salons & talks

threewalls hosts a variety of public programs aimed at engaging audiences in a conversations about the visual arts. The salon program is an open, topical conversation, where the public is invited to participate in a moderated conversation around current issues in contemporary art practice. SALONS invite a group of respondents to be on hand and part of the discussion, but everyone is welcome to come and be apart of the dialog. 

SALON SPRING 2012: 

OF OTHER CHICAGOS

“The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.”
- Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”

Taking its cue from Foucault’s landmark essay on heterotopias, threewalls’ 2012 salon series, Of Other Chicagos explores ways in which local artists help us interpret, imagine, and participate in regional history and culture. By taking their practices out of the studio, the artists, organizers, educators, designers, and culinary enthusiasts featured in this series cultivate the potential for new types of collaborative processes and experiences for all Chicagoans. The SALON 2012 series also highlights Propeller Fund awardees and other artists and creative thinkers who work in the public realm. 

Salon respondents expand our notions of art, research, activism, and community by framing activities taken from other disciplines as distinctly creative endeavors. Together, we will explore possibilities for an expanded notion of everyday expressions and innovations. The relationship to civic life will be taken into account during these conversations about the many diverse creative practices happening through our city. Collectively we will ask: What is the work that this art “does” and how are its traces imprinted upon our city? What can we learn from these practices as we move forward with creative production in Chicago?

Image: Revival, a project by Frankie M. Brown, Andres L. Hernandez, L. Anton Seals Jr, Propeller Fund 2011 awardee

Schedule:

All events are 7-9 PM

January 25
The Fine Art of Tinkering: adaptive re-use in object-making and public pedagogy
with Brett Ian Balogh, Jessica Charlesworth, Nic Collins, Tim Parsons, Erik Peterson, and Charlie Vinz

February 22
Micro Media: handmade and hyper local modes of communication
with Brandon Alvendia, Marco Braunschweiler, Edie Fake, John Neff, Aay Preston-Myint, Joe Proulx, Martine Syms, and Nell Taylor

March 14
Life on the Land: reimagining public space
with Nick Bastis, Mike Newman, Claire Pentecost, Ellen Rothenberg, Sarah Ross, Rashmi Ramaswamy, and Helen Slade

April 11
Unofficial Publics: evolving definitions of identity and community engagement
with Todd Diederich, Andres Hernandez, Samantha Hill, and Laura Shaeffer

May 8
Rooted: food and farming initiatives as regional artworks
with Martha Bayne, Fallen Fruit, Eric May, Andi Sutton, and Fereshteh Toosi

Of Other Chicagos is organized by guest facilitator Penny Duff. Prior to moving to Chicago in 2010 to attend SAIC’s Arts Administration & Policy Masters program, she spent the last decade between Portland, Oregon and Brooklyn, New York pursing work rooted in her interest in vernacular media forms’ utility as a form of creative, collaborative research. This passion has taken the forms of urban gardens, documentary workshops, oral history archives, and micro-radio experiments, among others. She earned a Masters of Media Arts from The New School in New York in 2009 and co-edited the book Transmission Arts: Artists and Airwaves. Most recently, she organized a series of intimate musical performances in residential spaces throughout her Chicago neighborhood called Found Sound; ran a “pop-up” radio station out of MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts; and is organizing a Citizen Science Fair at The Hideout.