Public Media Institute and Co-Prosperity are honored to present Piotr Szyhalski’s COVID_19: Labor Camp Report Project, which will be wheat pasted and installed on the Co-Prosperity exterior mural wall and on the walls of Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar and Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream.

On March 24, 2020, in direct response to the global coronavirus pandemic, artist Piotr Szyhalski created his first COVID-19: Labor Camp Report. What started as a single drawing slowly morphed into a daily practice, a way to reconcile and record the thoughts, feelings, and change being wrought in the world. These ink drawings and hand-lettered texts were shared daily by Szyhalski on Instagram, poignantly capturing our politically fraught and painful landscape over the course of 225 days. Accom-panied by powerful captions by the artist, the series operates as both a witness to the current crisis and a container of time, time that is both labored and lost.

These daily dispatches, shared with thousands via social media platforms, serve as a way of witnessing, processing, and recording the complexities of life during the first eight months of the global COVID-19 pandemic. At times harsh and confrontational, other times quiet and contemplative, the Reports map multiple layers of interwoven historical phenomena: from the global health crisis, economic inequities, and the uprising following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police to environmental catastrophes and the waning days of the autocratic regime in the United States.

The series COVID-19: Labor Camp Reports comprises 225 posters, hand drawn by Szyhalski daily from March 24 to November 3, 2020.

Co-Prosperity is located at 3219 S. Morgan Street,

Maria’s Packaged Goods & Community Bar is located at 960 W 31st St

Pizza Fried Chicken Ice Cream is located next door at 964 W 31st St.

SLAYSIAN 2.0 is a multi-artist group exhibition curated by Jenny Lam

SLAYSIAN 2.0 is a group exhibition whose journey began in the summer of 2019, when Lam proposed an art show that would function as a celebration—a celebrAsian, if you will—of local Asian American artists. In January 2020, Lam put out an open call for SLAYSIAN, emphasizing the absence of theme and that the artists did not necessarily have to make art about being Asian; simply being and creating were enough. The ensuing exhibition was scheduled to open on March 20, 2020; this later happened to become the first day of Illinois’ stay at home order. As the opening approached, the pandemic became a reality. Lam postponed the exhibition “until things get better (have hope; they will),” as she wrote at Artists on the Lam, and spent the beginning of shelter in place moving the exhibition online, where it served as welcome respite and garnered acclaim from local, national, and international outlets. An excerpt from South Side Weekly’s article about the virtual show:

“Spanning neighborhoods, ethnicities, and mediums, SLAYSIAN showcases a subset of artists that have always been part of the city’s art scene, but rarely acknowledged as a collective. […] SLAYSIAN also examines how artists can value their identity while refusing to be pigeonholed by it. […] Their work raises questions of what it means to inhabit spaces designed specifically for artists to grow, but where the Asian American experience may still be sidelined. […] In addition to its role in educating and engaging with the broader Chicago community, much of SLAYSIAN reflects an inward-looking conversation among Asian Americans. […] SLAYSIAN embodies the aspiration that those at the outskirts of a society can redefine what success means for ourselves. […] By allowing for a multitude of stories, […] Instead of being locked into one narrative as victim or immigrant, their art is allowed to grow with the times. […] The exhibition showcases the determination of individuals to find their own answers to what the role of the Asian American artist is.” -Eileen Li, South Side Weekly, June 2020.

Now, two years later, you are invited to enjoy this exhibition in person. The show itself has evolved; many of the artists have created brand new pieces for this iteration. At long last, we proudly present to you SLAYSIAN 2.0.

Hailing from all over Chicago and the surrounding Midwest area, SLAYSIAN 2.0’s participating artists include:

Aimy Tien, Alex Kostiw, Caroline Liu, Charlene Moy, Chris Gallevo, Dao Nguyen, James Gu, Julius Dizon-Cruz Bautista, Justin Suico, Kaitlyn Hwang, Kristin Anahit Cass, Muriel Christensen, Nini Hawes, Priscilla Huang, Richard Gessert, Robert Apolinar, Sam Riesmeyer, Sophie Pokorny, Stafford Smith, Susie Xiong (InsomniaBird), Vivian Le, and Yuqing Zhu.

SLAYSIAN 2.0 opens on November 20th and will be on view through January 15th. Viewing hours are Fridays from 4 to 7pm and Saturdays from 2 to 5 pm. Join us for the opening party for SLAYSIAN 2.0 along with PLAYFIELDS, the window show by the Chicago duo ZoiZoi at Co-Prosperity on November 20th from 6 to 9 pm.*

*You must wear a mask and you must be fully vaccinated. Let’s continue to keep each other and our communities safe. Proof of vaccination will be required. 

THE WINDOW SHOW PLAYFIELDS BY CHICAGO DUO ZOIZOI IS OPENING ON NOVEMBER 20TH

Playfields is a whimsical homage to spaces that fostered Chicago’s socio-sonic history. This exhibition features five distinctly significant venues of the city’s past as they might be commemorated on the playfield of a pinball machine, an entertainment icon in itself that enjoyed its heyday when Chicago was the machine’s manufacturing capital. View this arcade of panels as windows into moments of Chicago’s cultural history; playfields depicting spaces of play from our city’s vibrant past. 

