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Just west of Torrence Avenue, 134th Street acts as a divide. To the south, the fringes of a junkyard gradually merge with warehouses and factories. Some of the street signs are hand-painted. There are cattails and prairie grasses that soar 12 feet into the air. A few feet away, a rusted-out shell of a car frame sits among tree trunks, its seats mustard-yellow. Deer tracks sidestep the jagged pieces of metal that protrude through the snow—remnants of long-gone industry. Coyotes and dogs pick their way through the discarded boats from the neighboring Calumet River.

To the north, Hegewisch Marsh stretches off into the distance. Given its polluted state, the wildlife doesn’t seem to notice where the nature reserve ends and the abandoned block to the south begins. Deep in the marsh, the only sign of the city is a deep rumble of distant traffic and the occasional whistle of a freight train. Soon the whistling trains, howling canines, and fragile snatches of birdsong will likely be accompanied by the not-so-distant refrain of hollow-point bullets.

On January 5, the board of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD) held a meeting regarding the future of a plot directly across the river from the marsh. The MWRD voted five-to-four to issue a 39-year lease to the Chicago Police Department for a site near 2025 E. 134th Street. Using money from a federal narcotics forfeiture fund, the department intends to build a new training facility that will include an outdoor gun range.

The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District is an independent governing and taxing body in Cook County. The MWRD, which treats wastewater and controls stormwater for several million people, owns several thousand acres in the Calumet region. In recent decades, it has managed the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, better known as the Big Tunnel Project—a multi-billion-dollar network of tunnels and reservoirs meant to improve floodwater management and reduce sewage pollution of local waterways. This most recent decision signals a big change.

In recent months, the proposed gun range has faced opposition from various environmental groups who argue that the noise of gunfire will disrupt both visitors and endangered birds at the marsh. The groups are concerned that the gun range will be too close to the marsh, which is in the process of being restored as part of the mayor’s Millennium Reserve Project. Despite the Millennium funding, the proposed range has now received Mayor Emanuel’s public support. Emanuel maintains that the facility is not “in contradiction to what we’re trying to do in Millennium.”

But in the Calumet region of Chicago’s Southeast Side, it wouldn’t be unusual for the city to renege on its promises. The forces of industry, commerce, and local government have quite literally reshaped the earth here, draining wetlands and displacing neighborhoods with impunity. Even today, the power politics of Cook County are clear enough: cops trump birds.

More troubling than this, the surrounding neighborhoods and the people who live in them seem to matter less to officials than the wetlands and the ecotourists they are intended to draw. Tom Shepherd, a lifelong resident of the area and longtime activist with the Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF), opposes what he sees as a more general disregard for the Southeast Side: “Some people are of the opinion that because we are largely contaminated that they can come down here and locate any sort of dirty business down here. We’re trying to maintain a reasonable standard of living.” Shepherd worries that the gun range symbolizes a lack of commitment to the environmental restoration promised by the Millennium Reserve Project.

The space near 2025 E. 134th Street was last used by a contractor working on the Big Tunnel during the early 2000s. Today, the site is marked as a green space as part of the Calumet Area Land Use Plan, adopted by the Chicago Plan Commission in March of 2004. This plan seeks to promote the redevelopment of underused industrial spaces and restore drained wetland basins, forests, and historic prairies while linking these sites to existing conservation lands, such as Wolf Lake and the Indiana Dunes region

This plan was supported by—among others—the city and state government, various Aldermen, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Forest Preserve District, and the MWRD, with the consultation of the Openlands Project and the SETF. The more recent Millennium Reserve Project, unveiled by Governor Quinn and Mayor Emanuel in December, is an attempt to facilitate the accomplishment of the Calumet Area Land Use Plan goals. Several million dollars of federal funding have been earmarked to push ahead with the marsh restoration.

Despite its isolation and relative underuse, the site near 2505 E. 134th Street is far from pristine. Ringed on three sides by capped landfills, massive terraced mountains of the city’s garbage, it has been indirectly or directly polluted for years. Terrance O’Brien, chairman of the MWRD, noted that an environmental investigation of the property “revealed the presence of soil and groundwater contamination,” including semi volatile organic compounds and metals.

O’Brien, who voted for the proposed facility, points out that the lease would require the City to monitor groundwater at the site and prevent further contamination. “There will be improvement to the quality of the land,” he claims.

When asked about alternative locations for the gun range, O’Brien emphasized that this site was the only one offered. As for the possibility of a suburban range, O’Brien said that the CPD wanted a facility within city limits “to prevent excess travel by their officers for training.”

The department’s supposed concern with travel costs is belied by the chosen site’s isolation; the site at 2025 E. 134th Street is located over 20 miles south of the police academy at 1300 W. Jackson Boulevard, roughly the same distance from the academy as suburban Downers Grove. But the proposed site seems to be supported by both municipal bureaucrats and workaday cops.

The webmaster of the blog “Second City Cop,” an anonymous Chicago police officer, sees a clear need for an outdoor range: “The ranges we have are literally gas chambers—when they’re up and functional.” The blogger writes, “it’s near impossible to run 12,000 officers [through] a suburban range,” especially when those suburban communities have to train their own police forces.

”Second City Cop” also claimed that noise from the site would be negligible, and agreed with other online commentators who had argued that, in light of the recent legalization of handgun ownership in the city, the range should be accessible to civilians: “[The range] would probably end up paying for itself in short order.” As it stands, the site will only serve the CPD, Homeland Security, and possibly suburban police departments.

