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.”

Claire Withycombe

Eerie, watery chants sung by a chorus of female voices echo out onto the street in a quiet residential block. The ebb and flow of the music pulls the curious pedestrian into the set of open doors and through to the back of a modest gallery, where black-and-white vintage footage of young female gymnasts flits on a small screen. Their bodies glide, somersault, leap, and twirl forwards, backwards, and around in a series of roughly cut and rewound frames to the haunting movements of the music. “Collective Magnetism,” by Sara Mosk, is an appropriate introduction to “Black Arts,” both for the magnetic pull of its sounds and images, and for its place in the collective spirit of this group exhibit at Pilsen’s Roxaboxen Minicastle.

At first, the feeling in the gallery suggests the sensation of hearing lonely footsteps on an empty Pilsen street: a few viewers mosey around the two open rooms, and the disjointed creepiness of the individual works dictates the mood. A striking duo of sketches of prone women’s bodies by Jenny Kendler hangs on the front right. The top image, entitled “Oh, Give Me a Home,” features buffalo thundering across a woman’s back. In the sketch below, entitled “Sibling Rivalry (Love Bites),” another woman is mounted by a furry animal. Glance to the left, and a drawing depicts soft grey lines wriggling across sketch paper like the shadowy traces of charcoal worms. A shroud covering an elliptical form resting in a metal frame points across the space toward a giant paisley plume, rendered in black upholstery with touches of orange and sapphire.

As the night goes on, the tiny space fills with a crowd of exuberant folk, and lively conversations bubble to the surface. A woman in a pink wig and heavy makeup saunters up to a college kid in black cargo pants. They hit it off and start chatting about the work in front of them: a piece by Alex Chitty, a burnt six-foot ladder situated between a sketch of dismantled cougar skin and a photograph of a mouthless mask superimposed on a satin curtain.

In assembling the exhibit, curator Liz McCarthy drew from her personal network of female artists, looking for “icons of the individual [artist]” she had in mind. Some pieces were created for the exhibit, but most were personally selected by McCarthy from each artist’s extant oeuvre. All but one of the fourteen artists are based in Chicago. McCarthy sought to gather different individuals’ takes on an archetype widely explored and exploited in human history through folklore—that of the “strong, independent female outcast from…daily life,” she says.

Walking through the exhibit, McCarthy explains the structure of the exhibition space as a transition between two major manifestations of artistic work: formal “approaches to making images,” such as watercolors and photographs situated in frames, and less formal work that reflects ideas of environment and embodiment in more abstract or unconventional media. Traces of the two themes present themselves in different regions of the space, but the human body is of central concern at the front (with the Kendler pieces, and other works that use the image of the human body), while moving through the exhibit, “the body becoming environment” comes to the fore. This second idea is exemplified in a sculpture that manipulates objects of interior environments and challenges notions of females as vessels of content domesticity: Chitty’s ladder, despite reaching to some higher goal, is burnt to a crisp; a work by Melissa Damasauskas entitled “Powers That Be”—a chair snaked in masses of velveteen black ribbons—is shoved up against a doorknob. McCarthy describes the progression of the exhibit as a “buildup” which seems to culminate in the hypnotic footage “Collective Magnetism.”

The choice to run the exhibit during the spring, according to McCarthy, dovetails with the traditional associations of fertility with the season—and by extension, of the fertile with the feminine. A nearly exclusive use of black and white in each of the pieces references the notion that this fertility springs from the “dark, rich soil” built up during the burial of organic matter during the winter.

Ultimately, “Black Arts” is worth a visit. The exhibit is united not just by form or by meaning but also organically and communally, by the biological femaleness shared by the artists themselves and by the supportive structure of the exhibit’s origins. While each piece certainly provokes thought individually, the exhibit’s greatest charm is to be experienced in the way those individual pieces act in concert with the others.

Roxaboxen Exhibitions, 2130 W. 21st St. Through June 2. Hours by appointment through roxaboxen.minicastle@gmail.com. Free.