In the context of a pandemic that gave way to an onslaught of beloved establishment closures, making a point to celebrate the memory of long-lost venues is beyond nostalgia — it’s a necessity.

Playfields is a part of the Co-Pro Peers series and will be on view from November 20th through January 15th. Join us for the opening party for Playfields and SLAYSIAN 2.0 - the 20+ artists group show inside Co-Pro - on November 20th from 6 to 9 pm.*

*You must wear a mask and be fully vaccinated. Let’s continue to keep each other and our communities safe. Proof of vaccination will be required. 

About ZoiZoi

Zoi Zoi is the interdisciplinary creative duo of Joanie Faletto and Myles Emmons. Pairing a painting and fiber arts practice with design/fabrication, Joanie and Myles meld their backgrounds to set off on design adventures that celebrate their shared joys, like dancing, bright colors, house music, and borzois.

In 2019, an extensive network of artists brought all their senses to the Mississippi River, paddling downstream in canoes, venturing up multiple tributaries, clambering over collapsing infrastructures, trudging across muddy banks and experiencing the river’s seasonal pulse. From the Headwaters in Minnesota to the Bird’s Foot Delta in New Orleans we set up five research hubs, delving deep into written and oral histories and creating works of all kinds, including guided tours, performances, pamphlets, lectures, shared meals and temporary shows for visitors and local inhabitants. Our concerns ranged across river ecologies, Indigenous, Black and settler-colonial histories, agriculture, urbanization, engineering, state and corporate violence, and the overflowing of liberation struggles that continue today.

How to put all that into a single retrospective? What we’ve developed is a collectively organized exhibition curating both existing and new works, gathering energy with an opening in Minneapolis, then setting out for further meanders downstream. Just follow the water to the latest edition: from the Mississippi up the Illinois, to the North and South branches of Chicago’s Backward River. Co-Prosperity and a newly opened space, Watershed Art & Ecology, are the ports. The artistic research group Deep Time Chicago is the host. Love and chaos are the keys.

Welcome to the OVERFLOW.

 Festival:

– The Chicago edition of OVERFLOW has been conceived in collaboration with the Backward River Festival, developed by the UIC Freshwater Lab and the School of Art and Art History. The festival takes place on October 16-17 at the Eleanor St Boathouse, 2828 S Eleanor St, 11am-7pm.

Project website: tinyurl.com/overflow-chicago

Host website: deeptimechicago.org

Festival website: thebackwardriver.org

Venues:

– Co-Prosperity, 3219-21 S Morgan St. Reception Friday Oct 15 6-9 pm, visiting hours Fridays 4-8pm and Saturdays 2-6pm, open through November 13.

– Watershed Art and Ecology, 1821 S. Racine Ave. Visiting hours Friday and Saturday 4-8pm, Sunday 2-6pm, open October 22 through December 1.

Participating artists:

Kayla Anderson, Sara Black, Jeremy Bolen, Isabell Carbonell, Andrea Carlson, Jennifer Colten, Adam Crosson, Annie-Laurie Erickson, Tia-Simone Gardner, Beate Geissler, Amber Ginsburg, Ryan Griffis, Monica Haller, Derek Hoeferlin, Brian Holmes, Sarah Kanouse, Jenny Kendler, John Kim, Brian Kirkbride, Emily Knudson, Sarah Lewison, John Lund, Marlena Novak, Heather Parrish, Claire Pentecost, Sydney Petersen, Mat Rappaport, Steve Rowell, Oliver Sann, Jenny Schmid, Michael Swierz, Corinne Teed, Joe Underhill, Monique Verdin, Joslyn Willauer, Paul Wu, Andy Yang, Jay Alan Yim.

Acknowledgments:

The research phase of this project unfolded in 2019 under the title Mississippi. An Anthropocene River, with extensive input and generous support from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, both in Berlin, Germany. For documentation of this continental-scale transdisciplinary cultural program, see https://anthropocene-curriculum.org/project/mississippi.

The first version of this exhibition was shown at:

Q.arma Gallery in Minneapolis, July 29-Sept 30, 2021.

It was conceived in parallel to the exhibition:

Many Waters: A Minnesota Biennial, at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, July 24-Oct 2, 2021.

Over 50 institutions were involved in the Anthropocene River project, but special thanks to Goethe-Institut Chicago, Augsburg University River Semester, the Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, Macalester College, the University of Minnesota, and the Q.arma Gallery.

DEEP TIME CHICAGO is an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of the Anthropocene Curriculum program at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany, in 2016. Our goal is to explore one core idea: humanity as a geological agency, capable of wreaking violent disruptions on the earth system and inscribing present modes of industrialized existence into deep time. By knitting together group readings, guided walks, lectures, panels, screenings, performances, publications and exhibitions, we are developing a public research trajectory, offering a variety of formats where Chicago area inhabitants can grapple with the crucial questions of global ecological change, as experienced right here at home. Through our participation in Mississippi. An Anthropocene River we have struck up new friendships and launched continental-scale collaborations, whose artistic expressions can now be seen in the exhibition OVERFLOW.

