February 18, 2015 | The Elections Issue

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. Started as a student paper at the University of Chicago, the South Side Weekly is now an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side, and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Editor-in-Chief Bea Malsky Managing Editor Hannah Nyhart Deputy Editors John Gamino, Meaghan Murphy Politics Editors Osita Nwanevu, Rachel Schastok Music Editor Jake Bittle Stage & Screen Olivia Stovicek Editor Visual Arts Editor Lauren Gurley, Robert Sorrell Editor-at-Large Bess Cohen Contributing Editors Maha Ahmed, Lucia

Ahrensdorf, Christian

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Luke White Ellie Mejia Adam Thorp, Baci Weiler

Senior Writers Jack Nuelle, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Olivia Adams, Julia Aizuss,

Max Bloom, Austin Brown,

Amelia Dmowska, Mark

Hassenfratz, Maira Khwaja,

Jeanne Lieberman, Zoe

Makoul, Olivia Myszkowski,

Jamison Pfeifer, Hafsa Razi,

Sammie Spector, Kari Wei Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet

Eldred, Kiran Misra, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Jean Cochrane, Lexi

Drexelius, Wei Yi Ow,

Senhyo, Amber Sollenberger,

Javier Suárez, Teddy Watler, Julie Wu Editorial Intern

Clyde Schwab

Webmaster Business Manager

Shuwen Qian Harry Backlund

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring, with breaks during April and December. Over the summer we publish monthly.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 1212 E. 59th Street Ida Noyes Hall #030 Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly Read our stories online at southsideweekly.com

2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2015

Cover design by Ellie Mejia, illustrations

by Javier Suárez, Jean Cochrane, Zelda Galewsky, Raziel Puma, and Senhyo.

IN THIS ISSUE apathy in the 25th

“We need to make sure the people are making the decisions.” lucia ahrensdorf...4

a rare vacancy in the 11th

This election will see the first new alderman in seventeen years, and the first non-appointed alderman in forty-six. christian belanger...6 skepticism in the 7th

“One of the common things that I hear is many don’t know who the current alderman is.” lauren gurley...8 mayoral face off

Emanuel told the audience it was like “being at the dinner table with three teenagers.” mari cohen and emiliano burr di mauro ...10 bankrolling in the 5th

Alderman Hairston’s significant financial advantages are simply in keeping with citywide political realities. patrick leow...12

WELCOME TO THE ELECTIONS ISSUE

IN THE ELECTIONS W

e Chicagoans have a great many things to be proud of.

Our city’s politics are not often one of them; we know better than to expect lessons in civics from our municipal elections. We should have every reason to expect, though, that our journalists of politics and city life report on the myriad campaigns and candidacies set for the ballot with the educated voter in mind. To that end, we’ve put together a special issue for the elections coming up on February 24.

For this issue, we’ve forgone the horse-race coverage you might find at other publications in favor of in-depth looks at some of the most interesting and important aldermanic contests on the South Side—the races in the 5th, 7th, 11th, and 25th Wards.

We’ve also included a brief piece on the passing of 16th ward alderman JoAnn Thompson. On the mayoral front, we’ve compiled a few essentials—a guide to the endorsements received by Emanuel, Garcia, Fioretti, Wilson, and Walls, as well as excerpts from the final debate of the campaign, held at the DuSable Museum on Tuesday, February 10.

If nothing else, we at the Weekly hope that you cast a vote this week. On Election Day—next Tuesday, the 24—polls will be open from 6am to 7pm and voters must go to their assigned polling place to cast a ballot. From now until Saturday, February 21, however, registered voters can vote early at any of the fifty-one available early voting locations from 9am to 5pm, regardless of residence.

All voting workers are entitled to two hours off on Election Day, without penalties, provided that employers are notified at any point before Election Day and work begins prior to 7:59am and ends after 5:01pm. Employers have the right to specify the twohour window in which workers are permitted to vote.

Registered voters can also cast absentee ballots. The deadline to apply is this Thursday, February 19. Once received, all cast ballots must be mailed, or sent back on or before February 23.

