Public Programs & Community Supported Art Chicago
Happy New Year! threewalls is excited about so many things this month! Check out our line-up of public programs, news about PHONEBOOK v.3.0, and our new project, Community Supported Art Chicago!
First, however, the staff and board at threewalls would like to extend a warm welcome to our new Program Director, Abigail Satinsky. Abigail is well known in Chicago for her work with InCUBATE, a research group that explores new approaches to arts administration and arts funding. She will be directing our residency and public programs as well as managing the upcoming Alliance for Independent Arts Organizers conference, Hand-in-Glove, next fall. We think she's a great fit for our organization and look forward to the projects she's already planning!
In this issue:
1. threewalls launches Community-Supported Art Chicago
2. The 2011 SALON Series starts February 8th.
3. Mindy Rose Schwartz talks February 10th.
4. Public Culture Lecture Series: Chad Elias, February 15th.
5. Subtitles series curated by LiveBox, February 18th.
6. Ashley Hunt performs March 4th
7. Really Early Warning: Hand-in-Glove Conference and PHONEBOOK v.3.0
8. SAVE THE DATE: Gala 2011
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1. Community-Supported Art Chicago
threewalls is excited to announce Community-Supported Art Chicago, a yearly subscription service of locally produced art launching April 2011. CSA Chicago is an affordable way for a community of people to support local artists and receive limited edition contemporary artist projects in return. Drawing inspiration from the Community-Supported Art program of mnartists.org and Springboard for the Arts in Minneapolis, MN, as well as other subscription projects like The Present Group, The Thing Quarterly, Alula Editions, and the Risograph CSA Project in Grand Rapids, MI, CSA Chicago is part of a national movement to create sustainable models to fund local artists and make contemporary art affordable and accessible. threewalls is pleased to partner with 3arts and Other People's Pixels in funding this program.
How it works: CSA Chicago works like Community Supported Agriculture, where shareholders invest in a local farm for the growing season and in return receive a monthly payout of fruits and vegetables. CSA Chicago asks shareholders to invest directly in the Chicago arts community with a “buy local” mentality. Each share costs $400 and subscribers receive 6 artworks over three months. Each artwork is a limited edition of 50 and shareholders receive a random selection from participating artists. Subscriptions are limited to 100 per year. CSA Chicago's season is from April to June 2011. The 2011 subscription features: Conrad Bakker, Edie Fake, Sara Black, Jessica Labatte, Laura Mackin, Eric Fleishchauer, Aay Preston-Myint, Pamela Fraser, Steve Reinke, Dan Wang, Jason Lazarus, and Jesse Harrod.
Included in your monthly box:
2 signed and numbered original works of art by contemporary Chicago artists (6 total over three months)
Coupons and ephemera from local artist-run and creative businesses
Essays contextualizing the work
Subsciptions are being offered now at an early-bird rate of $350.00 until the April 30th launch. You can pre-purchase your share on our website.
2. 2011 SALONS kick off February 8th with Curating the Turn at 7pm.
Guests: Anna Cerniglia, Nicholas Frank, Aay Preston-Myint and Kelly Shindler.
Traditional labels for arts workers don’t hold much water any more. On the one hand, notions of artistic practice, curatorial practice, arts writing and arts administration are expanding and blurring. But on the other hand, those categories are also being professionalized through graduate degree programs and related critical activities (such as symposia and arts journals). This simultaneous fluidity between, and attempt to define, different “art professions” reveals a real paradigm shift in the roles arts professionals play in the creation, exhibition, and discussion of new artwork, a shift that has been called the “educational turn” by some.
For this SALON series, @work, we ask: what is the nature of this paradigm shift, what are the conditions that are producing it, and why is it happening now?
Our investigation highlights the tensions and conflicts that this shift produces. As we explore the evolving definitions of curator, arts writer, arts educator and arts administrator, we ask: Is the self-reflexivity apparent in much of today’s curatorial projects a symptom of a simmering self-doubt about what curators are good for? Is the democratization in art criticism through new online platforms still just a fantasy? How do art workers in all disciplines negotiate shifting power dynamics as they encroach upon each other's territories? And how can we all take advantage of this newfound flexibility in ways that are mutually beneficial and, at the same time, good for the art world?
To explore these questions and many more, we are inviting a host of artists and art professionals to discuss how this shift has affected their practice, professional relationships, and their stakes in these shifting power dynamics.
@work is a special threewallsSALONS series curated by Rebecca Hernandez and Ania Szremski, both MA candidates at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Art History, Theory and Criticism and Arts Administration. Held on Tuesday evenings at 7:00 pm, SALONS feature guest respondents in round table discussion with the public about currents in the contemporary visual arts.
threewallsSALONS are an ongoing project that invites creative producers and thinkers into the gallery for an open-forum discussion about currents in contemporary visual art and culture. SALONS pose a discussion topic, gather a few key contributors and then open up the floor for discussion between those actively engaged in the 'question' and anyone and everyone who would like to come and be a part of the conversation.
