Testimony by Logan Center Exhibitions

TESTIMONY July 9 – August 30, 2014

Featuring the University of Chicago’s 2013/2014 Arts+Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture Artists-in-Residence:

David Boykin Krista Franklin Andres L. Hernandez Logan Center Gallery 915 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637 Tues–Sat 9am–8pm, Sun 11am–8pm arts.uchicago.edu/logan/gallery

Table of Contents

Introduction

Conversation

Exhibition Map & Checklist

Artistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Biographies

Public Program

Colophon

Introduction

The University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life initiative, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and Logan Center Exhibitions present Testimony, an exhibition featuring the 2013/2014 Arts + Public Life / Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture artists-inresidence. Coming from diverse disciplines and approaches but finding common ground in their interest in oral culture (both musical and discursive) David Boykin, Krista Franklin, and Andres L. Hernandez set out to develop ambitious new works that move beyond the act of witnessing towards laying truth claims and also grounding fantasies. Testimony–which spans the Logan Center Gallery, the North entrance to the Logan Center, the building’s courtyard and Gidwitz Lobby – makes space for critical reflection and ritual. David Boykin’s initiative Sonic Healing Ministries “believes in the power of sound/vibration to transform physical matter. Thought is a finer vibration that has the potential to shape the physical world, as our thoughts eventually manifest in the physical world.” His project for the exhibition, Drone of Testimony: A Vigil Against US Drone Attacks (2014), produced in collaboration with the engineer Angel Elmore, and the researcher and video producer Kasandra Skistad is a vigil against US military drone attacks. As the artist writes: “The sonic drone that is created out of the testimony of US military drone attack survivors is a vigil against future attacks. Some people light a candle, we make a sound. Let there be a fire always burning, a song always sung, a sound always resonating until this madness stops. Let there be a Drone of Testimony till there are no more drone attacks.” Krista Franklin’s ongoing interest in Afro-Futurism and Afro-Surrealism, has consistently manifested itself through her poetry and collage and she has used the occasion of her residency to extend these methods to the creation of an environment, where the energies of multiple authors from the past, present and future combine. “Hybridization is at the core of what I do,” she notes (in an interview with Tempestt Hazel). Developed especially for the exhibition at the Logan Center, her collaborative work, Fantastic (2014), is loosely inspired by the legacy of Detroit’s late and legendary producer and hip-hop artist J Dilla. Working with graffiti artists Kane One and Stef Skills, as well as the music producer and dj J. Johari Palacio, Franklin sets out to produce an environment that furthers an evolving imaginary. Andres L. Hernandez’s project Benign Neglect (2014) takes its title from a policy term coined in 1969 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, President Richard Nixon’s urban advisor,

purportedly as a means of ‘easing tensions’ following the Civil Rights Struggle, but widely understood as the institutionalization of a slow and deliberate abandonment of predominantly African American neighborhoods to poverty and arson. Hernandez’s project reimagines the resulting vacant lots of Chicago’s Washington Park, using aerial images, not as pure documents but as ‘plans’ for a Zen Garden. Made from the debris collected on the lots in an ongoing practice of walking as research, Hernandez’s ‘garden’ will be constructed in the courtyard of the Logan Center and tended as a rite, a rhythm, and a prompt for dialogue about a wealth of social and spatial possibilities. * In the conversation that follows, the reader learns about the artists’ broader views about their work for this exhibition and their experience of the residency at the Arts Incubator in Washington Park, including the influence of their peers. In the course of installing the exhibition, one quality of this year’s residents has come to the fore, which can perhaps most simply be described as ‘worldly’. The Masai travelling across Krista Franklin’s collaged and graffitied walls, the voices of drone attack survivors from Waziristan in David Boykin’s Vigil and the space of the Zen Garden in Andres L. Hernandez’s Benign Neglect suggest that, however deeply steeped in the local conditions of Chicago’s South Side their works may be, these artists aim to connect to global concerns and imaginaries.