Questions about absentee ballots can be directed to the election board at (312)269-7967.

You can still register to vote if you haven’t already. All fifty-one early voting locations will process grace period registrations until Saturday, February 21. To register you must be a U.S. citizen, a resident of your precinct for at least thirty days, and at least eighteen years of age on Election Day. Prisoners and those claiming voting rights elsewhere cannot vote.

When registering or casting an early ballot, voters must present at least two forms of identification, including one that indicates residency. Driver’s licenses, passports, state and school issued photo IDs, and bills, paychecks, and bank statements with names and addresses are all valid.

If your registration is challenged on Election Day, you can show the judges two of the above forms of identification as well.

Additionally, be sure to ask election judges to check the supplemental voter rolls if this happens. Voters without identification can still cast provisional ballots and present identification at the Election Board’s offices (69 W. Washington St, 6th floor) within seven days of Election Day. If you find yourself voting in the wrong precinct on Election Day, votes for all citywide offices, including the mayor, will still count. Aldermanic votes will be disqualified.

Finally, voters can check their registration status and their precinct residency, find their polling places, apply for absentee ballots, obtain ward maps and sample ballots, and view candidate lists and referenda at the Board of Election Commissioners’s website: chicagoelections.com. Any Election Day irregularities or difficulties can be reported to the Election Board at (312)269-7900. Additionally, the board can be emailed at cboe@ chicagoelections.net.

Only forty-two percent of registered voters cast a ballot in 2011’s municipal elections. Only forty-one percent voted in 2007.

We at the Weekly hope that our coverage in this issue, and the elections coverage we’ve brought to you over the past few months, will inform and inspire readers to turn those numbers around.

The Voters’ Bill of Rights From the Chicago Board of Elections Commissioners You have the right to: Cast your ballot in a non-disruptive atmosphere free of interference.

Vote if you are in line by 7pm.

Vote by provisional ballot if your registration is challenged, or there is no record of your registration.

Vote at your old polling place if you have moved within thirty days of the election.

Request assistance in voting, if needed.

Bring newspaper endorsements or sample ballots into the voting booth.

Protect the secrecy of your ballot.

Review your ballot to ensure it is complete and accurate, and correct your vote if there is a mistake or you change your mind.

Have your ballot counted fairly and impartially.

the body’s in the background

art from all corners

lola von miramar presents

By what right does someone exhibit a doormat as artwork? stephen urchick...15

The versatility of “Objects and Voices” speaks to the expansiveness of the Smart’s collections. zoe makoul...16

“One hundred and fifty years.

You’d think that’d be sufficient time to, you know, not kill people.” dan cronin...19

Bring your minor child in to the voting booth with you.

If any of your above rights are violated, call Election Central at (312)269-7870.

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

L

ining 18th Street, in the heart of Pilsen, are the recurrent red, white, and blue signs of mayoral and aldermanic candidates alike. Solis and Sigcho compete for attention among the white signs for Chuy Garcia. I see one “Mújica” sign at a local candy store. The shop owner says people came by to put up the sign and he let them—he can’t even vote in the election because he isn’t a U.S. citizen. As I go into the other shops one by one, I am met with blank stares and shrugs by these superficial endorsers.

“I don’t remember, someone came in to put up a sign and I said, ‘Sure.’ ” “I tailor Sigcho and Solis’s shirts so I let them put both of their signs up.”

“I don’t care.”

“I don’t know.”

“People wanted to put it up and I had no problem with that.”

“If Solis came in here wanting to put up a sign I would say no, I don’t want him claiming power over my business,” says one shop owner on 18th Street, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for her business. She has no political signage in her shop window.

She mentioned a newly constructed metal shredder and the $140,000 budgeted for arts and culture in 2013 that Solis still hasn’t paid to local artists as her primary concerns for the election. But when asked which of the other candidates she was going to vote for, she admitted that she didn’t even know the names of Solis’s opponents.

She didn’t think the other candidates had done a good job of advertising. “On a personal level,” she said, “it doesn’t feel like the aldermanic race would affect me one way or the other.”