Recuerdos explores the complexities that are generated by the re-contextualization of a quinceañera’s cultural celebration within a queer identity. It includes various paintings and sculptures and serves as the performance space for the artists’ quinceañera celebration. The exhibition defies social assumptions about queerness, femme identity, masculine identity, and their cultural identity. It aims to speak on the duality of trauma and joy that the artists have experienced being queer within the Latinx community. It is by focusing on this relationship that Recuerdos explores themes of neglect, self-acceptance, and nostalgia.

Recuerdos is a group exhibition curated by Moises Salazar, featuring works by Juan Arango Palacios, Lissette Bustamante and Moises Salazar.

The opening reception will take place at Co-Prosperity on August 14th from 6pm to 9pm. The use of masks and proof of vaccination will be required.

Open hours for Recuerdos are Wednesdays and Fridays 4-8 pm and Saturdays 2-6 pm. Make your viewing appointment here.

A Quinceñera celebration will take place at Co-Prosperity as a closing event on Sepetmeber 21st at 7pm.

Juan Arango Palacios was born in Pereira, Colombia, and was raised in a traditional Catholic home. Their traditional upbringing was cut short by a series of migrations that their family took seeking a better future. The family moved from Colombia to southern Louisiana where Juan’s sense of identity and belonging began to be skewed by their lack of knowledge of the English language, their unfamiliarity with American culture, and their internal struggle with a queer identity. Living in other parts of Louisiana and Texas, and being further subdued by the conservative culture in which they lived, Juan continued to live with a constant fear of their own identity throughout their youth. Juan graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has found a safe-haven within the queer community in Chicago.

 As queer body that was raised in a post-colonial context in Colombia, my identity was shaped in the shadows of North American normativity. My sense of self was further confounded by a series of migrations that my family experience in search of work and a more prosperous future. Moving through varying homophobic and misogynistic cultures in Louisiana and Texas, I have formed a disembodied identity that is not attached to any specific homeland and has always been challenged by the general norm.

My practice works towards addressing the lived experiences of ambulant queer identities that have been marginalized within a diasporic or migratory context. Through the fluid and boundless medium of paint, I have been able to represent memories,places, people, and archetypes that I associate with the safety, survival, and endurance of queer bodies in spaces that challenge their existence. Also, through the process of weaving I am producing narrative objects that aim at expressing the stories of individuals within a similar context. Placing emphasis on color and composition, my work aims at creating images glorifying and fantasizing the idea of safety in a queer experience.

Lissette Bustamante is a Chicago-based multi-disciplinary artist that explores contemporary urban landscapes through multimedia installations, specializing in sculpture and digital mediums. Bustamante is a recent graduate of University of Illinois at Chicago. 

Combining archived images with three-dimensional objects, I strive to curate an experience that embodies interactive integration. With materials such as metal, cement, and plastic, the work pays homage through visual parallels to industrialist urban landscapes, influenced by my upbringing in Chicago, IL. I am interested in abstracting images to mimic the formation of memory. By reprocessing family documents, my work alludes to the subjectivity of recollection while forefronting human interaction. Surrounded by a historically industrialized landscape with a huge immigrant population, it has informed my conflation of brutal aesthetics with intangible nostalgia.

MOISES SALAZAR is a non-binary multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Being first generation Mexican American has cemented a conflict within Moises Salazar’s political identity, which is the conceptual focus of their practice. Whether addressing queer or immigrant bodies, their practice is tailored to showcasing the trauma, history, and barriers these people face. Reflecting on the lack of space and agency they possess. Salazar presents queer and immigrant bodies in environments where they can thrive and be safe. It is by examining the intersections of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, queerness and the United States history that Moises Salazar addresses the reality of the barriers that immigrants and queer individuals face with the intention to begin to dismantle the myths and stereotypes used to criminalize and dehumanize them.

 Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Woaw Gallery, Salon ACME, HAIR+NAILS, the Museum of contemporary art Chicago, NADA FAIR Chicago, Kohn Gallery, the Chicago Cultural Center, and most recently at their solo exhibition at Mindy Solomon.  They have participated in the ACRE residency and are a recipient of the LuminArts Visual arts Fellowship. They hold a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Full of Subtlety, if You Believe Me by Lauren Sudbrink 

August 7th at 4pm PM to September 11th
In the windows of Co-Prosperity - 3219 S Morgan, Chicago

Full of Subtlety, if You Believe Me is a series of fifteen performative events stemming from Sudbrink’s larger work “840 Variations on Vexations,” a project which presents conceptual, poetic responses to duration, endurance, labor, and artistic interpretation, providing possibilities and inspirations for artists and musicians considering their own roles in labor and the re-inscription of the creative process. 

Throughout the recent year we found ourselves going through cycles of restriction, repetition and boredom – noticing more astutely the simple gestures and routines of our daily lives, dictated by the pandemic. Through a selection of works done by single performers - gesture, repetition and labor will be interpreted and perceived through Co-Pro’s glass window displays. Like listening to or playing Vexations 840 times, these works approach the evolution of boredom: from an offensive characteristic we are encouraged to avoid, to familiarity, acceptance and investment and finally, to a heightened intensity of experience. As silence offsets, complements and drives sound, so boredom offsets, complements and drives excitement. 

There will be weekly performances in each of the three windows of Sudbrink’s 840 Variations on Vexations. Participatory sidewalk events will accompany each opening. Copies of Chris Reeves’ new publication “A Little, Very Abridged, History of Storefront Window Events” will be available as well.

