6100 BMX

Twenty-five years ago, the demolition of an abandoned apartment building opened up two parcels of land at the corner of 61st and Dorchester on Chicago's southside. As the surrounding neighborhood declined and values plummeted a multifacted environmental collective, which would eventually become Chicago's oldest and largest private non-profit recycling company, bought the land and began operations. A portion of this land was at that time dedicated to urban gardening.

Ten years later, the entirety of these two parcels was turned into community gardens, fruit trees were planted, and an intensive organic soil buildup began. A gardening community of nearly 100 people formed. Most were local residents. The gardens were clearly beginning to improve the quality of life in this small corner of the City.

Two years ago, the bottom of a thirty year pattern of abandonment and disinvestment was reached in the surrounding Woodlawn neighborhood, and aggressive re-development began.  The two parcels of land, now richly inhabited by gardens and fruit trees, was targeted and acquired by the City of Chicago as land for a public school expansion. 

On a warm June afternoon just weeks prior to the "environmental remediation" which would destroy the gardens and replace them with crushed limestone and chain-link, an energetic project sprang to life. A BMX track was cut into the overgrown vegetation. A borrowed bobcat tractor made the initial pass and the track was fine-tuned by enthusiastic teenagers. Blackstone Bicycle Works, a local youth education bicycle program, took over track operations and organized training sessions and an elaborate day-long competition. The event was a stunning success. A week after the competition the jungle track was razed.

Thanks to:

The image is of Bill Gates after being pied by the Biotic Baking Brigade.

Jim Duignan / The Stockyard Institute / Children from the Back of the Yards Neighborhood

Gang-proof suit 

Description: The development of this project was initiated through a series of conversations with a group of youth in the Back of the Yards community of south Chicago. We have directed our explorations to address and confine selected conditions (power, violence, poverty) of the young people's lives as a primary subject of study. 

To advance the term mediation as witnessed in their popular culture, often we must acquiesce to the place youth are positioned in school. This space continues to remain passive and inconsistent with the necessary skills to interpret their experience. Support for an authentic voice has always had an irresolvable place on the street, a prerequisite to some interaction that remains the only respite to a kind of freedom to authentic communication. What is evident, however, is the illusion that exposure to a visually charged environment stands in for some understanding of (reading) information. Curriculum is not knowledge nor is it accountable, residing with some comfort at the pace of the printed page. Children are murdered and their visual landscape and any genuine means for exploration is non-academic, discursive, yet disposable. 

Stockyard Institute: We are examining the community as an 'underground', not in as much a sanctuary from pet dispositions, but, a center for visual studies and activism. This project [GPS] is not a singular reflection on a disorder nor is it a documentary of works cited simply through moderate descriptions and the images that stand in for them. It is a deliberate examination of that space in between. A space that requires study of what remains inescapable versus what is critically important. Our work operates through conversations. 

The future is not in our sites. It appears comfortable to speak of our urban spaces as under siege, panning the homes of families, churches, centers, and intersections they all share, communicate from, compromise, and struggle to work things out. This is outdoors, an objective landscape of sorts, brutally vital, activated and appropriately not responsible to both school and personal safety. Comfort is located in brief encounters and intimate connections, a pathology disproportionate (to) from a distance of these youths' descriptive life. This community's press is unreported, only defined as home, often only acknowledged by what it cannot accomplish. The architectural lines of demarcation are still evident, fixed not by the infrastructure of some metropolis, but internalized from learning to walk the street, still bordered, families compartmentalized by rivalries, mobility portioned off. The youngest children have been taught to walk a different way. Bipedal development and warfare fight for the same assumptions of self-hood, informing personal histories and testimony to what will suggests inherent, biological functions. Eyes scan the streets urgently and with a kind of completeness, witnesses to a landscape. 

The 'gang proof suit' has illuminated the promise of dialogue that has been as elevating as it has been ironic. Questions of mobility, safe passage, police protection, and the deadpan deliveries of murdered friends, brothers, and cousins pointedly marked and intersected our conversations with a casualty of each event detailed. 

Collectivo Cambalache

Their name translates to "Collective Exchange." Exchanges are an extremely important component of this group's work. We are presenting documentation of two recent versions of projects they did in San Juan, Puerto Rico. These projects have existed in other forms in Barcelona and in Bogota. 

Street markets that used to exist in Bogota, Colombia inspired their Museo de la Calle. Recycled and re-used items are placed out in a square or on a sidewalk. People are welcome to exchange items, but can not use money in the exchange. 

REPOhistory 

Their "Lower Manhattan Sign Project" reinstated the erased histories of locations of struggles for economic, sexual, racial and other kinds of justice and equality. They used signs to mark places in NY where gentrification and corporate culture had effaced any trace of the important events.

Taken from their web site: Perhaps the best way to describe the objective for this project is illustrated by this sign (pictured above). Lower Manhattan is filled with official historical markers. A sign marks the the site of the first outdoor Stock Market. The Slave Market, located across the street, was unmarked until the REPOhistory sign. In 1746 the New York Slave Market was the 2nd largest in the country.

Jorge Rivera 

ParacaÌdas (parachutes made from old umbrellas and tennis balls) were dropped by the hundreds onto a square in Old San Juan creating a stunning aesthetic intervention into the regular uses of the space. Jorge Rivera has done several versions of this project. The effects of this project were immediate and caused an incredible amount of joy and confusion in the square.

Elyce Semenec

The video, titled Audition, is a documentation of auditions for a "musical" which will be performed in Nov. through the Spareroom (a venue for performance and other time arts). The bulk of the auditions on the video take place at the site of the future performance, a traffic median on North Ave. & Western. Other auditions are held in the Home Depot parking lot (also North Ave.). All rehearsals for the "musical" will take place in public spaces such as alley ways, parking lots, and as it gets colder we will move inside libraries and stores with large aisles such as Home Depot or Whole Foods.

Temporary Services

We started a project in late August in response to a public sculpture by Chicago artist Josh Garber. This abstract sculpture was plopped down at the corner of Grand and Western without consulting anyone in the neighborhood. We put out three clipboards. Each clipboard had three images, different views of the sculpture, at the bottom. The clipboards held pads of paper. Each sheet had the question "What is your opinion of this sculpture and why do you think it was placed in this neighborhood?" written on it. In two weeks we received over 100 responses - a clear indication that people do have strong opinions and should have been included in the decision making process. We will present all of the responses and a booklet documenting this project. Copies of the booklet will be distributed in front of the sculpture and sent to the Department of Cultural Affairs.