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

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

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

Anton Bader/flickr

Several years ago in Viroqua, Wisconsin (pop. 5,079), a group of serious radio-heads started a community station. The station, Radio Driftless, is now on FM and broadcasts full-time, and since they hit the airwaves, Viroqua has had the radio bug. This Wisconsin town sounds like a sound guy’s fairy tale, but the story doesn’t end here. Someone left Viroqua for the city.

Last Thursday, snow fell, quieting the pothole-laden Hyde Park streets. The world took on a muffled quality—it was like hearing through a curtain of radio static. Outside of the Southside Hub of Production (SHoP), a notice read, “Please come in to talk about community radio.” Inside a large multipurpose room with art on the walls, four people had gathered, presumably there to talk about talking.

After waiting for stragglers, Gabriel Piemonte, editor of the Hyde Park Herald, greeted the group and started discussing his vision for the community. Piemonte worked on Radio Driftless in Viroqua and knows what can be done with community radio. He wants to start an Internet radio format station called Bughouse Radio, based on the Driftless model, where locals can produce their own radio programming.

“I have been thinking about community radio for a while,” he said. “It has tremendous potential.” He told the small group that the meeting marked “the launching of the idea.” That idea, he said, was to create a “station focused on local voices.” He continued, “My hope is that in a fairly short period of time we’ll be able to find people who want to be those voices.”

Piemonte is excited—he too has broadcast fever. He regaled the group with tales of Viroqua, where a passion for radio is contagious. “They have a license and a tower,” he said. “They’re broadcasting FM, and they have a substantial local donor. They also have online radio: radiodriftless.org. They have a full commercial license and they’re being supported by this tiny community,” Piemonte said, pausing for breath. Viroqua’s a place where community radio has a very loyal audience—a large percentage of the small town is involved with supporting the station in some way.

“That’s another dimension of what’s exciting about bringing community radio,” Piemonte continued. “Being part of the network of radios that’s coming up. We’ll have access to communities on the South Side that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.”

Piemonte believes a grassroots radio station could have a very positive impact on Hyde Park. “In places where community radio is really earnestly pursued, it really enhances the neighborhoods in a tangible way,” he said. Piemonte thinks SHoP would make for a good host to the radio because it already brings together a host of South Siders with varied interests in the arts and community development.

It begins with a few people and a great deal of enthusiasm. A number of community organizations have expressed interest, including the Hyde Park/Kenwood Transition Initiative, First Unitarian Church (which hopes to broadcast their “First Forum” speaker series), and the Hyde Park Players (who put on the popular performance “An Evening of Horror & Suspense.” ”We are starting from here,” Piemonte said, though he admitted, “we don’t have anything yet.”

What’s the next step for Piemonte? Recruiting voices, setting up an online station, and working on building content and a following of listeners. He hopes to start with a podcast and a partial broadcast schedule, and work on developing a full schedule before eventually becoming a low-power FM station. Although the station is still getting its sea legs in Hyde Park , Piemonte thinks the idea should take hold in the neighborhood. “Hyde Park is a perfect venue, there’s so much going on here,” he said. “If [the new station] isn’t going to get the average Hyde Parker listening and coming out, there’s no point.”

Mueller, a priest from the UofC’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship, came to bless rooms in honor of the recent feast day of Theophany. The holiday celebrates the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, and according to Orthodox tradition, the practice of blessing the home represents the ongoing sanctification of the material world.

Mueller has performed the annual blessings at UofC dorms for four years. As of Friday morning, he had blessed seven rooms and expected to carry out nearly 20 more by the end of winter.

In one room, Mueller began to sing in front of a makeshift altar he placed on a desk. The tenants participated in the ceremony, contributing names of deceased loved ones and listening to the prayer. Mueller placed the incense stick into the bowl of holy water and showered the room, droplets splattering across dressers and walls.

The students stepped forward to receive the priest’s blessing. Mueller dampened their heads with holy water as he held up a carved wooden cross. He then anointed the doorway with oil and once more sprinkled water on the heads of the students.

Though they had different reasons for requesting the room blessing, the students enjoyed the ceremony. One resident, Alexandra Mathews, explained, “Growing up with the Orthodox tradition, I always feel a bit of comfort when my house gets blessed because it provides security.” For some of the other, though, this was a new experience. Alexandra Bassen, who is not Eastern Orthodox, got her room blessed because she thinks “It [is] a culturally enriching experience.”

The oil, bowl, stick and cross returned to Mueller’s bag. He then departed, passing a pile of pink pillows and a display of paper cutout snowflakes, on his way to bless another room.

About 500 people packed into the Hyde Park Union Church for a period of introspection. As the room settled, Aisha Truss-Miller, Aspire’s youth program coordinator, raised her voice to the audience and declared, “Burn away the challenges presented to us this past year!”

