Chicago Reader print issue of December 28, 2023 (Vol. 53, No. 6) by Chicago Reader

FREE AND FREAKY SINCE 1971 | DECEMBER 28, 2023

MEET 21 INCREDIBLE CHICAGOANS

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | D E C E M B E R 2 8 , 2 02 3 | VO LU M E 5 3 , N U M B E R 6

IN THIS ISSUE

THE PEOPLE ISSUE 04 Ludwig | Intro Chicagoans give us a glimpse into their worlds.

06 The Accessibility Advocate Justin Cooper is creating art and content with an accessiblity lens. 08 The Corridor Cultivator Qideas shop owner Ellen Duong talks about creating community spaces on Argyle. 09 The Lefty Lawyer Attorney Flint Taylor on Fred Hampton, Hampton’s legacy, and fighting white supremacy. 12 The People’s Art Teacher William Estrada is making art for the people, about the people, by the people. 14 The Birder Water trails manager Lillian Holden encourages BIPOC outdoors enthusiasts to experience the healing act of birding.

16 The Chola Doña Artist and HIV advocate Bimbocita on nurturing her chaotic and refined artistry 18 The Land-Steward Councilman Chi-Nations Youth Council member and community organizer Anthony Tamez-Pochel sits on the 17th Police District council and says that he’s “building the plane as it is in the sky.” 20 The Hip-Hop Statesman Rapper-activist-promoter Kingdom Rock gives his flowers to foundational icons of Chicago hip-hop.

ARTS & CULTURE

21 The Practical, Magical Social Worker Therapist and founder of Uptown’s Pratical Magic Healing Bree Sorensen on the social work approach to healing 22 The Reinventor Acting newcomer Shariba Rivers is performing like an old pro in roles that challenge her self-perceptions.

44 Cardoza | Books roundup A Reader editor highlights five books from local authors.

30 The Anime-niac Emma Greenleaf cofounded a popular club that brings rare and obscure anime films to their fans. 31 The Museum Maven Therese Quinn is considering museums through a lens of access, social justice, and democratic spaces. 23 The Jack of All Arts SoloSam is a rapper, party promoter, cooking show host, cookbook author, and now he’s thinking about video. 26 The Environmental Evangelist Educator Ayesha Qazi-Lampert is bridging scientific work with the classroom and asking students to learn about institutional power.

28 The Newsstand Matriarch Beatrice Flowers owns and operates one of the last freestanding newsstands in Chicago.

29 The Star Partyer Chicago Parks District resident astronomer Joseph Guzman teaches astronomy and so much more when asked about the universe.

2 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

THEATER

45 Dance year in review Reflecting on the intersections of time, place, and presence in the year in dance

FILM

46 Film year in review Kat Sachs offers a 2023 repertory roundup

34 The Graffiti Champion Flash ABC, the community organizer behind a multigenerational art group in Logan Square, is “all city.” 36 The Inclusionist Emjoy Gavino is fostering space for BIPOC actors in local theater. 37 The Community-Centered Conservationist Forrest KingCortes speaks about mindfully exploring relationships to the land, starting with our own backyards.

40 The Uplifting Curator Wisdom Baty is encouraging Black mothers to consider the artist within. 42 The South Shore Organizer Dixon Romeo advocates for a community that is at risk of displacement, again.

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MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 48 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Ine’a J, Nnamdï, Fruitleather, and the Slo ‘Mo New Year’s party at the reopened Ramova Theatre 52 Early Warnings Upcoming shows to have on your radar 52 Gossip Wolf Stress Positions heat up New Year’s Eve with blistering hardcore, Cloudy teases a 2024 Whistler residency with an end-of-year DJ set, and more.

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PHOTOGRAPHY FOR THE PACKAGE BY JAMES HOSKING, HANNAH HUFHAM, FELTON KIZER, JOE MAZZA, YIJUN PAN, AND KIRK WILLIAMSON ART DIRECTION & PHOTO EDITING BY JAMES HOSKING ILLUSTRATIONS BY AMBER HUFF LOGO/TEMPLATE DESIGN BY KIRK WILLIAMSON SPECIAL THANKS TO KIM HACK / COCOA AND CO. BRIAN FLOOD / UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS CHICAGO STAFF OF METRO AND SMART BAR STAFF OF THE FIELD MUSEUM

n 1967, the great Studs Terkel published his first book of oral histories, Division Street: America, playing on the name of one of Chicago’s main thoroughfares to present the city as a microcosm of the nation through the firsthand accounts of 70 residents from all walks of life. In a WFMT interview with Mike Royko and Herman Kogan, Terkel said he was careful to limit his own observations to the preface. “If it were in any way impeding upon or impinging in what they were saying, the subjects, that’d be of no value,” he said. “It had to be they themselves talking freely.” The Reader introduced the People Issue in 2011, and you can view its collection of as-told-to interviews with Chicagoans as a spiritual grandchild of Terkel’s work in that it taps into some of the same lessons: Most folks have something to say and a story to tell, and regardless of how they might look, work, play, and pray (or not), people generally have much more in common than not. And that’s what makes a community. That all still holds true, but the world’s been through some things in the past 12 years, including multiple wars, climate disasters, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a

global rise of authoritarianism. It’s been inspiring to see everyday people in Chicago and elsewhere respond to these threats by banding together in the name of progress and change. But the prevalence of news silos, disinformation campaigns, and attacks on free speech, as well as the erosion of civil liberties and human rights, have made it painfully clear that others stand to benefit from stoking distrust, hate, and division. As we head into 2024, we’re in a pretty pivotal moment of the 21st century, and the waters look rockier ahead. While there are no easy answers to our collective challenges, one thing is certain: Connecting with a new person—particularly a new person whose experience and outlook aren’t exactly like yours—can be a first-line defense against societal destruction. At the very least, it makes life more interesting. It’s also good for the soul. As therapist Bree Sorensen [page 21] says, “Research tells us the only thing that we actually truly know to be effective about therapy is the human connection. It’s literally just the spark between two people.” If there’s any overarching theme throughout these 21 profiles, it might be that it takes just one person to open your mind forever. Take

community arts instructor William Estrada [page 12], who speaks of the Gage Park High School teacher who inspired him to pursue art as a full-time profession. Or lawyer Flint Taylor [page 9], who reflects on how the brief months he knew Black Panther leader Fred Hampton before Chicago police murdered him in 1969 cemented his decades-long commitment to fighting for social justice. To borrow from Terkel again, this time from a 2007 interview with Amy Goodman: “Ordinary people are capable of doing extraordinary things, and that’s what it’s all about.” Taken together, fleeting relationships and chance encounters can build into something much bigger. When you consider how many such threads connect the nearly three million people who call Chicago home, it’s easy to see where the city gets its strength. We hope the 2023 People Issue will inspire you to strike up a conversation with—and really listen to— someone you’ve passed by. You can be part of what makes Chicago better. As fair housing organizer Dixon Romeo [page 42] says about his work in South Shore, “We fight together.” v —Jamie Ludwig, Associate Editor

m jludwig@chicagoreader.com

Justin Cooper

Ellen Duong

Flint Taylor

William Estrada

Lillian Holden

Bimbocita

Anthony Tamez-Pochel

kingdom rock

Bree Sorensen

Shariba Rivers

SoloSam

Ayesha T. Qazi-Lampert

Beatrice Flowers

Joseph Guzman

Emma Greenleaf

Therese Quinn

Flash ABC

Emjoy Gavino

Forrest King-Cortes

Wisdom Baty

Dixon Romeo

4 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 5

Justin Cooper The Accessibility Advocate Interview by TARYN ALLEN Photos by James Hosking

Justin Cooper, 41, is a Black disabled photographer and filmmaker. Fueled by his experiences of living with a disability—including discovering in his 30s that he’d been misdiagnosed—and a family full of activists, he’s a staunch, longtime advocate for disability communities. Cooper also produces and cohosts a podcast at Crip Crap, a disability media company created by and for disabled people. He was born in Chicago, spent his longest stint in Uptown, and currently resides in Old Town.

was born and raised in Chicago by my mother, who has taken care of me my whole life. Growing up, I had to deal with a lot of things—being disabled, but also being a Black person in Chicago. It’s been an interesting journey, having to navigate systems that often don’t benefit people with disabilities or people of color. I was really raised by my mom to have strong values, [and fight] for the rights of people who are often disenfranchised and who are often not paid attention to. When I started working, I had no idea what intersectionality was. But over the past few years, I’ve really thought about the intersectionality of being a disabled person and a Black person. And those identities kind of shape who I am. My entire life is full of activists: it’s not just my mom, but it’s family members who have done a lot of work in the community for many years. Activism is in my blood; that’s the heart of who I am. As a Black person, it’s always important for me to fight for issues that affect not just Black people, but all people

of color. Fighting for the rights of people with disabilities and people in general is what I do. My work as an artist really started back in 2012; I started working on a documentary film called The Wheelchair Chronicles that focused on my life as a wheelchair user and my travels all across the city. It really took off, and it put me in spaces I never thought I would be in. From filmmaking, I transferred into photography around 2018, because I felt like I could make more of a connection with my photography around activism and accessibility. Before COVID, I was still heavily involved in activism and disability advocacy, and I was taking photos here and there, but just as a hobby. When COVID hit, it really made me think about, “OK, how can I continue to do the work while the world is shut down? How can I interact in a city that’s basically empty?”

In a way, it gave me a sense of freedom. Normally, I would have to navigate people, traffic, all of these things. But when that emptiness was there, it really created growth for me as a photographer, because I was able to actually tell the story of, “If this place was full of people, it would be very difficult from an accessibility standpoint.” What I want to do with my photography is continue the work that I do as an activist, but also share the stories of places where accessibility has been an issue, and highlight how we can make accessibility better for the city in general. I feel like film and photography have been so important to me because

they’ve given me a voice. Oftentimes people with disabilities don’t have a voice, or don’t often share their stories or what’s happening in their communities. It’s really an opportunity just to showcase what I see and the vision that I have. I’ve also really enjoyed doing [the Crip Crap] podcast because most of the people [we have on], they’re friends of mine, but then there’s others that I’m unfamiliar with, and I just enjoy interviewing them. It’s something that I really take pride in because these are people that do exceptional work in the disability community, and in the world in general, and their voices need to be heard and recognized. I’ve gotten so much feedback and so much attention from different folks

“I love having a camera in my hand and traveling to different areas that oftentimes I probably wouldn’t get an opportunity to. But in my chair, I’m able to do it. I’m able to photograph how gorgeous this city is.” 6 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

“Oftentimes people with disabilities don’t have a voice, or don’t often share their stories or what’s happening in their communities.”

who are prominent in the city. I’m just in awe of the connections that I’ve been able to make. People, they’re like, “Oh, I know your work from this particular person,” or, “I’ve seen your work here, and I know the work that you do in and out of the disability community.” I’ve just been fascinated by people who I look up to, whether in the disability community or in the art world, that are now recognizing my work. Getting that from your peers? I’m just absolutely in awe. And it tells me that the work I’m doing is very important and that people are taking notice. Learning that [I was] misdiagnosed was such a shock to me; for years you’re thinking that you’re living with this disability that pretty much has shaped who you are as a person, and now you find out, “Oh, well, you don’t have that diagnosis, you have this diagnosis.” You question everything, including yourself. Like, “What could I have done if I’d found out years earlier?” I tell you—my mother really was a huge supporter of me during that time. I didn’t know what I was gonna do next with my life. But I had some time to talk with my mom and just think, “OK, take a deep breath. It’s gonna be OK. Let me learn more about my new diagnosis.” I’m thankful for finding out that I have Becker muscular dystrophy [instead of cerebral palsy] because it really affects my body as a whole. Now, I have a team of doctors who know, “OK, this is your diagnosis. What can we do to help in some way? What can we do to make you live longer?” Having that misdiagnosis, it actually just made me realize the importance of living longer. Because I wanna be here a lot longer, I wanna continue to do the work that I do, and I wanna continue to be an activist.

So I’m like, OK, this is my diagnosis. It doesn’t affect who I am as a person. It doesn’t affect what I can do from a filmmaking and photography standpoint. So, all right, we got this. I have to move forward—I can’t stop now. Anybody who knows me knows that I love traveling across the city. Most of the time, if you see me, I’m riding in my wheelchair. I’m using public transportation just to get from one place to the other. And that can be a very fun journey. [Laughs sarcastically] Just navigating through accessible stops, dealing with elevators, dealing with crowds, and all sorts of stuff. I’ve interacted with so many cool artists and different chefs in so many different neighborhoods, and traveling in my wheelchair gives me that opportunity. I love my city. Through the good and the bad, I love being here, and I would never leave it. I will instantly defend it the moment somebody talks shit about it. I love having a camera in my hand and traveling to different areas that oftentimes I probably wouldn’t get an opportunity to. But in my chair, I’m able to do it. I’m able to photograph how gorgeous this city is. v

m tallen@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 7

Ellen Duong The Corridor Cultivator Interview by SAVANNAH HUGUELEY Photos by James Hosking

Ellen Duong grew up in her parents’ plant shop on Argyle Street, QIdeas, which has sold plants and kitchen supplies to people in Chicago, throughout the midwest, and beyond for more than 20 years. Since the 32-year-old Uptown resident inherited the shop in 2015, she’s been carving her own identity as business owner and community leader with her dad at her side. As she reimagined QIdeas as a multigenerational neighborhood hub, Duong reached out to another second-generation Vietnamese American creative initiative, Haibayô, with an invitation to share the brick-and-mortar space. Construction is currently underway, and the plan is to reopen QIdeas in January—just in time to usher in the Lunar New Year in early February—and follow with the Haibayô side by spring 2024.

y parents opened [the shop] in 2002 because my dad found this community to be really supportive and helpful. So there was a small community by the time he arrived in 1978, give or take, and there was a lot of opportunity, but also [it] was really difficult when he arrived, he noticed, for people to acquire plants or things that they were interested in without paying an arm and leg or having language barriers; he wanted to make it easier, be able to show people that you can have things that remind you of home, and it not be so difficult. You know, a lot of the midwest was struggling to find—it sounds crazy now—but jasmine flowers or certain types of fruit trees that seem really accessible now. There wasn’t even ginger in the grocery store in the 90s. Which is, like, unfathomable now. So things like that are really important for certain recipes, certain flavors, certain comfort foods to get you through some tough times. I grew up in, I guess it’s considered West

Rogers Park. But I have just always been around this neighborhood. So when I went to preschool, I would go to the Chiu Quon Bakery and get a little egg tart and a juice box before going to preschool over at Pierce. And back in the day, it used to be so bustling here. And everywhere you go, everyone’s just looking out for each other. There was a really vibrant and fun community here. So I spent most of my time here [in the shop] after school, on the weekends, always here. I think that it bred a lot of resentment sometimes because this was something that I inherited; this was something that I was just always a part of; it wasn’t a choice. And I think that when you don’t have choices, well, you feel trapped, really restricted. And you know, a lot of our

weekends and holidays are spent here. And that’s a really tough part about having a family business, [you’re] spending a lot of your time together but not really cultivating relationships—it’s more so around the task of what you’re doing. I went to grad school after my mom passed away in 2015, 2016—still in Chicago—and graduat[ed] with my master’s in counseling in 2019. I came back [to the shop], and I really saw connections between mental health and plants, and family businesses in general, and just the value of community corridors like this. So I had inherited the business in 2015, and, you know,

[the] pandemic hit. Then this relationship, the way I saw this space, this community, and the conversations were interesting and changed. And it really pushed me to take charge, be more proactive, and speak up more about protecting this space. That’s really bridged this idea of how I’m creating my identity within this business. I’ve made it really plant forward, plant heavy. I love plants because of this store. . . . It’s rewarding. And it’s stress-free, watching all the plants grow and knowing you can, if you wanted to, make them grow; still being patient through it and just waiting for the leaves to unfurl is very interesting. It does push you to slow down, connect with your body, understand it. We are well known for having . . . affordable bonsai

Turn to p. 10

“The piece about having a business, which I love so much, it’s people visiting and remembering you. And you’re seeing—it’s gonna make me cry—but it’s seeing these kids grow up. It’s so beautiful. People feel safe [here].” 8 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

Flint Taylor The Lefty Lawyer Interview by BEN JORAVSKY Photos by Kirk Williamson

Once upon a time, Flint Taylor was making a name for himself as a hip, young lawyer fighting for justice. That was in the 1970s after he and Jeff Haas, one of his partners at People’s Law Office, sued the powers that be on behalf of the family of Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and the family of BPP member Mark Clark. In 1969, Hampton was murdered in his bed by Chicago police officers working under the direction of Cook County State’s Attorney Edward Hanrahan and with the knowledge of the FBI. After 13 grueling years and several appeals—including one that went to the Supreme Court—the city, county, and feds agreed to pay the Hampton and Clark families $1.8 million. It’s been a long time since Flint Taylor was a hip, young lawyer. At the sagacious age of 77, he’s come to realize just how hard it is to change the world—especially one as corrupt and racist as Chicago. His lifetime of social justice cases includes ones that exposed the police torture crimes of former Chicago police commander Jon Burge. Flint chronicles that legal fight in his 2019 book The Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago.

didn’t have radical politics when I was growing up. Didn’t really have much politics at all. I grew up in Westborough, a little town outside of Boston. My parents were Republicans, but they were open-minded. The civil rights movement happened, and they became Democrats. I was really into sports. I played football, basketball, and baseball. Played them all left-handed, so, in that way, I was a lefty at an early age. [laughs] I grew up in the era of Bill Russell and Bob Cousy and was devoted to the Celtics. Still am. I was also a passionate Red Sox fan. I was there for the impossible dream year of ’67—the one where the Red Sox went from last to first in one year. I saw 21 games that summer. That team lost the World Series to the Cardinals when Bob Gibson beat Jim Lonborg in the seventh game. Broke my heart. In the fall of ’64, I went off to college at Brown University. I majored in history. Professor [John] Thomas had a big influence on me. He taught us about Reconstruction and the abolitionists. My older sister also had an impact—she was involved in the anti-war movement. Gradually, my eyes began to open. But it was my first year at law school—here at Northwestern—that I got radicalized. That was the summer of 1969, and my dad said, “Come home and work with [Senator] Ted Kennedy.” But I made the life-changing decision to stay here in Illinois. That was the summer that Fred Hampton was locked up in jail. And we worked to get him out. When I say we, I mean—I was working with some radical lawyers like Skip Andrew, Jeff Haas, and Dennis Cunningham. In August of 1969, we opened up the People’s Law Office at Webster and Halsted. Back in those days, it was a multicultural neighborhood. Dennis Cunningham was our North Star. Former actor

from Second City. Just a brilliant political mind. The police had locked up Fred for robbery in Maywood, his hometown. A white ice cream truck driver was robbed of $71 of ice cream. Under pressure, he identified Fred as the person who did the strong-armed robbery— despite several people who said Fred wasn’t there. It was a setup. Fred joked, “I may be a big guy, but I can’t eat $71 of ice cream.”

The judge was Sidney Jones. He knew it was a bullshit case. He told the lawyer he’d give Fred probation. But His Royalty (Cook County State’s Attorney Ed Hanrahan) was determined to keep Fred in prison. Hanrahan went nuts on Jones. Called him a lenient judge. Judge Jones reversed field and sent Fred to the penitentiary. He got two to five years for strong-armed robbery. While we were appealing the case, we also worked to get Fred out on an appeal bond. Ultimately, the state supreme court granted Fred the bond and he was released while his

Turn to p. 10

“After that, there was no going back. You have to fight racism and white supremacy with all your might. A lesson like that, man, it stays with you for all of your life.” DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 9

“People can live within a mile of this place and not know it exists. You know, it’s heartbreaking. And we’d like to really bring it back.”

ELLEN DUONG from p. 8 and affordable tools and easy access to that. I like having tropicals. We’re really famous for jasmines and citruses called calamondin, or calamansi, which is a really popular fruit in the Philippines but also in Vietnam. There actually is only one [original] second-generation Asian American business here, which is First Sip. So there aren’t that many here, especially originals, but inherited, there are a couple, but it’s still within this diaspora of adults born in the 50s, 60s, like our parents’ age. Because of that, there are succession issues on Argyle, which is why you see a lot of closures and empty storefronts, which is a problem because it gets really quiet here and people forget about Argyle—like, people can live within a mile of this place and not know it exists. You know, it’s heartbreaking. And we’d like to really bring it back. So I reached out to [Haibayô] and said, “Hey, do you want to collaborate? How can we reinvent this space?” I just don’t think it’s being utilized in a way that any longer supports the community. We’re going to create another door. And Haibayô is kind of an

10 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

artists’ creative collective space. It’s an incubation space, working and helping people figure out ways to connect with themselves or identify their values or connect with [the] community, so that we could actually hope to fill out these storefronts. And then they’ll have a kind of other entertainment space in the back [with] a little cafe where people can sit. It’s gonna be related to events. There’s actually a lot of storytelling around the city events that are so fun. But that would be really amazing, having a space for them on Argyle, just somewhere to go. I think it takes a lot of courage, for sure, and bravery, to do something different, especially when you’re used to seeing a corridor a certain way. When you look at all the other shops, it is of a certain time. It’s a really common look in the United States because our parents [left] Vietnam due to war, [and] there is a mindset in which they remember Vietnam being this way. They tried to recreate that comfort; so anywhere you go, there’s this eclecticness that people are used to when you think about going to some of these diaspor[ic] neighborhood corridors. We want [older generations] to feel welcome. We don’t want it to look gentrified; we don’t want it to look like they [should] feel intimidated to come inside. So it’s a real tricky mix of the arts of comfort with some new—a little bit of who we are. The piece about having a business, which I love so much, it’s people visiting and remembering you. And you’re seeing—it’s gonna make me cry—but it’s seeing these kids grow up. It’s so beautiful. People feel safe [here]. I feel like that’s my biggest pride and joy. People can come here, hang out, feel safe, and then go about their day. Like it’s a place to go, a place to hang. I want to continue to create that, sustainably. v

m shugueley@chicagoreader.com

“He was larger than life. He’d get up in front of a church filled with Black people or a room filled with law students, and he had them transfixed.”

