Eduardo F. Rosario is a sound artist and performing experimental musician from Caguas, Puerto Rico currently based in Chicago, Illinois.

Blair Bogin is an interdisciplinary artist combining documentary storytelling with surrealist humor, measuring the facts about human experience against its lesser quantifiable absurdities. Blair tends to merge her art practice with her work as a counseling astrologer; creating installation, video or live theatre inspired by planetary alignments. Additionally, she devises Dead Diary, a series that reports monthly star vibes through abstracted video art. Blair received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a certified Kundalini Yoga Instructor, Hypnotherapist and Holotropic Breathwork Facilitator. blairbogin.com / sisterbrideastrology.com

Robin Deacon (born 1973 Eastbourne, England) is a British artist, writer and filmmaker currently based in the USA. His interdisciplinary practice has spanned a variety of disciplines and themes, including explorations of performer presence and absence, the role of the artist as biographer, the possibility for journalistic approaches to arts practice, and the mapping and ethics of performance re-enactment. He graduated from Cardiff School of Art in 1996, going on to present his performances and videos at conferences and festivals in the UK and internationally in Europe, USA and Asia. His work has been commissioned and programmed by venues such as The ICA, London (1996), The Young Vic, London (2000), CCCB, Barcelona (2006), Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna (2007) and the Centre d’art Scenique Contemporain Lausanne, Switzerland (2009), Tate Britain, London (2014) and the Barbican Centre, London (2015). He has also been artist in residence at Sophiensaele in Berlin (2005), Camden Arts Centre London (2006), Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center, New York (2009) and the MacDowell Colony (2018). He has received a variety of awards and fellowships from organizations such as the Delfina Foundation, British Arts Council, Live Art Development Agency and Franklin Furnace Inc. Between 2003 and 2012, he was an Associate Artist of contemporary artists producing organization Artsadmin. From 2004, he was Course Director of the Drama and Performance Studies program at London South Bank University before relocating to the USA in 2011. He is currently Chair and Associate Professor of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Joanna Furnans is a Chicago-based independent dance artist. Her current project, Doing Fine, is supported by a 2018 Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum lab artist award and a 2019 Schonberg Fellowship at the Yard. Previous works were supported by the Chicago Moving Company, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), Links Hall’s Co-MISSION Residency, and the Walker Art Center’s Choreographer’s Evening. As a dancer in the works of independent artists Karen Sherman, Morgan Thorson, and Chris Schlichting, she has performed at the American Realness Festival (NYC), the Fusebox Festival (Austin), the TBA Festival (Portland), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), the Chocolate Factory (NYC), PS122 (NYC), and the Center for Art and Performance (UCLA), among others. Furnans has also performed in the work of Minneapolis-based choreographers Laurie Van Wieren and the BodyCartography Project as well Chicago-based dance maker, Ginger Krebs. Furnans is a sometimes-writer for the Chicago dance community. She co-founded the Performance Response Journal and has been a contributing dance writer for the Windy City Times, Art Intercepts, and See Chicago Dance.

David Hall writes in sentences and often works with materials already charged with significance.

Julia Pello is a Russia-born writer and media artist whose work engages sites where the articulation of time encounters complications, erosions and ambiguities to investigate possibilities of engaging with what is no longer materially present.

Lin Hixson directs Every house has a door, a group she co-founded in 2008. Previously she directed the performance group Goat Island from its founding in 1987 until it ended in 2009. She is Full Professor of Performance at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Hixson has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Illinois Arts Council, and the Chicago Dancemakers’ Forum and been given residencies at MANCC, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and Bellagio. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Dartington College of Arts, (UK) in 2007, given the United States Artists Ziporyn Fellowship in 2009 and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts fellowship in 2014. Her writing has been published in the journals Poetry, The Drama Review, and Performance Research. Her collaborative essays with Matthew Goulish appear in the 21st Century Performance Reader, Artists in the Archive, and The Creative Critic.

Lanny Jordan Jackson is a filmmaker and poet living in New York City. Select video work includes “The Companion” (2012), “Laughing Like The Head As It Imagined Itself Laughing” (2012), “Triple Shark Cerberus” (2013), “Vivian” (2013), “Scorpio vs. Glass Door Restaurant” (2014), “NERVES TEARS” (2016), and “The Accommodation For A Solitary B” (2017-ongoing).

Stephan Moore is a sound artist, sound designer, composer, improviser, maker, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work manifests as electronic studio compositions, improvisational outbursts, sound installations, scores for collaborative performances, algorithmic compositions, interactive art, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. His collaborations with sound artist Scott Smallwood (as electronic duo Evidence) and choreographer Yanira Castro (in her company A Canary Torsi) span more than a decade. He is the curator of sound art for the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, organizing annual exhibitions since 2014. He is also the president of Isobel Audio LLC, which builds and sells his Hemisphere loudspeakers. He was the touring music coordinator and sound engineer of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for several years, and has worked with Pauline Oliveros, Anthony McCall, and Animal Collective, among many others. He teaches in the Sound Arts and Industries program at Northwestern University. www.oddnoise.com

Hope Rehak was born in Chicago and shaped by its public schools. After graduating from Whitney Young Magnet High School, she attended Oberlin College on a scholarship from The Posse Foundation. She holds an MFA in Writing for the Screen & Stage from Northwestern University. In addition to Chicago, Hope has lived in Copenhagen, New York, DC, and Los Angeles. Hope has received the Copenhagen Wisecrackers Comedy Newcomer of the Year Award, the Northwestern University Sitcom Award, and scholarships from the WICE Paris Writers Workshop and the Kenyon Playwrights Conference. Her play Ruins was produced for a limited Off-Broadway run through an award from The Araca Project in 2017. Find out more about her here.

Ginger Krebs is based in Chicago, where she makes performance and sculpture. She was a CDF Lab Artist in 2014, and was awarded a MAP Fund grant (administered by Creative Capital) in 2015. The performance supported by those awards, Buffer Overrun, earned a four-star review and was chosen for the“Best Dance of 2016” by the Chicago Tribune. In 2017 Krebs presented Minor Local Slumpage, a solo exhibition of sculpture, along with an artist’s book and sculpture “tasting,” at the Chicago Artists Coalition. Krebs is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Performance and Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she’s taught since 2004 and created thirteen original courses. This year Krebs was awarded a residency at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) at Florida State University, and presented performances at The Pivot Arts Festival (Chicago) and the Seattle International Butoh Festival, among others. She’s currently a Sponsored Artist at High Concept Labs (Chicago).

About the artists:

Dakota Brown moved to Chicago in 2000 to work in a graphic design firm, but he was quickly drawn into the city’s little universe of DIY venues, small presses, and even smaller magazines. He is currently working on a dissertation about graphic design and the history of capitalism at Northwestern University. Dakota teaches courses in the history, theory, and practice of design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Allen Moore is and Black American interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator born and raised in the small village of Robbins IL just south of Chicago. In large, his work is a social allegory, conversing with symbols and institutions conducive to the constructs of race, social class and personal introspection. Paring formal elements such as drawing, painting and design with a DIY-Maker mindset, Allen cultivates his interdisciplinary exploration and pedagogy. Allen has a Bachelors of Arts from Chicago State University, a Masters in Arts from Governors State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University. www.allenmooreart.net

Sonnenzimmer is the collective output of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi. Their work explores the contemporary and historic impact of the graphic impulse through publishing, exhibitions, graphic design, and performance. While the duo works in an array of media, their focus is on triangulating a deeper understanding of the role of graphic expression at large. In addition to their self-driven work, Sonnenzimmer actively engages in commissioned projects aiming to reshape preconceived notions of the graphic arts. www.sonnenzimmer.com

About the artists:

Basma ALSHARIF is an Artist/Filmmaker born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin, raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip. She has a BFA and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works between cinema and installation, centering on the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes and natural environments. Major exhibitions include: the Whitney Biennial, les Module at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Al Riwaq Biennial Palestine, The Berlin Documentary Forum, the Sharjah Biennial 9 and Manifesta 8. Alsharif is now based in Cairo Egypt.

Artist-scholar Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) manages a living studio practice through photography, performance, voice acting, writing, installation, and video. Her work has been commissioned by Bemis Contemporary, Omaha; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Rhodes College, Memphis; and she has presented work internationally at Tate Modern, London; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; Krabbesholm Højskole, Copenhagen; Turbine Hall, Johannesburg; and University of Pennsylvania. A lifelong nomad who has moved 24 times, she began her artistic practice as a poet in London, England. RMB holds degrees from Yale University, SAIC, and Northwestern University. RMB is currently running a Gofundme campaign – donate here.

T Clutch Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty and of Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in the spring of 2019.

Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer. JT is the daughter of Nancy, Flora, Leonor, Sol, and Ana. Her collections include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011), Poems are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof Books 2013), DORA/ANA/GUATAVIT@ (RSH 2016) and YOU DA ONE (2017 Noemi Books & Letras Latinas’s Akrilica Series). She has held fellowships from the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics and CantoMundo. Currently, JT lives and works on Ohlone and Patwin lands and is a PhD student in the department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley; her research considers resistant, decolonial practices of voic(ing). You can find their writing and art at www.jennifertamayo.com.

On Civil Disobedience: An Epilogue is a three-day series of readings, responses, workshops and performances to mark the conclusion of the Green Lantern Press’s 2017-2018 monthly pamphlet series On Civil Disobedience which invited writers from a range of professional backgrounds to address the series title. The works produced in this series recall historical precedents set by Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and others while also considering the pamphlet’s important role in American revolutionary history. Filtering civic responsibility through the combined awareness of histories and disciplines, the pamphlets ask how citizenship and resistance intersect within the pledge of democratic ideals. On Civil Disobedience: An Epilogue will celebrate the work produced in the series, extending it beyond the page through performances by original participants and artists with resonant practices. Participants include Basma Alsharif, J. Dakota Brown, Rashayla Marie Brown, Sky Hopinka, T Clutch Fleischmann, Damon Locks, Ayanah Moor, Allen Moore, Sonnenzimmer, and Jennif(f)er Tamayo. This program is curated by On Civil Disobedience coeditor, Fulla Abdul-Jabbar.

About the artists:

Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, WI, and is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigneous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician, and deejay. He received his BFA in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a part of Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project working at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He is a recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts and a 2016 MAKER Grant recipient. He is also a Soros Justice Media Fellow. He works as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy.

As a kid, Ayanah Moor could be found hand drumming beats on elementary school desks and scratching 45’s on her beige Fischer Price turntable. Her claim to fame is the 7th grade band class in which she befriended Missy Elliot…they even performed together in the school talent show with Missy rhyming over Ayanah’s beat boxing! These days Ayanah Moor creates paintings, prints, drawings and performance where notions of blackness and gender identity take shape. Her recent Chicago exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Photography, DePaul Art Museum, Produce Model and Gather at Comfort Station.

On Civil Disobedience: An Epilogue is a three-day series of readings, responses, workshops and performances to mark the conclusion of the Green Lantern Press’s 2017-2018 monthly pamphlet series On Civil Disobedience which invited writers from a range of professional backgrounds to address the series title. The works produced in this series recall historical precedents set by Thoreau, Gandhi, King, and others while also considering the pamphlet’s important role in American revolutionary history. Filtering civic responsibility through the combined awareness of histories and disciplines, the pamphlets ask how citizenship and resistance intersect within the pledge of democratic ideals. On Civil Disobedience: An Epilogue will celebrate the work produced in the series, extending it beyond the page through performances by original participants and artists with resonant practices. Participants include Basma Alsharif, J. Dakota Brown, Rashayla Marie Brown, Sky Hopinka, T Clutch Fleischmann, Damon Locks, Ayanah Moor, Allen Moore, Sonnenzimmer, and Jennif(f)er Tamayo. This program is curated by On Civil Disobedience coeditor, Fulla Abdul-Jabbar.

Participant Bios

Fulla Abdul-Jabbar is an artist and writer living in Chicago. She presents thought in the form of language and presents language in various forms. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is Managing Editor at The Green Lantern Press based at Sector 2337. She has performed or exhibited at SPACES, Defibrillator, Woman Made Gallery, ACRE, BBQLA, St. John University in York, the University of East London, the Electronic Literature Organization, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her writing has appeared in Bad at Sports, DIAGRAM, and Bombay Gin.

Basma ALSHARIF is an Artist/Filmmaker born in Kuwait of Palestinian origin, raised between France, the US and the Gaza Strip. She has a BFA and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She works between cinema and installation, centering on the human condition in relation to shifting geopolitical landscapes and natural environments. Major exhibitions include: the Whitney Biennial, les Module at the Palais de Tokyo, Here and Elsewhere at the New Museum, Al Riwaq Biennial Palestine, The Berlin Documentary Forum, the Sharjah Biennial 9 and Manifesta 8. Alsharif is now based in Cairo Egypt.

Artist-scholar Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) manages a living studio practice through photography, performance, voice acting, writing, installation, and video. Her work has been commissioned by Bemis Contemporary, Omaha; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Rhodes College, Memphis; and she has presented work internationally at Tate Modern, London; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York; Krabbesholm Højskole, Copenhagen; Turbine Hall, Johannesburg; and University of Pennsylvania. A lifelong nomad who has moved 24 times, she began her artistic practice as a poet in London, England. RMB holds degrees from Yale University, SAIC, and Northwestern University.

Dakota Brown moved to Chicago in 2000 to work in a graphic design firm, but he was quickly drawn into the city’s little universe of DIY venues, small presses, and even smaller magazines. He is currently working on a dissertation about graphic design and the history of capitalism at Northwestern University. Dakota teaches courses in the history, theory, and practice of design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

T Clutch Fleischmann is the author of Syzygy, Beauty and of Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in the spring of 2019.

 Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, Milwaukee, WI, and is currently based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video work centers around personal positions of Indigneous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture, and the play between the known and the unknowable. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is currently a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician, and deejay. He received his BFA in fine arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a part of Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project working at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He is a recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts and a 2016 MAKER Grant recipient. He is also a Soros Justice Media Fellow. He works as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy.

As a kid, Ayanah Moor could be found hand drumming beats on elementary school desks and scratching 45’s on her beige Fischer Price turntable. Her claim to fame is the 7th grade band class in which she befriended Missy Elliot…they even performed together in the school talent show with Missy rhyming over Ayanah’s beat boxing! These days Ayanah Moor creates paintings, prints, drawings and performance where notions of blackness and gender identity take shape. Her recent Chicago exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Photography, DePaul Art Museum, Produce Model and Gather at Comfort Station.

Allen Moore is and Black American interdisciplinary artist, educator and curator born and raised in the small village of Robbins IL just south of Chicago. In large, his work is a social allegory, conversing with symbols and institutions conducive to the constructs of race, social class and personal introspection. Paring formal elements such as drawing, painting and design with a DIY-Maker mindset, Allen cultivates his interdisciplinary exploration and pedagogy. Allen has a Bachelors of Arts from Chicago State University, a Masters in Arts from Governors State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University. www.allenmooreart.net

Sonnenzimmer is the collective output of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi. Their work explores the contemporary and historic impact of the graphic impulse through publishing, exhibitions, graphic design, and performance. While the duo works in an array of media, their focus is on triangulating a deeper understanding of the role of graphic expression at large. In addition to their self-driven work, Sonnenzimmer actively engages in commissioned projects aiming to reshape preconceived notions of the graphic arts. www.sonnenzimmer.com 

Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, formerly undocumented poet, essayist, and performer. JT is the daughter of Nancy, Flora, Leonor, Sol, and Ana. Her collections include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011), Poems are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof Books 2013), DORA/ANA/GUATAVIT@ (RSH 2016) and YOU DA ONE (2017 Noemi Books & Letras Latinas’s Akrilica Series). She has held fellowships from the Hemispheric Institute for Performance & Politics and CantoMundo. Currently, JT lives and works on Ohlone and Patwin lands and is a PhD student in the department of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley; her research considers resistant, decolonial practices of voic(ing). You can find their writing and art at www.jennifertamayo.com.

Romi Crawford is professor in the Visual and Critical Studies and Liberal Arts Departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research revolves primarily around formations of racial and gendered identity and the relation to American visual arts, film, and popular culture. She makes regular contributions to publications on African American art and culture including, Theaster Gates, Black Archive (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017); “Do For Self: The AACM and the Chicago Style” in Support Networks (University of Chicago Press, 2014); and “Ebony and Jet On Our Minds…In Our Homes. On the Wall” in Speaking of People: Ebony, Jet and Contemporary Art (Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014). She is coauthor (with Abdul Alkalimat and Rebecca Zorach) of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Crawford was cocurator (with Lisa Lee) of the 2017 Open Engagement Conference, themed “Justice.”

Nicole Mitchell is a creative flutist, composer, poet, conceptualist, bandleader, and educator. A Doris Duke Artist and recipient of the Herb Alpert Performing Arts Award, she is most widely known through her work as leader and founder of Black Earth Ensemble, and through repeated recognition as the top jazz flutist by DownBeat Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association from 2010-2018. Mitchell’s primary inspiration was her mother, Joan Beard Mitchell (JBM), a self-taught Afrofuturist writer and visual artist who was an early member of the Black Folk Art Gallery of Syracuse (now the Community Folk Art Gallery). JBM died before having the opportunity to satisfactorily share her work, so upon her death, Nicole as a teen decided she would continue her mother’s path as an artist bridging the familiar with the unknown. JBM introduced Nicole to journaling and creative writing at an early age, which led to Nicole’s attraction to work as a typist and graphic designer for over ten years at Third World Press (TWP), the longest running African American book publishing company in the U.S.. At TWP, Nicole Mitchell absorbed lifelong lessons in Black history, philosophy and institution building, and gained incomparable mentorship from TWP’s founder and renown poet, Haki R. Madhubuti. Having started her musical career busking with her flute on the streets of San Diego and then Chicago, Mitchell eventually ascended from membership of Chicago’s venerable Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and co-founder of the AACM’s first all woman ensemble, Samana, to become the first woman president of the organization. Mitchell’s artistic work celebrates contemporary African American culture, centered in the belief that music and art has the power to be transformative, while narrative has remained key to her compositional process. Her greatest music mentors have included James Newton, Maia, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton and Ed Wilkerson. Mitchell was commissioned to create three projects inspired by science fiction writer Octavia Butler, including Xenogenesis Suite (Chamber Music America), Intergalactic Beings (Museum of Contemporary Art) and EarthSeed (co-commissioned with Lisa E. Harris by the Art Institute of Chicago). Her project Mandorla Awakening, noted in the top five jazz albums of 2017 by the Village Voice, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, was partly inspired by the book Chalice and the Blade by anthropologist Raine Eisler and from Mitchell’s own Afrofuturist narrative: Mandorla Awakening. Liberation Narratives (TWP 2017) is Nicole’s tribute to Haki Madhubuti, which connects music of Black Earth Ensemble with Madhubuti’s poetry. Meanwhile, Nicole’s poems and prose can be found embedded in the lyrics and spoken word of her dozen musical recordings. As a writer, Nicole Mitchell has had articles published in Jazz Times magazine, Wire Magazine (UK), Arcana VIII: Musicians on Music (edited by John Zorn), and Giving Birth to Sound: Women in Creative Music (edited by Ranate Da Rin and William Parker). Nicole Mitchell is a Professor of Music at University of California, Irvine. She also enjoys being a wife, mother and grandmother.

In her poems, Leila Wilson focuses on how enclosed spaces—back yards, hospital rooms, acres, graves, and alleys—call us to recognize the buried and intermingled lives within them. As both a caretaker and patient, Wilson investigates blood counts; she looks at genetic mutations, familial devotion, and the costs of care. She is the author of The Hundred Grasses (Milkweed Editions), a finalist for the 2014 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  She has an essay about Whitman and decomposition forthcoming in 21 | 19 (Milkweed Editions), a collection by contemporary poet-critics examining influences of 19th-century American writers. She is the recipient of a Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry Foundation, and her poems and essays have appeared in Iowa Review, Chicago Review, Poetry, A Public Space, American Letters and Commentary, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She runs the Writing Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also teaches creative writing and literature.

Alison C. Rollins’ first collection of poems, Library of Small Catastrophes, is to be published by Copper Canyon Press in the Spring of 2019. She is a librarian for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her work both supports and informs her poetry. She received her B.S. from Howard University and her M.L.I.S. from the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, and New England Review, among others. She is a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship and a 2018 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She has  been awarded support from the Cave Canem Foundation, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Kristina Pedersen is a photographer and writer whose work has appeared in Pitchfork, VICE, Under the Influence Magazine, and Temporary Art Review. Her work concerns performance, both spectacular and personal, and production/consumption cycles in creative labor.

Devyn Manibo, Chicago based poet & performance artist. Through text, object, and gesture, their work seeks to disrupt and activate constructs of time, body, and geography. Their poetry, in particular, traverses the intimate line between grief and ecstasy, love and loss

Marie Segelone holds a BA in Creative Writing and a BFA in Intermedia CyberArts from Concordia University (Canada). She is currently completing her MFA in Performance at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Marie’s work has been featured in Poetry is Dead Magazine, DRY MAGAZINE, and Glamour Girl. Her books Proprioception (2015), Libation (2016), Aphrodite (2016) and Requiem (2016) have recently been published by Anteism. Her work is an archive. She is archiving a process of writing and performance, a research into history, nature, and literature carefully creating incisions in which she inserts her own voice, allowing for doubt.

Tatum Howey is a writer and filmmaker based in Montreal. They are interested in intimacy and how it can become displaced and transfigured through queer relationships. They are also currently on the editorial board for Lemon Hound, a literary magazine founded by Sina Queyras.

Claudia La Rocco is a writer whose work frequently revolves around interdisciplinary projects and collaborations. She is the author of The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited), selected poetry, performance texts, images and criticism; and the novel petit cadeau, published by The Chocolate Factory Theater as a print edition of one and a four-day, interdisciplinary live edition. She edited I Don’t Poem: An Anthology of Painters (Off the Park Press) and Dancers, Buildings and People in the Streets, the catalogue for Danspace Projectʼs PLATFORM 2015, for which she was guest artist curator. La Rocco’s poetry and prose have been published in such anthologies as 6X6 #34: I Like Softness (Ugly Duckling Presse),Imagined Theatres: Writing for a theoretical stage (Daniel Sack, ed; Routledge), and On Value (Ralph Lemon, ed; Triple Canopy). Her work has been presented by The Walker Art Center, The Kitchen, The Whitney Museum of American Art, et al. She has received grants from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, and had residencies at such places as Headlands Center for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and On the Boards theater. She teaches and lectures widely, including at Princeton University, the School of Visual Arts, San Francisco Ballet, and Tokyo’s Dance New Air festival; and has bylines in numerous publications, including ARTFORUM, BOMB, East of Borneo, and The New York Times, where she was a dance and theater critic and reporter from 2005 to 2015. La Rocco founded the social and online criticism collective The Performance Club, and is editor in chief of SFMOMA’s art and culture platform Open Space.

Anna Martine Whitehead received her MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts, and has been presented by venues including the San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Watts Towers Art Center; Chicago Cultural Center; AUNTS; Pieter pasd; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; HomeLA; CounterPULSE; and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. She has developed her craft by working in close collaboration with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Thomas Teurlais, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, Jesse Hewit, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and bodies in action for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical; and contributed chapters to a range of publications including most recently Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance (Oxford, 2017). She has received generous support from Chicago Dancemakers Forum, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, DCASE, and Chances Dances Critical Fierceness; and has been supported most recently by residencies at Headlands, Pivot Arts, University of Michigan, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Links Hall, Djerassi, and High Concept Labs. Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). Martine teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Find out more at annamartine.com.

Rodney Koeneke’s latest book of poems, Body & Glass, is just out from Wave Books. Other collections include Etruria (Wave Books, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX, 2006), and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). His work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Granta, Harper’s, Harriet, The Nation, Poetry, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. An early member of the Flarf collective, he was active in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene until moving to Portland, Oregon in 2006, where he teaches in the History Department at Portland State University.

Zhou Sivan is the pen name of Nic Wong, a Malaysian writer based in Chicago. His e-chapbook of sonnets, Zero Copula (Delete Press, 2015), considers poetic and political questions of alignment and the constructedness of the breath-line. Sea Hypocrisy (DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016) is a hybrid lyric-satire-reportage piece that examines private and public, local and foreign media response to Malaysia’s policies on migrants and refugees. His work has appeared in Lana Turner, Chicago Review, Almost Island, and Asymptote. He is finishing a comparative literature dissertation on the forms of intellectual history in Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora.

Video Data Bank was founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB’s collection has grown to include the work of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles. VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art through its distribution, education, and preservation programs. The collection is made available to museums and galleries, libraries and educational institutions, cultural institutions and alternative exhibitors through a far-reaching national and international distribution service. Programs and activities include maintaining both analog and digital archives, preservation of historically important works of video art, the commissioning of essays and texts that contextualize artists’ work, the publication of curated programs and artists’ monographs, and an extensive range of public programs, including the online streaming program VDB TV.

Joni Murphy is a writer from New Mexico who lives in New York. Her work has appeared in 7×7, Canadian Art, Brick and elsewhere. She has created performance and sound art for ACRE, Resonance FM, and Sound Development City. Her debut novel, Double Teenage, was published by Book*hug. It was named one of The Globe and Mail’s 100 best books of 2016. Her novel Talking Animals, is set to come out with FSG Originals in 2020.

Kristi McGuire is an artist-educator, writer, and researcher. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; concurrently, for a decade, she worked as the Web/New Media Editor at the University of Chicago Press, and and continues to work as Consulting Editor at the Graham Foundation for the Advancement of the Fine Arts. She has collaborated with a spectrum of artists and scholars, for works published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Koenig, DOMINICA, Sternberg Press, Soberscove Press, Semiotext(e), Artists’ Platform and Projects, and Publication Studio. She is coeditor of Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing through the Discipline (Routledge, 2012).

Britton Bertran is the Director at Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago. He is also a Chicago-based independent curator and Lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Arts Administration and Policy Department. Previous positions held include Fellows Program Officer for United States Artists and Educational Programs Manager at Urban Gateways, a non-profit Art Education organization. He also owned and directed 40000, a contemporary art gallery in the West Loop and was the Visual Arts Consultant for the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Prior independent curatorial projects include New Icon at the Loyola University Museum of Art and Artists Run Chicago at the Hyde Park Art Center. Britton earned an MA in Arts Administration from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lara Schoorl is a writer and art historian from the Netherlands and currently lives in Los Angeles, where she runs Close Distance Journal and studies Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages at Westcliff University. Her writing can be found at The Los Angeles Review of Books, The University of Arizona Poetry Center 1508 Blog, FOUNDATIONS, and The Conversant, and is forthcoming with The Green Lantern Press (2018) and Not A Cult (2019).

Dao Nguyen is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist. Their name is a homophone for the Vietnamese word for knife. They are the compact, red Leatherman multi-tool your aunt gave you for Christmas ten years ago. On sale at Marshall’s. Versatility and hidden strength in a small package at a discount. Stealthy enough to pass through security checkpoints on three continents on four separate occasions. They can cut, screw, file, saw, and open your beer. Bonus applications include carving miniature graphite figurines, picking locks, and sculpting tofu. They have exhibited and performed in backyards, bathrooms, stairwells, highways, white cubes, and black box spaces, including Sector 2337, Defibrillator, the MCA, Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Brea Art Gallery, The Foundry Arts Centre, and Irvine Fine Arts Center. They received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Artist-in-Residence at ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale, Elsewhere: A Living Museum, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

Willy Smart is an artist and writer who works in presentational and propositional forms. Willy makes lectures, sculpture, and publications that propose extended modes and objects of reading and recording. Willy directs the conceptual record label Fake Music (fakemusic.org).

Mia Lopez is Assistant Curator at DePaul Art Museum in Chicago. She was previously Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Mia has master’s degrees in art history and arts administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in art history from Rice University. She is an alum of the Smithsonian Latino Museum Studies Program and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Leadership Institute.

Esteban King Álvarez (Mexico City, 1986) holds a BA in History and a MA in Art History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Curator of the collective exhibitions Transcripciones (Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2014), Fonema (Ex Teresa Arte Actual, 2015), Una red de líneas que se intersecan (ESPAC, 2016) and La nueva onda del silencio (El cuarto de máquinas, 2017), among others. From 2012 to 2015 he was curator and chief researcher at the Museo Universitario del Chopo. Since 2015 he works as curator at ESPAC, Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, in Mexico City, and works as independent writer and researcher.

Sternberg Press grew out of the small publishing house known as Lukas & Sternberg, founded in 1999 by Caroline Schneider. With a focus on art criticism, theory, fiction, and artists’ books, the Berlin-New York based publishing endeavor was set in motion with a pocket book series—edited in part with Nicolaus Schafhausen. Dedicated to an expanded notion of writing on art, Sternberg Press has created a formidable platform in which practitioners from the fields of art and culture (architecture, design, film, politics, literature, and philosophy) can engage in a critical discourse. Each book is a special object celebrating creative publishing at its best, based on both meticulous editorial decisions and distinctive design. Through both commissioned and translated works, Sternberg Press seeks out the blind spots within contemporary discourse and offers a timely response to the related debates.

EXPO CHICAGO (September 27-30, 2018), the International Exposition of Contemporary & Modern Art, has established the city of Chicago as a preeminent art fair destination. Opening the fall art season every September, EXPO CHICAGO takes place at historic Navy Pier whose vast vaulted architecture hosts leading international art galleries alongside one of the highest quality platforms for global contemporary art and culture. Dedicated to rigorous and challenging programming, EXPO CHICAGO initiates strategic international partnerships, built alongside strong institutional relationships with major local museums and organizations to open parallel exhibitions and events. The 2018 edition of EXPO CHICAGO will align with Art Design Chicago, an initiative of the Terra Foundation for American Art, to present various programs and events throughout EXPO ART WEEK (September 24–30, 2018) including panel discussions, performances, and activations across the city.

Tyrone Williams was born in Detroit, Michigan and earned his BA, MA, and PhD at Wayne State University. He is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Convalescence (1987); Futures, Elections (2004); Musique Noir (2006); and Pink Tie (2011), among others. His full-length collections of poetry include c.c. (2002), On Spec (2008), The Hero Project (2009), Adventures of Pi (2011), and Howell (2011). Williams’s work draws on a variety of sources to challenge and investigate language, history, and race. In an interview with the Volta Williams noted, “I don’t ‘revere’ the English language but I use it and, on occasion, abuse it.” Williams is the editor of African American Literature: Revised Edition (2008). He teaches at Xavier University in Cincinnati.