Cynthia Albritton, a Chicago native and South Side resident better known as “Cynthia Plaster Caster,” has lived the dream of teenage girls around the world. A self-titled “recovering groupie,” she has been making plaster casts of rock stars’ naughty bits since 1968. It all started in her college art class, where she was given the assignment to “plaster cast something solid that could retain its shape.” The Dick Clark Caravan of Stars happened to be in town that weekend, so Cynthia and her friend Pest decided to approach band members at the event in search of willing castees. While the weekend ended without a cast, she ended up losing her virginity to a member of Paul Revere and the Raiders—and, as she says on her website, “‘The Plaster Casters of Chicago’ were thus born.”

Cynthia is currently working on her autobiography. A complete list of her castees, a scrapbook of totally safe-for-work photos (she doesn’t publish photos of her “sweet babies” online), and a list of “Upcumming Events” are available on her website.

I called Cynthia five minutes before the scheduled time for our interview and she insisted I call her back; she was not kidding when she told me a few days before that she has been incredibly busy. Her voice boomed with assertiveness and I was almost too terrified to go through with the interview, but when she answered again, she was engaging and warm. She even spent our last few minutes asking me questions—the highest of honors coming from someone who, at my age, plucked Jimi Hendrix’s pubic hair one by one from an un-lubricated plaster mold. For a woman who’s seen more in her life than any teen girl (on the outside or inside) could ever hope to see, Cynthia “Plaster Caster” has maintained a giggly humility. Her life is a shining example for those hoping to find something they love and run with it—or dip it in dental alginate.

So, I guess my first question has to be…how’s the autobiography coming?

Yeah, that’s my big baby. I call my plaster casts my sweet babies, but my storybook is my big baby. I’m hoping to finish it by the end of this year.

I read an earlier interview that said your parents never found out about what you do. Is your mother still in the dark? Even with the autobiography coming out?

Well my mother passed away a few years ago. She never found out. It would’ve been perhaps less scary if my father found out. He would probably think it was funny. I realized that too late. But my mother would never understand. Never, ever, ever understand. I’d need to hire a bodyguard if she ever found out.

You were a young woman alone (or semi-alone) with celebrities in hotel rooms; was it ever scary? Did you ever feel unsafe?

Umm, yeah I mean I was and still am a shy girl and well, you know, I found it to be…I realized later it was kind of dangerous to be alone with anybody in a confined area without anybody around, but I was initially pretty tongue-tied being in the awesome presence of these so-called “rock gods” in or out of hotel rooms. It was overwhelming, unbelievable that they were actually talking to me. It’s dangerous, and I had a bad experience with Led Zeppelin—but that’s all I’m going to tell you about that.

Right, I’ve read that you’re going to include that in the autobiography.

Yeah. Never go to a guy’s room unattended unless you’ve checked out their background carefully. Interviews especially—the way they talk, the way they answer questions. If you do enough research you can get a sense of how wild they are.

Do you feel that Chicago’s music scene was the best for what you were doing back then? I know you moved to LA for a little while, but did you ever consider going to other cities?

Yeah, I dreamed about moving to London. But I didn’t have the money to move anywhere so I just stayed in Chicago, not really knowing how I’d get out of here until Frank Zappa came along. He was the one who thought I should move to LA, because he wanted to help finance this idea I had for a Plaster Caster museum. He said “LA is where the rock stars roam,” so that’s why I moved to LA.

How was the Chicago scene then compared to now?

Back then it was mainly a blues scene in Chicago, and there were some garage bands. They were modeled along the lines of the British Invasion and later that name applied. I didn’t really care for Chicago garage bands—the best were elsewhere. The music scene really sucked, except for the blues. And I was only interested in mop-top boys. But some of my favorite music now comes from Chicago.

Like who?

Right now I like a guy called Ezra Furman, originally from Evanston. And I liked The Redwalls when they were still around. I think Wilco is pretty great. Gosh, there’s quite a few. I’m not really a fan of The Smashing Pumpkins, but I think they got the ball rolling in terms of Chicago being a good place to live and make music. I tend to like bands that are relatively unknown, so I can say I saw them first, and hopefully they’ll be willing to pose for me.