A local landlord criticized the “lack of transparency of Solis’s office,” but did com4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Apathy in the 25th

mend Solis on moving the aldermanic headquarters east in the ward to 18th and Blue Island, a central intersection in Pilsen. He cited the redistricting of the ward as an example of “corrupt Chicago politics,” but also wished to remain anonymous because “the alderman will be re-elected and I will have to work with them in the future.”

The landlord described the metal shredder, the nearby heliport project, and the lack of local economic growth as the issues most important to him. But he said he hadn’t seen “much change in the community.” He admitted he was not sure if he will even vote in the upcoming election.

Even if voters are concerned about certain issues, it’s hard to present them with viable alternatives.

“The only way I’m going to get news out of Pilsen is usually to Google search ‘Pilsen,’” the landlord said. “Otherwise, it’s just not out there.”

M

ade up of Pilsen, Chinatown, University Village, Little Italy, and part of the West Loop, the 25th Ward is a patchwork of disunited neighborhoods. The current alderman, Danny Solis, has been in power for the last eighteen years; Solis was appointed by former mayor Richard Daley when his predecessor was indicted. Solis has been chairman of the Zoning Committee since 2009, which means that he played a part in the redistricting of the 25th Ward that has taken place since the last election in 2011. The redistricting pushed the bustling, art-gallery lined section of Halsted Street in Pilsen and part of Little Italy to the 11th Ward, and brought in land from the Near West Side and the South Loop.

As the incumbent, and as an influential veteran of City Council, Solis is by far the most powerful and well-equipped of all

¬ JANUARY 28, 2015

Four candidates attempt to unseat a powerful incumbent

BY LUCIA AHRENSDORF illustrations by raziel puma

the candidates. However, he is not invincible. In 2011, due in part to the unpopularity of the Solis-supported Fisk power plant in southeastern Pilsen, Solis’s opponent, Cuahutémoc Morfin, a Pilsen community activist, was able to launch a significant challenge against Solis’s incumbency. Morfin acquired more than sixty percent of the vote in the eastern half of Pilsen and the Latino vote overall, while Solis retained overwhelming popularity in University Village and Chinatown. The two went to a runoff, and Solis won fifty-six-percent to forty-four.

This time around, Solis faces five opponents. Edward Hershey is a teacher at Lindblom Math & Science Academy in West Englewood and is backed by the Chicago Teachers Union; he was arrested at a protest against demolishing the Whittier Elementary field house in Pilsen in 2013. Byron Sigcho is an Ecuadorian immigrant, a doctoral candidate in urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a lead instructor at UIC’s Center for Literacy, and a leader of Pilsen Alliance, a neighborhood social justice organization. Jorge Mújica is a community activist and a socialist well-known for his dedication to labor and immigration rights, and is backed by the Hispanic Council of Chicago (the Weekly interviewed him

Danny Solis in October). Roberto Montaño is a financial advisor and a former chief-of-staff for Solis.

Solis has more than five times the funds of the second-most-funded candidate, Montaño, with $206,645 filed by press time according to Aldertrack. In municipal elections, recognition is the most important thing money can buy. The more funds you have, the more visible you can be. Sigcho, who had slightly less than $2,500 at press time, says his biggest challenges have been educating people about the ward’s issues and getting recognition. With his amount of money, Solis has the ability to send more flyers, post more advertisements, and do publicity in the 25th Ward than the other candidates. Very few people I spoke to in Pilsen could even tell me who Solis’s opponents in the election were.

Solis didn’t win an initial majority of votes in Pilsen in 2011, however, and he still isn’t terribly popular in the neighborhood. His support for the Pure Metal Recycling metal shredder project, his silence over the $140,000 that was supposed to go to local art projects but has since gone missing, and his unwavering allegiance to Rahm Emanuel aren’t helping in the eyes of many Pilsen residents.

