Sasha Tycko

A sonic blend of jazz, funk, blues, disco, soul and New Wave, the house music celebrated by the women of Honey Pot Performance is not the heavily-digitized music we think of today. Their inaugural show at the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone last Thursday attempted to recreate the energy and intimacy of the house scene the dancers grew up in.

The ’80s house culture that originated on the South Side extended far beyond music and parties, especially for dancers Media McNeal, Abra Johnson, Boogie McClarin, and Ni’Ja Whitson. It provided a safe outlet for youth grappling with issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Aptly named, house music served as a home for those who needed one. “The Chicago house culture,” Johnson said, “is one rooted in family.”

Led by McNeal, the group’s artistic director, the four women created the Sweet Goddess Project to bring more attention to the rise of women in the house scene, where more and more girls are becoming DJs, dancers, and promoters.

As the audience trickled in and took their seats, a DJ spun jazz records in the dim light of the corner. The small space of the Experimental Station added to the mellow party vibe.

Swathed in the soft blue and yellow light, the Honey Pot dancers flung themselves into the music with palpable energy. Though choreographed and well disciplined, the dancing had an improvisational air to it. The women writhed, twirled, glided and stomped around the floor, yet the diverse movements were rooted in rhythm and fluidity. In their dialogue and video clips that were interspersed throughout the performance, the women addressed big issues such as freedom, sexuality, consciousness, and exclusion. But with the varying pace of the dance and the shifting character of their movements—sometimes interlocking and moving as one unified mass of bodies, other times flitting around dizzily—they seemed to physically break out of the confines of these words and problems.

The audience bobbed along and yelped out catcalls, their own minor contributions to the lively atmosphere. Each dancer brought a personal element to her performance—in one solo, Johnson spoke aloud about her family’s relentless migration through the city in pursuit of better education and more security. Clutching her chest, she ended her monologue with the statement, “I want a home that wants me too.” House music was that home. The Honey Pot Performance will return to the South Side on December 18 at eta Creative Arts.

Last Friday night, this performance, called “Ladies Ring Shout,” brought a crowd of South Side residents out of a cool rain and into the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone. Channeling this genre of spiritual ritual performed by African slaves, “Ladies Ring Shout” combined spoken word, song, dance, and video to probe some of the images of African-American women found in contemporary American culture.

Historically, ring shouts provided an emotional and artistic forum for African slaves to express the complex feelings born from their condition. This struggle is evident in the opening act of the show, when sorrowful groans combine with specter-like shadows projected on the wall behind, reminding the viewer of both the physical and spiritual nature of the activity.

The workshop and performance was developed by three accomplished academics and performers, Felicia Holman, Meida Teresa McNeal, and Abra Johnson. The trio has worked together for over ten years, confronting issues of race, religion, gender, unemployment, and sexuality from both a deeply personal and sweeping societal perspective. With “Ladies Ring Shout,” described by Johnson as a “combination of scholarship and life experiences,” they hoped to contextualize some of their own deep emotions into a holistic narrative on the place of black women in 21st-century America. “We wanted to draw off this story and tradition of the ring shout as a safe place to come and share stories,” McNeal said.

The artists used a variety of forms and perspectives to examine what they called the “(mis)representations of the black female in popular culture.” At times the show verged on the scholastic: in one segment, Johnson used a slideshow to lecture on misconceptions proliferated by pop culture figures like Tyler Perry’s “Madea” character. In a more theatrical section, the women donned black and white suits and simulated an interrogation in which two cast members aggressively demanded that a third answer to various stereotypes.

In the Q&A that followed the performance, which was moderated by WTTW journalist Sylvia Ewing, it became that the trio intended the performance to raise just as many questions as it would answer. Audience member Kulvinder Arora summed the evening up: “I feel like this performance reorients the frame for us. Each of us is able to relate to it through our own experiences.”

