Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku describes soap bubbles as a metaphor for parallel universes. What if these bubbles extend into our bodies of water? Coming from a parallel earth and from a parallel Chicago, AJ McClenon, brings findings from travels through the ocean and through lake Michigan from cities to cities, from species to species and from past, present and future.

Messages are articulated through large bubbles; sounds from the African diaspora and species studies and footage from water travels.

Register for the event 

This event is in conjunction with our Artist Run Chicago Fund. 

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About AJ McClennon: 

Born and raised in “DC proper,” A.J. McClenon studied art and creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, and The New School prior to receiving a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Alongside artistic experiences, A.J. is passionate about teaching and community collaborations with the goal that all the memories and histories that are said to have “too many Black people,” are told and retold again. As a means to uphold these stories A.J. creates writings, performances, installations, objects, sounds, and visuals. These creations often revolve around an interest in water and aquatic life, escapism, Blackness, science, grief, US history, and the global future. A.J. is deeply invested in leveling the hierarchies of truth and using personal narrative to speak on political and cultural amnesia and their absurdities. A.J. currently works and lives in Chicago.

About F4F:

A former domestic venue, and now nomadic project collective that cultivates a femme community, centers blackness, and expands upon understandings of what domestic space can be. 

About Artist Run Chicago Fund:

The Artists Run Chicago Fund is a unique regranting initiative designed and administered by Hyde Park Art Center has provided over half a million dollars in support of the artist community in Chicago, and we’re still going. Since 2020, The ARC Fund has awarded eighty-five $8,000 grants to artist-run platforms, infusing Chicago’s contemporary art network with flexible financial support to strengthen their diverse and experimental programs. Since 2021, the Artists Run Chicago Fund has also become a platform for collaborations between Hyde Park Art Center and artist-run platforms in the city.

The post Travels through the Ocean: A Screening and Performance with A.J. McClenon and F4F appeared first on Hyde Park Art Center.

Register for the event here. 

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About Ále Campos aka Celeste

Ále Campos (also known as Celeste) is a multi-disciplinary artist and performer currently based in Chicago, where they recently received an MFA in Performance from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Their body of work is elastic in nature, stretching across a variety of modalities, mediums, and presentational formats. Their studio practice rests within a commitment to drag and their persona, Celeste. As curator, producer, performer, and host of a variety of happenings and events that center drag and queer performance, Campos is an active member of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. In 2018, they started Queer Night of Performance, a monthly event in Hudson, NY to nurture a wide range of live queer acts. A large archive of images and texts from the Queer Night of Performance series, is the subject of a book produced by Printmedia Institute with the support of Buddy Chicago. Campos received a grant from the City of Hudson to then design and create a queer operated, mobile stage project called HI-BEAM, to host and financially support a variety of artists and performances outdoors during the pandemic. Campos recently performed with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and the legendary performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra at Jane Addams Hull House during the Casa Museo exhibition and co-curated a night of drag and dj sets by queer, BIPOC artists with Jeffrey Gibson at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago.

About Ajmal Millar aka MAS MAN

Ajmal ‘MAS MAN’ Millar was born on June 30, 1986 in Brooklyn. He is a self-taught contemporary visual artist and mas man (carnival costume designer). His work is multidisciplinary including installation, paintings, and mixed-media sculptural works that combine collage, painting, repurposed materials, scrap metal, performance, and photography. He interrogates notions of cultural heritage, sexual and gender identity, and ritual practices as a first-generation African American black queer man born to Trinidadian immigrants. He earned an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College in 2008 and earned an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Currently, he lives and works in Chicago.

About Corey Smith

Corey Smith is a composer, writer, and performer from Chicago. They have been an artist in residence at High Concept Labs, the University of Illinois Springfield, Light Box Detroit, the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory, and Grin City. Their work has been seen at Links Hall, the Detroit Fringe Festival, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emil Bach House, and numerous venues around the USA. Their longstanding project, The New Prairie School, has been featured by Architectural Digest.