Arnold J. Kemp is a poet and artist. His artworks are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Berkeley Art Museum. Kemp has read on street corners, in living rooms in Oakland, and in bars and bookstores in San Francisco, Berkeley and New York. His writing has appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Art Journal, and Tripwire. Kemp has presented his writing at the Bowery Poetry Club, Banff Centre, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Portland Art Museum, California College of the Arts, PDX Contemporary, San Francisco State University, Portland State University and New Langton Arts. He is the recipient of awards from Tufts University and the American Academy of Poets. In 2016 Kemp became the Dean of Graduate Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

A native Pittsburgher, Kelly Forsythe is currently living and writing in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Perennial (Coffee House Press, August 2018), and a digital chapbook of poems, Helix (Floating Wolf Quarterly). Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, The Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, among others. She was featured in American Poet as an Academy of American Poets “Emerging Poet,” with an introduction by Noelle Kocot. For over half a decade, Forsythe was the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon Press. She is on the Board of Directors for Alice James Books, and works for National Geographic.

Amy Lipman has worked as a teacher, a window treatment salesperson, a pasta maker, a server, a children’s sports instructor and a dramaturg. She also used to walk the dogs of a few B-list celebrities. Her first book, Getting Dressed, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in April. Her chapbook, Cardinal Directions, is forthcoming from Ghost Proposal.

Maggie Queeney is the author of settler, winner of the 2017 Baltic Writing Residency Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her recent work is found or forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, The Fairytale Review, The Cincinnati Review, Bennington Review, and Poetry Northwest. She reads and writes in Chicago.

Richie Hofmann is the author of a collection of poems, Second Empire (2015). He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and his poems appear in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, the New Republic, Ploughshares, New England Review, the New Criterion, Yale Review, and Poetry. He has been featured in the New York Times Style Magazine, on Poetry Daily, on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, in the anthology, Best New Poets 2014, and in Poets & Writers Best Debuts of 2015. His poem, “Children of the Sun,” is anthologized in Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (2017). He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He earned a B.A. from Boston University, an M.F.A. from the Johns Hopkins University, and a Ph.D. from Emory University, where he has held the Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. He recently joined Kenyon Review as a book reviews editor. He is currently a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.

The VGA Reader is a peer-reviewed journal for video game audiences and video game practitioners interested in the history, theory, and criticism of video games, explored through the lens of art history and visual culture. Its primary aim is to facilitate conversation and exploration of video game art, documenting and disseminating discourse about the far-reaching influence of video games on history, society, and culture.

Evan Meaney is an artist and researcher, teaching new media practices at the University of South Carolina in the United States. There he serves as head of the Media Arts program with specialties in game design, interactivity, and experimental cinema. His creative work explores digital liminalities and glitches of all kinds; equating failing data to ghosts, seances, and archival hauntology. He has been an artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Experimental Television Center, a founding member of GLI.TC/H, and a contributor to the Atlantic. His time-based artworks are available through the Video Data Bank in Chicago. He used to say he was a scientist.

More on the participants:

Kyle Beachy is a skateboarding enthusiast, novelist, filmmaker, and educator.

Jim Becker is a Chicago-based musician, producer, and sound engineer who has played around the city and around the world since the 1980s.

Deidre Huckabay is a performer, writer, photographer, and event producer.

A. Martinez is a writer, artist, mother, and community organizer.

MEGA LAVERNE & SHIRLEY is a big TEEN band that creates work with synthesizers, samplers, and choreography.

Kenyatta Rogers serves on the Creative Writing Faculty at Chicago High School for the Arts and is a MAKE #17 contributor.

Tricia Park is a Juilliard-trained concert violinist and fiddler who has appeared in concert on five continents and is currently an MFA candidate in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Born in Grenoble in 1963, Frédérique Guétat-Liviani makes installations that speak of languages, and writes texts that she builds like images. A founding member of the artists’ collective Intime Conviction (1988–94), she is now the publisher of Fidel Anthelme x. The author of several collections of poetry, she is of the caste neither of poets nor of artists. Instead, she inhabits a space in-between. She lives in Marseille. More information, including discussion of the forthcoming but it’s a long way (tr. Nathanël, Nightboat Books, 2018) can be found here. 

Nathanaël is the author of more than a score of books written in French or in English and published in the United States, Québec, and France. Recent works include N’existe (2017), L’heure limicole (2016) and Feder: a scenario (2016). Nathanaël’s translations include works by Catherine Mavrikakis, Édouard Glissant, Hervé Guibert and Hilda Hilst (the latter in collaboration with Rachel Gontijo Araújo). She lives in Chicago.

James Yood teaches modern and contemporary art history and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor and Director of the New Arts Journalism program. Active as an art critic and essayist on contemporary art, he has been Chicago correspondent to Artforum and writes regularly for GLASS magazine, art ltd., and Visual Art Source.  Educated at the University of Wisconsin and at the University of Chicago, he has lectured on issues in modern art at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Terra Museum of American Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Akron Art Museum, the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Boise Art Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Dayton Art Institute, the Spertus Institute in Chicago, the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, the Madison Art Center, the Speed Museum in Louisville, the Mint Museum in Charlotte, the Jewish Museum in Milwaukee, the Huntsville Museum of Art, and at many other venues.
 He serves as a writer and consultant to Encyclopaedia Britannica in modern and contemporary art  and has been a regular correspondent to WBEZ National Public Radio in Chicago.

A.L. Nielsen was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry, and has since received the Josephine Miles Award, the Darwin Turner Award, the Gertrude Stein Award, the Kayden prize and others.  His books of poetry are Heat Strings, Evacuation Routes, Stepping Razor, VEXT, Mixage, Mantic Semantic, A Brand New Beggar and Tray. He currently serves as the Kelly Professor of American Literature at Penn State University, having taught in the past at Howard University, San Jose State, UCLA, Loyola Marymount, and Central China Normal University.  His works of scholarship include Reading Race, Writing between the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction, Black Chant and Integral Music. With Lauri Ramey he has edited two anthologies of innovative poetry by Black American writers.  His edition of Lorenzo Thomas’s Don’t Deny My Name received an American Book Award, and he is currently working with Laura Vrana on The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas.
Poet, performer, and sound artist, Duriel E. Harris is author of No Dictionary of a Living Tongue, Drag and Amnesiac and coauthor of the poetry video Speleology. Current undertakings include “Blood Labyrinth” and the solo performance project Thingification. Harris is an associate professor of English in the graduate creative writing program at Illinois State University and the Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.

For more info, visit http://durielharris.com

Nabil Vega

Nabil is a Chicago-based Bengali artist working with new media, photography, socially engaged art and performance. Their most notable projects include “Visiting Thahab” (ongoing), a rich exploration of the contemporary presence and experience of the Muslim femme. Vega creates immersive works that examine elements of our lived experiences as they intersect with identity, personal politics, and queerness. Since 2014 they have been organizing and curating performance and new media works in collaboration with organizations and artist run platforms such as MIX NYC and their own platform VIX: Virtual International Exchange. Vega is recipient of the prestigious Traveling Fellowship (2018) and Springborn Fellowship (2011) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Their works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, festivals and galleries; including a solo exhibition at the New Bedford Museum of Art (2018) and featured in publications such as The Guardian, Huffington Post, Emergency Index Vol. 6, The Washington Post & The Aerogram.

Tannaz Motevalli

Tannaz Motevalli is a second-generation Iranian-American performance artist, writer, and thinker. She grew up in Baltimore, MD, but is now based out of Chicago, IL. Her multidisciplinary practice, often starting from the central act and practice of writing, explores a variety of ideas and concepts including invisible disability/illness and its relationship to the performing body, the mediated and technological body, fantasies of the reproductive/reproducing body in the age of reproductive technology, performance lecture as a methodology for personal narrative, and exploring notions of interiority, self-containment, and self-actualization within the female erotic landscape. Tannaz has performed and exhibited works in the International Museum of Surgical Science, Links Hall, Comfort Station, TCC Chicago, TriTriangle, The Chicago Home Theater Festival, 2nd Floor Rear Festival, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Oak Hill Center for Education and Culture. Currently, Tannaz is working on a memoir about her grandmother through interviews and careful studies of over 160 notebooks that her grandmother kept since a year or so prior to the 1979 Enghelab, Revolution, to present day U.S. This memoir explores, not only her tremulous yet evolving relationship with her grandmother, but also the private and intimate ways her grandmother has navigated political trauma, emigration, dual-citizenship, patriotism, mental illness, and womanhood.

Izah Ransohoff

A long time fan of animals in nature videos, Izah Ransohoff celebrates the purpose of movement, motives of the viewer, and uses intuitive movement to explore taking up space and the space in between us. They seek to make a space for others as they make a space for their own body. By opening the body to exist as medium, wandering, sex, making, working, are comprehensible as form. Like two long strings connecting past and present, multiple pasts and potential futures, it brings us to a single present, the state of presence. Izah relishes the mystery to be prodded at, values respect, humor, intuition, individuality, the everyday, and the occasional oddity.  Izah is part of S h l i p S h l o p s , a collaborative performance duo and has shown work at Links Hall, Mana Contemporary, Ballroom Projects, The Foxhole, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Archer Beach Haus, and various apartment galleries around Chicago.

Bryan Saner is an interdisciplinary art practitioner and maker focusing on the creation of performances, activist art events, neighborhood evolution and appropriately designed objects. He teaches workshops, mentors and lectures locally, nationally and internationally on the subject of performance, the body, neighborhood design, movement and collaboration. He is currently a mentor and advisor in the Interdisciplinary Arts graduate program at Columbia College Chicago. From 1995 to 2009 Bryan worked as a performing artist with the recently retired Goat Island Performance Group. During this time, the company toured internationally, performing at venues including the Venice Biennale, Bristol’s Arnolfini Theatre, the Eurokaz festival in Zagreb and the New Territories Festival, Glasgow.

He is currently performing with Matty Davis, Erica Mott Productions, 600 Highwaymen and Every House Has A Door.

Described by the New Yorker as “fearless,” Matty Davis is an interdisciplinary artist from Pittsburgh, PA, where his grandfather worked for decades in the steel mills.  His work seeks embodied transformation, often through collaboration and collision with other people, materials, and landscapes. Recently, Davis has been invested in how particular conditions of the body, the elements, and the ground necessarily impact kinesthesia, energy systems, and psychological states, partially in relation to having undergone intensive hand surgery last year due to a saw accident.  This research culminates in the making of performances, images, films, objects, and texts. In 2012, he co-founded and continues to co-artistic direct BOOMERANG, a performance project based in New York City.  His work has been presented by the Art Institute of Chicago, Steppenwolf Theater, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Pioneer Works, Judson Church, the Watermill Center, Dixon Place, Danspace Project, and the Arts Arena in Paris, among others.  He was the recipient of a 2016 Visual Arts Fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and has recently been an artist-in-residence at the Watermill Center and Kickstarter’s HQ in Brooklyn. Davis teaches masterclasses at colleges and schools throughout the US, including New York University, Columbia College, Oberlin College, Muhlenberg College, Kenyon College, The Professional Performing Arts High School in New York, and The Philadelphia School. More information is available at www.mattydavis.net

About the BOOK

SHADOWED! confronts the slippage of time and action within Ellen Rothenberg’s 2015 Sector 2337 exhibition, elsetime. Sweeping through the studio of Bertolt Brecht, Woodstock in the sixties, Berlin in the nineties, and the Syrian protests of today, SHADOWED! projects a dispersive, unfolding temporality. Beginning with a suite of elsetime photographs, the book continues with reflections by Hannah B Higgins, Jeffrey Skoller, Caroline Picard, and Shawn Michelle Smith—spreading out from there into an artist’s archive that includes scanned fragments of writings by Stefan Brecht,  Allen Ginsberg, Angela Davis, and  transcribed contributions from  Simone Forti. A subsequent section includes documentation of performances produced in response to elsetime by artists, activists, and musicians. SHADOWED! ends with the transcript of a public conversation that took place within the original exhibit, capturing a discussion that incorporates an active audience. By layering these performative, photographic, and written encounters, SHADOWED! allows the afterimage of an exhibition to unfurl beyond the gallery, beyond this book, and into its own elsetime.

Praise For SHADOWED!

“Ellen Rothenberg’s multimodal installation elsetime interlaced performance actions, installation, objects, public invitations to fellow artists, and visual essays. In this beautiful and thoughtfully designed book, you’ll find each of these aspects explored anew as though readied for further action. New pieces by collaborators enter the scene and become enmeshed in photographic echoes from ‘60s collective rallying, music documentary, contemporary migrancy, material icons, and the live events generated during the exhibition. The great exclamation mark of the title brings all these absents squarely into view, while posing the pressing question: how does one avoid reenacting shadows from the past!”
—CAROLINE BERGVALL, artist, writer, performer, and author of Drift.

“Rothenberg’s feminist social sculpture and animated objects echo radical en-actions from Brecht, Fluxus, suffrage street theatre, and Black Lives Matter protests. Worn shoes declare that the way lies both forward and backward, for the past always underlies the present and reverberates deeply in the desires of our current work and lives. This radical book should be in your backpack at a May Day parade or protest strike! Mourn and organize!”
—FAITH WILDING, artist, writer, and educator.

“Ellen Rothenberg’s book/archive serves as a complex memory machine where the global 20th century’s cultural, political, and social revolutions encounter the local now. The captivating imagery of Rothenberg’s reflexive and expansive work lifts you out of history’s shadows and makes you feel alive, resisting the wave of inevitability. Shadowed! is timely. This book is a gift to anyone curious about or deeply interested in material culture, history, social change, and contemporary art.”
—IRINA ARISTARKHOVA, author of Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture.

About Launch performers

Hannah B Higgins has been a professor in the Department of Art History at UIC since 1994. She is sole author of dozens of articles on the history of the avant-garde, multi-modal artistic experiences, Fluxus, performance art, and art and technology. This work appears in scholarly journals as well as Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009). Higgins is coeditor with Douglas Kahn of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012). She is also co-executor of the Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press. For more information and samples of her scholarship, visit www.hannahbhiggins.com

Mitsu Salmon creates performance and visual works that fuse multiple disciplines. She was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese mother and American father. Creating in differing mediums—translating one medium to another—is connected

to the translation of differing cultures and languages. Her work draws from familial and personal narratives and archives and then abstracts, expands and contradicts them. Salmon received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and her undergrad degree from NYU. She has presented work at places such as the Chicago Cultural Center, Julius Caesar, Comfort Station and internationally at Hebbel Am Uffer in Berlin, Made Budhiana Gallery in Bali and Urbanguild in Kyoto, Japan. She was awarded artist residencies at Tsung Yeh in Taiwan, Villa Pandan Harum in Bali, High Concept Lab, Links Hall, the Chicago Cultural Center and Oxbow. She is currently a HATCH resident through CAC. www.mitsusalmon.com

Shawn Michelle Smith is a professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught for the past twelve years. She writes about the history and theory of photography and gender and race in U.S. visual culture, and she maintains a photo-based visual art practice. She has published six books, including most recently Photography and the Optical Unconscious (Duke University Press, 2017), co-edited with Sharon Sliwinski, and At the Edge of Sight:  Photography and the Unseen (Duke University Press, 2013), which won the 2014 Lawrence W. Levine Award for best book in American cultural history from the Organization of American Historians and the 2014 Jean Goldman Book Prize from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Spectralina is the audio-visual performance project of Dan Bitney and Selina Trepp, collaborators, lovers, and magicians. Working in an improvised format, the goal of Spectralina is to create an image-sound relationship that treats each medium as equal, resulting in performances in which projection and sounds come together as visual music. Dan Bitney (American b. 1964) is a multi instrumentalist, improviser, sound designer, composer, bird watcher, gardener, and lover and is still learning what it could mean to be a human being. Dan Bitney is part of the musical group Tortoise. In addition to Tortoise, Dan is involved with many musical projects, Isotope 217, Bumps, Spectronix, A Grape Dope, and Ghost Rest to name a few. As one half of the duo Spectralina, Dan uses a computer, synthesizers, drums, voice and analog processors to improvise with sounds and images. Selina Trepp (Swiss/American, b. 1973) is an artist who works across disciplines. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is a goal, living a life of adventure is a way, embarrassment is often the result. “If in doubt be radical” is the best advice she ever got. In Spectralina Selina sings and plays the videolah, her instrument that creates animated projections in real-time.

About ELLEN ROTHENBERG

Ellen Rothenberg’s work has been presented in North America and Europe at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Museum of London, Ontario; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; The Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen; Royal Festival Hall, London; The Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania; among others. Awards include NEA Fellowships, The Bunting Institute Fellowship, Radcliffe College Harvard University, Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, The Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowships, and grants from CEC Artslink, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The LEF Foundation, and NEA Artists Projects. She has worked in collaboration with the Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, Future Force Geo Speculators, and Chelen Amenca, Romania. Rothenberg teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a Faculty Research Fellow of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at SAIC. Her exhibition ISO 6346: ineluctable immigrant is currently on view at the Spertus Institute, Chicago. www.ellenrothenberg.com

Erik Hagoort received his PhD in the arts in 2017 at the Antwerp University / the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, united under the name ARIA, Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts.

In addition to researching and practicing conditions for encounters in art, Hagoort teaches at the Master Institute of the St. Joost Academy of Art and Design in ‘s Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands. He rcently gave various masterclasses, at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam; the Master of Theatre Practices, Arnhem, with Bruno Listopad, and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Antwerp, with Nico Dockx, where he also was guest Professor Research Methodologies in the Arts (2015-2017).

Hagoort has previously published the essay Good Intentions. Judging the Art of Encounter (2005) through the Mondriaan Foundation, and has also published numerous reviews and articles on contemporary art in the Dutch national daily journal De Volkskrant and Metropolis M magazine for contemporary art. He has recently contributed to publications by Valiz and Sternberg Press on social art practices. In Chicago he participated with Caroline Picard in Mutualisms (2011), curated by Kirsten Leenaars and Lise Ross – Haller Baggesen. In 2014 Sector 2337 hosted Hagoort’s Symprovisation on Art and Empathy.

Kirsten Leenaars engages with individuals and communities to create participatory video and performance-based work. She examines the nature of our constructed realities—the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we identify with—and explores the way we relate to others. In her work, she aims to bring to light a shared humanity, often through humor and play. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, at venues including the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, the District of Columbia Arts Center, Washington DC, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Currently work by Leenaars is shown as part of The Tip of My Tongue at Weinberg/ Newton Gallery Chicago, curated by Kasia Houlihan and organized in partnership with the Chicago Literacy Alliance (through March 17).

Leenaars works as an associate professor in the department of Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Composer, performer, installation-builder, and administrator, Jenna Lyle has worked with various ensembles and specialized in the performance of works by living composers. She has presented her own works as well as those of her colleagues throughout the U.S. and abroad, with performances recently by Spektral Quartet, Mocrep, Chicago Composers Orchestra, Loadbang, D U C K R U B B E R, and The Riot Ensemble, of London. As a performer, Lyle takes on long-term collaborations drawing upon her background in theater and vocal performance. Her latest projects include an international tour of choreographer Erica Mott and composer Ryan Ingebritsen’s 3 Singers, a dance and multi-media opera; a collaborative duo work for bodies, voices, hanging speakers, and electronics with Australian mezzo Jessica Aszodi entitled Grafter; and a one-woman adaptation of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. Lyle is also a performing member of Mocrep and a co-founder of Parlour Tapes+, a New Music cassette tape label and media/performance collective based in Chicago. She holds degrees in composition from Northwestern University (DMA), Cleveland State University (MM), and Birmingham-Southern College (BM) and curates and coordinates programming at The Arts Club of Chicago as Programs Manager.

Deidre Huckabay is a Chicago-based performer, writer, photographer, and event producer. Her work reflects a solitary, interior world, drawing on a musical life that requires long hours alone and listening. She tends to make work that undermines authorship by employing improvisation and surrealist techniques, invoking the spectator’s personal history, and cultivating participant consensus.

Deidre is a 2017 3Arts Make a Wave Grantee and a 2016 High Concept Labs Sponsored Artist. In 2017, she received a full year studio and rehearsal residency from the Eighth Blackbird Chicago Artists Workshop.

Deidre is co-owner of the experimental cassette tape label Parlour Tapes+ and a regular contributor to Cacophony Magazine. She is a member of the Chicago-based performance group Mocrep, co-curator of the WE Series at Elastic Arts, and founder of Spiderf*rt Press. As a flutist, she has extensively toured the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. She performs with Manual Cinema and the Eastman BroadBand, and has recorded for Urtext and Bridge Records. She holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Duquesne University.

Lynn Xu is the author of the poetry collection Debts & Lessons, which was the finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and a chapbook called June. In 2008, her work was featured in Best American Poetry and in 2013, she was selected as a New American Poet at the Poetry Society of America. She is also an editor for Canarium Books.

Jennifer Roche is a poet, writer, editor, and occasional collage artist who lives in Chicago, IL. Her work has appeared in Footnote: A Literary Journal of History; The Rain, Party & Disaster Society; Ghost Ocean; and Anthology of Chicago. Her first chapbook of poems, “20,” is available from Alternating Current Press.

Presented with The Poetry Center of Chicago

Partial Schedule / Order Subject to Change

Friday, December 8th

Artists Working in Response to Werewere Liking’s It Shall Be of Jaspar and Coral

7:15 pm Josh Hoglund + Corina Copp

A past and present conversation about the future, which may or may not be interrupted by a chorus of unruly children. A play that is a dialogue based on a conversation about a book.

8:15 pm Sherae Rimpsey: “-ity, -ity, -ity (              )”

Two viewpoints converge, a film and a performance.

Ongoing:

Matthew Sage

Two works that address the faulty compartmentalization of identity, the liminal spaces between emotion and logic, and the dissonance, resonance, absorption, and reflectivity of the self as dictated by surroundings. Framed multi-layer drawings on vellum in graphite, pastel, acrylics, found paper and treated mirrors. Multi-layered video-capture of GIFs and Javascript text functions embedded in HTML.

Jen Hill

A flog (fake blog) tangential to the world and to Werewere Liking’s It Shall Be of Jaspar of Coral. How does a broken knee hinge? How does narrative power coincide with that of the webmaster?

Saturday, December 9th

Artists Working in Response to Werewere Liking’s It Shall Be of Jaspar and Corel

7:15 pm Max Guy

A two-person adaptation of It Shall Be of Jaspar and Coral, inspired by the formal techniques of Noh drama. How little can be done to embody a text?

8:15 Dao Nguyen

27 minutes. 9 overlapping horizontals.

Ongoing:

Matthew Sage

Two works that address the faulty compartmentalization of identity, the liminal spaces between emotion and logic, and the dissonance, resonance, absorption, and reflectivity of the self as dictated by surroundings. Framed multi-layer drawings on vellum in graphite, pastel, acrylics, found paper and treated mirrors. Multi-layered video-capture of GIFs and Javascript text functions embedded in HTML.

Jen Hill

A flog (fake blog) tangential to the world and to Werewere Liking’s It Shall Be of Jaspar of Corel. How does a broken knee hinge? How does narrative power coincide with that of the webmaster?

Sunday, December 10th

Beginning at Noon on the internet, Website addresses and specific times TBA

Suzanne Stein and Steve Benson: Unscripted, unrehearsed, and unedited, NOW is a three-part improvisational work created for the Third Annual Festival of Poets Theater. Bridging, exploding, and reinforcing the dialectical tension and chaos underlying the dichotomy of practice and performance, NOW attempts to examine, understand, and simultaneously realize its own nature during the course of this half-hour-long documentation-as-product.

Douglas Kearney will present a set of streaming micro-operatic works.

Annie Dorsen presents Youtube 1-4, a small collection of music videos made from pop songs and youtube comments.

Patrick Durgin directs Alain Jugnon’s radio play Artaud in Amerika, translated from the French by Nathanaël. Recorded, edited and scored by Mark Booth, voices are by Booth, Durgin, Jeremy Biles, Caroline McCraw, Joel Craig, Devin King, and Fulla Abdul-Jabbar.

Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947), a radio play embodying the “theater of cruelty.”

Bios:

Antonin Artaud is considered among the most influential figures in the evolution of modern drama theory. Affiliated with Surrealism in its heyday, he would break from this circle and found the Theatre Alfred Jarry with Roger Vitrac and Robert Aron. Author of The Theater and Its Double, Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society, The Nerve Meter and other texts straddling modernism and the historical avant garde, Artaud was also a magnificent actor (with a pivotal role in Carl Dryer’s classic Passion of Joan of Arc), a prolific visual artist, and he inspired the philosophical corpus of Gilles Deleuze, among other leading postmodernists. His radio play To Have Done with the Judgment of God was commissioned by French national radio but banned hours before it went to air. It has circulated and been studied in print and in its original recording for years and will be broadcast to cap off this year’s festival.

Steve Benson has lived in downeast Maine since 1996. He was an actor in productions of Poets’ Theater in San Francisco and directed Carla Harryman and Nick Robinson in Carla’s La Quotidienne at New Langton Arts in 1983. He directed a poets theater workshop at Intersection for the Arts in 1992. His poetry readings have often incorporated diverse media applications, oral improvisation, and collaboration with writers, musicians, and filmmakers. Benson continues to write and perform his works and shares links to on-line appearances through http://www.stevebensonasis.com/. A current project of daily poetry texts appears at https://www.tumblr.com/blog/stevebensonasis. He wrote or transcribed from orally improvised performances the material contained in Blindspots (1981), Blue Book (1988), Open Clothes (2005), and other books. He co-authored The Grand Piano series of autobiographical essays (2006-10) with nine friends.

Jeremy Biles teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the author of Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form.

Mark Booth is an interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, writer, and musician. Booth is on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited and performed his work in Chicago, nationally, and internationally in a variety of known and obscure venues.

Corina Copp is a New York–based writer of poems, performance, and criticism. She is the author of the poetry collection The Green Ray (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), several chapbooks, and the three-part play, The Whole Tragedy of the Inability to Love, fragments of which have been presented at Artists Space, Home Alone 2 Gallery, NYC Prelude Festival, and Dixon Place. Her talk, “Euphoria of Acting a Part,” was recently presented at the James Gallery (CUNY Graduate Center of Humanities); and another, “Goodnight, Chantal,” at After Chantal: An International Conference (U. of Westminster, London, 2016). Other work can be found soon or now in Pelt Vol. 4: Feminist Temporalities (Organism for Poetic Research), Los Angeles Review of Books, Imperial Matters, BOMB, Cabinet, The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet, and elsewhere. She is in the midst of translating Hall de nuit (Night Lobby, L’Arche, 1992), a play by Chantal Akerman (forthcoming, e-flux journal).

Joel Craig is the author of the poetry collection The White House (The Green Lantern Press, 2012). He co-directs MAKE Literary Productions, and serves as poetry editor for MAKE magazine. For many years he curated the Danny’s Reading Series in Chicago.

Annie Dorsen is a director and writer whose work explores the intersection of algorithms and live performance. Her most recent performances, The Great Outdoors, A Piece of Work, Spokaoke and Hello Hi There, continue to tour extensively in Europe and the US. She received the 2014 Alpert Award in the Arts, a 2017 Artist Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and currently teaches in the Theater and Performance Studies Department at University of Chicago.

Patrick Durgin is the author of PQRS (Kenning Editions, 2013) and The Route (with Jen Hofer, Atelos, 2008). His artist book Zenith was published by Green Lantern Press in the spring of 2016.The Volta published “Prelude to PQRS,” a reflection on his work in poets theater originally presented at the New [New] Corpse event series. His performance piece Interference was featured in the 2015 Festival of Poets Theater and published in Emergency Index 2015. “Recent Acquisitions” was featured in the 2014 issue of Text-Sound. An essay on New Materialism, Deleuze-Guattarian “schizoanalysis,” and disability poetics is forthcoming in The Matter of Disability (University of Michigan Press). In 2010, he commissioned The Kenning Anthology of Poets Theater: 1945-1985, edited by Kevin Killian and David Brazil.

Max Guy is an artist based in Chicago. In his conceptually-driven work he gives form to existential crises, moral and ethical dilemma. He has performed and exhibited at DEMO Project, Springfield, IL; Prairie, Chicago; AZ-West, Joshua Tree National Park, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Signal Gallery, New York, NY; Ghost, Deep River, CT; What Pipeline, Detroit, MI; Federico Vavassori, Milan, and the Manila Institute, New York, NY. Max co-hosts Human Eye, an occasional podcast on art and life with Miranda Pfeiffer. He has collaborated on curatorial projects such as Szechuan Best, Spiral Cinema, and Rock512Devil in Baltimore, Maryland. He received his M.F.A. from the Department of in Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in 2016, and is currently artist in residence at the Hyde Park Art Center.

jen hill make Things with sound, image, music, video, objects, jokes, the internet, ideas, etc. their recent works express an obsessive interest in pursuing of the imaginary, the impossible, and the useless. they have a bachelors of music in composition from the university of north texas (2015) and are pursuing a masters of fine arts in sound art from the school at the art institute of chicago (2018).

Josh Hoglund directs collaboratively devised performance works. His performance, writing and video have been shown in Chicago at Links Hall, Defibrillator, The Nightingale, Mana Contemporary, The Studebaker Theater, The Prop Theater and elsewhere. Recent projects include On Blue By You, presented through Links Hall’s LinkUp Residency and in Rhinofest 2017. This fall he will be performing Tino Seghal’s Kiss at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Upcoming projects include a concert reading of Gertrude Stein’s Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (Rhinofest, January 2018), for which he is directing and composing original music.

Alain Jugnon has written for the theatre and has published essays and articles on Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille. He is the editor of Cahiers Artaud and the political and poetic journal La contre-attaque.

Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). BOMB says: “[Buck Studies] remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” M. NourbeSe Philip writes that Kearney’s collection of libretti, Someone Took They Tongues (Subito, 2016), “meets the anguish that is english in a seismic, polyphonic mash-up that disturbs the tongue.” Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection that Publisher’s Weekly called “an extraordinary book.” Raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in the Santa Clarita Valley and teaches at CalArts. Douglaskearney.com

Devin King is the co-director of Sector 2337 and the poetry editor for the Green Lantern Press. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Caroline McCraw is a writer and artist based in Chicago.

Nathanaël is the author of more than a score of books written in English or in French. Her translations include works by Danielle Collobert, Édouard Glissant, Hervé Guibert, and Catherine Mavrikakis.