Conversation

May 20th, 2014, Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago Discussion with the 2014 Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race Politics and Culture Artists-in-Residence— David Boykin, Krista Franklin, Andres L. Hernandez; moderated by Tracye Matthews, Associate Director, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture and Monika Szewczyk, Visual Arts Program Curator, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. Monika Szewczyk: I thought I would start with the title we’ve chosen, Testimony, and think together what it means for each of your works, because I think your works are all very different, and yet the title rang true for everybody … Krista Franklin: I’ll start. I feel like a lot of my work comes out of my childhood experiences in the church—in the Pentecostal church—and this idea of spiritualism that’s kind of frenetic [laughs]. You know, a spiritualism that’s very demonstrative, and that has to do with ritual, strange happenings and occurrences … and being very comfortable in that environment. So if I think about the word “testimony” I always think about church, because there’s always someone testifying: “This is what God has done for me. This is what’s happened for me.” So “testimony” and “testifying” are linked together for me. And when it comes to my artistic practice and what I’ve been working on at the Incubator, which I consider to be a continuation of what I always do, I think that my work does somewhat testify to “strange happenings.” [Everyone laughs] MS: Yeah. Absolutely. KF: Take the Library of Love 1 —here we are in this environment that has been labeled internationally as a hotbed of violence in a hotbed of hate. So to have kind of plopped down this space as an altar in some respects— people could come in and really contemplate the idea of love, and be present in that moment—in some way, that’s testimony as well. And the collages are definitely testimony, as combinations of juxtapositions and collisions. MS: Well, it seems as though there’s a sense of polyphony or something like that in that testimony, like an insistence that more than one voice has to be heard. KF: For sure. I think so. Andres L. Hernandez: We had previously discussed the difference between “witness” and “testimony” when coming up with the title—and I liked that nuance. I thought a lot about what I had intended coming into the residency, which

was more about witnessing, looking. Within our visual culture, there are photographs or images in our mind’s eye of urban environments that we call the “ghetto.” That naming is a kind of a silent act. I think the testimony part is much more about being active and trying to make sense of what we are seeing in these images with other people, out loud, vocally, what have you … For the remaining months of the residency, I decided to get back on the street and become a gatherer or documentarian of stuff, and then use these materials as the prompt for people to talk about their experiences. You don’t need a lot to do that. I’m actually a minimalist at heart. It’s interesting to get back to really simple things, like “this is an empty space but it wasn’t always empty, what does it mean, and what’s the history behind it?” Just to be able to stand on land and talk about it, or talk about other things in the neighborhood has been fascinating. So I guess I’m interested less in my testimony than in other people talking about what’s impacting their lives. MS: Well, it’s interesting how the whole notion of emptiness becomes something of a prompt. You’ve been thinking about emptiness in various ways throughout the whole residency, but now it’s something that is almost like a provocation or maybe an irritation, a way of getting people to ask questions. AH: On Sunday for this latest installment of Absence is Fullness 2, we were out on the lots in-between the “Spray Paint Not Bullets” mural and the auto-repair place, and one of the folks that was there, who’s a self-identified community resident, said, “I have an issue with this title, Absence is Fullness and the idea of ‘evidence of absence.’ People look around the neighborhood and they see broken bottles and glass, and bricks and everything else on the ground, and they think that’s all we have in our neighborhood, drunks and whatever.” And she continued: “I kind of want to make photocopies of my college degree, my diploma, and just litter the lots like that.” I was trying to explain to her that this idea of ‘evidence of absence’ is not the absence of evidence. That something isn’t there doesn’t mean something has never been there, and even when something is missing there is still a presence. I recently recalled the chorus of this old 90’s black rock song by Living Colour called “Open Letter to a Landlord”—I’m not singing it for you [laughs]— “You can tear a building down but you can’t erase a memory / These buildings might look all run down, but they have a value you can’t see.” I thought that was so brilliant when I heard it in the early 90s. And in the process of being in the residency, I’ve been rediscovering things like that which have given me a lot of food for thought for what to do next.