In May 2014, the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals (chaired by Solis) approved plans for a fifteen-acre industrial metal shredder plant after lengthy delays. The metal shredder project poses yet another environmental issue in Pilsen after the Solis-backed coalfired Fisk plant. Residents are concerned that the shredder, which will be located at Loomis and Cermak, near Benito Juarez High School, could bring traffic congestion, pollution, and health risks to the nearby students and homeowners. The metal shredder would be the second in Pilsen: SIMS Metal Management operates another less than a

ELECTIONS

Byron Sigcho

Roberto Montaño

As the incumbent, and as an influential veteran of City Council, Danny Solis is by far the most powerful and well equipped of all the candidates. However, he is not invincible. mile away. Solis supports the shredder project, citing the jobs it will create. The other aldermanic candidates are unanimously opposed.

Solis’s second major political obstacle is the “missing $140,000,” a chunk of the total $1.3 million given to each ward annually to support infrastructure. Solis decided to allocate this money to support local art projects in the 25th Ward as part of the Arts in Public Places Initiative he started in 2012. $16,000 was promised to the Humboldt Park artist collective Pawn Works in 2013, to bring in renowned graffiti artists. $25,000 was promised to Benito Juarez Community Academy for an art project. Though Pawn Works has begun putting up murals in the neighborhood, the $16,000 still hasn’t been paid, and a perplexing total of $140,000 has gone missing. According to Solis’s spokeswoman, in an October 2014 interview with the Reader, the $140,000 is tied up in the “bureaucratic process of the city.” Solis and his spokeswoman declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this story.

O

n February 6, a community forum between the five aldermanic candidates was held at UIC’s Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center. Mújica was there with his impressive moustache and signature baseball cap, Hershey was in jeans, and Sigcho and Montaño showed up in business suits. The fifth candidate, Danny Solis, was not in attendance, reportedly due to a scheduling conflict.

There were about sixty people at the forum, and it felt like a small town meeting— about half of the people there were family members of the candidates or campaign volunteers. Students from the UIC organization United Students Against Sweatshops, who organized the event, posed the questions. They covered topics from immigration to public safety.

Mújica’s diction was powerful and resonated with the audience. He highlighted his successes in leading strikes and used concrete examples of his achievements to underscore his beliefs. “Today, two hours ago, the Golan’s Moving and Storage strikers finally got a settlement,” he said. “I organized the workers, they get an increase in salaries, they get transportation time pay. That’s what I do

Ed Hershey

Jorge Mújica

day to day. I am a worker organizer.”

Mújica, like the other candidates, supports a $15 minimum wage. He promises to push for municipal IDs, which he says would help immigrants applying to deferred action programs. He is anti-TIF and believes that TIF projects are taking away money from schools. He calls for a “moratorium on charters” and supports an elected school board.

Montaño, too, said that a $15 minimum wage is clearly “good economics—we do better when we all do better.” He described his extensive work on immigration and highlighted the positive economic impact of immigration, namely the small businesses immigrants tend to open. He also believes in an elected school board and wants to rein in TIFs, saying they take away from the lifeblood of the schools.

Hershey had some students in the audience. “I’ve helped organize students on the Southwest Side on school closings. I got arrested there, a year and a half ago,” he said in his opening statement. He mentioned Karen Lewis as a model and an inspiration.

Though still not enough, he believes that at least a $15 minimum wage is necessary.

He is against the closing of neighborhood schools and strongly in favor of electing a school board: “As a teacher, a personal frustration I would have is that undocumented students would say, ‘Why should I work to get good grades, I’m not going to afford college?’” he said. “And other students have the best grades, jump over every hurdle we set out for them and yeah, they come back to me, they’re just working jobs, they have no money. So yeah, we need to have equal opportunity. First of all, college should be free.”

“I’m an immigrant, activist, and community member,” Sigcho said of himself. “I am glad to see parents in the room, fighting

for their schools. This is about community, I want to include everyone.” He cited the problem of families being displaced from Pilsen because of rising rents. He has made education for immigrants one of his primary focuses, and has organized a community TIF forum to educate citizens on the confusing mechanism of Chicago taxation so that they could contribute to the discussion.