Dao Nguyen is an interdisciplinary artist who choreographs thought experiments, play apparatuses, obstacle courses, and transformation rituals. A score becomes a map is a situation where objects, actions, and bodies encounter philosophical questions concerning representation, systems, and relations. She has exhibited and performed in backyards, bathrooms, stairwells, highways, and gallery spaces, including Defibrillator, the MCA, Sector 2337, Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Brea Art Gallery, The Foundry Arts Centre, and Irvine Fine Arts Center. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Artist-in-Residence at ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale, In>Time Performance Festival 17, and Elsewhere: A Living Museum.

Sherae Rimpsey is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has exhibited her work in the U.S and internationally, most notably at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland; the Zentral Bibliothek in Zurich, Switzerland and National Library of Buenos Aires, Argentina as a contributing artist in Luis Camnitzer’s El Ultimo Libro – The Last Book project; and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany where she was awarded the prestigious Solitude Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Philadelphia Foundation Grant, as a Flaherty Fellow and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Residency. She has a BFA in Technology & Integrated Media with an emphasis in Visual Culture from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she currently teaches.

Matthew Sage is an aspiring non-specialist from the Mountain West living, teaching, and working in Chicago. He operates Patient Sounds, a private press record label and book publisher. He is fond of compost, bread rising, and reading landscapes. He has exhibited, performed and improvised works at MOMA PS1 in New York, Sullivan Galleries, The Block Museum, and The Comfort Station in Chicago, and at numerous DIY spaces, public parks, and rock venues across America.

Suzanne Stein’s publications and performance documents include The Kim Game, TOUT VA BIEN, and Passenger Ship. Recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Elderly and Best American Experimental Writing 2018; performance recordings are archived at PennSound. Other texts in the live, performative, and conceptual vein include Three-Way, HOLE IN SPACE, and Orphée. She is the founding editor, and for eight years was editor in chief, of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s online art and language magazine, Open Space. Together, Steve and Suzanne are the authors of DO YOUR OWN DAMN LAUNDRY, a manuscript documenting the 36 improvisational dialogues they performed together between 2011 and 2012.

About the panelists:

FIRST PANEL:

Neo Hülcker is a composer performer whose work focuses on music as anthropological research in everyday life environments. Their compositions evolve as situations, performance-installations, actions and interventions, and work with different kinds of public spaces.

Frauke Aulbert is one of the most active and multi-talented vocalists in the field of contemporary music today. Her almost infinite, impressive vocal sound palette enfolds a nearly four octave range next to classical singing (diploma), over- and undertone-singing, multiphonics, techniques from Bulgarian folclore, Korean gugak, gamelan, jazz, dhrupad, beatboxing a.s.o.

Composer, performer, installation-builder, and administrator, Chicago-based artist Jenna Lyle explores how the physical body, and in turn the culture in which it functions, adapts to its semiotic or “data-based” representation.

SECOND PANEL:

Anna Parkinson is an Associate Professor of German, the Co-Director of the Critical Theory Cluster, and a member of the Advisory Boards for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and the Holocaust Education Foundation in Weinberg College at Northwestern University. Her first book, titled An Emotional State: The Politics of Emotion in Postwar West German Culture, was published in the Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany series by the University of Michigan Press in 2015. Her current interdisciplinary project focuses on decolonizing critical theory, specifically in the field of critical memory studies in the context of the “global South.”

Caroline Picard is a curator, publisher, writer, and artist. She is the Executive Director, Head Curator, and Founding Editor of The Green Lantern Press (GLP), established in 2005 that produces contemporary art exhibitions, critical art and poetry publications, and cultural events that intersect literature, philosophy, theory, and art.

Lakshmi Ramgopal performs ambient electronic under the moniker Lykanthea. Her performances feature synths, harmonium drones, and processed vocal improvisation that draws on Carnatic techniques, with appearances that include NYU’s Occult Humanities Conference; Leipzig, Germany’s Wave Gotik Treffen; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Trinity College and based in Chicago, IL and Northampton, MA.

Sara Slawnik joined the 3Arts staff as Director of Programs in 2014, overseeing the 3Arts Awards program, 3AP (3Arts Projects), residency fellowships, and other artist support initiatives. Prior to 3Arts, she was Deputy Director of the Chicago Artists Coalition, Program Director at the Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media at Columbia College Chicago, and held positions in development at The Renaissance Society, The Drawing Center in New York City, and The Archives of American Art. Sara earned a BA in the History of Art from the University of Michigan.

Alberto Aguilar I will write this biography using 133 words but I won’t discover this number until I’m finished writing it. From this point forward he will speak in third person. Alberto Aguilar is a Chicago-based ___ist that uses whatever material is at hand to commemorate his exchanges and interactions. Aguilar’s work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Mexican ___, Museum of Contemporary ___ Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American ___, the Queens Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of ___, Minneapolis Institute of ___, and the ___ Institute of Chicago. He currently teaches studio ___ at Harold Washington College where he also coordinates Pedestrian Project, a program dedicated to making ___ more accessible and available. In order to create slight confusion, he omitted the word art wherever it appears in this bio with one exception.

Pouya Ahmadi is a Chicago-based typographer and art director. He is an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Design, and an editorial board member at Neshan magazine focusing on contemporary graphic design and the visual arts. His work has been showcased by AIGA Eye On Design, It’s Nice That, The Type Directors Club, Communication Arts, The Society of Typographic Arts, Moscow International Design Biennial, and Etapes. Pouya holds an MA/MAS degree in Visual Communication from the Basel School of Design in Switzerland and an MFA in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Manal Kara (b. 1986) is a self-taught Moroccan-American artist living and working in Gary, IN.

Feliz Lucia Molina was born & raised to Filipino immigrants in Los Angeles. Her books and chapbook include Undercastle, The Wes Letters, Crystal Marys. Her generative long poem, Roulette, is forthcoming from Make Now Books. She can be found at felizluciamolina.com

Claire Sherman (b. 1981 Oberlin, OH) received her B.A. from The University of Pennsylvania and her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, Yaddo, The Albers Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at DC Moore Gallery, NY; Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago; KMAC Museum, Louisville; Houldsworth Gallery, London; DCKT, New York; Aurobora, San Francisco; and Hof and Huyser Gallery, Amsterdam. Recent group exhibitions include the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Suburban Riverwest, Milwaukee; Gallery Seomi, Seoul; The New Gallery, Austria; and the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY. Sherman is an Associate Professor and Art Department chair at Drew University in New Jersey and is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York and Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago.

Edra Soto (b. Puerto Rico) is a Chicago-based artist, educator, curator, and co-director of the artist-run outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN. She obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000, as well as attending Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Beta-Local in Puerto Rico and the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Program in Captiva, Florida though a 3Arts Foundation Fellowship. Her work was featured at the 4th Poly/Graphic Triennial of San Juan and the Caribbean in Puerto Rico, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space and the Hunter East Harlem Gallery, in New York. She co-curated the exhibition Present Standard at the Chicago Cultural Center with overwhelmingly positive reviews from the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, PBS The Art Assignment, and Artforum. She was recently featured in Newcity’s annual Art 50 issue Chicago’s Artists’ Artists and at VAM Studio 2017 Influencers. Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship and the DCASE for Individual Artists from the City of Chicago. Recent venues presenting Soto’s work include: Sector 2337, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Uni- versity Galleries at Illinois State University and Museo de la Universidad de Puerto Rico and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Current and upcoming venues include: the DePaul Art Museum, Be- mis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, (NE), Gallery 400 at UIC and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago among others. Residencies attended by Soto this year include: Project Row Houses in Houston, (TX), the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, (WI), and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, (CA). Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally.

Chuck Stebelton is author of The Platformist (Cultural Society, 2012). His first book, Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005), was winner of the inaugural Jack Spicer Award. As a Wisconsin Master Naturalist volunteer he has offered interpretive hikes for arts organizations including Lynden Sculpture Garden, Friends of Lorine Niedecker, and Woodland Pattern Book Center. He was Literary Program Director at Woodland Pattern from 2005 to 2017. He currently serves as Program Coordinator for Interfaith Older Adult Programs in Milwaukee and is a participant in the Lynden Sculpture Garden residency program.

Fereshteh Toosi designs experiences using hybrid approaches that combine images, sounds, movement, and found materials. Fereshteh’s participatory art work takes many forms, ranging from oyster mushroom sculptures, films processed in mint tea and yeasts, and guided walks about lithium. Fereshteh studied at Oberlin College and Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art. She also holds a certificate in Environmental Urban Design from Archeworks in Chicago
and is an active member of the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides, the American Horticultural Therapy Association, and the National Association for Interpretation. Fereshteh is an Assistant Professor of Art at Florida International University in Miami, where she directs The Nature Connection Arts Lab, dedicated to exploring the connection between non-human and human health through contemplative art and creative research.

Jake Vogds is a multidisciplinary performance artist/singer working in sculpture, painting, installation, visual media, and costume. Through surreal pop-vocal performances, Vogds toys with contemporary notions of camp, trend, and queer consumerism. In June of 2014, he was awarded the Shapiro Center’s EAGER Research Grant for his Queer Mixed Realities Collective from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has performed and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Defibrillator, Links Hall, Chicago Artist Coalition, The Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Three Walls Gallery, and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, among others. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2014) on a presidential merit scholarship. In fall of 2016, Vogds taught an undergraduate performance course at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. After completing four 2017 solo exhibitions throughout the Chicago area and abroad, Vogds is currently working collaboratively with Rebirth Garments and Compton Quashie for Evanston Art Center’s Shape of Now fashion residency coming March 2018.

From 2013-2016, Trunk Show—a medium beat-up forest green 1999 Ford Taurus driven by Raven Falquez Munsell and Jesse Malmed—hosted three dozen exhibitions of commissioned artist bumper stickers. With the help of essayists Dana Bassett and Anthony Stepter, conversants Dan Miller and Davielle Lakind, designer Aaron Walker and testimonials by a caravan of anonymous and/or famous friends, the project is finding its way into book form. @trunkshowtogo

No Coast Editions presents its latest release of affordable artists’ multiples, this time featuring Danny Giles, Angela Fegan and No Coast/CABF co-founder Aay Preston-Myint. Together the three artists, with widely varying practices, present works that exhibit certain commonalities under the surface. Through print and sculpture, the artists each investigate how the replication and circulation of an image, particularly an image that serves to make one’s politics visible – functions in our cultural climate: what one of Fegan’s text-based works describes as “the echo chamber of false narratives.”

Giovanni Aloi is an art historian in modern and contemporary art. He studied History of Art and Art Practice in Milan and moved to London in 1997 to further his studies at Goldsmiths University where he obtained a Postgraduate Diploma in Art History, a Master in Visual Cultures, and a Ph.D. on the subject of natural history in contemporary art. Aloi currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sotheby’s Institute of Art New York and London, and Tate Galleries. He has curated art projects involving photography and the moving image is a BBC radio contributor, and his work has been translated in Italian, Chinese, French, Russian, Polish, and Spanish. His first book titled Art & Animals was published in 2011 and since 2006 he has been the Editor in Chief of Antennae, the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. 

Rebecca Beachy (b. Denver, 1982), is a recipient of both an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and currently teaches AP Material Studies, Contemporary Practices, and Sculpture at the Chicago High School for the Arts. Her sculptures, interventions and installations have been exhibited throughout Chicago and beyond, most recently traveling to Worpswede and Hamburg, Germany. Her writing has been published with the literary journal Puerto del Sol as well as various art catalogues and small publications in Chicago. As volunteer specimen preparator and educator, Beachy trained to demonstrate taxidermy to the public at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum for the Chicago Academy of Sciences, Department of Collections.

Caroline Picard is a writer, publisher, and curator. Her writing has appeared in Artslant, ArtForum (critics picks), Flash Art International, and Paper Monument, among others. She is the Executive Director of The Green Lantern Press—a nonprofit publishing house and art producer in operation since 2005—and the Co-Director of Sector 2337, a hybrid artspace/bar/bookstore in Chicago. Fiction and comics appear under the name Coco Picard. Her first graphic novel, The Chronicles of Fortune, was published by Radiator Comics in 2017.

Andrew Yang  is an artist, scientist, and educator working across a range to media to explore the natural/cultural matrix. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015) and solo exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2016). His writing can be found in publications including Leonardo, Biological Theory, Gastronomica, and Art Journal. He is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alan Felsenthal runs a small press called The Song Cave. With Ben Estes, he edited A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton. His writing has appeared in BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, Critical Quarterly, Fence, jubilat, and Harper’s. Lowly, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, is his first collection of poems.

Geoffrey Hilsabeck is the author of the chapbooks The Keepers of Secrets and Vaudeville. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Seneca Review, 6X6, Bomb, Wax, The Chronicle of Higher Ed, and the Poetry Foundation. He teaches at West Virginia University and lives in Morgantown, WV. His first collection of poems, Riddles, Etc., is forthcoming from The Song Cave.

Jennifer Nelson is an assistant professor in the department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is also the author of two books of poems: Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (UDP, 2015) and Civilization Makes Me Lonely (Ahsahta, 2017). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in BathHouse, LIT, Make: A Literary Magazine, Palimpsest, Pinwheel, and Versal.

Faith Wilding is an intermedia artist, writer, and educator, deeply engaged with teaching and learning, and the intersections of feminism, social justice, cyberfeminism, biotechnology, radical pedagogy, and eco-feminism.

Robin Deacon is a British artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator. His work has explored questions of memory, absence and fiction in performance, through a constant reconfiguration of his role as an artist – as a journalist and biographer, operator and technician, imposter and stooge. His recent research projects have explored histories of video documentation and outmoded media formats, as well as the practice and ethics of performance reenactment. His live and screen based work has been extensively presented in Europe, the US, and Asia. Robin is Associate Professor and Chair of Performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alain Jugnon has written for the theatre and has published essays and articles on Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille. He is the editor of Cahiers Artaud and the political and poetic journal La contre-attaque.

Nathanaël is the author of more than a score of books written in English or in French. Her translations include works by Danielle Collobert, Édouard Glissant, Hervé Guibert, and Catherine Mavrikakis.

Patrick Durgin is a poet-critic and co-curator of the annual Festival of Poets Theater. His most recent book is PQRS: A Poets Theater Script.

Alison James is associate professor of French at the University of Chicago. She has published a book on Georges Perec and articles on the Oulipo, contemporary French fiction, documentary writing, and connections between literature and philosophy.

Brett Balogh is a Chicago-based artist and designer making sculptural, aural and cartographic explorations of the electromagnetic landscape. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches courses in digital fabrication, robotics, sound and electronics.

About the artists:

Cartoonist and artist Anders Nilsen is the author of nine books including Dogs and Water, The End, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow and the multiple award-winning Big Questions. His comics have been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Reader, Medium, Kramer’s Ergot and elsewhere. His work has been widely translated and exhibited internationally. After thirteen years in Chicago Nilsen currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Sonnenzimmer is the collective work of artists Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi. Their collaborative practice was established in 2006 in Chicago, Illinois. Initially recognized for their idiosyncratic commissioned screen-printed posters, their practice has since morphed into an interdisciplinary toolshed spanning multiple platforms, including exhibitions, publishing, performance, graphic design, and exhibition design. Equal parts balancing act between art and design and radical reclamation of all aspects of visual expression, the studio is grounded in the lasting potential of the graphic arts, while exploring the physical and conceptual friction between abstraction and communication.

About the books:

After a number of more experimental ventures in comics and visual storytelling Nilsen’s new book Tongues marks a return to the more traditional comics form he last explored in Big Questions. Nilsen’s first book in full, lushly rendered color, Tongues is at once an adventure story with roots in ancient greek mythology and an exploration of human nature, language and evolution. Set in the contemporary middle east the book is a meditation on our present fraught historical moment.

Sonnenzimmer’s new book Café Avatar explores the folding graphic fabric of humanity. Through text and illustration, Sonnenzimmer posit the current age as a graphic-centric plane. As humanity enters a new skin, how will we remember our physical selves…or are we becoming computational mochas? Co-published with Perfectly Acceptable Press and released on the occasion of the exhibition Café Avatar at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, the artist book functions as a meta-catalog and a stand alone work.

Daniel Borzutzky grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of Chilean heritage. His recent books of poetry are The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Performance of Becoming Human (2016). He is the Intercambio Poetry Editor for MAKE and the 2016 awardee of the National Book Award for Poetry.

Daniel Borzutzky crecio en Pittsburgh, Pennsulvania, de herencia chilena. Sus recientes libros de poesía son The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), y The Performance of Becoming Human (2016).  Es el editor de poesía de Intercambio de MAKE

Carla Faesler (Mexico City, 1967) is the author of the Catábasis exvoto (Bonobos, 2010) and the novel Formol (Tusquets, 2014), which was named the best book published in 2014 by La Tempestad magazine in its annual Presente de las Artes en México issue. In 2002 she won the Gilberto Owen National Prize for Literature. For years she has made multimedia poetry as a part of her experimental work. Her work has been has been translated into English, German, and Bengali.

Carla Faesler (Ciudad de México, 1967) es autora de Catábasis exvoto (Bonobos, 2010) y de la novela Formol (Tusquets, 2014), considerado el mejor libro publicado en 2014 por la revista La Tempestad en su edición anual Presente de las artes en México. En el año 2002 obtuvo el Premio Nacional de Literatura Gilberto Owen. Como parte de su práctica experimental desde hace varios años realiza poesía visual. Su ha sido traducida al inglés, al alemán y al bengalí.

Cristina Rivera Garza is currently a distinguished professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston, where she developed the first doctoral program in Creative Writing in Spanish in the United States. Among her novels are Nadie me verá llorar (2011) and La muerte me da (2009)—both winners of the Sor Juana International Prize. She recently won the José Emilio Pacheco Excellence in Literature Award, as well as the Roger Caillois International Prize (France, 2013).

Cristina Rivera Garza es profesora distinguida de Hispanic Studies, de la University of Houston, en donde desarrolla el primer doctorado en escritura creativa en español en los Estados Unidos. Entre sus novelas se distinguen Nadie me verá llorar (2011) y La muerte me da (2009)—ambas ganadoras del Premio Internacional Sor Juana. Recientemente ganó el Premio Excelencia en las Letras “José Emilio Pacheco”, así como el Premio Internacional Roger Caillois (Francia, 2013).

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (2005), blert (2008) and, with Stephen Collis, Decomp (2013). Scott is the 2015/16 Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University. He lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

Nathanael Jones is a Canadian writer and artist. He holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MFA in Writing from SAIC. He has performed and exhibited in Chicago and Halifax, and his work has been published by the Cerealbowl Collective, Hound, HAIR CLUB, Present Tense Pamphlets, Infinity’s Kitchen, and Homonym.

Dolly Lemke was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She currently lives and works in Chicago where she received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. She is the author of two chapbooks, O Town Heights (DoubleCross Press, 2012) and I’m so into you (plumberries press, 2013). She founded and co-curated of The Dollhouse Reading Series from 2011-2016 and also co-founded the online poetry journal PINWHEEL with Stephen Danos where she currently serves as Editor-at-Large.

Paula Cisewski’s fourth poetry collection, quitter, won Diode Editions’ 2016 Book Prize and her third, The Threatened Everything, was the finalist selected for publication in the 2014 Burnside Review Book Contest. Both are newly released as of early 2017. Cisewski is also the author of Ghost Fargo (selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), and a chapbook of lyric prose, Misplaced Sinister (Red Bird Chapbooks). She has been awarded fellowships from the Banfill Locke Center for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board. www.paulacisewski.com

Matthew Reed Corey appears in Chicago. His poems have appeared in Dream Pop Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crazyhorse, the Massachusetts Review, DIAGRAM, Artifice Magazine, MAKE, Matter, Pinwheel, and elsewhere.

Fred Schmalz, the author of Action in the Orchards (Nightboat Books, 2019), is an artist and poet whose current writing focuses on textual response to encounters with dance, music, and visual art. He has performed in a variety of contexts, collaborating with dancers, artists, musicians, and performers. A pamphlet, “Measures” appeared in the Present Tense series in 2016. His field guideClaes Oldenburg’s Festival of Living Objects was published in conjunction with a series of gallery walks by the Walker Art Center in 2013. He is the author of the chapbooks documenta 13 Daybookand Ticket. He edits and publishes the micropress Swerve Press. fredschmalz.com

Mark Tardi is originally from Chicago and he earned his MFA from Brown University. His publications include the books The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive), Airport Music, and Euclid Shudders. He guest-edited an issue of the literary journal Aufgabe devoted to contemporary Polish poetry and poetics and has translated poetry from the Polish by Kacper Bartczak, Miron Białoszewski, Monika Mosiewicz, and Przemysław Owczarek. A former Fulbright scholar, he lives with his wife and two dogs in a village in central Poland and is on the faculty at the University of Łódź. 

Chris Glomski’s most recent poetry collection, The Nineteenth Century, was published by The Cultural Society in 2011.  A chapbook, Eidolon, was issued by Answer Tag Home Press in 2008. His newest collection of poems, Lit Up, will appear later this year, also from The Cultural Society. His poems, translations, and critical writings have appeared in Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review, Jacket, A Public Space, Chicago Review, Precipitate and elsewhere. He lives in Oak Park, IL.

Emily Martin is a writer and educator from Brooklyn. Her work has been included in The Recluse, Prelude, DataBleed, Tarpaulin Sky, The Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, among others. She and Derek Baron perform as Permanent Six Flags and they just released Harping on Units Since Forever with Reading Group, which is a record label where they are both sometimes executives and sometimes interns.

Willy Smart is an artist who works in presentational and propositional forms. Willy makes lectures, sculpture, and publications that propose extended modes and objects of reading and recording. Recent exhibitions and performances have taken place at BFI Miami, The Luminary, St. Louis; Essex Flowers, Willy directs the conceptual record label, Fake Music (fakemusic.org).

Sherae Rimpsey is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She has exhibited her work internationally, most notably at the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, Poland; the Zentral Bibliothek in Zurich, Switzerland and National Library of Buenos Aires, Argentina as a contributing artist in Luis Camnitzer’s El Ultimo Libro – The Last Book project; and the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany where she was awarded the prestigious Solitude Fellowship. She is the recipient of a Philadelphia Foundation Grant, as a Flaherty Fellow and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and Residency. She has a BFA in Technology & Integrated Media with an emphasis in Visual Culture from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Elena Ailes is interested in that which makes here a better person and a worse person, especially in theory. In reality, she is an artist and writer living and working in Chicago, IL. She received a MFA in Sculpture and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has presented her texts, videos and installations widely, including at ArtPOP (Montreal), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Cambridge), and 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago.) She is the co-founder of jeux d’été, an artist-run curatorial project, and currently teaches at SAIC.

Brandon Alvendia is a Chicago-based artist, curator, and educator. His interdisciplinary practice playfully engages spatial and social architectures by creating platforms for experimentation, discussion, and collaboration. He is the founder of multiple Chicago alternative spaces: artLedge (2004-2007 w/ Caleb Lyons), BEN RUSSELL (2009-2011 w/ Ben Russell), The Storefront (2010-2014), and art-publishing house Silver Galleon Press (2008-present). He attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA ‘03) and University of Illinois at Chicago (MFA ‘07).
Greg Ruffing is an artist, writer and independent curator working around topics of spatial politics, architecture, and material culture. He has organized exhibitions and programming at venues such as The Perch, Public Access, SPACES (Ohio), and the upcoming Terrain Biennial. He recently completed a dual degree MFA in Photography and MA in Visual & Critical Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Steffi Drewes is author of the poetry collection Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Magnetic Forest, Cartography Askew, and History of Drawing Circles. Her writing has appeared in various journals, and she recently debuted a set of photo-based tarot cards at The Wassaic Project Summer Exhibit: Vagabond Time Killers in New York. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and divides her time between writing, photography projects, and freelance editorial work.

Sammi Skolmoski is the Managing Editor at Featherproof Books and on faculty at SAIC and Roosevelt University. She is a regular contributor to Reductress and The Hard Times. Born/lives/likely dies in Chicago. More info at http://sammiskolmoski.com/

Sara Wainscott’s work appears in DIAGRAM, The Journal Petra, Powder Keg, BOAAT, Fairy Tale Review, The Collapsar, Dream Pop Journal, and elsewhere. Her chapbook of sevenlings is forthcoming from dancing girl press (2017). She co-curates Wit Rabbit, an inter-genre reading series in Chicago.

We were wrong about evolution.

Everything happens in at least two directions.

     — Marty McConnell, watershed

 Personhood then is also in the mesh — it may look solid from a distance, but as we approach it we discover that it is full of holes.

    — Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World

 Through video projection and the performance of poems exploring an un/dis-located, peri-apocalyptic landscape, visual artist Lindsey Dorr-Niro and poet Marty McConnell will invite the audience to navigate a physical and intellectual world of both familiar and unfamiliar disruption. Framing and interspersed within the performance will be mini-lectures by Dorr-Niro relating components of the current exhibit to both the concepts of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects and the role of music and art in resistance movements, including Woody Guthrie’s seminal alternative national anthem, “This Land is Your Land.”

Throughout her work, transdisciplinary visual artist Lindsey Dorr-Niro aims to make art a practice of critical consciousness, calling viewers deeper into themselves and relation with the world. Her installations disrupt and reorganize our vision and being in a way that enable us to see, imagine, and be differently — facilitating an embodied, contemplative, and ecstatic alternative to the amnesiac conditions of late capitalism. Lindsey holds her MFA from Yale University (2008) and currently works as both an artist and educator in Chicago, Illinois. Recent exhibitions include A Primacy of Perception at Indiana University’s Fuller Projects Gallery (Bloomington, IN 2016) and An Anthem for the Sun as part of Roman Susan’s No Diving! Series (Chicago, IL, 2016)

Marty McConnell lives in Chicago, Illinois, where she coaches individuals and groups toward building thriving, sustainable lives and organizations. An MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, her work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and Gettysburg Review, and is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review and Calyx. Her first full-length collection, wine for a shotgun, published by EM Press, received the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award (Publishing Triangle) and the Lambda Literary Awards. her first non-fiction book, Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop, is forthcoming in 2018 on YesYes Books. More information is available at www.martyoutloud.com.

C. Russell Price is a genderqueer punk Appalachian poet originally from Virginia but now lives in Chicago. Their chapbook “Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other” was released in June 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. Their current project “Human Flesh Search Engine” is a hyperqueer neo-confessionalist view of the apocalypse utilizing mixed media 90’s pop, and DIY/punk theory. They are a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Jacob Victorine was born and raised in New York City. His poems appear in places such as Columbia Poetry Review, Vinyl Poetry, Matter, DIALOGIST, Phantom Books, and PANK, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. His first book, FLAMMABLE MATTER, was published by Elixir Press in 2016. His second manuscript, Dear Anne, Dear Sarah, Dear Melita, was a semifinalist for the 2016 Fordham University Press POL Prizes. He currently lives in Chicago with his fiancée, Sarah, and their cats, Gilgamesh and Sita. Find him at jacobvictorine.com.

Kenyatta Rogers earned his MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. He is a Cave Canem fellow and was twice nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, his work has been previously published in or is forthcoming from Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta among others. He is an Associate Editor with RHINO and currently serves on the Creative Writing Faculty at The Chicago High School for the Arts.

Hannah Gamble is the author of “Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast” (2012), selected by Bernadette Mayer for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from InPrint Inc, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the University of Houston, where she served as an editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in The Laurel Review, Forklift Ohio, and jubilat, and she has written for the Poetry Foundation and the Poetry Society of America. In 2014, Gamble was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Dr. Tara Betts is the author of “Break the Habit” (Trio House Press, 2016) and “Arc & Hue” (Willow Books, 2009).  Her chapbooks include “7 x 7: kwansabas” (Backbone Press, 2015) and “The GREATEST!: An Homage to Muhammad Ali” (Argus House, 2013, originally commissioned by Peggy Choy Dance Company). She is also one of the editors for “The Beiging of America: Personal Narratives About Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century” (2Leaf Press, 2017). Tara’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, POETRY magazine, Essence, NYLON, the Steppenwolf Theater production “Words on Fire,” The Black Scholar, Obsidian, Callaloo, RHINO, Crab Orchard Review, CICADA, Bellevue Literary Review, Meridians, and Hanging Loose, among others.

Ben Clark grew up in rural Nebraska and now lives in Chicago, where he works as an editor for Muzzle Magazine. His first book, “Reasons To Leave The Slaughter,” was released by Write Bloody Publishing in 2011. He’s widely published in both online and print journals, included in several print anthologies, been featured online at Verse Daily, and nominated for a Best of the Net award. This summer he was selected for the second time to Art Farm Nebraska, a multi-disciplinary artist and writer residency. While there he completed a chapbook with GennaRose Nethercott entitled “Dear Fox, Dear Barn,” which was chosen as a finalist for the Black River chapbook contest run by Black Lawrence Press. In 2015, his second collection of poetry, “if you turn around I will turn around,” was published by Thoughtcrime Press.

Marty McConnell lives in Chicago, Illinois, where she coaches individuals and groups toward building thriving, sustainable lives and organizations. An MFA graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, her work has recently appeared in Best American Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Gulf Coast, and Gettysburg Review, and is forthcoming inMassachussetts Review and Calyx. Her first full-length collection, “wine for a shotgun,” published by EM Press, received the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Awards, and was a finalist for both the Audre Lorde Award (Publishing Triangle) and the Lambda Literary Awards. her first non-fiction book, “Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop,” is forthcoming in 2018 on YesYes Books. More information is available at www.martyoutloud.com.

Join Chicago-based artists Angela Davis Fegan and Lisa Vinebaum for a conversation about engaging with, interpreting, and animating past activist histories and historical archives, though the processes of print, book works, installation, performance, public interventions, and community engagement and participation. Each artist engages activist slogans, moments, and artifacts of the past — Fegan with Lavender Menace, and Vinebaum with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union — creating works that revive and reinsert them back into public spaces, thereby also giving new visibility to histories that have been marginalized and/or forgotten. How do these artistic re-presentations serve to value and uplift marginalized pasts and marginalized identities and subjectivities? What is the artist’s responsibility to the past and to the histories they are working with? How does each artist interpret and translate moments and artifacts of the past? And how do their interests in history or the archive intersect with their own identities and those of their communities? How do their works resonate in a larger neoliberal, neofascist, toxic, political context in which attacks on LGBTQ people, immigrants, people of color, and unions are increasingly normalized and legislated? Angela Davis Fegan and Lisa Vinebaum will discuss these and other questions, with audience participation, with reference to their ongoing works, the lavender menace poster project (Fegan), and New Demands? (Vinebaum).

Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parson’s School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Montgomery Ward Gallery, Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book (NY) and the Hyde Park Art Center. Her work has been selected for book covers including How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps by Laura Yes Yes, The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall and the upcoming All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her work has been written about in The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye and the Chicago Reader. http://angeladavisfegan.com

Lisa Vinebaum is an interdisciplinary artist, critical writer, and educator. Working across art and theory, her practice explores collectivity and intersubjective relationships, working conditions and workers’ rights, and the value of artistic labor. Her art practice incorporates performance, text-based installations, textiles, print, neon, video, photography and protest tactics. Her work has been included in exhibitions and festivals internationally, including Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, Performance Studies International 19, Open Engagement: Art & Social Practice, La Centrale, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Lincoln Center, and in conjunction with Grace Exhibition and Performance Space, and Articule Gallery. Her scholarly work has been commissioned and published in edited anthologies, academic journals and exhibition catalogues, including Exhibiting Craft and Design: Transgressing the White Cube Paradigm 1930-present, Danica Maier: Grafting Propriety from Stitch to Drawn Line, More Caught in the Act: Performance by Canadian Women, The Handbook of Textile Culture, the Journal of Modern Craft online, and Textile: Cloth and Culture. Lisa Vinebaum holds a PhD in Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is an Assistant Professor of Fiber and Material Studies, and affiliated faculty in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.lisavinebaum.com

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and Fable of an Inconsolable Man, by Javier Etchevarren. She is the editor of the anthologies Earth, Water and Sky: An Bilingual Anthology of Environmental Poetryand América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets. She is a  professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is the Director of the Program in Creative Writing.

Katherine M. Hedeen’s latest book-length translations include night badly written and tasks by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Nothing Out of This World, an anthology of contemporary Cuban poetry. She is an associate editor of Earthwork’s Latin American Poetry in Translation Series for Salt Publishing, an acquisitions editor for Arc Publications, an editor for Cubanabooks, and Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She is a two-time recipient of a NEA Translation Project Grant. She teaches at Kenyon College where she is a Professor of Spanish.

Johannes Göransson is the author of six books of poetry, including The Sugar Book most recently. He has translated several books of poetry, including works by Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Johan Jönson, Henry Parland and, together with Don Mee Choi and Jiyoon Lee, Kim Yideum. He edits Action Books with Joyelle McSweeney and teaches at the University of Notre Dame. He will read from his most recent work in translation, Aase Berg’s Hackers (Black Ocean) and Ann Jäderlund’s Which once had been meadow (forthcoming from Black Square Editions). 

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Poetry. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015),  The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007). He has translated Galo Ghigliotto’s Valdivia;Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund. He lives in Chicago.

William Corbett is a poet, memoirist and essayist who writes on art. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York where he directs the small press Pressed Wafer. He has written books on the artists Philip Guston, Albert York and Stuart Williams and edited the letters of the poet James Schuyler. In 2016 Granary Books published I Rode with the Cossacks, his collaboration with the painter Rackstraw Downes.

August Kleinzahler was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1949. He is the author of eleven books of poems and a memoir, Cutty, One Rock. His collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep was awarded the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Sleeping It Off in Rapid City won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. That same year he received a Lannan Literary Award. He lives in San Francisco.

Brandon Brown’s most recent books are The Good Life (Big Lucks) and Top 40 (Roof).  His work has appeared recently in Fanzine, Art in America, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Felt, and Open Space. He is also the author, with J. Gordon Faylor, of two volumes of Christmas poems, most recently A Christmas Reckoning. He lives in the Bay Area.

Feliz Lucia Molina was born & raised to Filipino immigrant parents who ran board-and-care facilities in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, from the early 80s to mid 2000s. Her books include The Wes Letters, Undercastle, and Crystal Marys is her latest chapbook. Her generative poetry book Roulette is forthcoming from Make Now Books in Spring 2017. She lives in Hyde Park where she occasionally makes chapbooks, is a poetry editor for LARB, and walks along the beautiful blue lake.

Jennifer Scappettone works at the crossroads of writing, translation, and scholarly research, on the page and off. She is the author of the hybrid-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (just out from Atelos Press), and of the scholarly monograph Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014). Her translations from the Italian of the polyglot poet and musicologist Amelia Rosselli were collected in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli. She founded, and curates, PennSound Italiana, a new sector of the audiovisual archive based at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to experimental Italian poetry. Installation pieces were exhibited most recently at Una Vetrina Gallery in Rome and WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, and she has collaborated on site-specific performance works with a wide spectrum of musicians, architects, and dancers, at locations ranging from the tract of Trajan’s aqueduct beneath the American Academy in Rome to Fresh Kills Landfill. Scappettone is Associate Professor at the University of Chicago.

Sophie Cymone Bolla (BFAAE, SAIC) is a multi-media artist, curator, and educator. Her practice embeds itself in the context of technology, math, andsocial science. She is interested in challenging the way in which affective data is presented in academic systems of knowledge and attempts to expose its unsustainability.

Elizabeth Judd is a filmmaker and future United States senator. I’m working on a feature length film that began as ethnography of the self that follows a traditional three act screenplay structure and is evolving into that allow the audience to draw connections between disparate lives, events, and images. I’m currently in research mode for a vingette following a conversation between members of a white, male dominated family debating the origin of wars in the ” Middle East.” I’m looking at the relationship between causes of climate change and the growing refugee “crisis,” inspired by a friend’s move from Tehran to Chicago.

Ohm Phanphiroj is an international filmmaker and photographer. Ohm has participated in more than 100 exhibitions worldwide with recent residencies and fellowships including Lightwork, Columbia College, Newspace Center for Photography, Documentary Arts Asia, Society for Photographic Art and Society, and the Art Institute ofChicago. His current book Underage (Bruno Gmunder, 2017) deals with underage male prostitutes in Thailand. He is adjunct professor in Film and Photography at EdnaManley School of Media and Visual Arts and on a two-year fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Maya Gendusa is a multifaceted human. From gardener to artist, writer to performer, she believes in ideas and dreams. She is interested in the things that cannot be explained by facts. More than the answers, she is interested in the questions. She believes in looking to history as a means of understanding the future as well as the current reality. She is now looking at history through sound & technology and questioning: “What is the importance of that which is dying?” “What do we lose when always searching for the next?” “What is to be gained from looking back?” “Why do some things change more than others?”

Megan May Erwin is an artist and filmmaker based in Chicago by way of Louisiana. Her recent work traces the simulacra of the “American Dream” and itsinevitable self-destruction. She is currently planning a move back down south to research and document cancerous air pollution along the Mississippi River.

Claire Barnes is a writer and sculptor with a background in photography. She’s focused primarily on narrative poetry and combinations of object and text. Her practice is largely queer and environmental and operates under the belief that quietness allows air into a work, making it more accessible.

Navi Schiff is a 20-year-old student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sharing her ideas of social change and conveying them through artistic purposes have always been her passion. Heavily influenced by photography and gifted at nine years of age with a small Fisher-Pricecamera, she has since explored a variety of mediums including writing, painting, drawing, videography, installation, sculpture, print design and sound art.  Sheaims to educate and highlight the ways in which each of us can improve for the betterment of the earth.

Hosu Lee is a sculptor who investigates religion, science, and philosophy through the work of art as a practical experiment for developing his concepts.Recently, he began to explore the topic Anthropocene in relation to his previous major, engineering and environmental studies.

Lisa D. Zhang is an artist and researcher currently based in Chicago, originally from California’s Bay Area. Her body of work explores multiple media including illustration, sculpture, video, and installation. She employs an interdisciplinary view to examine biology, history, and linguistics in an effort to understand these topics in a multi-faceted approach.

Zhou Sivan is the pen name of Nic Wong, a Malaysian writer based in Chicago. The Chinese characters of his pen name, 荮细玩, can mean “savoring a bundle of grass” or “straw-wrapped contemplation.” His brief collection of sonnets, Zero Copula (Delete Press, 2015), considers poetic and political questions of alignment and the constructedness of the breath-line. Sea Hypocrisy (DoubleCross Press and Projective Industries, 2016) is a chapbook-length lyric and satiric piece around acts of bearing witness to the refugee crisis in Southeast Asia. His recent work can be found in Lana Turner, Chicago Review, Almost Island, and Asymptote. He is finishing a comparative literature dissertation on the genealogies of Cold War Mahua, or Malaysian Chinese, literary history.

Anna Martine Whitehead makes moves for an uncertain planet. They have shown work across North America and have contributed significantly to projects by Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, and Julien Prévieux. Martine has written about Black and queer performance practices for an array outlets including C Magazine, Art Practical, and, most recently Meanings and Makings of Queer Dance. Their first chapbook TREASURE | My Black Rupture debuted this past Spring. Find out more at annamartine.com.

CM Burroughs is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Columbia College Chicago. Her first book is The Vital System, published by Tupelo Press in 2012. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, Callaloo Writers Workshop, and the University of Pittsburgh. She has received commissions from the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Warhol Museum to create poetry in response to art installations. Her poetry has appeared in journals including Callaloo, jubilat, Ploughshares, VOLT, Bat City Review, Best American Experimental Writing (2016,) and Volta. Burroughs is a graduate of Sweet Briar College, and she earned her MFA from the University of Pittsburgh.

Phillip B. Williams is the author of Thief in the Interior, a finalist for an NAACP Image Award and Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He received a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship and is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl. He is currently visiting professor in English at Bennington College.

Jacob Victorine was born and raised in New York City. He earned his MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago, where he is a Part-time Instructor in the Creative Writing Department. His poems appear in places such as Columbia Poetry Review, Vinyl Poetry, Matter, DIALOGIST, Phantom Books, and PANK, which nominated him for a Pushcart Prize in 2013. His first book, FLAMMABLE MATTER, was published by Elixir Press in 2016 and his second manuscript, Dear Anne, Dear Sarah, Dear Melita was a semifinalist for the 2016 Fordham University Press POL Prizes.

Kate McIntosh is an artist working across the boundaries of performance, theatre, video and installation. From New Zealand and originally trained in dance, she has performed internationally since 1995 – appearing in the work of directors such as Wendy Houstoun (UK), Meryl Tankard Australian Dance Theatre,  Cie Michèle Anne de Mey (Belgium), Random Scream (Belgium), Simone Aughterlony (NZ/Switzerland) and Tim Etchells (UK).

Since 2004 Kate has focused on directing her own work – including the solos All Natural(2004), Loose Promise (2007), and All Ears (2013) and the larger performances Hair From the Throat (2006), Dark Matter (2009) and Untried Untested (2012). Her installation works include De-Placed (2008 with Eva Meyer-Keller), and the participatory installation Worktable(2011). In her own work she has enjoyed collaborations with Tim Etchells, Eva Meyer-Keller, Jo Randerson, Lilia Mestre, Charo Calvo, Diederik Peeters, and many more.

Kate has directed several short videos which have played at festivals and exhibitions the world over. She was a founding member of the Belgian performance collective and punkrock band Poni, and she holds an MRes in Performance and Creative Research from Roehampton University (UK).

She is a founding member of SPIN: the artist-run production and research platform based in Brussels.

For further information about her work please see www.spinspin.be 

Passes for the festival are available here.

7:00pm: for_twovocalists by Nathanael Jones w/ Beth McDonald and Neal Markowski

Well, what does the title tell us? for_twovocalists. Let’s begin with the easiest part: “twovocalists.” A compound word of sorts. First a “two,” which unequivocally refers to the “vocalists”—there are two of them. Additionally, “vocalists” can be broken down further into the words vocal (relating to the human voice), and lists (a number of connected items or names). Together, they give us an idea of what to expect. Then there is the “for,” a preposition in this case. Preceding the compound word “twovocalists,” we understand it to mean that something is in support of/supporting the vocalists, or, that it is on behalf of/to the benefit of them. This is comforting. Lastly, we have the underscore. This is the most difficult part. It is a holdover from the typewriter, where it was used to underline sections of a typed text. In the digital age, it has come to find a wide variety of uses (email addresses and ASCII art being among the most popular). The greatest puzzle here then is to ascertain why a typographical element used to give emphasis should be place beneath an empty space.

Nathanael Jones is a Canadian artist/writer based in Chicago, where he is an MFA in writing candidate at SAIC. He has exhibited and performed work in galleries and alternative spaces in Halifax and Chicago, and his writings have been published in the Cerealbowl Collective and Hound. Beth McDonald is a classically trained tuba player gone awry, performing mostly electroacoustic music, free improvisation, and contemporary classical music. She currently performs with Korean Jeans, the Callithumpian Consort, cbs trio, and Seraph Brass, and enjoys working collaboratively with local artists, performers, and composers. As Artistic Director of the August Noise JP concert series, she worked to bring unexpected music to public spaces and to engage her fellow musicians in their community. She works behind the scenes at the Callithumpian Consort (Boston) and Piano Power (Chicago).

Neal Markowski is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based out of Chicago, IL.  He currently plays in a number of groups on a variety of instruments, but mainly on either drum set or guitars or tapes of various sorts.  Neal received his BM in Composition from the New England Conservatory, Boston, MA and his MFA in Studio (within the Sound Department) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

7:45pm: DORA/ANA/GUATAVITA by Jenni(f)fer Tamayo

DORA/ANA/GUATAVITA is a science-fiction performance text set in the Lake Guatavita sector of the Colombian Andes. In this dystopian future, the text reimagines the children’s cartoon character, Dora the Explorer, as La Dora/da, a descendant of the mythological character, El Dorado, or the “gold one.” In this absurdist melodrama, La Dora/da comes into collusion with Andr0id Jenn1fer Tamay0-0, a cultural terrorist whose first act of state defiance is to conduct an unsanctioned search for the remains of their grandmother, an act considered illegal in this futurescape. Through a series of semi-discrete acts, or “Breaths,” La Dora/da and Andr0id Jenn1fer Tamay0-0’s come into contact with Ida Bauer (Sigmund Freud’s “Dora”), a Chorus of Floras, and ultimately Mamá Chava, the Andr0id’s ancestor.  In this radically hopeful, world-making “hybrid” text (including video, drawing, photography and movement), poet-performer Jennifer Tamayo examines what it means to decolonize our process for (self) discovery and surfacing lost lineages.

Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, latinx, formerly undocumented, Colombian-born educator, artist and essayist. JT is the author of RED MISSED ACHES/RED MISTAKES/READ MISSED ACHES/READ MISTAKES (Switchback, 2011), POEMS ARE THE ONLY REAL BODIES (Bloof Books, 2013) and YOU DA ONE  (2014/16 reprint Noemi Books & Letras Latinas).  Her writing has been featured widely, including Poetry, Best American Experimental Poetry, Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing, Bettering American Poetry Anthology and Apogee. She holds fellowships from CantoMundo and the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. Currently, JT is a PhD student at University of California-Davis Performance Studies program as a Cota-Robles Fellow.

8:45pm: The Brig, by Kenneth Brown, Living Theatre production filmed by Jonas Mekas

Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theatre had spent over a decade producing plays written by high modernist poets when along came Kenneth H. Brown’s script The Brig. Their 1963 production of this brutal, minimalist day-in-the-life of a military prison marked a pivot point from poets theater to experimental agit-prop, inspired by the methods of Antonin Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” and the measures of avant-garde verse. New York underground film legend Jonas Mekas’ rarely screened film of the Living Theatre production puts viewers perilously in the midst of the action.

Passes for the festival are available here.

6pm: Reception for Early Ticket Buyers

7pm: Cosmological Plants by Michael Pisaro

Cosmological Plants is a dance with music and a poem aligned to the maps of three constellations in the November sky.

Michael Pisaro is a guitarist, composer and a member of the Wandelweiser collective. His music is performed frequently in concerts and festivals around the world. Recordings of his work (solo and collaborative) have been released by Edition Wandelweiser Records, erstwhile records, New World Records, another timbre, slubmusic, Cathnor, Senufo Editions, winds measure, HEM Berlin and on Pisaro’s own imprint, Gravity Wave. Before joining the composition faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, he taught composition and theory at Northwestern University.

7:45pm: Corvus corax by Joseph Clayton Mills

A composition for tape recorders, cassette loops, dictaphone, typewriter, and suitcases, Corvus corax takes as its raw material Patrick Farmer’s prose poem Wild Horses Think of Nothing Else the Sea (SARU 2014).

Joseph Clayton Mills is a musician, artist, and writer who lives and works in Chicago. His text-based paintings, assemblages, and sound installations have been exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Europe and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker. He is the author of the short-story collection Zyxt, and in 2012 published Nabokrossvords, a translation of early Russian crosswords by Vladimir Nabokov. He is an active participant in the improvised and experimental music community in Chicago, where his collaborators have included Adam Sonderberg and Steven Hess (as Haptic), Michael Vallera (as Maar), Noé Cuéllar (as Parital), Sylvain Chaveau, Jason Stein, Michael Pisaro, and Olivia Block, among many others; his recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS, and Entr’acte. In 2013, in conjunction with Noé Cuéllar, he launched Suppedaneum, a label focused on releasing scores and their realizations.

8:45pm: To Speak of Future Delights

Two images provide a portal to the other side of the world. A lecture delivered in performative typing and voiceless montage.

Kevin B. Lee is a filmmaker and critic based in Chicago. He was named one of the Chicago New City Film 50 in 2013 and 2014. He received an MFA in Film Video New Media and Animation and an MA in Visual Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare’s tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being — from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one’s interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear’s progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.

Craig Dionne is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at Eastern Michigan University, where he teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature. He specializes in Shakespeare and popular culture, early modern literacies and cultural studies. He has co-edited Disciplining English: Alternative Critical Perspectives (with David Shumway, SUNY Press, 2002), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture(with Steve Mentz, University of Michigan Press, 2005), Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage (with Parmita Kapadia, Ashgate, 2008), and Bollywood Shakespeares (with Parmita Kapadia, Palgrave, 2014).  He was senior editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory for ten years, and he also co-edited the inaugural issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (with Eileen Joy, Palgrave, 2010).

Written during the advent of hormone therapy and gender transition, Chelate by Jay Besemer explores the journey towards a new embodiment, one that is immediately complicated by the difficult news of a debilitating illness. This engaging chronicle speaks powerfully and poetically to the experience of inhabiting a toxic body, and the ruptures in consciousness and language that arise when confronted by a stark imperative, and choosing to live, and to change. The book moves intermittently from exile and alienation to hopeful anticipation, played out in short bursts of imaginative dreamwork, where desires eventually give way to their realities, as the self begins mapping the permutations of its momentous shift. What begins in uncertainty and commitment ends in self-recognition, and more uncertainty, but now in a necessary space unified by will, love, action, process, and documentation.

Jay Besemer is the author of many poetic artifacts including Telephone (Brooklyn Arts Press), A New Territory Sought (Moria), Aster to Daylily (Damask Press), and Object with Man’s Face (Rain Taxi Ohm Editions). His performances and video poems have been featured in various live arts festivals and series, including Meekling Press’ TALKS Series; Chicago Calling Arts Festival; Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading}; Absinthe & Zygote; @Salon 2014 and Sunday Circus. Jay also contributes performance texts, poems, and critical essays to numerous publications, is a contributing editor with The Operating System, the co-editor of a special digital Yoko Ono tribute issue of Nerve Lantern, and founder of the Intermittent Series in Chicago, where he lives with his partner and a very helpful cat.

In PearlStitch, Petra Kuppers initiates us in ritual conversation, collective and intimate. Her embodied engagement with the political, mythical, pop cultural, feminist, historical and scientific brings poetics into the commons all the way through to the tender touch of lovers—knitting labor with Eros, “beneath your fingers, worker, is your fantasy and your redemption, meet my eyes, beloved,/turn around.” These are incantatory poems, stitching together (the purl of) factory floors, canopies, rivers, borders, sidewalks and streets. Invocations of singer Madonna, Beatrice and Sophia converge with Jung, Wittig and Audre Lorde. Kuppers contends with systemic violence as in the murder of women in Júarez, Mexico and the ravages of neoliberal capitalisms, while also bringing the sensate, individual body into presence on the page, in alchemical discovery and in pain. She traces our own proprioceptive map of chronicity, a million tiny stabbing decrepitudes, “spines protruding into the melody’s gap./Glottal rhythm hiccup and veering off downward and out.” At the same time, and throughout, she dances in solidarity with queer and disability activists toward the possibilities of relational healing.–Denise Leto and Amber DiPietra

Petra Kuppers is a disability culture activist, a community performance artist, and a Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, teaching in performance studies. She also teaches on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College. Her most recent poetry collection, PearlStitch, appeared with Spuyten Duyvil (2016). She has published poems and short stories in British and US journals like PANK, Adrienne, Visionary Tongue, Wordgathering, Poets for Living Waters, Disability Studies Quarterly, Beauty is a Verb: New Poetics of Disability, textsound, Streetnotes, Epistemologies, Accessing the Future, Quietus, Beyond the Boundaries, Cambrensis, About Place, and QDA: A Queer Disabled Anthology. She is the Artistic Director of The Olimpias, an international disability culture collective, and she is currently engaged in the Asylum Project, with her partner Stephanie Heit.

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of The Performance of Becoming Human, a 2016 National Book Award finalist for Poetry. His other books and chapbooks include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! (2015), Data Bodies (2013), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007). He has translated Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008).  His most recent translation is Valdivia by Galo Ghigliotto. His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund. He lives in Chicago.

Galo Ghigliotto was born in Valdivia, Chile. He is a poet, fiction writer and editor. His books of poetry include Valdivia (2006), Bonnie&Clyde (2007) y Aeropuerto (2009), and a work of fiction A cada rato el fin del mundo (2013). He is the publisher of an independent poetry press – Editorial Cuneta. He lives in Santiago, Chile.

Katherine M. Hedeen is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. Her latest book-length translations include collections by Hugo Mujica and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez. She is an associate editor of Earthwork’s Latin American Poetry in Translation Series for Salt Publishing and an acquisitions editor for Arc Publications. She is a two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Project Grant.

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba’s most outstanding contemporary writers. He has published more than thirty books of poetry throughout Latin America and Europe, and has received major awards all over the Spanish-speaking world. He divides his time between Gambier, Ohio, where he is Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College, and Havana, Cuba.

Erik Anderson is the author of three books of nonfiction, mostly recently Estranger (2016). His forthcoming collection of essays, Flutter Point, was selected by Amy Fusselman as the winner of the 2015 Zone 3 Creative Nonfiction Book Award, and will be published in 2017. He teaches at Franklin & Marshall College, where he directs the annual Emerging Writers Festival.

Elizabeth Hall lives and loves in Los Angeles. She is the author of the book I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris (Tarpaulin Sky Press) and the chapbook Two Essays (eohippus press). Her work has recently appeared in Best Experimental Writing, Black Warrior Review, LA Review of Books, Two Serious Ladies, and elsewhere.

Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, Illinois native. He is the author of the book of poems Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016). He received scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Phillip received his MFA in Writing from the Washington University in St. Louis. He is the Co-editor in Chief of the online journal Vinyl, was the Emory University Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry for 2015-2016, and will be visiting professor in English at Bennington College for 2016-2017.

Misha Pam Dick (aka Gregoire Pam Dick, Mina Pam Dick et al.) is the author of this is the fugitive (Essay Press, 2016), Metaphysical Licks (BookThug, 2014) and Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009). With Oana Avasilichioaei, she is the co-translator of Suzanne Leblanc’s The Thought House of Philippa (BookThug, 2015). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, Fence, The Capilano Review, EOAGH, Postmodern Culture, Aufgabe, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere; her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium. Also an artist, Dick lives in New York City, where she is currently doing work that makes out and off with Hölderlin, Pizarnik and Michaux.

Carla Harryman is known for her genre-disrupting experimental writings such as Adorno’s Noise (Essay Press, 2008), W—/M— (Split/Level 2013), Baby (Adventures in Poetry, 2005), There Never Was a Rose Without a Thorn (City Lights, 1995), the experimental novel Gardener of Stars (Atelos 2002), and numerous collaborations in writing and performance: these include The Grand Piano, an experiment in autobiography (Mode D, 2006-2010); The Wide Road with Lyn Hejinian (Belladonna, 2011); and Open Box, a music/text work with Jon Raskin published on the Tzadik label.  Her poets theater and polyvocal performance works have been presented nationally and internationally. Sue in Berlin, a collection of performance writing and poets theater plays is forthcoming in French and English volumes from the To series of the University of Rouen Press. Gardener of Stars, an Opera, a work for speaking voices, microelectronics, and prepared piano will be presented in the Poets Theater Festival at Links Hall in Chicago in December 2016. She lives in the Detroit area and serves as Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University, where she coordinates the creative writing program.

Michael Heller is a poet, essayist, and critic. He is the author of twenty books, including This Constellation Is a Name, Living Root: A Memoir, Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems, and Conviction’s Net of Branches, his award-winning study of the Objectivist poets. He lives in New York City.

Norman Finkelstein was born in New York City in 1954. He received his B.A. from Binghamton University and his Ph.D. from Emory University. He is a Professor of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he has lived since 1980. He is the author of ten books of poetry and five books of literary criticism, and has written extensively about modern poetry and Jewish literature.

Alexis Almeida lives in Denver. Her poems, translations, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in TYPO, Denver Quarterly, Aufgabe, Vinyl Poetry, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant editor at Asymptote and performs with the poets’ theater group GASP. She was recently awarded a Fulbright grant, and is currently living in Buenos Aires working on an anthology of contemporary female poets living in Argentina.

Daniel Borzutzky grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, of Chilean heritage. He has published three full-length volumes of poetry, The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Performance of Becoming Human (2016). He is the Intercambio poetry editor for MAKE.

John Pluecker is a writer, interpreter, translator and co-founder of the language justice and literary experimentation collaborative Antena. His work is informed by experimental poetics, radical aesthetics and cross-border cultural production. His texts have appeared in journals in the US and Mexico and he has translated numerous books from the Spanish, including Tijuana Dreaming: Life and Art at the Global Border (Duke University Press). His book of poetry and image, Ford Over, was recently released.

Rebekah Smith teaches at LaGuardia Community College, edits at Ugly Duckling Presse, and usually lives in Brooklyn.

Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal is a Mexican and Chicana poet, a translator, and an instructor of English at Houston Community College. Her translations have appeared in Sèrie Alfa: Artiliteratura, Eleven Eleven, and Mandorla, and her work can be found in Papeles de Manscupia, Her Kind, and at El Vértigo de los Aires: Encuentro Iberoamericano en el Centro Histórico 2009. Her visual poetry was part of the Antena Books exhibit at University of Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum during Spring 2014.

Garrett Caples is the author of Power Ballads (2016), Retrievals (2014), The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), Complications (2007), and Quintessence of the Minor (2010). He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013) and Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems by Frank Lima (2016). He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. For City Lights, he has edited books by Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, John Wieners, and Michael McClure, among others.

Wendy Lee Spacek has published one book of poetry, PSYCHOGYNECOLOGY (Monster House Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Blotterature, Monsterhousepress.com, Didactic and in LVNG Magazine by Flood Editions. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University Bloomington.

Matthew Girson is an artist, curator and writer. His artworks have been exhibited locally, nationally and internationally. Recent exhibits include solo shows at the Chicago Cultural Center (2014) and Mission Projects (2016). Earlier this year he curated “Dianna Frid and Richard Rezac: Split Complementary” at the DePaul Art Museum. Matthew’s research interests focus on the legacy of modernism philosophically and artistically. He is a professor of painting and drawing at DePaul University.

Devin King co-curates Sector 2337 and teaches in the Liberal Arts department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Stephen Lapthisophon is an American artist and educator working in the field of conceptual art, critical theory, and disability studies. Lapthisophon received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1979. His early work combined poetry, performance, sound art, and visual arts with postmodern philosophical concerns. He was also influenced by the legacy of the Situationists, who sought to make everyday life a focus of artistic activity. Lapthisophon has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute, and the University of Texas at Dallas. He currently teaches art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington.

Lorelei Stewart, Director of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) since 2000, has organized over 50 exhibitions, including the Joyce Award-winning exhibition Edgar Arceneaux: The Alchemy of Comedy…Stupid (2006). In 2002 she initiated the acclaimed At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago series, a commissioning program that encouraged Chicago area artists’ experimental practices, and organized Stephen Lapthisophon’s solo exhibition With Reasonable Accommodation in the first year of that series. Stewart is a faculty member in UIC’s Museum and Exhibition Studies graduate program and a board member of Roots & Culture, Chicago. She holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, a BA from Smith College, and a BFA from Corcoran College of Art and Design.

The weekend’s events also include an Artist Talk: Friday, September 16, 2016, 1-2:15pm at Museum of Contemporary Photography
On the occasion of the exhibition Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy, exhibiting artists Oliver Sann, Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost will discuss their work with Deep Time Chicago, an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of their participation in the Anthropocene Curriculum at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. They are joined by special guest Katrin Klingan, who led the Anthropocene Curriculum project.

Deep Time Chicago Curriculum is an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of the Anthropocene Curriculum events at HKW in Berlin, Germany. The initiative’s goal is to continue exploring one core idea: humanity as a geological agency, capable of disrupting the earth system and inscribing itself into deep time. By knitting together group readings, guided walks, lectures, panels, screenings, performances, publications and exhibitions, the initiative seeks to develop a public research trajectory, offering a variety of formats where Chicago area inhabitants can grapple with this crucial question of our time.

This event is organized in conjunction with The Goethe Institute.

I HAVE WANTED TO BE EVERY GIRL EVER is a release party for Olivia Cronk’s Louise and Louise and Louise. The book connects genre tropes to the public and private performances of all ages of women to ask how giving birth and becoming a parent could be understood as a shift in genre: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, or soap opera. I HAVE WANTED is a performance in search of Louise and Louise and Louise; it is one giant text created by a collaging of texts from nine performers, all of whom appear, directly or indirectly, in the pages of the book. The performance is an invocation, an acting out of what preceded the written text. It celebrates multiplicity, plasticity, iteration, and girl-ness (of any type).

Benjamin Arakawa’s work is concentrated on back alley type secrets, exposed through the use of an outlet he calls “poemographic” addiction. He is currently a graduate student at Northeastern Illinois University.

Olivia Cronk is the author of Louise and Louise and Louise (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016) and Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012), and co-edits The Journal Petra (thejournalpetra.com).