MS (to David Boykin): Now you, David are using actual testimony in your work, right? David Boykin: Yeah, in my case the exhibition title is kind of literal, because we’re actually using recorded testimonies. The work itself is focused more on drone attacks, and we create a drone sound out of recorded testimonies of drone attack survivors. Their voices are layered to create the drone, so that’s the testimony. MS: How was that testimony gathered? DB: It’s ripped from videos, from different films that deal with the issue, using interviews with a lot of drone attack survivors. MS: But the drone also has—and I’m thinking of this in light of your Sonic Healing Ministries 3 —I also think of drones as that kind of sound which is meditative and spiritual. It has a completely opposite connotation to the violence of nearly escaping death. DB: It does and it doesn’t—that’s the thing, the idea of drone is also very similar to the idea of silence. We’ve talked about silence and trying to reach an absolute silence. There’s always something you hear, but it’s just the constancy of it that makes you think that it’s silence … There is something about silence, and something about the drone sound, that takes us to this meditative place, that takes us closer to that place that’s, I don’t know, in a place between life and death, or whatever we think comes after this life. There’s something about that drone and that experience of being in that sound, in that meditative place, that takes us closer to what we think comes after this—it takes us closer to make us recognize and deal with that reality. We have to deal with that eventually. MS: I must admit that when you first told me about the project, I thought, “Wow, David’s really stepping out of his game—he’s putting aside the Sonic Healing Ministries project and going into documentation, political content, war, this kind of work that has a very different pitch.” At first I thought it was a totally different approach, but I’m realizing that it’s actually very connected. Tracye Matthews: And everything sounds connected now, just hearing you guys talk about it together, certain themes keep coming up. “Absence,” the silence, is also full of sound, and it’s all about things unseen, faith in the unseen and the unknown and what’s next.

MS: Which is funny because when we first sat down to talk about the three projects, we were saying: “Oh boy, these are three very different projects—should we do three different exhibitions?” But I think it’s going to work really, really well. AH: I agree—I wonder what that says about us as artists, but also the influence of—even though we’re not always in the same place at the same time all the time—the hallway conversations at the Incubator or the ones on the street or in the studio. You all say something and I go back home and think that I have to redo everything now! [Laughs] I need a month just to think about it, come back, regroup. Even though our approaches may seem disparate, there’s a lot of proximity. We all have overlapping circles. And I wonder if a lot of folks in our circles are also in this reflective state in their own work. KF: I’m also a really big believer in—I’m about to give it to you esoterically [laughs], really esoterically, crazily, as the spiritualist of the year—I’m also a really big believer in the idea that when you put creative minds in close proximity to each other, not even living together, but just kind of nearby, there is this kind of ether that develops which everybody starts pulling from, so everybody’s giving it off, right? I’ve always believed that. I’ve been in a lot of artist’s communities and I find that it’s more present with writers. Poets give it off all the time, and they think they are stealing from each other [everyone laughs], but nobody’s stealing anything from you! It’s just in the ether! Somebody snatched it before you did, and now you’re mad! [Laughs] We were both thinking about it at the same time, but nobody’s talking about it. Artists are very sensitive… MS: That’s maybe also why I also really enjoy the residency exhibition, and also in a way, the MFA exhibitions at the Logan Center Gallery, because they are not based on some kind of fabricated group theme. They are about people who have been together for some time, and the conversation is still unfolding, and there are many different points of intersection. You can call the exhibition Testimony, and it’s a really good word that speaks to many different things, but I’m curious about other points of reference or even of collision that are going to materialize which may speak to what you have discovered together during the residency. Switching gears somewhat, I was curious if you could say a little bit more about the Incubator, and your daily work there. Each of you have created regular situations which happen to be on Sundays. David, you have the Sunday Sessions, improvisational jam sessions, as part of Sonic Healing Ministries. Krista you are doing the Speculating Darkly reading series, and Andres you have these community

forums called Absence is Fullness. I’m curious if you can say a little bit more about trying to shape the daily calendar, the rhythm of a place together … TM: Right, and all of you have decided to do things that aren’t one-offs, necessarily. They’re repetitive series, and how did that happen? That doesn’t always happen. DB: I don’t know how that happened! [Laughs]. MS: Is that how you always work? Or was this residency the occasion to determine, “I’m actually going to do something every single Sunday”? DB: Well, as a musician, you are always doing one-off stuff, and you would like something more regular, something more steady, so if you get the opportunity you try to establish that … TM: But what about Sonic Healing Ministries, I mean wasn’t that already regular? DB: The idea of it was that it would be regular … KF: I always thought of it like church session that you go to every week, you know what I mean? AH: I’ll be honest, I was just “beat-biting.” I thought, “Man, they’ve got something going on, so okay, I’d better get my stuff together too!” KF: It was in the ether! It was in the ether! AH: That’s the fire … I’ve been really excited to see the consistency of what everybody has been doing. I think it does a lot for the Incubator. It’s funny, the building is huge and can feel really empty. I laugh every time I’m moving something, thinking: “this building is all doors!” [Laughs] I think having that consistent programming, whatever it is, is a beautiful thing for the neighborhood. For me, if Krista and David are doing those other things, ideally we should be able to feed each other’s projects in some way. I hope we can get a residency alumni thing going … DB: Well, it would be good to help new residents by relaying things you overlooked when you first came in. In hindsight, there are things that we could tell them … TM: Like which staff member to avoid. [Everyone laughs] KF: Yeah, don’t talk to Tracye! [More laughs]