FLINT TAYLOR from p. 9

appeal was being heard. If you’ve seen the movie Judas and the Black Messiah, you know the scene where Fred got out and came back to Chicago and gave that unbelievable speech. I was there and I’m telling you—that scene in the movie doesn’t do it justice. That was Fred. I was in awe of him, even though he was two years younger than me. He was larger than life. He’d get up in front of a church filled with Black people or a room filled with law students, and he had them transfixed. Anyway, we had this radical organization in law school. And we asked Fred to speak. And I picked him up at the Panther office at 2350 W. Madison. That was October of ’69. And I drove him to the law school. Just me and Fred Hampton in the car. He did most of the talking. He was talking about the police and said, “The pigs are following me. They’re after me.” And I thought, “Man, this guy’s paranoid.” We get to Northwestern’s Law School—to Lincoln Hall, which is a big room that seats at least 200. I expected maybe 25 people would show up. But, no, the place was jammed, like the entire law school was there to hear Fred speak. I introduced Fred. I don’t remember what I said but it wasn’t impressive. I stammered a bit. Fred got up and he started off by good-naturedly saying, “Man, you better get your act together and learn to speak.” And then he

went on to deliver his speech. I learned two lessons that day. The first was that Fred was right. I needed to get my shit together and learn how to speak. Particularly, if I want to be a trial lawyer. And so I did. The second lesson? That didn’t hit home for another couple of months. On December 4, we got the word. I think [former Black Panther] Bobby Rush contacted Skip Andrew and Dennis Cunnnigham with “Come to the crib, the chairman has been murdered.” I went by the law school, grabbed Jack Welch, another law student, and we went to the crib—2337 W. Monroe. I’ll never forget it. I was standing in Fred Hampton’s blood. And that’s when I realized that Fred had been right. He hadn’t been paranoid. They were after him. He’d lost his appeal on that ice cream truck case. And he was facing two years in prison. I think they thought he might go underground. So Hanrahan’s police killed him, while he was asleep in his bed. I think about Fred all the time. Going to that apartment. Standing in his blood. They were just kids. Fred was 21. Just idealistic young Black kids who were swept up by the liberation movement. After that, there was no going back. You have to fight racism and white supremacy with all your might. A lesson like that, man, it stays with you for all of your life. v

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DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 11

william estrada The People’s Art Teacher Interview by KERRY CARDOZA Photos by Yijun Pan

Artist, community art teacher, and UIC professor William Estrada, 46, has taught art in the classroom and in public spaces for more than two decades, focusing on addressing inequity and historical passivity in marginalized communities. His Mobile Street Art Cart project fosters community by bringing opportunities for art making into neighborhoods. His first solo exhibition, “William Estrada: Multiples and Multitudes,” opened at the Hyde Park Art Center in July.

went to Marquette Elementary on the southwest side. We didn’t really have art, but my social studies teacher, or geography, Mr. B, he would give us these maps to color and I would spend a lot of time coloring them. One day, he announced to the class, “There’s an artist in the class. I want to show this artist’s work.” And he showed my map that I had colored. I was like, “Oh, I really, really love that.” I worked really hard with my amazing art teacher, Ms. Stallings, to have art at Gage Park High School. She took me to see Jacob Lawrence in 1995 at the Chicago History Museum. We saw a number of his paintings from the Great Migration. I loved it. It was one of the first times that I had seen a person of color

my family to go to college. I went to the School of the Art Institute [of Chicago] and I got my BFA and a certification in art education. I decided I was not going to teach in public schools. I really wanted to work in community organizations because I was interested in talking about culture and race, power structures, and mak[ing] art about them or in response to it. I got this teaching artist gig at [elementary school that infuses Mexican arts and culture into academics] Telpochcalli, and I’ve been there—this will be 21 years. I was having these really powerful, beautiful, complicated conversations with students

I would try to have those same conversations with adults in the neighborhood, in Little Village. It was so much more challenging. The same time that I started teaching at Telpochcalli, I was invited to the Little Village Arts Fest to do some workshops. That was the initial spark for a lot of the projects that, over the years, have turned into what they are now. I really wanted to have art workshops on the sidewalk so there wouldn’t be any barriers to people that were curious about what we were doing. Like there was no doubt that they belong there because we were out in the street and it’s a public space and it belongs to everyone. When I started doing

them in 2002, it would happen once in a while, till 2014—2014 is when I was like, “OK, all the work that I do, I want it to be more intentional.” The family portrait project was the first project that I was like, “OK, I’m gonna create this mobile photo studio out in the neighborhood and try to convince folks to let me take a family portrait.” That project was really thinking about representation: Who gets to claim a neighborhood, who gets to tell the stories of what happens in this community, how is gentrification or displacement affecting you, or not? That was really the first time that I moved my practice from the classroom into the neighborhood. In 2015, 3Arts reached out for 3AP, which was 3Arts’s crowdfunded projects. They were

“This is all different work, but it’s really just different ways of talking with people. It’s the teaching that is the thread.” being celebrated for being an artist. But I was still not convinced that I could be an artist. I thought art was something that you did as a hobby. Then senior year, my art teacher asked me what my plans for the future were. I was like, “Well, I want to go into psychology.” She was stumped by my answer. She’s like, “I thought you were going to be an artist?” And I was like, “Ms. Stallings, you can’t be an artist. That’s not a real job.” She had a serious talk with me. She was actually the one that told me, “You should apply to art school.” I sat down with my parents and I was like, “I’m going to be an artist.” I was a bit nervous to talk to them about it, but they were extremely supportive. They were just really excited that I wanted to go to school. I was the first person in

12 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

about representation, lack of access to resources, power structures, law, school, and the purpose of school. They would ask me really complicated questions that I had no answers to sometimes, like, “Why do people hate Mexicans?” Or, “Why do people hate migrants?” I was like, “I don’t know. Why do you think that?” We would start thinking about: What are the things that we want people to know about us that aren’t usually represented in the news about our neighborhood, about our culture? And we would create these narratives.

“When I was in school, they’re like, ‘You should not call yourself a community artist, you should be an artist with a capital A.’ There was this hierarchy I really struggled with. What I ended up doing is, all of the projects that I wanted to do, I turned them into lessons that I did with students.”

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like, “We have this platform, we really want to support your work. Is there a project that we could help you promote?” I was like, “Yes, I’ve been doing these street workshops with a folding table for a really long time. And people don’t quite understand what it is that I’m doing. I want to build this art cart, very similar to an ice cream cart or food vendor mobile.” I described it as this classroom on wheels. But it really focuses on art making as an organizing process of bringing people together. All the work I had been wanting to do for so many years, the art cart embodied, and I think it gives people a solid, concrete thing to be like, “Oh, that’s what you do.” For a long time, I separated my teaching and my making. Like, teaching and making are very different and don’t belong together. When I was in school, they’re like, “You should not call yourself a community artist, you should be an artist with a capital A.” There was this hierarchy I really struggled with. What I ended up doing is, all of the projects that I wanted to do, I turned them into lessons that I did with students. I had been working as a staff artist for ART (Art Resources in Teaching). ART dissolved in 2012. And I was like, “OK, what would I do next?” I went to grad school. I was a person with a mission. I was like, “I know why teaching in the neighborhood, teaching around race, power, analyzing historical passivity, analyzing history and how history is told, I

know how to do those pieces.” What I don’t have the language for is: Why do those things need to exist within the art world and in art making? I was like, “I want to leave out of here being able to tell folks why this is important, and have this theoretical framework of what I’m doing, how it fits into the history of this work.” I remember when we were installing [“William Estrada: Multiples and Multitudes”]—it’s the first time that I’ve exhibited a good chunk of the work that I’ve been making over the last 18 years—it was very emotional. It was very, very validating, and it was also this reminder [that], “Wow, I’ve been doing this work for a really long time now.” I mentioned to [curator] Mariela [Acuña], “This is all different work, but it’s really just different ways of talking with people. It’s the teaching that is the thread.” When people see it, not only are they able to see the actual art, but it’s this reminder of all the amazing stories I get to hear. I had a really hard time with the name of the exhibition. I was like, “No, get rid of the ‘William Estrada.’ Because none of this was created by me, by myself. There’s so many other folks that made this work possible.” v

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DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 13

lillian holden The Birder

Interview by MIKE SULA Photos by James Hosking

A student of Urban Planning and Policy at UIC, with a focus on sustainable cities, Lillian Holden, 27, developed an appreciation for the natural world as a kid, playing under the giant oak tree in the vacant lot near her grandmother’s North Lawndale home, and tending to many pets of various species. Today she’s on the Chicago Bird Alliance board (formally known as Chicago Audubon Society) and the planning committee for Black AF In STEM Collective’s Black Birders Week. She’s also the regional water trails manager for Openlands. When she first joined the conservation organization as an apprentice, she led Chicago Public School students on birding walks with the idea that fostering an early appreciation for nature can help rebuild communities.

was a weird teenager. That developed from some great experiences with my dad that fostered confidence in me. He was fascinated with aquatic life, so we had aquariums. He included all of the different species needed to make sure that the life cycle was there. There were snails at the bottom. There were suckerfish, and they were doing all the additional cleaning. He had oscar fish. There was, at one point, a couple of piranhas and some eels.

like a snake.” I connected this to my attempts to figure out how to develop self-love. I was first welcomed into the birding world as Openlands’s Birds in My Neighborhood coordinator. That’s a volunteer-led youth program geared toward inspiring advocates for nature through birding education and birdwatching. I wasn’t really exposed to many Black and Brown folks birding. There’s an age gap, a race gap, and a gender gap. I felt discon-

The Chicago Bird Alliance had a Bird Outing Leader Training program, which took me out to LaBagh Woods. That’s about a 45-minute to an hour drive away from my home, and inaccessible by public transit. Traveling there for guided birding was transformational for me because it showcased the biodiversity in Chicago’s parks compared to preserves. I was able to see my first great horned owl and redheaded woodpecker. It helped me connect to BIPOC birders because the founder of Chicago BIPOC Birders, Daniela Herrera, was a board member, and most participants in the

leadership program were BIPOC. Black Birders Week—when it first came about, I was super inspired. I was very proud of what they were doing. With BIPOC birders it feels like a community of learning. The playing field feels more leveled. It feels like less of an ego behind it. There’s still experts in the room and there are fewer barriers to entry to that expertise. I enjoy birding with all types of people, but I particularly enjoy birding with people of color. We did a big sit in Garfield Park and saw a red-tailed hawk eating a squirrel. I was like, “Where is it? I can’t find it.” The person who saw it initially was there with me to help me find it. It wasn’t like, “You can’t see. So

“The act of birding can be super healing—being more aware of the world and life, and more aware of myself.” And there was this whole other phase. We had several species of reptiles: iguana, bearded dragon, Chinese crocodile lizard. There was a cobra, an albino snake, a snapping turtle, and the cherry on top was a tarantula. My cousins used to call our apartment Animal House. When I questioned why we had so many species living with us, my dad always said, “I don’t want you and your siblings scared of nature.” The most exotic animal of them all next to the tarantula was the python. He would shed every four to six weeks, and it was usually after a big feed. It’s not pretty, but at the end you have this new flesh. My dad had a unique way of looking at it. He said, “Think of yourself

14 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

nected from my culture for a bit, and it didn’t feel relatable as much. People were nice, and we birded, and it was educational. But to be the only Black woman just felt like a culture shock—a tad bit stressful. My early days of birding, I was around predominantly white male birding spaces, which is fine. I do think there’s a different approach to birding based on what community you’re in. Sometimes birding can be like a sport and very competitive. But that doesn’t resonate with everybody.

“Birding for me, especially when I’m around likeminded people, builds community. And it’s so simple. You can lose track of time.”

we’re done.” That’s not every space. I’ve been around spaces where I feel like if I don’t know everything about birds, I feel like an idiot. I feel like it’s like an ancestral duty for me to be a part of Black Birders Week because of its larger-than-life mission and because of what it was born out of. It’s a week to celebrate Black people in ornithology and education and science with the focus on creating safe spaces and community. I was a public ambassador for the African American Heritage Water Trail, and [did] a little bit of community engagement. Now, as a regional water trails manager, I take people out paddling along the Little Calumet River. I try to incorporate birding into the experiences. Having that skill set and flexing it is beneficial. I live across the street from Douglass Park, but I think my favorite is probably Jackson Park. One time I saw a huge congregation of black-crowned night herons. I associate those birds with the Hunchback of Notre Dame. They look goofy, but they’re cute. The act of birding can be super healing— being more aware of the world and life, and more aware of myself. I’ve been able to make common sense of things. Birds helped shift my internal analysis and observation and listening [skills]. You’re looking up, you’re listening. If you want to peel back some layers of human society, there are some common threads with birds. Sometimes there are patterns. I’ve been able to pull life experiences and understanding of humanity through the understanding of birds, and their resource-pooling processes. I think it’s really interesting when you think about birds, how they decide to divvy out resources. There are some birds

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that are very cooperative. They work together in order to make sure that they are surviving. Acorn woodpeckers live in colonies of a dozen or more. One [to] three females lay eggs in a single nest and they hatch, and then all the adult birds in the group feed the young bird. It’s their collaborative nature. And then there are some birds, like the cowbird: It invades another nest and has its egg in another nest, and its fledgling ends up outcompeting all the original [offspring] for resources. It’s a weird way of staying alive. It’s super sketchy, but interesting. Birding for me, especially when I’m around like-minded people, builds community. And it’s so simple. You can lose track of time. I don’t like to do it alone. I think it’s kind of boring. I really prefer some people who know a little bit better about birds than I do. It stretches your observation skills. To be able to identify birds, you have to be paying attention to the smallest details, and it can be very overwhelming. Birding has shown me those things. But then birding has also slowed me down enough to process some of my own things. It’s been a therapeutic endeavor. v

m msula@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 15

Bimbocita

“If everyone focused more on their own sexual health, not other people’s, they wouldn’t have to worry about others’ HIV status.”

The Chola Doña Interview by MICCO CAPORALE Photos by Kirk Williamson

Amparo Zavala is club queen of the arts and a proud HIV advocate. At 28, she’s already had a varied career as a zinester, designer, illustrator, and drag portraitist. In 2018, she came out as HIV positive on national television while supporting her then partner, the Vixen, on RuPaul’s Drag Race. She’s used that visibility to uplift the HIV-positive community, including by participating in PrEPárate, Cook County Health’s Latine-focused PrEP-awareness campaign, and working hotlines for AIDS-related organizations. These days she leads a much quieter existence, away from the glamour and drama of nightlife. But this self-described chola doña, who creates art under the name Bimbocita, always has the creative magic of the dance floor vibrating in her soul.

was born in the McKinley Park area and grew up in a very Mexican, very immigrant neighborhood. In high school, I moved to the suburbs near Brookfield Zoo. Lots of lessons learned, both in the city and the suburbs. I was five or six when my mom taught me how to draw Disney characters by sight. She never got a chance to nurture her artistic skills, so I honor her by taking that and running with it. I took my first art classes in high school. I thought I was gonna go to art school, but for financial reasons I ended up studying social justice and women’s and gender studies at Roosevelt. My second semester I took an art class and was like, “I really don’t want to do anything but art.” That’s when I started a zine called ¿Serio? In 2014, my friend Luz Magdaleno Flores and I started ¿Serio? to spread awareness among students about corrupt corporate stuff going on at our university. Our school branded itself a social-justice university, but we found many flaws in that plot. The zine was a mix of student news and institutional accountability. Our first year we made maybe four issues and sold them at Quimby’s and did zine fests in Canada and New Orleans. ¿Serio? was even featured in a museum in New York. That lasted three years, and then we joined the artist collective Brown and Proud Press. I was their lead illustrator until 2020. I helped with a lot of images, graphic design, and layouts, but my main focus at that time was the drag scene. Around 2015 I started dating a local queen by the name of the Vixen. At the time—well, even

16 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

now—there was a lot of discrimination against south-side residents attending Pride on the north side, and the Vixen highlighted it through her artistry. Together we made a lot of very simple designs with her tagline “South Side Trash.” We would write that on a variety of different outfits and looks, and then we made merch. I helped her execute a lot of early designs—whether by painting leopard spots on a bodysuit or constructing 3D elements out of unconventional materials. I also became a drag portrait artist. I tabled at clubs selling prints that celebrated performers, and a lot of them ended up commissioning me. In 2016 I was diagnosed with HIV. That made me reevaluate what was important to me: community and making sure that others can take preventative measures when possible. In 2018 the Vixen got cast on RuPaul’s Drag Race. There was an episode called “PharmaRusical,” where people performed to musical numbers inspired by pharmaceuticals, and she chose to highlight PrEP. I’m HIV positive, and she’s HIV negative. That kind of relationship is taboo, but we wanted to show that if the love exists, it’s possible.

On the show, we did a photo shoot with Adam Ouahmane. Part of our brand was that I was the painter and she was my muse, so in the photo, it looks like I’m painting her with a paintbrush. She had this gown made out of PrEP pills that I’d drawn and arranged, and I had the HIV medication

that I was taking pouring out of holes in my jeans. Before that, I had been fairly private about my status, so it was a little scary to come out so publicly. But I was a brave little chaotic guy—a punk! My family was very worried. I come from a very traditional Mexican family, so the fact that I was gay was already a thing. Dating a drag queen was another thing. And then on top of all that, I have HIV. But we got through.

Seeing other personalities in the community, like [drag performer] Milani Ninja, be open and proud about their status was so inspiring. It gave me freedom to talk about my own status, though that’s also a huge privilege. I had a famous partner and was established as an artist in my local scene. I was already very public about a lot. For people who can’t be as public, they’re often seen as liars or schemers—when really, if everyone focused more on their own sexual health, not other people’s, they wouldn’t have to worry about others’ HIV status. We need to make medicine like PrEP and HIV treatments accessible—especially to people who don’t have insurance because they’re low income or undocumented. [The] Vixen and I dated for three years. We kind of had this power-couple image, but I had made my own connections and moves to build a solo brand as Pinche Alvarito—a name and a

second floor live-scene painting and vending my prints, and sometimes guest artists and vendors would join me. Before the pandemic, I was working probably three nights a week at different clubs, doing a mix of tabling and live painting, which is kind of what I was first known for. That’s where you set up at a gig with an easel and slap paint on a canvas based on the vibe. Club tabling was barely a thing pre-pandemic, and club painters have pretty much gone extinct. It was great to have my personal stamp in the scene. During lockdown, I announced that I was transitioning and began exploring what that meant for me as an artist. When I closed commissions [in 2021], I left Pinche Alvarito behind. Bimbocita is my art persona now. You know the bread brand Bimbo? I

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“You know the bread brand Bimbo? I thought, ‘What if the little bear in the logo served cunt?’”

legacy I’m very proud of. Right when me and [the] Vixen separated, I found what became my chosen family. They saved me when I was in a really dark place. Our den mother’s name was Javi Aya, and she started a show called Enigma! at Meeting House Tavern in 2019 that ran until the pandemic. Enigma! was an alternative variety show. At the time, a lot of shows were just drag with a lot of the same performers over and over. Our party had singers, acrobats—real variety. A lot of it was still drag, but it was more than queens. Genderfuck drag. They hired me to be their resident artist. I would be on the

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thought, “What if the little bear in the logo served cunt?” It felt right, coming into my womanhood. I came from so much chaoticness, and I felt like that really encompassed my chaotic nature—but in a new, refined light. I’ve had my commissions closed because I needed time to nurture my artistry. I had been doing commissions nonstop since 2015. This is the time for me and giving love to my community. v

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m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 17

Anthony Tamez-Pochel The Land-Steward Councilman Interview by SHAWN MULCAHY Photos by Kirk Williamson

Anthony Tamez-Pochel, 24, is an Indigenous and Black community organizer and a 17th Police District Council representative. He is believed to be the only Native American elected official in Illinois. He lives in the Albany Park neighborhood.

’m First Nations Cree, Sicangu Lakota, and Black. I am a member of the Chi-Nations Youth Council in the city of Chicago. We’re one of the only Native or Indigenous youth councils here, with the mission to create safe space for Native youth through arts, activism, and education. Chi-Nations Youth Council was started in 2012. It was a group of Native youth who were getting together and just wanted to hold space for each other. Oftentimes, as Native people, we’re the only ones in our jobs, in our classrooms, in any space that we’re in. The youth council provided a space for Native youth to get together and hang around people who think like you, who have similar traditions to you, and who believe in the same causes as you. The youth council has played a large role in everything I have accomplished so far. A lot of the Native organizations in Chicago—and I say this pretty confidently coming from the Native community here—are very

“We want people to know about Native people, we want people to learn from Native people, and we want people to learn in context.” 18 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

conservative in their views and in their actions, specifically when it comes to social issues. And so the youth council, with a lot of us being younger, we tend to come at things with a more progressive view. One of the larger things that we did when we first got started was a protest against the Keystone Pipeline running through Indigenous communities up in Canada. We threw one of the largest protests in the midwest. I’m also one of the cofounders of the First Nations Garden on the northwest side in the Albany Park neighborhood. The garden was created, and is now maintained, by the Native community of Chicago. It just entered a 50year land trust. The trust itself is held by [the organization] NeighborSpace, but the Native people are the stewards of the land. I’m glad that the city has recognized the importance of allowing Native or Indigenous people to lead in a space they have traditional knowledge in. In July, the City Council redirected $1.1 million to the First Nations Garden. That money will go into redeveloping the garden. Obviously, I just want that process to be done. But a more immediate hope is engaging the larger Albany Park community, getting them involved in the garden. We want people to know about Native people, we want people to learn from Native people, and we want people to learn in context. We’ve also been able to use the garden to collaborate with other communities. The Native community can be very siloed off. Christopher Columbus Day was one of the very first times multiple communities across multiple races [in Chicago] came together. Chi-Nations Youth Council’s the one that wrote the Indigenous Peoples’ Day [city] ordinance to abolish Columbus Day. [The 2019 proposal failed to pass before the

previous City Council term expired in May 2023.] We did that in partnership with folks from the Black community and folks from the Caribbean community. We often see, when it comes to Christopher Columbus, people like to quickly turn it into a Native American issue. Columbus never set foot in the borders that we know today as the United States. We thought it was really important to center the communities who have [had] firsthand impact. When we show up for each other, it helps the broader community understand, “Oh, these things aren’t just Native issues,” or, “These things aren’t just Black issues,” or, “These

things aren’t just Latinx issues.” These are our communities’ issues and we need to come together on them. I also think it’s important because we’re able to provide context into our communities. We need to have intentional solidarity. We can use it as a time to check in with each other and make sure our communities actively seek out ways to help each other. As an Anishinaabe person, it’s also our job to make sure people are living how they’re supposed to live in our homeland, respecting things around them. We do that by working together across communities and races. I sit on the 17th District police council, and was just sworn in at the beginning of May. With that, I became Illinois’s

“Unlike City Council, or really any other body, I don’t have peers that I can turn to. We [police district councilors] are creating these positions. We are building the plane as it is in the sky.” only sitting Native American or Indigenous official—and one of the youngest Native American elected officials nationwide. I ran as an abolitionist in a district on the north side. It’s pretty incredible we were able to get over 13,000 residents to vote me into office on the platform I ran on. I was able to do that through a lot of my Native community members going out and collecting signatures, going up and door knocking with me. [Alderperson] Rossana Rodríguez taught me the importance of cogovernance. . . . The people that helped get you elected—your community—should always be your main focus, not what office you’re trying to aim toward next. Something I knew would be a real challenge was being a Native person running for office in the city of Chicago, and wanting to bring the morals, values, and traditions taught to me my whole life into this new political realm. Unlike City Council, or really any other body, I don’t have peers I can turn to. We [police district councilors] are creating these positions. We are building the plane as it is in the sky. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that getting into Chicago politics is one of the hardest things anyone can do. If you don’t know where to start, it can be pretty impossible to get in. It’s my firm belief that Native people should be in every office level throughout the country. Our perspectives are valid and important, and we need to make sure we are being heard. As a Native and Black person, I know the role I’m in is inherently harmful to both my communities. It’s something I personally struggle with. The city—any government created on Native land—was created in direct conflict with Native people. And so, while I’m in this role trying to help people, I’ve also had to grapple with the fact that I’m committing

Contempt Towards Eden

By I.S. Jones

in the voice of Eve Milton gets the tale about me wrong: Paradise is boring. I ate of God’s Golden Heart1 and betrayed heaven for myself. In the uncountable years of the Garden, I was born motherless, and mother-less is the wound of my motherhood. My kingdom of remorse. My Father in Heaven, there is no evenness in your world, only this man dragging me by the throat. This strange creature named “husband” sinking his rage into my stomach. The word “shame” did not reign me until my eyes flung against Pity’s light—cutting open my cornea, brown yolk spilling out. One day I will tell our daughters every time you touched me, it was the Lord’s mercy guiding your hand. 1. The hapus mango, for its heart shape and sweetness, is referred to as “God’s Golden Heart,” which is also the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden.

harm. I view myself as a community member; community is where my heart is. But I also have to recognize I now hold this position of power within and over my community. Some people may feel uncomfortable with that. But they should, right? Why should they trust a government that has harmed them in so many ways and has rarely, if ever, taken accountability for its actions? When we have Native people and people of color in office, we are doing harm reduction. With more of us in office, it’s something we can change. I may be the youngest Native person in office right now. But pretty soon, there’s going to be someone younger than me in office doing amazing work. There’s going to be another Native person in office in the city of Chicago. I really draw hope and inspiration from my own Native community. With a Native person in office, a lot of Native issues are being brought to the forefront—or at least to my neighbors’ attention. It brings me so much hope. Has there been a learning curve? Yes. But it’s been a really good learning curve. It’s a reminder that we’re never done growing and learning new things. v

I.S. Jones is an American/Nigerian poet and essayist. She has received support in the form of fellowships, retreats, and residencies from Hedgebrook, Brooklyn Poets, Sewanee’s Writers Conference, Callaloo, Bread Loaf, and The Watering Hole. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. For the last three years, she served as the Director of the Watershed Reading Series with Art + Literature Laboratory. Her chapbook Spells of My Name (2021) was selected by Newfound for their Emerging Poets Series. I.S. Jones is a 2023 Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar. She is currently an instructor with Brooklyn Poets, a reader for Poetry Magazine, and is at work on her debut full-length collection of poems. Poem curated by Faisal Mohyuddin. Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (forthcoming March 2024 from Next Page Press), The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, and The Riddle of Longing. He teaches high school English in suburban Chicago and creative writing at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies; he also serves as a Master Practitioner with the global not-for-profit Narrative 4 and is a visual artist. A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

Hours

Wednesday & Friday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM Thursday: 11:00 AM–7:00 PM Saturday: 10:00 AM–5:00 PM Note: The Poetry Foundation is currently closed and will reopen to the public on Wednesday, January 3, 2024.