The room soon filled with excited chatter as the large crowd related anxieties and worries of the past year to their neighbors before scribbling them down on pieces of blank paper. Slowly, the room adjourned to the modest fire burning outside in a small steel bucket.

Participants sealed the  tightly folded white squares with a kiss and then threw them into the flames, sometimes with a violent vigor and often with a loud cry of “Adios!” or “Bye bye!” With this, the accumulated pains of person after person disappeared into a cloud of ash and smoke carried away by the westward wind. With big worries sent away, their smiles widened.

Participants then proceeded to slip a second piece of paper, detailing their aspirations for 2012, into an envelope. These were hopes of a fresh start, and the smiles on the faces of the participants suggested a sincere belief in the promise that the new year held for each of them.

After disposing of their papers, a group of three shared cigarettes. The three were complete strangers—the first was from the suburbs, the others from just blocks away. Yet, for the time being, they were bound together in their hopes for the year ahead.

courtesy of HPAC

Bibiana Suárez’s latest exhibit—an installation piece that combines the voluptuous rear-end of Jennifer Lopez, three glittery cowboys, vintage maps, and hand-painted signage—is an exhibit that attempts to speak for the growing sentiment of latinidad. The notion of a pan-ethnic solidarity amongst people of all Latin American origin became pertinent to Suárez in 2000, when it was announced that Latinos had become the largest group within the minority population of the United States. Ten years later, Suárez is proud to present “Memoria (Memory),” 108 squares spread across three walls of a large, industrial room in the Hyde Park Art Center. Each square is a piece of a puzzle, a part of a game.

Based on the ubiquitous children’s game Memory, the installation is divided into three parts. The viewer looks straight onto the central wall, where some squares are “turned up,” presenting a colorful image and others remain “face down,” showing what appears to be a generic pattern on the backs of cards, but which is actually string of words the Hispanic community uses to refers to themselves and others. One player’s winnings of matching pairs are displayed on the south wall and the opponent’s are displayed on the north wall, the pairs of matching images fully revealed.

Yet, upon further examination, the matches are not identical. The pairs are somewhat recognizable—the matches feature the same subjects, the same composition, or the same words—but the colors, language, and details vary. One pair is JLo’s backside rendered in two different color palettes. Another is a technicolor mango, sliced in one image, intact is its complement. One poignant match is made up of two portraits: one of a smiling Latina girl, black hair and brown skin, the other of a Caucasian girl, blonde hair and white skin. Both smile the same toothy grin and wear the same plastic beads around their necks. The opposite wall has a similar pair, with images of a young boy—one white, one with café-colored skin.

Allison Peters Quinn, director of exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center says, “It’s exactly that! The children of the same ethnicity could be matched together, but they are not. The matches aren’t always obvious. Suárez wants us to think and make connections beyond the obvious.” She points to a pair of matched cards. One reads, “Se Habla Inglés” and the other reads “We Speak English.” Both players have matched the two different signs to each other. “See?” says Quinn, “You can swap the English and the Spanish signs with each other…What is that saying? There is content behind the matches.”

Six different squares in the game feature a black silhouette of a bird with dashed lines—the indication of a flight path—overlaid on an aged map. One of the birds is the hummingbird, the national bird of Puerto Rico (Suárez’s birthplace) and the other is an eagle, the national bird of Mexico. “Suárez is creating a play on migration, trying to show how people end up in different places. It’s all about play for her, the aesthetics of play,” Quinn explains.

Suárez’s installation engrosses and engages, as each unsuccessful turn in the memory game entice players to make another attempt. The revealed but unpaired cards offer multiple combinations for the viewer to select: a square of choppy seas with a three-dimensional canoe titled “Elián” (referring to the 2000 Elián Gonzalez custody and immigration controversy) can be paired with several images—a steamboat, a fleet of canoes, a black and white anchor among them. But the anchor could be paired with the image of a swaddled infant, evoking the “anchor baby” and birthright citizenship debate. Several other cards, made of various media, have several possible matches.

“She was always thinking about the pairs as she was creating “Memoría,” this idea of the pair, the duality. It speaks to the mutuality of the American and Hispanic identities and voices,” Quinn says. She clarifies, “Suárez is a painter, but here she branches out to use all sorts of materials, in a way trying to capture the many voices of latinidad.”

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through March 25. hydeparkart.org

Isaac Dalke

Norma van der Meulen says that she is getting old, that she can’t quite remember as well as she used to. She is modest, seated in front of a pot of tea in her Hyde Park apartment. Her eyes come alive behind her glasses. Opera comes from WFMT in the background.

A small-town Ohio girl, she fell in love with the Spanish language in college and later taught at Hope College in Michigan, where she met her husband, an architect. For a while, they traveled around Europe; he designed buildings for the State Department, she cared for their two young children. In 1956, the young couple moved to Hyde Park where she has lived continuously ever since (minus a four-year respite to the Virgin Islands) raising three children and keeping active in the neighborhood community.