DB: About the idea of time—this residency is so many months long, but you actually may not have physical access to everything that you want until some time after you begin, so plan for that. The building itself has felt busy to me, very busy. I’m there on Sundays and, also prior to a couple weeks ago, I’ve been coming in a lot every day, and doing my daily practice. I would get there right at the end of the day, right when Mercedes and everybody else was wrapping up and leaving. The transition time is always really busy. And whenever I come on Saturday, Marya’s coming in with students. It feels super busy but it all fits, and it all works. MS: When you think of a residency, you think of a place, and a building, and a space. You don’t think of time as much, maybe. Can we talk about how this is a period of time you can use in a different way? AH: In an architecture office, we would mark out phases: “schematic design,” “design development,” “construction documents.” Each phase would come in 50%, 75%, and 100% done, but the completion had more to do with how much money the client had than with a period of time! [Everyone laughs] Every minute of your time is billable to somebody, and it’s really interesting to think about that process prior to the actual construction of something—the planning. That’s been both my gift and also my curse as an artist, being so heavily influenced by a background of preplanning, planning, more planning, so that you think after the planning is finished that everything’s done! And now I can build it, or hand it over to somebody to build. And in this residency, my being able to incubate as an artist and realize some things about my own practice has been a big thing. I’m less the experimenter—I experiment when I’ve thought through it all, which is problematic. Or it’s good to break that sometimes. I think that during this ten-month period, I’ve been able to develop and grow as an artist. Now I need to put the fire under my butt and figure out what the next ten months after this is going to be like … KF: Yeah, I think this residency has been very different from other residencies, because you really don’t have that time with the Arts Incubator to incubate. Right away you’re asked: “What do you have going on? What’s for the people?” You gotta get it together—you don’t have that time that other residencies I’ve been at give you to just stare into space for ages. You know, that’s all I would do—just stare into space and then take a nap and then maybe eat something [laughs]. And I’d go stare some more, and think “Oh … there’s some paper right there, I should make a collage … ” and that could be like Week 3! [Everyone laughs]

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MS: Though maybe it’s interesting to think how you’ve created that reflexive space in your exhibited work. When I think of the Library of Love exhibition—we stayed in there forever because it promised pleasure and leisure. You went into the Incubator Gallery in the middle of the day, to, you know, do this studio visit and instead: “Ooh, books! Ooh, a couch!” And you could just— KF: Zone out. MS: Yes, and it’s really important! I think there are so few places in the world for that nowadays. I think that’s why a lot of people like galleries, because they are quiet places to sit down and reflect. KF: And you’re also forced to observe what is around you. Especially because we live in a society that’s so digital—and I love it in part, but every five minutes we’re like this [taps microphone]. You know, we’re all tapping into the machines all the time, so a gallery space does give you that moment to say, “oh, there are images on the wall, there’s something on the wall right there,” and you have to be present and observe what is happening in that space, and it causes you to be a bit more reflective, I think. TM: How do you all feel about the physical space of being in Washington Park and being in this building, dealing with the politics surrounding it? Has any of that had an impact on your practice in any way, or not? DB: I don’t think it has. I think that’s what my practice was already, so I don’t think it really impacted it. TM: Or vice versa. Do you feel that you’ve impacted the space? DB: No, it forced me to deal with the same challenges. You know, trying to play jazz music in a black community where there aren’t venues, or playing at alternative venues and trying to get people to come to those venues, it just forces you to be more creative. TM: Was this more challenging, or was there anything particularly unique about this situation? What are the barriers? DB: The barriers are unfamiliarity with the music itself, just absence of music in the community right now, especially with younger people. They’re not being taught the music at school or playing it in their home. The extra barrier is because it’s in this University of Chicago building, and some

