“Every year we have the same intention. We want to widen the networks and nodes of various groups so we can grow a multiplicity of milieus in the art world,” explains Ed “Edmar” Marszewski. He’s talking about the Version Festival, an annual eleven-day arts festival that he founded and co-curates, which celebrates social and activist art in Bridgeport and on Chicago’s South Side. The theme of this year’s festival, “Infrastructure and Territories,” is appropriate to the history of the festival and the community that has grown up around it. Read the rest of this entry »

In the United States, the prevailing notion of Iran is one of religious fundamentalism and political oppression. “Iran” conjures up images of veiled women, state-sponsored terrorism, and nuclear weapons; rarely is it connected with contemporary art. “Dialogue,” a new exhibition of collaborative U.S.-Iranian art, opens January 29 at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Bridgeport. The show presents a very different reflection on Iranian culture and its relationship with the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Lines are being blurred in the Chicago art scene. As demonstrated by last Saturday’s Artist Run Spaces Tour, organized by the Hyde Park Art Center, the divisions between artist and curator, studio and gallery, office and home really aren’t so defined after all. The Artist Run Spaces Tour represents HPAC’s contribution to the year-long Studio Chicago project, a collaborative project that seeks to celebrate methods and places of artistic production. Read the rest of this entry »

June 19, 2007. The scene is a large, fluorescently-lit conference room, walls draped in threatening black curtains, the air chiming with the scattered tinkling of metal, glass, and thick, cream-colored hotel-grade dinnerware. Slight murmurs drift upwards from a series of round tables filled with the occupants’ self-satisfied smiles. If it weren’t for the overabundance of grey suits, the scene could be mistaken for the Daytime Emmys, but lo: the smiles are shrinking. Read the rest of this entry »

Originally called Hardscrabble, Bridgeport began as a community of Irish-American canal workers paid for their labor with land deeds. While its segregation from the South Side’s black neighborhoods made it a hotbed of torrid racial relations up through the ’90s, today it is considered one of the city’s most ethnically diverse neighborhoods and is home to large Lithuanian, Polish, Hispanic, and Chinese-American populations. Spawning both Richard Daleys and three other Chicago mayors, Bridgeport has been nicknamed the “Cradle of Mayors,” but it’s equally a cradle of beautifully maintained historic churches, diverse ethnic eats, and underground culture. As Pilsen faces the twin blows to low property values of gentrification and economic recession, many of the Chicago Arts District’s slick galleries and squalid artists’ lofts flock to the home turf of Chicago’s merry prankster art collective, Lumpen, and struggle to find new life while rent is cheap. The bountiful DIY concerts, gallery openings, and ethnic street fairs offered by Chicago’s latest “Neo-Bohemia” are a valuable resource for culture-hungry South Siders. Bridgeport is one of the more convenient neighborhoods to access, lying due west of the Red Line’s Sox-35th stop. The 35 and 8 buses will help you navigate the neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »

Curating a show isn’t something new for Chicago artist Bert Stabler. His show “$(heart),” which was featured in the NFO/XPO at Lumpen’s Version Festival 2009 this past spring, dealt with our psychological relationship to currency. A year previous, “Vulva O’Keefe Versus Angry Goldsworthy” prompted artists to “interact” with his premised division of the sexes: an “Eternally Perverse Primal Father Creator/Destroyer” and an “Infinitely Schizophrenic Future Mother Protector/Disintegrator.” Other favorite themes include paganism, swamps, and perversion (“Brown River,” July 2007). Stabler fully embraces the notion that being a curator can be artistry in itself, and each of his shows have sought simultaneously to express his own ideas and provoke new concepts from fellow artists.

While “Salad, Church, and Exercise” (a.k.a. “Sal-ChEx”), Stabler’s upcoming group show at the Co-Prosperity Sphere, has similar goals, the curator’s relation to the exhibition is slightly different. Read the rest of this entry »

“It does surprise me,” says Mark Solotroff, “how within genres of music that are underground, confrontational, and aggressive, people can still be closed-minded to other underground, aggressive, dark music.” The Chicago musician and scene veteran hits upon an all-too-common contradiction in musical subcultures, which preach nonconformity while erecting their own rigid aesthetic expectations. Matchitehew Assembly, a two-day festival featuring a range of acoustically vicious performers that “encompass the spectrum of dark sound,” breaks down boundaries by uniting diverse patrons of extreme music under the Co-Prosperity Sphere’s roof. Read the rest of this entry »

I know that art is supposed to transcend earthly realities and all, but when Bridgeport’s January Third Friday gallery walk also landed on the coldest winter spell so far this year, reality inevitably intruded. Gallery openings were hard to spot, with nearly no one on the streets passing from one to another. The only audible noises were a few spinning tires trying to get over snow banks to park and a few freezing patrons cursing the cold as they hurried to find a heated refuge. Read the rest of this entry »