(Ethan Tate)

As you enter the apartment at 55th and Hyde Park, the projector is on your left. Straight ahead, a canvas covered with what looks like multi-colored sponges hangs on a wall. When I ask about it, Julian Antos urges me to take it off their hands: “I just hate feeling like my home is an art project.”

Sponges aside, the apartment that Julian shares with Rebecca Hall feels like an extension of their own project—the Northwest Chicago Film Society (NWCFS), a nonprofit they and a third partner, Kyle Westphal, started in January 2011. According to its mission statement, the Society “exists to promote the preservation of film in context.” Its founders believe that film’s “ability to capture the past uniquely” is more “intelligible when it’s grounded in unsimulated experience: seeing a film in a theater, with an audience, and projected from film stock.” To achieve this goal, the NWCFS runs a classic film series on Wednesday nights for five-dollar admission at the Portage Theater on North Milwaukee.

In addition to the series up north, Becca and Julian host occasional screenings in their apartment, drawing films from their vast personal collection. Though they emphasize the difference between their living room screenings and the society’s public series at the Portage, Becca points out the new NWCFS logo she designed and spray-painted onto her bedroom door. Julian offers a cookie from the open packet of Chips Ahoy sitting on the kitchen table, brought to the previous day’s screening by one of their “favorite patrons.”

The weekly series at the Portage draws a crowd of regulars, many of whom first got to know Becca and Julian when the screenings were held on Saturdays in the now-empty Bank of America Cinema. That program, the Classic Film Series, began in 1972, and persisted in that space around the corner from the Portage as the building’s owners and the programmers changed over the years.

Becca discovered the Bank of America Cinema as a University of Chicago student through her involvement with Doc Films, the university’s student-run film society. “It was legendary among the [Doc] board in 2007,” Becca says. “Once I got to know them, I got to tag along.” She describes it as having “a really weird set up.” According to Becca, “You had to walk around to the back of the building, and there was this quaint little movie theater lobby.”

Becca soon began working at the cinema, and that is where she and Julian first met. “Julian, in my head, was that happy kid who would come with his parents and buy popcorn from me,” she says. Michael Phillips, who now runs South Side Projections and programmed at the cinema for its last few years, eventually brought Julian on to help out. According to Becca, he thought having a high-school kid around would annoy her, but the two quickly became friends. “He was like, ‘I’m going to screen this print of “The Black Cat” in my basement,’” Becca remembers, before asking Julian: “There was a live performance aspect, right? Your parents’ weird friends’ children?”

Both the programmers and patrons were conscious of the cinema’s uncertain fate. “People kept saying that every season for the last year and a half of the Bank was the last one,” Becca says. They began exploring options for continuing the series at a new location. “We were holding out on incorporating [as a nonprofit] until we found a space,” she says. They were introduced to Dennis Wolkowicz, the owner of the Portage Theater, who runs the Silent Film Society in that location. The last screening at the Bank took place on December 18th, 2010, and the NWCFS officially incorporated as a nonprofit on January 21st.

“It was clear that Dennis wanted to see us doing things at the theater,” says Becca. “His love is old films. I think he likes seeing cultural history-oriented programming happening.” In one post on the Society’s blog, Kyle describes the “archaeological aims” of programming a calendar.

“Maybe that’s what we should have called it, the Archaeological Film Society—everyone would think we show dinosaur movies,” says Julian. Neither Becca nor Julian remembers exactly what made them settle on the moniker “Northwest Chicago.” “We didn’t have much time when we were getting started,” Becca says. “I thought it was because we kept fighting and wanted to stop fighting,” Julian responds.

Julian has been collecting film since he was sixteen. The apartment he and Becca share was inherited from a former Doc Films Programming Chair, and the collection is stored in his old bedroom. The room is small and narrow, making the humidity level and 60-degree temperature easier to maintain. It barely fits two desks, a shelf that’s “half-organized,” and a closet holding canisters upon canisters.

“Julian’s just temperamentally a projectionist, he yearns to be in a small dark room with machines,” says Becca. Her interest in film preservation began when she began projecting at Doc Films. “As I was learning, I started hearing little things, sometimes from Kyle, about how because of digital technology’s rise, film stock might not be around for so long. So I was thinking about this the whole time I was learning about it, and these came together to make it seem quite important,” she said in an interview with Michael Phillips for the Chicago Tribune. “We’re still waiting to see if 35 mm, especially, continues to be available from conventional sources, so we’re looking at a lot of ways to make sure that we can keep doing that, including amassing our own film collection.”