Speaking on behalf of several officials in the mayor’s office, city spokesperson Eve Rodriguez would not provide <i>the Chicago Weekly</i> with information on projected noise levels from the facility or comment on the possibility of an alternative site, noting that the training facility was still being developed. Like O’Brien and the “Second City Cop” blogger, she underscored the need for an outdoor facility.

But among the critics of the site, no one seems to oppose an outdoor range in general. “I see the need for an outdoor firing range,” said MWRD board member Debra Shore, who voted against the lease proposal. But they also stress that the proposed location is an important habitat for migratory birds. When the police only offered one site, the MWRD found that its hands were tied.

In April, the MWRD asked the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to carry out a survey of the area’s wildlife. Six black-crowned night herons—an endangered species—were identified. Because they found no nests, the state did not register an objection to the project. However, the survey also noted that a longer-term, specialized study would be needed in order to determine the impact that gun noise might have. According to Carolyn Marsh of the Audubon Society, during a recent Christmas bird count two bald eagles were spotted. While no longer endangered, the bald eagle is protected under the Migratory Bird Act Treaty. Without thorough, extended sound study, no one can predict how these birds will be affected.

Some wonder why the gun range site is no longer slated for restoration. “It is pretty remote, and it’s pretty degraded. But parts of it have vegetation and could be restored,” said Shore. Since the police have taken an interest, the original restoration plan appears to have been abandoned, and the range seems increasingly like a foregone conclusion. At this stage, three more City Council committees will review the proposal before the full council votes. Spokesperson Rodriguez estimates that this will take roughly four months. Although the lease may be rejected or curtailed at one of the upcoming stages, Shore seems resigned to the gun range: “Each step of the way, I think it’s going to get harder.”

* * * *

Roughly two blocks south of 135th, a pirate sculpted from scrap metal points the way to the M&M Windjammer, a nautical-themed bar which overlooks the Calumet River. In January, the docks of the river are flanked by tarp-covered boats and an unlit neon palm tree stapled to a telephone pole. Just across the water, behind the snowy bluffs of a capped landfill, lies the gun range site.

Inside the Windjammer, no one particularly seems to care about the gun range. Squiggy, a man playing video poker at a machine near the door, knew that the range was coming, but not when. “I go shooting, too,” he said, before turning back to his video poker machine.

Neighborhoods like South Deering and Hegewisch grew up around factories and railroads. Although the area had long supported a variety of industrial uses, by the mid-twentieth century, US Steel and other steelworks had become the region’s economic base. But during the 1970s and ’80s, the American steel industry collapsed, and people began to leave.

Nowadays, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, the economy in Hegewisch is heavily dependent on casinos across the Indiana border. Tom Shepherd of the SETF has seen the area change: “Wisconsin Steel, Republic Steel, Acme Steel are all gone,” he notes. Other companies, including Pullman Locomotive, Electro-Motive Diesel, and Sherwin-Williams, have also shut down or moved, taking with them thousands of jobs.

Although the steel mills have mostly left, traces of them remain. In the Calumet Region, what at a distance might be meadow turns out to be a junkyard, and ragged forests cloak the detritus of heavy industry.

About a mile north of 2025 E. 134th Street lies the 87-acre Lake Calumet Cluster, chosen by the EPA as a Superfund Redevelopment site in 2000. Slag dumping and other industrial practices left a robust mix of contaminants in the cluster, including lead, chloroform, PCBs, and arsenic. The Dutch Boy Superfund site (described in an EPA fact sheet as a “former lead and lead-based paint manufacturing facility”) is also nearby.

Across the Indiana border, industrial suburbs that were once beacons of progress (Josef Stalin proudly boasted that the city of Magnitogorsk’s production output was equal to Gary) now command six EPA National Priorities List sites within a radius of roughly two miles. Shepherd himself first got involved in SETF while opposing the use of a Waste Management-owned incinerator to burn hazardous materials; these actions, though in violation of the company’s permit and eventually discontinued, were clearly in keeping with historical precedent.

* * * *

Traveling through this region, it takes a great deal of faith in the power and virtue of government to imagine something like the Millennium Reserve succeeding. Nature has returned to the area by default rather than by design.

A few miles east of Lake Calumet, Wolf Lake spills out across the Indiana border. While Lake Calumet has been radically expanded, contracted, alkalified, and acidified by over a century of changing industrial interests, Wolf Lake is relatively healthy—at least where it isn’t crossed by I-90 or filled in with ferrous slag. Power lines and smokestacks jut out above its eastern shore, but on the relatively bucolic Chicago side, a whiting of swans has settled near a cluster of ice fishing shanties.

A few ice fishermen watch the swans, but most focus on drilling through the surface and dropping in their lines. One fisherman, bundled up in arctic exploration gear, hadn’t heard anything about the range. “I’m not from around here,” he said, turning back towards the lake. Startled by encroaching humans, the swans scatter, settling a few hundred yards away. The fishermen keep drilling.

The city hopes to create such a scene in the marshlands, but it’s unclear whether this kind of tranquility can exist with a gun range next door.

courtesy of the Renaissance Society

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Just before last Sunday’s opening of Cathy Wilkes’s exhibit “I Give You All My Money,” Renaissance Society staff briefly convened to determine where the installation’s borders were supposed to lay. One staff member suggested that gallery-goers should be permitted to step over the small purple roses scattered on the floor. Another staffer agreed, but suggested using the disintegrating pink rubber mat as a limit. Guests could approach the small pile of matted hair and shattered pottery on the floor, but probably should not go behind the abandoned counters of the supermarket conveyor belt.

