Last Wednesday, Vargas opened his both serious and comical speech at the University of Chicago’s International House by saying, “My name is Jose Antonio Vargas and I look Asian, which means I’m Filipino.” Throughout his talk—which left many members of the audience with damp tissues—Vargas played to his audience’s emotions in order to convince them that the United States immigration policy is racist and in dire need of reform.

Vargas began with his own story. In 1993, as a twelve-year old, he immigrated without his parents to Mountain View, California in the Bay Area. “I got there before Google,” he says jokingly. When he went to apply for a Driver’s License at the DMV in his late teens, he discovered that his green card was counterfeit. Since then, he has managed to evade the authorities while becoming one of the nation’s most celebrated young journalists. He has held coveted positions at some of the country’s most eminent publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post.  In 2007, Vargas won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Virginia Tech Massacre, but the journalist terms his acclaimed profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker to be the “high point of [his] career.” As a high school student, he says he thought, “Maybe I could write myself into America.” And that is exactly what Vargas has done.

His campaign, called “Define American,” is a mission to fix “our broken immigration system” and to create a “21st century underground railroad for illegal immigrants” to fill in where the government has failed. Vargas is critical of the “show-me-your-papers” bills being passed in Arizona, SB 1070, and Alabama, HB 56. He sees this legislation as the white man’s hypocrisy. “From 1892 to 1954, twelve million Europeans were welcomed into the United States at Ellis Island. And sixty years later, America is faced with the migration of another twelve million people.” The most important question, he says, is not “who, when, where, or how many,” but, “why do people want to come to the United States?” He answers this questions with another. “Why couldn’t I have a better life in Manila?” Vargas’ rhetoric is somewhat oversimplified. He seems to have overlooked the question of whether or not it would be sustainable for the United States to grant citizenship to every individual in the world who wants to become an American citizen.

To this day, Vargas, who has become a sort of celebrity activist, travels through airports in this country without a valid visa, betting each time that the authorities won’t catch him. “‘Why don’t you just make yourself legal?’ people ask me.” He gave the I-House audience his answer with a smirk: “Cause I’m a masochist and this is so fun.”

Run aground in the water of Morgan Shoal, a shallow expanse of botanically lush water which extends over half a mile between 45th and 51st Streets, the 109-foot vessel resisted all rescue attempts. After three days of struggle and a safe evacuation, she tipped. She may have caught fire. Since that summer, the Silver Spray has rested underwater off the shore of 49th Street, tranquilly preserved by the lake’s fresh water.

This was the story told last Saturday at the Hyde Park Historical Society by long-time Hyde Park resident Greg Lane, who swims in Lake Michigan every day and harbors (pun intended) a kind of boyish enthusiasm that would more likely be expected of his grade school son. Lane was intrigued by the Silver Spray’s boiler, which is visible from shore, so one day he swam out to investigate.

“There’s nothing quite so enchanting as swimming along in the lake and then suddenly looking down and discovering a propellor that’s as tall as you are,” he says. Scuba diving is illegal off the shores of the lake (“It puts people in danger of enjoying Lake Michigan,” Lane quips), but this doesn’t stop him from spreading the gospel of the sunken ship. At 10am on most Sundays, Lane can be found guiding civilians on “shipwreck tours”—free-dives out and down to the corpse of the Silver Spray.

Shipwrecks in American waters are protected by the Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987, created, essentially, to bring looters and abandoned booty within the realm of law. With no individuals to claim ownership, sunken vessels are given, by default, to the state. Lane expresses concern about protecting the wreck from municipal interference.  He wants people to be aware of, and to appreciate, the abandoned Silver Spray and its resting place on the shoal.

“Just like a historical building, it has a story to tell,” says Lane, a consciously modest and somewhat accidental spokesman for the wreck. Speaking to a full crowd in the Historical Society’s small space along Lake Park Avenue, his rhetoric  resembles a rallying cry to the amateur Hyde Park enthusiast. “I am now an underwater archaeologist,” he says with a smile. “That’s the great thing about this shipwreck. It’s the most accessible on Chicago shores, and it’s ours.”

