Hyde Park Art Center expands its Publications Program
with integration of longtime partner Green Lantern Press
CHICAGO (October 17, 2022) Hyde Park Art Center is thrilled to announce that Green Lantern Press (GLP)–an artist-run publishing house dedicated to the support, production, and dissemination of contemporary art, poetry, and philosophy–will become the Art Center’s in-house publisher. The merger integrates GLP into the Art Center’s existing Publications Program, which crystallizes the Art Center’s role as a critical presenting institution for emerging and mid-career artists in Chicago through exhibition catalogs and documentation, while building on GLP’S legacy of fostering dynamic dialogues between artists and writers.
Moving forward, all of the Art Center’s exhibition catalogs and publications will be published by GLP and disseminated through GLP’s national distribution network. Additional projects supporting emerging art writers and experimental projects will be curated by the Art Center and produced by GLP for local and national distribution. Past GLP publications will continue to be circulated by Hyde Park Art Center. GLP’s and a selection of the Art Center’s publications will be available for browsing and purchase on www.hydeparkart.org/publications.
Caroline Picard, Founder of Green Lantern Press, shares why the Art Center is the perfect new home for the publisher: “For more than 80 years, Hyde Park Art Center has set a benchmark for unwavering commitment to art making and community in Chicago. Its institutional ethos had a profound impact on my own approach to artist-run publishing, exhibition making, and administration at the Green Lantern Press. Among other sympathies, I share the Art Center’s belief that publishing books about artists captures, archives, and disseminates an artist’s work beyond the bounds of a physical exhibition, providing a public record of the city’s critical talent.”
Allison Peters Quinn, Art Center Director of Exhibition & Residency Programs, talks about the history of collaboration between the two and what the integration means for future work: “It’s such an honor to continue GLP’s legacy and marry the Art Center’s Publications Program to this well respected moniker going forward. For over a decade, GLP has been a trusted partner and collaborator in producing books featuring the work of Chicago’s contemporary artists and writers, several of which were made in conjunction with Art Center exhibitions including the books Artists Run Chicago Digest, Epic Something, and Institutional Garbage. Known in the field as a platform for creative art writing and poetry, GLP brings renewed energy to our publications program by inspiring us to reconsider our role in supporting experimental art writing in the Midwest and ensuring future relationships between artists and writers to come.”
Hyde Park Art Center publications compliment its exhibitions program, often while producing the first-ever monograph catalog of a Chicago artist’s work. Since 1945, Hyde Park Art Center has generated over 70 publications that range from black-and-white booklets to substantial perfect-bound books. The Art Center is dedicated to providing quality documentation, commissioning writing on Chicago artists, and representing a diverse range of experimental, contemporary art made in Chicago, through its publications.
RELATED PROGRAM
To celebrate the merge, a book release will take place on Tuesday, November 22, 6-8 p.m. at Hyde Park Art Center, for The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful, GLP’s most recent publication and first book released by award winning flutist and composer, Nicole Mitchell Gantt. Mitchell will be in conversation with critically acclaimed author, filmmaker, dancer and independent scholar, Ytasha L. Womack, followed by a book signing. The book will be available for sale on-site through the independent bookstore Seminary Co-op, and distributed by University of Minnesota Press.
The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella. The book blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that are integral to the collective survival of our planet.
Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist, and composer. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founder of the Black Earth Ensemble, and Professor of Music at University of Virginia, Charlottesville. The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is her first book.
Ytasha L. Womack is a critically acclaimed author, filmmaker, dancer, independent scholar, and champion of humanity and the imagination. Her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture (2013) bridges science fiction, futurisms, and culture and was a 2014 Locus Awards Non Fiction Finalist. Womack tours the world championing Afrofuturism and the role of the imagination. Her works in Afrofuturism have been translated into Portuguese and Spanish for markets in Brazil and Latin America. Womack’s other books include Rayla 2213 (2016) Post Black: How a New Generation is Refining African American Identity (2010), which was a Booklist Top 10 Black History Reader, and Beats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love & Hate About Hip Hop (2007). More information available here: https://www.ytashawomack.com
About Green Lantern Press
Founded by Caroline Picard in 2005, Green Lantern Press is an artist-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing house dedicated to the support, production, and dissemination of contemporary art, poetry, and philosophy. GLP was committed to funding artists in the commission and development of new work that raised ethical questions about how to ensure a more equitable and sustainable creative life. Since inception, GLP organized over 250 events and exhibitions and published more than 40 paperback editions in a range of genres from contemporary art, critical theory, fiction, and poetry, featuring the work and collaboration of Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, Candida Alvarez, Joel Craig, Romi Crawford, Luis Felipe Fabre, Lily Robert-Foley, Coco Fusco, Becca Mir Grady, Matthew Goulish, Amira Hanafi, Roberto Harrison, Young Joon Kwak, Devin King, Ellen Rothenberg, Nick Sarno, Lara Schoorl, Sonnenzimmer, Hui-Min Tsen, Moshe Marvit, and Fo Wilson, among others.
About Hyde Park Art Center
Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections.