As anticipated, the boundary between art and gallery space was re-drawn as each viewer interacted with the piece. One man bent down to pick up a rose and was promptly informed that touching was not allowed. Later, a young girl gleefully approached a stovetop and reached for a worn plastic fawn resting atop the burners—only to be reminded by her mother that she shouldn’t grab at the toy because “this is art.”

“I Give You All My Money,” nominated for the Tate Modern’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2008, certainly defies any singular reading. Painted mannequins draped with rags are juxtaposed with food containers with crusty residues of marmalade and porridge, creating a scene with an uncertain narrative. “I am not interested in trying to be objective in a work of art,” Wilkes said in a talk with curator Hamza Walker last Sunday. “There isn’t a point to thinking what somebody else might think as I’m working.”

Though scattered bowls, an old stroller, a stove, and the exhibit’s title certainly address the issues of consumerism and womanhood, the objects in her installation do not insist on a singular interpretation. Wilkes says she was inspired by the notion of attention, “a contemplative openness without any thoughts, a non-aggressive thinking.”

In creating “I Give You All My Money” Wilkes says she drew from her own experience as a woman, a mother, and a Christian. Repeated motifs in the installation raise some objects to icon status, serving as vehicles of communion for their viewers. “There is a type of presence in repeated actions,” she explained in the talk with Walker. The image of a basket, for example, is included both in the form of a birdcage hung over a mannequin’s head and as a shopping basket, which serve as signs of entrapment in the role of a homemaker. Yet, according to Wilkes, it also references the basket Jochebed used to send Moses down the Nile representing the ultimate maternal sacrifice.

As viewers contemplated the installation components of “I Give You All My Money,” three untitled paintings lay on a wooden table on the other end of the gallery, largely ignored. The small canvases, abstract compositions with colorful undulating lines and amorphous forms, displayed a thick buildup of paint, smeared like mud on the image surface. Though these paintings seemed at first a far cry from the other symbolic objects in the exhibition, their placement on a table suggested that they, too, should be viewed as objects rather than fine art. But as Wilkes discussed how her paintings would accumulate layers of detritus from use as impromptu notepads and coasters, the paintings began to emerge as readymades in their own right.

By taking objects out of her own life—whether pots, pans, or paintings—and inserting them into the sterile “white cube” of the gallery space, Wilkes successfully transforms them. A viewer can recognize the objects as functional or sentimental reminders of home, but the desire to touch and use them is blocked by their status as art. “A feeling of alienation or not alienation with objects is important,” Wilkes says, later adding, “I was putting them inside a cosmic space, apart from the physical world we live in.” By suspending quotidian objects in a realm of contemplation and confusion, Wilkes encourages her viewers to reconsider the relationships and borders between people, objects, and the art we often take for granted.

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue. Through Mar. 4, 2012, Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday: 12-5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

The process of adapting “Invisible Man” for the stage began some years ago when film director and screenwriter Oren Jacoby paired up with Christopher McElroen, a New York-based stage director. The work posed challenges for the two early on—getting the rights to the novel from the Ralph Ellison Trust was not easy. Because of Ellison’s qualms about letting out his work for adaptation, the trust has closely monitored use of the book.

The script is composed only of direct quotations pulled from the novel, which was published 60 years ago this year. Though the work’s first-person narration has been pared down considerably, it has been a battle to whittle down the script to a manageable length. The show runs for three hours with two intermissions, which seems long until you consider that for most of last year, Jacoby, McElroen, and Court staff traveled around the country hosting readings, cutting chunks of the script each time.

The first of these readings was held in November of 2010, and the idea of adapting “Invisible Man” immediately struck a chord with Court and its audiences. “The show represents an intersection of Court’s recent mission—new adaptations and African-American stories,” says Court dramaturge Drew Dir. According to Dir, this story should be especially interesting when told in Hyde Park, both a South Side cultural hub and Barack Obama’s home base.

Both the novel’s content as well as it form proved difficult to rework—its non-linear, first-person narration of the title character’s journey from aspiring professor to radical spokesperson for “the race” is difficult to present onstage. The flashback, the voiceover, the memory, which are all vital elements of Ellison’s prose, might be better suited to the silver screen, where it is easier to rapidly switch between images. Court has taken on the challenge, and the product comes very close to a screen-like adaptation, even if at times the visuals come off more assaulting than arresting. The production is clearly meant to astonish and entertain—the sheer mass of lighting and projection effects make the small theater space shimmer like Times Square.

The design is difficult and intense, incorporating many intricate movements of partial walls and floor props. The effect is a little odd—the design is so technical and sophisticated that it feels slightly over-executed. The director and the designers,  brought in from New York, have had over a year to stew on the project, so every detail has been calculated and checked over. The whole technical component, dubbed “aggressive” by Dir, is so powerful it’s almost blinding. The unfortunate result is that it’s powerful enough to overshadow the acting, which often manages to hit right on target, especially considering the number of roles each actor must play—there are ten actors and twenty four characters. Invisible Man, played by Teagle Bougere, has more lines than you can shake a stick at, and he delivers them flawlessly and with poise. The actor playing Ras the Destroyer and the university president is also a standout.

