The actual result of the mapping experiment at Art in Action, however, was much more free-form than it’ s organizers had envisioned—rather than a chart of the physical or political geography of the city, the maps gave subtle hints at how different people understand the same environment. One impressive twelve-year-old submitted a detailed map of the El, while another participant mapped out good South Side coffee spots, explaining in a note, “I added Powell’s because it’s nice to browse books after you’ve had coffee at Istria.”

Mark Hopwood, a third-year UofC graduate student in philosophy from northern England, started thinking about common University perceptions of the neighborhood when he, like so many UofC students, was cautioned against walking from campus to 65th and Cottage Grove. Being the “kind of person who’s always been curious about my local neighborhood,” he did it anyway. In February of this year, Hopwood attended a presentation by the Counter Cartographies Collective (3Cs) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where they displayed the alternative maps they’d created of their campus. Hopwood cited the 3Cs as the impetus for the Chicago project and found maps particularly appealing for this kind of experiment because, as he noted, “representing something visually lets people find their own entry point.” Because they are visual tools, maps present multiple perspectives and allow viewers to interpret and form their own impressions. For this reason, maps have an incredible potential to influence social consciousness. Hopwood references both the Mercator Projection and the iconic London Tube map as examples.

The ultimate goal of the project is to visually represent different sides of the local community and challenge the assumptions behind them, with a particular emphasis on life at the UofC. Hopwood’s vision of the project is fairly nebulous, and he hopes that in time, an organizing principle will arise through the project.

An incredible number of people from both the University and the broader community around it have expressed interest in the mapping project. Commenting on the impressive response, Hopwood says, “I love maps, and it turns out I’m not the only one.” The participants bring diverse perspectives to the project, and include both campus and local residents, activists from the Southside Solidarity Network and Southsiders Organize for Unity and Liberation (SOUL), geography majors, and artists, who have come together as a group of people that Teddy Kent, a first-year at the UofC, describes as “absolutely passionate.”

During a mapping brainstorm session, the group proposes ideas for maps, such as foreclosures on the South Side, where StreetWise vendors sell and stay, and the extent of the University’s land ownership. During these discussions, the group grapples with the issues of access to information and controversy. Particularly with regard to the land ownership map, Kent has had trouble locating in public records the information necessary to create the map and anticipates pushback from the University if he pursues the subject further. Hopwood concedes that controversy might be inherent to this project because these maps could serve as an alternative to the image that the University of Chicago presents of itself and the surrounding community He elaborated, “The University produces…perfectly accurate, perfectly serviceable maps of Hyde Park. What’s also true is that they produce a narrative of the community that’s not exactly false, but it’s not exactly the whole picture, either. All of us have the sense that our community is healthier when people have a wider range of perspectives to draw.” The first major project Hopwood hopes to put together will consist of several physical maps that will assist incoming UofC first-years in interpreting the many sides of their new home.

More than controversy, Hopwood wants to encourage residents of the South Side, particularly students, to learn about the community around them and reevaluate their impressions of neighborhoods that are—and in some ways are not—their home. As Hopwood says, “Maps are never just maps—they’re stories, they’re landscapes, they’re histories. They’re a way of accessing those stories.”

(Emilie Shumway)

The truck for Shawn Michelle’s Homemade Ice Cream sits tucked away under the pavilion of Kimbark Plaza at 53rd and Kimbark Avenue. Parked oddly between Leona’s and CVS, the powder blue truck’s painted-on slogan, “Best Homemade Ice Cream in the World,” is difficult to make out from across the plaza.

From behind the truck’s tiny order window, the server calls out to some passersby, “Want to sample some homemade ice cream?” Shawn Michelle’s is out of a handful of flavors even though it is barely four in the afternoon, but that does not stop the employee from doling out liberal samples of what he has left.

The menu consists of sixteen flavors, most of which contain the word “supreme.” The flavors range from the basic Vanilla Supreme to the more adventurous Jamaican Rum Raisin Supreme to the mysteriously named Melanin Magic (which, it turns out, is Shawn Michelle’s take on chocolate, with a hint of mint and cookies ‘n’ cream). But the menu is in no way fixed; there is a host of experimental and rotating flavors beckoning the courageous.

For $3.95 and up, you can get varying quantities of ice cream pre-scooped into styrofoam cups. Perhaps a traditionalist would find the lack of cones a disappointment, but the ice cream is more than capable of standing on its own. Less creamy and heavy than, say, a tub of Breyers ice cream, the flavors have a way of melting away on your tongue. Lacking the preservatives of store-bought ice cream (but none of the sugar), the ice cream is about as fresh and rich as it gets.