Vicki Yang and Matt Wan

[Show as slideshow]

The Experimental Station at 6100 Blackstone Avenue has a knack for reinvention. From the very beginning, the Station has been marked by its ability to rise from the ashes. Artist Dan Peterman set up a studio there in 1987, in what was then a recycling center, and then purchased the building in 1994. He cleared out the mass of random recycling detritus, making space for artists and local businesses, including his own Blackstone Bicycle Works, an organization that has brought bikes and bike-repair skills to many University of Chicago students and Hyde Park and Woodlawn residents over the years.

But on April 25, 2001, a fire devastated the building, leaving only the brick exterior standing. Connie Spreen, Peterson’s wife and the station’s co-founder, recalls how on the day of the fire, a young boy stood looking at the wreckage. He said to her, “Connie, I’m sure glad that you and Dan aren’t the kind of people who pack up and leave.”

Before he spoke, Connie thought she was that kind of person.

She changed her mind and replied, “I’m glad I’m not.” And the couple began to clean up. Out of the smoking heap, Dan and Connie rebuilt their organization and renamed it the Experimental Station.

The commitment to rebuild, and all that has come from it, came from the people. “You can own the property but you don’t have control over the sense of community there,” said Connie. “That’s what we’re invested in.”

Responding to the needs and expectation of their neighbors, the Experimental Station has launched numerous programs since the fire, in hopes of serving, equally, the diverse communities around it. Over the years, this commitment has manifested itself in areas of art, culture and politics, through everything from community gardens to places for free legal consultations, to performance spaces for local theater groups. But perhaps the station’s greatest success has come through an unexpected medium: food.

Last Saturday, the 61st Street Farmer’s Market  opened in the lot wedged between Dorchester and Blackstone Avenues. Entering its fourth year, the market announced spring’s arrival with its bounty. Merchants stood at the 61st Street Farmers Market, waiting behind stalls brimming with bright green asparagus, pink rhubarb and the just-red hues of the season’s earliest tomatoes. And in return, spring brought its worst. The day was cold, gray, blustery; the sharp wind constantly knocked over signs and threatened to topple tent poles. The farmers stood and shivered, hoping that their tents wouldn’t fly away. And though there were few customers, the square was filled with the optimism of new beginnings. It was the first farmers market of the season, and the producers were ready and eager to give out free samples.

Fresh, local, organic, free-range; all those words were posted on signs around the market, as they’re posted in farmers markets all over the country. Three words, however, made certain signs stand out: “LINK Accepted Here.”

Those three words make the 61st Street Farmers Market more than just a place to buy produce. They represent the Experimental Station’s goal to help low-income families afford fresh, organic food. In the vegetable stand’s fight against the food desert, they are a call to arms. They are the sign of a new food culture, and for the Experimental Station, food culture is synonymous with community.

The LINK card is the Illinois version of the national Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which replaced the old system of food stamps that was founded in 1939. The actual stamps are gone; those who are eligible now receive money for food electronically on a debit card. Despite the change in method, the essential need for food assistance remains much the same: some estimate that as many as 1 in 8 Americans today rely on SNAP.

When the Experimental Station opened the 61st Street Farmers Market in 2008, it was one of the very few markets in the city to accept LINK cards, and they are now the city’s foremost experts on implementing food stamps in farmers markets. Last year, the Experimental Station helped 5 farmers markets out of the 17 operated by the City of Chicago set up the technology they need to accept Link cards. Spreen called it “the most successful pilot program of its size in the country.” With a $35,000 grant from the Department of Community Development, they bought EBT (Electronic Balance Transfer) machines, the devices that accept LINK cards, paid the transaction fees, and hired someone to oversee the EBTs in all five markets. Incidentally, the man they hired, Corey Chatman, was on the SNAP program until he got his job at the Experimental Station.

According to a USDA blog, Chicago farmers markets earned $28,944 in total revenue from EBT transactions in 2010. In a single day in October, the Daley Plaza market cashed in $1186 in SNAP credits and broke a record in the process.