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people feel this space is off-limits or it’s not for them. So I’ve been trying to overcome that, invite people and get them to come in … AH: It’s interesting too to think that this was a musical block. There were maybe four or five music venues, literally on the block that hosts the Incubator—309 E. Garfield was a Chinese restaurant and Tavern, there was the Rhumboogie Cafe between the vacant lots and the mural. That was a big music venue. And further to the west, two blocks down the street on Prairie, there was a big theater. It wasn’t really an entertainment district—that’s what’s funny about it—but when that disappeared, you lost venues, or you had to travel to them. Before it was just part of daily life, you heard jazz just walking down the street, all day. DB: Yeah, I lived for a period at 46th and Indiana, and people who remember that area in the 50s and 60s talk about how “back in the day” you walked down the block and just heard people practicing all day … MS: How do you dig up the information that tells you what something used to be? AH: I’m a night owl. So I’m just on my laptop. All this information is public, even things like land ownership, and something I like to do is connect the dots. I had heard about the Rhumboogie Cafe on this documentary on Channel 11 and thought, “Let me see where Rhumboogie was.” And it was 345 E. Garfield, literally right in the middle of that large vacant parcel of land. There are many online sources like the Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago Library. The University has a list of all the jazz venues on the South Side from 1910 onward. I used to think people didn’t care, but that’s not it at all, they just don’t know how to access the information. I think that’s an art form too—being able to coalesce the data and package it in a way … MS: I’m curious about these processes, and also the testimony—in the sense of records—that you’re using … KF: I like the fact that with the Information Age, you have the information right at your fingertips. And like you said, it’s public information, so you just have to have the curiosity to seek it out. AH: I agree. I will say this though: I think it is important to think about the role that the Incubator plays. An archive is accumulating already, with photographs and I’m not sure what else. What happens if it just becomes another University of Chicago research archive? It’s in the building,

in a file cabinet somewhere and the building has certain hours. Even if you have curiosity, you might not even know that it’s there. So how do we make information public? Also, what role could we assign to the folks at the Incubator— does this becomes a continuous process? We are constantly encountering stories—the other day, people were arguing what was on a parcel of land. One says, “it wasn’t that,” and the other, “it was this!” And you know, both of them were right—it was both things, but at different time periods. So you only get a piece of the story if you don’t continue to build that archive. I think this idea of public history and public archives could be really fascinating, particularly for that area that stretches along Garfield all the way to the Dan Ryan. There was once so much happening in that strip, including, as David was saying, on 51st, 47th, 43rd. All those strips have a lot of amazing history. It would probably take a research fellowship just to collect stories and figure out how to curate that back to the public. MS: I think there are two related things happening with the Digital Age. On the one hand, with the expanded horizon of memory, there is this kind of archival impulse, but on the other hand you really see a call for the fantastic or something that actually did not exist, or that somehow opens up a space that doesn’t have a trace in the material world. You seem to be investigating the latter [to Krista], and I’m wondering if you can speak about it. Is the reading series Speculating Darkly about a shared cultural fantasy? 4 KF: Well, for me it’s so embedded in black culture. One of the poets who read last Sunday mentioned Zora Neale Hurston. All this is present in her writing—the language is there, strange shit’s happening … [Laughs] She evoked things that seem magical or mystical, but they were really just ordinary black occurrences. I guess to many people of color, people in general, it’s so ordinary that we don’t see it as the fantastic thing it is until somebody highlights it who’s outside of the culture, and says, “That’s weird! Did you see that?” And you’re thinking, “That’s been there forever! They always do that!” And they say, “But they levitated. Their feet were just a little off the ground!” And you think, “But they do that all the time!” [Laughs] Both of the artists I have the privilege of being in collaboration and community with right now—Kane One and Stef Skills—have that in their work as well. MS: I wonder if we can think of the archive in relation to oral traditions. We could say oral traditions rely on the body to archive, or the storyteller as somehow embodying centuries of knowledge. This is different, I think, from the archive understood as the site of the lonely search for some