Owner Yahya Muhammad came up with the name as away to commemorate his sister, Shawn Michelle. Herself a chef, Shawn Michelle was killed in a car crash in 1999. Muhammad has been making ice cream since his college days, and his concoctions were given many names before Muhammed settled on Shawn Michelle’s Homemade Ice Cream.

After several years of struggle, the business began to establish itself, and now it is really starting to take off. Shawn Michelle’s storefront is located in Blue Island, a southwest suburb. The truck used to traverse the route from Hyde Park back to its home base at 119th and Western Avenue on a daily basis. However, last fall the truck took up a more permanent residence at Kimbark Plaza, much to the benefit of Hyde Parkers. The truck has been parked there since October, with intentions of staying year round. The hours have been constantly renegotiated, but the truck is currently open from 9am to 9pm, Wednesday through Sunday. After braving out the long winter months, Shawn Michelle’s is gearing up for the summer season as the only ice cream vendor in Hyde Park, outside of the occasional roving ice cream truck blaring some worn-out variation of “The Entertainer” from its speakers.

You would have to sample a lot of pints to determine whether Shawn Michelle’s really is “The Best Homemade Ice Cream in the World,” as the truck proudly proclaims. But on a hot summer day in Hyde Park, it might as well be.

Alone on the second floor of the Hyde Park Art Center, I push aside thin felt curtains to enter a gallery featuring “The City,” the first of four video installation programs in “Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism.” There are two pieces in this exhibition, Sarah Morris’s “Midtown” and Bertrand Lamarche’s “Autobrouillard.” The second is playing.

A white light passes over an otherwise dim scene of a city at night. The movement repeats over and over again, like a searchlight scanning desperately for the hint of life amid ruins, while the wreckage consists of glass and cement buildings. The only other movement on the screen, besides a blinking red light off in the distance, is the occasional appearance of a woman’s face, made visible by a reflection of the white light. Her hair has fallen back and her mouth is open as if producing a scream; she is frozen in that position, appearing momentarily on a glass panel in front of the city scene. It seems as if the white light is coming from inside of a building, shining through a window to probe the outside world.

The video art on view sits above the rest of “Spatial City,” an exhibit inspired by the theoretical structures of the same name by Israeli architect Yona Friedman (born 1923). After fleeing his native Hungary during World War II to settle in Paris, Friedman famously declared in his 1958 manifesto “Mobile Architecture” that the structures of an ideal city were to occupy a minimal surface area on the ground, to “be easily broken down and moved,” to be transformable by the individual inhabitant. His ideas disseminated widely in post-war France, and most recently provided the conceptual framework for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Nicholas Frank, the originating curator of “Spatial City.” Each piece in the exhibit relates in some way to the architecture of a utopic city that is alternately optimistic and cynical. The artists selected for the exhibit, like Friedman, make reference to the brutality of war, dehumanizing conditions in totalitarian states, and the impact of urban living and industry on the environment and individuality.

Walking through the exhibit, any trace of unstained wood is startling—the viewer is overwhelmed by steel, plastic, and, especially mirrors. The layout of the art in the exhibit looks as if it could be modeled after the plan of a city. In Friedman’s drawings and collages at the entrance of the exhibit, urban spaces are geometric sets of layered circles and boxes. Likewise, the position of each piece has been carefully chosen to highlight the beauty and horror of these monuments to progress. In Didier Marcel’s massive “Sans titre (labours 4),” stained black wood contains waves of freshly turned dirt. It is a frozen garden, set on display with steel, polyester, resin, and glass fiber instead of flowers. Made with several hundred pounds of actual resin, the structure could have theoretically served as the bed for new life. Near the opposite wall of the gallery is Philippe Ramette’s “Objet Cynique,” a four-person electrical chair constructed of wood, rope, electric cable, and aluminum. The image suggests that a collective exit from the world we’ve made has the potential to mollify the pain of death. The most conscious use of urban planning is seen in the arrangement of Kristina Solomoukha’s “Shedding Identity,” a set of neon digital prints behind Plexiglass and mirrors. When stepping between certain prints, the viewer becomes an inhabitant of a city that no longer looks beautiful.