What’s next for Jacoby’s “Invisible Man?” Dir says that there are many different productions to come. “The book has never not been relevant…we want to reexamine “Invisible Man” in a new epoch,” he states, sharing the sentiment of many other theatres around the nation. The script is expected to develop beyond this stage and emerge within a few years as a more polished work—hopefully with fewer flashing lights. And in case you’re wondering, Court’s master electrician proudly delivers the number of bare bulbs onstage in Court’s design at exactly five hundred thirty-five.

Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 19. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org

Upon stepping into the exhibit’s space at the back of the gallery, the viewer is at once struck with the skin-crawling beauty of the objects spread throughout the room. Centered on a pedestal in the middle of Marenco’s room is a pretty piece of old metal craft: a small iron resting upright, its petite grip still attached to the body. But the familiar domesticity comes with a dark underside: a litter of metal spikes rise out of its bottom, facing the doorway. This piece, “Homage to Man Ray,” directly recalls the work of the well-known surrealist, who also stuck nails into an old iron and called the new, unusable object “Cadeau” (Gift). Those frightening spikes recur throughout Marenco’s show, throwing off the comfort found in ordinary household articles and inviting dark and disturbing connections.

Deeper into the room, along the dark painted walls and seated on another low pedestal, is an expertly crafted hobbyhorse—or rather, a hobby-bull—titled “The Little Bull for the Baby Pain.” A cute and lovely display of woodwork; but, there again, a host of masochistic spikes jut out from the seat of the plaything. Similar in both prickliness and material, a piece titled “The Last Step,” is fastened onto the dark-blue wall next to the bull. A pleasant match, the inside of this open-faced shoebox is a weathered pair of loafers turned toes-to-the-ground, their insides filled to the brim with the spiny “gumballs” of sweet gum-trees. Perhaps the most discomforting intervened item, though, is “Toothbrush,” a smooth white wooden brush with teeth growing out from where the bristles should be.

Marenco constantly plays with the tension between daily comforts and the uncanny nastiness they obscure. There’s an undeniable, creepy comedy to all of it. In this exhibit, he riffs on puns at one moment (“Toothbrush,” for instance), and revels in absurdity the next, as in “Hairball Machine,” a rusted gumball machine filled with tangles of the artist’s girlfriend’s actual hair). The viewer’s gut reaction to all of these surreal pairings is a combination of a scoff and shudder. But under the surface of these works, which evoke art movements of years past, is also a distinct, personal experience—a story of the artist himself.

Marenco manipulates many childhood staples in “Objetos Intervenidos,” but the ones central to the artist’s own memory seem to be placed in the limelight. “Slingshot for an Altarboy,” for example, transforms a rosary into a slingshot with a leather-strap and a T-bone handle. Next to it hangs “The Voice of Silence,” a corroded tin lid with the silhouette of the Virgin Mary in its center, recalling traditional portraiture in a striking, almost perverse way. Both works reinforce an understanding of the artist’s childhood under Mexican Catholicism, but “Objetos Intervenidos” unfolds for the viewers, allowing them to dredge out buried thoughts. These items of mixed-together elements and odd material house the pains of childhood, both personal and universal, well addressed or still unresolved. With some strange pleasure, they at last pull back the veil on absurd connections that sprout up there. Or so said the umbrella to the ironing board.

33 Contemporary at Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Through February 11. Monday-Thursday, 10am-5pm; Friday, 10am-7pm; also by appointment. Free. (708)837-4534. 33collective.com

Fast-forward five years and it seems that this artistic ménage à trois has disbanded.

In preparation for his debut at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in the West Loop, Butzer gave a presentation last Wednesday at the Cochrane-Woods Art Center that demonstrated a reactionary shift in his style.

In the dim light, Butzer gripped the lectern, a cable-knit cardigan draped over his thin shoulders. “I have something entertaining for you,” he began, “something that is entertaining for both you and for myself.” Appearing before the crowd in round wire glasses, corduroys, and a striped polo shirt tucked conspicuously into Jockey boxer briefs, the artist looked like a more stylish Buster Bluth. He removed a stack of folded paper and explained he would read lines from the writings of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus—first in German, and then in English—in conjunction with slide images of his work. “So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.” The audience perked up their ears in anticipation.

He paused and flicked on the projector to reveal an image of one of his paintings: smoke gray with two rectangular outlines encroaching on one another.

“The sun is wide as a human’s foot,” he read. After clicking for the next slide, Butzer slowly turned over a new sheet from his stack of paper.

“If everything that exists should become smoke, even nostrils would still distinguish it.” The audience squirmed as he deliberately read the phrase forcefully in German, paused for effect, then repeated the phrase in English.

Butzer’s recitation held the audience in rapt puzzlement. Each slide deviated only slightly from the ones preceding it—a slight thickening of the ubiquitous black rectangles, a miniscule variation in the gray hues.

These paintings are nothing like the vibrant cartoon-like work he completed in the mid-2000s. In fact, it seemed as though his work had undergone a complete genre swap: Butzer’s self-proclaimed “Science Fiction Expressionism” now reads as stark non-fiction. But Butzer insisted, “I see [the paintings] as similar to everything I did before. [The audience] should react and be irritated by it.”

The exhaustive exploration of the formal black and gray paintings is essential to Butzer’s artistic process. “If it seems familiar to you then it’s new…[The repetition] is how you can get closer to the birthplace of painting.”