Full of Subtlety, if You Believe Me opens on Saturday August 7th and will be on view until September 11th. The performances will commence at 4pm each Saturday, skipping only September 4th.

About Lauren Sudbrink:

Lauren Sudbrink is an artist living and working in Chicago. Recent and on-going works deal with the transactional nature of experience, examining the potentials and difficulties inherent in participation and play, as evidenced by her on-going series on 19th Century composer, Erik Satie’s “Vexations,” titled “840 Variations on Vexations.” This question of participation and experience has been particularly significant as we navigate the daily challenges of the social and our shared experiences.     

Letters to Chicago by Almighty & Insane Books

On view August 6 - August 8, Fri/Sat 12-7pm and Sun 12-5pm

In 2019, Sir Charles and Almighty & Insane Books collaborated with risograph printer Flatlands Press to create the book Letters To Chicago. Within its pages Sir Charles's lettering work is paired with mid-20th century photographs from the archives of Chicago’s Urban Renewal Department. Documenting the process of identifying “blighted” buildings/neighborhoods and targeting them for destruction/replacement, these photos preserve images of bygone structures in the oldest parts of the city. This initiative displaced many from their homes for the sake of municipal infrastructure projects, a new university campus, public housing, and private real estate developments. With a mind to current parallels, Sir Charles’s letters, symbols, and messages ghost through this history demonstrating a new lettering mode combining calligraphy with graffiti handstyles that is both deeply indebted to and an integral product of his native city of Chicago.

This exhibition celebrates Letters To Chicago through a display of its individual pages on the walls of Co-Prosperity to continue a conversation around this history and related subjects of identity, displacement, and community. To support and deepen the historical context, ephemera from the archive of Almighty & Insane Books will be on view, including a small selection of social athletic club dance cards from 1901 to 1930 and gang compliment cards from the 1960 to 1980, along with house music flyers from the 1980s courtesy of DJ Mario "Liv It Up" Luna. There will also be an archive of Made In Chi-Town With Love apparel designs on display, representing a contemporary small creative business from Chicago manifesting the aesthetics of their culture with their own twist. Sir Charles and Michelle Vega teamed up to create a brand to continue the dialogue of inner city challenges many of our youth continue to face. Their brand has grown widely and their story has now reached international levels, but has never lost their focus or message.

Finally, there will be new works on canvas by Sir Charles, following in and expanding on a series of “scrolls” he made in 2020. These commission-based scrolls incorporated messages of unity, love, forgiveness, and growth, hand-lettered in ink over patches of paint and other pigments on loose canvas. The new work will reflect an evolution of this process, and a movement forward from the original Letters To Chicago project in which the exhibition is rooted.

About Almighty & Insane Books

Almighty & Insane Books is a platform to examine/preserve history and culture from the city of Chicago by working with artists and archives to create printed publications.

About Sir Charles

“My name Sir Charles is a representation of the gang violence that affects many children all throughout our cities. My work is to speak up against gang violence and continue bringing attention to issues that keep children and communities from advancing in their growth. I see a healing factor that can be translated through the work we create and if we tune it just right, we’ll be able to convey our message through feeling and memory.”

About Mario Luna

Mario "Liv It Up" Luna is a DJ, collector, and life-long Chicagoan who specializes in house music vinyl and memorabilia. His flyer collection is featured in the Beyond Heaven book series, published by Almighty & Insane Books.

Pakiramdam by Alex Kostiw

July 3 at 5 PM to August 1
In the windows of Co-Prosperity - 3219 S Morgan, Chicago

Finally, I arrive. There is my mother, waiting for me. Does she need anything? She admits, “Maginaw nang kaunti.” Somewhere else, I think, Here is the place where my Tagalog is perfect.

All along the way had been a thousand blankets I could have gathered, pulled across states, an ocean, a forest of pine and birch, and billowed onto her small shoulders. Instead, my hands are pale and empty.

So picture, like I did, a doubling: a wide, vacant duvet cover you fold in half. Enough for a warm night in a winter monsoon (let’s say), or a cool night in this kind of summer. Thick. Crumpling over you.

You can stick out your limbs if it gets too hot.

Now, wake up. Pakiramdam mo you are untethered in water.

There is a thought that runs in your family and into you: that a strange feeling in your body has its origin in someone you love.

Wonder whose ghosts meet up with yours. Where is your mother dreaming?

Pakiramdam, meaning intuition or feeling, explores how distances both actual and metaphorical render the real as otherworldly, and ways that kinship connects us across such distances. It encodes a personal history of immigration, migration, parentage, and embodiments of hybridity along the way, bringing the ghostly and human into a single space. In the project, ghosts are not just representations of the past, they are disembodied presences who are a phone call, text message, or video chat—a technological “seance”—away. Meanwhile, to be human is to contend with demands for exactitude, specific locations in space and time, and visible manifestations of identity.

The fabric panels reference family photos taken in the Philippines and, later, Sweden, household objects that relate to the family’s origins, and the Barong Tagalog and Filipiniana dresses, traditional Filipino garments that have elements reflecting the Spanish colonial era. Painted on the windows, a comic illustrates a simple act of folding bed linens. With overlays and layerings that include viewers’ reflections in the glass, the project interrogates distinctions between body and person, stranger and self, parent and child, or immigrant and local; between absence and presence, especially when only distanced interaction is possible; and, within the multifaceted (or multiracial) identity, between authenticity and synthesis.  