Harriet Monroe & The Open Door

Visit our latest exhibition to learn about Chicago icon and Poetry magazine founder, Harriet Monroe.

Open through January 13, 2024. Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 19

Kingdom Rock The Hip-Hop Statesman Interview by LEOR GALIL Photos by Yijun Pan

In the 1980s, hip-hop promoter, activist, and rapper Carrico “Kingdom Rock” Sanders Sr. founded Ill State Assassins (whose ranks included Ang13, E.C. Illa, Toxic, and the Legendary Traxster) and launched one of Chicago’s first recurring hip-hop parties at Hyde Park youth center, the Blue Gargoyle. In the 1990s, he focused on managing artists via Kingdom Rock Productions, delaying his long-in-the-works debut solo album (eventually released under the name Cuzn Rico). The vice president of ChiROCK, a long-running hip-hop conglomeration established in 1985, is also part of performance and activism collective Legends of Chicago Hip Hop, and in 2021, he cofounded the Chicago Hip Hop Heritage Museum in Grand Boulevard.

found hip-hoppers at Dunbar [High School]. For you to have on a pair of Pumas, a pair of Adidas shell toes, or fat laces, people would identify you quickly. We had IAC—Tranz and his crew—at Dunbar. They were a little older than us, and they used to hang out at Wall of Fame, which is the dedication to all the best graffiti writers at the time, which was under the Cermak viaduct. We started throwing all-around citywide hip-hop meetings at the Museum of Science and Industry. There was hundreds of us. The museum, they told us there was too many of us to be on the [steps]. We looked across

the street; we saw the Iowa Building. It’s a structure that had been abandoned. We was like, “Let’s go to that shelter that looks like the Terrordome!” It’s been called the Terrordome ever since. That’s where Chicago hip-hop artists have been frequently having meetings—especially under the Chi-ROCK name. We created a crew called RA N a t i o n — w h i c h wa s Rock and All Nation—to compete against Zulu Nation, house music, and Chi-ROCK. We were from Ida B. Wells, and we wanted our own group. We started all these different groups— Ill State Assassins was the final group we created. Chi-ROCK invited our whole Ill State Assassins crew as a chapter. Twenty years later, they made me a vice president. RANation battled so many crews and got our own little reputation. We started taking tapes up to WHPK. JP Chill would let us play tapes every Wednesday. I would pull records for him, answer telephone calls, and all that stuff, just to be at the radio station. After that, I heard about somebody renting out the Blue Gargoyle across the street. I had a history at the Blue Gargoyle—I

“The people that define heritage in Chicago hip-hop, they know, and that’s what the museum is about. Not the superstars that came from Chicago but the superstars that made the superstars that came from Chicago.” 20 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

had gotten in trouble as a youth, and they made me take therapy and counseling while I was under supervision at the Blue Gargoyle. Because of my age, I had to have a cosigner [on my Blue Gargoyle contract]. My cosigner ended up being my mentor, Reverend Dr. Finley C. Campbell. I started throwing parties at the Blue Gargoyle. Dr. Groove recognized me in the Source magazine, because he used to do the regional report—I was in the Source as the number one promoter in Chicago hiphop. Hip-hop was supposed to be so bad, but Dr. Groove made it a point to mention that I had never had any fights [or] disturbances at the Gargoyle. I think that helped to get other

venues to start letting hip-hop in. In my mind, everybody that showed up at the Gargoyle is a legend, because they made it possible for it to thrive. Twista’s first time performing to his own music was at the Gargoyle. The first one for us was ’89, and we probably did them until ’93, ’94-ish. By ’94, we had started record companies and left the party scene. The one record company that we all had access to was D.J. International, and [cofounder] Rocky Jones didn’t want hip-hop. Rocky was like, “If you want to rap over house music, we’ll look at it.” We was like, “No, house music and hip-hop don’t mix!” After Rocky refused us, we would send demo tapes to New York. When we called they’d be like, “Yeah, we’ll listen to it. It came in, so-and-so got it. They ain’t listen to it.”

Turn to p. 24

Bree Sorensen

The Practical, Magical Social Worker Interview by KATIE PROUT Photos by James Hosking

Bree Sorensen, 35, is a therapist and founder of the Uptown counseling practice Practical Magic Healing, an adjunct professor with Loyola University Chicago and Fordham University, and a social work PhD candidate. Sorensen is also one of the cofounders of Fat Friends of Chicago, a group of Chicago fat activists who host pool parties, clothing swaps, and other events for the local fat community.

hen describing the kind of social work I practice, I have to talk about my mother. She passed away, but she was this radical hippie [who] went to U of I during the 1960s and 1970s, burned her bra. She worked in social work for several years and then got frustrated with systemic issues, like a lot of social workers do, so she went to law school. My mom was the director and vice president of Metropolitan Family Services for years, where she specialized in working with domestic violence. Her conceptualization of social work, at least from my experience (ironically, as a therapist) was never focused on therapy. It was always social-justice focused, it was always political, it was always law-adjacent.

Magic Healing, is 100 percent queer-run, queer-owned, and we’re all these radical liberal socialists. We get to bring our politics to the work that we do. As queer people, I would argue, we don’t have the privilege to step away from it. But I also want to recognize that I get why people might feel more inclined to stay silent, because of potential repercussions. I am very aware of the red tape that social workers have around our licenses from the state of Illinois. A lot of us are complicit with working with insurance companies, myself included. Clinicians in general, we get stuck in this place where we kind of have to choose between our moral system and then capitalism,

you ever thought about being part of size initiatives and communities?” Just getting curious with clients: “Do you want to engage with this thing that brings you to therapy?” HAES has a few components. First, it acknowledges natural body diversity. When I started learning about Health at Every Size and doing my own unlearning about bodies, there were some things that felt so, like, duh. If we can accept and understand that bodies come super, super tall, and we also can understand and know that bodies come super, super short, wouldn’t it make sense that bodies also come very, very t h i n ?

And then bodies also come very, very fat? It’s all natural. They’re just normal human diversity, so there’s no need to pathologize. That’s one part. Then, this is the part that sometimes people try to debate with: there is no one full, objective definition of health. That just doesn’t exist. Sometimes when people talk about weight and about fatness, they somehow conjure up this one objective truth about health, but that doesn’t exist, right? When we’re talking about health, people typically exclude mental health, social connection, ability, disability. Those just somehow get evaporated out of the conversation. And then people tend to turn health into this moral thing, where you are somehow bad, where you’re

Turn to p. 25

“This is the part that sometimes people try to debate with: there is no one full, objective definition of health. That just doesn’t exist.” With my mom, I saw how laws and policies impacted women with domestic violence, which then impacted the micro-individual therapy setting. And so the definition of social work, at least for me, has always been radical and political. It’s always just been very social justice focused. I’ve carried that with me forever, throughout my entire social work career. Now I’m in this cool place where I have the opportunity and privilege to work with a whole bunch of queer weirdos. My practice, Practical

basically. That’s a shitty place to be. At Practical Magic Healing, we don’t focus so much on pathology. I work with clients, and I do Health at Every Size [HAES], right? There’s a huge social justice component to HAES. And so my approach doesn’t just stay in, “Let’s talk about coping skills.” It’s a conversation that focuses on, “Let’s talk about community building. Have

DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 21

shariba rivers The Reinventor Interview by KERRY REID Photos by Yijun Pan

Shariba Rivers has been a reliable and solid presence in Chicago theater for more than a decade, particularly on storefront stages. She scored two Equity Jeff Award nominations this past year— one for October Storm at Raven Theatre and the other for her riveting starring turn as Wiletta Mayer in TimeLine’s revival of the Alice Childress classic about racism in theater, Trouble in Mind (one of her top three favorite roles). Rivers also nearly stole the show from under the noses of a powerhouse cast in her Goodman debut this fall with The Nacirema Society—without speaking a single line. The 57-year-old Louisiana native came to acting a little later in life, but she’s making up for lost time big time.

spent my childhood until my early twenties in Baton Rouge. And then, much to my mother’s chagrin, I decided—with nine hours left to go—in college, that I didn’t want to finish. In my family, that’s not something that you do. I am fortunate enough to be a third-generation collegegoer, which not many African American families can say. I went and took a job as a flight attendant, moved to Atlanta, and was a flight attendant for nine years. In that nine years I did go back to school and finished my undergraduate degree. I got my BS in higher education administration with a concentration on African studies. [Rivers originally majored in Spanish with a minor in dance.] From Atlanta, I moved to Brooklyn. From Brooklyn, I moved back down to Georgia, but a really rural town called Fort Valley, Georgia. Population maybe 10,000. And then from there, I moved to Chicago. I looked up one day and realized I’d become a soccer mom. [Rivers has a son from her first marriage and a stepdaughter with her second husband.] I’m like, “Well, my husband has something to do, and my kids have something to do, and I’m just the chauffeur.” That was never the plan. I originally signed up to go back into dance classes, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to per-

22 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

form. I’m like, “You’re in your early forties, girl, you’re not gonna get on a stage and do that.” I’ve always liked performing arts, but I just knew dance wasn’t it. So I just kind of said, “Well, what about acting?” I did all of the wrong stuff. All the stuff they tell you not to do if you actually are a trained actor and get a degree for it. I went to this big open-call thing. There were a good 300 of us there, and I think 295 of us were told, “Yes, you’ve got what it takes. We will represent you as long as you pay us this amount of money.” The interesting thing was that it worked for me. They offered classes, little workshops and stuff like that, almost every day of the week. I would leave work and I’d head out there and I’d take a class several times a week. I auditioned for an independently produced play. We did it out in Schaumburg for one night. And it was self-written, self-produced, self-directed by this woman who now has her own skincare line. But my second audition was for a show at [now defunct] Mary-Arrchie Theatre. I owe the rest of my acting career to [Mary-Arrchie founder] Rich Cotovsky and [longtime former Chicago actor] Lindsey Pearlman. [pause] I hope I don’t cry. [Pearlman took her own life in Los Angeles in 2022.] Lindsey was in [2010’s] The Rant with me at Mary-Arrchie. I think the woman who was directing was just used to working with actors who knew what they were doing. And I was not that actor. This is my first actual theater, my first play that was going to be reviewed. Lindsey and Manny [Buckley, also in the cast] went to Rich and said, “She’s new. She’s not trained. She’s good, but she needs somebody to help her kind of figure out these moments.” And so Rich called me at seven-something in the morning on a Saturday and said, “You’ve

“The reviews came out, and they were very nice. And I looked at my husband, and I was like, ‘I think I might be good at this, and I think I want to try to continue to do this.’”

Turn to p. 24

Solosam

The Jack of All Arts Interview by JONAH NINK Photos by Felton Kizer

Recording artist, poet, chef, promoter, and former glassblowing shop worker SoloSam is a true renaissance Chicagoan. Some might know him as the host of party series B-EATS, while others might keep a closer ear on his music, which zhuzhes up confident hip-hop fundamentals with thoughtful pop and R&B flair. At first glance, it can be tough to pinpoint an overarching vision throughout SoloSam’s work, but the 31-year-old West Loop–area native will tell you that—disparate as they may seem—a distinct thorughline runs through his projects. At his core, SoloSam is a learner with a deep passion for exploring new forms of self-expression, and he embraces every creative adventure with an open mind.

would have to give props to my dad [painter Samuel Akainyah]. Growing up, he was an artist. He ran his own art gallery. He was a professor. Just seeing how he fully engulfed himself in the creative aspects of life was really interesting to me. He came here originally [from Ghana] to study international law at the University of Chicago. Then, when he graduated with his degree, he pursued art. If he wanted to work, he’d work out of his space. Then he’d call the framers to bring the frame and he’d frame [the piece]. He’d do this with a series of paintings, and then he’d plan an exhibition where people would come and see [the work] at his space. As I got older, one of the things he really instilled in me was the desire to continue growing, developing, and learning. I really do enjoy learning, taking the time to grow, and

just getting better at something that I’m passionate about. My mom [Kim Akainyah] was born in Seoul, Korea, and came here when she was five. She was adopted by a Black family on the south side of Chicago. She went into medicine, but I think that she has that creative nature in her. She really helped cultivate me as an artist through that emotional support side of things. She’s creative in her own right, in the way that she instilled my moral compass. I’m really blessed to say I had two parents who came from educational backgrounds: My dad and my mom went to Northwestern. They both were supportive of me leaving college to pursue [art]. I had an initial interest in poetry, and I had always loved music. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I decided to dabble more into [music]. Even though I went to college for football, I never really was a sports kid as much as I was a music and arts nerd. It was a process of being introduced to poetry and then in high school to music. I went to Valparaiso University. Then in college, I had to sit out a semester because I was a credit short, ironically in art, which led me to drop a mixtape called Off Season [in 2012]. I quit football. I was like, “I do not want to do this. I want to pursue music, and this is

“Life can be so much more fun if you’re open to the idea of the journey of it.”

taking up too much time.” That’s kind of my origin story; recording these songs on these mixtapes, putting it all together, it really helped me during that process because it was a hard time. My mentor is leale, who’s also my engineer. I [started] going to a studio where he was working. We got to the point where he’s like, “I’m going to be honest, you might just be one of the rare few [where] you just perform better in your own setup. If you want to do that professionally, here’s the gear you need, here’s how you need to practice.” When I left school, a good friend of mine told me, “Hey man, I know you left school. We

can always use another pair of hands at the glassblowing shop.” When I got there I was just helping out [running] the studio. I fell in love with something called “cold working.” That’s essentially like . . . there are people who design cars, and there are people who detail them. [Cold working] is the refining, the polishing, the etch, pretty much the cold aspect of glass art—the finishing touches, you know, quality control. I did that for five years before the pandemic hit, while I was doing music. It was a lot of fun. I got to work with some world-renowned glass artists and work on their work. And just, once again, it was a safe space of being in a creative environment where people supported my dreams and what I was doing and also allowed me to have a creative job. Right before the pandemic started, I had

Turn to p. 25

DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 23

“I was this freestyling cat that was rapping everywhere, winning all the contests. I was like, ‘I’m a star now. So I can start bringing up other people!’”

KINGDOM ROCK from p. 20 We w a s l i k e, “Let’s do it ourself.” E.C. started with Mob City Records; he put out The Invisible Man E.P. Rappalot had a group at the time, and their backer created Death Watch Records. Then D 2 tha S was signed to Deep Dish. Our crew, our side of Ill State—or Kingdom Rock Productions—we created Coroner Records. Mob City turned into Wicked Entertainment. Each one of them had a different marketing plan and a different plan of execution. Traxster, who is part of D 2 tha S, started producing for the west-side cats. Then Traxster got the deal with Universal [in the mid90s], and people thought we was rich. If you did your history on anybody that came out of Chicago hip-hop between 1988 and 1995, there’s an Ill State shout-out or Ill State reference on that album. Everybody’s rockin’ with us. But after that deal, they kinda got jealous. They thought that we had all this money and we was holding back. My ego was bigger than it should’ve been. I actually thought I was so good, because I was the leader. I was this freestyling cat that was rapping everywhere, winning all the contests. I was like, “I’m a star now. So I can start bringing up other people!” I started developing and promoting these artists, and I always thought, “I’m so good that

24 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

I’ll be able to come back and rap later.” I didn’t finish my album until my crew was done. My crew ended in 2007. I was like, “Just record it.” I recorded some stuff—it was two-tracked. It was never professionally recorded, never mixed, but it’s out there. I put this portfolio together of all my accomplishments; I used to call it my little hip-hop museum. Then the Legends of Chicago Hip Hop started. I was trying to convince them to do a museum and hip-hop foundation. We were doing GoFundMes for people in hip-hop that died, like MC Rock, Heckle Fresh, Quicksilver Cooley, Black A.G. I was like, “This is terrible—we need to do something to give them flowers.” COVID came, shut the world down. Me and my partner, Brian Gorman, we had this place for another venture that we were doing. We gave the space the name Bronzeville Podcast Studio, and we invited Darrell “Artistic” Roberts to come down so that we could do some Chi-ROCK virtual meetings. He was like, “You know, Kingdom, you’ve been talking about that museum. We can do it here for Hip Hop Heritage Month.” When that month was over, I was like, “Well, there’s some people that ain’t seen it, so let’s keep it up until the end of summer.” End of summer came, and it was like, “Man, we ain’t taking that down. Let’s start trying to make it a real, legitimate organization.” There’s millions of records [sold] that I’m connected to. The people that define heritage in Chicago hip-hop, they know, and that’s what the museum is about. Not the superstars that came from Chicago but the superstars that made the superstars that came from Chicago. That’s my claim to fame. I’ve saved 30 individuals by giving them a different direction in their life; we all talk about where they would be, and they’re happy where they are. I could be richer, but I’m never bitter about where I’m at in life. I get rewards when I see my friends winning. v

m lgalil@chicagoreader.com

“I ask my ancestors for their permission and for them to help me tell the story the way it needs to be told.”

SHARIBA RIVERS from p. 22

got some people in your corner, and I’d like to know if you’d like the help.” And I was like, “Oh, bless you. What do I need to do?” And so he just took me through getting to know my character. He just asked questions. He was like, “You build that backstory. Nobody else needs to know the answer.” Then the reviews came out, and they were very nice. And I looked at my husband, and I was like, “I think I might be good at this, and I think I want to try to continue to do this.” I had my first independent film showing. It was called For the Cause (2013), and my grandmother was still alive at the time. And my granny and my parents came to the showing of that. At the end of the film, in addition to saying, “I never knew you used that kind of language,” my granny said, “I want to tell you something. You are fulfilling my dreams. I always wanted to be an actor. But at the time that I was coming

through as a young adult, the casting couch was real. And my mother would just not have me subject myself. So I gave up that dream.” I’ve found myself doing the same thing every time, especially with some of the plays that I’ve done where I was playing a pretty significant role. My granny’s an ancestor now, and I ask my ancestors for their permission and for them to help me tell the story the way that it needs to be told. And then I sit down, and I do the work that Rich gave me. I give that person a backstory if they don’t already have the backstory, I try to make sure that I know if, even if nobody else knows, the relationship that I have with these other characters, and I try to make sure that I build that in my mind. And I try to bring that every time I walk into the room. v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

BREE SORENSEN from p. 21

just worth less if you don’t put health as one of your values. But people don’t owe you health. Nobody owes anybody fucking health! That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve dignity or respect. I’m a PhD candidate, I value education. Not everybody values education! And that’s cool. I love that for them. Everybody doesn’t have to value the same thing, and nobody owes you anything. The old trope is like, you can’t control anybody else, but you can control your person, right? You can control the things that come out of your mouth and your behaviors. But I’ve learned that that’s actually not true, either. About ten years ago, my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Now, he no longer has control over the tremors in his body, he no longer has control over the fact that he can’t walk. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with dementia, so now he no longer has control over his memory or over the words that come out of his mouth, and even less control over some of his behaviors. So much of it has to do with a deep fear of death. “Being fat’s gonna kill you! Being overweight is gonna kill you. That’s so unhealthy!” And then I am like, life is gonna kill you! None of us are getting out of here alive, right? “Healthy people” [makes quotations with her hands] die regularly. “Unhealthy people” die.