While occupying HPAC, the exhibit also features works by Chicago-based artists Sara Schnadt, Jeff Carter, Hui Min Tsen, and Detroit artist Ben Hal, in addition to those from the French Regional Contemporary Art Funds (“the Frac”). Schnadt’s “Network” hangs above a gallery attendant, who reads silently in the corner. Electric yellow twine is tied in knots overhead in a site-specific web, suggestive of a virtual network landscape. Jeff Carter’s “Untitled #1 (Chicago Tribune Tower)” is made entirely of modified IKEA products in the form of the eponymous structure.

It is the first time that these works, brought together by the Frac from each region of France, are being shown together in the United States. Dwelling in our own metropolis until August 8, “Spatial City” is a bold and terrifying reflection of humanity’s complicated relationship with the structures it enables.

A fragment of Vita’s centerfold. (Tuncay Esref)

In her last days as a University of Chicago student, fourth-year Jackie Todd hopes to revive “Vita Excolatur,” the sex publication made by and for students that contains questionably pornographic material. Taking its name from the University’s motto, the magazine attempts to show “the life enriched” by sexuality. Although “Vita” has been short of writers, photographers, models, and a leadership structure since the magazine last made it to print in 2007, Todd has a strong interest in carrying out the project she inherited after her first year at the College. Many have expressed interest in “Vita” since then, but Todd says the problem has been students’ fears of commitment. Getting people to lay bare their bodies and thoughts about sex has proven difficult, even in a periodical that anticipates selling only 200 printed copies and will not be posted online, and editors have received last-minute requests to use pseudonyms or pull nude portraits. Contributors to the magazine cite anxiety of potential discovery by future employers or law school admissions officers as reasons for their preference for anonymity. Todd, calling herself the “Vita girl,” does not share this anxiety, stating plainly, “This is the bed I made for myself.”

UofC second-year and photographer Edward Menéndez, the only other actually named Vita contributor, is proud of the work he has submitted, although it was not shot for the magazine specifically. Like many UofC students, Menéndez is interested in questioning sex and gender roles, and believes “Vita” would be the appropriate venue. In this upcoming issue, he poses one female model in such a way that “it’s hard to draw sex out of the image.” A black-and-white side profile of a girl staring into a window located outside of the frame, the light spilling onto her slightly slumped shoulders, offers to its viewers no suggestions that are explicitly sexual. And yet by virtue of the fact that she is a naked woman, he admits that her image is sexualized. Menéndez prefers to inspire reflection rather than hand viewers any definite assignment or conclusions. “It’s a provocation, be it sexual, physical, psychological.”

As a rule, Todd would not ask “Vita” contributors to do something that she herself would not feel comfortable doing, which includes shots of penetration or masturbation. For her, a spread that involved any live sex act would be “crossing a line I’m not comfortable with,” adding, “There are some things you don’t get to see.” Though Todd’s boundaries may have influenced the direction of this last issue, her bold direction sets the bar high for issues to come, as she will be posing for “Vita”’s staple photo of “hot chicks reading books.” Said one of the magazine’s photographers, Tuncay Esref, “People are scared of other people’s judgments, which I think is why ‘Vita’ is necessary.” Esref hopes to find a future venue for “a shoot that involved sweat and bulges of skin and pubic hair.” With Todd graduating in just a few short days, her hope to “bring sex to a more public arena,” beginning with her own full exposure, is the first step to reclaiming the world of academic erotica. And with students like Esref and Menéndez sticking around, “Vita Excolatur” will live on as the counterpart to this crescat scientia institution.
“Vita” will be printed and ready for sale by the start of the second week in June in the UofC Reynolds Club.

(courtesy of Cecil McDonald)

Moments. Slices of reality. The daily progression of the world. This is the subject matter for Cecil McDonald, Jr., a photographer based on the far South Side. Dramatic lighting and glowing jewel tones predominate his images, carefully staged reproductions of the everyday. His photographs are largely of intimate domestic scenes, his wife, his daughters, and himself the subjects. McDonald speaks slowly when describing his work, taking thoughtful pauses and emphasizing certain words, as if relishing their weight in his mouth. “I don’t know if I am making pictures that are going to change people’s opinion about anything,” he says, “but I am hoping that I am making pictures that people come to, look at, are excited, feel inspired in some way.” He is quick to qualify: “Not inspired in some way that they’re going to change the world, but even if it’s just for a minute while they’re in front of the picture. I think that those kind of small steps along the way in life, they really move life along. And they’re just as important as big bold sweeping statements.”