Clark and Samarov are headlining this second installment of the Seminary Co-op’s “Doppelgangers” reading series, which aims to bring together local writers with similar interests, styles, and even last names (the first installment featured Adam Levin and Sarah Levine, both local authors and SAIC faculty). With the lighting situation resolved, the two writers, monoliths in the world of ‘Chicago cab driver fiction,’ assume positions on adjacent barstools and begin to read.

Clark chooses excerpts from “Nobody’s Angel,” a work that reads as a traditional murder mystery but also functions as a historical and topographical exposition of the mean streets of Chicago. Clark himself grew up devouring the works of Raymond Chandler and Nelson Algren, citing the first three pages of Algren’s “The Man with the Golden Arm” as the work that made him want to write. This influence is noticeable in his prose, which is simple and uncluttered, and, when read in his wonderfully abrasive Chicago accent, reflects the man’s desire to capture a seedy past and in the process, tell a damn good story.

Samarov, by contrast, is more of a critical commentator, interested in recounting his experiences with stupid, drug-addled, oversexed passengers, and using these to describe the reality of being a cab driver in a bustling, metropolitan city. “Cab drivers aren’t really seen as people,” he relates. “To most, you’re just the back of a head.” This sense of alienation, Samarov adds, makes for “a behind-closed-doors” dynamic that he believes heightens the humor and intimacy of his stories. Reading from “Hack,” a collection of short stories that take place primarily in downtown Chicago, Samarov, in Bukowski-like fashion, rants about inebriated teenagers, backseat sex-fests, and his general loathing of the ‘Drive-thru’ all in an honest, humorous, and genuinely unaffected fashion.

The event concludes with a brief but illuminating Q&A session, revealing, among other things, Jack Clark’s once unmistakable resemblance to Travis Bickle (I’d buy it) and Dmitry Samarov’s grim but characteristically comical message for prospective English majors: “Be careful, you might end up working at Starbucks or, you know, driving a cab.”

Behind Ondaatje’s light-hearted demeanor is an enduring history of printed works which have brought complex emotions, empathetic characters, and moving landscapes to inspired readers for decades. His most well-known book, “The English Patient,” centers around a burn victim with hardly any knowledge of his identity, and explores the intersections of several histories and characters. The English Patient garnered the Man Booker Prize for Ondaatje, who explained at his talk that the book started with a simple setting. A patient in bed, a nurse, and the two talking—such situational elements comprise what Ondaatje calls a “keyhole” to the content of his novels.

Ondaatje, white-bearded, looked every bit the part of the authorial sage. He spoke of the writing process, and how his mind spawns a novel from a well-visualized setting—which he relies upon to provide the underpinnings for characters, themes, and plot. He also read a few selections from his poetry collection “Handwriting,” and some new fiction. With gentle intonations and an unstirred focus on his creation, Ondaatje presented three passages from “The Cat’s Table,” which was published in 2011. He shared some excellent insights, expanding on the importance of setting to his writing, and he admitted to having no official process, or formal understanding of how he writes. As evidenced by the precisely constructed work he recited, Ondaatje remains an artist in every sense of the word.

(Anna Fixsen)

Adaeze Okorafor graduated from Northwestern with a degree in Bio-Engineering and a specialization in Prosthetics in 2010. She is now the founder of Dash Me—a Chicago-based company that hosts regular clothing swaps in the city. She explains that “after a few years of soul-searching, my interests shifted.” Her interest stems from her own excursions across the city: “I would go to Plato’s Closet and various consignment shops to drop off unwanted clothing and the idea came to me to develop a process where individuals could swap their items with each other—right then and there.”

Consignment shops like Plato’s Closet offer store credit and sometimes cash for unwanted clothing, accessories, shoes, and the like. However, customers often forget about store credit or can’t find the time to go back to redeem it. Okorafor notes that the immediacy of the exchange is lost.

Her company, Dash Me, takes its name from a West-African slang term meaning “give me” that is used to express one’s desire to receive an object. It is often used as a term of endearment between people when exchanging attractive or fanciful objects. Through Dash Me’s clothing swaps, she hopes to create a more immediate, gratifying, and social shopping experience.  This process of exchanging unwanted items is part of a growing interest in recycled fashion. Shoppers are becoming more aware of the unique path each garment follows—from maker to producer to buyer to supplier to consumer. Okorafor says, “while there are a few other local businesses in Chicago selling recycled fashion, it’s definitely a new trend.”