We’re all gonna die. Every single one of us! You can go eat your keto—love that, that’s body sovereignty!—and you’re still going to die. Research tells us the only thing that we actually truly know to be effective about therapy is the human connection. It’s literally just the spark between two people. That’s so fucking magical! You can’t read your way into that. You can’t standardized test yourself into that. That is just such a beautiful kismet experience between two people. So there’s the magical side of it. But then obviously there is the practical, right? We do EMDR, we do all these therapeutic interventions. But I think a lot of people lock into only thinking about the clinical interventions and don’t necessarily put enough emphasis on the spark between two people. That’s the most exciting part of therapy. The name is really supposed to capture the balance of these two worlds. It was totally accidental, how the practice came to be. I was growing as a clinician. For a while, I was just working for myself, and a friend needed an internship. He was like, “Oh, I have this friend, Finn, who is trying to navigate services and be more anti-capitalist.” Then Finn hopped on, and they were like, “Oh, I have this friend Sue.” What’s really cool is only Molly, another person on my admin team,

“Did I expect to go to play college football? No. Did I expect to drop out and go into glassblowing? Absolutely not.” SOLOSAM from p. 23

this album release called Plated [2019], and I released a project [also called] Plated, with a cookbook and a coffee-can collab with Dark Matter Coffee. Then everything came to a halt. During the pandemic, I had this downtime and [I thought] “be productive.” So I worked on more music, but at the same time, I would just cook. I learned about food. I was just googling things, trying different things—different methods, tools. I first got into [cooking] when I left college. I’m like, “Shit, I can’t order out all the time.” Creatively, it was a way I could decompress. My dad, when he would be working at the galleries, he would come home at like 2 AM and

“People don’t owe you health. Nobody owes anybody fucking health! That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve dignity or respect.” [has] a position I put an ad out for. Everybody else has been just a cold email: one day, I opened up my email, and Stacy’s in there like, “Hey, are you hiring?” And I’m like, “Why the fuck not? Sure, come on board!” Melina is in there like, “Hey, I work with Venezuelan migrants, are you hiring?” And I’m like, “Fuck yeah, come on!” Maybe that’s the magical part: it’s all been happenstance. Maybe it just goes back to the name. I hope that I create an atmosphere where everybody feels safe. This practice is just so fucking safe—I feel safe here, too. I need that. I love it. v

m kprout@chicagoreader.com

he would just start cooking. I’m like, “One, why the fuck are you cooking at 2 AM? I’m sleeping. Two, order some food.” As I got older, I realized that [cooking] is a way creatively you can express yourself. I cook a lot of everything, it doesn’t matter. One thing I keep coming back to is Asian food. A lot of that food balances sweet, spicy, heat, savory all the time. The flavors hit the spot. When it came to grabbing the camera and doing this food photography, it really was just to learn about the aspect of the visuals. That led to me not only being able to create a song but think while listening to this song, sketch out what dish reminds me of the song. From there, creating the dish but also recording me plating the dish, taking a photo of it, and that’s the album art. My song “Numbers,” “What That Feel Like,” or “Haters”—all of those [songs had] album arts that were created off of dishes I plated. Dark Matter hit me, like “Yo, we’re trying to work on some content ideas—do you have any ideas?” And I pitched them this cooking show, Principles to Dine By. What ended up happening was when I dropped my [self-released 2021 album] Principles to Die By, I also dropped the first season of my cooking show, Principles to Dine By. A year later, Soho House was looking to

collaborate with local creators and I pitched them the idea of [2022 YouTube cooking show] House Special, in which we would bring in guests, have them cook in the kitchen, and then I’d interview them. That got greenlit, and we did four episodes. Life can be so much more fun if you’re open to the idea of the journey of it. Did I expect to go to play college football? No. Did I expect to drop out and go into glassblowing? Absolutely not. Did I expect to have a cooking show and to be a music artist? No. But all of those things have been dope to do so I’m not complaining at all. The thing that I’m putting a lot of energy towards right now is documenting a lot of what I’ve been doing. Just like I learned about food, just like I learned about music, [I’m] really learning about cinematography and how to package and put forward my ideas behind the camera. Creating these shorts that I make with friends or just people that I enjoy, our day-today conversations, and putting that forward, and also music videos. [Whether] I’m making album covers or plating dishes, I’m documenting that process. Instead of just having a videographer follow you around while you do things, here it is coming from the source. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 25

Ayesha Qazi-Lampert The Environmental Evangelist Interview by SHAWN MULCAHY Photos by Kirk Williamson

Ayesha Qazi-Lampert is a 31-year-old environmental educator in Chicago. Through her work at Chicago Public Schools, the Field Museum, and with local and national teachers unions, she strives to bridge the classroom experience with work grounded in community. For more than a decade, she’s fought for environmental justice in the classroom, in the workplace, and in the streets.

love nature. The region I’m from, where my family’s from, is near the Afghan–Pakistani border. Nature has always been a healing space for me. When I was younger, in moments of trauma or conflict, I’d fly a kite. Kite-flying isn’t just tied to my cultural identity, I think of it as a way my family found to heal—just letting your thoughts flow with the wind, allowing the amorphousness of things shape where society needs to go. I studied biological sciences for my undergrad, but my focus was in ecology. You can learn a lot about how the world navigates around us humans just by sitting and listening. Sometimes we get so caught up in the human-centered world, we forget about the nonhuman world over which we have so much influence and power. Through my research, I started tutoring others. I’d spend all my lunch periods tutoring people in the library. I had this drive to help people. But I didn’t recognize that was my path towards education; I thought I was going to become a doctor. But Dr. Carole P. Mitchener at the University of Illinois Chicago’s education department went out of her way to ask me if I’d ever thought about education courses. I tried one class, and it changed my life. I thought about the power dynamics in the classroom, about how much impact a teacher has. That’s when I was like, “OK, wow. Teachers can really shape the conversation of how we see our relationship with and responsibility to nature.” I’ve been teaching AP environmental science for seven years now. I’m also an associate of science and education at the Field Museum. I like to bridge the scientific work with the

26 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

classroom. I want students to see what scientists do, why museums matter, how museums recognize and reconcile with the fact that objects in their possession are stolen. I want students to see the messiness of the real world—but also the power these institutions hold. I’m also a member of the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) Climate Justice Committee. I designed and cotaught the Climate Justice Education Project professional development class. We’ve taught more than 100 educators to develop climate action plans. And along with Jackson Potter, CTU’s vice president, I taught the Environmental Justice Freedom School this summer, where we had students present climate action plans to Mayor Brandon Johnson and to Chicago Public Schools (CPS) officials. I’m also currently chairing the American Federation of Teachers’s Climate and Environmental Justice Caucus. We just had our first nationwide meeting, where we connected with teachers on the east coast, the west coast, and in the midwest—we’re finding ways to push this nationally. Unions are such beautiful spaces. They have the tools and mechanisms to change institutions. They play a huge role in shaping what schools can look like. Schools don’t just serve students. They’re for parents, for the community. I think of my immigrant parents. They look at schools as spaces of hope. If we make an impact, climate-wise, in Chicago, if all the schools become climate-resilient and forward-thinking, that impacts not just our air quality and biodiversity but also things like pedestrian safety. What if bike lanes around schools were protected? What if we prioritized safer, slower streets? That’s bargaining for the common good. We’re not just looking at the school but the entire campus and its role in our communities. During times of crisis, are

o u r schools ready to be that space of support? Students are huge stakeholders of the school, too. We have to think about students’ voices, and encourage them that, “Hey, your voice matters, too.” I tell students, “No matter what your political background is, if there’s a bad air quality day, that impacts everybody.” So the question is, how do we protect everyone? That’s really what drives me with this

work. It’s also important for students to recognize that in all parts of their lives, they’re going to deal with people who have different worldviews. And with the climate crisis, we’re modeling for students how to take in different perspectives, how to engage in negotiation, and how to push policies that will improve everyone’s lives. The classroom is the perfect space to practice this in a safe way. When I break down what I do and why I do it, I think of three things: The first is climate and environmental literacy. If you can call

“Sometimes we get so caught up in the human-centered world, we forget about the nonhuman world over which we have so much influence and power.”

something out, you can fix it. The second is helping students develop skills to advocate, skills to organize, skills to collaborate. And the third piece is the social-emotional aspect. I have so many students who’ve shared this year that the climate crisis is on their minds. Parents tell me many of their childrens’ mental health issues are tied to their fear of where the climate is headed. As educators, it’s our responsibility to help young people develop social, emotional, and interpersonal skills to find ways to be resilient and push forward. How do we harness collective grief and use it in healing and transformative ways? We need to reactivate our relationship with nature. When I have art students create art exhibits tied to pollution, when the musically oriented student makes soundscapes tied to nature, those are proud moments for me. They’ve found their own connection to this work. As teachers, we have a lot of impact, but we also have a lot of responsibility. With declining biodiversity, with where the climate’s headed, there are ways to advocate—and we can start right now. There are so many beautiful examples of people from communities in Chicago taking action without institutional support. We as a CHICAGO_READER_PRINT_9.75X4.8542.pdf city are positioned to always be leading if we continue to respect the legacy of Hazel Johnson, the mother of the environmental justice

movement, and make sure our curriculum honors her vision. We need to recognize current and former leaders in struggle. But we also need to be truthful about the formation of Chicago. We can’t talk about environmental justice without discussing Indigenous history. Which communities have been marginalized? Subjected to colonization? How do we reconcile that? To be an active member in society, to shape societal structures, we have to think about policy. Politics do matter. If politics take on public education, we’re not going to get protected bike lanes, we may not get textbooks, we may become a state where we can’t talk about climate change in the classroom. Once you know which mechanisms

08/12/23

“I want students to see what scientists do, why museums matter, how museums recognize and reconcile with the fact that objects in their possession are stolen. I want students to see the messiness of the real world—but also the power these institutions hold.” to influence to create change, you do what you can to make this world a better place for all. These are exciting times. The multigenerational work I’m seeing now more than ever gives me so much hope. Young people are ready—young people have always been ready—but we’re seeing a shift in adult thinking, as well. Folks are more open. As adults, we have a stage. We have to think about how we use that stage to bring in voices that might not be there. And we’re finally seeing institutions start to respect youth voices. I think that’s pretty cool. v

16:23

m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com

MAKE US

THE BEST OF

CHICAGO risecannabis.com @risedispensariesillinois Please consume responsibly. Keep out of reach of children.

IT’S A BIG YEAR FOR CANNABIS & AN EVEN BIGGER YEAR FOR RISE. SCAN TO PLACE YOUR VOTE! DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 27

Beatrice Flowers The Newsstand Matriarch Interview by DMB (DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN) Photos by Kirk Williamson

Beatrice Flowers runs one of Chicago’s last free-standing newsstands on the corner of East 58th Street and South Indiana Avenue. Flowers, 52, grew up on the south side and graduated from Columbia College Chicago. She went to school for business management and cosmetology. “I have a lot of trades [in] my background,” Flowers says. In 1966, her late mother moved to Chicago, where she raised Beatrice and her three siblings, and eventually became proprietor of the unnamed newsstand. After her mother’s passing, Flowers inherited the business that she’d helped run as a teenager.

don’t have family over here at all. My family is in Chicago but this stand is located east. Over here it’s just a lot of people who I have grown to love and became friends with. The newsstand will be 35 years old come June. We’ve had it that long but there were previous owners before us. My mom got it from a friend after one of his friends had passed away and his family no longer wanted it. I’ve been working [here] for over 27 years. And when [my mom] passed in 2010, I decided I’d keep it five years. But it’s 13 years later, I’m still here. It’s been remodeled over nine or ten times due to accidents. I make it like it’s my living room. I have my DVD players up in there. I have my entertainment for my games. I got my little music up in there. I have my little snacks, I got a heater now, whatever I need. I eat and cook my little food in there—all that good stuff. It’s a living room. And I’m watching everything that goes on outside. I’ll see everything, and everybody asks me, did something happen to they car? If something happens right in front of this area they come ask, “Did you [see]?” “Yes I did, so sorry.” I’m the eyes. The nine or ten accidents I mentioned were car accidents that destroyed the stand. I was injured in one. Other times it was basically the newsstand being hit. The most recent rebuild

28 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

of this was last year in July 2022. It’s been a year now since that happened. I wasn’t here at the time. I got a phone call about a two-car collision. When I got here, it was kind of on a tilt, pushed to the side, and so I had it redone. Funds for that came out of my pocket and right now I’m fighting their insurance to get my money back. I had it rebuilt once before, which the neighborhood helped to pay for. By them helping, they showed me they wanted me to stay. Earlier versions of the newsstand looked something like the one here. Like a box, just a squaredout little shack on the corner. It changed as years went on. It was bigger, it was wider, it was longer. And then as time went on, permits changed, you had to get smaller and smaller. The distance of it had to be away from the corners. But we’ve basically been right here, can’t move anywhere different. The space they give you is what you got. It’s always been insulated and always had a window. They once even had the side windows that look pulled out at the side. People could stand there for a minute, go through they papers, make sure everything’s in there before they go about their way. Besides selling newspapers, we have chips, we have water, we have pop. Customers come for anything, everything. Everything that they can get their hands on, even knowledge, to pull something off the Internet. “Can you help me do that?” they’ll ask. I do that to help them to get all kinds of things. They really come here like I’m, as they call me, the Little Matriarch of the neighborhood. My decision on what newspapers I sell is intentional. The reason is that certain people, they’ll accept certain papers. Then other papers, they’ll just sit here. People are looking for papers to move. People look for entertainment, people are looking for holiday things

to do. And some of those papers don’t really have all that. Some of them are more sociable, dating, all that stuff that’s in there, and people don’t really have the time for all that. They can do all that on they phone. The

things that they miss, they come to the SunTimes for. We had all those [papers, once]. We used to have the Readers. We had the Red Eye, we had Defender, Sun-Times, Tribune, we had South Side Weekly . . . we had Hyde Park Herald, we had USA Today, we had the New York Times, we had several papers. Our customers

Turn to p. 32

“I’m just trying to be here for some of the people who still like to feel paper in their hands. . . .”

Joseph Guzman The Star Partyer Interview by PHILIP MONTORO Photos by Yijun Pan

Born and raised in Pilsen, Joseph “Astro Joe” Guzman is founder and CEO of Chicago Astronomer, a crew of experts and enthusiasts that since 2004 has collectively served as resident astronomer for the Chicago Park District, the 606 trail, and many other institutions and organizations. He’s been a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador for close to 15 years and the sole astronomy instructor for After School Matters since 2017. In 2023, he was named a Latino Leader by the Chicago Latino Network.

e hit parks from Evanston down to South Chicago. We stop in December— we don’t come back till March. On the Chicago Astronomer website, there’s a schedule of all our appearances, including the 606 trail, where we go monthly. We set up telescopes at the western trailhead at Ridgeway. We connect thousands of people with the cosmos, every time we go out. Sky lovers all over the city follow me on Facebook and other social media. And there’s a constant line of emails: What did I see last night? Can you help me buy a telescope? What would you recommend? The 606 trail is great to get a 360 view. It’s easy to get to, free parking. For deep, darksky sights, I like Big Marsh Park, on Chicago’s far south side. There the lights are at a minimum—it’s kind of wild. You can still hear the coyotes howl at night. And also Steelworkers Park—that’s a great site to set up a telescope to watch the moon rise over the lake. People are under the impression that because you live in the city, you can’t see anything—you know, light pollution and glare. Well, to a certain extent, yeah. But if you get the right astronomer and the right gear, I can show you galaxies. For the general public, the planets are always a treat. I’ve seen Pluto from the city of Chicago. With Pluto you’ve got to know what

you’re looking for, but I can show you Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune easily in the telescope. We use an armada of telescopes. The flagship is the C11. It’s an 11-inch Celestron Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. It’s the largest free mobile telescope in the city. And I lug it around all over! I can show you the crescents of Venus and Mercury. When Mars comes close every two years, polar ice caps and terrestrial markings can be easily seen in our telescopes, the muddy and reddish color. Everyone wants to see Mars. But Saturn, people think that’s a sticker. “ T h a t ’s n o t real. Look how beautiful it is!” You can actually see the rings and the divisions in the rings and the banding on that planet. I love the constel-

lation Orion, with Betelgeuse in it. But that’s the calling of winter, that winter is coming in. I’m not a big fan of that. I like Vega, in the summertime. And as it sets, Orion rises. Leo in the springtime comes up. That’s galaxy time, when you can show the public galaxies—primarily Andromeda, M31. It’s the closest galaxy to us, and it’s racing toward us at breakneck speed. It will collide with us shortly, and when I say “shortly,” it’s a few billion years. In the

blink of a deity’s eye. I usually don’t show deep-sky objects to the general public, unless someone’s really interested. Because if you look at Andromeda, it looks like a cotton ball. All these pictures that you see of spiral arms and dust lanes, those are photographs. Those are time exposures. Our eyes just don’t do the job, to get all that detail. The C11’s beautiful—you can see colors in the stars, a little bit. Of course you can tell what’s going on in a star by the color. And this is part of the mini lectures that I give during our Chicago Astronomer sessions. A big

Turn to p. 32

“We need to know where we’re at in order to be better people and to connect and to center ourselves.” DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 29

Emma Greenleaf The Anime-niac Interview by MICCO CAPORALE Photos by James Hosking

Emma Greenleaf grew up in Troy, Michigan, but her love of all things film brought her to Chicago. The 26-year-old Uptown resident started her career with an internship at Facets. Years later, she has completed a master’s degree in communication and media studies at DePaul University and has become the theater’s marketing manager, which allows her to program films, too. After the runaway success of a series called Anime Auteurs that she coprogrammed with Facets’s program operations manager, Nick Edelberg, the pair cofounded Anime Club. Every month audiences can enjoy some of the rarest, weirdest, or most celebrated anime on the big screen.

’ve loved film since I was a child. In high school, I made friends with three other girls who really loved film, and we started a monthly film club at our Catholic school. We had to go through a school-sanctioned licensing website, so the selection was very limited—a lot of religious films. But we still showed some cool stuff, like Nightmare Before Christmas and 10 Things I Hate About You. My friends would typically come over to my house beforehand to watch the film that we were going to screen, so that we could have some discussion points for the club. The club was kind of a flop, though, be-

wanted to be hosting screenings. I spent two years at Wayne State studying media and cinema studies, and then I transferred to DePaul in 2017. DePaul is right down the street from Facets on Fullerton. When I moved to the city, I remember being in the car with my family driving to Target to get stuff for my dorm and passing the marquee and being like, “Hold up, is that a theater?!” I quickly became a member and

a full-time job. Two years ago I did my first-ever program for Facets. We had just reopened after lockdown, and it was a five-film program called Alternative Horror Essentials that spanned the month of October. Just something I threw together to talk about some of my favorite horror movies:

Raw, Trouble Every Day, Ganja & Hess, Perfect Blue, and Don’t Look Now. In June 2022 my coworker—well, more like my best friend at work, closest work confidante—Nick Edelberg and I programmed a four-film series called Anime Auteurs, which included Ghost in the Shell, Angel’s Egg, Mind Game, and Paprika. And we saw an insane response. We were just really overwhelmed by how popular it was. We were like, “We can’t do this once a year, we need to bring anime to

Turn to p. 33

“Every month we put out a suggestion box during the screening, and we’re like, ‘Please. What are you dying to see that you never thought you’d be able to see on the big screen?’” cause no one really came. [laughs] Heading to college I knew I wanted to study film, but I didn’t really know what I could do with that. I was interested in festival work and film criticism. I was doing a lot of writing in college and was really inspired by Roger Ebert. He’s so accessible. Then film theory helped me find Pauline Kael, and then queer film theory introduced me to Jack Halberstam and Linda Williams. But I always knew in some capacity I

30 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

started going to screenings. In 2018, I applied and got accepted as a marketing intern. When my internship was wrapping, I knew I wanted to stay at Facets. I was like, “OK . . . are they hiring in the video store?” I got a job there. Then I worked in the video store and the projection booth. [When] COVID hit, I was in grad school at DePaul, and everything went online. I did another internship in the marketing department and was able to turn that into

Therese Quinn The Museum Maven Interview by DEANNA ISAACS Photos by James Hosking

Therese Quinn, anarchist and self-proclaimed “terrible student,” is a professor and director of museum and exhibition studies at the University of Illinois Chicago.

was born in San Francisco, but I’ve lived here since 1979. I came as an exchange student at the School of the Art Institute [SAIC], and just stayed. My parents married because they were pregnant with me, and they split up pretty quickly. Then my mother married a jazz musician named Elvin Jones, who played with Coltrane, and she moved to New York. So I had to go somewhere. They sent me to live with my father’s parents in the East Bay area. Eventually, my mother returned. She was addicted to heroin, which Elvin also was, and needed to get clean. So she moved back to Sacramento, where her parents were. She brought my brother, who is Elvin’s son, and I went to live with them when I was 14. It was after I went to live with her that I realized she was addicted. I was depressed and cut school a lot, riding my bike around Sacramento, looking for things to do. I actually moved out of home before I finished high school. I came out as a lesbian at 16, went to live in a women’s collective, and then managed to graduate. I was a terrible student; my grades were very bad. But California had a master plan, a wonderful ladder sys-

tem which said that if you graduated from a public high school, any city college would have to accept you. And if you finished your AA degree, any state university would have to accept you. When I did the

“I was always considering museums through this lens of access, social justice, and democratic spaces, so that was what I pitched—that this could be a program that would foreground those ideas.”

SAIC exchange, I was a student at Sacramento State. I moved here to be with a boyfriend because it turned out I liked boys too. He was a medical student when I met him, and he moved to Chicago for a residency at Cook County Hospital. It was when Quentin Young was head of the house staff, a really political and interesting time there. Then I got pregnant, and I thought, “I guess I’ll take a leave of absence.” A couple years later I had another

baby. I went back to SAIC in the mid-80s, majoring in visual art, and in my last semester, I got an internship at [the] Field Museum. The internship was finding images for the Pacific exhibit. I got to meet all these scientists, and started to learn about myself—that

I could do research, and that I actually liked to write. When a part-time job there opened up, I applied and got it, and it eventually became full-time. By then, I was in the process of getting divorced. I ended up staying six years, becoming an assistant exhibit developer, and working on the Africa exhibit. As an exhibit developer, you’re interfacing with the scientists. I would talk with them, and then try to translate that information to something accessible for a broader audience. This was during the time that Mike Spock was there—Dr. [Benjamin] Spock’s son. He was all about making museums more accessible and working with a multiracial team. It fit my politics, which were evolving. It helped me understand who was working in museums and who wasn’t. In 1993, I took a job at the Chicago Children’s Museum as an exhibit developer. I learned a lot but only stayed for a couple years, in part because I began to see the pattern of how these places keep you underpaid. At about the second year mark I got a job working for Beverly Serrell, a well-known museum consultant. I learned the independent pathway she had carved out. And then someone told me, “Hey—this professor at UIC is looking for someone to come into his class of pre-service teachers to tell them how they could use museums in their teaching.” She put me in touch with him and it was [Weather Underground founder] Bill Ayers. So I went in and talked to his preservice teachers. The ideas were about social justice in museums, which of course is what he was teaching. After that, he said, “Have you considered going to graduate school?” I was like, “No,” I didn’t think I could get accepted. But it planted the seed. I applied to the master’s program in educational leadership and got accepted provisionally. I was concerned that it was in the college of education and my degree was in visual art. But Bill said, “You can focus on curriculum as it applies to museums.” I didn’t really know what that meant, but I thought, “OK.” I was 43 when I finished the PhD. A job came up at SAIC in the department of art education. It required someone who could teach in

Turn to p. 33

DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 31

“My regulars go back 30 years; a lot of them remember me from being in high school. Others have passed on, God rest their souls. But some of they children still come by, just to say hi, just to see how it’s looking.” BEATRICE FLOWERS from p. 28

were different nationalities, all kinds of different people. They came through and left papers here. They even had the lottery and the horse race. We had everything. But we started getting rid of the less popular magazines around 2000. Millennium came in and that hard paper thing started slowly going down. We used to sell 300 papers a day, before my mom passed we were down to like 80 papers and now we’re down to like 20 a day. The only thing we got going on right now is really Sun-Times and Tribune. We still do home deliveries every now and again. We been surviving most of the businesses, they’re no longer here anymore. I’m the only one that runs this stand full-time, it’s my retirement. There used to be several newsstands. There used to be [one] on 51st and Michigan. There used to be one on 55th, and there used to be one on 47th over in Hyde Park, and 103rd. I mean, there was an abundance of newspaper stands. But there’s only maybe two of us left now. [A newsstand on] 47th and something in Hyde Park and me right here. Used to be one on 39th and State, but he just recently passed in August. He was over there for maybe 50 years. When permits were still being issued, before 2010, it was just $50 to get one. That was it. You can’t get it anymore. They don’t exist anymore. So, what you have is what you have. If I leave, then this is it. Newspaper stands

32 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

now, they’re in kiosks, either those metal boxes or they’re under the el stations. That’s about the only place you can find them now. I can stay here because I was grandmothered in. I get up at four in the morning. I head out at five, do my drop-offs and deliveries, and I’m here at seven. I got 12 drop-offs and deliveries in downtown, East Side, and over here. Those are some of my mom’s regulars. I’m just trying to be here for some of the people who still like to feel paper in their hands, versus the phones, because a lot of people can’t do the phone thing. My favorite thing about being here is the people, even though my regulars are fading away. I only have, like, maybe 14 left and the rest of them are retiring, taking care of grandkids, and just every now and then they want to come in shuckin’ and jivin’. My regulars go back 30 years; a lot of them remember me from being in high school. Others have passed on, God rest their souls. But some of they children still come by, just to say hi, just to see how it’s looking. They take pictures every blue moon just to make sure I’m good. You got all kinds of people that come through here, like people that work downtown. But my customers are also ordinary people taking their children to school, people just trying to have the paper for break time. It’s the news. People want to know what’s going on. v

m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com

“When people come up to the telescope and we start talking, it always goes down to aliens. Do you think we’re alone?” JOSEPH GUZMAN from p. 29

red one, that’s an old guy—he’s near the end of his life. A little guy, a blue one, he’s got a lot of energy—he’s got billions of years left in his lifespan. I spent 20 years in the police department, and when I retired, I started the Chicago Astronomer organization. We notify the districts where we’re at, to let the desks know that we’re doing an activity and to do a drive every once in a while. So people know we’re out there. We usually don’t spend past 10:30, 11 o’clock. Parks close at 11. All-night sessions are not an option for Chicago Astronomer. For telescopes, those who want to get one, I always recommend an eight-inch Dobsonian telescope. It’s in that sweet spot. It’s not too small, it’s not too big. And they’re relatively inexpensive, really—you can get an eight-inch for maybe $400, $450 if you look around. And that will show you the universe beautifully. Never, ever point telescopes or binoculars at the sun unless you’re properly filtered. I don’t want people to lose their eyes. I have white-light filters, and I also have this special Coronado hydrogen-alpha [Hα] telescope. With that telescope, you can see prominences or flares off the edges of the sun, things you cannot see in a regular white-light telescope like the C11. Hydrogen telescopes, they block all that spectrum light, from blue light to yellow light—it just lets that little sliver of hydrogen through. And with that, it just opens up the sun. It’s still amazing what you can capture under city sky light. I have an ASM student, a former student of mine—he’s a crew member—he’s only 17, and he’s taken all these damn photographs that I can’t even reach! He’s using a little telescope, I think it’s an 80-millimeter refractor, and he’s taking time exposures with filtering. The Orion Nebula, M57, the Ring Nebula, all these deep-sky objects.

