Light and noise spill out from the Zhou B Art Center onto a dark street lined with vacant brick factories, hinting at the warmth and activity inside. Cross the threshold and the eerily quiet street life is replaced with a different kind of urbanism. Hulking marble sculptures lay about like ancient ruins. Young cosmopolitans talk art and politics, wine-filled cups in hand. One floor up, a brood of children breaks away from their parents and runs circles around an installation art piece, and in another corner a spectator comments, “I just don’t get it—are those condoms?” “Finger condoms, actually,” artist Connie Noyes chimes in. “Chefs use them.”

It’s Third Fridays in Bridgeport, and on this night every month, the underground arts scene comes out to play. Read the rest of this entry »

Bursting with art studios and galleries a few years ago, Pilsen’s stretch of South Halsted Street now features flyers advertising the potential of empty storefronts. Crowds continue to pack the street on the district’s monthly Second Friday event, but they find fewer open galleries and openings than in past months. A good portion of the studios in the Podmajersky artists loft complex were vacant as of mid-November, and even fewer opened to the public on Second Friday. Although some galleries continue to put out new monthly exhibitions, the vacancies signal a shift in Pilsen’s once-thriving art district.

A few miles south, Bridgeport’s former industrial district has become the quiet home of an underground art scene. 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 »

Last Friday night signaled the opening of 33 Collective Gallery’s annual self-portrait exhibition. The approximately 100 pieces on display confirm the growing importance of this event to the versatile group of Chicago-based artist contributors, who span the spectrum from the up-and-coming to the well-established. The common denominator: all were given the chance to share a self-portrait. Fifty of the works have gone up in the gallery and will remain there through June 11, while 100 were chosen for the permanent online collection which may be accessed through the gallery website. Read the rest of this entry »

The recently tabled “Event Promoters” ordinance, originally scheduled to be voted on by the Chicago City Council on Wednesday, May 14, is so patently fatuous and overbroad that you are moved to wonder how it was ever considered for passage into civic code. While the entire proposed law runs to several thousands of words, its most egregious proposal must be that “event promoters” register every performance they organize with the city of Chicago and pay a filing fee scaled to the expected size of the audience. The price of a promoter’s license ranges from $500 to $2000 for two years. Fines for offenses under the terms of the license range from $500 to $1000, and penalties for holding events without a license can reach $10,000. The definition of an “event promoter” is among the worst of the proposed law’s perversions; the tortured wordiness of the proposed ordinance makes every small-scale music professional, from the booking agent at the Empty Bottle to a singer-songwriter scheduling his or her own shows, subject to the law’s requirements. For the courageous few willing to pay the ridiculous registration fees, more strictures follow: every applicant must be over 21 years old, subjected to a background check, and fingerprinted. And each event promoter would have to inform the police of any performance seven days in advance of its scheduled start. Read the rest of this entry »

The cops broke in like it was the Haymarket Riot. The Zhou B. Art Center in Bridgeport—white interior gleaming, techno beats pulsing softly—was hosting the 3rd Annual Printers’ Ball, a gala for the see-and-be-seen crowd in Chicago’s independent publishing circle. Then the boys in blue arrived. “I noticed early on that the off-duty police who were working security were wearing Kevlar vests and behaving in a rather aggressive manner considering the fact that it was a party for independent print culture,” David “Raver” Emanuel remembers in his blog “Impossible to Work.” “When we got back [from dinner], the police had already kicked everybody out and were preparing to put big orange stickers on the front doors, letting the world know that the venue was closed for business, effective immediately.” Read the rest of this entry »

The most significant modern-day landmark in Bridgeport is U.S. Cellular Field—known as “The Cell” in certain parlances—the home of Major League stalwart and 2005 World Champions Chicago White Sox. The memories from that whirlwind season still linger here, but the neighborhood which has grown in the shadow of steel and concrete is one in flux. Bridgeport’s character, as well as its physical area, fall under the stadium’s literal and figurative shadow. This is the historical home of Irish and Lithuanian blue-collar roughnecks who drink alternately silent and raucous toasts to the White Sox along the whiskey frontier lining Halsted Street. Here remains the husk of Chicago’s industrial past and the birthplace of the Daley Dynasty. Bridgeport is also simultaneously one of the fastest “browning” neighborhoods in the city and an increasingly expensive place to live. Not to mention the unique arts community—struggling to combine highbrow sensibilities with activist politics and populist sentiment—that has produced local noise and international stars. And from every street corner, the stadium in the distance looms unmoved. Read the rest of this entry »