McDonald came to photography in his last year as an undergraduate at Columbia College, where he was studying fashion design. He recalls realizing that, all along, he had been drawn to photographs of clothes as much as the clothing itself. This newfound interest prompted him to return to Columbia for a master’s degree in photography. Today, his background in fashion permeates his photographs, and McDonald describes himself as being extremely interested in infusing his work with “style.” “I come from a culture where style is substance, right?” he says. “And it’s not a wrapping or a dressing, you know… Style is the thing. And that’s what I try to infuse in all of my photographs.” Style, then, is what makes McDonald return to a moment and recreate it. What’s more, a photograph transcends its origins when a surprise or shift infuses the image with a new style.

Coming of age in Chicago also influenced the photographer. In the early- and mid-1980s house music exploded on the South Side, and McDonald describes his teenage self as highly involved in that world. He laughingly reports that he almost flunked out of school because of his commitment to music, yet also claims that it was through the house scene that he first became an artist, although he didn’t identify himself as such at the time. Today music, like fashion, plays an important role in McDonald’s artistic process. “I think that those kind of influences have stayed with me,” he says. “It may not be an outward thing that you can represent in a picture, but it’s definitely there when you’re working. It becomes part of your fabric, becomes part of your make-up.”

Now that he has claimed the title of “artist,” the adult McDonald feels that he has license to engage with the world differently. “So now I am expected to be creative, not only in the making of things, but in the way I live. Which is really what it means to me to be an artist. You know. You live creatively.” He also seeks to pass that creative agency onto the next generation as an arts educator at several Chicago public schools. McDonald pushes his students to think of themselves as artists in every arena of their lives. “Creativity is not [exclusively] the domain of the artist. You know?” he muses, “The creative instinct, the creative impulse is something that everyone needs to nurture.”

In terms of his own work, McDonald has no concrete expectations about what the future will bring. He anticipates becoming more well-known, but isn’t looking for an explosion in popularity. “I’m very interested in sloooow ascension,” he says, drawing the word out. “I don’t have to have a rocket to the top…if there is a top. But I’m very much interested in just kind of moving things along.” In that way, the subject of his work has also become the mantra for its development. Moments. Slices of reality. The daily progression of the world.

The savory aroma draws a crowd to his stand, just as it drew Arctander to the business of crêpe cooking two years back: “My friend Leroy Stevens was making crêpes at the market,” he explains. “He and [Experimental Station president] Dan Peterman had started the crêpe stand as a way for people to try foods available from other vendors. Leroy was leaving town, and asked if I wanted to take over. I have been making crêpes ever since.” Every Saturday morning a long line of crêpe devotees wait to sample savory combinations of crêpe fillings. Favorites include “Call of the Wild,” a cheese and mushroom variety, and “the Crowd Pleaser,” which is filled with Nutella and bananas.

To the dismay of South Side residents (your correspondent included), Arctander is moving on. As he put it, “In the back of my mind I hear Dade Murphy’s Mom from the movie Hackers saying, ‘You are going to like New York, it’s the city that never sleeps!’ I just graduated from UIC and our lease in Pilsen is up as of June 1st. Some friends in Brooklyn have a room opening up for June and July. I’m thinking of this summer as a non-committed test run of a potential new home.”

Arctander is currently searching for an apprentice to take over his crêpe stand. The prerequisites are simple: “The ideal candidate is reliable, sociable and resistant to heat and wasps,” Arctander said. Interested candidates should send him an email at z.arctander@gmail.com. In the wake of Arctander’s popularity, the new crêpe maker will certainly have a large griddle to fill.

The “Communion” piece came towards the beginning of “Ritual,” a dance performance organized by nine students from the UofC that made a short run of three shows last weekend. The dancers choreographed their own pieces, combining elements from dance traditions as diverse as Indian classical dance, flamenco, and ballet, setting them over mostly modern music, familiar to their college-aged audience. The performance focused on the universal importance of ritual; directors Amulya Mandova and Virginia Rangos wrote in the program that they were inspired by French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s ideas of collective effervescence.

The early “Coming of Age” number followed the social initiation of new members in light blue by the priests in purple. In “Seduction,” a flamenco-inspired rhythm and guitar line played around three dancers whose twisting motions and flowing sashes evoked sexual initiation. In the later pieces, conflict arose within the society of dancers, and a piece of cloth became a blindfold across the eyes of a condemned girl.

The performance itself had the effect of ritual. The dancers were in total physical commitment. They hit the ground hard, and in one striking moment, a young initiate fainted backwards towards the floor, and one of the veterans swooped to catch her head a few inches from the floor. What might have been a few missed steps and stumbles in timing were part of the nervous energy at the center of the scene, and even the clanking of the doors of the rehearsal space didn’t seem to distract from it.

