learned as much about life as they did about artistic practice from Bradford, who beautifully validated the burgeoning voices of the self-proclaimed “Art Kids”.

Mark Bradford’s work will be on display at the MCA from May 28-September 18, 2011

Museum of Contemporary Art

220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago

What do you get when you mix a maverick artist with strong community ties and an Urban Planner? For one thing, Theaster Gates. For another, the Dorchester Projects, pictured above. Theaster has been purchasing properties in the Woodlawn/Grand Crossing neighborhood for a few years now, and has quietly acquired the stock of the former Dr. Wax record store as well as the now defunct Prairie Avenue Bookstore (both businesses were revered in their respective collector communities). He created a home for glass lantern slides that depict the canon of Western Fine Art. Using reclaimed materials, he is turning his properties into cultural community hubs, featuring curators and programming that reflects the collections and the community.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll be curating the record collection in May and June of 2011, culminating in a series of talks on Chicago Music History (details to follow) and a couple of good, old-fashioned dance parties starring local-born music.

Read the New York Times article about what’s poppin on the South Side with the Dorchester Projects.

The University of Chicago’s Center for the Studies of Race, Politics, and Culture, DOVA (Department of Visual Arts) Temporary Gallery, Black Panther Party Illinois History Project, and Diasporal Rhythms for an exhibit of works by Emory Douglas, internationally known artist and former Black Panther Party Minister of Culture. Location: DOVA Temporary (5228 S. Harper). Exhibit runs December 2, 2009-January 2, 2010.

Click to view slideshow.

On the back of each issue of The Black Panther, a weekly paper published by the Panther Party, was a poster, usually created by Douglas.

When The Black Panther newspaper was first published, the spectrum of African American experiences was almost invisible from the mainstream (Eurocentric) American media landscape, save stereotypical roles.  The black press often concentrated on the middle class.

In The Black Panther newspaper, images of poor and working class black people were glorified, and Emory Douglas often featured women in his illustrations. For 10 years at the paper, his drawings maintained poor black people’s dignity while focusing on their plight. There was no patronizing. He drew dark-skinned African-featured everyday people beaming with pride.

This week the Sun-Times published an article talking about Pedro Bell, the man behind the iconic cover art, liner notes, and other print ephemera for Funkadelic from 1973 till about 1986.  Pedro, a Chicago native who went by Sir Lleb, has hit hard times.  Today he’s facing dire straits in Hyde Park, though his work was recently featured in a retrospective of acceptional album art at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Thick dust covers the gold lame shirt and silver leather coat in Pedro Bell’s closet.

The clothes are remnants from a brighter time when Bell, a rainbow Afro wig on his head and platform shoes on his feet, strutted through Chicago as a charter member of the ’70s funk revolution whose sound is heavily sampled in rap songs today. 

“It was psychedelic from a black perspective,” Bell said.

And despite the commercial success of Clinton’s music, Bell said he didn’t profit from it.

He’s broke.”  for more from Kara Spak’s article, click here

Last year, not only was his work featured in a retrospective entitled “Sympathy for the Devil”, but he embarked on a collaborative T-Shirt design project with Supreme, a skateboarding lifestyle store based in New York.  They captured a video interview with the man that you can catch here.  Despite this, he’s barely skirted eviction.  Every reissue that features his cover art is only a reminder of a former life, not a means of survival (which he needs).  Tragic, yet it’s one of the oldest story in the Music Industry.

Mr. Bell’s story is well worth digging into… For his 1994 interview with Jake Austen’s Roctober Magazine, click here

Image by swanksalot via Flickr

Lady Terror says she’s a menace on a mission. Terrorizing for a cause. Be it staging a soapbox rant in front of Rothschild’s Liquors (clamouring for more grocery stores) or engaging in impromptu yoga at a Harold’s Chicken Shack (calling for inner city yoga centers for the sake of public health), her performance art and poetry is meant to highlight issues in her community, and to start dialogues about them.  She calls them “guerrilla art spectacles”.  And, she believes poverty is a form of terrorism.  She wants to “slay terror by dropping knowledge bombs to all”.
“I’m writing to give voice to the communities they have forgotten. I am mad. I want to know why you are so calm. We got work to do.”

Check the video clip below. Jive on…

Woodson Regional is a gem of the South Side.  I’ve always believed that.  One of my favorite locations of the Chicago Public Library, bar none.  The library, located at 95th and Halsted, boasts the Vivian Harsh Research Collection (all manner of Black Ephemera) and a really strong overall collection.  1 of only two regional libraries in the city (the others, save Harold Washington downtown are all “branches”), Woodson is stocked with literature and art from a good number of local sociologists, artists, and writers.  Case in point,  the temporary exhibit celebrating the Art (and activism) of sculptor Marion Perkins. 