Dash Me held its first clothing swap at the University of Chicago this past winter, offering university and community members a chance to try out this alternative transaction. Okorafor partnered with Alexandria Batdorf, a fourth-year at the university involved with UChicago Hype, to organize the event in Ida Noyes Hall on a Saturday afternoon. While a Facebook invite detailed how the swap would work, most first-timers appeared somewhat confused though eager to learn as they arrived at the event.

Shoppers brought items from their closet (most of which they hadn’t worn in months), lugging them through the door in shopping bags. A guest handed her bag to a volunteer who checked her in, but told her she was to wait on the side until her ticket was ready. Five minutes later, her ticket was delivered, revealing how much her contribution was worth—she could swap her unwanted clothes for up to nine items. While one could certainly imagine attendees strategizing and calculating, the ferocity with which guests were rushing around the room to make their way to the hanging racks was surprising. The fervor was accompanied by Okorafor’s personal playlist of only the best Rihanna and Beyonce tracks, pumping up the fashionistas with fast-paced beats.

Another girl sorted through a stack of shirts trying to find something that she loved and that fit her well—a challenge, since the clothes were piled by styles and not size.  Shoppers seemed to look immediately for correct sizing over anything else. This strategy worked for two girls in the back who were laughing about how they were jealous of each other for “stealing” one another’s unwanted clothes. Of course, this wasn’t stealing—they had just exchanged their items. But it was still easy to feel a sensation of jealousy, when one watched another try on their unwanted items.

A few shoppers questioned the cleanliness of items at the swap, but as Okorafor says, “you never really know the path an item takes to get to you.” It’s easy to say something in a department store is cleaner than an item picked up at a swap, but this is not always the case: “it could very well be that an item in a department store never went through a sanitary inspection before being placed on a rack in a store.”

Racks filled with sheer blouses, nylon shirts, corduroy blazers, and denim jackets were slowly picked away. The tabletops in the center, which were once covered with pants, belts, and purses, were now visible, their barrenness indicating the many satiated swappers milling about.

This past weekend, Okorafor and Hype teamed up again to host a swap, but this time in the UofC’s McCormick Lounge. At this second event, there were more tables and racks set up for clothes, a wider variety of items (including jewelry), a longer swapping period, more shoppers from the community, a bigger team of volunteers , a photographer, and even some surprise wine.

The event garnered enough attention that there were, in fact,  too many items for the hanging racks, so volunteers filled several suitcases with clothes and placed them around the room. The overall mood was upbeat, but even more friendly this time around. Shoppers exchanged stories, tried on clothes for each other, and shared style advice. A girl from the North Side mentioned that she and a friend came down to Hyde Park for the swap just to have a “girls day.” Okorafor kept on her feet during the entire event, helping shoppers with any style or swap questions they had and directing her volunteers. “I’m lucky that some of my volunteers are my best friends,” she said. “They’ve been really supportive of these swaps.”

Every clothing swap is a learning experience for Okorafor. “I continually refine the process so that it’s more enjoyable and structured for shoppers.” The success of her swaps lies in their ability to get people moving, talking with each other, and having a good time. Okorafor hopes to also hold a mens-only swap in the near future. While there’s a tendency to associate an interest in clothing with women, Okorafor says this is definitely not the case: “Men—just like women—have plenty of unwanted items lying around in their closets.”

Okorafor certainly knows how to dress the part—at one event she donned a fedora-like hat with gold medallion earrings, while at another she wore a vintage floral top with a ballerina bun. But it’s important to recognize Dash Me did not emerge out of her interest in fashion; the company is much more about the practice of conscious consumerism. As Dash Me’s website notes, “Americans throw away 68lbs of clothing and textiles per person every year. With over 300 million people in the US, that adds up to over 10 million tons of waste.”

Okorafor also hosts an online vintage site in addition to her regular clothing swaps. “I go to stores and pick up pieces that I think are unique and sell them online.” Her mission is to promote recycled fashion through classic vintage styles. While she’s not really sure what the future holds for Dash Me, she says, “I’m definitely enjoying the process of figuring things out.”