Does anything bother you about today’s music scene, their groupies, etc.?

Groupies still are like groupies…but I think it was more exciting back in the ’60s because it was new and we were creating the formula as we went along. It was more of a challenge and there were more interesting personalities amongst just regular girls that became fans because of their love of music, and maybe other reasons. And now the only groupies that I know of with any notoriety are movie stars or musicians, like Courtney Love or Winona Ryder. I recommend it as a lifestyle to check out. Well maybe not a lifestyle, but an experience to have. It really taught me about who I am and who I was not.

Who was your most recent subject?

Unfortunately I haven’t cast anyone in a couple of years. The last one was Ariel Pink. I’d never heard of him. I think it was a Saturday night. My friend was going to the show and insisted I go with him, and by 1am Ariel Pink was in my apartment. I was so impressed with his music. We didn’t have a fluffer because he didn’t know anyone in Chicago…that person usually is—preferably—a wife or girlfriend of the subject. He had to take care of things himself. He wasn’t representing his full “capability” [laughs]. The dental mold is like a camera; it takes a picture of a moment in time and space. And he’s always welcome for a return, because he has way more “capability” than has been shown.

Have you ever gotten any stern rejections when you’ve asked to cast someone?

Well I’m very careful about reading people beforehand, because I don’t want to be rejected. I realized I had to research them before being alone with them. I’m a big analyst—I guess that’s the Gemini in me. I watch them onstage, watch their body language, see what’ll happen if I get backstage…I also don’t just flatly go up to them and hand them my calling card, as I used to. I like to take some time to get to know them, and them to know me, hopefully without telling them who I am. And if they seem like they have a heart of plaster, I’ll pop the question!

Would you ever cast someone because they were particularly famous?

Well, now not because they’re famous but because they’ve done something extraordinary—make my life better, make me happy. I’ve fantasized about casting Barack Obama. A lot of fantasies I might have, about someone who happens to be well known. That kind of person, especially a politician, is likely not to do it. It might not be good for their career, and it’s always a crapshoot how they’re gonna come out in the mold. Wayne Kramer, if people didn’t know better—it looks like he has no penis at all, just because of the way the mold looked that night. I’m not a fame queen and I’m not a size queen, I’m just a talent queen.

Have you gone out of your way (travelling-wise) to cast a particular celebrity/normal person? Or do you always let them come to you?

No. I mean I have travelled. I did travel to see MC5 and I had my kit with me. I was actually coming from New York and I had a stopover. I was planning on coming straight to Chicago but someone told me to stop in Detroit. But no; at this point, I’ve never gone out of my way to travel just to cast someone. It’s sort of a spontaneous thing.

Which makes it better, I guess.

Yeah, because they might change their mind if they think about it too long!

Where, besides New York and San Francisco, have you exhibited your work?

The Jimi Hendrix cast was very briefly displayed in Boston, but it was banned because the owner of the gallery was afraid that the parents of some kids would get mad at him because there was also a restaurant next to this gallery and the kids might ask some difficult questions about this sort-of lifelike cast. That’s the reason he gave; who knows. I’m hoping to have more exhibits after I finish my book.

Will you be exhibiting your work in the Chicago area anytime soon?

I’d like to, since I’m born and bred here, but it has to be the right gallery. There isn’t that great of a choice of galleries in Chicago, compared to the rest of the world.

You ran for mayor in 2010. How was that?

Yeah, it came about suddenly over a couple of margaritas, and Daley was stepping down, and I knew there would never be an election like this again. The race was up for grabs and I had to throw my hat in. I know very little about politics and I’m still just learning. I don’t think it’s important. The mayor should bring people together and have more forums and town hall meetings, discussions about what people want and need. And also, all these political speeches are very boring—so boring that you can’t listen to them long enough to get the platforms. The whole process needs to be less boring. Change the language. I thought Rahm Emanuel would be good at that, but he’s not. Where’s the potty mouth?!