Kathryn Hudson studies English at Northeastern Illinois University. Interested in the politics of literature, she is working to explore the ways in which we manipulate our perceptions and how this manipulation emerges as mutation and restriction.

Natalie Roman is interested in modes of inquiry that straddle the lines between the creative and the critical. Her research interests include critical race theory, aesthetics, poetics, and the limits and possibilities of community.

Christine Simokaitis is a prose writer who has a tremendous capacity to recall distinct images from the 1984 Seventeen Magazine Fall Fashion issue.

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of to exosk(elle), the last sugar (Zoo Cake Press, 2015). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in H_NGM_N, TYPO, Forklift Ohio, The Offending Adam, FLAG + VOID, La Vague, DREGINALD, jubilat, and other publications.

Sara Wainscott makes poems and comic experiments and co-curates Wit Rabbit, an inter-genre reading series. She can be found driving down Western Avenue / singing along with upbeat songs about despair.

Daniel Woody lives in Chicago, where he writes poems, takes pictures, and makes friends. Some of his work can be found online at BOAAT, The Volta, Opiate, and HOUND.

A founding editor of both LVNG and Flood Editions, Michael O’Leary works as a structural engineer and lives with his family in Chicago. The Reception is his first book of poetry.

Kenyatta Rogers earned his MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from Columbia College Chicago. He is a Cave Canem fellow and was twice nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes, his work has been previously published in or is forthcoming from Jubilat, Vinyl, Bat City Review, The Volta among others. He is an Associate Editor with RHINO and currently serves on the Creative Writing Faculty at The Chicago High School for the Arts.

I will write this biography using 165 words but will not discover this number until it is complete. From this point forward he will be speaking in third person. Alberto Aguilar is a Chicago-based aartist and was born there as well. Aguilar’s creative practice often incorporates whatever materials are at hand as well as exchanges with his family, other aartists, and people he encounters. His work bridges media from painting and sculpture to video, installation, performance, and sound and has been exhibited at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary AArt, the Queens Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American AArt, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of AArt, the Minneapolis Institute of AArt and the AArt Institute of Chicago. He holds a BFA and an MFA from the School of the AArt Institute of Chicago and currently teaches at Harold Washington College one of the City Colleges of Chicago. In order to create slight confusion, he has added an extra letter A where ever the word aart appears in this bio.

Michal Samama creates body-based art, incorporating movement, everyday objects, sound, text and site-specific practices. Her work moves between the theater, the gallery and the public space, exploring the different dynamics by which these spaces are capable of ‘framing’ art. She recently presented works at Theatre de la Ville in Paris, ASPECT RATIO Gallery in Chicago, Intima-Dance and Curtain Up Festivals in Tel Aviv and was commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater in New York. In Chicago, her work has been presented at Julius Caesar Gallery, EXPO CHICAGO 2014, 6018 North Gallery, Rapid Pulse Festival 2014 and TBSO3 at Defibrillator Gallery, Out of Site 2015, Mana Contemporary, Links Hall, TRITRIANGLE and Northwestern University. In New York she presented her work at New York Live Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Performance Mix Festival, Dixon Place, Joyce SoHo, CPR, Chez Bushwick, Priska C. Juschka Gallery, AUNTS and the 92nd Street Y, where she also curated Sunday At Three in January 2012.

About the curators: Every house has a door was formed in 2008 by Lin Hixson, director, and Matthew Goulish, dramaturge, to convene project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performances in which the subject remains largely absented from the finished work. The performances distil and separate presentational elements into distinct modes – recitation, installation, movement, music—to grant each its own space and time, and inviting the viewer to assemble the parts in duration, after the fact of the performance, to rediscover the missing subject. Works include Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. (2009) in response to the work of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, Testimonium (2013) a collaboration with the band Joan of Arc in response to Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony poems, and the on-going project 9 Beginnings based on local performance archives.

Sector 2337 is not hosting any public events this summer. If you are interested in proposing an event for the fall, please use our contact form.

With thanks to Revolution for donating beer / Chris Glomski + Ben Chaffee for loaning the Ping Pong tables / Trophy makers Amelia Charter, Dao Nguyen, Erik Peterson, Peter Speer, + Sonia Yoon / Referees Lou Sterett + Amelia Charter / Neil Brideau of Radiator Comics for the flyer / and all of you for always

Jessica Hopper’s music criticism has been included in Best Music Writing 2004, 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011. Her first book, The Girls Guide to Rocking, was named one of 2009’s Notable Books for Young Readers by the American Library Association. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two young sons.

Jac Kuntz is a writer and artist from Atlanta, Ga. She earned a BFA in painting, a BA in Psychology, and a minor in art history from Clemson University, South Carolina. In addition to her journalistic pursuits, Kuntz enjoys the working in the editing and publication process. Her writing often takes a narrative form; she is currently writing a thesis on the state of contemporary art in the southern U.S., following a summer-long series of interviews, encounters, and road trips. She will soon be graduating with a Masters in New Arts Journalism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Hannah Larson is a graphic designer, farmer, and community activist, in Bridgeport, a near south side neighborhood of Chicago. Currently, Larson is publishing the debut issue of Arttoo Magazine, a magazine dedicated to women, tattoo arts and culture, for her master’s thesis.

Ana Sekler is a writer from Chicago. She has published work in F Newsmagazine, Newcity, and Gapers Block. Clothing is an expressive outlet for her and she writes about it for her thesis publication, Chic Shifter, a digital fashion journal with an altered hem. Aside from collecting striped shirts and miniature objects, she collects diplomas from Chicago’s universities: two in French Literature and one in New Arts Journalism.

Amie Soudien is a writer and artist from Cape Town, South Africa. She completed her BAFA in print media from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2013. Soudien has since worked as a freelance journalist for ArtThrob, and as an editor for Platform Magazine. Her interests include postcolonial studies, emerging art from Africa, and pop culture. She is a soon-to-be graduate of the Arts Journalism program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Master of Arts in New Arts Journalism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) reinterprets and transforms the largely textual skills of traditional journalism into the multifaceted demands of contemporary arts journalism, where text and image are interwoven and responsive to one another and media platforms are continually evolving. The program both focuses on traditional modes of journalism that discuss art and other aspects of culture, and the ways in which journalism can itself, take on forms of artistic expression.

Daniel Borzutzky’s books and chapbooks include, among others, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015), Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! (2015), Data Bodies (2013), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), and The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007). He has translated Raúl Zurita’s The Country of Planks (2015) and Song for his Disappeared Love (2010), and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (2008). His work has been supported by the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Pen/Heim Translation Fund. He lives in Chicago.

Jose-Luis Moctezuma’s critical and poetic work has been published in Jacket2, Chicago Review, Big Bridge, FlashPoint, Comma, and elsewhere. Spring Tlaloc Seance (Projective Industries, 2016) is his first chapbook. He was managing editor at MAKE Magazine. He is currently at work on a long narrative poem on the competing occult histories (and metahistories) of Chicago.

Edgar Garcia’s poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Big Bridge, Damn the Caesars, Mandorla, Sous les Pavés, Those That This: Arts Journal, and Tzak: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics. A chapbook of his poems, Boundary Loot, was published by Punch Press in 2013. He teaches at the University of Chicago.

Alexandria Eregbu is a conceptual artist and disciplinary deviant. Her practice often takes shape in the form of maker, performer, curator, educator, and programmer. Eregbu’s concerns frequently address performativity, visibility, ontology, resistance, locality, and mobility. Her work tends to insert itself at the axis of personal experience and myth— usually reliant upon the collection of artifacts, material culture, and an attentiveness to current and historical events.

Eregbu has been featured in a range of exhibitions including the Arts Incubator in Washington Park, Hyde Park Art Center, Woman Made Gallery, Nightingale Cinema, Roots + Culture Contemporary Art Center, and The Franklin Outdoor in Chicago, IL; Milwaukee Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI; Distillery Gallery in Boston, MA; and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. Eregbu has held fellowships as Resident Curator with HATCH Projects (2013-14) and as Public Studio Artist in Residence at the Chicago Cultural Center (2015). Most recently Eregbu  was highlighted in Newcity’s Breakout Artists: Chicago’s Next Generation of Image Makers (2015) and she is a current Resident Artist and Curatorial Fellow with ACRE.

TRUNK SHOW is a mobile exhibition space usually located in Chicago. It features monthly solo shows for which artists are commissioned to design a limited edition bumper sticker. The sticker lives, rides along with and helps propel a medium beat-up 1999 forest green Ford Taurus owned by Raven Falquez Munsell and Jesse Malmed. In addition to the month-long exhibitions, the bumper stickers are sold à la carte and by annual subscription. Openings follow a nomadic, symbiotic logic and include a public affixing, conceptual catering and playlists. TRUNK SHOW has been featured in the Chicago Reader, Hyperallergic, Newcity (who also named it The Best New Gallery on a Car Bumper) and the Chicago Tribune, which deemed these missives among the Best of Visual Art in Chicago.

Jenny Vogel’s Handbook for Photographic Investigation is a lecture about historical and paranormal mysteries and their photographic representations. The visuals for the lectures are created live, on-site with a copy machine, and are presented to the audience via projection. Legend, myth and the supernatural are persistent forces in society, despite an ever-growing trust in science; it is the iconography that changed. Though now in the scientific rather than the religious realms, the images are strikingly similar: blurry lights, faint traces of hard to define objects and the ever lasting conflict between believers and skeptics. From the Spiritualists of the 19th century who used the telegraph to communicate with the dead, to the real-time, livestreaming webcam of camgirls, the fascination of electronic transmissions and image creation has continued. The low-resolution black and white images from the copy machine feed our desire to believe, perpetuating the myth. Much like a magician Vogel creates a tension between the reality of the performance space and the blurry illusion of the projected images.

Description of Pearson’s Performance Forthcoming

Jenny Vogel works in video, photography and computer arts. Vogel’s art explores the world as viewed through new media technology using web-cameras, blogs and Google searches as source material. She received her MFA from Hunter College (NYC) in 2003. She is a 2005 NYFA fellow in Computer Arts and is currently Assistant Professor of New Media Art at the University of Massachusetts. Her work has been screened and exhibited in group and solo- shows in numerous locations and galleries: Storefront Gallery, NYC; The Dallas Museum of Art, TX; McKinney Contemporary, TX; San Francisco Camerawork, CA; Arnolfini, UK; The Siberia Biennial, Russia; The Swiss Institute, NYC; EFA Gallery, NYC; Kunstwerke, Berlin; PS1 Contemporary Art Center, NYC.

Benjamin Pearson (b.1984 – Toronto, ON) is an artist based out of Chicago. His video and performance work is concerned with the History of the present, its peripheries and contingencies. He has recently exhibited at CPH:DOX (Copenhagen), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago), the Lincoln Center (NYC), Kasseler Dokfest (Kassel). Images Film Festival (Toronto), EFF Portland (Portland), Threewalls Gallery (Chicago) Chicago Filmmakers (Chicago), Gallery 400 (Chicago) MIXNYC (NYC), BRIC (Brooklyn). He is currently a lecturer at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. 

David Buuck is a writer who lives in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, and co-founder and editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. Recent publications include SITE CITE CITY (Futurepoem, 2015) and An Army of Lovers, co-written with Juliana Spahr (City Lights, 2013). A Swarming, A Wolfing is forthcoming from Roof Books in fall 2016. davidbuuck.com /tripwirejournal.com

Marcelo Morales Cintero, born in Cuba in 1977, is a member of a generation of writers who came of age in Havana during the island’s “Special Period” of severe post-Soviet economic crisis. His influences range from international literature to readings in history and philosophy. Dedicated to the slow development of his book projects, Morales has earned many of his literary awards for segments of larger works in progress. For example, excerpts that would come together to form his 2006 poetry collection El mundo como objetowon the 2004 poetry prize presented by La Gaceta de Cuba, as well as an honorable mention in the national Julián del Casal prize competition and a coveted finalist position in the international Casa de las Américas competition. Morales is also the author of the poetry collections Cinema (1997, Pinos Nuevos prize) and Materia (winner of the 2008 Julián del Casal prize), among others. His novel La espiral appeared in 2006. Morales edited and introducedComo un huésped de la noche, an anthology of poetry by Roberto Branly, published in 2010. His work has appeared in MAKE Magazine and is forthcoming in MAKE X, a best of MAKE anthology.

Peter O’Leary will read from The Sampo, a new long poem that resets stories of wizards and witches from Finnish mythology. He will be joined by Father Bob Hutmacher, OFM, who will accompany Peter’s reading by improvising on his harp. Father Bob, a Franciscan friar, directs Chiesa Nuova, a musical ministry dedicated to allowing people to witness God’s beauty through the performing arts. Before the reading, Father Bob will perform some of his compositions for the harp.

What is the Sampo?

The Sampo is an object of great power, a talisman of deep earth and high art, forged by the smith Ilmarinen for the wizard Väinämöinen. But Louhi, the witch of the north, has locked it in the heart of a mountain, in dreary Sariola, land of always dawning gloom. Väinämöinen and his band of heroes must steal back their treasure and escape south, with an enraged Louhi in their wake…

Drawing episodes from the Kalevala, a Finnish epic, Peter O’Leary has created a poem of atmospheric intensity, full of elemental forces harnessed by supernatural craft. Line by line, it is composed of images and epi- thets that flicker into animation, condensed phrases that cascade into sequences of unfolding action. Throughout the quest, The Sampo returns us to the hazards of making, the power of singing, and the adventure of poetry.

Peter O’Leary is the author of five books of poetry, most recently, The Sampo, published by the Cultural Society. A book of criticism, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. With John Tipton, he edits Verge Books. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the University of Chicago, and lives in Oak Park.

Robert M. Hutmacher, ofm has been a Franciscan friar since 1968 and was ordained a priest in 1979. Music has been his life since he was 5 and flowed through his education. He holds degrees in sociology, an M.Div. in theology and liturgy from Catholic Theological Union, Chicago, and the MA in music and liturgical studies from the University of Notre Dame. Music studies were also done at the University of Memphis, Quincy University, Northland College along with private study of harp and piano. He has recorded 13 collections, the most recent being The Nature Suite, recorded in Italy in 2015 and released numerous compositions through U.S. and Italian publishers. He is the founder and presently artistic director of Chiesa Nuova, a Franciscan ministry devoted to the performing arts; Chiesa Nuova has presented over 530 artists since 1996 all over the U.S. and Europe. He has concertized throughout the U.S., Canada, Italy, Germany and Singapore. Friar Bob has been associated with St. Peter’s in the Loop since 1993 and was Director of Worship there until 2012. Presently he serves as an assistant at Ascension Parish, Oak Park and continues to compose, inspire and bring people to God through splendid preaching, the arts and a great sense of humor.

Bernadette Mayer is the author of over 27 collections, including Ethics of Sleep (2011), The Helens of Troy, New York (2013), Eating The Colors Of A Lineup Of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer (2015), as well as countless chapbooks and artist-books. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and was the recipient of the 2014 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. From 1980-1984, she served as director of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. She founded and edited 0 to 9 journal, in addition to United Artists books and magazines. She has taught at the New School for Social Research, Naropa University, Long Island University, and Miami University.

Jennifer Karmin’s multidisciplinary projects have transpired across the U.S., Cuba, Japan, Kenya, and Europe. Venues for these pieces include: the Poetry Project (NY), the Walker Art Center (MN), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibits (CA), and Woodland Pattern Book Center (WI). A founding curator of the Red Rover Series, she teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and is the author of the text-sound epic Aaaaaaaaaaalice. Her poetry is widely published and featured in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, The &NOW Awards: The Best Innovative Writing, and the Iraq War chronicle 4000 Words 4000 Dead + Revolutionary Optimism: An American Elegy. This spring Convulsive Editions will release The Sexual Organs of the IRS & Other Poems, a collaborative chapbook with Bernadette Mayer.

Philip Good recently completed Poem A Month, 12 poems for each month with corresponding artwork. He is included in Infiltration, An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley and Helix Syntax, the 41st Summer Writing Program Magazine, Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University. His work can also be found online at BigBridge, Exquisite Corpse, Tool and The Volta. He is the author of UNTITLED WRITINGS FROM A MEMBER OF THE BLANK GENERATION. Listen to Philip Good on POET RAY’D YO.

Sara Deniz Akant is the author of Babette, selected by Maggie Nelson for the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize, as well as Parades (Omnidawn, 2014) and Latronic Strag (Persistent Editions, 2015). Her work has been recognized with fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has appeared most recently in The Brooklyn Rail, The Denver Quarterly, jubilat, and Lana Turner. Akant has taught poetry and writing at the University of Iowa and the City University of New York.

Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare, selected by Timothy Donnelly for the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize. Her poems and translations appear in A Public Space, Boston Review, Fence, The New Republic and The New Yorker. Her honors include scholarships and fellowships form the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Fulbright Program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yaddo and Stanford, where she is currently a Stegner Fellow.

Callie Garnett was born and raised in Brooklyn. Having completed a masters in English at the University of Iowa, she now works for Bloomsbury Publishing. Hallelujah, I’m a Bum is her first published collection.

NOTE EARLY START TIME

Hegel’s Kilogram: On the Measure of Metrical Units

Hegel’s theory of measure, articulated in the Science of Logic, was developed shortly after the foundation of the metric system in the late 18th century. The establishment of physical standards for the meter and the kilogram, fabricated and archived at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres in 1799, illustrates Hegel’s understanding of measure as “the concrete truth of being” in a curiously salient way, demanding consideration of the relation between scientific accuracy, metaphysical speculation, and material particularity. The metric system instantiated universal standards of measure in singular physical objects, themselves created through meticulous measurement practices, thus dramatizing the problem of grounding in relation to both particular metrical units and the practice of science in general.

What is at stake, conceptually and empirically, when these inaugural units are themselves redefined? Since the 1960s, key standards of the International System of Units (SI) have been redefined on the basis of numerical constants, such as the speed of light (c) and the elementary charge (e), rather than physical objects. This paper considers ongoing efforts to redefine the kilogram unit on the basis of the Planck constant, focusing in particular on Watt Balance experiments carried out at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. These experiments offer a fascinating contemporary case study of the problem of measure. Considering both their empirical operations and their conceptual implications, Brown argues that the redefinition of metrical units is a key site for thinking not only the imbrication of epistemology and ontology, but also for understanding the history of modernity at the crux of science and philosophy.

Nathan Brown is Canada Research Chair in Poetics in the Department of English at Concordia University, Montreal, where he directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. He is the author of The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics, forthcoming from Fordham University Press.

Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory or InterCcECT convenes a Chicago circle of readers, writers, thinkers, and makers working in and beyond the university, through and around the commitment to theory. “Theory” we encompass in its critical, experimental, philosophical, aesthetic, political, literary, and psychoanalytic forms. InterCcECT coordinates the union of sets in Chicago via reading groups, workshops, performances, conferences, seminars, studios, parties, and other platforms.

About Double Teenage (Book Thug, 2016) tells the story of Celine and Julie, two girls coming of age in the 1990s in a desert town close to the US–Mexico border. Starting from their shared love of theater, the girls move into a wider world that shimmers with intellectual and artistic possibility, but at the same time, is dense with threat. This unrelenting novel asks what it feels like to be a girl, simultaneously a being and a thing, feeling in a marketplace. Part bildungsroman, part performance, part passionate essay, part magic spell, what Double Teenage ultimately offers is a way to see through violence into an emotionally alive place beyond the myriad traps of girlhood.

About Job Shadowing (Book Thug, 2016): My slow adaptation is to her a sign of my being ‘outside life.’  An unemployed man, losing his ability to imagine a future self, disappears into the shadow world of an ambitious millennial. His wife, an idealistic artist at the turning point of her career, falls deeper and deeper into the gravitational field of her ultra-wealthy employer. Job Shadowing is a novel of our 20th-century desires torn asunder by the new millennium. Through stylish, searching prose, it tests the grounds of impossible love, generational identity and middle-class fantasy.

Popahna Brandes is the author of In An I, (Sidebrow Books, 2015); The Sea In Me/The Riddle We Heard (The Corresponding Society); and Reading Tests, in collaboration with Jack Henrie Fisher and a machinic interlocutor (Jan Van Eyck Academie). Works of translation, prose, film and music have been published by Belladonna*, The Encyclopedia Project, Sleepingfish, Ein Magazin über Orte, Tarpaulin Sky, and Pocket Myth. She has led classes in lyrical and impossible narrative forms for many years, runs an annual writing workshop in the book village of Montolieu, France, and has collected a few sticks in Chicago where she now lives. Her current book project examines invisible domestic labor and peripatetic language allowances.

Joni Murphy is a writer and artist living in New York City. Originally from Las Cruces, New Mexico, she has shown and published work in the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, Serbia, and Greece. Her creative output takes the form of poetry, criticism, curatorial projects, audio, and performance. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was an artist in residence with Sound Development City’s 2016 expedition to Belgrade and Athens. Double Teenage is her debut novel.

Malcolm Sutton lives in Toronto. His fiction has appeared in Maisonneuve and Joyland, and his writing on art has appeared in C Magazine and Border Crossings. He is the Founding Editor of The Coming Envelope journal of innovative prose, and the Fiction Editor at BookThug Press. Job Shadowing is his debut novel.

About culebra: “Roberto Harrison is a minimalist, but his poems transmit consciousness through association and fragmentation. culebra ‘knows to be the one another time within/ as it dissolves/ in mountains’ and evokes the important paradox of inconstancy and stillness that underlies the eco-spiritual life of the Americas. In poems that slither in spiritual migration towards unity, Harrison becomes the visionary poet of the Anthropocene, the poet we need for the other side of our age.” — Carmen Giménez Smith

About Zenith:  Zenith (2015-2016) is the third in a series of printed objects or “artist’s books” by Patrick Durgin, each with the dimensions of a 7” vinyl record. Zenith is a set of seven scratch off cards with the revelatory promise of pre-loaded Macintosh desktop wallpaper images, e.g. of a pinkish Mt. Fuji, or prairie grasses dangling in the breeze. Zenith cites a history of broadcast technology, addiction as a faultless economic engine, and gaming as a way to withhold suspense.

About Authors and Performers:

Patrick Durgin is the author of PQRS (Kenning Editions, 2013) and The Route (with Jen Hofer, Atelos, 2008). You can read his criticism in Contemporary Women’s Writing, Journal of Modern Literature, and Postmodern Culture. The Volta published “Prelude to PQRS,” a reflection on his work in poets theater originally presented at the New [New] Corpse event series of Green Lantern Gallery. His performance piece Interference was featured in the 2015 Festival of Poets Theater at Sector 2337 and the script published in the newspaper that December. He is currently writing two books: a critical biography of Jackson Mac Low and Hannah Weiner and a collection of poetry with the working title Imitation Demise. He edits the non-fiction series Ordinance for Kenning Editions, an independent press he founded in 1998. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chic

Carol Genetti is a vocalist, composer and installation artist. Her work is focused on the interplay between the voice as an expressive musical instrument and its extension into the sound-making realm. She has developed a personal yet universal palette that is an abstraction of “extended” voice sounds — breaths, overtones, and disconnected textual bits, squeaks, growls, non-verbal tones — sounds that evoke unconscious emotions and human physicality. She has collaborated with a large number of like-minded artists in both ad hoc groupings and long-standing partnerships, including her duos with electroacoustic improvisor Eric Leonardson; saxophonist Jack Wright; pianist/synthesist Jim Baker; guitarist/violinist Peter Maunu; composers Olivia Block and Adam Sonderberg; Turkish artist Deniz Gul (with Audrey Chen, Owen Davis, Frank Rosaly and Katie Young); and multi-disciplinary performances with dancer Asimina Chremos.  She has composed sound/music for Sonic Celluloid Festival, Outer Ear Sound Arts Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Chicago Art Institute. Her sound installations utilizing tape loops and lathe-cut records have been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Spare Room Gallery and the Nova Art Fair. Labels that have published her recorded work include Balance Point Acoustics, Crouton, Dead CEO, Last Visible Dog, Recorded and Spring Garden Music.

Roberto Harrison is the author of the poetry collections Os (subpress, 2006), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), and bicycle(Noemi Press, 2015), as well as of many poetry chapbooks. He edits the Bronze Skull Press chapbook series and is also a visual artist. He lives in Milwaukee.

Paul Martinez-Pompa is the author of Pepper Spray (chapbook) and My Kill Adore Him, which won the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize. He earned degrees from the University of Chicago and Indiana University, where he served as a poetry editor for Indiana Review. His poetry and prose have appeared in various journals and anthologies, and he is a recent recipient of an Illinois Arts Council award. He is now an editor for Packingtown Review, and he teaches rhetoric, poetry and creative writing at Triton College in River Grove, Illinois.

Dutch bassist Albert Wildeman relocated to Chicago in 2011 to pursue improvised music, and has since performed with musicians including Fred Lonberg-Holm, Frank Rosaly, Carol Genetti, Dave Rempis, Tim Daisy, Tony Malaby, Jeb Bishop, Katherine Young, Mars Williams, Ryan Packard, Ståle Liavik Solberg, Avreeayl Ra, Michael Zerang, Jim Baker, Jason Roebke, Juozas Kuraitis, Keefe Jackson, Nick Mazzarella, John Niekrasz and Guillermo Gregorio. In addition, he co-host and curates the Splice Series with Peter Maunu, aiming to present and bring together a wide range of approaches to improvised music and performance.

Carol Barreto is a black feminist fashion designer from Salvador, Bahia, Brasil whose work, both academic and as fashion designer, promotes a feminist, anti-racist and queer discourse. Through her creative work and administration of the brand that carries her name and political ideas, the clothes that she designs focuses on the creation of images aiming toward a more conscious communication to be linked to fashion consumption. Barreto will be speaking about her work in relation to the Afro-Brazilian cultural context of Salvador, and showing recent designs that have been developed from this research.

Carol Barreto’s trip to Chicago was made possible through Harmonipan-Flotar, in partnership with Perto de Lá.

Damon Locks is an artist, musician, educator, deejay who will talk about his practice using some of the tools of his trade. He will discuss the hurdles of art making in these times of racial tumult. He will be presenting a version of his audio piece Sounds Like Now. For centuries Black people have been decrying this omnipresent system of oppression. The struggle for justice and freedom continues. The volume increases as a result of monthly, weekly, and daily examples of the expendability of Black people. Sounds Like Now utilizes records, samples, instruments, and voice in order to hear the past in present tense. He will also be showing/discussing the piece Freedom/Time, an animation project created in  with incarcerated artists that were a part of the Prison and Neighborhood Arts class.

Artist Bios:

Carol Barreto teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Fashion Design and professor of the un-dergraduate Gender and Diversity Studies course of Federal University of Bahia, PhD student in the Multidisciplinary Graduate Program in Culture and Society – PosCultura – UFBA. Her first runway show was in 2001. In 2007, she completed a master’s degree in Design and Culture. Since then, she has worked as professor, designer and businesswoman. In 2010, her brand was re-structured for commercially purposes, like launching a website, opening the first atelier and store. At 2013 Carol Barreto was invited to represent Brazil in Dakar Fashion Week Senegal, an international event gathering fashion designers from different nationalities who express the cultural diversity of their country. In that visit to the African continent, she had the opportunity to gather multiethnic references that are now announced in her collections. Until now, Carol Barreto has shown collections on varios themes as gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality to discuss and promote the black women culture in Brasil. The Carol Barreto brand has as its strongest features precise fittings, geometrical designs in color blocks, bold and futuristic imagery. It focuses in women who are young in soul, who are interested in costume that transmits their personal vision and personality. The VOZES collection evokes a debate about post-colonialism and questions: What does it mean to be the product of a country that was colonized? What identity features can be interpreted as subalternity or resistance? The VOZES collection features the nobility of handicraft, from practice to the concept of appropriation and resistance, materialized in a vivid and multicolored color palette that contemplates Brazilianness and ancestry from the following perspective: OTHER VOICES.

Damon Locks is a visual artist and vocalist/musician operating in the Chicago area since 1988. As a visual artist he began his schooling at SVA in NYC as an illustration major. He transferred to The School of The Art Institute in Chicago where he received his BFA in Fine Arts. In late 80’s he formed as vocalist and percussionist of the punk band Trenchmouth, whom toured the U.S. and internationally for 7 years. In the 90’s, he formed the avant-garde The Eternals with whom he still plays with. After the turn of the century he also began to perform as a vocalist and sampler operator in Rob Mazurek’s jazz group the Exploding Star Orchestra. He regularly creates music as an improvisor in different ensembles and deejays a monthly night. A printmaker at heart he uses the medium that suits the situation best whether it be screen print, digital print, photography, paint, pencil, teaching, drum machine, sampler, kalimba, melodica or vinyl records. He has been know to say that his art is communicating and the medium is less the focus. As time marches on he has become more invested in creating art that inhabits the spaces that intersect with the concerns of surviving contemporary culture. In recent years, 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, the Jane Addams Hull House Museum and teaching at UIC. The collaborations have allowed him to explore more directly engaged ways of making work. Recent recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts and a residency at The New Quorum.

Prelude: The Breath of Charybdis

– 20Hz (Semiconductor, 2011, 5:00)

– ERRORRUNNINGWWWATERNOISES [RE:MIXXX] (Jon Cates, 2012, 6:45)

– CLONE [excerpt] (Aldo Tambellini, 1976, 10:00)

There is a tale from Aristotle’s Meteorologica that recounts the origin of the mountains. It begins with Charybdis, the daughter of Poseidon “God of the Sea.” Charybdis lives within the ocean, where her exhalations and inhalations cause the tides to rise and fall. When she took her first gulp, the sea drew back and exposed the earth. Charybdis captures and releases: revealing and concealing perceivable worlds. This mythical figure also appears in Homer’s Odyssey, where she takes the form of a whirlpool located within the Strait of Messina and threatens to swallow Odysseus’s ship whole. Later, Edgar Allen Poe encounters a similar phenomenon off the Norwegian coast in A Descent into the Maelström: a terrific spinning funnel of smooth, shining, jet-black water that descends at a forty-five degree angle to an unperceivable depth; its edges are lined in a gleaming vaporous spray; the teeth of its tempest winds emit a shrieking roar. // Prelude: The Breath of Charybdis draws upon the accounts of these poets and philosophers to evoke a dynamic environment. It is not the embodied Charybdis that this program seeks to present, but rather a manifestation of her inspiration.