Sabina Bremner

In 1988, Adelheid Mers—curator of “Hairy Blob,” currently on view at the Hyde Park Arts Center—received a yearlong grant for graduate study at the University of Chicago’s Committee on the Visual Arts. “I spent all of my time in the Regenstein,” she says, “reading everything I could get my hands on about space.”

For twenty years, she kept that knowledge stored away. Then she turned to time as a theme for her art, and she found a natural outlet for those hours of studying. Time, she has come to believe, is intimately bound up with our conception of space. “We think of time metaphorically, in terms of space,” she says.

These considerations are central to “Hairy Blob,” whose aim is to reconceptualize time. She explains, “I came to realize that our everyday, traditional understanding of time as past, present, and future leads us to use the past to validate certain traditions, and to use the future to justify things we want today; it helps us to avoid thoughtfully thinking through things.”

She pauses and begins to speak slowly, each word suffused with weight. “It seemed to me that past and future were thought constructions used to leverage power, and if we could think about time differently, social justice and sustainability thinking could be furthered.”

The title of the exhibit is a metaphor for our experience on Earth: we are just transitory ‘hairs’ on a spinning blob. The show includes cityscapes made of cardboard, a column of gilded encyclopedias entitled “Sunsets,” and a net suspending ping-pong balls scrawled on by viewers contributing their own opinions on the nature of time.

One video installation documents a bicycle ride through industrial Chicago neighborhoods, its frames aligned both spatially and temporally. “Piers,” a glossy photograph encompassing an entire wall, features its artist, Sarah FitzSimons, overlooking a barren, mountainous landscape on a boardwalk inscribed, “In memory of ancient seas, and for those waters yet to come.” Emily Newman’s video triptych “Polyteknicheskaya (Don’t Love Here)” elegizes a decaying Soviet-planned suburb slated for redevelopment: in a spare, candid style, it presents several intimate portrayals of the culture that has organically emerged there.

Faheem Majeed’s installation, “Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden,” takes up an entire room. It features a table piled high with found objects—books, paint cans, photographs, and knickknacks—which he thinks of collectively as a cityscape. These ephemeral objects have not been imbued with a monolithic social value; they are poised to be discarded and forgotten. As such, their positioning in the installation strikes the viewer as particularly personal.

“Viewers may be frustrated,” Majeed says, “by the fact that they don’t know why these objects were selected, what their explicit meaning was.” But that is part of the installation’s aim: to rethink the way we select history, valuing certain objects over others through archiving and documentation. Here, that process is turned on its head. Reconceived as art, these objects have been imbued with new meaning both individually, through the personal relationship Majeed shares with them, and socially, in their new role as art objects. The connection between time and space is rendered explicit in the way the piece also documents the history of a given space—the South Side Community Arts Center, the previous home of the objects.

In keeping with the theme of temporality, the pieces will evolve during the course of the exhibition. “It’s very important that the show not be static,” Mers comments. “Otherwise it’s just the same thing all over again: it becomes just another archive that gets reinterpreted.”

Kirsten Leenaars’ piece, “Rising and Falling Actions (Everything is imprinted forever with what it once is),” is currently an incomplete wall drawing featuring the words “TIME AS WE KNOW IT IS COMING TO AN END” in bold text. It will be filled in with the unfolding plot lines of a science fiction video she will create during a residency at the Center, in which the Center itself metamorphoses into “a flagship on a time mission.” Becky Alprin’s cardboard cityscapes will march across the gallery space day by day, a process that will be documented in stop-motion animation.

“Hairy Blob” itself is accompanied by a website, “The Asteroid Belt” at hairyblob.net, on which contributors post stories and essays consistent with the exhibition’s themes. As for Majeed’s piece, the gallery put up a “Do not touch” sign next to his installation, inadvertently forcing viewers to choose whether to transgress the prohibition. As gallery staff and viewers interact with the piece, it changes to reflect their modifications. Majeed claims that “Planting” is “the most unintentionally interactive he’s ever made.”