One of his volunteers, a man in his late fifties, told me that Sigcho is helping him to get his GED. “What I will do is what I’ve been doing.

I would like to continue to do that in City Council,” he said. “We need to make sure the people are making the decisions.”

At one point, about halfway through the forum, Montaño said forcefully: “One of us is going to win. Danny Solis is not going to win.” Next to him, Hershey made a face, shrugged, and mouthed “maybe” to the audience.

Not many voters were at the forum, and information on the unfamiliar candidates isn’t easily accessible—citizens would have to go out of their way to do enough research to feel confident about making a decisive vote. People care about the issues, and the problems in the community over which the alderman has influence, but in the end, many potential voters are just too busy to actively seek out information about the race, beyond the mailings that arrive on their doorsteps and the ads that inundate their televisions—that is to say, beyond what Solis’s campaign finance buys for them. That barrier to information only fuels the sense of indifference exhibited by many 18th Street shop owners. “I don’t care.” “I don’t know.”

“People wanted to put it up and I had no problem with that.”

As the landlord said, “There’s a little bit of apathy, because not much changes.”

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

A Rare Vacancy in the 11th

Three candidates fight for the 11th Ward’s first aldermanic vacancy in seventeen years

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER illustrations by senhyo

John Kozlar

Maureen Sullivan

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

W

hen Patrick D. Thompson announced that he would be running for a seat on the City Council in the late summer of 2014, few political prognosticators would have picked against him. Thompson has been a commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District since 2012; the widely-recognized, much-maligned middle initial of his name marks him as a member of the Daley family, the political powerhouse within Chicago—and even more locally, Bridgeport— that counts two mayors, a White House chief of staff, and a current Cook County commissioner among its ranks. Despite this, the election has been closer than most might have anticipated; though a recent poll still showed Thompson in the lead among residents, with about thirty-seven percent, the two other candidates in the race—John Kozlar and Maureen Sullivan—were holding at about twenty-two and twelve percent, respectively, while the rest of the prospective voters polled remained undecided. As the race gears up for its final days, residents of the 11th Ward (redistricting has added East Pilsen and University Village to the area) are left to choose from a strange, disparate grouping: a twenty-five-year-old law student, a longtime pet shop owner and community activist, and a real estate lawyer burdened and blessed by his affiliation with

¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2015

a family that has ruled the ward for more than half a century.

A brief history of the past half-century of 11th Ward aldermen is itself fascinating, as it becomes clear just how inextricably the Daleys are linked to the ward’s councilmen.

Current Alderman James Balcer has served since 1997, when Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed him to replace Patrick Huels, who was forced to resign after a minor financial scandal. Huels himself was appointed in 1976 to fill the void created when Michael Bilandic replaced the deceased Richard J. Daley as mayor; Bilandic had won the 11th Ward office in 1969, encouraged to run at Mayor Daley’s behest. This current election will see not only the first new alderman in seventeen years, but also the first non-appointed alderman in forty-six.

John Kozlar is by far the youngest participant in the race, though he is the only one of the three candidates to be running for the second time. In 2011, he garnered almost a quarter of the ward’s votes in an unsuccessful attempt to oust Balcer. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he is currently finishing up his final year at the John Marshall Law School in the Loop.

Kozlar says he feels much better prepared for this race than he did four years ago: “It was a learning experience last time —we didn’t have the signage until the

month before.” By his own estimate, he has about five times as many signatures as in the previous election and has raised a great deal more money.

Rhetorically, he presents himself as a fresh-faced facilitator, citing his success as president of the Canaryville Little League, where he presided over $225,000 worth of renovations, as proof of his ability to both administrate and unite different neighborhoods. He took over the league while still a third-year at the UofC, replacing an administration weakened by accusations of financial impropriety. By 2010, in the first year of his tenure, his administration had raised over $31,000 for renovations.

His tenure as Little League president is also his chief response to those of his detractors who argue that his youth (both Sullivan and Thompson are over forty) and political inexperience are key points against him in this election. “I’m the most experienced when it comes to civic engagement,” he said. “The Canaryville Little League was all about bringing different neighborhoods, different communities together.”