Tempestarii

– Tempestarii (Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert, with music by Stephen O’Malley 2013-C, 39:00)

Dawn spreads its luminous rays across the coast of Iceland, to reveal a sorcerer standing between wine-dark sea and mountainous black rock. He is tempestarii, a figure of medieval lore, undertaking a primitive rite manifested to conjure a storm. The tides of the deep ocean breathe heavily rising and falling across the cinema screen with amplifying power, as the weather-maker beats a mysterious sack against the monolithic cliffs with powerful repetition. // As a magical tool, this sack contains forceful winds pulled from each corner of world. As an analogy, it is aligned with the revolutionary transformations of nature by water, air, solar radiation, and geological shifts and filled with the vast potential of man’s will in alliance with Nature. As an omen, the tempestarii signals profound change on both physical and metaphysical realms. // By demonstrating contemporary art as meteorological sorcery and political activism, the duo Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert raise a storm and blacken the air.

Maar

“Maar is Joseph Clayton Mills and Michael Vallera, a pair of polymaths who have each had hands in some of Chicago’s most affecting experimental music. In his solo work and with the group Cleared, Vallera (who’s also a photographer) uses strong rhythmic and melodic structures to frame grainy, amorphous sounds that evoke both apprehension and nostalgia. A member of Haptic and Partial, Mills is also an author and a coproprietor of the Suppedaneum label, which pushes the boundaries of notation and interpretation; for his recent CD-R SIFR, for example, seven different composers wrote or drew scores in response to his arrhythmic, woody percussion and transient electronic tones. Maar’s own recordings are artifacts of a process in which each player adds layers to the other’s recordings, and both contribute fragmented instrumentals, abraded drones, mechanical pulsations, and flickering electronic textures.” — Bill Meyer

Yannick Franck

Yannick Frank is a Belgium-based sound artist, performer, and curator. He is the Artistic Director of the art center Les Brasseurs in Liège, Belgium, and owns the record label Idiosyncratics. Additionally he is part of the industrial-noise duo Orphan Swords and founder of electroacoustic improvisation combo Y.E.R.M.O., which, among others, provided the sound for Gast Bouschet and Nadine Hilbert’s exhibition in the Pavilion of Luxembourg at the Venice Biennial in 2009. // On this occasion he will present a sound performance where experimental vocal techniques, field recordings and textural researches collide into a trance-inducing journey.

Paul Druecke has published two books with Green Gallery Press: Life and Death on the Bluffs (2014), and The Last Days of John Budgen Jr. (2010). Druecke’s work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. His Social Event Archive will be exhibited at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2016 in conjunction with the project’s 20th anniversary. A co-authored discussion of his work will be included in the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Public Art. Druecke has worked with the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; Marlborough Chelsea, NYC; Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Lynden Sculpture Garden, Milwaukee; The Suburban, Chicago; Outpost for Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Many Mini Residency, Berlin; Green Gallery, Milwaukee; and the Contemporary Art Museum Houston among other venues.

Chuck Stebelton is author of two full-length collections of poetry, most recently The Platformist (Cultural Society, 2012). His first book Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005) was winner of the inaugural Jack Spicer Award. Recent print objects include Morning Dub and A Southern Exposure (Lynden Sculpture Garden, 2015 / 2014); Keep (Portrait Society Gallery, 2014); and ‘Tis (Wisconsin Triennial, 2010 / John Riepenhoff Experience, 2009). As a birder and Wisconsin Master Naturalist volunteer he has offered interpretive hikes for organizations including Lynden Sculpture Garden, Woodland Pattern Book Center, and Friends of Lorine Niedecker. He works as Literary Program Director at Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.

Margaret Noodin received an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English and Linguistics from the University of Minnesota. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she also serves at the Director of the Electa Quinney Institute for American Indian Education. She is the author of Bawaajimo: A Dialect of Dreams in Anishinaabe Language and Literature and Weweni, a collection of bilingual poems in Ojibwe and English. Her poems and essays have been anthologized and published in Sing: Poetry from the Indigenous Americas, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Water Stone Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. With her daughters, Shannon and Fionna, she is a member of Miskwaasining Nagamojig (the Swamp Singers) a women’s hand drum group whose lyrics are all in Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe).  To see and hear current projects visit www.ojibwe.net where she and other students and speakers of Ojibwe have created a space for language to be shared by academics and the native community.

Lisa Slodki creates real-time performances and installations, often working in collaboration with the Chicago experimental audio and noise communities. Performing with The Fortieth Day under her Noise Crush moniker, Slodki generates VHS tape loops which are mixed live through a battery of VCRs to construct evolving projected superimpositions. Pulsating light of decaying VHS tape and manipulated found footage conjure familiar yet indiscernible images, and the fragility and resilience of both medium and perception. noisecrush.com

The Fortieth Day is the duo of Isidro Reyes and Mark Solotroff, both key players in the heavy-electronics outfit BLOODYMINDED, a band known for its aggressive and confrontational live shows. Solotroff is also known as the vocalist in the doom/shoegaze band Anatomy of Habit. In The Fortieth Day, Reyes and Solotroff utilize guitar, bass, drum machine, and analog synthesizer to create epic, blackened, psychedelic-industrial drone soundscapes, likened to “sustained, withering blasts of high-pitched noise that are as distinct from one another as spotlights sweeping across the night sky; jackhammer clatter, jet-engine whines, and forlorn keyboard melodies dart in and out of those huge sounds with the grace and impunity of plovers picking a crocodile’s teeth”  — Bill Meyer, Chicago Reader  http://www.last.fm/music/The+Fortieth+Day

Aldo Tambellini (based in Cambridge, MA) is an experimental artist working in performance, film, video, sound, painting, sculpture, and poetry. He is perhaps best known for his explorations of black, the color and surrounding concepts, and his electromedia performances. In the early 60s, he was a founding member of the counter-culture group Group Center and worked closely N.H. Pritchard, Ishmael Reed, Carla Black, and the Umbra poetry collective to create intermedia events—combining poetry, jazz, photography, choreography, and film-making. In the 60s, these events evolved into electromedia events, such as Black Zero (The Bridge, 1965; Intermedia ‘68 at Brooklyn Academy of Music; Performa 2009; Tate Modern, 2012) where he collaborated with Benn Morea, Ron Hahne, Elsa Tambellini, Bill Dixon, Alan Silva, and Calvin C. Herton, and the founding of The Black Gate Theater (1967).

MRB Chelko is the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Manhattations (PSA, 2014). A faculty mentor in the low-residency MFA program of The New Hampshire Institute of Art, Chelko also serves as associate editor of the unbound journal Tuesday; An Art Project. Her recent work appears in current or forthcoming issues of Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Slice, Poetry International and other journals. She lives in New York City with her husband and three-year-old daughter. 

Anthony Madrid lives in Chicago. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. His first book is called I AM YOUR SLAVE NOW DO WHAT I SAY (Canarium Books, 2012).

Sarah Stickney is a former Fulbright Grantee for the translation of Italian/Albanian poet Gëzim Hajdari. Her co-translations of Elisa Biagini’s selected poems, The Guest in the Wood, received the Best Translated Book Award for poetry in 2014. Her poems and translations have appeared both in the U.S. and abroad in publications such as La Questione Romantica, Rhino, The Portland Review, Drunken Boat, Mudlark, The Notre Dame Review, Structo and others. She lives in Annapolis, MD, where she teaches at St. John’s College.

As part of Mark Booth’s installation, The Sea is Represented by an Irregular Shape, Sector 2337 is proud to present a series of performances of the work featuring various artists from Chicago and across the United States. Each Saturday’s performance begins at 2:30 and continues until read through a selection of the chain of Booth’s entangled metaphors. In keeping with the construction of the work, each Saturday a longer chain of metaphors is read, so the performance slowly grows from an hour to six hours through February and March. Backed by musicians, singers, shape arrangers, and shape creaters, as the constantly changing performers read their way through the metaphors the supreme stillness of Booth’s formal decisions highlight the work’s strangely conscious inward movement. Cosmic in scope and stoic in its ethics, The Sea is Represented by an Irregular Shape is an opera for our ecological age.

Approximate Run Times:

February 13th: 2:30-3:30 pm

February 20th: 2:30-4:30 pm

February 27th: 2:30-5:30 pm

March 5th: 2:30-7:00 pm

March 12th: 2:30-8:00 pm

Mark Booth is an interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, writer, and musician. His work in text, image, and sound explores the material qualities of language, as well as the ways that language functions (and does not function) to describe human experience. Having learned to read and navigate the world as a dyslexic, Booth uses his work to make sense of his own disjointed experience with words and meaning. His art is simultaneously grandiose in scope (attempting (and failing, of course) to describe the entire spectrum of human existence) and comically quotidian. Booth is on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited and performed his work in Chicago, nationally, and internationally in a variety of known and obscure venues.

The 4th edition of IN>TIME Festival is a convergence of performance practices in Chicago. IN>TIME collaborates with 18 venues that range from museum to gallery to DIY spaces. It is borne from deep engagement: engagement with local performance practices, with friends and artists internationally, with structures and concepts of performance itself. It has evolved from a biennial to a triennial festival, encompassing venues all over Chicago, and pieces ranging from dance to performance art to experimental theatre. It’s IN>TIME because it comes just in the dead of winter, when things seem bleakest; because it provides a snapshot of what is happening in contemporary performance right now; because performance is a time-based medium that required that we all be present with one another. IN>TIME is a coming together for a moment within performance.

SOOZE LANIER is a writer and maniac living in Chicago. Her debut collection of short stories, The Game We Play, was published by Curbside Splendor in 2014. Lanier’s work can also be found in Annalemma, Hobart, The Spoiler’s Hand and elsewhere.

EILEEN MUELLER studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been featured at Higher Pictures in New York, NY; The Pitch Project in Milwaukee, WI; the OSU Urban Arts Space in Columbus, OH; the Museum of Contemporary Photography and at the Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago.

ERIC PLATTNER lives & walks in Chicago. He’s already missing the next lost thing.

BILL SAVAGE teaches Chicago history, literature, and culture at Northwestern University and the Newberry Library. He believes that Daniel Burnham is overrated, while Edward Brennan is underrated. He is at work on a book about Chicago’s street grid. Savage is a lifelong resident of Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood

Partial Schedule / Order Subject to Change

6:30 pm Interference is a remote controlled performance piece by Patrick Durgin taking cues from Scott Burton’s infamous “Behavior Tableaux.” See if you can find it.

7:00 pm In The Gunfight, by Brent Cunningham, a war of weapons between The Kid and Tex turns into a war of words, then into a war of words about words, then–almost thankfully–back into a war of weapons.  The Gunfight was originally performed as part of Poets Theater at Small Press Traffic in 2007 with Dan Fisher as The Kid, Lauren Shufran as Tex, and Brandon Brown as the Sheriff. Since then it has been performed at the Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival (2007) and at The Rogue Theater in Tucson, Arizona as part of the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Poetry Off the Page Event (2012).

7:30 pm Figures of Speech and Figures of Thought (re-visited): Encounters from David Antin’s 80 Langdon Street talk re-performed // David Antin’s aborted talk piece “Figures of Speech and Figures of Thought” was originally presented in May 1978 as part of the “Talk” series poet Bob Perelman ran at the San Francisco art space 80 Langdon Street. Approximating the spatial and temporal conditions of the original event, Ira S. Murfin, together with the audience, re-performs transcribed audio recordings of those moments when the talk was diverted from its intended format by audience intervention. In general, Antin’s talk poems begin as extemporaneous lectures before live audiences that are then recorded, transcribed, edited and published as poetry. In this case, key members of the audience at 80 Langdon, including poet Ron Silliman, Perelman, and Antin’s wife, the artist Eleanor Antin, intervened in Antin’s talk to debate the limits of the performance as an artwork, who controls when, or if, the talk would become a poem, and what it would ultimately include. Though the talk piece itself was never published, accounts of the incident have appeared from Antin, Perelman, and the artist Ellen Zweig, who was in the audience. Murfin resumes the interrupted process of entextualization and uses that material to re-inhabit the parts of the performance when its monologic status was dialogically called into question. Using simple tools and a shared occasion, Murfin facilitates a re-performance that gives Antin’s self-reflexive unpublished talk a new temporal, voiced, and embodied life in the present and off the page.

8:30 pm The Birth of the Poet, directed by Richard Foreman, is a production of a play written by downtown legend Kathy Acker, with music by Peter Gordon and sets by David Salle. Part of 1985’s Next Wave Festival, The Birth of the Poet was reviled at its premiere: the audience (those who hadn’t already walked out) barraged the actors with boos, and the next day’s reviews unanimously echoed the audience’s rage. The Birth of the Poet is still considered one of the most panned shows of the Next Wave. (From BAM blog)

Partial Biographies

Brent Cunningham is a writer, publisher and visual artist living in Oakland, California. He has published two books of poetry, Bird & Forest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and Journey to the Sun (Atelos, 2012). He currently works as the Operations Director at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Along with Kevin Killian, Camille Roy, and Elizabeth Treadwell he was one of the founders of the Poets Theater festival at Small Press Traffic in San Francisco, which has been running annually since 2001. He and Neil Alger are the co-founders of Hooke Press, a chapbook press dedicated to publishing short runs of poetry, criticism, theory, writing and ephemera. For longer than any writer should ever, ever admit, he has been working on a novel.

Patrick Durgin is the author of PQRS (2013), The Route (2008, with Jen Hofer), Color Music (2002), and Imitation Poems (2006). His artist books are Singles (2014) and Daughter (2013). He edited the selected works of Hannah Weiner as Hannah Weiner’s Open House and is currently writing a book about Weiner’s life and career, entitled Useful Information. He teaches in three departments of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ira S. Murfin is a writer, theatre artist and scholar completing a doctoral dissertation, Talk Performance: Artistic Discipline, Extemporaneous Speech, and Media in the Post-1960s American Avant-garde, in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre & Drama at Northwestern University. His artistic and academic work focuses on the relationship between talk, text, and the performance event. Criticism and scholarship has appeared in Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and Chicago Arts Journal. Solo and collaborative performance work has been seen at MCA Chicago, Links Hall, Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, Sector 2337, and Chicago Cultural Center, among other venues. In addition, Ira makes work with two theatrical laboratories: The Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration and the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials. He is currently a Chicago Shakespeare Theatre PreAmble Lecturer, Performance Editor for the literary journal Requited, and the Graduate Assistant in Public Humanities with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern.

Poets theater is a genre of porous borders, one that emerges about the same time, and involving many of the same artists, as performance art, performance poetry (“spoken word”), conceptual and “intermedia” art. But poets have long been playwrights, either primarily (Sophocles, Shakespeare) or as a platform for postmodern literary experimentation (the operas and page plays of Gertrude Stein, for example). The Festival of Poets Theater will feature performances, screenings and readings over four nights, plus an afternoon of talks on the genre and salient examples of it. The festival is curated by Devin King and Patrick Durgin.

Partial Schedule / Order Subject to Change

Saturday December 5th

2:30 pm Carla Harryman’s talk, Towards a Poets Theater, will approach Poets Theater from the perspective of a practitioner, focusing on full-length works since 2000 that explore polyvocality, bilingual translation, interdisciplinary collaboration, sound-text experiment, multi-authorship, site and physical context in the realization of non/narrative “poetic” plays. These works include “Performing Objects Stationed in the Sub World,” “Mirror Play,” “Sue,” and “Gardener of Stars, the Opera,” most of which are written as autonomous text that are radically open to interpretation by any given performing group. Harryman will also give a brief account of the “language-centered” Bay Area Poets Theater from the late 1970’s through mid 1980’s to establish a context for the development of later works, and to show the potential of a yet-to-be fully realized theater within and beyond her own practice.

3:15 pm Heidi R. Bean’s talk: Capturing the Scene of Amiri Baraka’s Home on the Range: In 1968 Amiri Baraka’s play Home on the Range seemed destined for an auspicious career. Despite being a strange little one-act in which the white characters speak in what one prominent critic deemed “unintelligible gibberish,” it toured nationally, played before an audience of 2600 as part of a high-profile Black Panther benefit that was widely covered by the media, and was published in the celebrated 1968 Black Theatre issue of The Drama Review. And yet the play soon fell into obscurity, with no productions on record after 1970 and no reprint for thirty years. So what happened? More than most plays, this talk argues, Home on the Range enjoyed a moment precisely because it captured a scene. It was both product and victim of its own competing interests—a clash of pro-textual avant-garde poetics, anti-textual performativity associated with American theater of the 1960s, Black Nationalist ideology, and the emerging sense of cultural performativity Baraka championed, all coming together at a particularly activist moment in African American cultural history.  

3:45 John Beer’s talk: “Just People”: The Actor in Poets’ Theatre: David Buuck, in his “Some Remarks on Poets Theater,” characterizes the form as “Anti illusionism…”Actors” are not their roles but just people (or, if you can’t get any people, poets.)” Buuck’s remark (which seems accurate as a characterization of at least one major strand of poets’ theater) recalls the longstanding avant-garde goal of abolishing the boundary between life and art. It also seems an instance, or perhaps better an effect, of what Martin Puchner has characterized as “the constitutive anti-theatrical dynamic within modernism.” What’s at stake in the effacement of the actor in this theater? How might that shape the relation of poets’ theater to other forms of theatrical experimentation? I’ll think through these questions with reference to texts and performances of texts by Gertrude Stein, Ntozake Shange, Rodrigo Toscano, and Richard Maxwell.

Heidi R. Bean is Assistant Professor of English (specializing in modern and contemporary drama) at Bridgewater State University. She is co-editor, with Mike Chasar, of Poetry after Cultural Studies (University of Iowa Press, 2011) and co-editor, with Laura Hinton, of a special issue of Postmodern Culture devoted to the topic of poets theater since the 1960s. She has published articles, reviews, and interviews at the intersection of poetry and theater in a number of journals, and her account of Bunny Lang’s work with the Poets’ Theatre in the 1950s is forthcoming in Beat Drama: Playwrights and Performances of the “Howl” Generation, edited by Deborah Geis (Methuen). She is currently at work on a critical history of American poets theater since WWII.

John Beer is the author of the poetry collection The Waste Land and Other Poems (2010), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the chapbook Lucinda (2013). A former theater critic for Time Out Chicago, Beer’s criticism has appeared in Verse, the Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, and other magazines. He currently teaches at Portland State University.

Carla Harryman is an innovator in interdisciplinary performance, poetry, and prose. She has authored seventeen books including W— /M— (2013), Adorno’s Noise (2008), Memory Play (1994) Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays (1989) and the multi-authored work The Grand Piano, an Experiment in Autobiography: San Francisco, 1975-1980. Open Box (with Jon Raskin), a CD of music and text performances was released on the Tzadik label in 2012. Her Poets Theater, interdisciplinary, and bi-lingual performances have been presented nationally and internationally and have been featured at the Hölderlinturm, Université de Montréal, and the Wels Music Festival, Austria. Over the past ten years, her work has increasingly emphasized music-text collaboration and bilingual performance. Recent performances include the work-in-progress “Gardener of Stars, the Opera” presented with Jon Raskin at &NOW 2015 Festival at Cal Arts; “Open Box” and “Disk” presented at the San Francisco Outsound Music Festival (with Gino Robair and Jon Raskin, 2012), new work for speaking voices and instruments at The Center for New Music, San Francisco (2013), “Mirror Play” performed as a dialogue in Czech and English (Prague Micro-festival, 2011), and Occupying Theodore W. Adorno’s “Music and New Music,” a keynote lecture-performance (with pianist Magda Mayas) presented at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). In addition to “Gardener of Stars, the Opera,” she is currently writing a new work for Poets Theater, “Two Hannahs,” that, focused in feminism, explores the concept of global culture shock. She serves on the faculty of Eastern Michigan University interdisciplinary creative writing program and on the summer faculty for the MFA program of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

Poets theater is a genre of porous borders, one that emerges about the same time, and involving many of the same artists, as performance art, performance poetry (“spoken word”), conceptual and “intermedia” art. But poets have long been playwrights, either primarily (Sophocles, Shakespeare) or as a platform for postmodern literary experimentation (the operas and page plays of Gertrude Stein, for example). The Festival of Poets Theater will feature performances, screenings and readings over four nights, plus an afternoon of talks on the genre and salient examples of it. The festival is curated by Devin King and Patrick Durgin.

Friday, December 4th

7:00 pm Nero’s Ghosts is a combination of translations of Seneca by Kristina Chew and John Tipton. As a pre-eminent stoic philosopher focused on small acts of impoverished virtue who lived a life of opulence as an advisor to the hedonistic Nero, Seneca’s contradictions mark him as one of the great representatives of Roman life. While his philosophical influence can be tracked in Dante and Montaigne, amongst others, his work as a playwright looms large over Renaissance theater. Seneca’s plays—updates of Greek myths that are generally assumed to have been written to be recited amongst friends in a salon environment—are strange, tortured works of heavy violence and psychological turmoil. This performance takes as its beginning a scene between Nero and Seneca himself from Octavia—a play long attributed to Seneca but now known to be written by someone else—and moves to combine sections from a few of Seneca’s different works. Reminiscent of 1001 Nights—though trading a bedroom setting for a sterile office—this performance reflects upon how myth interprets and fulfills state sanctioned bodily harm.

7:45 pm In his directorial debut, poet/performer avery r. young explores light, sound and language in the late Amiri Baraka’s play, Home On the Range. Within an evening of watching television, a family is confronted by an intruder. In this interactive presentation, young will rely on both performer and audience in this inspection of stereotypes, imagery and sonic shifting. Co-presented by the Red Rover Series with performers: Dan Godston, Shadell Jamison, Jennifer Karmin, Kortney Morrow, Analeah Rosen, and Nate Russell.

8:30 pm The Arm Collector by TRAUMA DOG (Cassandra Troyan & Rachel Ellison) is a stage for uncovering the erotics of competitive objectification. We prepare for battle; on the pole, in the octagon, on the field, in the air, in the wilderness. Self-realization, attained by victory and satisfaction, is enacting on this terrain of desirous drama. 1: “It’s like anything else: I’ve done all of my life. I would never stop training no matter what.” 2: “The environment is perfect for celebrating. Plenty of room to sit and great view from all directions.” 1: “Put that together…it hits you a lot.” 2: “The dancers were high energy and very good at their routine.” 1: “You don’t want to hear the critics sometimes but still — I’m a sensitive guy and it still hits you, hits you and you are never good enough.” 2: “Doors open at 7 pm. Bring extra dollars for the men, they are very entertaining and real gentlemen. The drinks are great and the talent is so adorable.”

Rachel Ellison is an artist, writer, and sculptor of experiences based in Chicago. Rachel creates performance-events called Rehearsals for Ways of Being using strategies to rethink, recontextualize, and reperform scenes of everyday life. The performances pull from an evolving register of forms to highlight the significance of gesture, politics of the personal, and fantasy in relation to a multiplicity of subjectivities. They often bring people together in unusual ways to engage, speak, watch, think, and feel. She received her MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago where she met collaborator Cassandra Troyan, the other half of Trauma Dog (formerly known as JIMMYBROOKS). You can find Rachel at rachelellisonhappyforever.com and at @YesJewess.

Devin King is the co-director of Sector 2337 and the poetry editor at Green Lantern Press. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

John Tipton’s translations include Sophocles’ Ajax and Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes. A new collection of poems, Paramnesia, is forthcoming from Flood Editions.

Cassandra Troyan is a writer, ex-artist, and pétroleuse whose writing, described by Blake Butler, “takes the Sade-ian end of the oversharing shtick, turning one’s own private human pain into a diorama reflecting the environments and brains that birthed it.” Their work demarcates spaces for experience through exploration of myths, normative (gender) roles, historical legacies, and cultural influence as a means to re-organizing agency in the disorganization of daily life. As a desirous voyeur wanting to reanimate the most gorgeous impulses in the unlikeliest of places, they are a trans-historical operator deriving pleasure and power from situations of submission, violence, labor, queer romance, sex work, horror, and capital. They are the author of THRONE OF BLOOD (Solar Luxuriance, 2013), BLACKEN ME BLACKEN ME, GROWLED (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2014), KILL MANUAL (Artifice Books, 2014) and the chapbook HATRED OF WOMEN (Solar Luxuriance, 2014). Forthcoming in 2016 is a chapbook from Kenning Editions’ Ordinance series, entitled “FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION.” They received their MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago in 2012 and currently live in the bay. http://onemurderleadstoanother.com/

Multidisciplinary artist avery r. young is a 3Arts Award winning teaching-artist, composer and producer with work that spans the genres of music, performance, visual arts and literature. Examining and celebrating Black American history and culture, his work also focuses in the areas of social justice, equity, queer identity, misogyny and body consciousness. As a writer, this Cave Canem alum has work featured The Breakbeat Poets, Coon Bidness, to be left with the body and Make Magazine. He has also written curriculum and essay on arts education which appear in Teaching Artist Journal and A.I.M. Print. Dubbed “sunday mornin jook joint,” his performance and work in sound design merges spiritual and secular aesthetics with dramatic and comedic sensibilities. He has performed in the Hip Hop Theater Festival, Wordstock and Lollapalooza. Has recorded with house producers Anthony Nicholson, Charlie Dark and is featured on recordings such as, New World Reveal-A-Solution, Audio Truism, Catfish Haven’s Devastator and New Skool Poetiks. His new full-length release, booker t. soltreyne: a race rekkid, features songs and other sound designed created during his artist residency with the University of Chicago’s Arts and Public Life initiative. It was during w as as during a during this residency that he worked worked on sound design design and concrete poems called cullud sign(s). Through voice, sound, visual art and performance, young is constantly exploring the forms in which poetry can exist. His work moves through these genres seamlessly and presents a human with multiple identities. He currently is a coach for the youth Poetry Ensemble, Rebirth and working on his first full manuscript of poems.

Thursday, December 3rd

7:00 pm Adaptation of Quraysh Ali Lansana’s book of poems, The Walmart Republic, directed by Emily Hooper Lansana.

7:30 pm El Gato Pussycat Proteja Your Gringo Cheese, a neo-benshi piece by Daniel Borzutzky, investigates manifestations of violence and cultural imperialism on the Southwestern border as depicted in early pop-culture images of Mexicans in and outside of the US.

8:00 pm Who Is React? is an early “Flarf” composition by K. Silem Mohammad, directed for the festival by Sharon Lanza. The Flarf e-mail list, populated by myself, Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Drew Gardner, Sharon Mesmer, Jordan Davis, Katie Degentesh, Maria Damon, and others, was active during the aughts, when we would send poems to each other that we wrote by various methods, most conspicuously by collaging together scraps of language taken from Google search page results. As was typical of these early pieces, the googled language in “React” underwent minimal editing, and great care was taken not to take great care with arrangement, continuity, or coherence. It has been performed at the Small Press Traffic Poets’ Theater Jamboree in 2004 in San Francisco and the first Flarf Festival at the Medicine Show Theater in 2006 in New York City.

Poets theater is a genre of porous borders, one that emerges about the same time, and involving many of the same artists, as performance art, performance poetry (“spoken word”), conceptual and “intermedia” art. But poets have long been playwrights, either primarily (Sophocles, Shakespeare) or as a platform for postmodern literary experimentation (the operas and page plays of Gertrude Stein, for example). The Festival of Poets Theater will feature performances, screenings and readings over four nights, plus an afternoon of talks on the genre and salient examples of it. The festival is curated by Devin King and Patrick Durgin.

Partial Biographies

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015), The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011), The Ecstasy of Capitulation (2007) and Arbitrary Tale (2005) His work has been anthologized in, among others, A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, Seriously Funny, and Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA. He has also translated books of poetry from Spanish. He lives in Chicago.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of eight poetry books, three textbooks, a children’s book, editor of eight anthologies, and coauthor of a book of pedagogy. He is a faculty member of the Writing Program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School. Lansana served as Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University from 2002-2011, where he was also Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing until 2014. Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community (with Georgia A. Popoff) was published in March 2011 by Teachers & Writers Collaborative and was a 2012 NAACP Image Award nominee. His most recent books include The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop w/Kevin Coval and Nate Marshall (Haymarket Books, 2015) and The Walmart Republic w/ Christopher Stewart (Mongrel Empire Press, September 2014). Forthcoming titles include The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent (Haymarket Books, 2017) and Revise the Psalm: Poems Inspired by the work of Gwendolyn Brooks (Curbside Splendor, 2017).

K. Silem Mohammad is a professor in the Creative Writing BFA program at the Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003), Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), and The Front (Roof Books, 2009). He also edits the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln.

Wednesday, December 2nd

7:00 pm Ordinary Isadora: Often called the mother of modern dance, Isadora Duncan is now mostly remembered for her unusual death, her scandalous life, and, perhaps, her outre costuming (Duncan dancers still wear tunics). But Duncan’s dance is built on ordinary movements: walking, skipping, running, as well as moments of interaction–touching, looking, pushing, reaching–between people, objects, and atmospheres within scenes. Her work also asks us to think about the ordinary in historical ways; to think, that is, more deeply about the historicity of bodies developed in Marcel Mauss’s notion of “body techniques.” This performance talk by Ingrid Becker and Hannah Brooks-Motl, currently studying Duncan dance (and in the PhD program in English at the University of Chicago) will address Duncan and ordinariness through both movement and discussion.

7:30 pm I Am American: I Speak English, by Josh Rios and Anthony Romero, explores the historical changes of status certain languages undergo​ in the US​ and the effects this shift has on subsequent generations​​. Translation, multilingualism, interpretation, and mediated events of language acquisition are the ​points from which the performance begins. Language exceeds mere communication; it is a symbol in itself; it is a place of respite, a method of resistance, and a marker of difference. Configured to challenge authenticity as rooted in a way of speaking while lamenting the systematic erasure of native tongues I Am American: I Speak English​ attempts to deal with the ​conditions​ under which​ ways of speaking become​ lost and then found?

8:15 pm Playing with cliched feminine personae, Eleanor Antin in The Adventures of a Nurse (1976)  manipulates cut-out paper dolls to tell the story of innocent Nurse Eleanor who meets one gorgeous, intriguing, and available man after another. Nurse Eleanor is the fantasy creation of Antin, who is costumed as a nurse. Staged on a bedspread and acted by a cast of one, The Adventures of a Nurse moves through successive layers of irony to unravel a childlike, self-enclosed fantasy of a young woman’s life. (Description from Video Data Bank)

Poets theater is a genre of porous borders, one that emerges about the same time, and involving many of the same artists, as performance art, performance poetry (“spoken word”), conceptual and “intermedia” art. But poets have long been playwrights, either primarily (Sophocles, Shakespeare) or as a platform for postmodern literary experimentation (the operas and page plays of Gertrude Stein, for example). The Festival of Poets Theater will feature performances, screenings and readings over four nights, plus an afternoon of talks on the genre and salient examples of it. The festival is curated by Devin King and Patrick Durgin.