Mers remarks that “we’re more networked now than we have ever been.” The accelerating social change of postindustrialism affords us a novel vantage point from which to view, and therefore to reconceive, time. “Hairy Blob” seeks to take advantage of this particular moment, and Mers thinks that the response to it has reflected the unique nature of the show. “It’s a dialogue starter,” she says.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through July 29. Monday-Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 10am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Nandini Ramakrishnan

Behind most provocative art one expects to find a big personality and big opinions. But the face behind all of the genitalia, racial slurs, vomit, tongues, human feces, urine, breasts, and crude depictions of “Coco River Fudge Street” is a reticent, mild-mannered, and self-critical man in his early thirties. At the closing of his exhibition last Sunday at the Hyde Park Art Center, David Leggett was dressed in faded jeans, a hoodie, and old Nike sneakers—a guy you would not look twice at walking down Michigan Avenue, nor expect to have an imagination to rival the most hormonally-infused of teenage boys.

A Chicago resident and a graduate of the Savannah School of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute, Leggett’s work has been showcased at a range of venerable institutions, including the New Museum in New York City and Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Yet during his talk, Leggett had little to say, and almost none of what he did say was positive about the outcome of his exhibition, a collection of colored-pencil drawings created daily in 2011 and posted on his Tumblr. “I was very tired by the end,” he said apathetically, when coaxed by the curator to make a remark. Despite Leggett’s reticence, there is, in fact, a lot to be said about his work.

From Obama’s healthcare policy to teenage pregnancy to hustler culture and a whole lot of sex, most of Leggett’s 152 pieces address some social, political, or economic issue, usually pertaining to the African-American experience. With a quick glance across one of the rows of drawings in the hallway gallery  at HPAC, you’ll see a toilet overflowing with urine; the head of a black man on a rainbow swastika; a possessed  doctor with the words “Obamacare” hovering above a fat, sunburnt white man; and a chubby, unkempt black guy who’s thinking about his penis while a Cyclops stands behind him. The work is accompanied by the text, “All my work is about my mom.”

Most of the pieces contain some text written out in schoolboy penmanship with atrocious grammar, and the majority contain the word “niggah.” Besides colored pencil, Leggett also uses other “low tech materials,” such as glitter and felt. At times, his collection feels autobiographical, at others times it seems controversial purely for the sake of being controversial. “I’m not trying to be a moral compass,” he says.

Although Leggett’s drawings are humorous and brutally honest vignettes about society—in the gallery, you would often hear a patron chuckling under her breath—some of his work verges on complete arbitrariness. The Pablo Picasso stamps that fill a number of his drawings, for example, have nothing to do with the subject matter of the other drawings. Some works seem needlessly provocative; one piece consists of a simple phallic scribble below the word “penis,” and some drawings verge on the pornographic. His collection also seems unedited—this is perhaps the point—to the extent that it looks more like a series of exercises rather than a selection that is ready for show. Regardless, the best of his work sticks to the African-American experience.

It is clear Leggett uses his art and the Internet as a means to express that suppressed teenage boy inside him. His project began on a Tumblr account, where he posted his daily drawings and took requests from the public once a week. Since the inception of his blog, he has amassed a huge cult following of, believe it or not, teenage boys—a couple of whom eagerly waited in line at the closing of his show to ask him questions. This is perhaps the only thing he expressed an inkling of enthusiasm about; “I find it fun to talk to teenagers,” he said, “looking at what fifteen year olds are doing and then there’s me, 31, doing the same thing.”

At the end of his interview, the curator asked him, “Do you have any questions for the audience about their perceptions of your work?” “No, not really,” he said, staring into space. Then a member of the audience asked a question about working on Tumblr.  He paused and said, “Online is great because people think I’m much cooler than I am.”

(Julia Dratel/University Theater)

“…that Proper Inner Creative State, is rare / It is so seldom that an actor dares / to be a human being in front of you / It’s often just by chance.” This is the explanation of the slippery task of acting provided by Stanislavski #5 in Mickle Maher’s adaptation of “An Actor Prepares,” which had its premiere last weekend at the Logan Center for the Arts. In the play eight, actors, four of whom are UofC students, dare to portray the author of the classic guide to acting.

Stanislavski wrote his book “An Actor Prepares” to explain his “system” for making acting a living, emotional craft—in other words, to make it honest. Maher’s play is written in rhymed verse, something that he finds brought the work closer to that honesty. He explains,  “It just felt wrong to have Stanislavski talk about truth and theater and artifice and belief in some ‘realistic’ biopic vernacular.”  In Maher’s play, the audience discovers early on that the work is no self-indulgent theatrical inside joke; it provides a place and a set of emotions to the stereotypical etching of Stanislavski imagined by his readers.