Born in 1908, he moved to Chicago as a small child.  He worked as a dishwasher, freight handler, and postal clerk in his lifetime, and though in his artistic career he was lauded with awards (among them the Guggenheim Fellowship) he was never able to devote full time to his art.  Perkins was not only an artist, he was an activist for social change, fighting for both Ethiopian freedom and civil rights in his own backyard.

Visit Woodson for Woodson’s sake, but don’t forget to carve out time to see the temporary exhibit: “To See Reality in a New Light: the Art and Activism of Marion Perkins”, at Woodson until December 31, 2009.

By: Veronica Gonzales

Envision this: a creative haven for artists both local and global to come together and encourage the economic growth of a community. A neighborhood place where artists, intellectuals, community activists, students, and visitors can work collaboratively towards creative expression and community building. Marguerite Horberg, drawing on over 20 years of experience with the acclaimed performing arts center HotHouse, hopes to make this lofty vision a reality with Porto Luz, an arts and culture center scheduled to open on Chicago’s South Side within the next year. Through this venture, Horberg plans to show the world a model for responsible economic stimulation of a creative community.

As Horberg writes it, her resume reads like an invitation for a challenge: “Catalyst, Artist, Unrepetent [sic] Socialist and Innovator.” Go ahead, try me, I dare you, she seems to say. Since her start as a Chicago-based entrepreneur in the late ‘70s, Horberg has been responsible for the creation of two now-defunct artisan clothing boutiques, Studio V and the Salon of Modalisque, as well as HotHouse, an internationally recognized nightclub and cultural center. After nearly 20 years at HotHouse, Horberg departed from the venue in 2006, a move that fueled her fire to found Porto Luz. With this, her latest enterprise, she pushes forward by laying down a serious plan ahead of time, hoping to disprove previous notions that her talents with HotHouse lay only as proprietor of artistic vision and mission.

In early July of 2006, Horberg was forced to discontinue her work at HotHouse after she and its board of directors had a falling out over a restructuring of executive leadership that took a significant amount of power away from Horberg. Her suspension, the following media coverage and web-board arguments, and the subsequent closing of HotHouse a year afterwards are all behind Horberg now. HotHouse was a revolutionary model for an artistic community space and venue, presenting many emerging artists to the community and its South Loop location from 1998 to 2006. In Horberg’s time with HotHouse, the venue showcased a wide variety of music, but it was known especially for promoting jazz and world music including fado from Portugal, cumbia from Colombia, and Afro-Cuban music. Horberg, then, has much experience in drawing together international dance/pop artists, members of the world music community, and proponents of jazz and creative improvised music, having worked with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Charles Sanders, Hugh Masekala, the Women’s Jazz Festival, the Latin Jazz Festival, the Improv Music Festival and the South African Jazz Festival.

Marguerite Horberg with Studs Terkel; courtesy of Marguerite Horberg

A big hope of Horberg’s is to take the experience gained from her time at HotHouse and use it to create an intimate setting for people to interact with musicians and artists—a salon of sorts—and channel it into a more culturally responsible setting. Horberg envisions Porto Luz as a model for artistic communities worldwide. But these visions are not Horberg’s alone; Porto Luz is the project of Partisan Arts International, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to furthering progressive arts and culture communities in urban settings. While Horberg was instrumental in the founding of Partisan Arts in 2007 and has since served as its executive director, the organization is a collaboration between Horberg and about 40 other dedicated individuals, most of whom have backgrounds in the arts and community activism. Horberg and the team at Partisan Arts International are interested in building sites that “foster progressive community and innovative cultural expression,” that provide a community with a cultural space as well as high-quality arts programming. The idea is to take parts of urban cities that are underdeveloped and forlorn and use the arts and culture to stimulate economic development in those areas. The members of Partisan Arts, some of whom worked at HotHouse with Horberg and followed her when she left, hope to combine their myriad art-industry-honed talents to create culturally responsible model art communities, specifically through Porto Luz as well as Chelsea Social, a project underway in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. Horberg explains that in the case of Porto Luz, this will primarily include a performing arts space, a new theater housing around 600 seats, a meeting place, and a restaurant. Porto Luz as a venue will be not only a resource for local artists, providing a space in which to work on their projects or plan activist events, but also a more personal space where they could host events such as weddings and quinceañeras. Horberg refers to this as a “Cultural space, with a capital C.” Partisan Arts feels that Porto Luz will be a much more socially considerate venue than HotHouse was, and hopes to help in the economic growth of its community by stimulating businesses growing around Porto Luz.