The dancers ended with a namaskar, a South Indian tradition where dancers pay their respects to the universe by stomping on the ground beneath them. With the last stomp, the performance was over, and after a brief moment the dancers relaxed their bodies. For an instant, though, nobody seemed to realize that the ritual itself was over, and that the women in front of them were embracing as people and not performers.

For the first time in forty minutes, the crowd broke out into noise. They moved towards the center and congratulated the dancers, bread still in their teeth.

If you had a funky, alternative, yoga-practicing, holistic-remedy-dispensing grandmother from New Orleans, she might feed you something like the food served up at Yah’s. The menu consists of a rotating circuit of $10 daily specials with no separate options, placing one at the mercy of the daily special. While this is typically a risky affair, in this case it’s your funky vegan grandma in the kitchen, making a meal that emerges comforting, inexplicably smooth and animal product-free.
Friday’s daily special was a mishmash of sides foregrounding “BBQ Nuggets,” a seitan-based meat alternative glazed lightly in barbeque sauce. With a tender, meaty texture, the BBQ nuggets were a hit among my cohorts, not one of whom was vegan. Eggplant lasagna served as another locus of the meal, and the delightfully creamy, not-quite-cheesy top layer left me wondering what mysterious alchemy had been performed in the kitchen. The complements to the dishes brought us back to the realm of the familiar. A generous bowl of subtly flavorful garlic lentil stew, the “mushroom patty,” a doughy pastry stuffed with diced, marinated mushrooms that suffers only from its cafeteria-style name, and a rather ordinary vegetable kebab. The confusing array of well-prepared sides gave the meal the feeling of a Thanksgiving feast, and although barbeque and lasagna are not typical brethren, we all ate with a potluck-inspired enthusiasm. A blueberry “cheesecake,” which a friend accurately described as “weird but good,” followed the dinner. While surprisingly similar to the real thing in taste, the dry texture of the cake ultimately undermined its $5 price tag.

The not-quite-thematic state of the meal was consistent with the rest of the experience. Glasses and plastic cups alike crowded onto the table with a variety of colorful dishware. Silverware came wrapped adorably in a bit of paper towel. Consistency in the menu was similarly ambivalent, with the veggie kebab replacing grilled broccoli in our day’s special. True to its Southern roots, the service was sweet but meandering. Plates generally emerged from the kitchen one at a time in temporally unsystematic shifts, and when our group ballooned from three to seven, water was hard to come by.

Although occasionally frustrating, Yah’s easy-going approach ultimately paid off. In addition to their daily specials, the restaurant cooks up a number of other sides that can be freely substituted at no extra charge. And while the restaurant purports to close at 8pm, my group arrived ten minutes before the hour and things were just heating up. A live blues band had even crowded into the room, playing well past 8 o’clock and on into the next hour. If relaxed service is a take-it-or-leave-it condition of a Yah’s visit, the benefits still outweigh the negatives. Yah’s Cuisine provides the “comfort vegan soul food” it claims on the menu, with double the comfort.
Yah’s Cuisine, 2347 E. 75th Street. Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-8pm. All items under $10. (773) 382-1742.

All-white walls enclose an unidentifiable treadmill-like device, the whoop, whoop, whoop-ing of its enormous belts sounding throughout the room. This gallery-within-a-gallery at the University of Chicago’s DOVA Temporary exhibition space in Harper Court was created by graduating Master of Fine Arts candidate David Cordero. The artist began thinking about his thesis project, “Grind,” using a set of tiny models set in shoebox-sized boxes, as a live sketchbook for the works he could create for a full gallery exhibit. This “testing space” for his ideas required the construction of simple, recognizable objects scaled down to thumb-size. Playing with the ambiguity of those shapes we commonly utilize, the blown-up result is majestic proof of technological innovation; it’s confusing and beautiful, and mechanically perfect, begging the question, so what does it do?

Cordero’s show was the last of five solo 2010 MFA thesis shows held at DOVA Temp. Each of the exhibiting students—André Callot, David Cordero, Sophia Cara Dixon, Andrew Fansler, and Nicole Mauser—was handed the task of transforming the space for four or five days. Shows were scheduled at the same time each Friday beginning on April 9, in the hopes that art enthusiasts and members of the UofC community who turned up for one show would make it to the rest. The turnout last Friday was small, even an hour after the start time. When asked who usually turns up at these exhibits, one MFA candidate replied, “We do.” With a few exceptions, the people walking towards the exhibit were other MFA candidates, a few of their professors, and visual arts undergraduates.

