Oct 14 | Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Non-Citizens
Oct 14, 2016
6pm - 7pm
The Muffler Shop, 359 E Garfield Blvd, Chicago
The Mobile Speakers’ Podium for Citizens and Non-Citizens, created by artist Jenny Polak, is imagined as a deployable speakers’ corner that is both functional and symbolic. The two halves of the Speakers’ Podium rely on each other. Suburban house collides with prison fence to invoke the needed voices and ever-presence of the incarcerated among the free in a country that locks up 2 million people. The Speakers’ Podium is inspired by the effective coalition of citizens and immigrants/non-citizens who fought successfully to block the building of a for-profit detention center by Corrections Corporation of America in Crete, IL. Weekly programming will feature activists, poets, student groups, prison abolition groups, performing artists, and individuals who through their practice engage with conversations around mass incarceration, immigrant detention, and citizenship.
free and open to the public; rsvp
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Damon Locks performing with Roger Bonair-Agard (pictured above)
Damon Locks is a Chicago based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician, and deejay. He attended The Art Institute in Chicago where he received his BFA in Fine Arts. Recently, he has been lending his artistic and/or teaching talents to organizations such as Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project, Art Reach, the Center for Urban Pedagogy, and at UIC. The voices, the places, the stories, and the human exchange helps connect his work to the experiences of others, thus making the work stronger. He is a recent recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts and the 2016 MAKER Grant. He also just completed a music residency at The New Quorum in New Orleans. Website: damonlocks.com/art2
Jenny Polak
Jenny Polak is originally from England. Her art draws on her background in architecture and includes public and socially engaged projects such as architectural installations, drawings and useful commemorative objects. Her fictional firm Design For The Alien Within creates hypothetical hiding and dwelling places, symbolic lookout and counter-surveillance structures for people dealing with hostile authorities. Her family history of migration drives her work about citizen-non-citizen collaborations and accommodations and amplifying demands for social justice. She has completed collaborations and residency projects around the country and in 2012 was an artist in residence at Northwestern University, where she initiated the Speakers' Podium for Citizens and Non-citizens, inspired by community activism against the for-profit prison industry. Website: jennypolak.com
Cauleen Smith
Cauleen Smith is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the imagination. Operating in multiple materials and arenas, Smith roots her work firmly within the discourse of mid-twentieth-century experimental film. Drawing from structuralism, third world cinema, and science fiction, she makes things that deploy the tactics of these disciplines while offering a phenomenological experience for spectators and participants. Smith was born in Riverside, California and grew up in Sacramento. She earned a BA in Creative Arts from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Theater Film and Television. Smith is based in the great city of Chicago and serves as faculty for the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program and as visiting assistant professor at University of Illinois, Chicago. Her films, objects, and installations have been featured in group exhibitions. Studio Museum of Harlem, Houston Contemporary Art Museum; Yerba Buena Center for Art, and the New Museum, New York, D21 Leipzig and Decad, Berlin. She has had solo shows for her films and installations at The Kitchen, MCA Chicago, Threewalls, Chicago. She shows her drawings and 2D work with Corbett vs. Dempsey and kate Werble. Smith is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Rockefeller Media Arts Award, Creative Capital Film /Video, Chicago 3Arts Grant, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Chicago Expo Artadia Award, and Rauschenberg Residency. Smith was a 2016 Recipient for the Herb Alpert Awards in the Arts in Film and Video is the 2016 inaugural recipient of the Ellsworth Kelly Award. Along with Lana Lin, Smith co-programmed a series of experimental films for Flaherty NYC Spring 2016. Website: cauleensmith.com
Maggie Brown is a Chicago native who made her professional acting and singing debut at the Body Politic Theater. She studied music, theater and voice at Columbia College and has traveled with her show, Legacy, which follows the history and evolution of African American music and covers a wide range of musical forms. The Chicago Music Awards nominated Maggie’s first CD, From My Window, for Best Jazz CD. A protégé of both her father, Oscar Brown, Jr., and Abbey Lincoln, Maggie has developed a unique vocal style that James Walker of jazzchicago.net describes as “transcend[ing] limitations and genres, while still maintaining her unique unmistakable voice.” Maggie has been featured at the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park and with Orbert Davis’s Chicago Jazz Philharmonic at the Auditorium Theatre and the Logan Center for the Arts. She can also be heard in clubs throughout Chicago.
Website: facebook.com/msmaggiebrown
<< back to the Speakers' Podium series
This venue is physically accessible. Please contact Arts + Public Life at 773.702.9724 with any questions or accommodation requests.
______________________________________