The Chicago Cultural Center is the anchor for the city’s largest architecture festival—the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Walking into Preston Bradley Hall, you’ll see a towering banner with a land acknowledgement from the American Indian Center of Chicago. It recognizes the city as the traditional homeland of the Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and many other nations.
This statement, along with the other exhibitions and installations, sets a new tone for the citywide event. The three-month festival, which ends January 5, 2020, is centered around four themes: land and belonging; architecture and memory; rights and advocacy; and collaboration and discussion.
For a design festival, these themes address issues often overlooked in the industry. The biennial, titled “...and other such stories,” is less concerned with new takes on skyscrapers and more interested in how to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, such as housing rights and pollution of the natural world.
The leaders of the third edition, Artistic Director Yesomi Umolu and co-curators Sepake Angiama and Paulo Tavares focused heavily on strengthening the educational and community aspects of the biennial through collaborations, some with high school students, local architecture firms, and international artists.
“We didn’t want Chicago to just be a backdrop,” said Angiama.
At many of the exhibits and off-site venues there will be lectures, discussions, and other events throughout the biennial from September 19 to January 5. Here are some of the exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center and off-site locations that stood out during opening week.
The legal language of land and value of black space
Part of the Chicago Rooms at the Chicago Cultural Center, Theaster Gates’ “Landed: Gates et al.” consists of wooden desks with decorative building artifacts, large spiraled notebooks of art made from legal real estate jargon, and framed letterpress prints with words like “black space isn’t vacant.” A black and white video gives a snapshot of the South Side’s history with vignettes from public housing demolitions to present day buildings.
The project is inspired by the work of Hans Haacke in the ’70s that detailed the real estate holdings of Harry Shapolsky, a notorious and exploitive New York City real estate investor. In a similar framework, Gates uses documents and photographs to catalog his own real estate acquisition history, which involves restoring and activating more than 35 abandoned buildings in under-resourced communities. Gates’ was behind the Stony Island Arts Bank, a structure that sat vacant for three decades before becoming a gallery, media archive, library, and community center.
A reactivated South Side school closed in 2013
One of the off-site curatorial spaces of the biennial is the Anthony Overton Elementary School in the Bronzeville neighborhood. When the city decided to shutter 49 elementary schools, Paola Aguirre Serrano of Borderless Studios began to call developers who had purchased the sites to find out what was going to happen to the schools. In 2015, she connected with Ghian Foreman who had purchased the building as the developer and was open to hearing Serrano’s ideas about how to activate the space in a period of transition.
Since then, Borderless Studio has managed a series of design projects and now new work will be exhibited after a week of research and youth workshops. As an off-site location, there are multiple exhibitions, installations, and events at the space.
There are double-level picnic tables that resulted from Architecture For All’s student workshop on how neighborhood memories can be shared at meals. A Zorka Wollny audio installation contrasts vacant classrooms with the vibrant recordings school sounds using kids from Dyett High School and Williams Prep. Two maps are painted on the asphalt at Overton: one depicts the school closures across the city and the other shows Bronzeville’s amenities like parks, museums, and historic sites.
This past summer, studioBASAR worked with high school students to envision how the courtyard could be transformed for the neighborhood. During the biennial, the firm led a handful of community days where local residents worked on projects that involved woodworking, spray painting, stenciling, photography, and video documentation.
A decolonized history of Chicago
The translucent displays of “Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center” are inconspicuous, but the stories printed on these reveal an important history. Led by architects María León and Andrew Herscher, the Settler Colonial City Project research collective commissioned by the biennial investigated the hidden colonial violence embedded in the building’s materials, symbols, and labor.
The project tags what is traditionally valued and reminds the viewer of its true history. Bold text printed on the windows of Yates Hall overlooking a corner of Millennium Park read: “You are looking at unceded land.” Another example, the Tiffany-built dome in Preston Bradley Hall, is admired as the largest in the world with 30,000 pieces of glass. However, León and Herscher note Tiffany & Co.’s long practice of appropriating designs from Indigenous people and acknowledge these people’s displacement.
Hunt through the first, second, and fourth floors to find the displays and pick up one of the red booklets which details all of the Settler Colonial City Project’s research for the biennial.
A library for the resistance
Nope, this isn’t a biennial bookshop but a delightful “Anarchitechtural Library” curated by artist, theorist, and urban designer Adrian Blackwell. It honors the Chicago Cultural Center’s history as the city’s first public library and pays tribute to organizations fighting to keep public space alive. Visitors are invited to scan the shelves filled with local authors and sit at the curved benches for a read.
The library details histories of public housing destruction, school closures, environment degradation, and mass incarceration. Some of the texts include a radical coloring book Color Me Rising, a history of ’60s public art and black liberation The Wall of Respect, and Eve L. Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard.
