Benjamin Murphy wedges his cigarette butt into the gray planks of a picnic table and squints, surveying his sanctuary. In the fading light of a late-May Thursday afternoon, the 65th and Woodlawn Community Garden resembles a living patchwork quilt—some plots in this roughly 1000 square-foot space are lined with misshapen bricks, others are freestanding mounds of soil punctuated by the occasional wire trellis, tree branch, or toiling gardener. Murphy laughs, “You can’t gang-bang on this corner.” Read the rest of this entry »

Around a rectangular table in a conference room at the Bessie Coleman Library, a group of University of Chicago students and community members are meeting to discuss this year’s Art in Action festival. “Okay, who is taking care of sign-making Monday?” one student asks. Several hands go up from the planning committee, made up of seven students and seven community members, including a local pastor, several artists, and members of various South Side organizations. Enthusiasm is high and periodic chatter interrupts the main agenda: the logistics of an event meant to bring the UofC community into contact with those around it. Read the rest of this entry »

“My work is context specific. It’s about social context. It’s about place. Place refers to more than land; place is about land that has history. It feels more alive,” explains Nance Klehm, an artist and activist based on the South Side. This particular morning, Klehm is in a motel room in Tucson, Arizona. It’s 6am, and she’s ready to hit the road. Read the rest of this entry »

Movement is part of the American dream. Across an ocean to the new world, west to the last frontier, then up the social ladder, out to the suburbs—or so they say it­ goes. Social mobility and housing mobility are inextricably linked in the national psyche. But there is a darker, less public story about this movement; for many Americans, a change of housing isn’t an opportunity—it’s a necessity. On Chicago’s South Side, gentrification, the foreclosure crisis, and the city government’s demolition of public housing have in recent years forced thousands of people from their homes. Read the rest of this entry »

Michelle Alexander, author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” was supposed to discuss her book last Wednesday evening in the large central room of the Experimental Station, but the heating went out. So instead, about a hundred of us packed tightly into a small, multi-purpose room next door, filling even the kitchen at the back of the space, piling our coats together on refrigerators and over each other’s seats. Read the rest of this entry »

Art is meant to draw people together, to forge cultural bonds that cross social boundaries. And yet, for decades, issues of race have impeded the diffusion of artistic innovation across the South Side’s social and racial lines. Although the University of Chicago’s presence in Hyde Park has engendered cynicism from surrounding communities, a few years ago, several Woodlawn residents and UofC students joined forces in an effort to dismantle the boundaries that have been impeding productive musical and artistic dialogue. The result was the creation of Woodlawn Collaborative, a communal space for art and activism. This Friday, the space will encourage the larger South Side community to come together and make music by providing a smorgasbord of artistic forms and flavors. Read the rest of this entry »

Rudy Nimocks is a pear-shaped man with a pedagogically dapper bowtie and a tough scowl. But as he rises, and the din of the crowded atrium resolves into an attentive silence, a jovial grin melts his hardened visage. He’s clearly pleased by the turnout. “Before we get into the here and now,” he coos, “I want to tell you all a story about a neighborhood called Woodlawn.” Read the rest of this entry »

Senegalese musician Morikeba Kouyate sits in the sunny front window of Hyde Park’s Chant restaurant, his twenty one-stringed kora resting in his lap. He is taking a breather in between songs, which layer his high, strong voice over complex fingerwork on the gourd-and-stretched-skin instrument. In the expansive dining room, a few diners circle around the buffet table, where fresh fruit, French toast, and omelets-to-order are offered alongside Thai-style chicken and bottomless mimosas. It is the mid-afternoon, and the brunch rush has passed; Morikeba no longer has to compete with the clinking of silverware. Jazz and blues has, of course, a long and illustrious history on the South Side, and Chant’s musical brunches are well-attended, with outdoor tables crowding the sidewalk in warmer weather. But what do brunches with accompaniment say about Chicago’s jazz tradition today? Read the rest of this entry »