When asked about his shift in aesthetic, he answered without batting a lash: “I wanted to escape the dualism of polychromatic and monochromatic.” He looked at the projector screen, and said, “These works inhabit color. They are primary colors living in the painting inside—not being added on the surface.” The audience gazed blankly at the flat gray paintings, trying to fully comprehend this assertion.

An attendee asked about the black rectangular forms, but Butzer see it that way. “I have never painted a rectangle in my whole life because I do not believe in earth-bound geometry,” Butzer asserted, somewhat opaquely. “I calculate coloristic values rather than geometry. I would call the paintings round, even. I paint over these laws and calculate every bit of it and paint over again and again. It’s about annihilation. It burns away measurements because they are round.”

Continuing the theme of annihilation, Butzer told the crowd that he only draws inspiration from dead artists and cited Raphael as his latest artistic muse. “I cannot accept the [artists] that live,” he said. “It’s not my job to like other artists.”

Room 43, the new home of the Hyde Park Jazz Society, is already more than a venue—it’s a niche social scene. After decades of lacking a regular venue for affordable jazz performances, harmony (preferably of the discordant Miles Davis variety) is within earshot for legions of South Side jazz fans, and the people packing Room 43 on Sunday nights know jazz. An embrace is the most common form of greeting and no one is shy about telling you the size of his record collection. One gentleman couldn’t wait to detail the best of his three-thousand LP library. But before getting there, he had a few questions. “Hold up,” he boomed, by way of introduction. “Do you know who this is?” pointing at a speaker issuing a stand-in melody. By luck, sheer dumb luck, his interlocutor knew the name. “Oh, well I just had to check up on ya’. Make sure you were for real.”

For area resident John Lee (also, like Bernard Scavella, of the pharmaceutical persuasion), the Hyde Park Jazz Society’s return and permanent residence is no minor feat. “I’ve been following Bernard for years,” says Lee, weighing his words carefully, beret slightly askew. “Its an achievement that we can bring people like him in regularly. I’ve been listening to this stuff for over 40 years and I would always come back to hear him here.” He explains that his love for the medium began as a kid in Alabama, back in the day when the Norman Rockwell-vision of the whole family huddling round a radio had already ceased to be a societal norm.

The Hyde Park Jazz Society’s new (or rather, renewed) home is located a good eight blocks beyond the neighborhood’s northern border. If not for the nearby bistro, African art gallery, and the muffled sounds of ’40s ballads, Room 43 would blend seamlessly into this staid section of 43rd Street. The area betwixt Bronzeville and Hyde Park once vied with Harlem as jazz’s national epicenter. Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans, but when his dynamic riffs had become a local legend and he was ready for the big time, Satchmo ditched the Bayou and set up shop on the South Side. The area had a good half-century run until the late ’60s, when the number of clubs dwindled and then—with the help of, as a few audience members put it sourly, “urban renewal”—ceased to exist.

The Hyde Park Jazz Society formed back in 1995 to try and revitalize the scene by regularly enticing musicians to stray farther south of the Loop. Despite the group’s huge success with its annual Hyde Park Jazz Festival, the organization has  had trouble maintaining weekly performances. At long last they found Room 43, offered by local restaurateur Norman Bolden in 2009. But a bureaucratic snafu caused the city to halt performances until Bolden went through the lengthy process of obtaining a Public Place of Amusement license. With amusement legalized on 43rd St., the Hyde Park Jazz Society celebrated its new digs in high style on January 5.

Still, it’s not exactly promising when a building feels the need to advertise itself as “classy.” (But that’s the trouble with classiness: if you use it you lose it.) In the case of Room 43, though, the word presents itself as something of a self-evident truth. The venue sports elegant tables complete with candlelight and black tablecloths, the wait staff is attentive, the bar well-stocked, and the hors d’oeuvres not abnormally expensive. The décor appears to have been lifted from the nearby African art gallery and makes what might have seemed a generically chic layout distinctive and worth pausing over.

But Scavella doesn’t seem to need pauses. As evening wore into morning, the tunes’ tempo and verve steadily increased. Scavella, like any venerable musician, can master any mood, but seems practically transcendent when he slips into classic jazz anthems. The group performed a peerless rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan,” and the song’s Spanish intensity forced one aged attendee to attempt an interpretative dance number without leaving his chair. Scavella is backed up by a crack ensemble, staffed with soloists that can keep pace with his trilling, bar after bar. Guitarist Randy Ford gets so absorbed in the improvisation that he silently scats his killer riffs before he plays them; reading his lips is a preview of the soaring rhythms that are next on tap. Toward the end of the night, the quintet brought the house down with the Herbie Hancock mainstay “Cantaloupe Island.” The tune is an improviser’s dream, an infectious melody that hooks the listener into the extended solo section that mercifully refuses to end. The four-hour format is one of Room 43’s chief strengths.  Jazz is an art form best absorbed live and at length. The call and response needs to be teased out and the harmonies absorbed over time to be cared about.

After quitting Room 43, the fact that many Americans’ exposure to jazz begins at Starbucks and ends with three excruciatingly mellow-minutes of Kenny G. starts to seem like an ongoing national tragedy. Locally, there is an escape route. South Siders no longer have an excuse for feeling lukewarm about jazz. Elevator music has a cure and it just gained a new lease on life on 43rd Street.