When people come up to the telescope and we start talking, it always goes down to aliens. Do you think we’re alone? There’s evidence of life on Mars even today, right now, as we speak. When I was a kid, I used to take my dad’s binoculars without his permission and go in the backyard and just look at the sky. What little boy doesn’t like space and astronauts and moon landings and stuff ? As I got older, I kept on studying space. It wasn’t until I started teaching it—what I realized was that we are the universe. Our elements were created in the hearts of stars that are no longer there. And when we look at the stars, we look up, inside we get a warm feeling. We smile. And what we’re actually doing is looking back home—that’s where we came from. We are the universe looking at ourselves. That is why it’s important to be aware of where we are in the whole scheme of things. We need to know where we’re at in order to be better people and to connect and to center ourselves. You can’t help but be humble! All these elements that make us up—the iron in red blood cells, the nitrogen, the calcium in our teeth and our bones—it just didn’t appear magically. It came from stars, from the creation of the universe. And we are at a point where we have the ability to look back and contemplate it. I think that’s pretty cool. v

m pmontoro@chicagoreader.com

EMMA GREENLEAF from p. 30

the forefront of our programming.” I always had friends who were into anime. Like, it was like their whole life. They drew it, read it, cosplayed it. I was always aware of it but never got super into it until I started dating my partner of four-and-a-half years, Gwen. Early in our relationship, she made me watch Perfect Blue, and I was like “Oh wow, I get it now.” After that, we did a deep dive into all of her top anime and then started discovering more together. When COVID hit, we had a lot of time to deep dive. A lot of people connect with anime because it’s really earnest and unironic. It gets to the core of the human spirit in a way that something like Rick and Morty or . . . you know, some of those American or European animation styles we’re used to don’t capture in the same way. I think the wide availability of anime online has made a huge difference in why so many people have become interested in it, too. And during lockdown, I think a lot of people who were maybe casual anime fans or just curious were able to finally deep dive, like I did. The thing about anime is that so much of it is extremely hard to license. A way to get around that while making it more communal

and intimate was by providing screenings for members only. That’s how Anime Club was born. Anime Club has been an extremely collaborative process—not just between me and Nick but between us and the club members too. Every month we put out a suggestion box during the screening, and we’re like, “Please. What are you dying to see that you never thought you’d be able to see on the big screen?” That’s how we’ve gotten some of our most well-attended club nights, like the six-episode miniseries FLCL, which we screened in August, and September’s double feature of the Devilman OVAs [original video animations]. We’ll screen classics, or sometimes Nick and I will just look at the Facets catalog and pick the oldest, craziest-looking anime we can find. I think it’s a club that’s going to live or die by word of mouth. The first one had about 35 attendees, and it’s slowly grown from there. We allow members to bring a friend for free, so there’s always new people to meet. I’ve seen friendships blossom over the course of several screenings. You get to know everybody real quick. It’s become a real little community. v

“A lot of people connect with anime because it’s really earnest and unironic. It gets to the core of the human spirit in a way that something like Rick and Morty or . . . you know, some of those American or European animation styles we’re used to don’t capture in the same way.”

m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com THERESE QUINN from p. 31

both art education and museum education. Just lucky timing. I was hired as an assistant professor of art education, and after a while I became director of the undergraduate teacher education program in art ed. I chaired the department for a few years, and got tenure there, researching and publishing about who has access to art education, and what kind of access they have. I also became active at organizing there, which I’ve done at every job. And then a job opened up at UIC, and that’s the job I have now—director of the museum and exhibition studies program. I was always considering museums through this lens of access, social justice, and democratic spaces, so that was what I pitched—that this could be a program that would foreground those ideas. One of the people I had discovered when I was working on my dissertation was Congressperson Cardiss Collins. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, she held a series of congressional hearings about public museums. She made them testify about who worked in those institutions, made them report their numbers. Overwhelmingly, museums were all white, es-

pecially at the higher, content-shaping levels. I thought she was brilliant to use her platform to force these places to account for their hiring practices and then asking them what they were going to do to change not only their hiring practices, but how they were shaping the content for their exhibits. I was inspired by her, and I pitched that in my job talk.

niche by creating a well-prepared pipeline of graduates who represent the demographic richness of Chicago. I am really proud of that. Looking back, I was kind of a nerdy, poetryreading kid, even though I was a bad student. I was inspired by Allen Ginsberg and Walt Whitman and Audre Lorde. At the time I thought I was gay. Later on, I thought, “I guess I’m bisexual.” Then the language of queer came up, and that felt right. It’s this capacious term that accommodates many practices and thoughts about sexuality and love, but also brings this political dimension because it’s about decentering norms. I started thinking about those ideas—that queer is about social justice, and that there should be movement for justice everywhere, in all our institutions and our society. It came together, in my mind, with labor organizing, this bigger struggle for justice. I’ve always heard that age makes you more conservative—it’s the opposite with me. The older I’ve gotten, the more leftist I’ve gotten. I believe in nondomination. This year I’m sure I’m an anarchist. v

“I’ve always heard that age makes you more conservative—it’s the opposite with me. The older I’ve gotten, the more leftist I’ve gotten. I believe in nondomination. This year I’m sure I’m an anarchist.” Students in museum studies programs nationally are 80 percent white. The UIC museum studies program last year was over 70 percent underrepresented minorities, and diverse in a lot of other ways. That’s the vision of the program, and I think why I got the job. We have a robust number of applicants every year, and we also have a flourishing graduate concentration. The program fills a valuable

m disaacs@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 33

Flash ABC

The Graffiti Champion Interview by LEOR GALIL Photos by Kirk Williamson

As a teen in the early 1980s, Flash ABC joined one of Logan Square’s first graffiti crews, Angel and Berto Crew, later known as Artistic Bombing Crew. He developed a deep interest in photographing graffiti, which earned him the nickname Flash. In the past few decades, Flash turned his attention to organizing within the city’s sprawling, multigenerational graffiti community, helping organize meetups (including the Meeting of Styles gathering), graffiti tours, and mural paintings on businesses and permission walls. Flash oversaw the defunct Project Logan, a sprawling permission wall on Fullerton near Milwaukee.

was born in Humboldt Park, and then my parents moved to Logan Square. Across the street was BboyB; our parents still live across the street from each other. From that block, we made friends with Angel Perez—this is 1983—and they created Angel and Berto Crew. I started documenting graffiti in the neighborhood. Some of my graffiti pictures on artisticbombingcrew.com are the first graffiti pictures of Chicago. I documented everybody. And then we came back to Logan Square and started hanging out at the Eagle monument, where now you hear about the Writers Bench; it’s where writers met up, sketched, planned, and went on missions to take over rooftops. We made it from Logan Square all the way to Division and Ashland on the Blue Line, on the rooftops—one of the first crews that was on there. We all [went] away, we got arrested; I went to the military and spent nine years in the National Guard, driving trucks around Illinois. When [I came] back, I really didn’t find anybody until the Internet. The Internet recreated [ABC], and we have [one of the oldest] website[s] right now—it’s been on there since 2003. When it started to get heavy traffic, we created a forum where we started to interview ourselves. It’s a different life.

34 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

You go on those forums, that’s where we first started to go to the Writers Bench. [And] that’s where we started to organize ourselves with Meeting of Styles and all these walls you see going on. I painted every wall on the south side between 2003 and 2008. I painted everywhere that they let me and I said, “Why can’t I paint in my neighborhood?” I ended up with a wall, working with [neighborhood artists’ network] AnySquared, and it’s called Project Logan. My wife was watching—with my granddaughter—Project Runway. I was like, “Curating this wall is this project—it’s not supposed to last.” Graffiti isn’t supposed to last in Chicago; we rotated panels on a monthly and biweekly basis for 11 years. I made art out of it. Now the wall’s been knocked down, and there’s other projects starting to pop up around the city. I’m 56 right now. After this wall coming down, [and] losing a job—I lost my best friend that got me to the south side, Chumbly, he was the one that got me on the walls in the first place. His anniversary just passed, and I’m like, “My God, we did so much.” I’ve got a vast

history that I like to share. I do graffiti tours on bicycles to explain letter structure. Lots of people show up at West Town Bikes, I go to the 606, I go to the walls, and I go to Project Congress—that’s another one of ours that BboyB’s running; The Congress Theater is under construction and we’re the ones organizing bringing the artists to come in and paint. The word “project” gives the artists the understanding that this stuff ’s not permanent.

We need practice walls. A permission wall, if [artists] go over it, it’s really practicing for other things that’ll come along. We’re older men now, we’re in our 50s. My crew celebrates 40 years of graffiti this year. We painted a mural in Logan Square right now, where the Blue Line comes out; there’s a tribute to us and all the people that were in our crew. I lived in Logan until five years ago. I didn’t own, and every year the rent went up $100! I felt like improving my neighborhood with Project Logan and advancing the art form, I pushed myself out. I started seeing on Reddit that people were moving to the neighborhood just because of the wall. But I am all city; that’s what people have to remember about graffiti. If you think that I’m just Logan, then you don’t know me, you don’t know Chumbly—and everybody who runs around. I don’t know if you’ve seen 95th and Commercial, they have Meetings of Styles over there because it’s gotten so big. We go over there, and the community treats us as part of their community.

“I painted every wall on the south side between 2003 and 2008. I painted everywhere that they let me and I said, ‘Why can’t I paint in my neighborhood?’”

Let’s Play! I’ve never been shy of showing my errors. I was terrible when I started again in 2003. I’m painting in the Crawford Steel on the front, they let me. People were walking by—one guy was like, “Look at this twisted letter!” You have to learn how to take criticism, or don’t be an artist—you don’t grow. Coming back in this Internet era, you’re exposed. You’re no longer hidden. Everybody knows who Flash is. You put a tag or anything—“What, were you drunk doing this?” You learn how to take the criticism, knock the chip off your shoulder, be more of a community man—and understand that criticism has always been helping evolve. I’m a fan of books. My wife collects books here. The amount of that you see on New York graffiti, and then you look for something about Chicago? I hope that somebody grabs my archives and starts making books. I want to start making books. I work with this one artist, we’re working on one for the wall, but Chicago has got a big void when it comes to sharing the data, getting it out there, and having some books.

In the last year, when I needed food, I had people come over here and drop off food. It’s been a humbling experience to have been looked at like a community leader, and then having people helping me in my time of need. This whole unemployment experience has matured me more, [and] I take my art more seriously now. I’m part of a community. My community expects me to be there and do things for them. As you get older it’s been easier, because it’s just more managing. It’s been fun to walk up to the wall and not have to paint it; it’s already been buffed because the young kids buffed it. I painted during the Meeting of Styles, it was one of the best times. I put four good hours into my piece and I was done. That comes from the experience of being in the Styles when it first started. We have progressed. Every time we paint it’s because we want to progress. We’re part of that progressive movement. v

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“I started seeing on Reddit that people were moving to the neighborhood just because of the wall. But I am all city; that’s what people have to remember about graffiti.”

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2:21 PM DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO7/23/21 READER 35

Emjoy Gavino The Inclusionist Interview by KERRY REID Photos by Joe Mazza

Actor, coartistic director for Gift Theatre (with Brittany Burch and Jennifer Glasse), and founder and executive director of the Chicago Inclusion Project, Filipina American Emjoy Gavino has been an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion on local stages for many years. She divides her time now between Chicago and Minneapolis, where her husband, Chad Peterson, works as director of marketing and communications for Children’s Theatre Company. On the day we talked, she was getting ready to leave town to rehearse as Mrs. Cratchit in A Christmas Carol at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater (adapted by Chicagoan Lavina Jadhwani).

was doing theater in the Pacific Northwest through college. When I graduated from college, I could have turned [Actors’] Equity actually then. Then my boyfriend at the time, who is now my husband, got a job at Northlight. And so that moved us across the country to Chicago in 2006. I’ve been a Chicagoan since then. Technically Evanstonian. The west coast in general is just—maybe integrated might not be the right word, but maybe it is. I think there’s diversity in both places. I do think that there is segregation, like heavy segregation, in Chicago that I did not

classic and cast all of my favorite actors?” And that’s where the Inclusion Project started. I had to start a nonprofit because Equity wouldn’t let me put on a one-time reading for under $3,000. So we raised

are specific, but it’s mostly 30 Americans in a bar. We put on a reading to show casting directors and other directors, “Here’s our offering. We wanna just show you what we’re capable of and that it’s not impossible, so that you can do this again.” And after that reading, I sat down with all of

tagline was “Get everyone in the room, and everyone in the same room.” That was our goal. It’s so simplistic, but that’s essentially it. Inclusion Project came from me and my friends who came from all different disciplines and backgrounds. Some were from storefront [theater], some were Equity, some were Asian, Black, members of the disabled community. It was like we could all only work

“I try to tell students, ‘It seems like you don’t have power in your trajectory and that you need to be passive and just do what you’re told.’ And there is a generation of people who’ve been told that.” witness as much in Seattle. But then there’s also segregation within the theater community of, “Stay in your lane. If you’re musical, you do musicals. If you’re straight theater, you do straight theater.” I also, in the midwest, just feel othered in a different way. And I can’t quite articulate what it is, but it is there. When I started the Inclusion Project, our

36 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

together during A Christmas Carol. I just thought, “When am I gonna just do a play with all of you that has nothing to do with magic?” 2015 was a really big year because that is when I became a casting director. That’s when Michael Thornton [founder and former artistic director] asked me to join Gift Theatre as the casting director. That’s when I said, “Can you help me do this reading of an American

m o n e y, so that we could pay all of these actors to do The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan. It’s about the American dream. If you read the [character] breakdown, it just says, “This person is a dancer. This person is a dreamer.” It doesn’t say body type. It doesn’t say ethnicity. There are a couple of things that

these artistic directors and casting people and said, “So how can you do this? ’Cause I don’t wanna be the only one doing this.” My journey with Gift started then, and then my journey with engaging with the Chicago theater community and—not demanding, but just asking, “How can we help you do this?” [The Inclusion Project] has a staff of all BIPOC people,

Turn to p. 38

Forrest King-Cortes

The Community-Centered Conservationist Interview by DMB (DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN) Photos by Hannah Hufham

Forrest King-Cortes, 32, is a lifelong Chicagoan who recently began a job as national director of community-centered conservation for the Land Trust Alliance, a nonprofit that brings together more than 900 wildlife conservation organizations across the country to help grow their resources to make equitable and effective change. He studied wildlife ecology and management at Auburn University, but Chicago’s parks and green spaces nurtured his interest in this work. King-Cortes and his husband recently moved to Birmingham, Alabama but plan to return to Chicago sometime in the future.

was born and raised in Chicago. My parents [were] both born and raised in Chicago, but come from immigrant families. My mom’s family is of European descent, a little bit of German and Italian mixed in there; [they] have been in Chicago for many generations. My dad’s family is from Michoacán, Mexico. My grandparents came to this country not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, but are diehard Chicagoans. My journey in conservation started close to home and at a young age. One of my favorite places in Chicago is North Park Village Nature Center, a park on the city’s northwest side. I have early memories of going with my parents to hike those trails, going to summer camp there, and volunteering after school to help improve the habitat. I ended up going to school for wildlife ecology and management at Auburn University in

I progressed into stewardship program manager with the Nature Conservancy and the Chicago Park District, working in some of the places that I grew up playing in to protect [the] habitat in the city for people, animals, and plants. That job brought me to all different parts of the city, working with volunteers, schools, groups, and partner organizations, from organizations that specifically serve people with disabilities all the way to after-school groups, or groups of seniors who wanted to see their communities improved. The Nature Conservancy and the Chicago Park District each noticed that, in some places, there was a disconnect between the green spaces and the people living around

Let me be clear: Those relationships were already there. People were excited to be in the space but, in some cases, [they’d] never been intentionally invited or felt welcomed. Our communities have so many different and distinct relationships to nature. But often those go unrecognized and underappreciated by both environmental groups and other forces in this work. Queer communities and communities of color, especially, have strong relationships to nature where, sometimes, it’s just about unlocking our sense of safety and accessibility to let those connections flourish. A lot of times

when people hear [phrases like] “nature in cities,” “nature in Chicago,” “the outdoors and queer communities,” or “the outdoors and Brown communities,” they think that they’re carrying a contradiction. But I’ve found, throughout all my years of this work, that there’s not a contradiction there; these things are in harmony. Our communities have deep roots in stewardship, in tending to the land, in being in relationship with the land. And those are just often not valued or acknowledged. One of the events that sticks with me to this day is an event where I worked with community partners in Bronzeville along the south lakefront. It was a commemoration event that honored the lives lost and the social justice leaders who emerged in the

Turn to p. 38

“People all have different stories and relationships to land. We need to understand those connections to build healthier cities, and to build healthier relationships with our neighbors and leaders.” Birmingham, Alabama and, after graduating, [I] stumbled into a community engagement and outreach role with an animal shelter there. I came back to Chicago, and I worked in some fellowships and internships at Lincoln Park Zoo related to community outreach and urban conservation, like protecting habitat in the city.

them. They saw there needed to be dedicated staff capacity and intentional efforts to help people connect in ways that felt comfortable and enjoyable to them. A lot of the work we did was getting families out in the space by way of hosting cultural events and art workshops there, [and] by engaging people in taking care of the spaces.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 37

“Queer communities and communities of color, especially, have strong relationships to nature where, sometimes, “But then you have to live it’s just about unlocking with the consequences our sense of safety and of not speaking up and accessibility to let those not saying anything connections flourish.”

and not advocating for what you would FORREST KING-CORTES from p. 37 have wanted. And that is sometimes more harmful than not getting the job because so-and-so wouldn’t cast you.”

EMJOY GAVINO from p. 36

and we’re still learning what access means. We’re still learning how to help us and how to help our community and how to help the leaders learn, so that it’s not falling on the marginalized people inside their institutions to carry it. I’ve been lucky to have worked with the Gift in a bunch of different capacities since 2015. I really did start as just the casting director. So I was like the only staff member that wasn’t an ensemble member. I was a fangirl. I loved what they did. And the reason I think Mike gave me the chance that he did is because around 2015, when I started to get frustrated, I emailed every artistic director I knew and I said, “I think you need my help because I think I see things in a way that you have not been able to see things. And I think I know people that you should know.” I was pretty blunt about it. And so when Mike hired me, he knew what he was getting. I would challenge him and whoever the director was to say, “Who do these characters have to be? What is the most important part of this character? Do they have to have this body? Do they have to? Who are you not thinking about?

38 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

Who has not been invited into this room yet?” I talk to college students as much as I can. I try to tell students, “It seems like you don’t have power in your trajectory and that you need to be passive and just do what you’re told. And there is a generation of people who’ve been told that. But then you have to live with the consequences of not speaking up and not saying anything and not advocating for what you would have wanted. And that is sometimes more harmful than not getting the job because so-and-so wouldn’t cast you.” I tell them, “You are almost protecting yourself by saying something and then not getting that gig, because otherwise you would’ve had to spend time with those people putting you in that box and making you quiet and diminished. And that’s not worth it.” And I say this as a middle-aged person now who has gone through years of having done that and wishing I hadn’t and wishing that somebody had given me the permission to say, “Even if you don’t book that job, that job wasn’t worth it.” v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

face of the 1919 race riots in Chicago. The event commemorated the space where some of these things took place—a place where, in some cases, people had experienced deep harms or traumas. When we came together to host that event, our intention was to curate space for young leaders to talk about what it feels like to be safe and valued outdoors for them right now, in this moment. And it was about bringing elders from the community together to talk about their lived experiences in those spaces—in some cases, their lived trauma and, in some cases, joy. This work is social work just as much as it is environmental work. People all have different stories and relationships to land. We need to understand those connections to build healthier cities, and to build healthier relationships with our neighbors and leaders. The opportunity opened for me to transition to overseeing, more broadly, the work of community engagement statewide when I was chosen as the director of community engagement for the Nature Conservancy in Illinois. I saw at a different scale what it looks like to support communities through conservation work and what it looks like when communities can help to shape conservation work in different places around the state. Once you’ve spent time with different community members in the same spaces, you don’t walk through green spaces the same. You don’t walk through parks the same. You have a whole different view on the city. A lot of my work in this field, though, has also been volunteer. My husband and I cofounded a group called Out in Nature in Chicago in 2019. You often hear, in some of my professional circles, “Well, people of color don’t go outdoors,” and, “Queer people, they may not really be outdoors people.” I was hearing stereotypes that say that our communities don’t have relationships to land. I saw this need for a space where we could be ourselves outdoors and grow our relationships with green spaces

around Chicago. My husband and I took the plunge. We just said, “Let’s tap some of these networks that I’ve developed through my professional work and get the word out and see who shows up.” Like, “Let’s go look at birds together at Big Marsh in the Calumet region. Let’s go rock climbing at a park in Chicago outdoors. Let’s go kayaking on the river. Let’s go to the Indiana Dunes.” And people came. We had much smaller events to begin with. And now our community is several hundred strong. You can really see the diversity of our communities shining and the excitement of people to get outdoors together in a way that feels liberating. My passion for nature, as a city kid, really embodies this: this false juxtaposition that people sometimes hold that cities and nature are separate, or that people and nature are separate, or that queer people and nature are separate. We all have a story, and that story is just as important as the environmental data that we looked at in conservation, as the planning we do with maps and statistics. It’s one thing to create a new green space. But it’s quite another thing to ensure the communities around it fully benefit from it. v

m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com

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Wisdom Baty The Uplifting Curator Interview by KERRY CARDOZA Photos by Yijun Pan

Wisdom Baty, 39, is an artist, mother, curator, and arts administrator. In 2019, she founded Wild Yams, an artist residency on the south side that supports Black mothers. Baty also works as the Girl/Friends Leadership Institute programming coordinator at A Long Walk Home, an art organization that works to end violence against girls and women.

hat propelled me to art? So I’m adopted. My mother passed away when I was really young, but I’m learning that she was an artist. I grew up with my aunt. She’s not in the art world at all, but was like, “OK, I see that you like art.” So I started going to this [youth arts program] called Marwen in like sixth grade and took art classes. I lived on the north side, so I could walk or take the train. I stayed with Marwen for a very long time. I became a student teacher. I also got to experience a residency program there. We went to New York and visited the Studio Museum. It was like my precursor to residencies. I was a teenager. We saw Mickalene Thomas’s work. Thinking back, I’m like, “Was that a dream?” It was moments like that that [made me think]: these are the possibilities. I was selling art. [Marwen] would just position you in a way that kind of hit all the spots: teaching, studying under teachers, having these free classes. So my aunt would nurture, but I don’t think she ever really understood what I was doing. It was always like, “What do you plan on doing with your life?” I was like, “I’m gonna be an artist.” Now I look back and I maybe feel my mother’s spirit. She’s opening doors in this way that I’m now doing different rituals and com-

muning with her. I feel like that has been the precipice of Wild Yams. [When I attended UIC] I was making paintings and drawings—figurative works like superhero narrative works, textured, text-based works, playing a lot with color. Kerry James Marshall was my professor. It was really amazing to have that experience. Tony Tasset, Julia Fish, a lot of people who were really working artists. I graduated and taught art for like ten years at a Black-owned social justice school called Village Leadership Academy. During that time, I had a baby. I was like, “Oh, I gotta, like, work at things that are consistent.” I don’t think I would have taught as long if I did not have a child. After a while, I was trying to figure out why I, or artists that I knew, didn’t make it as artists. It’d come to bother me more and more, like I went to school for a thing [but] I’m doing this other thing. That’s why I was like, “Let me go to school for arts administration.” Because clearly there’s something there.