The financial success of the LINK program in urban farmers markets offers convincing proof that the system is sustainable and is silencing skeptics. This year, ten Chicago farmers markets will accept LINK cards. According to Dennis Ryan, manager of the 61st Street Market, approximately 50 markets across the state offer LINK payment options as well. The Experimental Station has even taken their grassroots work to the level of political advocacy: Ryan co-wrote a bill in the Illinois legislature called the Farmers Market Technology Improvement Program Act (HB-4756), which increased state efforts to make more farmers markets open to people who rely on food subsidies.

At the farmer’s market, Spreen discussed the Experimental Station’s role in making fresh food more accessible in the local community. Sitting at a wooden table in the Station’s large, inviting kitchen, Spreen greeted the various people filtering in and out, who chatted and dropped off boxes.

She explained the Station’s first struggle, in choosing to develop the 61st Street Farmers Market: “You can make food available but not affordable, even on LINK.” So to encourage people to spend their very limited income on fresh produce, the Station implemented the Double Value Incentive program. Thanks to grants from the Wholesome Wave Foundation and the Leo S. Guthman Family Fund, for every purchase a customer makes with his or her LINK card on one market day, the Experimental Station will match up to $25 in credits on the card. Since the market is open every Saturday, that means that someone could get $100-125 worth of free food per month. To put this in perspective, according to the USDA, in 2009 the average SNAP household earned $711 in gross income and received $272 from SNAP per month. The city markets, which are open more frequently, will match $5 per day.

The next logistical issue the program faced was not whether they could provide affordable food for those in need, but whether people would eat it. The answer? Not if they don’t know how to cook. That’s why the farmers market offers cooking demos, and the Experimental Station teaches cooking classes and healthy eating workshops at local schools including the Carnegie and Fiske Elementary Schools, as well as Hyde Park High School.

Of course, one of the best educational tools is the market itself. One of the farmers for the market, Vicki Westerhoff of Genesis Growers, explains, “I feel a large part of what we do is educate members of the community about the value of vegetables and fruits, especially those grown organically and sustainably. We talk about how produce picked at its prime and taken to the market fresh from the field yields higher nutritive value. We also talk about food preparation so people know how to prepare what they buy, and perhaps encourage them to try new vegetables.” And it seems to be working. From 2008 to 2010, the Station has seen a steady increase of shoppers from outside of the University community. This is especially true for Woodlawn residents, who, Ryan says now attend the market with equal frequency as Hyde Parkers.

The Experimental Station doesn’t stop with its 61st Street Market. It has an entire organizational branch devoted to “food culture,” including the market, a community garden, the Woodlawn Buying Club, where residents can buy organic and natural food in bulk, and a wood-fired oven in the Station’s kitchen. It’s all part of the Station’s commitment to building a “food culture” in their community.

“How we grow our food and feed our community affects everything,” Ryan notes. “It impacts our health, our economy, our social interaction with each other. In most cultures around the world, food is the center of everything—family, community, fun. Food should not be a status symbol. Food is the key to life. If we connect our community with the best food available, make it affordable and ensure we all know the value of that food, our communities will thrive.”

But the last several years have dealt several blows to the culture that Peterman, Spreen, and the rest of the community have nurtured, recalling memories of the hard times our of which the Station was born. In an unfortunate series of events, the University demolished the 61st Street Garden to lay the foundations for the new Chicago Theological Seminary building, a trailer caught fire on their property in August, and then Backstory Café—the Station’s social center, which served homemade, organic soups, sandwiches, and pastries—closed abruptly, citing a shortage of money and “entrepreneurial energy.”

But as time has shown, the energy that has sustained the Experimental Station will again be renewed. After it was razed, the 61st Street Community Garden moved one block over to 62nd and volunteers got back to work. And the buzz that surrounded the popular brunch spot Backstory Café will likely be transferred to the raw, vegetarian café, B’Gabs Goodies, which will soon open in its place. The Experimental Station has not only fed the community, but has also fed a kind of community that will outlast any of its programs or structures. It’s not the kind of place to pack up and leave.