In a conversation before the show, Callot seemed dissatisfied with the low visibility of their work at the university. “These thesis shows should be about finding attention for our artists.” Callot acknowledged the possibility of a lifetime of poverty, attributing it partially to the University’s historically lopsided relationship with the MFA program. In his two years here, Callot has come to believe that “the University doesn’t give a shit about art.” Spending any amount of time within the space of Lorado Taft’s Midway Studio suggests the same. Old complaints of poor air circulation, faulty door locks and alarm systems and the resultant losses of expensive equipment due to theft and break-ins have gone, for the most part, unaddressed. “Midway Studios has the charm and ambiance of an abattoir,” said Callot, adding, “Every time it rains, art is ruined. Every time.” He went on to describe the relentlessly noisy construction on an arts center that few of the MFAs believe will be erected by its slated completion date in 2012.

After the November 2009 destruction of part of Midway, MFA students were in obvious need of a new space. So when the Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences moved out of an old brick house at 60th Street and Kimbark Avenue, the building became an almost secret home of the arts. In the last year, it’s seen everything from noise rock concerts to potluck-style Thanksgiving dinners, though on any given week night the typical scene is an assortment of graduate students working deep into the night while conversing over a few beers. “I feel nothing but love for and from my friends here. We’re mishpoche,” he says, using the Yiddish term which means, roughly, “crazy family.”

The five MFA students, along with Masters of Arts Program in the Humanities candidate Young Joon Kwak, have collectively named themselves Gamma Ray Burst Six, and will exhibit their work in various forms of collaboration and installation at Pilsen’s Roxaboxen gallery starting this Friday, May 28.

The friendship and creative influence that each of these graduating students have shared has helped them produce art that third-year visual arts major Paul Siple called “really fucking good.” At the very least, the students expect their group exhibition to be “one more way to get someone else to pay for our drinks,” as Callot puts it, so that the GRB6 can celebrate the time they have had together before moving on to other venues.

Art in Action will take place this Saturday, May 29th at First Presbyterian Church in Woodlawn from 11 am to 7 pm. The festival is full of music, art, vendors, and workshops. This year’s musical acts include Queen Portia, a local blues singer, jazz pianist Paris Smith, hip-hop artist and activist HB Sol, and Lakesigns, a student rock band. The event also features workshops for belly dancing and slam poetry. In addition to the entertainment, there will be discussion groups focused on South Side issues, like the impact of the 2016 Olympic Bid, a financial literacy workshop, and a discussion exploring the nature of racism. “There’s a hell of a lot of talented people but there isn’t a place to sell their art,” University of Chicago graduate student Mark Hopwood says. He gestures to a woman in the planning committee, “Dessie Williams is a great example. She makes jewelry, paintings, and children’s toys. Art in Action is somewhere she can sell it.” This year, Art in Action will include a free barbeque lunch and dinner.

Advertising for the festival has been almost entirely word of mouth, but the word has spread. What started as a 70-person event five years ago drew over 400 people last year. “I think this will be our biggest year yet,” Carol, a South side resident says confidently. This time around the committee is planning for about 500 visitors. Art in Action began with the partnership between the Southside Solidarity Network (SSN), a University of Chicago student run organization, and Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), a community advocacy group from Woodlawn. The two groups found they had overlapping goals: SSN, a student group at the University, seeks to facilitate connections between the University of Chicago and the South Side; STOP aims to encourage political and economic awareness among South Side residents. Art in Action was a way to encourage the dialogue that both groups want to see.

Within the university community, regions south of the campus have traditionally been represented as uniformly dangerous, and students have been discouraged from venturing outside of typical University stomping grounds. “The mentality was that if you cross the Midway, you were going to get killed,” says STOP community liaison Wardell Lavender. The same sentiments ring true in the other direction as well—there has been mistrust in the Woodlawn community with regard to the University. “The University and the community were just never together,” Lavender says. “But then guys from the University came to the community and said ‘Look, we want a festival where the community mingles with the University.’”

Art in Action has grown out of a belief that the presence and practice of art can be a form of activism by breaking down cultural barriers and forging relationships with the community. “This event is meant to give students a different view of Woodlawn,” says Hopwood. “It is not a threat, but a community with a history, and it is possible for a relationship with the residents.”

For more information about Art in Action visit artinactionchicago.com