“Emotion memory,” Stanislavski cannot resist explaining to the audience, “is a bead inside a box… Our past / is precious and is, naturally, of vast / importance to the actor. But it’s passed.” Maher’s play calls up a past, a person, and a process that aren’t imagined at all. It brings to life the real world of 1935 Moscow, Stanislavski as more than a mythical figure, and the way to make acting into necessary truth.

Much of the cast remembers Maher’s decision to fit Stanislavski’s long written work into a 90-minute night. This is evident in the show’s urgent pacing, as Stanislavski forces himself to explain in words a system which he himself believed “must be studied in the work of practical execution.”

He has help in this task. Just as the original book used a Socratic dialogue of characters as its illustrative device, the eight Stanislavskis take part in exercises which put the theory into practice: imagining a madman at the door or the sensory recounting of a trip to a store—where, to the famously chainsmoking Stanislavski’s despair, the cigarettes purchased were merely imaginary—and so on. The shifts in scenes are marked by stark changes in lighting and dramatic surges of music involving violin, cello, and one particularly powerful use of a Russian chorus.

These dramatic exercises stand out as delightful challenges to the seasoned actor and remind the elder Stanislavski of what he loves about the craft. The practice, however, becomes horrific when Stanislavski’s own memories and fears begin to pervade the circumstances; he sees his nephew and his old pupil Meyerhold murdered—as they truly were—for unspecified crimes against Soviet Russia.

The horror of these deaths is sometimes shaking and sometimes diluted, often giving the impression of something underexplored. But the doubt that Stanislavski feels about his work and his politics enlivens what could have been a self-referential piece of theater with human emotion—with need, regret, and nostalgia. The play’s eight characters bring to the piece what Maher also says has been a benefit of working with students, as he has throughout the creation of this play—eagerness and newness: “they haven’t seen it all before.”

Maher, a founding member of Theater Oobleck in Chicago, finds that playwriting “remains a solitary experience.” But he has benefited greatly from the workshops, classes, and rehearsal process this play has seen. And the students who have been a part of this process since the fall—or earlier, for those who took the class attached to it—have learned a great deal in return. As actor Jason Shain, a fourth-year in the College, puts it, the play is “a very simple request for people to just commit to being a real person.”

The actors each have their own processes of preparing to “commit,” including a focus-building game of catch with a ball of duct tape (“Ductball,” introduced by other Oobleck veterans). For actor Alexandra Mathews, a first-year in the colege who plays Stanislavski: #4, prepartion entails a meditative period which she sees as a transformative “molting” of her usual self, helping her to more convincingly inhabit the role. The immensity of work done to make this play a real examination of both acting and the experience of “real” life in terrible circumstances, frustration over both writer’s block and the loss of friends and youth, has paid off.

Halfway through the play, the “real” Stanislavski slips irresistibly back from bed to tell the audience of “memories…eager always to fly on where we / cannot,” and a chill Russian wind heard in the theater seems to whisper the truth: that this line speaks, not only of the mind, but to the art of theater. This play stands in for the power of acting itself: the remarkable practice of showing life.

“An Actor Prepares” runs for one more weekend. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. April 26-28. Thursday-Friday, 8pm; Saturday, 3pm and 8pm. $6. (773)702-9315. taps.uchicago.edu

This was not a show that catered to the uninitiated. Audience and cast members for an upstairs production of “The Vagina Monologues” clustered outside the doors of Hallowed Grounds coffee shop tentatively. The more adventurous peeked inside, but true fans made themselves known. This crowd—college age, mostly male, and largely bespectacled—almost looked ready to take a serious academic interest in the proceedings. Hallowed Grounds, while still open, was not selling much coffee.

