Alternative Programming:

The Agora

  • How do we MEND our communities?

    Catherine Reinhart will be performing The Cutting, where the artist will cut a quilt from their project, “The Collective Mending Sessions”.

    The performance will be followed by a discussion around these questions;

    • How do we MEND our communities?

    • What is the role of grief in mending and repair?

    • What is the role of mending and repair in grief?

    • How can craft be a catalyst for social repair? For building community?

    The conversation will be facilitated using the Talking Circle Style.

    Answers and Questions are welcome.

Lumpen Radio

Live on 105.5FM

  • PS1 Weather Report

    A re-visit of a short-lived (but maybe coming back) podcast from PS1 originally started back in Novemeber 2021!

    Hosted by John Engelbrecht from PS1 and other guests from the Midwest!

  • Spaces for Possibility is a collective of art teachers who will share their practice located at a storefront in Chicago. In this practice we contemplate what we can, cannot and can Not do in response to neoliberal conditions for teaching.

  • Janari’s Garden

    Nomadicube presents “Janari’s Garden”. Jalisa Ford, Deja Stout, and Marianne Bernstein remember 9 year old Janari Ricks who lost his life to gun violence while playing outside in Cabrini Green in 2020.

Print-Zone

  • AICWU (Art Institute of Chicago Workers United) Live Screenprinting with Annie Kielman: prints, decals, and structural change!

    We’ll be live-screenprinting AICWU swag, to support our organizing work — we’ll have tees, totes, and ephemera, and our own screen.

    NOTE: we will be sharing with the other group that signed up for Friday night, so Nick said to book the next available session (Sunday), so you’d get our info. But this will take place on Friday evening, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. (we’ll get set up a bit sooner!)

  • Tote bag screen printing with John Lacefield

    Roman Susan will be doing live screen printing for tote bags!

    John Lacefield will bring their screen printing cart to the space, and a heat press.

    Guests can BYOTote, or pick up a repurposed printed bag through a donation to Roman Susan.

High Concept Labs – OPEN LABS

In-progress Performance & VR | Located in HCL studio #401

Presented by HCL in Joint Residency with the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary

  • HCL Artist in Residency Shalaka Kulkarni performs a section of Nyra’s Dream (working title), a new dancework in development that explores female identity and erased narratives, both in Western and Indian cultures, through dance, text and new technology.

    The evening draws from ongoing movement research and is designed for active viewing. It begins in the 4th floor Library for brief community drawing and writing, and continues in the HCL studio for the performance. People may go back to the Library and leave markings on the paper, as a visual art impression after the performance.

    Shalaka’s dancemaking integrates auto-fiction with experiences from her childhood in India, and diaspora life in Chicago. This Open Lab performance emphasizes experimentation with text, including original text and the writings of American poet Maya Angelou (1928-2014) and Indian poet Sujatha Bhatt. It is also people’s first look at the work development since Shalaka’s recent residency in Germany, where she played the lead, against typical casting, in Scharniertheater’s theater dance Novecento, Alessandro Baricco’s fabulist monologue, in Hanover, the Kreisemuseum Syke near Bremen, and Berlin.

    More details at https://highconceptlabs.org/artists-in-residence-all/shalaka-kulkarni

  • HCL Fellow Yoshinojo Fujima presents a virtual reality performance, "Kurokami E{m}Urge #ChooseYourReality”, co-directed with filmmaker Subhash Kumar Maskara, in Mumbai, India, and created in collaboration with Hekiun Oda, a Grandmaster of Shodo traditional Japanese calligraphy, and Nozawa Matsuya, a Kabuki Gidayu Shamisen artist in Kyoto, Japan. The work’s central design element is a ceiling-hung bamboo hexagonal with painting on rice paper by Hekiun Oda. Outside of the digital center, a lone dancer in kimono (Yoshinojo Fujima) performs to Shamisen.

    Yoshinojo Fujima explains “The pandemic’s onset coincided with the start of developing this virtual experience. It was an unexpected opportunity to create in a manner that inspires a different avenue of thought, cognition, and realization is an exciting opportunity. Due to the individual and technological nature of the experience, a setting that is indoors, calm, and spacious, such as the HCL studio, was conducive to achieving the intended experience for the individual.

    Kurokami E{m}Urge is taken from a Kabuki play scene, and the intended experience is self-realization of thoughts regarding one’s own identity, the connection between all beings, and the ability to sympathize and relate one’s own beliefs while exploring from within another precept, in this case, during a virtual happening. The piece is a work in progress, and at a stage of development that the experience can be provided using the Oculus 2/Meta headset.”

    More details at https://highconceptlabs.org/artists-in-residence-all/rika-lin