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Gordon Parks-Inspired Arts Workshop

1/28/2015

Monday, February 9th
(6:00-7:00, 7:15-8:30 p.m.)

Mozart Park Fieldhouse
2036 N. Avers Ave.
Chicago, IL 60647

all ages, free & open to the public

You are invited to come to our next arts workshop, when we focus on the life and legacy of Gordon Parks, who was a photographer, filmmaker, poet and composer. We will:

Talk about Parks' biography, including his connection to Chicago;
Look at and discuss a some of Parks' photographs;
Watch a clip of one of his films; and
Write poetry and create visual art inspired by Gordon Parks.

Bring your musical instruments, your poetry, your art supplies! These workshops are interactive and multidisciplinary. We have supplies and equipment on hand that workshop participants can use -- including pencils, pens, paint, a piano, other musical instruments.

Location: Mozart Park is in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. It's on the north side of Armitage Ave. -- several blocks east of Pulaski Rd., just south of Dickens and Shakespeare Streets. Our workshop series happens in the room to the left of fieldhouse lobby; some workshop sessions may happen outside in the park, weather permitting.

Transportation & parking: Mozart Park can be reached by public transportation (such as the #73 Armitage Ave. bus, and not far from the Logan Square and Western Ave. stations on the CTA's blue line. Mozart Park has a parking lot on Armitage, east of Avers.

Registering for Chicago Portraits & Arts Journeys: You can register for this workshop series at the Chicago Park District website.

Additional info: You can contact us by clicking here (if you have questions about this workshop or to RSVP). Click here to find out more about the Chicago Portraits & Arts Journeys workshop series.

Above: Photographs by Gordon Parks. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

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Nelson Algren-Inspired Arts Workshop at Mozart Park

3/28/2014

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You are invited to come to our next Chicago Heroes & Arts Adventures workshop --

Monday, March 31 (6:00-7:15, 7:30-8:30 p.m.)

Mozart Park Fieldhouse
2036 N. Avers Ave.
Chicago, IL 60624

all ages, free & open to the public

During this workshop, inspired by the great Chicago writer Nelson Algren, participants will:

Learn more about Algren's work and legacy;
Read passages from Algren's poetry and prose, and several letters from Simone de Beauvoir to Algren;
Watch and discuss several video clips: part of Studs Terkel's 1975 interview with Algren; a clip from The Road Is Nothing, the End Is All; and Willem DeFoe reading "The Lightless Room," a short story by Algren; and
Creatively explore Algren's work through creative writing and visual art.

Location: Mozart Park is on Armitage Avenue in Logan Square -- several blocks east of Pulaski Road, just south of Dickens and Shakespeare Streets. There is street parking by Mozart Park, and a parking lot is on the east side of Avers.

Please contact us by clicking here -- if you have questions about this workshop and/or if you would like to RSVP. Thanks!

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Interview with Meg Duguid

7/12/2012

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Meg Duguid is an artist, performer and curator whose work has been presented at Defibrillator (including Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic), and collaborations with Out of Site.

Duguid received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Bard College. She has performed and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Macy’s on State Street in Chicago, the DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, and 667 Shotwell in San Francisco. She has screened work at Synthetic Zero in New York, Spiderbug in Chicago, and at the Last Supper Festival in Brooklyn. From 2009 to 2011 she ran Clutch Gallery, a 25 square-inch white cube located in the heart of her purse; since then she has lent my purse to others to curate and carry. She lives and works in Chicago, IL with her husband and three cats.

Recently Borderbend intern Ellyn Leahy interviewed Meg Duguid about her background, curating Clutch Gallery, and other projects.

Leahy: What artists most inspire you?

Duguid: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Marcel Duchamp, Aleksandra Mir, Pina Bausch.

Leahy: You've been living here in Chicago for a few years now. What is your favorite thing about living and working in Chicago?

Duguid: My favorite thing about living in Chicago is the fact that my husband lives here and all of my stuff is here. My favorite thing about working in Chicago is the community's ability to entertain anything as art. It makes the discussion about what art is and how it functions really great.

Leahy: "Recipe Roulette," which you and Catie Olson performed during the 2010 Chicago Calling Arts Festival, was wonderful. What role does humor play in your art?