I may run again. I’m thinking about it. I’ll be more prepared—I was really taken by surprise the first time, people talked me into it. I didn’t get registered as a write-in, and I’ll make sure next time I will be.

Rachel Wiseman

When I meet Arel Brown, he is in his hairnet and apron, sporting the neon green T-shirt that is the uniform of Eternity Juice Bar & Deli. He is in the middle of preparing food, and shows me the pieces of raw kale stuck to his hand when I reach out to shake it. “My hands are a bit dirty right now,” he apologizes.

Brown is the owner and manager of Greater Grand Crossing’s Soul Vegetarian East restaurant and its juice bar and deli extension. He takes off his apron and leads me to the main dining area, where, even at 4pm, most of the tables are full. An older man, lean and well-dressed in a tightly tailored black suit and tie, greets Brown and walks with us into the next room, an unoccupied, more formal dining area. He sits down and introduces himself. “My name is Prince Asiel Ben Israel,” he says, each of his names a carefully enunciated burst of sound punctuated by a short pause.

I am surprised and delighted to hear this, because I know who Prince Asiel Ben Israel is, though I have been unable to find out much about him. Ben Israel and his wife, Yohanna Brown, started Soul Vegetarian East in 1982; the birth of their son Arel and the addition of the Eternity Juice Bar and Deli followed soon after.

Ben Israel is a charismatic figure, and he speaks in an even, amiable tone—except, as when he introduced himself, when he wants to make sure he is heard clearly. Given the recent controversy to hit Soul Vegetarian, this instinct to guard against potential misunderstandings makes sense: a November interview in the A.V. Club Chicago quoted Yohanna Brown as saying, “Women don’t wear men’s clothing, and men don’t wear women’s. If you look at present culture, you can see how breaking these guidelines has led to things like homosexuality.”

Brown and Ben Israel are both Hebrew Israelites, and this identity is the basis of their vegan offerings. Based on an interpretation of Old Testament dietary prescriptions, they support a vegan diet as the source of both spiritual and physical health and believe that being mindful of one’s diet is the first step to living a healthy lifestyle. While this belief is in and of itself unproblematic for most, some have voiced concern that the source of these beliefs is also the source of Brown’s homophobic remarks.

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

The books have been made by any and all comers: for $25, participants receive a blank sketchbook and fill its 32 pages with whatever they want. Each person chooses beforehand how they’d like to categorize the book. Choices include travelogue, atlas, almanac, and plain ol’ sketchbook. This year’s most popular category was “fill me with stories,” which describes the sketchbooks well—most seem to fall along a continuum from art object to personal story.

Jani, an art student and hairdresser from Wisconsin, had come to the exhibit to visit her own sketchbook, which took her two months to complete. As she talked about her work, “The Grey Side of Life,” she took pictures of other sketchbooks’ barcodes so she could look them up later in the project’s digital library.

At the checkout counter, a girl named Martha hugged her sketchbook, titled “Opposite day.” One hour and many trips to the checkout counter later, her mother told her, “I’m all sketchbooked out.”

Over 10,000 books were made this past year. Once participants complete and return the books, they go on an international tour that includes stops in San Francisco, Toronto, Melbourne, and Chicago. While the sketchbooks are on the road, the barcode system “checks in” with their creators whenever they’re viewed. After the tour, the books will be retired to their permanent home in the Brooklyn Art Library.

The crew travels with the books. The group claims on its website that “a great road trip is always spontaneous,” and the project’s director, Eli Dvorkin, echoed this sentiment. He talked about passing through a ghost town in Nevada on last year’s tour. “It still had an opera house left over from the gold rush days,” he said. “The whole town, which now has about seventeen citizens, gathered around the truck for an impromptu exhibit.”