Arts admin [at] SAIC—a very different culture than UIC. It was a two-year program, I did it in three years. In the year I took off, I actually went back to Marwen. During the interim of teaching youth, they had a teaching artist residency. I just started talking to mothers [whose children went there]. I was like, “There’s a hole [for mothers in the arts ecosystem].” So I began Ways We Make, a workshop series for moms of color. I created a manifesto while I was there. And I was like, “OK, I’m onto something.” I did a workshop there. I did a workshop at Threewalls.

And then Experimental Station. Then I went back and finished. I was having a conversation with my mentors, and they were like, “What do you really want to focus on?” And I was like, “Black mothers on the south side.” I was working at a coworking space. I was like, “Can I bring people to show their work?” That’s where [Wild Yams] began, very small with one person. Then it was just artists showing work, having an opening, doing a studio visit. That led to me inviting more artists, the second cohort. Because I was like, “You know what? Mothers need to not be in silos. We need to talk to each other and gather, and childcare needs to be there.” I was understanding, after I graduated, what artists’ residencies

“Motherhood is an artistic practice. Nurturing is an artistic practice. Even if you’re not a mom, biologically, caring for things, to care for, to curate: that is art. So many of us don’t consider ourselves artists” 40 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

“People just design things; artists are really great at undesigning things and redesigning things. Just because things have been like it’s been for a long time, it doesn’t make it the right way or unshiftable.” were set up as. There’s a lot of dope ones [that consider] children and mothers, but the majority of them are not and historically have not. I knew this one sister who brought her child, and she actually got kicked out of a residency. I was like, “What would it mean to have a space, an alternative?” I did two of those [residencies] and then the space actually closed. Then Sadie Woods had a residency at the cre.æ.tive ROOM [art studio in the Greater Grand Crossing area]. I didn’t even know the space was there. I felt like I was stepping into the south. [Founder] Clemenstien Love—who is an interior architect and SAIC alum—gutted the space and reverted it to an artist’s residency. I was like, “I think this space is really beautiful. I run an artist’s residency and we’re looking for a space.” So that’s how we began in 2020. Been there ever since. Right now we offer studio space, studio visits with critics and curators. We just came down from our Black Joy series where each artist got a stipend to curate their own programming that they felt would bring Black joy. We’ve been having reading circles, manifestation sessions, [and] praise mother sessions. That was in collaboration with 6018|North. We got a DCASE [Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events] grant to provide funding for programming, food stipends, material stipends, also a onetime childcare or self-care stipend. One of our artists is not a mother biologically, but she does this motherhood work. We provide opportunities to gather and talk about each other’s work. In past sessions, we provided quote-unquote professional development. We provide exhibition opportunities and we’ve sold artists’ artwork. There’s an application. You show your work, your goals. It hasn’t been perfect. It’s just like labor. It’s painful and it’s beautiful. You learn as you go. Now I’m working with Alyssa Martinez, who is kind of my thought partner. I think COVID brought a lot to bear, just with everything, [for] artists of color—there’s a lot of artist-generated residencies happening,

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which are really amazing. But people have been complaining for a long time. I think there’s been great shifts in the ecosystem, [but] not enough. People just design things; artists are really great at undesigning things and redesigning things. Just because things have been like it’s been for a long time, it doesn’t make it the right way or unshiftable. With my position at A Long Walk Home, the [executive director] has been really pushing me to bring my creative practices to the forefront, and I’m working on doing that. I’m working on making sure I do something every day that’s creative. My curatorial practice is my art making. And my communing with my grandmother to make the space happen. [With] Wild Yams, one of the big questions is like, motherhood is an artistic practice. Nurturing is an artistic practice. Even if you’re not a mom, biologically, caring for things, to care for, to curate: that is art. So many of us don’t consider ourselves artists. Black women, Black mothers, they’ll be like, “Yeah, I do X, Y, Z.” I’m like, “All of that is art.” But it’s how to really reimagine what art is for ourselves, and how we actually do live creative lives. That’s very much in search of our mothers’ gardens. v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 41

Dixon Romeo

The South Shore Organizer Interview by KATIE PROUT Photos by Yijun Pan

Dixon Romeo, 29, is a lifelong South Shore resident and executive director of Not Me We, a grassroots community group building power for poor and working-class folks in the neighborhood. Romeo is also an organizer with the Obama Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, which includes organizations across Chicago and residents at risk of being displaced by the Obama Center and the University of Chicago. When I meet him, he’s seated next to the coffee grinder at a busy Starbucks. It’s hardly an ideal place to record an interview or virtually attend a court hearing, but Romeo is here for both. “You wanna hop on this with me? Court’s never on time. I thought you could listen in as we talk,” he says, inspecting an earbud before handing it over. “It’s clean enough.”

Throughout our interview, Dixon never seems distracted. He never asks me to repeat myself. He’s also following the court proceeding, which involves the 312 Tenants Union (with whom he’s been organizing) and representatives of their landlord. The Woodlawn apartment building at the center of the dispute has been cited with dozens of code violations. When the tenants speak, he shifts his focus to them. He remains present for everyone simultaneously, and he seems buoyed and calm. When the hearing ends, we stroll down 71st. Romeo greets everyone we encounter. A woman walking with speakers shyly turns them down when he says good morning, to which Romeo replies, “Turn it up!” He peers into an empty storefront (“I’m looking for an office space”) and takes me to get burritos (“I figured you were hungry”). He’s just as gregarious on the way back. It’s a pleasure to see someone doing what they’re meant to do.

42 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

f you took Black America and shrunk it, the one thing it’d look like is South Shore. You have middle class, upper middle class, but the majority of folks are working class. You got all the issues that Black communities deal with, but also you got the lake and a really deep energy of folks who have been here for decades, and the different cultural things that come with that. This is the only neighborhood that has the Obama Center, the Tiger Woods golf course, the lake. It’s beautiful, and Black folks live here, and we should be able to stay. Most folks have really interesting reactions

“There’s this idea that community organizing is a long-term thing, and it is. But it’s also a shortterm thing.”

and who has control over what’s going on. A lot of the probusiness, progentrification people, they don’t have any power, and they know that. They’re just slightly bigger fish, before they get eaten by a shark—and we’re all fish. The overwhelming majority of folks are poor and rent in the neighborhood. We’re honoring that all of us want to see things differently, but grounded in the fact that some folks do have it worse. And whatever we’re pushing for cannot make it worse for anybody in this space. It can only improve it. The idea around the South Shore ordinance is how can we really have some robust change

that doesn’t just affect this neighborhood in this specific situation? [Editor’s note: The ordinance is part of the proposed Community Benefits Agreement, or CBA, that would guarantee rent subsidies, affordable housing, and other protections for residents of neighborhoods facing gentrification as a result of the Obama Center. A CBA ordinance for Woodlawn passed in 2020.] There’s gentrification happening across the city, right? South Shore is a place where folks who were displaced from [public housing project] Ida B. Wells, who were displaced from the projects—the number one neighborhood for voucher holders was South Shore. And at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about. We have had in my lifetime every fucking example

to power and what you can do about it. I think that some folks have a warped interpretation of what organizing is. They think organizing is, like, the organizer convinces masses of people to do what the organizer wants. It can work that way. But that’s not the way that we do things. The idea is: How do I show you and empower you to feel comfortable to confront power in the way that you see fit? And to do so in an organized, coordinated way? I don’t want you to listen to me; I want you to have more of an analysis and more of a vision for yourself than I do for you. Organizing intergenerationally, interclass, is about getting folks aligned. It’s about getting clear on who has power, who is the target,

“The idea is: How do I show you and empower you to feel comfortable to confront power in the way that you see fit? And to do so in an organized, coordinated way? I don’t want you to listen to me; I want you to have more of an analysis and more of a vision for yourself than I do for you.”

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in the world about what’s going to happen if this ordinance doesn’t pass. We’ve seen Logan Square flip. We’ve seen what’s happened in Pilsen. We’ve seen gentrification of Bronzeville. We’ve seen it in Cabrini-Green. We’re starting to see it in Englewood, right? Like, we have seen it. We know what happens. We know the story. You are insulting everybody’s intelligence if you say, “Well, maybe it’s not that bad, and it’ll take time—” No. It happens. It’s violent. And we’ve seen the destruction that it creates. If you don’t stabilize housing in South Shore, you don’t care about CPS schools, right? No one from Jackson Park Highlands sends their kids to Parkside. It’s people who live in the Parkways. It’s people who live in New Vistas II apartments that send their kids to CPS. It’s not the 3 percent of folks who make over $100k—they’re not sending their kids to Bradwell or Mann. It’s people who live in these buildings. So if we care about these schools, we care about the CBA. If we care about violence in the neighborhood, we care about the CBA. If you actually talk to young people in the neighborhood and talk to people out here, they don’t have places to go! I don’t think I’d be able to sleep at night if I wasn’t doing this. It doesn’t mean other people need to feel that way, but that’s how I feel. If we don’t get the CBA, I literally won’t be able to afford to stay here. Over in Woodlawn

r i g h t n o w, there are folks in this building [from the 312 Tenants Union] who are paying over $2,000 a month in rent. I can’t afford that! And I’m not gonna get rich doing community organizing. So I have a direct interest. My family lives in the neighborhood. And even if I were to change careers, start a hedge fund, and I made $100 million, I cannot afford to subsidize everybody in the neighborhood, right? Because the only way I can make money is doing stuff that would be exploitative for folks. Organizing helps me but [it] also helps others—I’m self-interested to do this work. That’s the common through line. Of course, you’ve gotta rest and take breaks. But that’s what keeps me in it. We don’t have a choice! What else are we gonna do? There’s this idea that community organizing is a long-term thing, and it is. But it’s also a short-term thing. I think about this all the time. Like with this court case—there’s at least 100 units, 100 people who have not been displaced because of this work. These tenants would not be in this building if we were not organizing. It’s more effective than any city power, when you get a bunch of people together. We fight together. v

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m kprout@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 43

ARTS & CULTURE YEAR IN REVIEW

2023 books worth revisiting The Reader’s culture editor recommends five books by Chicago authors. By KERRY CARDOZA

ry as we might, it’s impossible for us to cover every Chicago-centric book that comes out in a given year. So here is a small effort to make amends for that before we look ahead to the buzzworthy books of 2024. In no particular order, here are five books by authors with local ties that the Reader recommends checking out.

Voices from the Margin, Volume II: Present Within the Stream of Life Red Line Service (Red Line Service)

Trace Evidence Charif Shanahan (Tin House) In 2015, author Charif Shanahan traveled to Morocco, his mother’s birthplace, on a yearlong Fulbright, planning to research his family’s history and “representations of Blackness in the Maghreb.” But just two months into the trip, he was in a bus accident that broke his neck. During his long convalescence at his childhood home in the Bronx, he wrote the poems that make up Trace Evidence, his second poetry collection. The accident is detailed in a long, probing poem at the center of the book. It’s bookended by lyric poems that circle around racial identity and sexuality, how we attribute meaning to our differences, and how we long for connection and understanding. The author has said that he hopes the book reminds readers “that we are all the very same thing,” so that after reading it “our oneness feels to them, even momentarily, irrefutable.”

Red Line Service is the only art organization in the city led by people with a lived experience of homelessness. It aims to connect people with creative resources in order to generate a “sense of belonging.” This volume, supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, features the artwork and critical and creative writing of participants in Red Line Service’s programs; some are first-time authors. The writers largely highlight the work of local artists that inspire them: Richard Hunt, Nick Cave, Tonika Lewis Johnson. One fascinating essay, by Valerie Bankston, examines the Depression-era photos of Farm Security Administration-funded photographer Russell Lee. Another, by Max Stoller, details the loss of public access to the Thompson Center. One thread runs through all the work: the passion that the writers have for art and the energy and excitement it brings them to flex their creative muscles. Chicago Mosaic: Immigrant Stories of Objects Kept, Lost, or Left Behind Edited by Chris Solís Green and Amy Marie Tyson (Big Shoulders Books) In 2022, DePaul professors Chris Solís

44 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

Green and Amy Tyson put out a call for stories about objects that were meaningful in people’s migration to Chicago. The result, Chicago Mosaic, weaves a rich tapestry of experiences, detailing the travels of folks who left their home countries over 100 years ago as well as in more recent years, all in search of a better life. Every object holds a personal significance: beautiful arracada earrings from Mexico, a suitcase handmade out of scrap wood in a displaced persons camp in Austria, a pair of yellow Nikes from South K o r e a . As our headlines are again dominated by stories about migrants, the editors write, it is more important than ever to remind readers “that immigrants are people and not aliens, and that the United States is largely made of immigrants.” To that end, the book is available for free, with the caveat that you instead lend time or money to organizations working to support immigrants in Chicago. Call You When I Land: A Memoir Nikki Vargas (Hanover Square Press) A love for travel was instilled in author Nikki Vargas at a young age, by her aviationobsessed father. So it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise that, in her mid-20s, she breaks with the traditional path she’s on—promising career, impending wedding—to choose a more open-ended life of adventure. In this engrossing page-turner, the Colombia-born, Skokie-raised Vargas takes readers with her on a trip around the world as she pursues her passion for

travel writing. V a r g a s ’ s words are sure to s p a r k a t least a little wanderlust in you too, with her dazzling descriptions of Iguazú National Park in Argentina, Rouen in France, the Ganges river in India, and Mara Naboisho Conservancy in Kenya, among many other sites. Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go Cleo Qian (Tin House) This powerful debut by writer Cleo Qian stood out among the submissions Tin House received in its open period for unagented short story collections. And it’s clear why: over 11 short stories, Qian paints an unsettling, often surreal picture of life for her young

Asian and Asian American protagonists. Qian, a University of Chicago graduate, clearly grew up with the omnipresent Internet—here, technology mediates reality in both banal and exciting ways; the dissociation that the virtual world encourages lurks like a shadowy presence. Her characters navigate the stresses and the isolation of the modern world as best they can, trying to find safety amid so much precarity. v

m kcardoza@chicagoreader.com

THEATER

Alexandra Pirici’s Encyclopedia of Relations at the Renaissance Society IRENE HSIAO

YEAR IN REVIEW

‘A doing done by practice’

Reflecting on the intersections of time, place, and presence in this year in dance By IRENE HSIAO

n November 29 at the Logan Center for the Arts, five dancers begin by improvising to recordings of their voices sharing details—birthdays, favorite colors, friends— in Body Language (created by dancer Meredith Dincolo in collaboration with historian Tara Zahra through a fellowship at the Gray Center). In the postperformance discussion, Zahra says: Before we worked together, I never realized how much choreography is like history, whether one ought to dive into a minute detail or follow the arc of a matter. In the end, we are trying to make a story from the fragments we have. (Whether intentionally or not, the dancers with more experience, Terry Marling and Andrew Murdock, carry their time in amplified presence.) There’s no reason these are my memories and not yours. The history I write reflects only what I saw, an intersection of time, place, and presence—this year, for reasons including my own practice (of which writing is only a part),

less than in others. So I offer what I have, glimpses of performances witnessed without trying to make meaning of the whole, if only to say, “Wish you were here.” December 14, Alexandra Pirici, Encyclopedia of Relations: Dressed in jeans, corduroys, sweaters, and T-shirts, performers utter facts about the sea, trees, and fauna beneath the arches and gables of the Renaissance Society, aligning their bodies to the walls, panes of glass, and each other to form architectural structures. Their hands flicker, marking measured facets, a school of fish darting in interlocking angles, a tree blossoming in stop-motion. They sing tones, harmonies, which resound through the largely empty space. They stare into our eyes without transmitting light or heat; the words they recite are cold as “Alexa, read me Wikipedia.” When they invite us to stand with our hands out and our eyes closed to receive a “haptic experience,” tongues clicking like robot arthropods

seeking warm prey, I do not let them touch me. I keep my eyes fixed on the two other audience members in the space, trembling as they receive. November 14, “Why We Create: Making as Meaningful Exchange”: Alberto Aguilar plays a game of pickleball inside Bond Chapel with Sebastian Bruno-Harris, a random key of a piano struck by Elizabeth Flood each time the ball makes contact, played to the point of tedium for both players and viewers, a performance that teases at the order and play that reflects Aguilar’s fascination with the pattern, made and found, of ordinary life. Over four days, November 9-12, Lama Losang Samten creates the Sand Mandala of Infinite Compassion at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art. The ringing of metal tools is hypnotic, as are the colored grains of sand gently falling in diffuse blocks of color or hairthin spirals that become clouds, lotuses, and other emblems of compassion, an hourglass reversing entropy. Periodically, he lets us push the sand with a sponge brush or add sand according to the design; we barely breathe as we do it. In this durational practice, he does not fear rest: he converses, he eats, he stops when enough has been done for the day. He remembers and names how and why he left Tibet; he never once wavers from the task of peace. The dissolution ceremony is quick and brutal: we can destroy in an instant a lifetime of practice, the red, blue, yellow, white, green now simply the color of sand, the dust we are, other than this brief time together. November 3, Deeply Rooted at the Auditorium Theatre: In Ulysses Dove’s Vespers, Emani Drake pirouettes impossibly fast, the steady axis of a whirling universe, then stops like a lightning strike in a high attitude side. Six women bow their heads down and thrust their faces up to the sky in a canon that repeats, overlaps—they sprint in curving trajectories, arms firmly held at the sides, hearts high. Bound by mathematics, geometric structure, mercilessly precise technique, this dance is first and last impelled by what can only be called the Spirit—one sees the dancers surrender to it. November 4, Hedwig Dances, no ideas but in things at Ruth Page: Noelle Kayser’s Pat and Diana makes a monument of a heap of clothing molted from the bodies of Chicago dancers looming ominously upstage. Rigoberto Saura and Sophia Vangelatos share a blazer between them, a fascial tissue visualizing connection and how intimacy makes us new and strange to ourselves. In Jenna Pollack’s untitled work,

Paula Sousa rolls across a line of person-sized boxes, head down, feet up, her long shadow lapping at angles. Far too many hands emerge from their corners, the magician’s trick of fragmenting and multiplying the body. Saura’s K@02 is a fever dream of deadly sins, a Bosch painting crawling with larval motion. October 27, The Story of Lady Li, Paper Whisperers coproduced by Campfire Repertory Theatre at Hamilton Park: As a Halloween roller skating party rages in the gymnasium downstairs, doused in the heady scent of popping corn, four puppeteers (Yiwen Wu, Coco Huang, Jin-Hee Kim, and Annie Wu), and a musician (Lorenzo Goehr) pursue a footnote. A faintly indicated detail of a hint of a life becomes a poetic inquiry into the mystery of a woman, Lady Li, whose beauty, barely recorded on the page, becomes an exposition on the beauty of the literal page: paper cut and folded into pop-up edifices, paper silhouettes rolled on a crankie, paper lanterns that throw elegantly wrought incisions of light onto the floor. Like a snowflake, intricate, astonishing, impossible to grasp. November 15, The Lion in Winter at Court Theatre: An aged king prowls his castle, unwilling to give his kingdom to his sons or his enemies, fearful of losing his legacy, yet destined to do so because all things must pass and change. Unlike monarchy, in art and in writing, there can be an infinite number of simultaneous actors. Our history is forever slipping from us—it cannot be the task of the few who write it down. In 1953, Martha Graham said, “I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.” There is a contradiction to this practice, also a necessity. We are here, vividly and imperfectly, in a complexity created by all the moments that we have ever witnessed and all those we didn’t. This work relies not on our authority to do but our will to do—a doing done by practice, and forever in process. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 45

FILM YEAR IN REVIEW

Nostalgic, meditative, and mortality-confronting cinema A Reader writer’s 2023 repertory roundup By KAT SACHS Chocolate Babies (1996) REELING: THE CHICAGO LGBTQ+ INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

ast year, I proposed making a list of my top ten favorite repertory screenings rather than my ten favorite new films, and I was so invigorated by the task that I’m now hoping it will become an annual tradition. Where a lot of cinephiles begin thinking about their favorite films of the year before it’s even halfway over, I rejoiced in mentally logging where a repertory filmgoing experience might fall on this list instead. My criteria, like that for all lists, is nebulous and highly personal. Format matters, though something not being projected on film isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. Audience response is also a factor, but at one of the screenings listed below (hint: the filmmaker’s name starts with a Stan and ends with a Brakhage), many people around me fell asleep. Emotional response, both mine and others, is especially impactful, but many great films ask their viewers to keep a studied distance. All this is to say that it’s certainly not a science, nor is it comprehensive. Try as I might, I hardly get to every screening; what I’ve missed could be its own list. But reflecting on films I did see and where they fall within the ups and downs of my year is oddly comforting. Sometimes things are good, sometimes things are bad, but I always have the movies. 10. Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy (1999) at the Music Box Theatre, July 2 If what happens in childhood is thought to determine the course of one’s life, then it’s no wonder that nostalgia viewing is a trap even the most sentimentality-resistant cinephile can fall into. I’m certainly no exception, and a particular white whale of theatrically exhibited nostalgia viewing for me has always been The Mummy. When the Music Box announced that it would be a midnight screening, nat-

46 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

urally I made plans to mainline caffeine so that I’d be not just awake but fully present for this long-desired cinematic reexperience. It was everything I remembered it being and more. Let’s consider its virtues: its stars, Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, the impetus for many a millennial’s bisexuality and legitimately good actors to boot. The story, worthy of its Universal Classic Monsters origin, has some memorable humor thrown into the mix. Combine all this and a midnight audience—some folks even dressed up—and it exceeded my admittedly high (but potentially misguided) expectations. 9. Highs & Lows presents Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995) on 35 millimeter and Chantal Akerman’s Golden Eighties (1986) at the Music Box Theatre, May 2 I not only named Highs & Lows’s irreverent double features as a Reader Best of Chicago pick in 2022, but one of the programs in particular made it to number two on this same list last year. The gist of the series is that programmers Will Morris and John Dickson pair a “highbrow” film and a “lowbrow” film that are similar in nature. That there could be a connection between Clueless, one of the greatest teen comedies ever made, and a Chantal Akerman film is representative of their programming prowess. The gossamer linking the two is the shopping mall, a metaphorical blank slate whose barren visage any number of perspectives or ideologies could be projected onto. Confessedly, the location is more incidental in Clueless, wherein the mall is symbolic of the Valley girl character mannerisms and setting. But Akerman renders the location a microcosm in which considerations of capitalism, feminism, and even Jewish identity come alive as an homage to the MGM musical. Both films maybe shouldn’t work, but do, and somehow even more so together.