As the viewing angle changes, our ghost and human bodies come together and shift apart.

Pakiramdam will open on July 3rd, at 5pm and will be on view in the windows of Co-Prosperity until July 31st. The artist will host two guided workshops that will prompt recollection, writing, and/or drawing to visualize our memories and encode them into short poetry comics. Each one starts with a look at abstract comics, poetry comics, and montage techniques for inspiration. Everyone is welcome—no previous experience with comics or creative writing is required.

Object Memory - Saturday, July 17th at 2pm at Co-Prosperity

Participants will bring in a personal artifact—an heirloom or object with a long history (or several pictures of one)—to use as the basis for their comic. After a brief look at abstract and poetry comics, we’ll collect memories related to the object, and use them to structure and create a comic.

In Other Words - Saturday, July 31st at 12pm at the Chicago Cultural Center Learning Lab

Participants will use a favorite line of poetry or prose to generate the content and structure for their comics. We’ll look at examples of montage and related techniques from a variety of sources. Then, we will collect, curate, and montage personal and inherited memories in an original comic.

About Alex Kostiw

Alex Belardo Kostiw is a graphic designer, artist, and educator. Her practice deals in poetic and iterative elements, visual structures of comics, and conceptually driven forms. Like dense knots, her publications invite interactive, intuitive reading—even as they resist full unraveling. By exploring the ambiguities of language and expression, her work forms a liminal space for feeling out complicated realities of identity, human intimacy, and unfamiliar worlds. Alex received an MFA in Visual Communication Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago. She has participated in such shows as the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, Chicago Alternative Comics Expo, LA Art Book Fair, and Chicago Art Book Fair. Her work is in the special collections of several libraries and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She lives and works in Chicago.

tenderly-honestly.com

Before the After Party is a long-postponed group exhibition featuring five 2019 ACRE Residents: Amy Cousins, Charles Ryan Long, Christopher Sonny Martinez, Toisha Tucker and Zachary Hutchinson.

Co-curated by Nick Wylie, Sofia Moreno and Paula Volpato.

• Opening Celebration: Friday (6/18) 6-10 PM

• Open Hours: Thursday through Saturday 4-7 PM

Before the After Party is one in a sea of exhibitions opening after waking from a long slumber of indeterminate postponement. At the first public Co-Prosperity opening since we started referring to the pandemic in the past tense, we see a glimpse of time travels queerer than the sticky ticking of lockdown time.

Recorded history would have us believe that homosexuals and transgender folks are modern inventions, born of ever-shifting recent language—“Inverts,” “Comrades,” “Fairies,” or wordlessly with a flip of the wrist, a bandana in the back pocket, a sly look over the shoulder. For a window of time queer life was marked by a non-participation in normative biological time—puberty, dating, living, kids, nest, retirement. By contrast, queers often had long, studious childhoods, and grew up to enjoy what might look like a prolonged adolescence—a continued participation in countercultural parties, protests and pageantry usually seen as the realm of teens and young adults tasting what it might feel like to be free. The queer refusal to leave the party at the end of the night, to go home to a normative life and sleep it off, is where the queer possibilities begin, the transient site of the After Party.

Recalling pasts that are still present, the exhibition invites us to imagine how to revere the radical legacies that haunt us while demanding futures queerer and more beautiful than the ones on offer. Charles Ryan Long sees a near future marked by the inevitable “end of white manhood” and shows us a path to an Afro futurism paved in love and rage.  If you want to rage, love, come to a party where you’ll be invited to throw Toisha Tucker’s weighted confetti at sundown, be transfixed by Amy Cousins’ mammalian disco ball near the almost-lifesized protesters who brought Chicago our first queer dance party, check your look against images of queer revelry captured by Christopher Sonny Martinez, look at slide shows of what will be while containing your excitement in the bracelet you’re clutching, and at some point find a corner to drift off, wrapped in Zachary Hutchinson’s festooned blankets of the recent past. When you leave you won’t know what time it is.

The exhibition, already displaced in time, will be displaced in space as well. Launching in Chicago at the outset of summer, it will then have a second life as the first show at Co-Prosperity Catskill, a new space in the New York town where Washington Irving’s short story Rip Van Winkle was born. The antihero of the story is a colonial buffoon who takes a too-strong drink from giants and sleeps through the American Revolution. When he finally wakes up and goes to drink more at King George’s Pub, he finds that the name of the colonizing monarch has been erased. 

In some ways it can be nice to imagine going to sleep one day and waking up in a world changed by revolution. There’s also the rebel’s somniphobia- fear of not being awake for Marx’s millenarian moments when we have so much rage and love to help fuel them. Could the queer future be in the gay past, though? We could just do the separatist thing of our foreparents- run away to farms and say, “wake me when it’s over, when you’re having the after parties.” Who knows-  let’s dance together again, we’ll probably remember the moves.

