Buddy Moves Home to Co-Prosperity for the Holidays

Where?
Buddy Pop Up @ Co-Prosperity
3219 S Morgan Street.
Chicago, IL 60608

When?
Nov 27 -Dec 20

Wednesday - Friday
2-3PM, by appointment
3-7PM, walk-ins welcome

Saturday & Sunday
1-2PM, by appointment
2-6PM, walk-ins welcome

Buddy, Public Media Institute’s new shop in the Chicago Cultural Center, is committed to giving artists and small manufacturers in Chicago a place to showcase and sell their goods and artwork. As a collaboration with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Buddy has been put on hold until the Cultural Center opens, but we have launched a website and are now opening for a limited time at Co-Prosperity for the holidays to try to help the artists we work with during the economic hardships of the pandemic.

Forget the big-box stores - support local artists and makers this gift-giving season. 100% of your purchase at Buddy goes directly to the artist who made it.

Our capacity is limited to 4 customers at a time to ensure social distancing. Mask required to enter.

You can always also order online at hi-buddy.org and have your items delivered.

Contact:info@hi-buddy.org
Instagram: @buddy.chicago
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buddy.chicago

Casey Carsel

November 17, 2020–January 31, 2021

Opening event, November 18, 12.30–4.00pm

The opening occurred on the sidewalk outside the Co-Prosperity and down the street at Kimski, where a garlic-themed Community Kitchen meal was available to take home.

"To You I Can Talk" Casey Carsel in conversation with Sharon Mazer, December 17, 6.00pm on Lumpen Radio Twitch TV

Garlic and a whole lotta lovin’ — Textile artist Quishile Charan’s 2019 love letter to Casey

Community Kitchen menu

Didactic and menu typeset by Unyimeabasi Udoh.

This show is a part of Co-Prosperity Peers, a series of solo exhibitions initiated by the Co-Prosperity Programming Council. Four artists are selected each year to take over the Co-Prosperity windows and hold programming during the run of their show.

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Casey Larkin Mazer Carsel is a New Zealand-Jewish editor, writer, and artist. Her practice focuses on how communal narratives are constructed and passed down through generations and across the world, and how these stories shape identities and make connections. What is held onto? What is forgotten? What is lost in translation? Carsel received her BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland (2016), and her MFA in Creative Writing from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2019). Recent solo exhibitions include Shum Klum, RM Gallery, Auckland (2019); When a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick (but we sing, we still sing), Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin (2019); and Rather owe you than not pay you, MEANWHILE onsite, Wellington (2017). In 2019 she co-founded Plates: An Experimental Journal with Unyimeabasi Udoh. She lives and works between Auckland and Chicago.

Instagram: @carsellular

“The Black Body, whether on the auction block, the American plantation, hanged from a lightpole as part of a lynching ritual, attacked by police dogs within the Civil Rights era, or staged as a “criminal body” by contemporary law enforcement and judicial systems, is a body that has been forced into the public spotlight and given a compul- sorry visibility. It has been made “to be given to be seen” 

- Harvey Young, Embodying Black Experience: Stillness, Critical Memory, and the Black Body, 2010

Body/Space by Anthony Sims

Oct 12th to Nov 6th Co-Prosperity - 3219 S Morgan, Chicago

Performances in the windows each night from 7:00 - 9:00PM

Anthony Sims's practice utilizes durational performance to prompt prolonged visibility for black queer bodies. In his examinations of black queerness, the importance of the environment and the representation of space plays a vital role.

In Body/Space, Sims adopts the form of a tableau vivant (a living image), creating a series of 26 performances that are unique to each of Co-Prosperity’s three windows. Body/Space focuses on conscious and subconscious labeling, neglection, and interpretation of black queerness in the contemporary art world and LGBTQ+ community. By introducing shifting scenic elements and costume design, he will explore vast eras of time, beginning in the 1920s and ultimately documenting the past 100 years of black queer liberation. Reckoning with the window pane as a photographic lens, Sims aims to highlight the power of resistance in stillness.

Stillness in performance can allow for a phenomenological experience in the spectator. In theater, speech and action are found to be the two key elements for understanding. Sims is more interested in the idea of a conscious and subconscious interpretation that is enhanced visually, without the presence of speech and action in this project. This will promote the examination of our own bodies, and question what things arise in them when we see a black body in space. This stillness introduces the dynamic of performative viewing, which stresses the audience’s role as viewers that are also viewed back.

 Performing in the age of Covid-19 has raised huge issues within performance communities. To ensure everyone's safety, Sims's target audience is those who pass by the window. Like most durational work, it's about the observation. 

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This show is a part of Co-Prosperity Peers, a series of solo exhibitions initiated by the Co-Prosperity Programming Council. Four artists are selected each year to take over the Co-Prosperity windows and hold programming during the run of their show.