Mark your calanders:
Curating the Turn
Tuesday, February 8th, 7:00 p.m. (new date!)
Crisis-Free Arts Criticism
Tuesday, March 1, 7:00 p.m.
Unschooling Arts Education
Tuesday, March 29, 7:00 p.m.
Arts Administration
Tuesday, April 26, 7:00 p.m.
3. Mindy Rose Schwartz Talks February 10th at 7pm.
Join us for Mindy Rose Schwartz's artist-talk, a poetry reading and food-tasting that responds to Schwartz's current exhibition at the gallery. If you haven't already seen the show, please come by! The show is open until February 26th and features an essay by Chicago critic and writer Lori Waxman, available at the gallery next week.
Certain conventions of American home decorating and interior design from the seventies and eighties and the mundane domestic objects featured in that décor become fantastic when in the hands of Mindy Rose Schwartz. Working in ceramics, paper, and plaster, Schwartz’s sculptural installations blur the boundaries between recognizable household trappings and almost nightmarish manifestations from the natural world that encroach upon and overtake their environments. Schwartz is interested in the mutability of those sentimental objects and surroundings that absorb our personal histories and accompanying emotions. Her final installations seem animated with the drama of everyday life, becoming monstrous, ghostly or otherwise charmed by the sentiments they have been repository for.
In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle describes how “when an object is lost, a subject is found.” Objects, once disparaged as excess, hobbyism or perversion, are actually the centerpieces of emotional life and provocations to thought. Schwartz’s work explores this rich territory, where objects become container for feelings and desire and move into the magical and uncanny. She traps the moment when things morph into the meaningful, loaded with the ‘people’ who chose, cherished and projected onto them.
Mindy Rose Schwartz has shown her sculpture and installations throughout the United States with exhibitions in Houston, TX; Brooklyn, NY; St. Louis and Kansas City, MO; Miami, FL and Chicago. Her work has been written about in artnet Magazine, Beautiful Decay (online), Time Out Chicago, The Chicago Tribune, Newcity, ArtForum, Frieze Magazine, Art in American and Whitewalls. She was the recipient of a 3Arts Fellowship to Ragdale in 2010 and a Frankel Foundation Full Fellowship Award to the Vermont Studio Center in 2005. Schwartz earned her MFA at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
4. Public Culture Lecture Series: Chad Elias, February 15th, 7pm: "How to Do Things With Words in Public Space"
The ability to occupy the city, to make oneself visible, to address and mobilize a public, has been drastically diminished as a result of encroachments on public space under neoliberal programs of urbanization. What would it mean to insist on the public function of art today? As opposed to traditional conceptions of public art as work that occupies or constructs physical spaces and addresses preexisting audiences, Rosalyn Deutsche has argued for the necessity of artistic practices that actively constitute a public “by engaging people in political discussion or by entering a political struggle.” In recent years, a growing number of artists have produced work that not only calls for new forms of participation in public space, but also demands a critical reconsideration of the function of speech within those spaces. Calling attention to the linguistic constitution of collective
subjectivity, this work sets out to transform networks of atomized and disembodied communication into conditions for the articulation of alternative forms of political identification. My talk will address writings and performances by Vito Acconci, Andrea Fraser, Sharon Hayes, Adrian Piper and Paul Chan.
About Chad Elias: Chad Elias is a graduate student in art history at Northwestern University. His research focuses on contemporary art practices in Beirut.
The Public Culture Lecture Series, co-organized by Randall Szott and InCUBATE, seeks to highlight examinations and enactments of public culture. Rather than following a preformed idea of what public culture actually is, the lecture series treats it as an open question and invites attendees to explore the question with us. A variety of creative people (artists, public art scholars, historians, cooks, collectors, etc.) will present the ways that the notion of “the public” emerges in their work and/or informs it. The series includes talks, workshops, and tours, that bring together a wide spectrum of perspectives on how contemporary culture intersects with everyday life. The Public Culture Lecture series grew out of InCUBATE and Randall Szott's event series, "In Search of the Mundane" at threewalls in October/November 2009. Its premise was to be a living exhibition: a
series of public events that open up the space of the gallery to living and doing, calling attention to the wide spectrum of people interested in the beauty and political potential of the ‘everyday.’
5. Subtitles Series Curated by LIveBox, February 18th
New this spring, threewalls hosts LiveBox, a roaming curatorial project focused on video, performance and new media art. The "Subtitles" series happens monthly, on the third Friday, and features ephemeral media - including video, noise art, performance and readings - inspired by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, Doris Lessing and Roald Dahl. Check our website for more details on upcoming events and artists.