It would be a mistake to prejudge South Kawa’s food or service based on its lack of traffic, however, as both were more than satisfactory. We started our meal with edamame, hoping to quiet our grumbling stomachs while we waited for three friends whose bus never came. The beans were delicious—firm, fresh and hot, with the perfect amount of flaked salt shaken on top. They came out within five minutes of us ordering, and were gone in as much time. Our waiter laughed when we asked for a second helping: “I told you so!”

With a mound of pods left on the table and our friends on their way by cab, we gave in to hunger and ordered our sushi. The menu features a variety of rolls and pieces ranging from the simple to the elaborate, alongside a limited range of non-sushi appetizers and entrees. I split two of their more extravagant rolls—the Fallen Angel and the Sweet Sixteen—with two companions, along with the less showy salmon and avocado roll. We also ended up with a bowl of yaki udon, and the chicken skewers from a series of yakitori options based on our server’s second suggestion—his first was to get all five types, ideally washed down by three cold beers and a baseball game.

The yakitori skewers were small but well-grilled, and the sweet sauce was good enough to warrant some skewer twirling. The yaki udon came in a generous portion, with firm noodles and a sauce that managed to be salty without crowding out other flavors. The Fallen Angel roll—crab meat, seaweed salad, tempura bits and avocado with scallops and roe on top—was good, but the salad somewhat overpowered the crab. Both the skewers and the roll were listed as spicy, but as somebody who tears up at an extra drop of Tabasco sauce, I imagine that a person looking for heat would be disappointed by both.

The Sweet Sixteen, which topped tuna with salmon, was given a punch up by the inclusion of mango, which lent a pleasing sweetness even if its mushy texture didn’t contribute much. Selected from a back page of rolls like the “Sexy Mama” and the “Anaconda,” both the Sweet Sixteen and the Fallen Angel were beautifully presented—a mosaic of colors and textures accented by the sauces drizzled on top. All were prepared by a lone, headband-crowned sushi chef at a bar set into the wall across from our table. In terms of taste, hearty isn’t a term usually ascribed to sushi, but it fit here: the fish was thick cut, and our hungry group left almost unanimously full.

South Kawa really shines on service. Though tea wasn’t on the menu, my friend was brought some free of charge on request. Save for the yaki udon, all of our food came out within ten minutes of ordering, and the noodles quickly followed. Our servers were always on hand but never hovered, a hard balance when waitstaff outnumber patrons. The restaurant’s decor was as sparse as the crowd, limited to a large stylized koi pond painting and a flat screen twice its size that loomed from across the narrow restaurant. Yet the servers’ friendly banter kept the emptiness of the restaurant from feeling oppressive.

The instrumental background music switched to a lullaby as we left South Kawa. “See you soon!” our waiter called. We wandered onto Halsted, as lazy, full, and well-cared for as the koi glancing from the back wall.

3417 S. Halsted St. Monday-Thursday, 11am-3pm, 4pm-10pm; Friday-Saturday, 11am-3pm, 4pm-11pm. (773)940-1238

The event in question was the launch of the SMALL Showroom, a pop-up exhibition designed to promote awareness of a range of local Bridgeport-area artisans and products. Over a hundred companies and individuals were represented through SMALL (Small Manufacturing Alliance), which, according to their website, promotes Chicagoland “companies and individuals who make locally manufactured products.” Items on display ranged in size from a massive, $500 didgeridoo nicknamed “the Elephant Tusk” and hand-carved from an agave stalk, to one-inch cubes of Asiago cheese selected from Giles Schnierle’s Great American Cheese Collection. Among these offerings were free tastings from 18th Street Brewery, Koval Distillery, Bridgeport Coffee, and Katherine Anne, the “founder and confectionista” of Katherine Anne Confections. Non-culinary products included custom-designed bikes, graphic tees, beaded animals, and tables carved into the shape of various American states (the company offered to do any state in the union other than Hawaii, Florida, and Maryland). The space also served as a bulletin board for myriad advertisements for demonstrations and exhibitions, all of which seemed to be occurring concurrently with the showroom proper.