The Hyde Park Jazz Society holds concerts every Sunday Evening at 7:30 in Room 43. 1043 E. 43rd Street. $10 adult/$5 students and children. hydeparkjazzsociety.com

Traditionally the music of the Colombian peasantry with a distinctive Afro-Caribbean beat, cumbia has begun to incorporate other music genres, from reggaeton to house as it modernizes. As cumbia evolves, so does its fan base: no longer only a favorite of Latinos and Latin-music enthusiasts, cumbia is drawing in young Chicagoans looking for something to dance to. One of the genre’s virtues is its ability to retain and expand its appeal, incorporating the sounds of the people and places it comes into contact with.

A style less renowned than salsa or bachata—at least in Chicago—cumbia is rarely played in these parts. To make up for this shortage of that signature shuffle, the People’s DJs Collective holds monthly cumbia nights where the lively and danceable music is given its due. When they first started playing, they showcased Maracuyeah, an all-female DJ group from Washington, DC. Maracuyeah’s name is a play on the Spanish word for passion fruit, maracuyá, and denotes how they, like the People’s DJs Collective, are interested in injecting Latin music with the sounds of hip-hop and dubstep.

Earlier in the night, familiar salsa and meringue beats reverberated: a more folksy style of cumbia issued from the turntables, with fewer of the touches that give cumbia its contemporary, poppy flavor. Later in the night NuCumbia came on, a subgenre that infuses elements of hip-hop and house. The DJs played some tried and true remixes, like Juanes’s “La Camisa Negra,” and some pleasant surprises, like a mashup of the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

The People’s DJ Collective got their start playing fundraisers for non-profits. Their promise to serve the community through the fusion music they play remains evident today in their decision to hold cumbia night at Zhou B. While the swank art gallery is not exactly of the masses as cumbia professes to be, Itzi-Nallah says that Zhou B’s location in Bridgeport helps to attract a local crowd—one of the Collective’s primary objectives. “Many times the Latin community has to go north or to expensive places to hear nice music, or just a generic Latin night. A lot of our people don’t want to go to Wicker Park.”

The dancers on the floor included Latinos living on the South Side and young adults with a taste for cumbia’s syncretic sound. There were a few members of the crowd engaging in the kind of sexy shimmying that Shakira removed her bottom rib to do, but most of the attendees seemed relaxed and insouciant, practitioners of a more homegrown groove. Another DJ summed it up nicely later that night: “It’s a traditional kind of music, but anyone can dance to it.”

Tyler Leeds

Bruce Taylor began the first day of class by asking his nine students why they were given their first names. “I was named Joy,” responded one student, “because my daddy said I brought joy into his life.” After two beats of respectful silence a single giggle escaped from someone’s mouth. The class erupted in laughter. Taylor moved on to the next student.

“My grandma and my mom named me Ashley because they didn’t want stereotypes thrown upon the family,” answered another student. “Instead of being called a black name, they chose a common name so that unless I told someone my race no one would know.” This time no one laughed. Instead, a few hands crept toward the book lying on everyone’s desk—Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” Taylor was unfazed, and moved on to the next student. Ashley’s response was exactly what he was looking for.

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The students all came from King College Prep in Kenwood, one of Chicago Public Schools’ selective-enrollment high schools. They had come to a classroom on the University of Chicago campus to participate in an enrichment program called Living Bookshelf. The program, created by Taylor, attempts to push student engagement with the arts beyond plot quizzes and reviews. In Taylor’s classroom, the students were pushed to emotionally identify with Ellison’s work. In preparation for their first session, the class attended Court Theatre’s production of the “Invisible Man”—the novel’s first theatrical adaptation.

After four two-hour sessions of discussion and collaboration, the students will have produced their own creative response to Ellison’s novel—a two-scene musical theatre piece exploring the identities of two secondary characters. Mary Ann Ivan, a veteran of Broadway musical pits, will be flown in to compose music to accompany the lyrics the students write. Taylor will then hire professional actors and singers to perform the scenes on stage at Court Theatre as part of the Hyde Park Bank High School Performance Festival on February 24. But before lyrics can be paired with notes, the students have to do some work.

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While Ashley’s response quieted the room, Taylor was just beginning to warm up. At age 65, Taylor is a spry man. He has a mess of grey hair and a full mustache. He speaks with the intonation and cadence of someone used to an audience. As his students sat along narrow tables that formed a hollow rectangle, Taylor ran about in the middle. He never waited for his students to raise their hands. Instead, he would rush up to whoever hadn’t spoken in awhile. He would lean across the table and look them in eye and ask, “What do you think?” If they took too long, he would reach across and poke the students gently in the head. Their stunned expressions and indignation didn’t change the fact that Taylor’s enthusiasm was infectious.

Taylor’s first question was intentionally pointed—the history of one’s family and culture are often expressed in one’s name. Taylor’s class contains nine African Americans from the South Side, and he was seeking an emotional avenue into Ellison’s text. “Invisible Man” is the story of an African-American man leaving the South for New York City during the turbulent inter-war years.

After Ashley’s remark, everyone could make out the connection between their own lives and the novel. But how clearly did they see it? While Taylor allowed the power of Ashley’s words to linger in the classroom, he is still, like many great educators, quite demanding. Taylor began to drill his students on the basics.

“Our understanding must begin with context,” Taylor declared. “What is the context of this work?”

“Racism. Those were racist times,” said one student, half as an answer and half as a question.

“Correct, but tell me more,” Taylor pressed. “Tell me specifically. Jim Crow laws have a lot to do with the context of this work. Now, which Jim Crow laws offend you the most, and which offend you the least?”