kind of information, which doesn’t have that performative dimension, it doesn’t have the human voice doing something extra that will make you remember and make you archive it in your own body with all your senses in turn. TM: That’s where the oral testimonies and oral histories come in that David’s been mining. I mean, it is the history but it’s with the human voice telling the story, and capturing that as a piece of paper or photograph is different. KF: Yeah, but I love the piece of paper and the photograph—I don’t want them to go anywhere either, while we make room for these other ways. And I think the machines can document somebody reading something, maybe even capture some kind of essence of what that might have been. AH: Can I ask a question about the avant-garde? I wonder if what we’re attempting to do, consciously or not, is to reassign fringe experience back to normative, everyday practice. What we do isn’t something that’s “Black AvantGarde,” it is just what we do. DB: The music, though. That is Black Avant-Garde. [Everyone laughs] AH: I feel you, I feel you. DB: In jazz music, there is always an avant-garde element, there is always a piece that shocks people, and that’s always been there, and that’s how it’s always been received. MS: But in an interesting way, the avant-garde tradition is what travels around the world. I’m just thinking about the AACM … DB: Well, that’s the most exotic, to the non-American. So there’s that appeal to it, I think. And on some level, that’s always the most applicable. Wherever you’re coming from, there’s this traditional culture and the current, popular thing or the avant-garde thing. The traditional thing is so steeped in a place that it might not always be well received if someone from outside decides to work with it—like me doing Kabuki Theater [laughs]. But whatever the newest, latest thing in Japan is, I might be able to get away with doing that. The more traditional the cultural practice the harder it is to appropriate often times because it can be so nuanced that it becomes extremely difficult to imitate with limited life experience of that culture. There is something about the new thing that makes itself available to everybody. I think that’s why I like traveling.

MS: Yeah, I’m interested in those forms that can move around. And when people find each other from different contexts, because there is some kind of non-verbal understanding. DB: My take on creative music and avant-garde music is that it’s a reflection of the divine harmony of all these different goings-on in creation. That’s what it’s about, making people aware of that. AH: It seems like a lot of us are asking people to slow down and witness. But I’m always afraid that I’m alienating, that there’s not enough of something to grasp on to. KF: But I like that! [Laughs] Even as a kid, I made myself this kind of outsider. DB: I feel like today, black artists, or just artists, alienate masses of people. And especially today, because right now it’s acceptable for black artists to use tropes from black culture that were previously taboo. KF: But that’s also kind of hiding in plain sight, right? I enjoy this when it happens at the Arts Incubator. If I go out back and have a cigarette and the gates are open, nobody knows that I have some crazy-ass Surrealist collages in that room in there. They just think I’m some black girl sitting outside having a cigarette, and I love it! So there’s this kind of anonymity where I can camouflage myself. AH: I’ll bring up the Black Artists Retreat 5, because it’s both a retreat, and you’re also in the middle, in the eye of the hurricane. All this stuff’s happening around you, and you have this one space to do whatever you’re doing, and this opportunity to educate, to dialogue, to take the question that was just asked. That is the purpose of the place, that the questions get raised through the work. And the shows I’ve been to and the meetings I’ve been to, where you could tell there was obviously a dichotomy between the artists who are from the neighborhood and regular folk from the neighborhood, I think people are just trying to figure it out. And that’s what I like about it—people seem to be agreeing, “I’m not sure what’s happening, but I’m going to come check it out.” DB: I was recently at some art event—it wasn’t in my neighborhood, but it was close to my neighborhood, and similar. And there were some things said, some talk about artists as though they weren’t part of the community, but I felt like this was my community! And I just felt weird.