****

Kyle, who works at the George Eastman House, the museum of photography and film in Rochester, New York, writes regularly for the Society’s blog. He has devoted a series of posts to the importance of 35mm as it relates to their mission. In a blog post titled “Programming: How To Do Things With Films”, Kyle writes that “the industry-wide switch from 35mm to DCP exhibition is expected to be completed in the next two years.” The Digital Cinema Package, according to a February article in The Atlantic, is “a collection of media files with specifications set by the Digital Cinema Initiatives, a joint venture between Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal, and Warner Bros.”

The cost of the equipment used to project these files amounts to over $75,000—a bill impossible for many small theaters to foot. “These exhibitors are clinging to 35mm because it allows them to use existing projection equipment with minimal and rather predictable maintenance costs. It’s an incidental objective,” Kyle writes. “Showing films in 35mm is a mission on a different level of magnitude for repertory venues.”

In the interview with Phillips, he explains that the “film history that we’re often interested in, this very material physical sense of film history, is where you’re learning something not just by seeing it on screen but by actually holding it in your hand, winding through it, and making, in many ways, artistic decisions about how to present it.”

These decisions are evident in the Society’s choice of venue—“We talk about different series that’d be good for the Portage, or good for Cinema Borealis,” says Becca. The Borealis is a small independent screening room in Wicker Park. They talk about a recent five-hour program they screened there called “TV on Film,” explaining how 16 mm prints were used in television broadcasts. Julian recalls a screening of “The Incident,” a 1967 movie, featuring a young Martin Sheen, about young punks taking over a subway car. Because of the Borealis’ proximity to the Damen “El” station, “you could hear the train going by.”

“At an older theater it becomes a different kind of experience,” Becca says of the Portage and Bank of America. She describes the films in that series, a series which continues “in spirit” at the Portage, as “classic but obscure.” Former Bank of America Cinema programmer Mike King wrote in a goodbye tribute posted on Cinephile, a website devoted to Chicago independent cinema, that the series was a testament to the fact that “in order to fully grasp American film history, you have to venture well beyond the canon.”

He goes on to write that though the Bank showed “mostly old movies to mostly old people, the Bank [was] no nostalgia house.” What’s special about the movie-watching experience at the bank or Portage does not only have to do with the choice of film, or even just the fact that it’s on 35mm: “Take a film like ‘The Lady From Shanghai,’” King wrote. “When it plays at Doc Films at the University of Chicago, the undergrads laugh straight through it, to prove how smart they are. Go see it at Gene Siskel Film Center, and nobody laughs at all, as if they are humbled by how smart the film is. At the Bank, people would laugh along with the jokes. But also chuckle at first hearing Orson Welles’ wretched fake Irish accent. Because it’s funny.”

The NWCFS’s mission statement speaks lovingly of “the creak of the seats, the smile of the concession stand girl, the ripped edges of a ticket.” It continues, “going to the movies should mean more than watching a consumer product violently cajoled into filling a theater screen….We believe that it is an experience—aesthetic, material, social, and moral—worth preserving.”

Now, however, the Portage is threatened. CBS 2 reports that a North Side church, the Christian Tabernacle, has offered $2 million for the building, which contains the theater and a few storefronts. The Commission on Chicago Landmarks gave the theater “preliminary landmark status” in early April, and the Zoning Board of Appeals met on April 20 to address the issue. According to the Portage’s website, the church proposes “to convert the theater into their worship space, remove the marquee, alter the auditorium, and eliminate the storefronts and half the apartments.”

Community members and 45th Ward Alderman John Arena are rallying around the historic theater, writing letters to the Zoning Board of Appeals protesting the church’s request for a special use permit to allow for religious services in the theater. The Portage’s website urges community members to attend the Board’s June 15 meeting where the proposal is to be considered.

****

But for now, Julian has just found his “intermission reel”—a collection of old advertisements for concessions he’s spliced together—and he wants to watch it. The apartment’s screening area is currently doubling as a bedroom for one of their roommates; a button-down hangs next to the screen and a desk is in the corner. The couches sit on a stage left by the apartment’s previous occupants. There’s a crash as Julian loads the film. “You scared the cats!” Becca yells from the couch.

“I feel like it still hasn’t sunk in for the general public yet, that there’s a person literally making the show happen,” she says. On the website, they’ve collected pictures of projectors drawn by projectionists. Their answer to the anticipated question —“Why this project?” reads: “Because the future of the medium is particularly uncertain these days, we’d like to record a sense of the skill and affection involved in every level of the trade.”

Becca talks seriously about her “fantasy,” that someday “repertory screenings will get their due;” that listings, the general public, and film critics will acknowledge the difficulty of obtaining certain prints, the particular choices programmers make, the combination of visceral experience and cultural history that lend these films a unique value beyond the stories they tell. “But we still believe in concessions,” Julian jokes. “Popcorn is economically important.” Becca adds that the Portage serves beer, wine, and hot dogs. “People don’t know that!”