Amy Cousins

Amy Cousins is an artist and educator from Houston, Texas living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Tyler School of Art & Architecture. Her work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, the Visual Arts Center at Boise State University, and the Lawrence Arts Center in Kansas. Cousins was an artist-in-residence at Illinois State University in 2018 and at ACRE Residency in 2019. She is a 2020 recipient of InLiquid’s Wind Fellowship.

Zachary Hutchingson

Zachary Hutchinson (b. 1991) is an artist living and working in Chicago IL. Hutchinson came to Chicago in 2010 to attend school at the School of the Art Institute Chicago where she earned her BFA in interdisciplinary arts in 2015. Hutchinson continued her education at the University of Illinois - Chicago earning a MFA in moving image in 2017. She has shown work globally in places like Montreal, Mexico City, San Francisco CA, NYC, Los Angeles CA, Portland OR, Austin TX, Berlin Germany, Athens Greece, Glasgow United Kingdom, Iceland, Venice, and extensively in Chicago IL. She is currently an adjunct professor at UIC and was recently listed as one of the Chicago Film 50 for the 2020.

Charles Ryan Long

charles ryan long is a Chicago born and based interdisciplinary maker and shaker. He uses varying mediums as pathways to making works that seek to pierce through our current realities making way for futures not yet imagined. His works seek to prod the viewer/ participant into dialogues that make visible both our personal and communal roles in what comes next.

 Christopher Sonny Martinez

Christopher Sonny Martinez is a filmmaker and photographer born and raised in Oak Cliff, Texas. Martinez has lived and produced work in Chicago, IL, New York, NY, and Dallas, TX. Martinez’s work breeds intimate moments from a Queer Chicano lens.

 Toisha Tucker

Tucker is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer. Their work explores three often-overlapping veins of critique. They use art as a mode of cultural organizing illuminating social constructions of gender, race, and identity. They posit incisive critiques of contemporary and historical events of Western society. They delve into the anthropomorphic relationship between technology and humans, contemporary dystopia and human empathy. Their practice is process and research based and manifests through text-based prints, photographs, video, performative pieces, sculptural installations, analog and virtual physical labor, crafting, repetition, and other media that aim to directly engage with the body. Tucker’s work reflects their deep desire for precision in material, firsthand experiential evidence, and fabrication that conveys these elements. Many of the pieces are ongoing and mutable. Tucker resides in the Bronx with their partner, a thriving aloe plant named Wednesday and a fiddle leaf fig named Newton.

Liberation Among the Stars: A Past and Future Dream by Tesh Silver

May 29 at 7 PM to June 26 at 8pm

In the windows of Co-Prosperity - 3219 S Morgan, Chicago

Stars. Ancestors no longer earthbound, suspended in infinite space. We long to be among them, finding a home that’s truly ours, where freedom is not a foreign word or long-sought goal, but finally made real. For as many times this world has turned against us, a new world awaits to embrace us in its abundance and let us call her home. Here we build anew. Here we heal. Here we will find joy!

With illustrations that look both forward and to the past, Tesh Silver envisions a new world that is not only fun, colorful and exciting, but makes space to explore what Black liberation could look like in a hopefully not-so-distant future. Hop on the Mothership and see what’s possible!

Liberation Among the Stars: A Past and Future Dream opens on Saturday, May 29, 7 PM at the Co-Prosperity windows and will close on Saturday, June 26 at 2 PM with a print sale near the installation (More details TBD).

Additionally, Tesh will be joined by Coriama Davis for an artist talk on June 21st live on Lumpen TV.

-

About Tesh Silver

Teshika Silver is a teacher, facilitator and a cultural worker with lifelong love and practice of both art and design. Illustration is her passion, using both traditional media as well as digital programs to create pieces that are both captivating and magical. Originally from Detroit, Chicago has been her chosen home for fifteen years. She currently lives on the Southside in Woodlawn with her dog Penny.

For Tesh, it has always been essential that her work involves joy: joy when she creates the work, as well as for the person viewing it. Tesh Silver’s practice consists of both traditional but mainly digital work, though she is not bound by medium. As she developed her style, it became clear that she needed to represent the communities she belongs to, and that joy is not only reserved for those of privilege. Black, queer, femme, and other marginalized people should also experience joy, as well as the spectrum of emotions any human being does, and life is not always about struggle and lack. “I mean to represent these folks in their authentic nature of empowerment: Having seen struggle but strong in their conviction that they will win. If through the work, they are seen as valuable and divinely made, and their wholeness and wellness matters, my goals have been attained. We need to be able to envision the world that we want to see—the world that’s only in our wildest dreams—full of love, understanding, abundance, magic, and possibilities.” - Tesh Silver

Radiant Beings by Roland Knowlden

April 15 at 7:30pm to May 23 at 6:00am

In the windows of Co-Prosperity - 3219 S Morgan, Chicago

Radiant Beings is a map between two spaces, a current presence and an origin. The window installation invites viewers to step within the vibrant hues of the beings whose skin radiates outwards. These thermal hues illustrate the notion of origin through color. The radiating colors speak to the melanin content of black skin as a result of the thermal properties of our geographical origin. That relationship to the continent of Africa is rendered visible through the thermal hues that can be found on heat maps. The radiant beings embody the knowledge of origin, and a feeling of belonging that can be carried within the black body. The beings become maps connecting here and there. Being, both where we are and where we come from.