The sprawl of the showroom led to certain limitations on space as well as time for those organizing the show. My conversation with Ed Marszewski, co-director of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, was held in a cramped space between the falafel table and the main display window, leading some passersby to wonder whether or not we were part of some sort of SMALL-sponsored performance piece. Despite, or perhaps due to, the hustle and large number of guests, Marszewski was still very excited. “It’s great that I can bring together all these people—many of them friends who live within a block of this space—and be able to promote them like this.” He also noted, however, that the preparation has been hectic. “I’ve been meeting with hundreds of people every day. I’ve barely been able to learn everyone’s name.”

Herein lies the essential dilemma for the SMALL Showroom: if it is to represent an intimate community of businesses and artists in Bridgeport, how will it adapt as Bridgeport grows into its own as “the community of the future”—as one local publication optimistically christened the neighborhood—where more and more artists and manufacturers are moving everyday? How long, one wonders, will SMALL be able to remain small?

The audience ranged from zany to utterly nondescript. A woman wearing a short leather jacket and stockings patterned with silhouetted houses sat in front of me, while another wearing a beige trench coat and an unassuming dress sat next to me. The room’s thick white walls were blank with the exception of a single panel, where “Fresh Flesh” was spray-painted in a galactic mix of purples, greens, and copper-speckled white. Ed Marszewski, one of the directors of the Co-Prosperity sphere, donned his thick-framed glasses before launching into the plans for the night.

“This is going to be an informal gathering” he explained. “We are going to come up with actionable plans, we’re going to have constructive and generative thought about the cultural plan of Chicago. So, to do that,  you’ll come up and speak for 5  minutes…”

This year, the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) is working on the “2012 Chicago Cultural Plan,” which proposes to first figure out Chicago’s cultural identity and then shape it moving forward. This plan aims to provoke conversation between local artists, community members and anybody aspiring to add to the discussion of Chicago’s cultural identity. In these conversations, participants are invited to put forward ideas and proposals to further the impact of the Chicago arts community. Its aim is to establish an encompassing plan to ameliorate the problems artists face in Chicago through the collaborative partnerships formed in the private and public sectors.

The night began with Marszewski pointing at people to start the conversation. His finger first fell on a stylish advertising agent dressed in red lipstick and high-piled  hair. She stepped forward and spoke about consulting services for artists wanting to spread their image. Marsewski continued to direct the relaxed procession around the room until he abruptly left unexplained—possibly for a bathroom break? However, the floor had already been cleared for passionate debate about reforming the cultural identity of Chicago, and the intensity of the conversation compelled volunteers to step up.

Some of the brainstorming included a proposal for cultural ambassadors, who would be the link between the neighborhoods and the city. These ambassadors would be artists deeply embedded in their neighborhood who could identify problems artists faced and understand the interests and needs of the neighborhood; people who could represent them forcefully, accurately, and passionately about the decline of art production. Many speakers mentioned different systems and programs in other states and in other countries that worked efficiently and effectively to spur artistic creation by providing struggling artists with resources like living and showcase spaces, and materials for creation.

One of the most striking suggestions of the evening, perhaps because it was the only Powerpoint presentation, was the establishment of a space to be called the New Museum. This venue would address the problem that independent artists face today of securing legal spaces to showcase their artwork. Currently, they hold “illegal” private apartment parties out of necessity, always faced with the pressure from the police to shut them down. The New Museum would centralize independent artists in a legal space and integrate artists scattered across the city to increase visibility for emerging artists.

Marszewski, halfway through the presentation, came to a poignant realization: “You know, I’ve been thinking. Let’s face it—the city isn’t going to meet all of our demands. What we need to do is [take this] into our own hands. We need to connect with artists and change Chicago together.”

These community meetings aren’t just a way to communicate to the City of Chicago artists’ needs; they enable networks to form that enrich conversation between artists and about art in Chicago. Theirs is a diverse union, held together by the passion to create, to explore and to challenge; and for future Chicago cultural growth, it is vital to use that common artistic spirit as a means of reinforcing the weakening bonds of art within the city.