8. Henry Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 (1948) on 35 millimeter at the Music Box Theatre, August 26 This is a first for me: a film I didn’t previously care for all that much that I now love because I was able to see it exhibited in a theater with an enthusiastic audience. Screening as part of Noir City, Call Northside 777 is set and was shot in Chicago. I now think it’s one of the best—if not the best—films both about and made in our great city, a staunch deviation from my previous assessment of it as a rather dull procedural directed by a journeyman director who really only made one great film (Peter Ibbetson, but I digress). Jimmy Stewart stars as reporter P.J. McNeal, who’s spurred by his editor to investigate an old case based on a classified ad placed by the convicted man’s mother, seeking information about the real murderers for a significant reward. In investigating the story, McNeal begins to believe in the man’s innocence, uncovering the lengths to which the bureaucracy will go to not be embarrassed. It’s a distinctly Chicago premise, and the audience—who seemed to love cinema as much as they hate cops— reacted accordingly. 7. “Stan Brakhage: Imagination and Perception” on 16 and 35 millimeter at the Gene Siskel Film Center, December 2 A screening of films by Stan Brakhage, especially on film, is not just a screening but an experience. This was even more so, as Brakhage savant, local filmmaker, and educator Fred Camper—author of the relatively new book Seeking Brakhage—was on hand to discuss the experimental luminary and the nine short and entirely silent films included in the program. Each is a revelation unto itself; I consider the experience of watching Brakhage’s films akin to meditation, through

which it’s possible for a person to attain a heightened level of spiritual awareness by focusing in a dark, enclosed space only on the image, movement, and light in front of them. Picking a favorite is futile, but I was especially enthralled by Chartres Series (1994), Spring Cycle (1995), and Interpolations 1–5 (1992), all of which are examples of films that Brakhage painted, directly onto the celluloid, by hand. In a 1993 interview with Sight and Sound magazine, he said, “Every time film reflects something that’s nameable, it limits what it can do. If I can make films that refer to things that can’t be lived through, then I feel that I’m giving film a chance to be in the fullest possible sense, and that makes me feel good.” It makes me feel good, too. 6. The Ousmane Sembène Centennial at the Gene Siskel Film Center, September If he were still alive, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène would have been 100 this year, hence the centennial celebration. And if Sembène were still alive, even at such an advanced age, he’d be one of the coolest, most radical, and forward-thinking artists working today. His output, which encompassed literature as well as cinema, is the perfect melding of the aesthetic and the political. The six films in the series—Black Girl (1966), Mandabi (1968), Emitaï (1971), Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), and Guelwaar (1992)—each exhibit this in its own idiosyncratic way, spanning genres to form a cohesive ideology amongst a distinctively varied body of work. Black Girl, for example, is reminiscent of a French New Wave film (likely because he lived in France for a period of time, but ironic because the film is about a Senegalese woman who’s exploited by her French employers), though it’s markedly more subversive in how it interrogates race and colonialism. Xala is an incisive satire, and Ceddo is a historical epic

FILM that’s unmoored by categorical expectations. Seeing these on the big screen was especially powerful, as is befitting the big ideas of such an iconoclastic figure. 5. Stephen Winters’s Chocolate Babies (1996) at Chicago Filmmakers as part of Reeling 2023, September 23 Though it may be fifth on this list, the screening of Stephen Winters’s Chocolate Babies as part of the Reeling film festival wins for best filmmaker Q&A. Set in New York City against the AIDS epidemic, Chocolate Babies is ripe for rediscovery as an underseen entry of New Queer Cinema. It’s equal parts ecstatic and heartbreaking, as incendiary as it is touching. The film centers on an underground cadre of Black, queer, HIV+ activists who execute a series of attacks against local politicians in an attempt to expose corruption around the AIDS crisis. Also written by Winters, it’s hysterical; fittingly, Winters’s Q&A was both edifying and entertaining. It was also moving, especially when members of the audience spoke about what brought them to the screening and what such events mean to the community. The Q&A was almost as long as the film itself, perhaps the only time in the history of film screenings that one would be happy about this fact. It’s unfortunate that not everyone can see this incredible film with Winters in person to further elucidate its still-relevant themes, but it’s still absolutely worth seeing. 4. “A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch” at the Gene Siskel Film Center, July Ever since I first read about Camille Billops’s Finding Christa (1991), I had longed to see the transgressive film about Billops’s relationship with her daughter whom she gave up for adoption. Not only have I since had the pleasure of seeing it, but it was on the big screen alongside several other of Billops’s films. I wrote about this series of films, which Billops made with her husband James Hatch, for the Reader back in July, when it was screening at the Film Center. As I wrote back then, “In their idiosyncratic body of film work . . . Billops and Hatch explore the tempestuous complexities of life, family, and society at large, asking all the questions and providing none of the answers.” The other films included were the titular A String of Pearls (2002), Older Women and Love (1987), Take Your Bags (1998), and the provocatively titled The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks: A Docu/Fantasy About Everybody’s Racism (1994). The title of my

I Was Born, But . . . (1932) MUSIC BOX THEATRE

piece was “No easy answers,” speaking to the authenticity and complexity of Billops and Hatch’s films, which evince knotty propositions around issues ranging from the familial to the societal. Indeed, I find myself thinking about the work often, even all this time later. 3. The Chicago Film Society presents Yasujirō Ozu’s I Was Born, But . . . (1932) on 35 millimeter at the Music Box Theatre, October 16 & Other Ozu I love Yasujirō Ozu, but . . . Just kidding, there is no “but” when it comes to Ozu, except in the titles of some of his films. The Japanese auteur’s legacy endures, spanning back to his early silent films, of which I Was Born, But . . . is considered among the most beloved. There isn’t an Ozu feature that doesn’t confound one with life’s rapturous melancholy, and this is no exception. In my now annual tradition of cheating a bit on this list, I was also privileged to see several Ozu films at the Harvard Film Archives during their “Ozu 120: The Complete Ozu Yasujirō” series over the summer: A Mother Should Be Loved (1934), A Hen in the Wind (1948), Early Summer (1951), and What Did the Lady Forget? (1937). With everything that’s been going on, all this Ozu was a balm for the soul, a reminder that even in the worst of times the sublimity of life might still reveal itself. The Chicago Film Society’s presentation of I Was Born, But . . . was accompanied by the MIYUMI Project Japanese Experimental Ensemble, whose score was a particularly inspired interpretation of the film’s themes and ambience through jazz.

Nitrate as in the film base, which ceased being produced in the 1950s; nitrate as in, extremely flammable. The latter aspect is what makes the Nitrate Picture Show so novel and, for a cinephile like myself, an educational experience, as the event also includes lectures and demonstrations. But it’s the programming, all repertory, that makes it second on this list, as it epitomizes why I do this and not a regular, year-end top-ten list. The festival opened with a beautiful print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), and I’m confident in my assessment of it as a beautiful print, considering the festival program literally quantifies the quality of each one. The real treat for me was King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946), its dangerous beauty fitting for a showcase wherein the strike of a match could set the whole place aflame. I’m exaggerating a tad (the folks at Eastman are pros and take every possible precaution in exhibiting nitrate), but the hyperbole should be indicative of my excitement.

1. Oscarbate presents William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977) at the Music Box Theatre, September 2 The number one film on this same list last year was Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979), starring Roy Scheider. William Friedkin’s Sorcerer also stars Roy Scheider. Coincidence? I’m not sure. Regardless, Sorcerer, which was presented by the Oscarbate film collective following the Chicago-born filmmaker’s death in early August, was an easy pick for the number one spot. Similar to All That Jazz, it’s an enthralling, mortality-confronting cinematic experience; really, they’re actually very similar, musical numbers notwithstanding. Scheider stars as one of four men who end up in Colombia and take an impossible job hauling unstable dynamite that could explode due to even the most minute disturbance. I don’t know that I’ve ever been that nervous—the tension was palpable. This year will also have been memorable to me for really starting to appreciate the filmmaker and his idiosyncratic output, and that’s in no small part due to many local programmers screening Friedkin’s films following his death. Other instances include his iconic horror film The Exorcist (1973) and his underappreciated but just as iconic neo-cult classic Bug (2006), both on 35 millimeter at the Music Box, and his crime thriller Cruising (1980) at the Leather Archives & Museum. Never have anxiety and consideration of life’s futility been so goddamn fun. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

2. The Nitrate Picture Show at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, June 1–4 OK, so this is my big cheat. Since 2015, the George Eastman Museum in Rochester has hosted an annual exhibition of films screened from vintage nitrate 35-millimeter prints.

DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 47

MUSIC

Recommended and notable shows and releases with critics’ insights for the week of December 28

b ALL AGES F

THURSDAY28

PICK OF THE WEEK

Candy Sto presents Baldy Locs, Jovan Landry, and Mia Panic DJ sets by Skoli and K!te. 9 PM, Cole’s, 2338 N. Milwaukee, $5. 21+

Emerging Chicago R&B singer Ine’a J lands her first headlining gig

Chicagoans are so spoiled when it comes to local nightlife. Take the stacked hip-hop showcase Candy Sto, whose featured performers—Baldy Locs, Jovan Landry, and Mia Panic—are all dynamic artists with distinct vocal styles and multiple talents. As Locs exclaims, “You do what you want when you Baldy” (from “Who’s Baldy?” off her 2016 Playtime EP). Live, she pushes that sentiment to the max, serving up hedonistic, party-your-tits-off fun with beats full of Juice WRLD–inspired melody and Chicagoapproved trunk rattle. I hope she plays her latest single, November’s “Out the Blue,” a warbly, AutoTuned ode to sex, money, and overcoming the fake bitches in her vicinity. Jovan Landry has been active in music for more than a decade, and her packed Soundcloud page takes you through tapestries of hip-hop, house, and tribal, with Indigenous and meditative grooves that complement her polished flow. She extends her relentless work ethic into all her creative pursuits: she’s a filmmaker, photographer, emcee, and all-around Renaissance woman who’s produced for or worked with great local acts such as Mykele Deville, Glitter Moneyyy, and D2G. She wrote, recorded, and engineered her latest project, July’s Intellectual Frequencies, all by herself, weaving together diverse musical genres and influences. Mia Panic, a relative newcomer, rounds out the night with her bass-heavy bad-bitch rap. There is no bias in my words when I say Chicago breeds some of the most talented woman and femme artists on the planet. The holidays keep on giving with Candy Sto, and this trippy squad of performers—accompanied by sounds from DJs Skoli and K!te—is sure to melt faces and stand up to any inclement weather. —CRISTALLE BOWEN

PAIGE BROWN

Outronaut John San Juan and Depravos de la Mour open. 8 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $15. 21+

INE’A J, ELIJAH LEFLORE, PHNX.WAVE, MORGAN GOLD

Thu 1/4, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $15, $10 in advance. 21+

IN OCTOBER, VOCALO on-air personality Bekoe brought Chicago R&B singer Ine’a J into the studio to talk about her budding career. Bekoe founded music outlet Illanoize in 2012, and it’s done great work documenting local hip-hop and R&B—if he champions a local artist, I know I need to listen. He’s fond of Ine’a J, and I’m right there with him. Her October EP, The Colors (TheRepertoire), seems to belong to an ethereal realm, full of dreamy synths and beats so sparse they can seem absent—but her rich voice and measured delivery give the music a con-

48 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

FRIDAY29

crete weight and dimension that anchor it in the real world. Ine’a J also creates a nuanced sensuality that invites you to lean in and hear textures in her melodies whose subtlety or evanescence might otherwise make them almost imperceptible. On “Instead | Green,” she duets with Chicago singer Marflo, who acts as her foil in the best ways. His brief but insistent interjections prod Ine’a J into delivering fierce, smoldering responses—she keeps me plugged in for every second of the song, and I’m eagerly awaiting her next project. —LEOR GALIL

As far as underappreciated Chicago bands go, Outronaut surely rank among the best. Since 2015 guitarist Steve Gerlach has used this trippy, largely instrumental project to release a steady stream of irresistible, infectious, and haunting music with a rich variety of sounds. They’re solid on the homages (“Back Stabbeth” and “Endless Bummer” from 2015’s Ad Astra per Aspera are dead-on), and they can switch from neo-noir to desert doom to intergalactic surf on a dime. They’ve been especially productive since the start of the pandemic, packing several fists’ worth of punches on their 2020 full-length Kill the Light and single “CreamDream LightningStorm” as well as last year’s Godfinger EP. When a band is largely instrumental, their rare vocal tracks make you stand up and pay attention. The Godfinger song “Poison Hero” is a dark

MUSIC

Outronaut TOM MCKEON metallic-psychedelic epic worthy of a big-budget film adaptation—or at least a graphic-novel treatment a la Heavy Metal magazine. And the slinky charger “War in the Heavens” (released with a trippy video by Tom McKeon) could psych anyone up for battle. Gerlach, a longtime booster of local artists, developed his musical flexibility in the trenches: he’s played with Tommy Keene, Plush, John Cale, and Chris Connelly, among others. You can often find him onstage with Connelly’s all-star Bowie tribute project, Sons of the Silent Age. The current lineup of Outronaut includes guitarist Peter Muschong (of the Tossers and the Fluffers) and the killer rhythm section of bassist Ryan Nelson and drummer John Carpender. Outronaut are known for their live shows, and you can expect their sound to fill and spill out of the cozy Hideout. That is to say, buy your tickets early, so you won’t miss the fun if this one sells out. Also on the bill are John San Juan (of local rock outfit the Hushdrops) and delightfully sleazy garage punks Depravos de la Mour, whose 2012 single “I Got Your Christmas Right Here” (a shoulda-been cult classic) needs to be on your holiday playlist. —MONICA KENDRICK

SATURDAY30 Nnamdï See also Sun 12/31. Monobody open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+ Chicago singer, rapper, and multi-instrumentalist Nnamdï shares a broad aesthetic of frenzied eclecticism with hyperpop stylistic omnivores such as 100 Gecs and Charli XCX. But even for that oddshaped hole, he’s an unusually odd-shaped peg. His discography includes a warped, skittery start-stop tribute to Loony Tunes composer Carl Stalling (the self-released 2020 album Krazy Karl), and his most recent single, “Going Crazy” (from last year’s Please Have a Seat, released by Secretly Canadian and Sooper, the label he co-owns), has a distorted multitracked chorus that cheers and haunts him as he

Mucca Pazza CHAD LEVERENZ muses on his grind-culture work ethic: “I just want to have a little fun / Wish I could have a little bit of fun,” he sings, turning a hedonistic call into a wistful lament. Nnamdï’s music is a series of psychedelic burps of self-indulgence, self-mockery, and selfmitosis. He might race lyrical mouthfuls around a few bars of metal roar before downshifting to woozy laid-back vibes, alternating with big sweeping heartfelt choruses that trip over interpolations of broken funk. Watching Nnamdï reproduce these dynamics with a live band is disorienting, especially since his affect onstage can be disarmingly sincere, even when he sings every other line in falsetto and wraps jazzy guitar spasms around off-kilter drumbeats. It’s hyperpop turned in on itself so thoroughly that it’s not really pop anymore, but instead a confessional elucidation of the scattered bits banging around in Nnamdï’s headspace: brilliant, uncertain, and suffused with surprising sweetness. —NOAH BERLATSKY

SUNDAY31 Mucca Pazza ÉSSO and Lawrence Tome open. 8 PM, Chop Shop, 2033 W. North, $43.15. 21+ If Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention ever teamed up with a klezmer outfit and recruited a pom-pomwielding Sarah Squirm as their hype person, you might get something like Mucca Pazza. This local absurdist marching band describes itself as a “30-odd-member” group, and the emphasis is definitely on the “odd.” Nothing sounds or looks quite like Mucca Pazza, who have graced stages as big as Lollapalooza and (somehow) as small as the space where NPR hosts its Tiny Desk concert series. In Chicago, they’re such a renowned institution of heady irreverence that you could be forgiven for thinking they’ve been around forever, but were Mucca Pazza a person, they couldn’t legally buy beer. They turn 20 in 2024. The only thing as outsize as the colorful troupe’s

silliness is their ambition. Get Pumped!, Mucca Pazza’s first release since 2018, is their cleanest, meanest record yet, and the band have set their sights on making their debut European tour once this anniversary year is through. At this New Year’s Eve show, which celebrates two decades of Mucca Pazza, catalog throwbacks will mingle with a heap of tunes from Get Pumped!, which the band will be selling in two limited-edition flavors: an orange vinyl LP and a yellow “Banana Edition” cassette (an in-joke from the Get Pumped! track “Bananas”). Drummer Andy Deitrich tells me that concertgoers should also get pumped for some new cheers and never-before-heard material, including a “brandnew epic and top-secret cover song.” With Mucca Pazza’s massive performances and floor-rattling sound, it’s always safe to assume “epic” is on the itinerary. —HANNAH EDGAR

Nnamdï See Sat 12/30. Stress Positions open. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $25. 21+ Pleasure Palace: A Slo’Mo New Year’s Eve Musical direction by Akenya, choreography by Darling Shear, special performance by Angelíca Grace, and DJ sets by VitiGrrl and Icey Bby. 8 PM (VIP), 9 PM (general), Ramova Theatre, 3520 S. Halsted, $75, $125 VIP balcony. 21+ In November, local and national outlets repackaged a press release about the new celebrity co-owners of the Ramova Theatre, a 1920s Bridgeport movie palace that shuttered in 1985 and is now days away from reopening as a music venue and restaurant. Jennifer Hudson, Quincy Jones, and Chance the Rapper share ownership of the Ramova with the project’s developer, Tyler Nevius, but it’s unclear what role those Chicago music stars will play beyond drumming up publicity. (To be fair, Jones came aboard long before last month’s announcement—Block Club reported in March that he’d invested in the Ramova.) As far as I’m concerned, that flurry of coverage buried the most interest-

ing information: that the Romava had hired former Thalia Hall manager and partner Pete Falknor (misspelled “Falkner” in the Sun-Times) as director of operations and former Sleeping Village talent buyer Kyle LaValley as programming and creative director. Falknor and LaValley are already helping shape the Ramova’s character: the resurrected theater will debut with a New Year’s Eve celebration presented by Slo ’Mo, a long-running queer party series cofounded by event producer (and former Reader staffer) Kristen Kaza. Slo ’Mo had a regular spot at Sleeping Village during LaValley’s tenure, and what better way to christen a new venture than with a community you know and love? Slo ’Mo should have no trouble filling the 1,500-capacity theater, not least because Kaza is apparently incapable of throwing a bad party. She can also handle big shows on big stages: in July, Slo ’Mo and queer hip-hop collective Futurehood booked bounce star Big Freedia to headline an event called the Femmergy at Pritzker Pavilion, and that wasn’t even the first Slo ’Mo show in Millennium Park. Slo ’Mo has become a cultural institution celebrated by the city at large, and in March, Brandon Johnson’s mayoral campaign made a stop at a Sleeping Village Slo ’Mo party. The Slo ’Mo New Year’s bash at the Ramova, titled Pleasure Palace, is inspired by 1920s fashion and music. Singer, songwriter, pianist, bandleader, and Slo ’Mo collaborator Akenya has assembled a six-piece ensemble to perform swinging jazz, and dancer Darling Shear has choreographed widescreen dance numbers to accompany it. Slo ’Mo DJs VitiGrrl and Icey Bby will take turns behind the decks, and drag artist Miss Angelíca Grace will make a special appearance. I hope fidelity to the theme doesn’t prevent Akenya from playing some of her original material, because last month she dropped the luscious, inviting “Hades Moon,” the first single from her forthcoming debut solo album. Its crisp, unfussy hip-hop beat provides the wind for the soaring sail of Akenya’s ornate neosoul melody, making it more than grand enough for the stage at the Ramova. —LEOR GALIL

DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 49

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews.

continued from p. 49

THURSDAY4 Ine’a J See Pick of the Week on page 48. Elijah LeFlore, Phnx.Wave, and Morgan Gold open. 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $15, $10 in advance. 21+ Dave Rempis Residency A quartet of Dave Rempis, Jason Adasiewicz, Joshua Abrams, and Tyler Damon headlines; a trio of Dave Rempis, Tomeka Reid, and Joshua Abrams opens. 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $15. 21+ On January 4, 1984, a Massachusetts preteen named Dave Rempis attended his first saxophone lesson. Forty years later, he’s come a long way, both geographically and technically. Upon graduating from Northwestern University with a degree in ethnomusicology in 1997, he joined the Vandermark 5. In that band, he developed his already substantial mastery of the alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones into a flexible improvisational language, which has enabled him to bring a vital intensity to collaborations with an exceptionally long list of partners, among them percussionist Michael Zerang, electronic musicians Lasse Marhaug and Christof Kurzmann, and pianists Paul Giallorenzo and Elisabeth Harnik. He has also led a multitude of ensembles, which differ widely in instrumental makeup and stylistic approach but share a commitment to free improvisation. Rempis is a concert organizer as well as a performer, but last August he stopped programming improvised music at Elastic Arts after 21 years. Because he spent much of the subsequent fall touring Europe, and because the two most recent albums on his Aerophonic label feature overseas musicians, one might surmise that he’s looking to elevate his international profile. But all but one of the eight ensembles he’s assembled for the Hungry Brain residency he’s playing on all four Thursdays in January are staffed with locals, many of whom are bandleaders in their own right. That’s certainly the case for cellist Tomeka Reid and bassist Joshua Abrams, who will join Rempis for tonight’s first set. The trio’s two albums are studies in adroit, nuanced interaction. The band that will play second—in which Rempis and Abrams are joined by vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz and drummer Tyler Damon—hasn’t released any records yet, but in concert it’s been perfecting a mix of high-octane, jazz-rooted blowing and oceanic walls of sound for a couple years now. On January 11, the lineup includes Rempis’s long-standing partnership with drummer Avreeayl Ra and a trio with violinist Mark Feldman and drummer Tim Daisy; on January 18, a new duo with pianist Mabel Kwan and a quartet with trumpeter Russ Johnson, bassist Jakob Heinemann, and drummer Jeremy Cunningham; and on January 25, the first Chicago appearance by Rempis’s new duo with guitarist Tashi Dorji and a set with Abrams, Ra, and keyboardist Jim Baker. —BILL MEYER

50 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

The founding lineup of Radio Outernational: Nate Lepine, at far left , has been replaced by Kenthaney Redmond. COURTESY THE ARTIST

Akenya leads the band at Pleasure Palace: A Slo ’Mo New Year’s Eve. ERIK MICHAEL KOMMER

FRIDAY5 Radio Outernational, Damon Locks 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $12. 21+ One of the most promising local bands to make a live debut in 2023 was Radio Outernational, who played their first show at the Hungry Brain in April. The five-piece collective features the seasoned rhythm section of drummer Areif Sless-

The trio of Tomeka Reid, Joshua Abrams, and Dave Rempis performs as part of Rempis's residency at the Hungry Brain. COURTESY THE ARTISTS

Kitain and bassist Wayne Montana along with guitarist Aaron Shapiro, flutist-saxophonist Hunter Diamond, and flutist Kenthaney Redmond (who’s replaced founding member Nate Lepine). Radio Outernational float between Ethio-funk and psychedelia and sometimes up into the cosmos, creating a rich, layered sound via an ensemble-based songwriting process that’s “shaped with a lot of care,” according to Sless-Kitain (a former Reader staffer). This Hideout show is Redmond’s first gig with the band, and for the occasion they’re introducing a new tune, “Spatial Orbits.” The evening

begins with a solo set by Damon Locks, a bandmate of Sless-Kitain and Montana in the Eternals, whose hybrid of dub, funk, and punk has been evolving since the late 90s. (Sless-Kitain says the Eternals have finally finished mixing the record they started tracking in 2019 as a six-piece with Shapiro, Damien Thompson, and Jeanine O’Toole. They aim to release it in 2024.) No matter how far the temperatures have dropped outside, Radio Outernational’s slinky, simmering grooves will fuel your dreams of basking in sunshine and temperate breezes. —JAMIE LUDWIG

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Corey Harris & Cedric Watson In Szold Hall SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3 8PM

Bonnie Koloc In Maurer Hall SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 4 7PM

Alash In Szold Hall THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8 8PM

Reverie Road In Szold Hall SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 8PM

Sam Bush In Maurer Hall

MONDAY8

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17 8PM

Fruitleather Ira Glass and Stalled open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. 21+ F If you’re aiming to get a sense of Fruitleather, you’ll have to do some digging. Formed in late 2021, this experimental Chicago indie-rock trio dropped a debut album, Finally, Some Music!, in fall 2023, but so far it’s not available to stream digitally. When they played an album-release show at Record Breakers on October 1, they showed up with handmade CDs and cassettes, each one containing the album plus a unique mix of live recordings of the band and audio sketches by Fruitleather songwriter D Jean-Baptiste, who sings, plays guitar, and occasionally drums or fiddles with DJ equipment. You can hear some of Jean-Baptiste’s sketches on Soundcloud—they’re experimental collages that combine found sounds, soothing synths, and guitar—and if you talk to members of the band, they’ll tell you they use them in their songs. I don’t have reason to doubt them, but I can say that what they do together sounds nothing like Jean-Baptiste’s sketches. Aside from a live show, YouTube is currently the best way to hear Fruitleather. Youth indie-scene booster Eli Schmitt filmed an acoustic Fruitleather set for his New Now series in 2022. And this past fall, Fruitleather drummer Shravan Raghuram (who also plays in local alt-rock group the Courts) filmed one of their sets for When the Wall Breaks Down, a YouTube channel he runs to document local underground shows. Raghuram let the camera dangle from its strap around his neck, so the footage is extremely shaky, but the set sounds great. The members of Fruitleather (Jean-Baptiste, Raghuram, and bassist Stas Slyvka) tell me that they feel compelled to follow their strangest ideas to see where they go, and Raghuram’s ten-minute video of “Always Watching” backs them up. The band’s restlessness propels them through long stretches of curdling feedback and prickly, anxiety-provoking sample loops to achieve an irresistible postrock tension mitigated by moments of grace. I find the messy traces that Fruitleather have left online exhilarating, and the actual album recordings of Finally, Some Music! fulfill that promise. (The band will have additional unique copies of the physical release on hand at this Bottle show.) And considering these are all just documents, I can’t wait to see them play in person. —LEOR GALIL

Parker Millsap In Maurer Hall SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18 11AM

Man-eaters JAMES YEAMAN

Justin Roberts & The Not Ready For Primetime Players

Kids & Family Show!