Within CoPro’s windows, the series of film works, Radiant Beings, is looped on screens and projected on reflected surfaces. The durational images are accompanied by geographical models and narrative text that together map a relationship between present being and origin.

Programming:

Opening of Radiant Beings

Projectors and screens are turned on for the first time, everyone is invited to see the first night of the show from the sidewalk. Masks and social distancing will be observed.

In the sidewalks of Co-Prosperity 4/15 at 8pm.

Radiant Beings: A Conversation

Roland will was joined by Anthony Stepter in this live-streamed dialogue about the exhibition and some of the ideas behind its thesis. Livestreamed via Lumpen.TV on 4/22.

_

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.

Roland Knowlden is an African American artist and architectural designer. As an architect, he is interested in our physical environment, and the cultural and social implications of materials as they map and construct space. As an artist, Roland aims to articulate a visual language for a more invisible experience of space. His work questions notions of race, origin, belonging, boundaries, and power. Mapping, whether visualized through film or drawing, becomes a tool for Roland to create space. His work aims to not only reproduce our environments and experiences, but to produce new spatial realities.

rolandknowlden.com

An Epithet curated by Jory Drew and Joelle Mercedes

March 13th at 5:55pm to April 30th, closing at 8:00pm

Make an appointment HERE.

An Epithet is a constellation of ubiquitous materials, a multimedia exhibition featuring artists who use playful strategies of resistance to create sacred monuments and excavate the structures of domination that use language to exclude, consume and mold subjects. As a slur, a classification, or a synecdoche, an epithet can conjure consent, pain, discernment, and lamentation. Consider the tenacious poltergeists who haunt, tickle, and reconfigure our bodies, domestic spaces, and technologies. In this mischief, an epithet demands rebirth. 

This exhibition is curated by Jory Drew and Joelle Mercedes. It is presented at Co-Prosperity and with primary support from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The show opens on March 13th and runs until April 30th. The Gallery hours begin at sunset every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday by appointment only. Make an appointment HERE.

To set an appointment or find more information about the exhibition check out Epithet.info.

Programming:

SVAK (Weak)

Produced and funded by INTERNS (a digital residency) SVAK is a 7 part Norwegian language web-drama written, edited and directed by Justin Chance. Exploring the possibilities, materialities and failure of language learning, SVAK (Weak) follows a different day of the week.

Trap Door 

Trap Door' is a performance sculpture by Nerieda Patrica that uses narrative device, sound, and movement to explore trans politics of visibility and abstraction. Mortality, bodily precarity and embodiment are problematized as ways of seeing and being seen, ignored, clocked, and passing.

Video of the activated performance will be released on Lumpen.TV. Date TBD

Panels

Online conversations between curators Joelle Mercedes, Jory Drew and artist Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel regarding An Epithet .

Streaming on Lumpen.TV. Date TBD

Curated By:

Joelle Mercedes: is an artist and educator whose work is grounded in collage techniques that puncture the restrictions of the two dimensional frame, examining and stretching concepts of origin, ancestry, birth and history. Their work has been presented in various forms at: ACRE Projects, Links Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, Compound Yellow, Roman Susan, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Threewalls, Sherman Park Branch Library, Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), Lynden Sculpture Garden Gallery (Milwaukee), California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA). Their work has also been published by KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Recodo.sx.

Jory Drew: is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Chicago, IL.  Their work reckons with the social constructions of race, gender, and love which influence the economic, legal, and political conditions that subsequently manifest and determine the lives of black people. They have exhibited locally and nationally and have participated in residencies at Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), ACRE (Steuben, WI/Chicago, IL.), Open Kitchen (Milwaukee, WI.), and Hot Box (Austin, TX.).

They are currently a co-lead artist for the Teen Creative Agency at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and may also be recognized as a Co-founder of F4F, a domestic venue in Little Village, and a Co-organizer of Beauty Breaks, an intergenerational beauty and wellness workshop series for black people along the spectrum of femininity.

Featured Artists Included:

Betelhem Makonnen: A native of Ethiopia (b. 1972), currently living and working in Austin, Texas. Her formal education consists of an MFA (2019) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a New Artists Society Merit Scholar and a B.A (1995) in History and Literature of Africa and the African Diaspora from University of Texas in Austin. Working with a variety of mediums that include video, photography, and installations, she researches questions on perception, presence, purpose and place within a trans-temporal and trans-locative topology that operates on the relational dynamics of an African diasporic consciousness. She has exhibited both  nationally and internationally. In addition to her practice she is an active  member of the Austin-based contemporary arts collaborative Black Mountain Project.

Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel: (b. 1991, Venezuela) holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2015) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2020). He graduated from the Academic Program at SOMA in Mexico City (2018). His collaborative projects have been exhibited at SOMA and Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Mexico City; Logan Center for The Arts, Threewalls, and Chicago Cultural Center (forthcoming), Chicago; QUEENS, Los Angeles; Duplex, Spare Room, and Access Gallery (forthcoming), Vancouver B.C.; 3rd Kamias Triennial, Manila, Philippines. Zambrano-Rangel is the recipient of the Arts, Science & Culture Collaborative Project Grant from the University of Chicago and The New Artist Society Full Merit scholarship from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. He received the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship in 2020. 