KF: Conversations about community in general make me feel weird, though. What community are you talking about? Whose community? There can be 25 different communities inside of a community. So what kind of community are we trying to get at here? Is it the woman next door? I get very confounded by the notion of community. DB: There are artists, and then there’s this community person—regular person. Are artists not regular people? AH: I’m not a person who has a lot of shows or exhibitions. A lot of times I don’t even call myself an artist, but I think exhibitions become opportunities to continue that dialogue between different communities. The artistic community will look at it in a certain way, but all of us are citizens and residents of other communities as well. I think it’s an interesting bridge moment, and that fishbowl of the gallery downstairs in the Incubator becomes key. It’s a structure inside of a structure inside of a structure—the University of Chicago, local arts center, and then the gallery. So if you talk about barriers, there are at least three barriers to get into the gallery. I just open the door up if I’m in there and see if people come in. This is a moment for artists to be able to have a space to do their thing and have a space to educate and be educated. There are some interesting folks in the neighborhood who also identify as artists, but don’t have opportunities let alone a studio. KF: There’s a lot of work to be done. TM: I’m wondering about the privilege of being at the University of Chicago. I was just curious about how that affected your experience of the space and impacted your work. KF: One of the reasons I was really looking forward to applying to this particular residency was that it would have been the first time outside of Ohio that I actually made work in a black community, and that was something I was intrigued by. I wanted to know if my work would change, or what would happen. MS: And has it? KF: Kind of! I think it just got more weird … I thought to myself, “I’m gonna go all out, as weird as I can possibly get in the next ten months.” I did a lot more experimenting and playing because there was really not much at stake, you know what I mean? I just thought, either they’ll dig it or they won’t. So it was kind of liberating for me. I was able to embrace that avant-garde edge a little bit more.

Notes 1 Krista Franklin’s Library of Love was an exhibition conceived in collaboration with Stephen Flemister, Norman Teague, and Raub Welch. It took place at the Arts Incubator at Washington Park between February 12th and March 31, 2014. 2 Absence is Fullness: A (E)Utopic Assembly is an experimental forum hosted by Andres L. Hernandez. Focused on broader themes of absence and emptiness across multiple disciplines, monthly assemblies explore the potential of these states of being as opportunities for imaginative possibility. 3 Sonic Healing Ministries is “an organization dedicated to the evolution of the human spirit through music. The crux of our mission is to consciously create work that positively impacts the wellness of ourselves and our audiences.” In this framework, Boykin has organized the purely improvisational Sunday Sessions at the Arts Incubator. 4 Taking its title and spirit from a series of essays written by poet Roger Reeves (published on the Poetry Foundation’s ‘Harriet the Blog’), Speculating Darkly, or The Folk Surreal Future is a reading series that features emerging African Diaspora writers from the Midwest who focus on the black fantastic, the grotesque, the Afro-surreal, the Gothic, the speculative, and science fiction. This cross-genre reading series, which took place on Sundays between May 4th and June 22nd at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race Politics and Culture, engaged fiction writers, poets, essayists and theorists, and those working in the experimental/avant-garde. 5 The Black Artists Retreat [B.A.R.], convened by Theaster Gates, was held in Chicago, IL over two days in August 2013. “Our initial goal was to create the time and space for inter-generational dialogue that reflects and considers how contemporary artists of color engage collaboration and generosity. The retreat provided the time for artists to invest in themselves and other creatives outside of the institutional environment.”

South Entrance

Gidwitz Lobby

Courtyard

Gallery 1 3

Logan Center Level One North Entrance

Large Gallery

David Boykin in collaboration with Angel Elmore and Kasandra Skistad Drone of Testimony: A Vigil Against US Drone Attacks, 2014 Four channel video and sound (20:36), paper

Small Gallery

Krista Franklin in collaboration with Kane One and Stef Skills Fantastic, 2014 Mixed media on MDF board [incorporated into left wall] Krista Franklin Beam Me Up, 2012 Aerosol paint on vintage mixer Collection of Cecil McDonald Jr. [on the headphones] Krista Franklin Fantastic (The Reprise), 2014 Sound Curation by J. Johari Palacio

Wall Behind North Desk

Andres L. Hernandez All works are Untitled (from the “Omniscient Eye” series), 2014 Inkjet prints on paper

Courtyard

Andres L. Hernandez Benign Neglect (let rocks their silence break), 2014 Found debris, gravel, plywood and recycled palettes

Gidwitz Lobby

Andres L. Hernandez Untitled (from the “Omniscient Eye” series), 2014 Inkjet print on paper