6. Ashley Hunt: March 4th at 7pm, "Notes on the Emptying of a City."
“Notes on the Emptying of a City” is a performance that acts as a dismantled film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images, and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience. Exploring the first-person politics of being in New Orleans with a camera and microphone in the months following the storm, it recounts Hunt’s engagement with community activists while researching the city’s refusal to evacuate the Orleans Parish Prison, raising themes of architecture, cameras, and visibility; and the powers of speech, silence, art, and journalism in a moment of crisis. Set up as a slide lecture, a narrator sits at a desk before an audience, with papers and a laptop computer connected to a projector. Between meditations on his own experience he cues testimonies—videos of a citizen, a neighbor, an organizer, and
others—each one drawn from the archive of material compiled during his visits. Together, the artist’s narration, still images, and videos weave into a montage that offers a larger testimony on disaster, race, law, speech, and witnessing at a time when the urgency of Katrina’s crisis seems to have receded into a comfortable past.
Ashley Hunt is an artist, activist and writer who engages the ideas of social movements, modes of learning and public discourse. His work is often concerned with questions of power and the ways that some people have more access to it and others have less. Among his works are The Corrections Documentary Project (2001–present), the collaborative 9 Scripts from a Nation at War (2007), and On Movement Thought and Politics (2004-present), a collaboration with dance artist, Taisha Paggett. Recent exhibitions include the Center for Curatorial Studies/Hessel Museum, P.S.1/MOMA, Project Row Houses, the Tate Modern and documenta 12; and recent publications include Printed Project 12 (‘09),Radical History Review (‘08),On Knowledge: A Critical Studies Reader (‘08), Radical History Review (‘08), Journal of Aesthetics and Protest (‘08, ‘07, ‘05), and An
Atlas of Radical Cartography (‘07).
www.ashleyhuntwork.net / www.correctionsproject.com
7. Hand-In-Glove & PHONEBOOK 3
Many of you have wondered about PHONEBOOK - how to list and where to buy a copy - and we're pleased to announce that v.3.0 is in the works in conjunction with the Hand-in-Glove arts administration conference and the formation of the Alliance of Independent Arts Organizers (AIAO) scheduled for October 20th-23rd, 2011.
PHONEBOOK will be launching a kickstarter mid-month where you can buy your copy in advance in support of this self-publishing effort. This volume will be greatly expanded, with categories dedicated to SPACE (apartment galleries, multi-use spaces, collective studios, and any other physically planted organization that is mostly: self-organized, independent, noncommercial), TIME (re-occuring events and programs that are unaffiliated, including: space, film and video screenings, performance series, tours, and radio programs), SPACE/TIME (projects with a substantial residency component), and RESOURCES (organizations that help artists acquire physical materials, equipment, research, archives, pedagogical projects or information). The actual book will be released at the Alliance for Independent Arts Organizers (AIAO) conference Hand-in-Glove
in October. For more information on being listed or to reserve copies in advance, please contact: phonebook@three-walls.org
Here's more on the AIAO and Hand-in-Glove, we hope you'll save the date:
Hand-in-Glove
is the first bi-annual conference for independent visual arts facilitators working at the crossroads of creative administration and studio practice. This conference is open to people engaged in the pragmatic realities and imaginative possibilities of organizing exhibitions, re-granting programs, publications, residencies, public programs, platforms for projects, and a variety of other programming that challenges traditional formats for the production and reception of art at the grass-roots level. A vibrant and vital art world would be unimaginable without these opportunities, but despite the fact that these programs offer most -- if not all -- of the ground floor support for artists, they operate with very little to no funding or resources beyond sweat equity, volunteer labor, and personal resources. In short, they lack the proper support system and infrastructure to really thrive and
actualize their programs on a fully resourced scale.
In response to this realization, the 2011 conference Hand-in-Glove brings together these independent arts organizers to address the practical and philosophical issues prevalent in their work. The conference features keynote speaker AA Bronson and panels curated with guest respondents from artist-run culture around the nation, discussing local art ecosystems, unconventional residency programs, the archiving of artist-run history, and fundraising strategies for small-budget projects. In conjunction with the conference, threewalls will award the 2011 Propeller Grants as well as release the third edition of PHONEBOOK.
The Alliance of Independent Arts Organizers (AIAO) is a professional organization that provides resources to independent, grass-roots organizers and facilitators who support creative practices that challenge traditional formats, and innovate new genres. Advisory members include Shannon Stratton (threewalls), Abigail Satinsky (InCUBATE/threewalls), Bryce Dwyer (InCUBATE), Sarah Workneh (Skowhegan), and Elizabeth Chodos (Ox-bow).
8. SAVE the DATE for GALA 2011!
It's written in stone: May 21st is this year's annual Spring Gala! Stay tuned for "Big Rock Candy Mountain." And while you plan your costumes, get inspired by last year's "Office Romance:" Leroy Koetz and Suzanne Martineau at Scafer Condon Carter produced this great video for us that captured what a great night it was!
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