Taylor marched around the room, passing from student to student. They all had the chance to demonstrate their opinions, with Taylor supplementing their knowledge of history along the way. In this manner, the students not only strengthened their understanding of the text, but also the connection between Ellison’s reality and the South Side today.

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Taylor has a long history with theatres. In the mid-1970s, Taylor was the production stage manager for the Seattle Opera. Under the Carter administration, federal money became available to arts organizations that were willing to bring their programming to public school students. This is where Taylor got his start as an arts educator. To prepare students to experience opera—never an easy task—Taylor was sent to prep classes on what to expect before arriving at the theatre. According to Taylor, “I had done almost everything anyone can do in a theatre, but I found I really enjoyed [teaching] and that I did it well.”

From this beginning, Taylor conceived of a post-viewing session to help students refine their understandings of the performances and to discuss their reactions. But Taylor knew arts education shouldn’t simply work to increase his student’s appreciation of work. He wanted his students to love art with the same intensity he possessed, but he also wanted them to get a job so that they could continue to appreciate the arts. As a result, Taylor claims it is his job to “get kids to really use in their own lives what we in the arts use in our profession. So I thought to myself, ‘What are the habits of mind that artists develop? How do we think? How do we create? How do we work together?’”

The seed of Living Bookshelf was planted, but Taylor still needed inspiration. During this time, Taylor came across the Foxfire Magazine. Created in 1966, “Foxfire” is one of the most prominent examples of 1960s experiential education.

Based out of Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School, a private high school in Georgia, “Foxfire” was a student-produced publication that documented the cultural history of the declining Appalachian culture. A collection of the articles was published as a book in 1972, later becoming a national bestseller.

“After reading the Foxfire book,” says Taylor, “I asked myself, Why couldn’t kids do that in the arts?” As a result, Taylor began a program entitled “Creating Original Opera.” As in Living Bookshelf, students were tasked with not only understanding a work—in this case, an opera—but also producing an artistic response to be performed. According to Taylor, “Creating Original Opera” was conducted in over 1000 schools across twelve countries.

But “Creating Original Opera” was always seen as a supplement to his students’ education. While Taylor may wish otherwise, operas never play a central role in primary education. In today’s world, the reaching of national standards in the language arts and mathematics controls school funding. Taylor had to adapt.

“Common Core State Standards dominate primary education. They have been adopted by 46 states. And so I looked at the Common Core requirements, and I thought that I could slightly modify what I do to meet these new requirements,” says Taylor. Living Bookshelf is Taylor’s attempt to meet state education requirements through the arts.

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Taylor recently left the East Coast for Chicago because his wife found a new job. “She makes way more money than I do, so I had to move with her,” he says. “I moved here without a job. I still don’t have a job, but arts education is what I do, so I don’t care if I get paid to do it or not. I like to think that I am my wife’s contribution to the arts.”

Once in Chicago, Taylor got in touch with William Michel, executive director of the UofC’s Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Taylor’s current incarnation of Living Bookshelf is being offered through the UofC’s Arts and Public Life Initiative. Taylor had no plans to work with “Invisible Man,” but took advantage of Court Theatre’s production. According to Dara Epison, program coordinator of University and Community Arts Collaborations, “The fact that the students chosen to work with him would have the opportunity to perform their work on Court’s stage with professional actors was simply a result of the stars aligning properly and Court being incredibly supportive.”

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By the end of the first session, the students had had no problem identifying the two characters from “Invisible Man” that they wanted to explore. Selecting the character of Ras, who is loosely based on the Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, was especially easy. The students were intrigued by the man they interpreted as vengeful, strong-willed, and determined.

In between the end of class and the second session, held last Saturday, the students were tasked with creating a biography for Ras that explained his traits. Whether the result of Taylor’s careful prodding or not, imagination was in strong supply.

“Ras witnessed the murder of his family,” said one student, serious and soft.

“Yeah, his father was betrayed by a white guy involved in the Brotherhood,” whispered another.

As they traced out the source of his anger, Ras’s identity came into focus. He was a poet, and a few years had passed since the time of “Invisible Man.” Ras was now a participant in the Harlem Renaissance—another context for the students to explore.

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Most classrooms don’t work this way. Often, mastering the plot is what matters. It demonstrates a student’s ability to grasp and recall information, as that line of thinking goes. But while Taylor has adapted his project to state requirements, he believes foremost in protecting his students’ futures.

“Plenty of people have iPhones or iPads—if you want to know something, you just look it up,” he notes. “The students of today, if they want to succeed, need to learn how to think and create. They will be paid to be creative. The thing we have to prove, and I want to demonstrate with these kids, is that artists can contribute to student achievement. But we’re not going to succeed by having kids just act, sing, and dance. We have to have them get creative in a way they can apply to an academic subject.”

By leading his students through lyric writing, Taylor hopes to grant his students a command of metaphors—something required for state tests and successful communication. Placing these lyrics atop a melody will be no easy task, but the students still have a few more weeks to prepare. In the end, Taylor’s class will have created something new. This ability—creativity—is at the heart of Taylor’s mission.

“Because of the tests, teachers don’t ask students what they think, they ask what do you know, which isn’t so important. When you ask younger kids what do you think, they freeze. But the jobs out there today are conceptual and creative. The arts can help them think and create.”