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.”

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.”

(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.

(Vida Kuang)

“Our Black Year,”  a new book by writer and UofC Law School graduate Maggie Anderson, opens with the author and her Harvard-educated financier husband savoring a celebratory lobster in a chic Gold Coast restaurant. The ensuing tome, in a harshly ironic twist, expends most of its bulk following the same couple as they dodge “unsavory types,” rummage around for something edible in derelict minimarts, and crisscross the South and West sides frantically searching for nutritive food for their two young children.

No, this is not the story of a formerly affluent day-trading couple laid low by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The Andersons’ perplexing and ultimately moving culinary desperation was entirely self-imposed. They were well off, African-American, and appalled at the egregious inequality in their racial community. To do something about it, the Andersons decided to buy exclusively from black-owned businesses for an entire year, and document every cent spent.

That this was a challenge is unsurprising. That it should be next to impossible in Chicago, the long-time center of Black America, punctures the myth of a post-racial society and illustrates an income gap that obstinately refuses to narrow.

In July 1931, when the country was mired in worse economic doldrums and Jim Crow was the entrenched and seemingly unshakable law of its lower half, W. E. B. Dubois wrote, “If we once make a religion to spend our meager income so far as possible only in such ways as will bring us employment consideration and opportunity, the possibilities before us are enormous.” Continually stymied in his relentless rhetorical push for political equality, Dubois came around to the belief that the only way to alter the racial status quo was for the black masses to more aggressively leverage their economic clout.

Eighty years later, the Andersons attempted to put Dubois’s plan into action. The couple shifted their investments to black-owned banks, switched to black physicians, and bought gift-cards from black-owned gas stations and restaurant franchises. They were determined but not unreasonable; there are no black-owned health insurance companies in the United States and they weren’t about to let their children go without it. Their receipts were then to be handed over to researchers at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, to keep tally of their progress.

As residents of Oak Park (placid, prosperous, and mostly white), the family understood that taking on this challenge would necessitate a lot of increased travel-time to the South and West sides. The first hurdle was just discovering which businesses were black—Maggie, it’s worth noting, had opted to make running the experiment into her full-time job. While there are a handful of black business directories for Chicago, they proved incomplete. The Andersons therefore were reduced to going in-person to businesses in black neighborhoods at random and asking if they were black-owned. Almost unfailingly, the answer was no.

Even a full-service grocery store proved next to impossible to locate. At the time Dubois was writing, this was the single largest category of black businesses in the United States.  After starting the project with a certain degree of publicity in May of 2009, the Andersons simply could not find one. The narrative is bookended by visits to the closest thing to an ordinary black-owned food provider they could initially locate—J’s Fresh Meats.

“Almost nothing here was worth buying,” she writes. “There were not price tags on anything and there was no meat…fresh or otherwise at J’s fresh meats.” To top it off, this dubious oasis attracted the kind of clientele that often made Maggie Anderson unwilling to get out of her car.

For a time, the Andersons found a supermarket and became fast-friends with its African-American owner.  Within months, however, it became clear that the Andersons were among his few regular customers.  They organized fundraisers at their church and received many verbal statements of support from a theoretically galvanized black community, but in the end few people proved willing to ditch Jewel or Publix on principal.  Eventually (mercifully toward the end of the Anderson’s economic odyssey) the store was shuttered and the Andersons were forced, frustrated, to resume their urban foraging.

Food was not the only basic necessity the Andersons found in short supply. The Anderson adults were able to rely for the most part on a pre-set stock of clothing, but their daughters had no such luxury. With growing girls and no black-owned children’s clothiers, essentials like new shoes were aggravatingly hard to come by. There were also fewer visits to Chuck-E-Cheese (a hardship this reviewer takes to heart).

The book makes an incisive and important argument, but there are distracting elements. Occasionally, the seriousness of the disparity Anderson is trying to dramatize is undermined by a tone that has trouble finessing the boundary between motivational and preachy. When confronted in a gas station by a drink-sodden pan-handler looking to trade food-stamps for habit-sustaining cash, Ms. Anderson publically upbraids him before treating the reader to a series of pages on how he has failed the civil rights movement. When approaching a woman with a toddler behind the register, Mrs. Anderson “also noticed—because it is [her] habit to look whenever [she] see[s] a  young Black woman who appears to be a mother—that she wore no wedding ring.”

Accounts of the married couple’s domestic bliss and surprise at its reluctance to unspool under strain continue long after the point has been made. There are also a few too many remarks along the lines of,  “John was dying without his bagels. I missed my sun-dried tomatoes, feta and boursin cheese, and ahi tuna.”