In Maurer Hall

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25 7PM

Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet In Maurer Hall SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25 7PM

Matt Andersen In Szold Hall FRIDAY, MARCH 1 8PM

Jess Williamson In Maurer Hall

FRIDAY, MARCH 1 8PM

Willam Fitzsimmons In Szold Hall

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY

Fruitleather COURTESY THE ARTIST

WEDNESDAY10 Man-eaters Death Party, Whippets, and Moonily open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12. 21+ Chicago’s Man-eaters emerged a few years ago from the wreckage of several infamous local punk and hardcore bands, including Cülo and Tarantüla, and their music fuses the greasiest, grimiest aspects of decades of underground rock ’n’ roll into a sweaty, heaving mass. On 2020’s Gentle Ballads for the Simple Soul (on Cincinnati’s Feel It label), the four-piece run the gamut from weirdass midwest protopunk to primordial garage to hip-shaking boogie rock, along the way hitting various hardcore, glam, and heavy-metal touchstones.

NEW SEASON!

Their tongue-in-cheek humor and self-awareness let them wink at the bravado associated with those styles without crossing over into comedy. It’d be ridiculous to describe anything about Man-eaters’ 2021 follow-up, Twelve More Observations on Healthy Living, as “more refined,” but the performances are tighter, the shredding more ferocious, and the lyrical quips more biting (insofar as I can understand them through the full-throttle mix, which is bare-bones in the best way). Just like Gentle Ballads, the whole thing sounds as if it could burst into flames at any second, which is exactly the sort of irreverent energy this sort of music calls for. This show, rounded out by Austin punks Death Party, Madison garage outfit Whippets, and Los Angeles dream rockers Moonily, promises party vibes to spare. If you hate fun, stay home. —JAMIE LUDWIG v

JAN 10 Silvia Manrique with Marcel Bonfim JAN 17 Chicago International Salsa Congress JAN 24 Guillermo Paolisso’s Guitar Odyssey JAN 31 Julián Pujols Quall FEB 7 Lunar New Year Celebration feat: Tzu-Tsen Wu & friends FEB 14 Valentine's Day Celebration w/Peter Jericho & MGeni Black History Month Celebration FEB 21 Beppe Gambetta FEB 28 Nani FEB 6 Cecilia Zabala Tribute to Violeta Parra MAR 13 Sara Curruchich MAR 20 Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper MAR 27 Altan FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS IN LINCOLN SQUARE! $10 SUGGESTED DONATION

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG DECEMBER 28, 2023 - CHICAGO READER 51

EARLY WARNINGS

UPCOMING CONCERTS TO HAVE ON YOUR RADAR

b ALL AGES

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

Early Warnings newsletter: sign up here THU 2/29/2024 Keyshia Cole, Trey Songz, Jaheim, K. Michelle 8 PM, Wintrust Arena b

BEYOND Alash WADA FUMIKO

SAT 3/2/2024 Jhariah, Piao 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+

JANUARY

FEBRUARY

THU 1/11/2024 Snuffed, Fetishist, Heet Deth 9 PM, Empty Bottle

THU 2/1/2024 Cruel, Diet Lite, Shoobie, Courts 8 PM, Schubas, 18+

FRI 1/12/2024 Dave Hollister 6 and 9:30 PM, City Winery b

SUN 2/4/2024 Alash 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b

SAT 1/13/2024 Bulldoze, Hold My Own, End It, Volcano, Outta Pocket, Bayway, Enervate, Si Dios Quiere 6 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Noah Reid, Wyatt C. Louis 7:30 PM, Park West b

MON 2/5/2024 Tweet 6 and 9:30 PM, City Winery b

SUN 1/14/2024 John McEuen & the Circle Band 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b

THU 2/8/2024 6arelyhuman 7 PM, Subterranean b Living Colour, Radkey 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b

WED 1/17/2024 Chicago International Salsa Congress featuring Landy Cabrera 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music F b Robert Ellis (solo) 8 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn THU 1/18/2024 Deep Sea Peach Tree, Maya Lucia, Darling Suns, Ocean Child 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ SAT 1/20/2024 ++, Avantist, Woonds 7 PM, Epiphany Center for the Arts Night Spice, Marina City, Muted Color, Grayson DeWolfe 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ WED 1/24/2024 Nat & Alex Wolff 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b THU 1/25/2024 Mickey Darling 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ FRI 1/26/2024 999999999, Brenda, Josh Tong 9 PM, Metro, 18+ TUE 1/30/2024 Knox, Maryjo 7:30 PM, Schubas, 18+

TUE 2/6/2024 Tweet 6 and 9:30 PM, City Winery b

SAT 2/10/2024 Deap Vally, Sloppy Jane 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ WED 2/14/2024 Dan Navarro 7 PM, Schubas

SAT 3/9/2024 Celtic Tenors 7:30 PM, Park West b Alessandro Cortini, Lia Kohl & Whitney Johnson 8 PM, Epiphany Center for the Arts b SUN 3/10/2024 Rickie Lee Jones 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b MON 3/25/2024 Ado 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b TUE 3/26/2024 Codeine 9 PM, Empty Bottle Lola Young 7 PM, Chop Shop b THU 3/28/2024 Neutro Shorty 7:30 PM, House of Blues b SAT 3/30/2024 Damian & Stephen Marley 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b THU 4/4/2024 Action Bronson 8 PM, the Vic, 18+

THU 2/15/2024 Thumpasaurus 8 PM, Lincoln Hall

WED 4/10/2024 Mannequin Pussy, Soul Glo 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

FRI 2/16/2024 J. Robbins (band) 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 18+

SAT 4/13/2024 Sam Barber, Jake Kohn 8 PM, Joe’s

FRI 2/23/2024 Cold War Kids, Joe P 8 PM, Salt Shed, 18+

FRI 5/3/2024 Hip Abduction, Vana Liya 8 PM, Martyrs’

SAT 2/24/2024 Jayhawks 4 and 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b

TUE 5/7/2024 James Arthur, Forest Blakk 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b

SUN 2/25/2024 Jayhawks 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b

SAT 5/11/2024 Swans, Kristof Hahn 9 PM, Metro, 18+

TUE 2/27/2024 Cat Power 8 PM, Cahn Auditorium, Evanston b

WED 5/15/2024 Electric Callboy 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom b

WED 2/28/2024 Domo Genesis, Fly Anakin 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

SAT 5/18/2024 Social Distortion, Bad Religion, Lovebombs 7 PM, Salt Shed, 17+ v

52 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

CHICAGO ALTERNATIVE-POP auteur Nnamdï has picked a hell of a band to open his New Year’s Eve show at the Empty Bottle: hardcore four-piece Stress Positions. Earlier this month they released their debut album, Harsh Reality, and it’s one of this wolf’s favorite punk records of the year! Stress Positions formed in early 2021. Guitarist Benyamin Rudolph, bassist Russell Harrison, and drummer Jonathan “Jono” Giralt had played in hardcore band C.H.E.W. together, which split in 2020, and they started writing material together and finessing unfinished C.H.E.W. songs to fit a new lineup. The trio needed a singer, and after trying out a few, they asked a friend they’d met when they all lived in Orlando: Stephanie Brooks. “She tried it, and it felt fuckin’ perfect,” Giralt says. “It was a pretty seamless composition—the fact that we were already all friends and knew each other forever. Steph had never been in a punk band of any sort, but she has an incredible set of pipes. It was super easy to just get up and go.” The new band recorded a batch of songs in November 2021 with engineer Seth Engel, who’d previously played with Rudolph and Harrison in indie-rock group Great Deceivers. Stress Positions dropped their debut EP, the unrelentingly driving Walang Hiya, in May 2022. Harsh Reality was recorded during the same five days of sessions that produced that EP. “We wrote all of those songs off the bat— we recorded all of those tracks at the same time,” Giralt says. “We had never tried that method before, and we wanted to see what it would be like to record multiple records at the same time. I think we all kind of realized, like, ‘Ah, cool, glad we tried it. Don’t want to do that again.’” Stress Positions released Harsh Reality through Three One G, the long-running San Diego punk label run by Justin Pearson of the Locust, Swing Kids, and Retox. “We just sent Justin a cold email,” Giralt says. “We talked about a couple labels that we would want to put things out with. We’ve worked a bunch with Iron Lung, previously as C.H.E.W., and they rereleased the Walang Hiya EP. But we wanted to try something new.” In July, a 2022 documentary about Pearson, Don’t Fall in Love With Yourself, screened twice in Chicago. Pearson came to town for the occasion, and Stress Positions opened the screening at Color Club. “We got to meet him, hang out, and bullshit for a few hours,” Giralt says.

A lot of time passed between the recording and release of Harsh Reality, but the songs on the album remain as urgent to Giralt as the day he began writing them. The world is still just as fucked-up, if not worse, and that gives Stress Positions material to work with. “Everything is always seemingly grim,” Giralt says, “so it was really nice to be able to talk about everything as a group and fantasize what we would’ve liked to do.” CHICAGO DJ CLOUDY, known to his friends as Dayjahvell, grew up in an AfroLatinx household in Humboldt Park, educating his musical palate with multicultural dishes like reggaeton, hip-hop, and R&B. He calls himself “Cloudy” because DJing lets him shapeshift like the weather and the clouds that make it a visible. “Being a DJ gives you the opportunity to maneuver the room and kind of set the tone for what’s about to happen,” he says. On Saturday, December 30, at the Whistler, Cloudy will spin a set dedicated to lo-fi hiphop, underground vaporwave, dreamy vibes, and upbeat dance sounds. Before picking up a controller, Cloudy emceed shows for rappers such as Semiratruth and Flowurz at the city’s hypest venues—an experience that taught him crowd control and how to read the room, because he could see how folks responded to what he added to the atmosphere. This performance will kick-start Cloudy’s monthly residency at the Whistler, where you can catch him every third Saturday in 2024. THE BLACK METAL COWBOYS are a local crew of Black punk and hip-hop artists assembled by musician Harley Omega, and their next show is at Cafe Mustache on Friday, December 28. Omega calls herself the Harley Quinn of the crew, most likely to cross into metal, industrial, hardcore, and alternative. Rizzi Konway wears a creepy Slipknotinspired mask onstage, but behind it he’s an exuberant rapper. “He is kind of the Lil Wayne of the YMCMB,” says Omega. “He’s a monster on a mike.” J Heavy is the Cowboy for pure hip-hop fans, playing to the crowd while experimenting with his flow. Marky McFly is the group’s Green Ranger, charismatic and energetic—an extrovert among introverts. “I went my whole life loving goth culture, emo aesthetics, alternative music, and metal and not really having a lot of peers of color to share that with,” Omega says. “And now as an adult, [I] have that.” —DMB AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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JOBS Sr. Software Engineer Groupon, Inc. is seeking a Sr. Software Engineer in Chicago, IL w/ the following responsibilities: Dvlp, construct & implement the next generation of company products & features for Groupon’s web & mobile applications; design high-performance RESTful service-oriented architectures & software that is fast & efficient for millions of users. Up to 100% remote work allowed from anywhere in the U.S.; can live anywhere in the U.S. Co headquarters in Chicago, IL. Apply at www.grouponcareers. com by searching keyword R28054. A s s o c i a t e D i re c t o r, Software Engineer UBS Business Solutions US LLC is seeking an Associate Director, Software Engineer in Chicago, IL. Full time position. Gather and analyze business requirements for the development team. Qualified Applicants apply through SH-ProfRecruitingcc@ ubs.com. Please reference 001399. NO CALLS PLEASE. EOE/M/F/D/V Accountant Prepare, examine, or analyze a c c o u n t i n g re c o rd s , financial statements, or other financial reports to assess accuracy, completeness, & conformance to reporting & procedural standards. Req’s: Bach’s degree in Accounting + 12 mos of exp. Interested applicants contact Ms. Rose Bucaro, Leo’s Gluten Free LLC, 10130 Pacific Ave, Franklin Park, IL 60131. MULTIPLE POSITIONS DRW Holdings LLC has openings in Chicago, IL for: QUANTITATIVE RESEARCHER (Pos ID QR/ IL/H053) under superv, produce high qual quant rsrch & anlys across mult asset classes. Req MS/ MA Stat, Math, Fin, Fin Engr, or highly quant field ; DATA ANALYST (Pos ID DA/IL/Z056) collect metrics & anlys data for complete, valid, integ & relevan. Req BS/BA CS, Econ, Phys, Engr, or highly quant field & 2 yrs exp. Email resume apply@ drw.com, Attn: M. CARTER. Must ref. Pos ID to ensure consideration for proper position. EOE. Assistant Professor of Accounting Information Northwestern University seeks Assistant Professor of Accounting Information for Evanston, IL. PhD or ABD in Accounting/ Finance/ Economics/ related field req’d. Req’d: High-quality research, high-quality teaching record, & high-quality recommendations. Applications should include vita, job market paper, & the names of at least

54 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 28, 2023

3 recommenders. Send resume to: S. Loukopoulos, spiros.loukopoulos@ kellogg.northwester n. edu, Ref: GR Kellogg School of Management Northwestern University 2211 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 Financial Quant Analyst Gelber Group LLC seeks Financial Quant Analyst in Chicago, IL to perf stat analysis by applying math/stat techniques on financial data. Reqs. Master deg or foreign equiv. in Fin. Eng., Finance, or rel. field. Coursewrk must incl Fin. Eng., Cont. Time Models, Machine Learn for Fin Eng & Oper, Compu Methods in Fin, Algorithmic Trading, Analysis of Algorithms. Quantenet C++ Certificate req. Salary: $72,000. Email Resume to: recruiting@ gelber group.com. Sr Software Eng Gelber Group LLC seeks Sr Software Eng in Chicago, IL to coordinate w/ multi dept to create & implement app. by overseeing their architecture, design, develop, deploy. Reqs. 3yrs of post-bacc. exp. as a software eng. Exp must incl C#, WPF, WCF. Salary: $160,000. Email Resume to: recruiting@ gelber group.com. Staff Accountant Prepare income tax returns for partnership, S and C-corporation, individual, trust and non-for profit organization; Prepare sales tax return, federal excise tax returns, and other tax related filing and reporting; Tax planning and consultation; Yearend business and individual income tax estimating; Prepare, examine, or analyze accounting records, financial statements, or other financial reports to assess accuracy, completeness, and conformance to reporting and procedural standards; Evaluate taxpayer finances to determine tax liability, using knowledge of interest and discount rates, annuities, valuation of stocks and bonds, and amortization valuation of depletable assets; Compute taxes owed and prepare tax returns, ensuring compliance with payment, reporting, or other tax requirements; Advise clients in areas such as compensation, employee health care benefits, the design of accounting or data processing systems, or long-range tax or estate plans; Prepare, analyze, or verify annual reports, financial statements, and other records, using accepted accounting and statistical procedures to assess financial condition and facilitate financial planning; Review data about material assets, net worth, liabilities, capital stock, surplus,

income, or expenditures, and among others. Mail résumé to Christopher M Burdeau, Quinn & Company Services, Inc, 18322 West Creek Drive, Tinley Park, IL 60477 Miller Creative, Inc. seeks a f/t Motion Graphics Artist. Req. Bachelor’s in Fine Arts or Graphic Design or Visual Art or Animation w/ 6 mos of prior Graphics Designer or Motion Graphics Artist or Motion Graphics Designer or Computer Graphics Artist exp and 6 mos of exp using Adobe Systems Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop, Creative Suite, Premiere Pro, Autodesk Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D. Jobsite: Chicago, IL. Salary: $52,541. Send resume t o : M o rg a n . d l o u h y @ millercreative.com Research Associate II The Department of Pediatrics, the Univ of IL Chicago, located in large metropolitan area, is seeking full-time Research Associate II to assist the department w/ the following responsibilities: Under direction & supervision, assist the department w/ designing research & data collection procedures & protocols for social & clinical research. Speciﬁcally, in the field of Pediatrics, contribute to the study of disabilities & diseases, in particular the analysis & description of Vertebral Malformation, Congenital and/or Idiopathic Scoliosis (specifically, the functional analysis of variants identified by whole exome sequence analysis in patients w/ vertebral malformations), & the Role of Erythrocyte Mitochondrial Retention in Sickle Cell Disease & related blood diseases & pain. Utilize specialized knowledge of research concepts, practices & procedures, including specific knowledge of medical field nomenclatures & concepts in order to coordinate research experiments & assist w/ Internal Review Board management, grants/ contracts reporting, & compliance documentation. Assist w/ pre & posta w a rd m a n a g e m e n t , provide documentation & data collection services at the departmental level regarding research activities, & implement research protocols in the field of Pediatric health. Collect & analyze data through observations, interviews, & surveys, & by using samples of blood or other bodily ﬂuids, as required per protocol. Responsibilities for other job duties & participate in special projects as assigned. Some travel may be peri o di cal l y

required for previously scheduled events, attend conferences, and/or professional development. This position minimally requires a Bachelor’s degree or its foreign equivalent in Public Health or related field of study, & the minimum of 1 yr research experience in epidemiology, data analysis, and/or study design. For fullest consideration, please submit CV, cover letter, & 3 professional references by January 28, 2024 to: Attn: Human Resources, Dept of Pediatrics, Univ of IL Chicago, 840 S Wood St, Ste 1200, Chicago, IL 60612 or via email to peds-hr@uic. edu. The University of Illinois System is an equal opportunity employer, including but not limited to disability and/or veteran status, & complies with all applicable state & federal employment mandates. Please visit Required Employment Notices & Posters (https://www.hr.uillinois. edu/cms/one.aspx?portalId=4292&pageId=5705) to view our non-discrimination statement & find additional information about required background checks, sexual harassment/misconduct disclosures, COVID-19 vaccination requirement, & employment eligibility review through E-Verify. The university provides accommodations to applicants & employees. ( B u ff a l o G ro v e , I L ) Yaskawa America, Inc. seeks Quality Assurance/Quality Control Engineer B w bach or for deg equiv in QE, ME or EE & 4 yrs exp in job offer or in qual ctrl & electr assem. Emp also accpts mast or for deg equiv in QE, ME or EE. Must have exp dev & oper qual ctrl sys incl train prog; using metrlgy & stat mthds to diag & corr improp qual ctrl pract; usng qual cost cncpts & tech; dev & admin mgmt info sys & audit qual sys for defic ID & corr. Apply to: HR, 2121 Norman Drive South, Waukegan, IL 60085 or online www.yaskawa. com/about-us/careers

in Managerial Studies & MBA programs and serve as a liaison between the business community and the University. Serve on various committees in the department, as well as at the College and University levels. Conduct research pertinent to the ﬁeld of Managerial Studies. Other duties and University service as assigned. Some travel may be periodically required to attend conferences and/or professional development. This position minimally requires a PhD degree or its foreign equivalent in Business Administration (Management), Business, or related field. For fullest consideration, please submit CV, cover letter, and 3 professional references by 1/24/2024 to Ashley Sefcik, University of IL Chicago, 815 W. Van Buren Street, Suite 220, Chicago, IL 60607 or via email to asefci1@ uic.edu. The University of Illinois at Chicago is an affirmative action, equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, protected veteran status, or status as an individual with a disability. UIC may conduct background checks on all job candidates upon acceptance of a contingent offer letter. Background checks will be performed in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. As a qualifying federal contractor, the University of Illinois System uses E-Verify to verify employment eligibility. The University of Illinois System requires candidates selected for hire to disclose any documented finding of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment and to authorize inquiries to current and former employers regarding findings of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment. For more information, visit https://www.hr.uillinois. edu/cms/One.aspx?portalId=4292&pageI d = 1 4 1 1 8 9 9

Assistant Professor The Dept of Managerial Studies, at the Univ of IL at Chicago, located in large metropolitan area, is seeking full-time Assistant Professor to assist the department with the following responsibilities: Under direction and supervision, teach undergraduate & graduate students in the field of Business, including areas such as Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship. Mentor and direct the research of undergraduate & graduate students

Office Coordinator Coordinate the work of office, administrative, or customer service employees to ensure adherence to quality standards, deadlines, and proper procedures, correcting errors or problems; Resolve customer complaints or answer customers’ questions regarding policies and p ro c e d u re s ; P ro v i d e employees with guidance in handling difficult or complex problems or in resolving escalated complaints or disputes; Research, compile, and

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prepare re-ports, manuals, correspondence, or other information required by management or governmental agencies; Implement corporate or departmental policies, procedures, and service standards in conjunction with management; Plan for or coordinate oﬃce services, such as equipment or supply acquisition or organization, disposal of assets, relocation, parking, maintenance, or security serv-ices; Arrange for necessary maintenance or repair work; Plan layouts of stockrooms, warehouses, or other storage areas, considering turn-over, size, weight, or related factors pertaining to items stored, and among others; Mail résumé to Amgaa Purevjal, iCodice LLC, 5005 New-port Dr, Suite# 505, Rolling Meadows, IL 60008 (Lake Zurich, IL) Echo Inc seeks Industrial Engineer w/Bach or for deg equiv in Ind Eng, Mech Eng or a rltd ﬂd & 4 yrs exp in job offer or in ind eng or manuf eng in a manuf environ. Must have exp in pneum & hydraul; proc dev, mtrl flw optmz & warehse layout; & Lean Manuf princ & method, mtrl hdlg & warehse equip & strge technq. Apply online at: https://www.echo-usa. com/about/echo-careers Data & Analytics Project Managers Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital seeks Data & Analytics Project Managers for various & unanticipated worksites throughout the U.S. (HQ: Chicago, IL). Bachelor’s in Info Tech/Healthcare Admin/Nursing/Social Sciences/related Analytics field +3yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills: 3yrs w/ project mgmt of tech sys implementations; Exp must incl: identifying & recommending solutions for Data Architecture; ETL Dev; Statistical data modelling; SSRS; SSIS; IS proj: scoping, re s o u rc e a l l o c a t i o n , budget; SCRUM; Agile; UAT; web services; SQL Server; SQL Query; SAS; Power BI/Tableau/Google DS. Hybrid position, requires in person work. Apply online: https:// careers.luriechildren.org Req ID: JR2023-4194 Global Innovation Sr. Manager Ice Cream Mars Wrigley Confectionery US, LLC.: Global Innovation Sr. Manager Ice Cream – Chicago, IL (Up to 50% per week telework permitted). Lead the innovation strategy for Global Ice Cream, ensuring the sufficiency of the innovation agenda. Job reqs Bach deg in Marketing, Biz Admin, Finance, or rel field + 3 yrs of exp in any job title involving working across

global innovation systs for consumer products goods in the food industry. In lieu of deg as stated, business will accept 5 yrs of exp in any job title involving working across global innovation systs for consumer products goods in the food industry. Send resume identifying Job Code 129 to MarsTA-PIC@ effem.com. No calls.

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