Duguid: Recipe Roulette was a collaborative piece that Catie Olson and I created where I made chocolate bon bons while Catie hula-hooped. Every time the hoop would drop, I would drop a bon bon on the floor in solidarity with Catie's motions and also locking her movement into a certain part of the floor as the bon bons built up. This was a sister work of Jump Jump Pie Pie, that we performed in Brooklyn where we each made an edible mud pie while the other kept pace by jumping rope in high heels.

above: photos of Meg Duguid and Catie Olson performing Recipe Roulette

Catie and I investigate the create work using an iterative structure; we let our play-on-word conversations lead our projects. Our collaborative rapport is as important as the final events themselves. During our process the iterative word piles that we create allow our personal and political lives to float to the top as well as let us frame them through our own diverse experiences with different media and mediums. At first glance our work seems fun, but there is more to it than that; on closer inspection you will find that not only are we two women creating humorous work but we tend to reference word play, the body, and food as well.

Leahy: How did you first get involved with curating, and how does it affect your other work?

Duguid: I have personally curated and organized a few projects over the years. Usually I put things together because there were a number of folks I wanted to work with or put a show together with.

Beach by Kim Guare, presented by Clutch Gallery
photo credit: Emma Robins

In 2009, I moved back to Chicago and conceived Clutch, which is the longest-running curatorial project I have done. Clutch Gallery is a 25-square-inch space located in the heart of my purse. This curatorial project was dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art of all media. Clutch opened in December 2009 and was initially intended to maintain regular programming through December 2010, but I continued to carry and program it until the end of 2011 in the belief that it would die a fitting and natural death by wearing out from daily use.

During my time with Clutch, I showed 23 artists in 22 shows. I was responsible for each job in my gallery—I was preparator, gallery assistant, director, and marketing director, but most importantly I was a performer.

With Clutch, my intent was to play on the grand history of artist-run spaces in this city while extending my own practice as a performance artist. Clutch allowed me to create a scenario in which my daily interactions with people could become a performance at any time.

Clutch had an element of constant duration. The performance was larger than just opening up the piece to someone at any moment or explaining the nature of the work. Essentially as a performer, the duration of the piece was both constant and not at all. The potential energy of just holding the space, maintaining the space, and sitting near the space allowed its performative potentiality to radiate into all things Clutch, and the moment someone approached Clutch's conceptual sphere, the person became a part of it whether the purse was in a state of rest or motion. During my time with Clutch I performed alone, with shopkeepers, baristas, TSA agents, thieves, the Secret Service, artists, family, and many others.

Last fall I decided to stop carrying Clutch. So I put it up for others to carry. Emma Robbins is currently carrying and curating Clutch Gallery.

above: photos from Meg Duguid's
Sounds like Mustache

Leahy: Why do you often choose to use multiple media in your work -- for example, combining performance art, photography, and drawing in the Episode Series?

Duguid: I believe that documentation is paramount to my art making, and I’m invested in the ways that documentation and art can be integrated in a single practice. At one point I felt comfortable talking about my work as performance art. But now I have found that the term performance art no longer encompasses what it is I do. I am actively seeking to articulate the relationships I am making between the performative and photography, video, sculpture, and drawing.

Drawing has proved to be a really effective tool for me in a few ways. First, for creating objects that stand in for the real deal. A mustache can suddenly just be a drawing of one held up in front of one’s face, and that’s enough for the viewer to say “Hey, look. A mustache."

Second, drawing is a really nice tool to use in conjunction with photographs of an action. In 2003, I started a series of street performances based in early filmic comedy. These performances derived from the simple question of what happens when you take a comedic moment out of its media context and re-present it in real life. While performing these acts in public, I have found that video cameras become too intrusive and upset the performance, usually contextualizing it as reality television, rather than being a calculated moment. As a result I switched my format to still photography, which allowed my documenters to remain as unobtrusive as tourists or other passersby.

When I got the photos back, I began to ask myself, how do I make this more than just documentation? It’s this question that led me to start erasing the performers out of the images and drawing them back in. The result is a photograph of an actual place and time with a comic book performer doing the action. It plays with the idea of what is real and what isn’t, as well as starts to refer to the idea of comic in all its meanings.

In the autumn of 2007, I staged a 15-person slapstick performance in Battery Park in New York City. The performance consisted of an all-female cast, five photographers, and the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty. I am currently in the process of creating a comic book from it. There are about 200 images in the book, so this piece has taken up various portions of the last five years, and I am finally going to be ready to unveil it by the end of this year.

Leahy: Last October you had a performance art piece called "Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic," which happened at Defibrillator during Chicago Calling. Would you mind giving us a glimpse into the creative process behind that piece?

above: photos from Bubbles Plus Bubbles
Divided by Traffic

Duguid: This work was twofold for me. I have been thinking about the performative quality of action painting lately, and I am really interested in how a piece of documentation from a previous work can carry over to the next work. The work in Defibrillator was called Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic, and it took place in the two windows at Defibrillator. This performance consisted of two men wearing Speedos, one in each window, making action paintings by blowing colored bubbles onto paper to a sound piece of traffic over bubble wrap.

Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic utilized a sound piece that was created as a part of Sounds Like Mustache that was performed at the Polish Triangle in August of 2011 as a part of the Out of Site Performance Series. In that performance I poured soap into the fountain in the triangle while bubble machines spewed bubbles into the triangle while a three-person mustache, a mustache that is so big two people must carry it so a third can wear it, walked on bubble wrap that was laid down throughout the triangle. The documentation of this work was the sound work Bubble Wrap Over Traffic.

Leahy: What are you working on now?

I have some work, including some of the newer parts of the episode series, going to the ZonaMaco Art Fair in Mexico City. Catie Olson and I are collaborating on a 10-course performance that is going to be performed at Defibrillator in September of 2012. And I am at the tail end of negotiating the rights to produce a screenplay that I have fallen in love with. I don't want to say what it is until the ink is dry on the contract, because you just don't know until the signature hits the dotted line, but if it all works out well, this will be the largest project I have ever taken on.

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Bicycles & the Arts

7/12/2012

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The Borderbend Arts Collective has presented two "Bicycles & the Arts" events -- during the Chicago Calling Arts Festival in 2010 and last year. Borderbend is co-presenting a third "Bicycles & the Arts" event, in partnership with Working Bikes Cooperative. That event happens on September 28, during the Seventh Annual Chicago Calling Arts Festival.

Bicycles and the arts have commingled a lot for more than a century -- such as in film, literature, sculpture, and music. Here are some highlights which span more than a century. Alfred Jarry was a French writer who wrote the play Ubu Roi and came up with the concept of pataphysics; he was an avid bicyclist, and bikes appear in many of his writings. Another French artist named Marcel Duchamp created a sculpture entitled Bicycle Wheel in 1913; that sculpture was among Duchamp's many readymades which have changed the way people think about art. Several decades later, Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Sica directed The Bicycle Thief (1948), an iconic Italian film which "works as a sentimental study of a father and son, a historical document, a social statement, and a record of one of the century's most influential film movements." In 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely unveiled a kinetic sculptureentitled Homage to New York, which included dozens of bicycle wheels and other parts, and whichfell apart during a 27-minute performance. Have you seen the video of a 22-year-old Frank Zappa teaching Steve Allen how to play a bicycle, followed by a performance with musical bicycles and the accompaniment of the Steve Allen Show orchestra?

Today you can find examples of intersections between bicycles and art, in Chicago and around the world. Recently a collective in Rogers Park proposed that 15 bike racks be constructed, and that proposal won funding during the 49th Ward's participatory funding initiative; those bike racks are currently under construction. If you've ever seen or participated in a Critical Mass event, you've probably seen some interesting art bikes, including tall bikes. As you travel along North Avenue in the Wicker Park / Bucktown neighborhood, you will pass a colorful bicycle mounted on the side of a building, at the corner of North and Wolcott Avenues. That bicycle, which hangs above the entrance of Rapid Transit Cyclechop, has fans in the bike wheel spokes, so the wheels are often spinning in the air. Local artist Ronnie LoBello built that bicycle 15 years ago.

Working Bikes Cooperative has several amazing bike artworks created by Matt Weber and others. Steven Lane curates an annual winter bike art show; that's always an exciting show to look forward to.

Examples of art bikes and bicycle art abound elsewhere here in the U.S. Artistically designed bike racks are being constructed in Rogers Park, and David Byrne has designed bike racks which have been installed in New York City. A group in Minneapolis has organized several annual Bike Art shows, and Tall Bike Posse in California organizes Art Bike Build events and bike art shows.Bicycle Inter-Community Action & Salvage in Tucson offers workshops where you can make inner tube wallets, tire belts, mobiles, sculptures, and jewelry out of recycled bike parts. In 2010 I saw Gabriel Orozco's Four Bicycles (There Is Always One Direction) at the MoMA, amazing.

photo of artworks on display during the "Bicycles & the Arts" event at Happy Dog Gallery (10.1.2010)

above: photos from the "Bicycles & the Arts" event during the 2010 Chicago Calling Arts Festival

Globetrotters can find plenty of examples of intersections between the arts and bicycles around the world. The Dekochari (Japanese art bike) is a unique phenomenon; here're some interesting pictures. Kunstrad (Art Cycling) competitions are happening in Europe.

Stay tuned for updates regarding the next "Bicycles & the Arts" event.

-- Dan Godston

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Gordon Parks-Inspired Arts Workshop

Nelson Algren-Inspired Arts Workshop at Mozart Park

Interview with Meg Duguid

Bicycles & the Arts

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