The evening included its fair share of traditional fairy and folk tales, but other accounts sprang from less predictable origins, inspired by everything from Homer’s Odyssey to Shakespeare’s King Lear, from life changing personal experiences to fleeting moments that sparked journeys to the farthest reaches of the imagination. There were song-stories and poem-stories, tales about love lost and about science, histories carried from the Solomon Islands and from the African continent.

Each of the performances was united through the teller’s enthusiasm and pleasure of spinning a well-crafted yarn.  It was a night filled with flying hand gestures, dramatic silences, whispers and yelps; people were genuinely passionate about sharing not just their experiences, but a great story.  Many of the performers were professionals, the business cards they had laid out proudly proclaiming “Storyteller.”  But more were simply individuals with a story to tell; a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago drawing from his anthropological work and a social worker imagining the death of his imaginary brother, a painter with a silly song of lust and an elementary school teacher in a fuss over a talking yam.

The stories and their tellers were unique, but everything seemed to revolve around a shared joy for that moment when the teller holds the entire fate of a person, a group, or an entire world in his words. (Isaac Dalke)

by Alex Boyd

“Please note that some of our sounds effects are a bit loud,” the warning read. “If you have sensitive ears, you might want to keep an eye on the trash can lids.” This note, displayed during “An Evening of Classic Horror and Suspense in the Old Time Radio Tradition,” seems a bit distant from the realities of today’s horror industry, where ear-piercing screams and suspenseful heavy breathing dominate. Yet the audience gathered at the Experimental Station last Friday to experience the Hyde Park Players’ performance quickly settled into the more old-fashioned approach. The program consisted of five scenes adapted from short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, W.W. Jacobs, and Charles Dickens. The undulating pitches of actors’ voices, trashcan lids, gravel, and a child’s toy whistle suddenly held a fantastic power over the audience members, allowing the visually calm scene onstage to provoke palpable suspense and chaos. Since it was a taped radio production, rather than watching actors in period costume flit across the stage in terror, the audience was held in grave attention purely by the strength of sound.

An actor mentioned after the show that the group was hoping National Public Radio would air the production, but on Friday night, those in attendance at the sold-out show were the main benefactors. Paul Baker, the founder of the Players and producer of the show, said of the choice of format, “We hope that people are intrigued by the mechanics being fronted in this way. A lot of people are intrigued by the homage to old-time radio style.”

Whether intrigued by the creative choices of the production or by the ghoulish subject matter, it is clear that the Hyde Park community responded enthusiastically to the idea. After the show, audience members shook themselves out of the auditory trance that the Players created, and left the Station with the reverberation of trashcans in their ears.

At the height of the city’s Olympic buzz, the two men had a darker vision of what the  games might bring to Chicago: not prosperity and fortune, as they were told by some media sources, but gentrification, corruption, police brutality, privatization of public lands, and massive, massive debt. In the fall of 2008, they met up to create the No Games Chicago organization. Their message was meant to speak for the City of Chicago: “We’re corrupt and incompetent and we’ll bungle this.”

Every day from July 26 to October 2, 2009, they mailed the IOC members evidence of corruption, crumbling infrastructure, lack of public support, and general penury. No Games met with the IOC once formally in Chicago, and twice informally in Switzerland and Copenhagen, where they handed out a “Book of Evidence,” sometimes sneaking past security to do so. On October 2, at 11 am local time, Tresser watched the results on TV in his hotel room in Copenhagen. Chicago was the first of the top four to be eliminated. He shouted, “We did it, it’s over, it’s done!”