This is understandable, and honestly sounds delicious, but given that much of the book laments the food deserts that force African-Americans to eat junk or schlep to white communities to get basic foodstuffs, the pining for boursin cheese is perhaps better left out of print.

These are minor quibbles, but the central charge that has been leveled at the experiment since its inception, namely that its pro-black aims and assumptions are racist, is patently ludicrous. Maggie Anderson chronicles the discomfiting frequency with which this slander was raised by both blacks and whites. The fact that any person could say this with a straight face, displays a level of ignorance about the nature of the divide that this book does much to correct.

The ripple effects of even a little extra cash flowing into embattled black businesses could, over time, transform neighborhoods. After reading “Our Black Year,” no one can deny the scope of the problem. Of the few black owned firms around, 40% of them operate in the red. In the book’s epilogue, Anderson reveals that since she and her husband ended the experiment, many of the places that sustained them have since gone out of business. Bronzeville coffee is gone, though Kimbark liquor, as many readers will be aware, isn’t going anywhere.

At a time when the country is singing a hymn to a post-racial era and the Supreme  Court appears poised to strike down Affirmative Action of any sort, economic barriers to black success are more formidable than ever before. The U. S. Census Bureau reported that the median net worth for a black household in 2009 was $2,200 while for whites it was $98,000. That’s not a typo, it’s the largest racial wealth chasm ever recorded.

The expression “we are the 99%” is perhaps the Occupy movement’s most polarizing asset. Journalist Zeeshan Aleem, representing Occupy Chicago, praised the movement’s diversity, noting the inherent difficulty in having a single panelist speaking for so large a group. He shared his vision for the movement as a form of agitation from outside the current political arena that could ultimately push the system toward change. Aleem pointed out that in the wake of Occupy, corporations have begun to change their PR rhetoric, choosing words like “freedom” over “capitalism.”

Representing the UofC Democrats, Sam Baron had different ends in mind. “I’m not sure how much Occupy has done besides change the political discourse,” he said.  For Baron, a self-described member of the 99%, but only a “highly sympathetic outsider” to the movement, the Democratic Party was still the best means of enacting change in favor of the American left. “I’m asking for a movement that is radically less sexy than what’s taking place,” he acknowledged.

In true Occupy fashion, the roughly 30 attendants played a major role in directing the debate. More than once the panelists abruptly stopped talking when someone from the crowd made a face, and the audience’s “questions” were usually prefaced with lengthy, heated remarks and historical clarifications. Beyond being mere points of debate, however, the questions repeatedly hit upon matters of definition.

“Is Occupy ‘the left’?” asked one woman, confused by the various uses of the term that had been thrown around. Later, another audience member, responding to Baron’s criticism that Occupy lacked a clear purpose, asked with a knowing grin: “What’s the Democratic party’s purpose? Hope? Change?”

In his closing remarks, Aleem tried to bring the discussion back to its original purpose, suggesting that Occupy “might be something other than the left.” But the war over words could not be put away that easily. After the debate, a member of Students for a Free Society stood by the doorway handing out fliers. “Are you interested in liberty?” he asked.

Turning first to history, Kristol gave a quick, almost medical evaluation of the two presidential candidates, running over their vital signs before moving on to more complex issues. Obama’s chances, he admitted, look pretty good. Incumbents generally have an advantage, especially if they aren’t challenged in the primary. And since 1986 every president that took the White House from the opposing party has held it for at least eight years.

On the other hand, he pointed out, Obama’s approval rating currently hovers at around 46 percent—hardly what you want heading into election season, especially since that rating often translates directly into a president’s share of the vote in the general election.

Moving on to Romney, Kristol couldn’t resist bemoaning this year’s motley selection of candidates. Kristol’s fervent, and failed, attempts to urge Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Congressman Paul Ryan, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to enter the race were a source of a fair amount of good-natured, self-deprecating humor. But a small amount of genuine vexation shines through. After rattling off the qualifications of each of 2012′s past presidential hopefuls, he took a pause—“I mean what kind of field is that, really?”

Kristol admitted that Romney was a weak candidate in the primaries, but pointed out that he’s been doing better lately since “he realized he had to tell people what he was going to do as president.” As he stacks up against Obama, both of the candidates are intelligent, successful men, but Kristol believes that “Obama is a more attractive American story.”

From a decidedly right wing, fast-talking pundit, a certain amount of bluster is assumed. However, Kristol retained a highly self-conscious, at times even self-mocking tone. When asked about what an Obama victory would mean, Kristol responded with even-handed irony: “You know, I can usually talk myself into thinking that the country will survive, and that conservatism will survive.”