Jamie Keiles

Three types of people turned out last Sunday for the Chicago Boat, Sports & RV Show: boat people, family people, and conventioneers.

The boat people flocked to McCormick Place for the boats. They bought boats (last year’s floor models), sold boats (“Rock-bottom boat show prices!”), and complained about things that were not boats (“Starbucks coffee is frou-frou!”). Atop the convention center’s lake-blue carpets landed boats formed a maze. In the alleys between the vessels, boat people talked shop, comparing specs on the various yachts, pontoon boats, and cabin cruisers on display.

The family people were not there for the boats. Children ran rampant and unsupervised across the convention floor, fingerprinting waxed fiberglass, kicking RV tires, and fishing for trout in the Huck Finn Trout Pond—basically a glorified baby pool with fish in it. For these kids’ parents, the boat show was merely this weekend’s alternative to a babysitter or a trip to Chuck E. Cheese’s.  From the sidelines of the show, the parents sipped sodas and looked relieved that the convention center’s attractions provided a momentary respite from the trials of parenting.

The conventioneers working the booths looked exhausted. For some, Chicago was nothing more than the fourth of many stops on the national boat show tour. Vendors arrived on Thursday equipped with bags of free giveaways, but by Sunday were running low on both energy and stock. They distributed the remaining promotional materials with an air of lethargy. Frequently, these giveaways had only tenuous links to boating. A kiosk advertising boat slips in Michigan offered free ChapStick. The Shedd Aquarium representative distributed chamois. Visitors enthusiastically hoarded these giveaways in promotional tote bags provided by Progressive, the show’s premier sponsor.

Cabela’s, an outdoor sporting outfitter, laid out one of the show’s more impressive spreads. At their booth, attendees fondled portable chairs, salivated over outdoor cookware, and camped momentarily in the display tents underneath the corrugated metal sky of the convention center. Touching the products was permitted. Though if it were not, it is doubtful that guests would’ve kept their hands to themselves.

One attendee, an Illinois resident who had just purchased a lake house in Indiana, attended the boat show in hopes of learning more about pontoon boats, a purchase he hopes to make in the future. Like many others, however, he seemed skeptical of the show’s capacity to turn a profit.  “I had a great time,” he explained.  “But I’m not really sure what kind of person actually buys a boat at these things.”

[Show as slideshow]

Kit Wise, Arcadia, 2011, video still, assisted by Darin Bendall

For an Englishman living in Australia, artist Kit Wise has a lot to say about ecology and sprawl in America. In his new piece “Arcadia,” which is on display at the Hyde Park Art Center through April 8, he uses dynamic high-definition digital collages of aerial photos to explore the relationship between ecology and urban forms.

Translucent photos of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 Mississippi River floods are overlaid to form a surreal landscape. Dozens of photos are projected across the screens simultaneously. They drift and merge. The superimposition is disorienting and unsettling, as discrete sets of images overlap along the length of the projection screens. Displaced houses float along wind-slapped highways. Down a few screens, cows and cars peer through images of damaged forests. Vast bodies of water suddenly become ravaged subdivisions. The transitory and transitional nature of the projections produces an otherwordly effect that highlights the limits of human control.

The exhibition’s title, “Arcadia,” is an intentional misnomer. The term, which conjures visions of idyllic pastoral life, makes an ironic statement when used as a descriptor for a piece that foremost showcases images of destruction. Wise’s collage harkens back to a work by French classical painter Nicolas Poussin. Poussin’s piece “Et in Arcadia” depicts four shepherds amid tranquil wildlife peering into a tomb. The title, which means “even in Arcadia,” is meant as a reminder that even in paradise, death and destruction are imminent. Wise’s “Arcadia” reflects and reiterates this theme. As skyscrapers and subdivisions merge with inundated streets and ravaged forests, Wise reminds us that at any time nature can break through the veil of civilized order. For Wise, like Poussin, destruction is a constituent part of utopia.

Continuing his tradition of producing site-specific pieces, Wise’s digital collage was created especially for HPAC’s Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery.  Located on HPAC’s second floor, the Goldwasser stretches, like a bridge, above the larger gallery below. On one side, viewers have an aerial view of the artwork and museumgoers on the first floor; floor-to-window ceilings flank the other side. “Arcadia” is an evening-only exhibition. At 3pm, as the sun begins to set, these massive windows of the Goldwasser Gallery are covered, and the shades become projection screens for Wise’s piece.

Viewing “Arcadia” in this setting is a curious experience. For one, it is difficult to avoid drawing parallels between the aerial nature of Kit Wise’s piece and the aerial view the catwalk provides of the gallery below.While looking down over the gallery conjures feelings of omniscience and control, looking at “Arcadia” spurs a sense of smallness, confusion, and distance. The piece’s translucent, overlapping bird’s-eye-views offer no real perspective of the places it depicts, and instead of the viewer feels a palpable loss of control, as if being consumed by nature. This effect is undoubtedly enhanced by the viewer’s proximity to the piece. Since the Goldwasser is at most three paces wide, visitors are forced to stand close to the vast screens. From this perspective, it is impossible to view the entire piece at once. Instead, the viewer must turn her head and crane her neck to keep up with the shifting landscapes. Occasionally, visitors to the gallery even come into contact with their own shadow outlined against the light of the projector, a subtle reminder that their own action or inaction, too, is implicated by the destruction of Arcadia.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through April 8. Reception February 12, 3pm-5pm. Monday-Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 10am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org