Almost exactly a year later, Tresser and Quellos decided to tell their story of the games as a “public resource.” Attendee Pat Hill, a retired  police officer and former Olympic qualifier, said, “The lesson is you can beat city hall.” We won’t ever know what the Olympics would have brought to Chicago, but this crowd considers the failed bid a victory. An elderly lady in the audience, Liane Casten, echoes him, calling the defeat “one of the great miracles of Chicago.” “This time,” she said, referring to the city’s politicians with a self-satisfied grin, “They didn’t get their way.” (Sharon Lurve)

The savory aroma draws a crowd to his stand, just as it drew Arctander to the business of crêpe cooking two years back: “My friend Leroy Stevens was making crêpes at the market,” he explains. “He and [Experimental Station president] Dan Peterman had started the crêpe stand as a way for people to try foods available from other vendors. Leroy was leaving town, and asked if I wanted to take over. I have been making crêpes ever since.” Every Saturday morning a long line of crêpe devotees wait to sample savory combinations of crêpe fillings. Favorites include “Call of the Wild,” a cheese and mushroom variety, and “the Crowd Pleaser,” which is filled with Nutella and bananas.

To the dismay of South Side residents (your correspondent included), Arctander is moving on. As he put it, “In the back of my mind I hear Dade Murphy’s Mom from the movie Hackers saying, ‘You are going to like New York, it’s the city that never sleeps!’ I just graduated from UIC and our lease in Pilsen is up as of June 1st. Some friends in Brooklyn have a room opening up for June and July. I’m thinking of this summer as a non-committed test run of a potential new home.”

Arctander is currently searching for an apprentice to take over his crêpe stand. The prerequisites are simple: “The ideal candidate is reliable, sociable and resistant to heat and wasps,” Arctander said. Interested candidates should send him an email at z.arctander@gmail.com. In the wake of Arctander’s popularity, the new crêpe maker will certainly have a large griddle to fill.

Version festival poster; courtesy of the Co-Prosperity Sphere

“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.

First held nine years ago, Version is meant to carve out a territory for rising artists who are often lost in the city’s sprawling cultural landscape. “The art ecology is not too healthy,” says Edmar. He created Version to combat, if only for a few days, the perennial struggle of rising artists. “Version is the first exhibition for a lot of artists. It is the perfect way to introduce different facets of the Chicago art world to larger audiences.”

“The show is invested in artists of a whole variety,” says Dayton Castleman, the co-curator of this year’s festival. “What I’ve been most interested in is the idea that territories take on a wide variety of connotations. It could be everything from real property to intellectual property. It deals with ideas of space, and whether that’s physical space or cerebral space, the term is sufficiently broad.”

The relationship between art and space has become increasingly important in contemporary art practices, and Chicago was an especially important city for movements that took real environments as a space for cognitive experimentation. As artists moved away from the gallery and into alternative spaces, many began to incorporate the dynamics of their surrounding community into their practices, eventually leading to what Edmar calls “social art” and “art activism.” With its vast abandoned industrial spaces and its stigmatized, segregated neighborhoods, Chicago offered a cityscape with widely variant artistic opportunities. It continues to do so today. “When artists move into communities, it opens new horizons,” says Edmar. Among the many community-based artist groups in Chicago, Edmar cites two as model examples. The first is the Stockyard Institute, a Chicago-based artist collective that designs projects and sustainable programs for communities around the city. The second, the Experimental Station, is a Woodlawn-based organization that aims to create local infrastructures for artists and for social change by supporting artists and activists in its community in various ways—including cheap rent, meeting spaces, free technology, communal ovens, and gallery space. For Edmar, these two groups exemplify some of the most important moves in contemporary art, as each have established systems where individuals can engage a community through artistic mediums. “Art plays an everyday part of peoples’ lives, but encountering it in a structured form allows people to enjoy things that they don’t seek out or have forgotten about.”