Anthony Sims is a Chicago based interdisciplinary Performance Artist/ Theatre Maker whose mission is to embody Afro American and queer experiences through performance. His work takes on an existentialist approach by focusing on the autonomy of the body within a systematic society. Utilizing the theory of The Black Body by Harvey Young, Sims explores critical memory of The Black Body by creating experiential overlaps that manifest visibility. The Black Body, whether a knee is on its neck, staged as a criminal, hung from a tree or light post, made to serve at plantations, auctioned off like cattle is a body that is given compulsory visibility. Researching that given visibility, Sims uses interdisciplinary methods through collage by constructing new visibility, thus reclaiming The Black Body. His work has been seen at Links Hall, Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery, The Chicago Physical Theatre Festival, The Peace Studio, Third Estate Art, Slate Arts, The Center of Afrofuturist Studies, and several other locations. He was just recently an Artist in Residence at the ADDS DONNA gallery in Humboldt Park.

anthonyjsims.com

BEING: Welcome to Humanity
September 26-November 6
Viewing By Timed Appointment Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays 12-6 pm
Sign up here to schedule a visit

"BEING: Welcome to Humanity" features seven up-and-coming Chicago-based contemporary artists who reflect on the perception of mental health and human emotion. It aims to shift the way that we view mental health by featuring raw, expressive imagery that speaks to the human in us all. Being stares into the darkness of human reflection and unlocks a universe of emotion. These artists dive deep into the burden of sentience and bring their mental health stories to the table. Here; we are removing the varnish, manifesting the true self, and creating a place of comfort and understanding. Being will hurt and heal. Join us as we traverse this winding path and embrace emotional release.

“The combination of works confronts the internalized nature of mental illnesses among POC as a result of generational teachings. The show was conceptualized after a conversation I had with my mother after seeking out mental health counselling. Upon speaking to her I understood that my propensity for mismanaging and developing a façade for my depression comes from an imprint of generational stigma. The research that followed concluded that this stigma is prevalent among POC as a result of needing to develop an emotional shield from oppression and its impact.”- Statement by Ahniya Butler, Curator of “BEING” & Co-Prosperity Programming Council member. Ahniya previously co-curated Shut Up Stone Mountain, which opened in June 2019; this will be her first solo curatorial endeavor at Co-Prosperity.

Programming for BEING will include:

• Comfort Food

Viewable on Youtube @ ComfortFoodTV

New videos released October 14th & 28th

Food provides an intimate connection with our personal moods and is often a pathway to the healing powers of our ancestors. Join artists in the exhibitions as they create comfort food recipes from across the country while telling the stories behind each dish.

Submit your dish and story to be considered for inclusion here

• MENtalk Health

October 9th & 23rd, 7:30 PM

This interactive live forum will feature four male-identifying artists discussing their mental health and navigating through stigma to promote better mental health care for men. 

• BEING: Welcome to the Artist

November 4th, 7 PM

Join the artists from the exhibition on Twitch where we will discuss our inspirations, methods of self-care, and answer your most pressing questions. 

How to visit the show:

Sign up here to schedule a visit

Due to COVID-19, the exhibition will not have a public opening, but visitors will be able to sign up for viewing hours Thursday, Friday, and Sunday 12-6 pm or by special appointment. One guest or small group (10 or fewer) at a time will be greeted by co-prosperity staff and welcomed to view the show in 30-minute increments. We ask that visitors maintain social distancing and keep masks on in the gallery. Wheelchair ramps are available and restrooms are gender-neutral and wheelchair accessible.

This exhibition features works from:

Ahniya Butler & Christopher Travis
@thegreenhauz

Ahniya Butler is an undergraduate student at UIC, an independent curator hailing from Robbins Illinois with a love for herbalism cooking, and ancestral connections. In her personal art practice Butler's sculptural and photographic work centers around human existentialism, the ephemerality of life, and navigating human emotion.

Christopher Travis is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago with degrees in Cinema and Media studies and African American studies. Travis is a writer and director of short films that embody reality and create organic, human moments.

Angela Redmond
@angieredmondartist

Angela Redmond uses her art to tell her story through personal and current societal events; as a means to promote social change. She uses the subject of social justice to insist on change in stereotypes of cultures through the concept of humanistic emotions. Using color she emphasizes the complexities of race and its value to human emotions and behaviors. Compelled by the portrait and the figure; she robustly applies the oil paint on the canvas to bring the applied texture to the actual. Her work is not limited to the voice of one culture but is speaking to all in our community, our society, our human race; while we respect our differences and honor our similarities.

Santana Villanueva
@santanavillanuevaart

Santana is a graffiti artist, painter, and recent graduate from ISU whose works feature chaotic arrays of shapes, lines, and figures in an explosively colorful manner.

Soulart
@soulartchicago

A Pilsen native, musician, artist, and electronics mechanic Soulart has always had a passion for expressing his true self through art. Each abstract painting is interwoven with a story of depression, anxiety, racism, and addiction and proves that beauty can come from such dark spaces in life. Abstract oil painting is his current favorite medium to release the fire from within his soul.

Timothy Cooper Jr
@timcooperjr

We do not translate emotion through any spoken language, but rather with our bodies. Cooper's art has grown to reflect that within each work. Every piece is a construction of rich emotion that captures feelings and moods never defined by society, beautifully expressed through a lens. Each work can not simply be categorized as photography but instead well-expressed poetry.

Yvette Lara
@zbette

A Chicago native and graduate of Texas A&M,  Through the lens of a young WOC, Yvette Lara creates photography, paintings, and videos that embody restless anxiety and help you find your way back home.