A photography walk through North Lawndale
British-Nigerian photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi visited Chicago’s Homan Square for a month-long residency where he met with students, artists, activists and neighbors during three open photography workshops. In his typical style, he documented the urban landscape in North Lawndale and other neighborhoods walking the streets quietly photographing. In “Easy Like Sunday Morning,” one wall shows images from North Lawndale and the other shows images in other parts of the city, drawing parallels between the city’s communities.
Akinbiyi’s photographs sit across from another striking piece in the Chicago Rooms at the Chicago Cultural Center. Maria Gaspar’s “Unblinking Eyes, Watching,” which is a full wall image of Cook County Jail’s most historic concrete barrier. All the viewer sees is the institution’s worn down gray wall, but on the other side is a major intersection in a residential neighborhood.
A room for assembly made from recycled materials
ConstructLab, a group of designer-builders that uses recycled materials, chose to address togetherness by creating an “agora”—an open space for public assembly in a project titled “How Together.” Visitors are welcome to take home a small book on a low, curvy table. It’s an “anti-manual” with stories and instructions on all the possibilities of transforming space.
The funky seating area in the Chicago Cultural Center made out of painted wood scraps, pool noodles, clear plastic, and crates acts as a gathering area. Throughout the biennial, the space served as a place for designers, writers, and artists to lead programs and hold discussions.
An audio tapestry at the last remaining building of Jane Addams Homes
The future site of the National Public Housing Museum in Little Village is another off-site location for the biennial. Together the Stockyard Institute and Keleketla! Library installed exterior scaffolding around the last remaining building of the Jane Addams Homes.
For the project “Listed.” the artists captured visitors’ movements and conversations through a walkway linked up with microphones and speakers. The recordings will be “woven into an audio tapestry” combined with relevant historic readings. As the audio is developed, it will eventually be linked online and have a home at the new location of the NPHM.
Currently in fundraising mode, The National Public Housing Museum has plans to open in 2021. While every building from the public housing complex was demolished in the early 2000s except 1322 W. Taylor Street, the museum did recover incredible, original stone animal sculptures. They’ll be restored and installed in the courtyard again when the space reopens in a few years.
A memorial for victims of gun violence
One of the most discussed installations from the biennial this year, “The Gun Violence Memorial Project” invites visitors to walk through a memorial which honors the lives of gun violence victims at the Chicago Cultural Center. There are four glass workers cottage with objects collected through remembrance workshops: a delicately folded Bulls jersey, photos, a graduation tassel, buttons, and a plastic flower. In each structure, audio interviews with relatives detailing stories and memories play through speakers.
MASS Design Group, in partnership with the artist Hank Willis Thomas and the gun violence prevention organizations Everytown for Gun Safety and Purpose Over Pain worked to show the magnitude of gun-related deaths that occur over a single month in the United States.
In the final weeks of the biennial, the exhibitors will host one last gathering at the cultural center featuring a performance from Wilco’s John Stirratt and other musicians.
A Brazilian city’s social movement for housing rights
Establishing housing as a right is presented through several biennial exhibits including projects from CAMP collective, FICA, and Usina-CTAH. In São Paulo, Movimento Sem Teto do Centro (City Center Homeless Movement) is one of the most active organizations advocating for fair housing policies and does so by occupying vacant downtown buildings.
There’s a clear difference between this practice and invading a space. For example, in 2016 the movement occupied a government office building that had been vacant for 42 years. It was mixed-use with 12 floors of housing that went completely unused in a city with a 93 percent housing deficit. Members of MSTC worked to make it habitable again by renovating and cleaning the abandoned building.
The collaboration between MSTC, Escola da Cidade, O Grupo Inteiro presents the movement’s highly organized strategies for pressuring the city to implement equitable housing policies through timelines, painted flags, and videos at the Chicago Cultural Center.
An heirloom seed library
“Marj and Prairie: Eating Our Histories” explores the impact of colonial practices on the natural world. The seed library created by Vivien Sansour is a collection from plants that are nearing extinction because of the disappearance of communal farming or environmental change. In the Chicago Cultural Center on wooden shelves, there are bundles of dried flowers, glass jars of earthy seeds and legumes, and books on Midwest foraging. A glass table with more earthy objects has a basket of postcards with photos of Palestinian farmers and their personal stories of farming in both Palestine and the U.S. heartland.
An accessible archive of art that solves problems
At another off-site venue, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, artist Tania Bruguera and Arte Util Archive presents its network as “an idea of art as a tool for social change.” Arte Util literally translates to useful art, but their initiative goes further than that. Perfectly in line with theme of this year’s biennial, the project catalogs the work of artists from around the world who are solving problems.
During the biennial, the organization reactivated the museum as a space for neighborhood groups, artists, and activists. Chicagoans submitted their own suggestions for the archive too and at the end of the festival Arte Util will map out the local organizations it will add to the archive of case studies.
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