Partial Biographies

Eleanor Antin works in photography, video, film, installation, drawing, performance, and writing. Many one-woman exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum and a major retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art which traveled to St. Louis and toured the UK. As both a performing and exhibiting artist she has appeared in venues around the world including the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale and Opera House and Documenta 12. She has written, directed and produced many videotapes and films, among them the cult feature, “The Man Without a World”, 1991, (Berlin Film Fest., U.S.A. Film Fest., Ghent Film Fest., London Jewish Film Fest, etc.) She is represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. Her work is represented in many major public collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, the Beaubourg, the Verbund Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, etc. She has written 5 books, BEING ANTINOVA (Astro Artz), ELEANORA ANTINOVA PLAYS (Sun & Moon), 100 BOOTS (Running Press), “MAN WITHOUT A WORLD: a Screenplay” (Green Integer, Sun&Moon Press) and most recently “CONVERSATIONS WITH STALIN” (Green Integer). She has just completed a new book “An Artist’s Life by Eleanora Antinova” (to be published by Hirmerverlag, Munich) along with a re-publication of “Being Antinova”. Major monographs on her work include The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “ELEANOR ANTIN” and “HISTORICAL TAKES” (Prestel) and “MULTIPLE OCCUPANCY: ELEANOR ANTIN’S SELVES” (Columbia University, N.Y.) She received many awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 from the Women’s Caucus of the College Art Association, 2 Best Show AICA Awards (International Assoc. of Art Critics), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture Media Achievement Award and an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an emeritus Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego.

Ingrid Becker is a graduate student thinking about 20th century American literature and culture at the University of Chicago. Over the last year, she has been rediscovering the relationships between brain and body, sound and gesture, individual and environment through the Duncan Dance tradition.

Hannah Brooks-Motl is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (Rescue Press, 2014) and the forthcoming M (The Song Cave, 2015). She has been studying Duncan Dance in Chicago since October 2014, and has recently started to explore the potential of movement and performance in her own critical and creative practice.

Anthony Romero and Josh Rios, both originally from south Texas, now live and work in Chicago. Over the past several years they have been developing various performances, 2 and 3 dimensional works, curatorial projects, installations, writings, and screenings that deal with the key experiences of being Mexican-origin in the US. Broadly speaking, their projects center on contemporary Chicana/o aesthetics, elided histories, and the larger themes of US/Mexico relations. In November they will be artists in residence at Harold Washington College. Their collaborative performances and projects have been most recently featured at the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Texas State University, Art in these Times, Sector 2337, and Andrea Meislin Gallery.

Chantal Neveu is a francophone writer and an interdisciplinary artist from Montréal, Québec.  She is the author of the books Une Spectaculaire influence (l’Hexagone), coït and mentale   (La Peuplade), Èdres followed by Èdres | Dehors (Éditions É=É), and many interdisciplinary textual projects – solo and into collaborations. A Spectacular Influence is translated from French to English by Nathanaël, and Coït is translated by Angela Carr (both published by BookThug / Toronto). Chantal Neveu is part of the creative-research project Artistic Strategies for Spatializing  Knowledge where she undertakes literary experimentation based on scripting – a method of  notation ‘real time’ notation – which partakes of the passage from the oral to the writen word in favour of research on the mixity of language, a literal and populated poetry.As Conseil des arts et des lettres grants recipient, Chantal Neveu has been Villa Waldberta’s guest in Bavaria (DE), House of Literatures Passa Porta in Brussels (B), Villa Hellebosch in Flanders (B), Subsistances in Lyon (F) and La Chartreuse / CNES in Avignon (F).

Keston Sutherland is the author of The Odes to TL61P, The Stats on Infinity, Stress Position, Hot White Andy, Neocosis and other poems. His Poetical Works 1999-2015 was published in 2015 by Enitharmon. He has published many essays on poetry and on Marx, and a book of literary critical theory, Stupefaction. For the Fall of 2015 he is based at Princeton. His home is in Brighton, UK, where he helps to run the annual Sussex Poetry Festival. He was for many years the editor of Quid and still co-edits Barque Press. He is a silent partner in the stochastic local noise band Michael Gove Meat Platter.

Ish Klein’s third book of poetry is entitled Consolation and Mirth. She also writes plays and makes videos. She is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theater (CRVPT) and her plays have been produced in America and England.

Greg Purcell’s first book, The Fundaments, is due in October of 2015 from Poor Claudia. His chapbooks include The New Music and More Fresh Air, and has been anthologized in A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years. He has been associated with The Danny’s Reading Series in Chicago, and the St. Mark’s Bookshop Reading Series in New York. He lives in Amherst, MA, with his partner Ish Klein.

Poet, editor, and reading series curator Joel Craig was born in Iowa. In his free verse poems, he uses the cadence of conversation to trace the widening wake of narrative. He is the author of the poetry collection The White House (2012), and his chapbook, Shine Tomorrow, is one of three chapbooks in the Lost Horse Press New Poets Series: New Poets, Short Books, Volume III(2008, series editor Marvin Bell). Cofounder and curator of the Danny’s Tavern Reading Series, Craig has also served as poetry editor for MAKE: A Literary Magazine. He contributes to the multimedia group Pulseprogramming. Craig lives in Chicago.

Casablanca Retro: Colonial Photography, History and Memory in Postcolonial Morocco

Throughout the colonial era photographers such as Marcelin Flandrin, an Algerian pied-noir who settled in Morocco at the establishment of the protectorate, collaborated with the government and tourism boards to construct a European vision of North African society and history. Known as the photographer of Casablanca because of his heavy involvement with the Protectorate government, after independence Flandrin’s work was criticized for reproducing Orientalist stereotypes and supporting the colonizing mission. Since the 1980s, however, Moroccan cultural, educational, and financial institutions have reinterpreted Flandrin’s images in order to resituate the protectorate as a part of Moroccan, rather than French, history. This talk traces Flandrin’s transformation from an archetypal French colonial photographer to a part of Moroccan heritage through an analysis of Flandrin’s 1928 and 1956 publications on photographs of the city of Casablanca (Casablanca from 1889 to the Present) and their subsequent reprinting by Moroccan scholars in 1988 (Casablanca Retro). Through the reinterpretation of these images and the appropriation of Flandrin by Moroccans, we can see the process of writing, resisting, and revising history and the instrumental role played by imagery in this process in colonial and post-colonial Morocco.

Patricia Goldsworthy-Bishop is Assistant Professor of History at Western Oregon University where she teaches courses in French and North African colonial history. Goldsworthy-Bishop earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine and was a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2010–2011. She is presently working on a book manuscript entitled Colonial Negatives that examines the role of photography in early twentieth-century Moroccan history.

Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory or InterCcECT convenes a Chicago circle of readers, writers, thinkers, and makers working in and beyond the university, through and around the commitment to theory. “Theory” we encompass in its critical, experimental, philosophical, aesthetic, political, literary, and psychoanalytic forms. InterCcECT coordinates the union of sets in Chicago via reading groups, workshops, performances, conferences, seminars, studios, parties, and other platforms.

Thom Donovan is the author of The Hole (Displaced Press, 2012), Withdrawn (Compline Editions, forthcoming), and Usufruct (with Rob Halpern; Timeless, Infinite Light, forthcoming winter 2016). He coedits and publishes ON Contemporary Practice, and is the coeditor of TO LOOK AT THE SEA IS TO BECOME WHAT ONE IS: an Etel Adnan Reader (with Brandon Shimoda; Nightboat Books, 2014) and Supple Science: a Robert Kocik Primer (with Michael Cross; ON Contemporary Practice, 2013). His collected writings regarding the Occupy Movement (2011-2014) will be available this month as an e-book with Essay Press. Since 2005, he has edited the weblog Wild Horses of Fire, where you can find out more about his work. He teaches visual art, poetics, and writing at Pratt Institute and Parsons.

Cassandra Troyan is a writer, ex-artist, and pétroleuse whose writing, described by Blake Butler, “takes the Sade-ian end of the oversharing shtick, turning one’s own private human pain into a diorama reflecting the environments and brains that birthed it.” Their work demarcates spaces for experience through exploration of myths, normative (gender) roles, historical legacies, and cultural influence as a means to re-organizing agency in the disorganization of daily life. As a desirous voyeur wanting to reanimate the most gorgeous impulses in the unlikeliest of places, they are a trans-historical operator deriving pleasure and power from situations of submission, violence, labor, queer romance, sex work, horror, and capital. They are the author of THRONE OF BLOOD (Solar Luxuriance, 2013), BLACKEN ME BLACKEN ME, GROWLED (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2014), KILL MANUAL (Artifice Books, 2014) and the chapbook HATRED OF WOMEN (Solar Luxuriance, 2014). Forthcoming in 2016 is a chapbook from Kenning Editions’ Ordinance series, entitled “FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION.” They received their MFA in Visual Arts from the University of Chicago in 2012 and currently live in the bay. http://onemurderleadstoanother.com/

Nathanaël is the (self-)translating author of more than twenty books.

Photo: Christine Taylor

Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar, the author of the poetry collection From Dame Quickly and of Exit 43, a cross-genre work on toxic archaeologies and salvage forthcoming from Atelos Press, with a letterpress palimpsest, A Chorus Fosse, out sooner from Compline. She edited and translated Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, and is curator of PennSound Italiana, an audiovisual sector of the PennSound archive devoted to contemporary Italian experimental poetry. Her critical study, Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice, was recently published by Columbia University Press. Her visual and sound poems have been installed in Berkeley, Brussels, Chicago, Ghent, Nagoya, New York City, Providence, Rome, and Turin; she has collaborated with a range of musicians, dancers, and designers, including Marco Ariano, the Difforme Ensemble, and Walter Paradiso (on Exit 43 operettas for performance and video), Kathy Westwater and Seung Jae Lee (on the performance work PARK at Fresh Kills Landfill, Pratt Institute, and elsewhere), composer Paul Rudy and AGENCY architecture (on X Locus, installations for the courtyard and tract of Trajan’s aqueduct at the American Academy in Rome).

Kit Schluter [@dedreytnien] is translator of The Book of Monelle by Marcel Schwob, The Cold by Jaime Saenz, and Circle of Dogs by Amandine André (in collaboration with J. Spaar), with translation-work forthcoming from Wakefield Press, Canarium Books, and Solar Luxuriance. His writing can be found in BOMB, Boston Review, Elective Affinities, and in Inclusivity Blueprint, a chapbook recently released by Diez. He is recipient of a 2015 “Discovery”/Boston Review prize, and a 2016 NEA Literature Translation fellowship. He lives in Oakland, CA, where he co-edits O’clock Press.

Katherine Behar is a Brookyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose work includes performance, interactive installation, video, and writing about digital culture. Behar’s work appears at festivals, galleries, performance spaces, and art centers worldwide, including the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Judson Church in New York; UNOACTU in Dresden; The Girls Club Collection in Miami; Feldman Gallery + Project Space in Portland; De Balie Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam; the Mediations Biennale in Poznan; the Chicago Cultural Center; the Swiss Institute in Rome; the National Museum of Art in Cluj-Napoca; and many others. She is the recipient of fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Art Journal and the Rubin Museum of Art; and grants including the Franklin Furnace Fund, the U.S. Consulate in Leipzig, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Cleveland Performance Art Festival. Her ongoing projects include two collaborations, the performance art group Disorientalism, with Marianne M. Kim, and the art and technology team Resynplement, with Ben Chang and Silvia Ruzanka. Behar’s writings on technology and culture have been published in Lateral, Media-N, Parsons Journal for Information Mapping, Visual Communication Quarterly, and EXTENSIONS: The Online Journal for Embodied Technology. She is Assistant Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College.

Joshua Kent is a Chicago based inner-disciplinary artist. His visual and performative practice navigates the intersection of writing, movement and sculptural installation. His work explores everyday poetics and its relationship to material objects. Joshua graduated from the performance department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010, where he was a Presidential Merit Scholar. Recently Mr. Kent was awarded a CAAP Grant from the City of Chicago, and was selected as a 2012 LinkUp Residency Artist at Links Hall. He was one of ten local artists shown in the 2013 Rapid Pulse international performance festival. In 2014 his work was featured at EXPO Chicago and he was also included in Newcity’s annual list of Breakout Artists. Currently he is developing featured programing to be shown in the 2015 Chicago Artist Month. Joshua also facilitates the daily operations of St. Francis House, a community working to serve the needs of those experiencing homelessness. He has lived and worked on site for the last four years.

Every house has a door was formed in 2008 by Lin Hixson, director, and Matthew Goulish, dramaturge, to convene project specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performances in which the subject remains largely absented from the finished work. The performances distill and separate presentational elements into distinct modes – recitation, installation, movement, music – to grant each its own space and time, and inviting the viewer to assemble the parts in duration, after the fact of the performance, to rediscover the missing subject. Works include Let us think of these things always. Let us speak of them never. (2009) in response to the work of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Makavejev, Testimonium (2013) a collaboration with the band Joan of Arc in response to Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony poems, and the installation/performance Caesar’s Bridge (2014-2015).

Joshua Clover is a communist, though various other communists don’t think so. The guidelines are unclear. He is also a professor of literature and critical theory at the University of California Davis. He has collaborated on writing, publishing, and conference organization with Jasper Bernes, Chris Chen, Timothy Kreiner, Annie McClanahan, Chris Nealon, Louis-Georges Schwartz, Juliana Spahr, Michael Szalay, and others.

Jenny Boully is the author of not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, The Body: An Essay, and other books.

Rachel Galvin is the author of a book of poems, Pulleys & Locomotion (Black Lawrence), and a chapbook, Zoetrope(Chätaro Editores), and translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets (Carcanet), which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for French Translation. Her poems and translations appear in journals such as Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker,  PN Review, and Poetry. A new collection of poems, Lost Property Unit, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and Alice James Books’ Kinereth Gensler Award. Galvin is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.

Christopher Backs is an artist and writer living in Chicago. As an artist, the majority of his work exists in the form of paintings and short animated operas. As a writer, he focuses primarily on short and long fiction as well as playwriting. In 2013, he was awarded a residency the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, during which, among other literary achievements, he sat on the lap of the Foundation’s venerable namesake.

Matt Morris is an artist, writer, and sometimes curator based in Chicago. He has presented artwork at Queer Thoughts, peregrineprogram, The Bike Room, Gallery 400, Sector 2337, and The Franklin in Chicago, IL; Fjord and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, PA; The Contemporary Arts Center, U·turn Art Space, Aisle, and semantics in Cincinnati, OH; Clough-Hanson Gallery and Beige in Memphis, TN; with additional projects in Reims, France; Greencastle, IN; Lincoln, NE; and Baton Rouge, LA. Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. Recent curatorial efforts have been presented at Western Exhibitions and The Hills Esthetic Center in Chicago, IL. He is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who teaches in the Sculpture as well as the Painting and Drawing departments. He is a contributor to Artforum.com, Art Papers, Flash Art, Newcity, and Sculpture; and his writing appears in numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs.

Nathanaël is the (self-)translating author of more than a score of books. Recent works include Asclepias: The Milkweeds (2015); The Middle Notebookes (2015); and Sotto l’immagine (2014).

Margaret Bobo-Dancy (b. 1990) is a Video and Sculpture artist living and producing in Chicago. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Margaret has exhibited nationally at the Spectacle Theatre of New York City and with the Nomadic Limbs Dance Collective in Milwaukee. Bobo-Dancy has been a part of exhibitions in Chicago including Woman Made Gallery, the Nightingale Theatre, The Defibrillator, and the Fulton Street Art Collective. Her work has been highlighted in the Chicago Reader and the online art forum Hyperallergic. She is the recent recipient of the Chances Dances ‘Critical Fierceness Grant’ to finalize sculptures from her most recent body of work, “Transverberate.”

D. Cain is a Chicago-based Moving Image artist & theorist. He is a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Cinematic Art + Science Program. His work explores the invisible realms of being and the subjects bound by them. He nurtures & observes the emotionality of characters and the unconscious to influence its very own aesthetic, creating unique expressionist perceptions.

Amina Ross is a transdisciplinary Chicago-based artist. Through visual abstraction she creates palatable tensions of repulsion and seduction. The conceptions of black visuality and the sexualized image are combined through a blending of image, writing, performance, curatorial and installation work. She has shown work at numerous venues including the Black Cinema House, Woman Made Gallery, Links Hall and Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery. She has spoken on panels and taught workshops at College Arts Association Conference, Black Artist Retreat, Threewalls and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Amina is committed to creating spaces that foster thinking, conversation, growth and love. These ambitions manifested in the founding of 3rd Language, queer arts collective; which has received the Propeller Fund grant and Davis Foundation awards for its summer workshops series. Amina holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a teaching artist at Hyde Park Art Center.  She is a part of Chicago Artist Coalition’s BOLT residency 2015-2016 cohort.

To further explore a line of research established by its affiliated reading group Following Nonhuman Kinds, The Green Lantern Press curated a series of short, related films that first screened at Sector 2337 in Chicago in June 2015, and again on ACRE TV. This series was curated by Giovanni Aloi, Kathleen Kelley, Trevor Perri, and Caroline Picard.
PROGRAM:

1. Himali Singh Soin (in collaboration with Dario Villanueva), “The Particle and the Wave” (12:47)
2. Chloë Brown, “Dialogue: Panthera Leo” (3:16)
3. Laura Aish, “The Machine”, (5:14)
4. Laura Cinti “Nanomagnetic Plants” (1:55)
5. Peter Matthews, “The Ocean Moves Through It” (11:34)
6. Matthew C. Wilson, “Forecast” (2:52)
7. Quiet ensemble, “Orienta” (2:45)
8. Sonia Levy, “I Roam” (3:16)
9. Max Stocklosa, “More World Material” (15:32)
10. localStyle, “Chew”, (3:33)
11. Gillian Wylde, “A as in Animal” (2:46)
12. NEOZOON, “BUCK FEVER” (5:54)
13. NEOZOON, “MY BBY 8L3W” (3:03)
14. Linda Tegg, “Sheep Actress” (2:58)
15. Filip Kwaitkowski, “Tiera” (2:47)
16. Chloë Brown & Ines Lechleitner, “The Hum” (3:19)
17. Smriti Mehra, “Authanakoota (Banquet)” (13:58)

Pulling from toy theater and the operatic tradition of regietheater, combined with the effect of streaming media in the present day, Caroline Picard and Devin King’s Grand Opera for One Person presents a 48-hour installation, interrupted for 2 hours by improvisatory guitar. The entire 48-hours is conceived as a performance of objects highlighting, in part, the potential for four 3-dimensional paintings to function as micro-stages that illicit a sense of anticipation and promise for aesthetic transformation within the viewer. The 2-hour interruption, or musical interlude, creates an intermission in the tableau, inverting traditional expectations about space and human relation.

Rehearsal of a Grand Opera for One Person assumes that a space can be active without human presence; a painting has the ability to move and affect, even while it is inanimate. Furthering that point, a birds-eye video loops simultaneously, capturing four acts and a curtain call of assorted objects as they move back, forth and around a black table by a pair of gloved hands. This simple choreography establishes a flux and flow of relations between things performing for a camera.

The collaboration was inspired by two separate lectures, samples of which are integrated into a looping 20-minute audio track. The first lecture about Graham Harman, Louis Zukofsky, John Cage and the sample-as-object (by King), and the second about Timothy Morton, Giorgio Agamben and The Pancantantra (by Picard) provide an ambient background text about nature and object oriented ontology.

The Opera is a Total Art Experience. It is massive, expensive, glittering and refined. Its high status and rarified aesthetic is easily inaccessible and exclusive — it is an older tradition, with massive audiences who sit together in vast, ornate rooms. King and Picard are interested in the potential for that form to be appropriated, reduced, tweaked and recontextualized as a one-on-one event, in which humans may or may not be present. This performance was their first rehearsal. This piece was performed on November 19th, 2012 in the basement of New Capital, in Chicago, Illinois.

Nathanaël is the (self-)translating author of more than twenty books.

John Beer is the author of the poetry collection The Waste Land and Other Poems (2010), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the chapbook Lucinda (2013). Beer received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the former literary assistant to poet Robert Lax, and the editor of Lax’s Poems (1962-1997) (2013). A former theater critic for Time Out Chicago, Beer’s criticism has appeared in Verse, the Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, and other magazines. He currently teaches at Portland State University.

About the Books

The Middle Notebookes (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015) began in French, as three carnets, written in keeping with three stages of an illness: an onset and remission, a recurrence and further recurrence, a death and the after of that death. But the narrative only became evident subsequently; the malady identified by these texts was foremost a literary one, fastened to a body whose concealment had become, not only untenable, but perhaps, in a sense, murderous. It is possible, then, that more than anything, these Notebookes attest both to the commitment, and the eventual, though unlikely, prevention of, a murder.

The talks gathered in Asclepias: The Milkweeds (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015) are all concerned with discrepancy and extinction. Polylingual and transdisciplinary, each essay addresses translation as a form of disagreement and photography as its mis-fitting corollary. Calling up an indiscriminate range of thinkers and artists— philosophers, composers, photographers, filmmakers, poets—including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Dmitri Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya, Sergio Larraín, Günther Anders, Alejandra Pizarnik, Antonin Artaud, and Friedrich Hölderlin, among many others, the resultant montage repeatedly abandons the reader to an empty, incriminating, theatre.

Jessica Campbell is a Canadian artist and enthusiast of books, jokes, and paintings. She is the publications and programming director for Kavi Gupta Gallery, as well as the founder of editions | Kavi Gupta, an art bookstore operated by the gallery. Previous to coming to Chicago, she spent many years working for Drawn & Quarterly, a comic book and graphic novel publisher based in Montreal. She completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was the recipient of the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship, and she was recently selected as one of NewCity‘s 2015 breakout artists.

La Houle is a Brussels-based publishing structure located 72 miles away from the sea, composed of Marie Lécrivain and Jean-François Caro. From art to fiction, our books try to build bridges between author, translator, artist, and publisher. La Houle will not follow a single path: through various encounters and collaborations, we choose to establish a methodology that will define itself along our publications. La Houle is a non-profit press. Our concern is to find economic ways of making and distributing printed matter, working in close relation to artists’ or writers’ practices.

Karsten Lund lives in Chicago, where he has organized exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), the Hyde Park Art Center, various artist-run spaces, and more unconventional sites, such as an immense factory shortly before its demolition. As an essayist, editor, artist, and curator he is invested in exploring an expanded range of possibilities for art-related publications; since 2007 he has produced experimental publications in conjunction with various projects, collaborated on multiple artist books, and worked on numerous museum exhibition catalogues. Most recently, he is the editor of Irena Haiduk’s Spells, a collection of the artist’s writings forthcoming from Sternberg Press. Lund works as a Curatorial Assistant at MCA Chicago.

Meekling is a very small press, based in Chicago, Illinois. We specialize in small, hand-made editions of books by authors we adore. We generally publish works that play with or ignore the boundaries of genre. We appreciate humor and beauty and risk-taking, and we see publishing as a collaborative, community-driven adventure

A native of Southern California, Marissa Lee Benedict is a sculptor, researcher, writer, explorer, teacher and avid amateur of many fields and disciplines. Motivated by a sense of critical wonder that is rooted in a practice of research and experimentation, her projects range from growing algae under fluorescent lights to digging up geological core samples in the California desert. Currently based in Chicago, IL, Benedict received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2007 and an MFA in 2011 from the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she currently teaches. She has shown most recently in Chicago at threewalls (threewall SOLO), the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, Harold Washington College, Columbia College, Mana Contemporary, the Sullivan Galleries, and in NYC at the Cue Art Foundation. She is currently an artist-in-residence and mentor for the BOLT Residency program (Chicago Artists Coalition), and was a 2011 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Fellowship.

Lindsey French is an artist and educator whose practice engages in gestures of communication with landscapes and nonhuman organisms. Mediated with sensors and algorithms, the work materializes as texts written in collaboration with trees, video performances of attempted dialogues with the landscape, and sound installations of distant and displaced forests. French has exhibited and presented work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pico House Gallery in Los Angeles, Flying Object in Hadley, MA and in conjunction with the International Symposium of Electronics Arts in both Albuquerque and Vancouver. Her work has been featured in essays in Leonardo, the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology, and in podcasts on Creative Disturbance. French currently teaches courses that explore new media practices and site specific research at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mel Keiser’s work has been included in the Detroit Center for Photography’s New Directions and Catherine Edelman Gallery’s The Chicago Project.  She was named a finalist for the 2015 Luminarts Fellowship and in 2014 was invited to The New York Times 2nd Annual Portfolio Review.  Her work has been published in Newcity Art, Feature Shoot, People’s Photography,  A+, and Manifest Gallery’s International Photography Annual.  Keiser lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Hannah B. Higgins has been teaching at UIC since 1994. Her research and course topics examine twentieth century avant-garde art with a specific interest in Dadaism, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, performance art, food art and early computer art. Her books and articles argue for the humanistic value of multimodal aesthetic experiences. Higgins is solo author of Fluxus Experience (University of California Press, 2002) and The Grid Book (MIT Press, 2009) and co-editor of with Douglas Kahn of Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Art (University of California Press, 2012). She has received the UIC University Scholar Award, DAAD, Getty and Philips Collection Fellowships and is co-executor of the Estate of Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press.

Shawn Michelle Smith is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  She has published several books on the history and theory of photography and gender and race in visual culture. Her most recent book, At the Edge of Sight:  Photography and the Unseen (Duke 2013), won the 2014 Lawrence W. Levine Award for best book in American cultural history from the Organization of American Historians, and the 2014 Jean Goldman Book Prize from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is currently working on Photographic Returns, a book about contemporary photography invested in the past, and completing a co-edited book with Sharon Sliwinski called Photography and the Optical Unconscious.

Ellen Rothenberg’s work is concerned with the politics of everyday life and the formation of communities through collaborative practices. Her installations and public projects often employ the iconography of social movements and their residual documents to interrogate the mechanisms underlying contemporary political engagement and social dialogue. Her work—architecturally scaled installations, public projects, performance, collaborations, and writing —uncovers histories embedded in the present, particularly those of women, labor, and feminism. Her approach to form and material is informed by these concerns, and inflect meaning beyond their historical conventions. Her work has been presented in North America and Europe at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Museum of London, Ontario; The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; The Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen; Royal Festival Hall, London; The Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania; among others. Awards include NEA Regional Fellowships, The Bunting Institute Fellowship Radcliffe College Harvard University, Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, The Massachusetts Artist Foundation Fellowships, and grants from CEC Artslink, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The LEF Foundation, and NEA Artists Projects. Rothenberg teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Vermont College Fine Arts Graduate Program.

Not to be Taken Performance Series invites select artists and thinkers to publicly use elsetime as a generative studio space in which she can engage questions about legacy and politics, place and time, through discrete actions; these subjective, ephemeral responses momentarily transform the exhibition with the performer’s unique potential.

Saturday May 16th at 3pm : Tim Kinsella

Saturday May 23rd at 3 pm : Alexandria Eregbu

Saturday May 30th at 3 pm : Dao Nguyen

Saturday June 06 at 3 pm : CLOSED

Saturday June 13 at 3pm : Mark Booth & Becky Grajeda

Saturday June 20th at 3pm : Terri Kapsalis & Anne Elizabeth Moore

Images from previous Not to Be Taken Performances:

Tim Kinsella, “Not to be Taken,” Performance Still, Sector 2337, May 2015. Photo by Caroline Picard.

Tim Kinsella, “Not to be Taken,” Performance Still, Sector 2337, May 2015. Photo by Caroline Picard.

Alexandria Eregbu, “Not to be Taken,” Performance Still, Sector 2337, May 2015. Photo by Deanna Ledezma .

Alexandria Eregbu, “Not to be Taken,” Performance Still, Sector 2337, May 2015. Photo by Deanna Ledezma .

Dao Nguyen, “Not to be Taken,” Performance Still, Sector 2337, May 2015. Photo by Caroline Picard.

Dao Nguyen, “Not to be Taken,” Performance Still, Sector 2337, May 2015. Photo by Caroline Picard.

Not to be Taken Participants:

Mark Booth is an interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, writer, and musician. His work in text, image, and sound explores the material qualities of language, as well as the ways that language functions (and does not function) to describe human experience. Having learned to read and navigate the world as a dyslexic, Booth uses his work to make sense of his own disjointed experience with words and meaning. His art is simultaneously grandiose in scope (attempting (and failing, of course) to describe the entire spectrum of human existence) and comically quotidian. Booth is on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited and performed his work in Chicago, nationally, and internationally in a variety of known and obscure venues.

Alexandria Eregbu is a visual artist, whose work often takes shape in the form of performance, programming, and curatorial practices. Her concerns frequently address community, materiality, performativity, and visibility of racialized and gendered bodies in space. In 2012, Eregbu was commissioned by Out of Site Chicago to perform 11/10/10, a project that confronted the physical and geographical boundaries of the city of Chicago. The following year in 2013, Eregbu curated Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire, Revisited at Columbia College Chicago. This curatorial project reexamined the first Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire— a Surrealist exhibition that took place in Chicago in 1976. Eregbu’s work has been featured in two solo exhibitions and several group exhibitions including Seminar (New York); Exodus at the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator in Washington Park; and Mythologies at Sullivan Galleries (Chicago). Eregbu was a recipient of the Propeller Fund Grant (2013), a 2014-2015 Resident Curator with HATCH Projects at Chicago Artists Coalition, and a Public Studio Artist in Residence at the Chicago Cultural Center. Eregbu received her BFA from the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago.

Becky Grajeda is a sound artist, sound designer and sound engineer based in Chicago. Her works of sound assemblage, multi-channel installation and performance frequently include field recordings of the sounds of machinations and/or in involve abstracting vocal inflection, intonation, and intended meaning in speech. She has exhibited and performed her sound work in Chicago, the UK, Finland, and in the Czech Republic. She recently received a grant from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events to document three of her performative sound works.