This year, Version has reached out to new territories. Participants hail from as close as a few blocks away to as far the Netherlands. Among this year’s artists are Chris Larsen, a Minnesotan who’s built a machine-like wooden structure with a hollow interior space where he will sit as a way of manipulating his environment. Jeff Zimmerman, a Chicago local, will show two paintings titled “North Sider” and “South Sider” that will hang across from one another as a way to evoke the gap between Chicago’s latitudinal divide. Thomas Morena will create a large imagined continent from new and burnt matchsticks as a way to evoke the idea of scorched earth in territories of war. Alexa Loftis will do a performance piece where she buries herself in sand in front of a beachscape as she drinks “girly” cocktails. This latter installation is a literalizing of territory, as Loftis will both mark her territory and be subsumed by it.

The festival’s theme is important not only for artists, but for curators, as well. For the exhibition, Castleman marked the floor of the Co-Prosperity Sphere with a grid system that divides the space into fifteen-by-fifteen feet quadrants, and allocated each to an artist. “In a sense, the gallery space is divided into distinct territories,” explains Castleman. “You can move from one territory to another. They’re permeable.” Artists can often be territorial in their desire to have prime space within a gallery; Castleman created the grid in order to allow artists discrete, compartmentalized spaces while also avoiding conflict between individuals. However, Castleman also encouraged artists to imagine new kinds of work that responded to the gallery’s geography. “I asked artists to conceive new work that would emphasize the space. So in that sense, the whole exhibition became a site-specific installation.”

Among this year’s newcomers is the b(ART)er collective from Denver, Colorado. The collective is a group of six individuals who set up systems of exchange from their van. “We have a bunch of different modes of exchange,” explains Alex Erskine, one of the members of the collective. “Each one is adaptable given changes in demographics and culture. This is as much inquiry-based as it is performative and relational. The really important part is figuring out what questions should be asked and generating these questions for ourselves as well as for the community.” The b(ART)er collective is making their first cross-country trek to Version at the recommendation of the group’s leader, Nikki Pike, who first visited Version as a graduate student several years ago. “At Version, I was exposed to ideas I couldn’t have imagined. It really exposed me to outside-of-the-academy art making. Anyone I get to take to the festival would have a similar experience. Some of the best thinkers are there.”

The b(ART)er collective has been assigned the space right outside of the entrance of the festival. There, they will park their truck and let the process unfold. “In the spirit of inquiries, we can have fun and experiment and see how Chicago responds to us. We like to remain really fluid. A lot of the time, the space dictates how the performance unfolds. That’s the most exciting part,” explains Erskine.

Over the past nine years, as Version has grown in breadth and size, it has created a distinct place for itself in Chicago’s art scene. The significance of this positions is up for grabs. Chicago is not New York, and Version Festival is not the Whitney, and this is something that Edmar is only too aware of. “It’s not like we’re reaching a general audience of Cubs fans,” he reflects. “But if people didn’t care, we wouldn’t be doing this.”

(Mehveş Konuk)

For the past three weeks, she has been working on a project in the Los Angeles area that assesses waste flow and finds creative ways to redirect it. The project involves three different locations: a public housing project in L.A., a hospital for Vietnam veterans in a mental health program, and a community of ranchers and members of the Shoshone Paiute Indian tribe in Owens Valley (where the city of L.A. obtains most of its water).

Klehm’s L.A. project has many independently evolving parts. She has developed two bio-filters, which contain a mechanical sand-gravel filter in addition to a soil-plant filtering component. One is constructed from a shipping crate, the other from 55-gallon barrels. Both filter rainwater and river water from the city. She is also cultivating wetlands for water filtration and purification. In Owens Valley, Klehm set up a large-scale earthworm composting and green waste program. “I’m working with the dynamic of my context,” explains Klehm. “The Latino community’s dynamic, the veteran’s dynamic, and this tiny town of ranchers and natives’ dynamic.”

“A lot of people don’t really see what I do as art-making,” Klehm pauses. “But I really don’t care. Others say this is art. I call it ‘social ecologies.’ I use aesthetic strategies to re-enliven dialogues around land use. And I engage people and help create a system that works for them.” Although Klehm has been in California for the past several weeks, most of her projects are based in her hometown Chicago, a historic center for community-based art forms.