Wyche was followed by Spanyurd and Preachy Preach, two local bands specializing in the kind of music that you feel more than hear. Spanyurd, a Chicago trio that jokingly fancies itself “nu-metal for the politically correct,” thickened the air with its manic psychedelia and heavy post-hardcore riffs. Preachy Preach played on its home turf; the band is comprised of UofC undergraduates Steve Balogh, Mike Splendore, and Josh Oberman. The trio has appeared over the years at both South Side and more northern venues, including the now defunct Moving Castle. On this night, they delighted in their own apocalyptic noise. Forceful riffs and deep grooves were considered by the audience rather than celebrated—many in the front row sat nodding appreciatively. One man lay on his back with a book. There’s a healthy contingent of Hyde Park devotees. But who else knew that UofC actually had punk bands? It’s a not-quite-rhetorical question that the show asked even in its promotional materials. Now, thanks to the efforts of TRIX operatives, the answer is “everyone who was on University Avenue between 56th and 58th Streets on Saturday night.”

“When we moved into the building, there was a sense we would do something,” said economics professor and art director Canice Prendergast referring to the business school’s occupation of the Rafael Viñoly-designed Harper Center. That “something” turned out to be a collection of contemporary art. Prendergast was joined by Suzanne Deal Booth, contemporary art director of the Art Institute James Rondeau, Rennaisance Society director Suzanne Ghez, and UofC alum and art collector Dean Valentine to seek and select the art.

The committee travels internationally, from Los Angeles to Switzerland, to find new and exciting works. They operate democratically, selecting pieces by vote. “Everybody’s had their feelings hurt,” Prendergast laughed. “I suggest what I think is the best thing since sliced bread and everyone says no, it’s terrible, and I kind of sulk for a bit.”

He doesn’t sulk for long. Big names in contemporary art grace the walls—Andre Butzer, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Hanne Darboven, to name a few. The collection’s burgeoning esteem, as well as the clout of the committee members, gains them access to increasingly rare and high-end art. “There are certain artists where demand far exceeds supply, so you basically have to make a case to the gallery,” Prendergast explained. “It took us a while to get to that stage, but now people know we’re a serious collection.”

The collection has caught the eye of galleries in New York. A work by Anna Shteynshleyger currently sits on loan in the International Center for Photography. In the past, the New Museum and the Irish Museum of Contemporary Art have also loaned pieces from the collection. The Booth School also has an agreement with the Smart Museum to lend out any piece at their request.

The unusual set-up of the collection, which is scattered throughout the building, gives the committee unique parameters within which to work. They have to appeal to a much wider audience, one that is not necessarily educated in art. “We are mindful of diversity on every level—medium, scale, subject matter, gender, geographic points of origin, etc.,” Rondeau said. The committee toyed with adopting a specific theme for the collection, but decided to leave it open-ended to avoid narrowing the scope of the work.

Certain motifs do inevitably crop up, connecting the works: the photographs, in particular, exude political messages, almost in response to their business school surroundings. Globalization, imperialism, cultural clashes, and industrialization are but few of the issues represented. For Prendergast, this complements the education at Booth, urging students to think broadly about the world.

Many of the photographs have a wry attitude toward their political subjects, like Tacita Dean’s “The Russian Ending.”  This series of photographs places handwritten stage directions above gruesome images of explosions, deaths, and shipwrecks, a jab at the practice of lightening the endings to Russian films so they’re easier for American audiences to handle.

Another series by Cao Fei focuses on Chinese teenagers who don the bright costumes of Japanese anime characters, acting out scenes in front of drab skyscrapers and overpasses. Other works deal with African independence, the endangered tenets of democracy, and industrial Germany.

The collection’s paintings are far more abstract than the photography. Prendergast jokingly admits that, although this wasn’t anyone’s intention, there are very few figurative paintings in the entire collection. The conceptual nature of the art, according to Prendergast, mirrors the conceptual approach to education at the university.

Prendergast hopes to integrate the collection with the rest of the university, and especially with DoVA.  He plans on inviting art classes to view the pieces,and aspires to create a series of podcasts to guide viewers through the collection. Currently, visitors can pick up a brochure at the front desk that highlights certain works on each floor.

For now, the collection remains largely unknown to much of the university. Booth students and faculty are certainly aware of the collection—one researcher in the Becker Institute professed that trips to look at the art were a nice break from her windowless office. However, this much could not be said about the undergraduates studying in the lobby of the Harper Center itself, who were surprised to hear of the collection that, unbeknownst to them, was all around.