Terri Kapsalis is a writer, performer, and cultural critic whose work appears in such publications as Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, Parakeet, The Baffler, New Formations and Public. She is the author of Jane Addams’ Travel Medicine Kit (Hull-House Museum), The Hysterical Alphabet (WhiteWalls) and Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press) and the co-editor of two books related to the musician Sun Ra. As an improvising violinist, Kapsalis has a discography that includes work with Tony Conrad, David Grubbs, and Mats Gustafsson, and she is a founding member of Theater Oobleck. She works as a health educator at Chicago Women’s Health Center and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tim Kinsella is the author of two novels, Let Go and Go On and On (2014, Curbside Splendor) and The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense (2011, Featherproof Books). He has also recently become the publisher and editor at Featherproof Books. Since 1996 his band Joan of Arc and its related projects have released dozens of albums and they continue to tour internationally on a regular basis. Recent projects include multiple commissions for the MCA Chicago and The Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Anne Elizabeth Moore is an internationally renowned cultural critic. Fulbright scholar, UN Press Fellow, USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and part of the team behind The Ladydrawers, she has written and edited several award-winning books. Cambodian Grrrl (Cantankerous Titles, 2011) received a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award for best book from the Society of American Travel Writers Foundation in 2012. Hey Kidz, Buy This Book(Soft Skull, 2004) made Yes! Magazine‘s list of “Media That Set Us Free” and Reclaim the Media’s 2004 Media and Democracy Summer Reading List. The first Best American Comics made both Entertainment Weekly‘s “Must List” and Publishers Weekly‘s Bestsellers List. Unmarketable (The New Press, 2007) made Reclaim the Media’s 2007 Media and Democracy Summer Reading list and was named a Best Book of the Year by Mother Jones. Her recent book New Girl Law (Cantankerous Titles, 2013), the follow-up to Cambodian Grrrl, was called “a post-empirical proto-fourth-wave feminist memoir” by Bust. Moore herself was recently called a “general phenom” by the Chicago Reader and “one of the sharpest thinkers and cultural critics bouncing around the globe today” by Razorcake. More here.

Dao Nguyen is a Chicago-based artist. She choreographs thought experiments, play apparatuses, obstacle courses, and rituals for transformation. A score becomes a map is a situation where objects, actions, and bodies encounter philosophical questions concerning communication, connection, and ontology. Her name is a homophone for the Vietnamese word for knife. She is the compact, red Leatherman multi-tool your aunt gave you for Christmas ten years ago. On sale at Marshall’s. Versatility and hidden strength in a small package at a discount. Stealthy enough to pass through security checkpoints on three continents on four separate occasions. She can cut, screw, file, saw, and open your beer. Bonus applications include carving miniature graphite figurines, picking locks, and sculpting tofu. Nguyen has exhibited and performed in backyards, bathrooms, stairwells, highways, and gallery spaces, including Defibrillator, Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries, Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Brea Art Gallery, The Foundry Arts Centre, and Irvine Fine Arts Center. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was recently an Artist-in-Residence at ACRE and Elsewhere: A Living Museum.

(C) Juno Gemes

Born in 1970, Devin Johnston spent his childhood in North Carolina. He is the author of four previous books of poetry and two books of prose, including Creaturely and Other Essays. He works for Flood Editions, an independent publishing house, and teaches at Saint Louis University in Missouri.

Photo: Jessica Baran

Ted Mathys is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Spoils and Forge, both from Coffee House Press. Originally from Ohio, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives and teaches in St. Louis.

Brandon Wilner and Willy Smart met in New Harmony, Indiana in the summer of 2012 and have seen each other only three times since. They co-run a reissue label called Fake Music Re-Anticipations and with their new book, Acknowledgements, they want to put you in the driver’s seat.

Jesse Malmed is an artist and curator working in video, performance, text, occasional objects and their gaps and overlaps. Various pre-occupations include: Choir Conductor, Loveable Slouch, Paranoiac Research Assistant, Comic Concierge, Junk Shop Salesman, Re-Titler, Poet-Comedian, Traffic Caller, Bootlegger, Idiot’s Idiot, Infinite Gesticulator, Pro Bono Closed Captioner and Imaginary Television Host. He has performed, screened and exhibited at museums, microcinemas, film festivals, galleries, bars and barns, including solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Portland Art Museum’s Northwest Film Center, University of Chicago Film Studies Center, Sight Unseen, Spectacle Theater, Artists’ Television Access, Microlights, Lease Agreement, Skylab Gallery and Chicago Filmmakers. In addition to his own work, Jesse programs at the Nightingale Cinema, co-directs the mobile exhibition space and artist bumper sticker project Trunk Show and has programmed work in a wide variety of contexts individually, as a member of Cinema Project and as the peripatetic Deep Leap Microcinema. His writing has appeared in Incite Journal, YA5, OMNI Reboot, Big Big Wednesday, Temporary Art Review, Bad at Sports and Cine-File. A native of Santa Fe, Jesse earned his BA at Bard College and his MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was named a “2014 Breakout Artist” by Newcity and is a 2014-15 Artistic Associate at Chicago’s Links Hall, where he is organizing LIVE TO TAPE, a week-long festival of artist television May 18-24, 2015. www.jessemalmed.net

James T. Green is a designer by trade and an artist by practice–making work that explores identity through new media, writing, object-making, and performance. His work has been shown in EXPO Chicago (2012, 2013, 2014), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2013), the Chicago Cultural Center (2012), and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago (2013). Green is currently an artist in residence at the University of Chicago Arts & Public Life/CSRPC residency program and has completed residency programs at ACRE (2011-2012) and Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH Projects (2012-2013). In 2013, Green helped to organize the Filter Photo Festival in Chicago and in 2014 was selected to perform at The Chicago Home Theater Festival. http://www.jamestgreen.com/

Presentations will include readings, video, performance, and discussion:

—Biomimetic Curatorial Practice: Learning from Sociable Weaver Birds (Hannah Green, Allison Jones, and Zahri Nicole Vafaee) : Can the collective nesting habits of social birds provide a novel model for arts curation?

— The Drag-Queen Cuttlefish and other Stories (Ana Vázquez, Joanna Suhayda, and Ailsa Stevenson): Readings from an adult-children’s book about the sensory worlds of various animals.

—Form Follows Function (Madeline Vaccaro and Ryer Appledoorn): An exploration of human reasons and resonances behind animal architectures, human and non-human alike.

—Becoming Your Meaning (Connie West and Kaleigh Moynihan) : A sculptural, fabric, live performance exploring visual and physical communication human/cuttlefish.

Jeff Sherfey is a poet currently living light on the land. He operates two projects in their inchoate form: The Library Cormorant and The Latest School of Correspondence. His first book of poetry, Swimming Pools, is published by Polyploid Press.

Leila Wilson is the author of The Hundred Grasses (Milkweed Editions, 2013), finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.  She is the recipient of a Friends of Literature Prize from Poetry Foundation, and her poems and essays have appeared in Iowa Review, Chicago Review, Poetry, A Public Space, American Letters and Commentary, and elsewhere.  She teaches creative writing and literature at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also runs the Writing Center.

Polyploid Press is a small press that publishes poetry, experimental writing, and other curiosities, always with a discerning eye for style and aesthetic. Swimming Pools acts as the press’s debut. The book is in two parts. The first part collects nine untitled poems that explores suburban (and sometimes urban) imagery and ideology. The second part is an expansive collage poem that finds its cohesion in the Lakota figure Crazy Horse. Swimming Pools features illustrations by Chicago artist Nick Jackson.

Willy Smart is an artist and reader currently studying and producing Visual Culture and Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Willy directs the conceptual music label Fake Music (fakemusic.org).

Anna Orlikowska is a visual artist based in Chicago and Amsterdam. She is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She exhibited her work in the Netherlands, US, Denmark, Germany and Brasil.

While in residence at Sector 2337, Josh Rios and Anthony Romero will present a two-part project titled Please Don’t Bury Me Alive!. Part One, a performative lecture, brings various gestures associated with pedagogy and theater together in a zone of imaginative investigation, a zone where diverse interests like speculative Chicana/o futures and the Othering of Modernism can co-mingle in uncommon and unpremeditated ways. Part Two, an installation staged in the project space, draws on vernacular forms of picture collecting and display indicative of mood boards, bulletin boards, and other casual approaches to aggregating images and objects. Specifically, the installation embraces the visual pleasure of presenting and arranging an excess of Chicana/o centered images where they would not appear otherwise.

Anthony Romero and Josh Rios, both originally from south Texas, now live and work in Chicago. Over the past several years they have been developing various performances, 2 and 3 dimensional works, curatorial projects, installations, writings, and screenings that deal with the experience of being US citizens of Mexican origin in these challenging times. Broadly speaking, their collaborative works center on contemporary Chicana/o aesthetics, the elided histories of the Chicana/o struggle, and the dismissal of Chicana/o contributions to US culture in general.

Artist Talk: (Fo Wilson)

Wilson will present a few examples of her work within the context of furniture and domesticity that question the role that objects play in domestic space and how we project our own identities and desires on them. She’ll also discuss how objects can not only have function, but exhibit behavior as a reflection of the human condition.

Lecture: Talk Shows: Talk as Performance Material (Ira Murfin)

This lecture introduces the cross-disciplinary history and possibilities of talk as a performance genre. It is based in a comparative historical project exploring the use of ordinary, extemporaneous talk by artists from disparate disciplinary backgrounds working in the post-1960s American avant-garde. These artists used talk to both position themselves within disciplinary structures where their work could be received and circulated, and to remain outside the formal limitations of disciplinary traditions and expectations. By putting their minimalist tendencies into tension with the institutional and media formations that articulated and circulated their work, Murfin argues that these artists were able to both keep open and foreclose the expansive possibilities promised by avant-gardes of previous decades. The talk surveys this idiosyncratic cross-disciplinary history and gleans from it models for materializing talk in performance practice and re-imagining the role of arts categories, while also hinting at a an interrelated repertoire of talk performance circulating outside the art world in performance genres that define public life, like pedagogy, popular culture, and public discourse. Ultimately, Murfin asks if talk can be distinguished as a performance media apart from cognate examples such as dramatic text, and traces how talk performance has been identified and deployed across genres.

Performance: Our Theatrical Future: A Talk Duet Between Hong Kong and Chicago (Re-Performed)

Conceived by Ira S. Murfin

Created by Ira S. Murfin with Aaron Kahn + Guest Artists

Performed by Ira S. Murfin + Guest Artist (Fo Wilson)

Ira is a graduate student in Chicago. Aaron is a yoga instructor in Hong Kong. They have been making theatre together and not making theatre together for over 20 years. On December 10^th 2014 in Chicago and December 11^th 2014 in Hong Kong they had a conversation via video chat over the internet, in the way it is possible to do now. They talked about theatre they have made together and theatre they have not made together and theatre they might make together someday. At each performance of Our Theatrical Future a different Guest Performer from a distinct artistic background joins Ira onstage to re-perform his conversation with Aaron, and Ira and the guest have a conversation of their own about making art and not making art, or whatever else comes up.

About the Participants:

Ira S. Murfin is a Chicago-based writer, theatre artist and scholar. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre & Drama at Northwestern University, where his dissertation examines talk-based performances in the post-1960s American avant-garde. He also holds degrees in writing from New York University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Critical and creative writing has appeared in Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 491, elimae, Fiction at Work, Chicago Art Criticism, Chicago Arts Journal, and Requited, where he is now also the Performance Editor.  His solo and collaborative performance work has been seen at MCA Chicago, Links Hall, the Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, and the Chicago Cultural Center, among other places. Ira is a member of two ongoing theatrical laboratories: The Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration (LEC), a collective concerned with the unique phenomenon of the performance event, and the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials (LDSM), which makes collaborative performances about cities and science. He is currently a Chicago Shakespeare Theater PreAmble Scholar and a Graduate Affiliate of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, this summer he will be a 2015 Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Fellow.

Fo Wilson is a maker, educator, independent curator and writer. She uses furniture forms to create experiences that reposition historical objects and/or aesthetics in a contemporary context, and offers audiences new ways of thinking about and interacting with history and objects. Fo received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design’s Furniture Design program in 2005 with a concentration in Art History, Theory and Criticism and is an Associate Professor at Columbia College Chicago. She has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and her design work is included in the collection of The Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design in New York.

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012). She lives in Chicago.

Brent Armendinger is the author of two chapbooks, Undetectable (New Michigan Press, 2009) and Archipelago (Noemi Press, 2009). His work has recently appeared in Aufgabe, Bloom, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and Web Conjunctions. Brent is a recipient of fellowships from Headlands Center for the Arts and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Pitzer College, where he is an Associate Professor of English and World Literature.

Artist Talk: (Kelly Kaczynski)

Details TBA

Lecture: Surface Aesthetics: The Table as a Site of Performance (Ira Murfin)

Proceeding from a prompt to discuss a theatrical structure, this talk takes up the recurrence of a minimalist impulse for individual artists to stage formally simple performances seated at tables. Surveying occurrences of this presentational structure across artistic disciplines, Murfin identifies an enduring theatrical format that sets non-dramatic and anti-spectacular performances in quotidian physical circumstances, which are nonetheless formally available to uniquely theatrical relationships and modes of address. Focusing on the case of Spalding Gray, whose use of the table in his autobiographical monologues helped define a performance genre, Murfin examines the development and circulation of Gray’s table performances through their mediated representations and the citational practices of the artists he influenced. More broadly, this talk places Gray’s work within a network of mutually legitimizing table performances that includes intentional artworks by cross-disciplinary performers from John Cage to Bill T. Jones, and the vernacular performance repertoire shared by newscasters, teachers, panelists, interviewers, first dates, and breakfast partners sitting, and performing, at tables. Tracked across time, context, and media the table maintains its authoritative and authenticating force, suggesting the ways that performance structures come to establish and assert themselves, sometimes without even having to settle on their own status as theatre.

Performance: Our Theatrical Future: A Talk Duet Between Hong Kong and Chicago (Re-Performed)

Conceived by Ira S. Murfin

Created by Ira S. Murfin with Aaron Kahn + Guest Artists

Performed by Ira S. Murfin + Guest Artist (Kelly Kaczynski)

Ira is a graduate student in Chicago. Aaron is a yoga instructor in Hong Kong. They have been making theatre together and not making theatre together for over 20 years. On December 10^th 2014 in Chicago and December 11^th 2014 in Hong Kong they had a conversation via video chat over the internet, in the way it is possible to do now. They talked about theatre they have made together and theatre they have not made together and theatre they might make together someday. At each performance of Our Theatrical Future a different Guest Performer from a distinct artistic background joins Ira onstage to re-perform his conversation with Aaron, and Ira and the guest have a conversation of their own about making art and not making art, or whatever else comes up.

About the Participants:

Kelly Kaczynski is an artist working within the language of sculpture. Selected exhibitions include Ortega y Gasset Projects, NY; Soap Factory, MN; Comfort Station, IL; Gahlberg Gallery, IL; threewalls, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, IL; Rowland Contemporary, IL; University at Buffalo Art Gallery, NY; Triple Candie, NY; Islip Art Museum, NY; Josee Bienvenu Gallery, NY; DeCordova Museum, MA; Boston Center for the Arts, MA. Public installations include projects with the Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA; the Interfaith Center, NY; Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Boston National Historic Parks, MA; Boston Public Library, MA. Curatorial projects include the 2014 exhibitions, Roving Room at Habersham Mills, GA and Virtually Physically Speaking at Columbia College, Chicago, IL and the 2011 exhibition Mouthing (a sentient limb) at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. She received an MFA from Bard College, NY and BA from The Evergreen State College, WA. She has taught with Northwestern University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Chicago, University of Pennsylvania and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Kaczynski currently is a Lecturer with the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL.

Ira S. Murfin is a Chicago-based writer, theatre artist and scholar. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre & Drama at Northwestern University, where his dissertation examines talk-based performances in the post-1960s American avant-garde. He also holds degrees in writing from New York University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Critical and creative writing has appeared in Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 491, elimae, Fiction at Work, Chicago Art Criticism, Chicago Arts Journal, and Requited, where he is now also the Performance Editor.  His solo and collaborative performance work has been seen at MCA Chicago, Links Hall, the Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, and the Chicago Cultural Center, among other places. Ira is a member of two ongoing theatrical laboratories: The Laboratory for Enthusiastic Collaboration (LEC), a collective concerned with the unique phenomenon of the performance event, and the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials (LDSM), which makes collaborative performances about cities and science. He is currently a Chicago Shakespeare Theater PreAmble Scholar and a Graduate Affiliate of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, this summer he will be a 2015 Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Fellow.

Olivia Cronk’s first book was Skin Horse (Action Books, 2012). Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Deluge, Dusie, Jubilat, Newfound,  Spolia, Swine, and Tender.Some of her work will be anthologized in Electric Gurlesque. She co-edits The Journal Petra (thejournalpetra.com) with Philip Sorenson and is an instructorof Composition and Creative Writing at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Aaron Kunin’s new book of poems is Cold Genius (Fence, 2014). He lives in Los Angeles.

In support of the release of Ben’s book Illustrated Games of Patience, Ben and Sue both made audio recordings (Ben recorded himself reading from his book, Sue recorded two new pieces specifically for this project), and The Song Cave then put these recordings onto a group of mp3 players to be shipped to each destination.

Ben Estes is the author of the chapbooks Lamp like l’map (Factory Hollow Press), Cymbals (The Song Cave), and 8 Poems (Engineered Garments), and Illustrated Games of Patience (The Song Cave). He currently lives in New York.

Sue Tompkins is an artist and a musician. Using a range of media including collage, painting, performance and typewritten text, her visual practice explores the subtleties of language, relying on an approach akin to concrete poetry. Tompkins’ works have been described as “strung-out exercises in associative free thought: performance poetry that moves from the page to the voice, from speech to song, from song to signal, from signal to pure sound.” Her work has been shown in the 29th Sao Paolo Biennale, at the Hayward Gallery, London, MACBA, Barcelona, ICA, London, Kunsthalle Basel, Tate Modern, London, and many others. Sue lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland.

The full schedule of dates is: 2/28, 4/4, 4/25, 5/23, and 6/20.

Reading List:

1. 2/28:

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

Poems (1920)

Tradition and the Individual Talent

2. 4/4:

The Waste Land (1922)

Hamlet and his Problems

Dante

Blake

3. 4/25:

4. Note time and day change: 6/16 at 6pm:

Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

The Cocktail Party (1949)

Poetry and Drama (1951) 

Anthony Opal (b. 1983) is the author of ACTION and founding editor of The Economy. His poems can be found in various magazines and journals: Poetry, Boston Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and elsewhere. He lives near Chicago with his wife and daughter.

About ACTION “Anthony Opal’s series of unrhymed (or off-rhymed) sonnets begins with a prayer to everything or anything—from a lower case “god” to a “compassionate sloth” and a “homeless zoo keeper.” In these poems reverence and rebellion, desperation and control joust. Then they dance. Opal’s lines are consistently surprising (if that’s possible) and, more important, they make me believe them.” -RAE ARMANTROUT, author of Just Saying and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize

“If you’ve ever opened the hood of a car and found a motor of flowers or opened a closet and out flew a flock of waxwings, monarchs, and philosophers, you’ll be prepared for these poems. Otherwise, reader, get ready for the brilliant onslaught of these prayerful evocations, these rollercoaster sonnets, these radiant affirmations of life and art.” -DEAN YOUNG, author of Bender: New and Selected Poems

“’I write sonnets empty of everything yet containing all things…’ goes a visual and philosophical echo of the unutterable ‘G–d’ ACTION interrogates, prods. Such slippery refrains drive this lively book’s composition and arguments. Birds fall throughout, echoing the rough descent of haloed, winged things; the speaker wrestles an angel by a river and, in a later poem, a father by a sink; prophets stumble about stripped of epic context, conscripted to a world of Doritos bags, iPhones, and prescription meds. Indeed, religion and the sacred’s place in the contemporary are on Opal’s mind. For as much as, say, ‘Out of the Whirlwind’ might aver otherwise, these adroit and contemplative poems don’t only fuck with ‘ideas of the holy,’ they seek them out. -DOUGLAS KEARNEY, author of Patter and The Black Automaton

“Opal’s eye mocks its own seeing. With a ‘strange mercy that pulls us inward,’ these poems glint from the threads tethering private myth to a larger one. Taut with hope and balancing a heavy humor, this is language carved of a voice that wants to shout lullabies: ‘I want to sing / a song to myself in the silence of / myself.'” -EMILY KENDAL FREY, author of Sorrow Arrow and The Grief Performance

Snežana Žabić is the author of the short story collection U jednom životu (In a Lifetime), and the bilingual poetry collection Po(eat)ry/Po(jest)zija written with Ivana Percl and illustrated by Dunja Janković. She edits Packingtown Review, and occasionally blogs at Spurious Bastard.

About Broken Records (Forthcoming from Punctum Books, Winter 2015)
In 1991, Snežana Žabić lost her homeland and most of her family’s book and record collection during the Yugoslav Wars that had been sparked by Slobodan Milošević’s relentless pursuit of power. She became a teenage refugee, forced to flee Croatia and the atrocities of war that had leveled her hometown of Vukovar. She and her family remained refugees in Serbia until NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999.

After witnessing the first nights of NATO’s bombing, Žabić took flight again. She moved from country to country, city to city, finally settling in Chicago. She realized — reluctantly, because she didn’t want to relive the past — that she had to write about what had happened, what she had left behind, and what she had lost. Broken Records is the story of this loss, told with unflinching honesty, free of sentimentality or sensationalism. For the very first time, we learn how it felt to be first a regular teenager during the breakup of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars, and then a 30-something adult, perennially troubled by one’s uprooted existence.

Broken Records is not a neat narrative but a bit of everything — part bildungsroman, part memoir, part political poetry, part personal pop culture compendium. And while Žabić represents a Yugoslav diasporan subject, her book also belongs to an international generation whose formative years straddle the Cold War and the global reconfiguration of wealth and power, whose lives were spent shifting from the vinyl/analog era to the cyber/digital era. This generation knows that when they were told about history ending, they were told a lie.

Punctum Books is an open-access and print-on-demand independent publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage.

Topic: Everywhere we turn, we find a territory of nonhuman things. It is impossible to escape the material din of others—from material structures: plants, robots, animals and objects, to those all but invisible bodies outside the bounds of human perception: atoms, molecules, pollution, viruses, satellites, planets et al. While humanity has historically identified itself as something categorically superior to all else, this reading group examines texts, theories, and works of art that challenge the theoretical terms with which we engage our landscape. Following Nonhuman Kinds pursues the complicated strangers among us, ignoring hierarchical conventions in order to reframe and reconsider the interstitial, interspecies web we inhabit. Organized by Caroline Picard, with texts suggested by members of the reading group and co-curated by Rebecca Beachy, Karsten Lund, and Andy Yang, the reading group will discuss the work of Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Jennifer Moxely, Gertrude Stein, Vanessa Watts, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and others. Following Nonhuman Kinds is a direct continuation of a symposium that took first place in Bourges, France in April of 2014, and continued at Latitude last fall.

Schedule: The first meeting will take place on Thursday, February 19th. After that, meetings will take place on alternating Wednesdays starting March 4th, except for April 28th, which is a Tuesday. The final meeting will be on Friday, June 19th with artist presentations by Marissa Benedict, Lindsey French, and Mel Keiser. The full list of dates is: 2/19, 3/4, 3/18, 4/1, 4/15, 4/28, 5/13, 5/27, 6/10, and 6/19. All meetings take place from 7:30-9:30 PM.

Readings: These will be emailed to participants in PDF format in advance of each session. Additionally, participants can should plan on procuring 5 books included on this list (indicated by an “*”) on their own.

1. Thursday, February 19th @7:30 pm: There Are Things We Live Among,  Jennifer Moxley, Flood Editions.*

2. Wednesday, March 4th @7:30pm
– Tropical Malady, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (film)
-“Romanticism and the life of Things: Fossils, Totems and Images,” WJT Mitchell
-“How The Light Gets Out,” Michael Graziano

3. Wednesady, March 18th @ 7:30pm:
-“Play of Signification: Coyotes Sing in the Margins,” Natasha Seegert
-“Why Look at Animals,” John Berger

4. Wednesday, April 1st @ 7:30pm:
– “The Movement and Habits of Climbing Plants,” Darwin
– “An introduction to phytosemiotics: Semiotic botany and vegetative sign systems,” Kalevi Kull

5. Wednesday, April 15th @ 7:30pm
– “Lives of the Monster Plants,” T.S. Miller
– “Should Trees Have Standing?” Christopher Stone
– “Biocommunication of Plants,” Witzany/Baluska
– “Botanically Queer,” Catriona Sandilands (vimeo)

6.Tuesday,  April 28th @ 7:30pm:  Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things (University of Minnesota Press)*

7. Wednesday, May 13th @ 7:30pm
-“Decolonial Dreams,” Zoe Todd
-“Mountain/s: An Object Oriented Reading” Anthony Opal
-“Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!),” Vanessa Watts

8. Wednesday, May 27th @ 7:30pm
– The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abrams*
–  The Enchantment of Modern Life, Jane Bennett*

9. Wednesady, June 10th @ 7:30pm:  Hyper Objects, Timothy Morton*

10. Friday,  June 19th (Final Meeting) @ 7:30 pm
– Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein (emphasis on Objects and Food sections)
– “Telling Friends from Foes in the Time of the Anthropocene,” Bruno Latuor
– With select artist presentations from Marissa Lee Benedict, Mel Keiser,  and others.

About the organizers:

Born in Denver, Colorado, Rebecca Beachy is a recipient of both an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Chicago, her sculptures, interventions and installations have been exhibited at Iceberg Projects, 6018NORTH, the Southside Hub of Production, and Gallery 400, among other spaces. A recent artist in residence at the FRISE Künstlerhaus of Hamburg’s Altona, Rebecca has since been collaborating on a new Chicago residency for German artists through Chicago/Hamburg Sister Cities Exchange. Her written work has been published with literary journal Puerto del Sol and will be included in the Center for Humans & Nature’s upcoming City Creatures compilation (Univ. of Chicago Press, Spring 2014). In addition to teaching at ChiArts, she works as a volunteer specimen preparator and educator, where she demonstrates taxidermy to the public at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum for the Chicago Academy of Sciences, Department of Collections.

Karsten Lund has worked as a curator, writer, and artist since 2007, after completing an MA at the University of Chicago. He is currently a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he has organized multiple exhibitions, including the forthcoming Chicago Works: Sarah and Joseph Belknap, and assisted on a dozen others, including The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology and This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s. Alongside his work at the MCA, Karsten pursues a wide array of independent projects, often as a means to explore experimental approaches, collaborative structures, or more open-ended propositions. Most recently, he guest curated Phantoms in the Dirt, for the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (July 24-October 5). Past projects have been presented at the Hyde Park Art Center, Peregrine Program, and an immense factory shortly before its demolition, among other locations. As a writer and editor, Karsten has a strong interest in the essay as a creative form and he continues to explore new directions and alternative formats for exhibition catalogues and artist-driven publications.

Caroline Picard is an artist, writer and curator who explores the figure in relation to systems of power though on-going investigations of inter-species borders, how the human relates to its environment and what possibilities might emerge from upturning an anthropocentric world view. To further accent the porousness of borders and bounds, Picard’s projects manifest in a variety of cross-disciplinary mediums including curation, painting, video, administrative practices, interviews with artists, works of fiction, comics, and critical essays. She writes regularly for the Art21, Artslant, and Art Forum, and was the 2014 Curatorial Fellow at La Box, ENSA in Bourges France for her project, Ghost Nature.

Andrew Yang’s research practice explores a range of themes across the evolution & development of form and natural history. His work can be found in journals such as Biological Theory and Gastronomica, and exhibited in Germany, Japan, and throughout the US. He studied zoology and philosophy of science at Duke University (PhD) and visual arts and the Lesley University College of Art and Design (MFA). He is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago a Research Associate at the Field Museum of Natural History.

For three weeks between 2014 and 2015, Daviel Shy was a resident artist at Sector 2337. During that time she developed the storyboards, props, and costumes for her forthcoming feature length film adaptation of The Ladies Almanack by Djuna Barnes. In March, principal photography for the film commences in Paris and will continue this summer in Chicago. The project features artists, writers, and thinkers like Hélène Cixious (as herself), Eileen Myles (as Monique Wittig), Guinevere Turner (as Liane de Pougy), and more.

The Ladies Almanack is a feature-­length experimental narrative film (now in pre-production) written & directed by Daviel Shy, based on the novel of the same title by Djuna Barnes. The film is a kaleidoscopic tribute to women’s writing through the friendships, jealousies, flirtations and publishing woes of authors and artists in 1920’s Paris. Here you will find profiles of the artists who make up the film’s cast and crew.

Daviel Shy —a writer, performer, and filmmaker, born on April 14, 1984 in Panorama City, California, she grew up on the west and east coasts with five siblings, spending her childhood with them playing ongoing imagination games like “Teen Hall” that would last years, or otherwise drawing all the time and locking herself up in the family RV with a My Little Pony coloring book, coming out of the vehicle parked in the hot Los Angeles driveway, sweat-drenched but with a beautifully finished book ! As an Aries rising Pisces, she possesses the trademark fire qualities of high Energy, Ambition, and Impatience, pinballing across the intersection of a Six-corner Fever and slowing necessarily, deliberately, into privacy, where thoughts often make behind-the-scenes progress until they are ready to Appear, or Shine. In every piece of work is a dedication, implicit or explicit, and in hers, they are clearly love songs for women who have been continuously left out of the story. Her approach begins with historical research and ultimately seeks to revise the canon, blending in her own experiments and fictions, and holding strong to luddite beliefs that aged tools are not dead tools. Daviel currently lives and works in Chicago, hosts a monthly film screening called Lesbian Movie Night Ongoing Project (L.M.N.O.P.), will eventually complete her tattoo series of five wolves, and is working on a novel. She is the Writer and Director of The Ladies Almanack, which will be her first feature film.

Michael Heller has published over twenty volumes of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction.  His most recent works are This Constellation Is A Name: Collected Poems 1965-2010 (2012), Beckmann Variations & other poems (2010) and Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen(2008, expanded edition, 2012).  His collaborations with the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson include the multimedia works Constellations of Waking (2000), based on the life of Walter Benjamin,This Art Burning (2008) and Out of Pure Sound (2010).  A new collection of poems, Diánoia, is forthcoming in 2016.

Peter O’Leary’s most recent book is Phosphorescence of Thought, a book-length poem about the evolution of consciousness. A new book of criticism, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, and a new book of poetry, The Sampo, are forthcoming. He lives in Oak Park and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at the University of Chicago. He edits Verge Books.