She speaks lucidly of the time a student she advised offered her marijuana, of befriending the future proprietor of the Medici when he was a graduate student, of a neighborhood with strong currents of change, and brings up the racial tension in the neighborhood with a frankness that would leave some addled.

The following is an edited interview with her, on a sunny New Year’s Eve, sitting in her apartment overlooking the Museum of Science and Industry. She speaks with a soft, sweet voice, and her arms move energetically as she tells her stories.

You volunteer at the Oriental Museum?

I do! I’ve been there for thirty years. I’m behind the counter Wednesday mornings, and Monday mornings I make jewelry for them. It’s a little room that’s  stuffed with ties and carpets and boxes and all kinds of stuff. I have these metal cabinets with amber and amethyst and malphite and lapis and fish vertebrae and little hand-carved skulls from Africa—all kinds of stuff. Wonderful stuff. And a lot of Afghani pendants and beads and what-not. It’s just like Christmas, I go in there and I say, “What will I make today?” And I pull out the drawer. I make about five, six necklaces a morning. Most of them sell.

I’ve made some observations of men shoppers, vis-à-vis men shoppers. Men come in and they have a purpose. They come in and say, “I’ll take that one.” Bingo. The women: “Can I see this one? Well, no wait a minute…” It drives you nuts! It’s a different thing, a man and a woman shopper. I also learned that people in general like an even string of stuff. They don’t like kooky things on their necklaces.

So that’s what I do. I have great fun. I go down there and turn on WFMT, the classical music station, with my bottle of water and my banana, and I make jewelry. I still don’t know how on earth they make those little beads.

How was advising at the UofC?

You know who one of my advisees was? Though I take no credit. David Axelrod. Nice bright boy. Barbara Curry, in the senate here, was one too. I had a lot of wonderful kids. [Axelrod] wouldn’t remember me, but I remember him. I didn’t have that much do with him, I would have these appointments and they would come in.

Some of these kids were very dependent, they would come over and over again whether they had an appointment or not, because they were lonely and they needed some advice or just to vent a bit, you know?

I had one boy from the North Shore—gorgeous tailoring, very handsome boy. He would come to my door with his coffee Thermos in his hand and we would talk a while. He is now in New York a huge success with some sort of advice for finances, I don’t know, it’s more than I can figure out. He writes books and things. I hear from him every Christmas, he sends me a picture of his kids. They’re a very treasured lot, that lot over there. A very privileged lot I would say.

Do you know any UofC Professors?

I used to, but I don’t anymore because they all died or moved. A lot of them went to Hawaii. They weren’t going to hang around here. Saul Bellow, he used to be very apparent in the neighborhood. Good writer. He knew so many people who had lived and died and remarried and had fights and what-not. He said too many houses had ghosts so he moved to Evanston (laughs). Got a new wife and all that. He used to eat over here at Piccolo Mondo.

Harold Washington used to live around here?

I know exactly where he lived. There is a tennis court over here on 53rd Street. There’s an apartment building on the corner; he lived there. He could see the green cockatoo birds out there.

We had some trees with big nests. Some green parrots got out of their cage out of O’Hare. They made it down here and made that their home and they squawked away. You could see these cubbies of green parrots flying all around the neighborhood. Harold loved those parrots!

What was it like raising children in Hyde Park?

Well, I’ll tell you. I had them walk to school every day when they were little. My eldest daughter went to Hyde Park High School, one of the last viable classes. The day Martin Luther King was killed, she came into my office wearing a dress about the green of your jacket and she was ashen-faced. She had been with one of her little boyfriends, who had glasses on. They kicked him to the floor and broke his glasses and beat him. She was absolutely undone. That was a bad thing.

My second daughter went to the new Kenwood High School [current-day Kenwood Academy]. Because it was new, [the administration was] trying very hard. They had a wonderful music teacher, and really nice teachers. She got through that all right and then went to Oberlin.

My son, Peter, went to Kenwood. When he was a freshman in high school, about 14 or 15, we lived in a six-flat down here. He was coming down the alley and a guy from Kenwood High School came behind him, jumped on his back, put his hands in his mouth and pulled and slammed his head on the sidewalk. Peter screamed out. The lady on the first floor heard him, stuck her head out the window and yelled at [the assailant] and he ran away.

Well, the kid was the son of two doctors—Haitian—who had lied about their address to get him into Kenwood High School. We got Peter out of Kenwood right then and put him into the Lab School. But the thing is that kid still remained at that school and he attacked the son of a lawyer. The fur flew, and they got him out of there and sent him to Haiti. When we got back from the Virgin Islands, his name was a headline in the newspaper. He had just murdered a DePaul student, a tennis star.

We had some bad, bad things happen in Hyde Park. They still do… These are not politically correct things to say, but I’m telling you, well, that’s the way things are.