Corey is an avid collaborator and has worked in various capacities as sound designer, director, performer, composer, and devisor with artists such as Lia Kohl, Jasmine Mendoza, Every House Has a Door, Rough House Puppet Theater Company, the Suburban Piano Quartet, Lindsey Barlag-Thornton, among many others. They received an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About Anna Johnson

Anna Johnson’s practice encompasses performance, musical composition, immersive installation, moving image, and social organizing. She engages spiritual, material and interpersonal energy in order to render emotional and psychological landscapes made manifest within one’s body. Her work prioritizes liveness and somatic experiencing in pursuit of embodied strategies for resisting alienation and challenging hegemonic economies of time. She aims to open holistic, transformative ways of being and relating, spaces in which symbiotic vulnerability can emerge. Her current work navigates the membrane – and tension – between her position as an individual and that of the surrounding collective body of human and nonhuman life. Anna’s performance and exhibition work has been presented at spaces including Links Hall, Roman Susan Gallery, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Companion Cooperative, the Cedar Cultural Center, Red Eye Theater, Open Eye Figure Theatre and The Cowle’s Center. She performs solo music under the name Ovovi and collaborates with Microviolet, an improvisational dronepop music project. She is completing an MFA in the Performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The post The Body in Practice: An Evening of Performances appeared first on Hyde Park Art Center.

There will also be poetry readings, panels, artmaking and movement workshops, a portfolio review, exhibition tours, fifteen-minute Open Platform presentations, and more. The programming will emphasize building relationships and community care.

Learn more and register for workshops and events for the Summit: 
https://www.survivingthelongwars.online/summit

Schedule

Thursday March 16 

10:00am – 3:00pm Coffee, Registration, and Check-in
10:00am – 3:00pm Mental Health Breakout Room
10:00am -10:30am Welcome & Grounding with Joseph Lefthand
11:00am – 3:00pm Quilting Workshop with Dorothy Burge
11:00am -12:30pm Surviving the Long Wars Humanities Discussion Hosted by NEH Veteran Fellow Eric Perez
11:00am – 12:30pm Community Health Workshop with Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises Hosted by Lovella Calica
11:00am – 12:30pm Warrior Writers BIPOC Writing Workshop
12:30pm – 1:30pm LUNCH
1:30pm -3:00pm Surviving the Long Wars Humanities Discussion Hosted by NEH Veteran Fellow Gina Herrera
1:30pm – 3:00pm Movement Workshop with Hussein Smko
1:30pm – 3:00pm Warrior Writers BIPOC Writing Workshop
1:30pm – 3:00pm OPEN PLATFORM

Friday March 17

10:00am – 4:00pm Coffee, Registration, and Check-in
10:00am – 4:00pm Mental Health Breakout Room
10:00am -10:30am Welcome & Grounding with Joseph Lefthand
11:00am – 3:00pm Traced Monoprint Memory Drawings with Yvette Pino
11:00 am – 3:00pm Drone Stories Embroidery Circle with Sabba Elahi
11:00am -12:30pm Surviving the Long Wars Humanities Discussion Hosted by NEH Veteran Fellow Anthony Torres
11:00am – 12:30pm Movement and Breathing Workshop with Joseph Lefthand
11:00am – 12:30pm Writing Workshop with Dunya Mikhail
12:30pm – 1:30pm LUNCH
1:30pm – 3:00pm Surviving the Long Wars Humanities Discussion Hosted by NEH Veteran Fellow Natasha Erskine
1:30pm – 3:00pm Frontline Paper Making Workshop
1:30pm – 3:00pm OPEN PLATFORM
4:00pm – 6:00pm The Space Between: Unlikely Entanglements Opening Program

Learn more about Surviving The Long Wars: https://www.survivingthelongwars.online

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Surviving The Long Wars is on view March 16 – July 9

The post Surviving The Long Wars Summit appeared first on Hyde Park Art Center.