Exhibition
Design

Potential Energy

Chicago is home to a rich and growing ecology of puppetry, bridging mediums and communities of makers. This sampling of puppets by local artists challenges expectations about puppetry and inspires the public to tell their own stories. Puppets are made to tell stories. By taking puppets off stage, we can focus on how artists design specific stories into each object. How do artists invent new ways to mechanize materials in motion, build cohesive worlds, and create characters that expand our ability to understand and empathize with ourselves and others?

This is an exhibition of potentialities. How can the possibility for a particular story be built into a puppet? What are new and unexpected ways to use familiar materials? What stories could you imagine telling with these puppets? What stories do you want to tell and how can you start telling them?

Exhibiting Artists
Alonso Galue * Christopher Knowlton * Eda Yorulmazoglu * Jacky Kelsey + August Boyne * Jacqueline Wade * Jaerin Son * Jerrell Henderson + Caitlin McLeod * KT Shivak * Manual Cinema * Mike Oleon * Myra Su * Pablo Monterrubio * Tom Lee * Wonder Wagon *

Printed on Risograph SF5130: florescent pink, cornflower blue, black

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Potential Energy was originaly concieved at Co-Prosperity in 2024. It is currently on display at the Chicago Cultural Center through April 6^th

Exhibition
Design

In        Concert
with Jen
de los Reyes

The first mid-career retrospective of influential social practice artist, organizer, and educator Jen de los Reyes* Canadian-born, Ithaca, NY-based Reyes has made a concerted effort to live and make work in accordance with her principles, including pragmatic organizing practices informed by her early years in punk music communities and recent anti-corporate and anti-racist direct action.
 
On the occasion of this exhibition, Co-Prosperity has produced a four book risograph publication series contextualizing the artist’s career and impact. The publication includes essays by Sampada Aranke; René De Guzman; Tom Finkelpearl; Eliza Gregory, Mark Menjivar, and Lexa Walsh; Zoë Heyn-Jones; Lee Painter-Kim; Stephanie Parrish; Anthony Stepter, Astria Suparak, and Nick Wylie. Publication was designed and produced by Josh Cook and Oscar Solis.

Exhibition +
Art Fair 

MdW Fair

MdW (said like: “Midway”), is a regional arts coalition centered in Chicago and spanning across the Central Midwest. This iteration includes an artist-run art fair, performances, screenings, lectures, publications, and road trips. MDW is planned and presented by seven artist-led projects assembled initially by some of the artist organizers at Public Media Institute in Chicago.

The fair was located at Mana Contemporary, across 5 floors and 3 days. Organizers needed a functional map and wayfinding systems for patrons making their  way through schedulded programming and artist booths. We expanded on the existing identity to create a playful catalogue, capitalizing on the unique typographic elements and colors.  Bright pink vinly was used to create the enviornamental wayfinding system, directing patrons towards state pavilions, the MdW stage, screening rooms, print areas and food & drinks.

Exhibition
Design

How do we make design labor visible?

During this performative exhibition at Typeforce 12, we welcome our audience to participate in a series of typographic experiments that surface the various forms of labor that are often obscured or minimized in the design process, while speculating on the future of design labor. Through this series of technological mediations, this publication was created with one critical text from each of three sections engaging in the tradition of urgent publishing: feminist perspectives, radical pedagogy, and queer language.

The programmed typesetter utilizing basil.js, selects the texts, typesets the copy, and prints out the publication for you. Creative coding programs act as type designer with outputs executed via pen plotter.

With four possible texts per section and six different cover options, there are a total of 384 possible versions of this publication. As such, all copies are unique objects.

Printed thanks to funds provided by University of Illinois Chicago School of Design and CADA Deans Professional Development Fund Award.

Exhibition
Design / 
Public History

What history can we make when we combine stories?

The Chicago History Corp is a community based trainning initiative whose goal is to teach participants how to collect historical interviews. The program was lead by UIC faculty and historian Dr. Jennifer Brier, centering the insights and experiences of community members during the pandemic.

I began the workshop with a brief survey of historical posters designed through pivital moments in public health crisis (The Spanish flu, Polio, AIDS etc).  Community historians were then asked to begin iterating on their own public health posters, translating their historial interviews into visual objects. I lead a series of group critiques that refined lo-fidelity sketches. Final versions of the posters were illustrated by a community of designers reflection on the oral history interview, further iterating on the historians concept.

Exhibition
Archive /
Public History 

Past and Futures of South Side Chicago:

“South Side Speculations: Pasts and Futures of Black Chicago” asks what’s possible when young people investigate their neighborhoods histories in one of the United States’ most segregated cities and imagine how to build healthier and freer futures. Resisting progress narratives that promise things will always get better and nostalgic accounts of carefree pasts, this online exhibition explores how economic, political and cultural structures evolve over time.

Redirecting our scale of imagination, we seek to challenge the idea that all problems have solutions. Speculation about pasts and futures, as a way of thinking, offers mechanisms to find and address problems more effectively.

The projects archived on this site speculate about pasts and futures of infrastructure, healthcare, and policing. The work you will see and hear should provoke questions about how we want the future of Chicago’s South Side to look, as it resists easy answers based on dominant representations of the city today.

South Side Speculations was produced by History Moves (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Transmedia Story Lab (University of Chicago). We received generous support from the Humanities Without Walls consortium, based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Humanities Without Walls consortium is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
website > South Side Speculation

Photography + Public History