For example, in 1993, the arts organization Sculpture Chicago joined with artists and local community organizations to create eight large-scale public art projects in several Chicago neighborhoods. The project, entitled “Culture in Action,” included a neighborhood parade that brought Mexican-Americans and African-Americans together, a hydroponic garden for HIV and AIDS patients, and a block party organized by neighborhood youth groups. Despite the project’s attempt to create a new dialogue between the artist and community, seventeen years later almost none of its effects remain. Most of the works in “Culture in Action” didn’t last; Klehm wants to make sure that hers do.

A few years ago, Klehm started the “Seed Archive Project.” Housed in Chicago, the archive is a public-access surplus of seeds, which Klehm gives to anyone committed to sowing and growing them. The project has an estimated eighteen-year development period. Klehm also started a “Neighborhood Orchard” near her Little Village home. The project has been developing for eight years, and continues to grow. Klehm began the community apple orchard when her neighbor, Trevino, refused money for a favor, asking her instead to plant him an apple tree. The orchard now takes up three-quarters of an acre. In 2007, Klehm built “Greenhouses of Hope”: two 2,500-square-foot earthworm compost sites in Chicago’s Pacific Garden Mission, a homeless shelter on South Canal Street. The project is continuous and ongoing. “Everything I do, I birth, has its own momentum, and eventually projects move away from me. I just have to keep up with them.”

Klehm, who grew up on a farm, clearly knows how to keep up with nature, but reconnecting urban residents with their landscapes is more difficult, and she knows what happens when community projects become dependent on a single individual. Twenty years ago, Klehm planted a hundred fruit trees in Grand Crossing. Today, only two remain, and they are now located at the Experimental Station at 61st and Blackstone. “People may want urban gardens, but they don’t know how to take care of them, or what it means to build an ecology and maintain it. That’s the missing piece, and that’s the hardest thing to teach because we’ve been so divorced from those long-term rhythms.”

As Klehm’s career continues to take her to new places, the resilience and relevance of her projects will be tested. But she has confidence in both her work and the communities they engage. “What I do is teach a system and see how people grab onto it. People I work with become collaborators. We are all on equal ground.”

Sitting on a small stage in the Experimental Station across from Chicago Public Radio host Steve Edwards, Michelle Alexander described the systematic discrimination against racial minorities by the United States’ criminal justice system. Author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Alexander explained that the supposedly colorblind narcotics laws that came out of the War on Drugs specifically target people of color, especially young black men. This has led to mass incarceration of minorities, many of whom are stripped of their legal rights upon release. In the ’70s, before drug legislation was implemented, there were around 300,000 people incarcerated in America. Now there are over two million people in American prisons, Alexander said, and it’s not an accident that most of them are black.

What if, Alexander asked us to consider, the police treated drug use in college fraternities like they do in poor minority communities? What if they entered parties, lawfully seized the personal property of the offenders, sent 18-year-old University of Chicago students to jail for years, and stripped them of legal rights when they got out? A murmur rose up among us.

This discrimination is real, said Alexander, but it is not simple to explain. There are more black officers on police forces now than ever before, she pointed out to us, and there are more black men in prison now than ever before. She told us that she herself, an African-American civil rights lawyer born a generation after Jim Crow was dismantled, still finds her perceptions colored by racial biases.

“Martin Luther King, Jr. used to say over and over again in his speeches that racial caste systems are supported more by racial indifference than racial hostility,” Alexander reminded us. “The same thing can be said about mass incarceration. We don’t care enough as a nation about black and brown youth, and if we did, the system of mass incarceration would not exist.”

When the discussion ended, many listeners lingered. We passed out fliers, we exchanged numbers, we filled the space with conversation. We left that small crowded room slowly, because we felt connected, and we did not want to be indifferent.

Clare Feinberg contributed reporting to this article.