Jacobo Zambrano-Rangel’s practice is grounded in the relationship between history and power and its modes of representation and translation. Through multi-layered narrative structures that adopt photographic, time-based media and sculpture as vehicles for storytelling, he re-stages situations and spaces where knowledge is exchanged and transmitted. From this ground, his installations become sites of inquiry about the roles and effects of knowledge institutions in the construction of colonialism, personal and collective memory, and national identity. He often employs methodologies associated with anthropology and ethnography to interrogate the past and its relation to the present moment.

Justin Chance: is an artist, writer and co-founder of the Collaborative Center for Storm, Space & Seismic Research based in New York. 

Nereida Patricia: (b. 1996, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in Chicago, IL. Nereida’s practice spans sculpture, text, and performance, and explores themes of history, trans poetics, and identity. Her work draws from postcolonial and feminist theory, Peruvian symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments, to build new mythologies around the transformation of the human body. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute Chicago and has also studied at The New School. Her work has been exhibited and spoken at venues including Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Prairie Gallery, Chicago; Annka Kultys Gallery, London; the Museum of the Moving Image, Queens; The Knockdown Center, Queens; and POWERPLNT, Brooklyn, among others.

Sydnie Jimenez: was born in Orlando, FL but spent most of her childhood in north Georgia from which she draws much inspiration. She recently graduated from SAIC (2020) with a BFA focusing in ceramic sculpture. Much of her work centers around the representation of black/ brown youth and self-expression as a form of protest and self care to protect against a Eurocentric society founded on white supremacy and colonization.

“I had been making all yellow work for 4 years because it represented hope during my past struggles with mental illness. It is a symbol for non-binary identity. Ironically when I was struggling with COVID my liver wasn’t working properly and I got strange yellow callused feet and toes. I realized that my art was imitating life once again. Now diagnosed with POST COVID SYNDROME, my yellow windows seek to memorialize my 10 month long haul with COVID, while providing the transformational curative power of fearless personal mythology. In my artjoys I am distilling the essence of suffering into something beautiful and strange.”- Hereaclitus Here Vernon

At the Yellow Windows by Hereaclitus Here Vernon

March 4th to April 4th Co-Prosperity - 3219 S Morgan, Chicago 

An experimental multi-window, one-person exhibition from transdisciplinary artist, Hereaclitus.

Live performances will be available to stream via Lumpen TV at 8pm every Thursday through March 18.

Leading up to livestream on April 1st at 9pm and performances in the windows on Friday, April 2 and Saturday, April 3 at 9pm.

There will be a special Easter matinee for families on Sunday, April 4 at 2pm with eggs hidden in the windows and edible art treats.

Paul Eluard writes, “To what fantastic creatures have I entrusted myself”.

Hereaclitus fantastic creatures fill the window with trompe l'oeil suggesting that everything is in flux, moving, enlarged, and out of place. Hereaclitus DADA ballet movements in the main windows are choppy and sped up and in the diamond window they liquid slow. In the window that symbolically represents the parietal lobe in the brain, a place where thoughts form and float in and out of logic and nonsense. They dangle in duet with their sculptural mobiles, puppets, and shadows.

The yellow windows are anything but a frozen poem in history, to Hereaclitus the text is made flesh, it’s alive. To Eluard and Hereaclitus, the window is a portal into the active imagination that keeps you company while you daydream, for it is hope that keeps you alive.

The Co-prosperity windows come alive in the spring infused with the frenetic dance movement, pastiche, and theatricality of a seasoned performer, Hereaclitus. Once described by the filmmaker Laura Parnes, “as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman on Acid”.

_

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.

Hereaclitus Here Vernon is a Chicago-based performance, video, and visual artist that  has presented their transdisciplinary work throughout Europe and the US for three decades. They studied Sculpture at Yale School of Art (1995) and they received a  nomination from Joan Jonas herself in 1995 for a Fulbright Scholarship to Amsterdam.  In 1987, they met and collaborated with Linda Montano, inspiring two decades of  ART/LIFE biodynamic art. This led to a second master’s degree in Art Therapy from The  School of the Art Institute where they pioneered a movement-based Expressive Arts  program into Chicago Area nursing homes for 5 years.

Hereaclitus is interested in what Shannon Bell refers to as, Fast Feminism. Their trans-disciplinary gustemverks over the last 30 years mash up sexual politics, identity, and meta-physical philosophy. They re-named themselves after the pre-socratic philosopher Heraclitus  that said, "The only thing constant is change.” In 2012, New City named them one of the  top 5 artists “whose life is probably an artwork”. Hereaclitus, has been an active  collaborative force, starring and acting in many films with Chicago-based filmmakers,  Peter Lambert, Derek Badgely, Julia Zinn, and Emily Esperanza. They can also be seen  in queer art videos by Wendy Geller and Cecilia Doughtery. Hereaclitus has danced and  collaborated with local movement-based artists: Darling Shear, Sara Zalek, and Victoria  Bradford. They were recently awarded art grants for experimental art through the  Foundation for Contemporary arts and through the Arts Relief Fund awarded by  American Artists. 

For more updates on Hereaclitus’ practice, follow them on Instagram , Facebook or join their Patreon.

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.

_

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