This project has been in the works for years now. Although Horberg explains that it was difficult not to immediately jump back into the scene and fill the void left by HotHouse, she wanted to prepare for this new venture better than she did for HotHouse, as her first time around she was more focused on getting a location and taking it from there. But experience has taught Horberg that much strategic planning and organizational development is required to build a strong foundational business plan. This time around, all the groundwork will be laid down before the group sets foot on location.

However, the location is key. Again, as the goal is to stimulate the economic development of an underserved community, Partisan Arts has a committee devoted to securing the ideal location. Current hopes place Porto Luz within Bronzeville, with plans in motion to secure a location within the year, understanding that the following six months would be required to renovate the site.

And yet, those familiar with Horberg’s work and restless for the old HotHouse life won’t have to wait that long. Even before ground is broken for the renovation of the site in Bronzeville, programming will be available to start building back the old HotHouse base. Porto Luz will be rolling out itinerant events as early as September. Horberg asserts that the public can expect a stronger Porto Luz presence in terms of visibility on the Chicago scene within a month or two. The first project is a big program launch with the 2009 World Music Festival. On October 31, the team will celebrate Day of the Dead with groups flying in from Mexico. Within this production, all elements will have a multi-disciplinary piece—for example, a visual component that will be set up in the memory of those who have passed within the community. This fall, the team also intends to put on a commemorative event for the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. Horberg assures that all events are designed to get the community learning, dancing, and excited for the new space.

Chris’s first solo show as a member of The Chicago Art Department showed an artist who knew what he wanted to do, yet was slightly unsure of his abilities. Though the show was pulled off with mild success, the thing that was missing was the attitude that personifies Chris Hales not only as an artist, but as a person.

This time around that mistake won’t be made again! “Mookie” has planned his revenge and has enlisted the help of others to pull off his second solo show at CAD. This one with little to no compromise. Come with no expectations and leave happy!

Mookie’s Revenge

@ the Chicago Art Department

1837 S Halsted

Chicago, IL

(6-10pm)

Happening on Monday at Links Hall (for the SAUCY in you) is Poonie’s Cabaret:

The quarterly Cabaret features artists working in many different creative realms – dance, music, contact improvisation, performance art, voguing, drag, burlesque, cheerleading, etc. Proceeds go to the Duncan Erley memorial Coming Out of the Closet Fund for artists whose work explores healing, gay activism, and spiritual and sexual transformation.

Monday, June 15, 8:00 pm
$5 suggested donation
tickets available at door or over the phone

First Fridays at the Museum of Contemporary Art

(Tonight,  Fri. May 1st)

Happy hour takes on a new meaning with First Fridays at the MCA. Cash bar featuring specialty drinks and free Wolfgang Puck appetizers. Enjoy live music from local DJs, the world’s only iMac G5 digital dating bar, creation stations, and more. Each month features an up-and-coming Chicago artist in a preview of the latest UBS 12 x 12: New Artists/New Work exhibition.

First Fridays tickets, which include museum admission, live entertainment, and complimentary Wolfgang Puck hors d’oeuvres, are $15 ($7 for MCA members). Advance tickets are available for $10 ($7 MCA members). Order your tickets online, or call the MCA box office at 312.397.4010. Doors are open from 6 to 10 pm with a cash bar until 9:30 pm. Guests must be 21 or older to enter.

220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 | 312.280.2660

for the after-set:

80′S BABIES PRESENT FRIDAY NIGHT LIVE W/SPECIAL GUEST DJ THE TWILITE TONE
LIVE PERFORMANCE BY PETER HADAR
@ THE FUNKY BUDDHA LOUNGE TONITE

9PM-2AM (at 728 W. GRAND IN CHICAGO)

Artsy-ass electro-soulster (in the BEST way) Peter Hadar ends his epic invasion of Chicago with a BANG!  And bless my man Twilite Tone.  Good time to be had, but I bet they’re both tired…

and don’t forget:

Art Chicago 2009 is ongoing (till May 4th) at the Merchandise Mart

Art Chicago® 2009, the annual international fair of contemporary and modern art, brings together the world’s leading emerging and established galleries. Art Chicago offers curators, collectors, artists and art enthusiasts a comprehensive survey of current and historic work, from cutting-edge to modern masters in a wide variety of media including: painting, photography, drawings, prints, sculpture, video and special installations.  There’s also a panel discussion series called Art Chicago Speaks, featuring curators and artists alike.

General Ticket Information
Tickets may be purchased onsite and and will be available online.
Adults:  $20 daily or $25 multi-day pass
Seniors, Students or Groups: $15 multi-day pass
Children 12 and under are free

Art from Immig-Art,  anonymously contributed immigration experiences as a group art project.  Immig-Art was founded by my friend, Kabuika Kamunga, a Congolese filmmaker and journalist based in Chicago.