Artists’ Biographies

David Boykin is a composer, bandleader, and multi-reed instrumentalist performing on the tenor and soprano saxophones, the soprano and bass clarinets, and the drum set. He has received many grants and awards for his talents as a composer. He is the leader of the David Boykin Expanse, founder of Sonic Healing Ministries, and an occasional collaborator with a few other artists. Boykin began studying music on the clarinet at the age of 21 in 1991 and first performed professionally in 1997. Since 1997 he has released 10 album-length recordings as a leader, contributed as a featured soloist to other musicians’ recordings, and performed at major international jazz festivals and smaller jazz venues locally and abroad. As part of his residency, Boykin’s Sonic Healing Ministries has been holding Free Jazz Jam Sessions, each Sunday at 2-5pm in his studio at the Arts Incubator in Washington Park. For details visit sonichealingministries.com Krista Franklin is a poet, visual artist, and performer who lives and works in Chicago. Much of Franklin’s creative output concerns itself with the intersection of the literary and the visual, and often explores the conceptual concerns of Afro-Futurism and Afro-Surrealism. Her collages have been featured as the cover art of award-winning poetry collections and exhibited nationally. Franklin is the recipient of Chicago’s Community Arts Assistance Program Grant, the Albert P. Weisman Award, and Columbia College Chicago’s Aiko Fellowship, and she has held residencies at Cave Canem and A Studio in the Woods. A co-founder of 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians, and scholars, Franklin holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts. As part of the residency at the Arts Incubator, Franklin created the exhibition Library of Love (February 12-March 31, 2014), working in collaboration with Stephen Flemister, Norman Teague, and Raub Welch. Her ongoing reading series, Speculating Darkly, or the Folk Surreal Future, was presented at the University of Chicago’s Center for Race, Politics and Culture between May 4th and June 22nd, 2014. For details visit kristafranklin.com Andres L. Hernandez is an artist-designer-educator who works to re-imagine the physical, social, and cultural environments we inhabit. Over the last 16 years, he has worked within a variety of institutions to develop innovative art and design curricula; to assist with research, installation, and educational activities for museum exhibitions; and to organize collaborative, community-based art projects throughout the city of Chicago. Hernandez received his

Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University and a Master of Arts in Art Education degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Education since 2006. He is also a Lead Artist with the Teens Re-Imagining Art, Community & Environment (TRACE) program of the Chicago Park District, and is co-founder of Revival Arts Collective. His discussion forum, Absence is Fullness: A (E)utopian Assembly, presented in the Second Floor Flex Space of the Arts Incubator, began on February 16th and continues through August 17th, 2014. For details visit whimplaceknow.com

Public Program All events held in CafĂŠ Logan

Artists in Conversation Sunday, July 20, 12-1:30 pm Public discussion with Andres L. Hernandez as part of the on-going series Absence is Fullness: A (E)utopian Assembly Thursday, July 23, 6-7:30 pm Krista Franklin in conversation with Alexander G. Weheliye Wednesday, August 27, 6-7:30 pm David Boykin in conversation with Nicole Mitchell

Colophon This publication is produced on the occasion of the exhibition Testimony, held between July 9th and August 30th, 2014 at the Logan Center Gallery, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. Featuring the University of Chicago’s 2013/2014 Arts + Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture Artists-in-Residence: David Boykin, Krista Franklin, and Andres L. Hernandez. Contributors to the conversation: Artists, Curator and Tracye Matthews, Associate Director, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago Curator/Editor: Monika Szewczyk, Visual Arts Program Curator, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts Curatorial Assistant: Katherine Harvath Transcription: Lida Zeitlin Wu Proofreading: Andrew Yale Design: David Giordano Images on pages 20-21: Lee Bey, Rovana Popoff, Monika Szewczyk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without prior permission in writing from the publisher. © The artist, authors and Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago. Logan Center Exhibitions Reva and David Logan Center For the Arts University of Chicago 915 E 60th Street, Chicago, IL, 60637 arts.uchicago.edu/logan/gallery Thank you to everyone who helped in making this exhibition possible: Miguel Aguilar (Kane One), Lee Bey, Dominique Boyd, Michael C. Dawson, Angel Elmore, Nicole Foti, Theaster Gates, Stephanie Garland (Stef Skills), Mike Gibisser, David Giordano, Hannah Givler, Katherine Harvath, Emily Hooper Lansana, Tempestt Hazel, La Keisha Leek, J. Alan Love, Tracye Matthews, Bill Michel, Nicole Mitchell, Greg Redenius, Mercedes Sahagun Zavala, Kasandra Skistad, Katie Soule, Ramyar Vala, Marcus Warren, Alexander Weheliye, Lida Wu and all the dedicated staff of Arts + Public Life, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts as well as Eliza Myrie and the staff of Currency Exchange Café.