Kozlar, in talking about his past credentials, understandably overemphasizes this spell as a Little League president, creating what sometimes feels like a one-note resume. His campaign pledges fall on the opposite end of the spectrum: they are var-

ELECTIONS

ied and dizzyingly ambitious, ranging from the standard promises to revitalize Halsted Street and create municipal dog parks in University Village to the more outlandish suggestion of erecting the “#1 bowling alley in Chicago” with, among other attractions, Beatles-themed nights (“where the screens will display various Beatles visualizations with Beatles music playing over the speakers”). He has also pledged to donate all $73,280 of his aldermanic salary to seniors and veterans.

While John Kozlar presents himself as an injection of fresh energy into an ossified political scene tarnished by years of corruption, Maureen Sullivan is even more explosive. Sullivan, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, made her first serious foray into community activism in 2005 with “Save the Ramova,” an awareness campaign to maintain and improve the Ramova Theatre on Halsted Street (on her website, she has accused Kozlar, who has also pledged to restore the theatre, of imitating her idea, dubbing him the “Ramova Rookie”). Since that campaign, she has been involved with a number of other local groups, such as the Bridgeport Alliance and the Bridgeport Business Association.

She has also presented herself as vociferously anti-establishment; in a DNAinfo article, Sullivan is quoted as saying that she didn’t take a job with the South Loop Chamber of Commerce because “I didn’t want work with the Machine.” In her platform, she says she wants to change the ward’s traditional “old-boy status quo,” and the “shadow finance network that seems designed to enrich the already wealthy.”

On her website, she has also condemned Thompson, her opponent, for his past work with DLA Piper, a law firm where, she says, “they make money by helping their clients take away good paying jobs from American workers to send those jobs to places like Asia and Europe.”

Both Sullivan and Kozlar condemn the heliport planned for 24th and Halsted, and all three candidates have vowed to improve communication between the ward office and the public. Sullivan has also pledged to fight for a new public high school in the ward, along with an elected school board, two policy goals that appear to have won her the support of the Chicago Teachers

Union, which recently endorsed her.

Finally, there is Patrick D. Thompson. During his time as commissioner of the Water Reclamation District Board, he says, “I passed pension reform, but I also invested hundreds of millions of dollars in getting residents drinkable water.” Thompson’s environmental credentials are strong; in 2005, he worked as a board member for the Bubbly Creek Committee, where he helped clean up a polluted waterway that he says often contained fermenting, festering carcasses.

Thompson has attempted to distance himself somewhat from his lineage: “I’m not running on my name, and I’m certainly not running away from my name, but if you check any legal document, if you check my law degree, it’s always said ‘Patrick D. Thompson.’ ” He has also expressed disapproval at how the other candidates and their supporters have labeled him a creation of Bridgeport’s political machine, stating, “Stuff like that is irrelevant. The notion of a machine is fiction, and it has been since the 1920s.”

Instead, Thompson, who works as a real estate lawyer, wants to point to his own long history of community service. He’s the secretary of the South Loop Chamber of Commerce that Sullivan so fiercely derided, as well as a board member at both the Valentine Boys and Girls Club of Chicago and the Illinois Council against Handgun Violence (ICHV). This last organization is apparently of particular importance to Thompson, as he pledges to curb violent crime rates in the 11th Ward if elected, while simultaneously criticizing both of his opponents as “willing to sit down with gangbangers.”

It’s not immediately clear what he means by this last statement, though Kozlar does say something like this on his campaign website, stating, “I will work with our community members and police to infiltrate gangs and have gangs realize that it is better to have a job instead of creating havoc in our neighborhood.” Thompson’s other proposals include a Stockyards Museum around 41st and Halsted and an Adopt a Viaduct plan.

Though it may very well be true that Thompson has not actively sought the support of the political establishment, it has certainly thrown its support firmly behind him. He has been endorsed by Senator

As the race gears up for its final few days, residents of the 11th Ward are left to choose from a strange, disparate grouping: a twenty-five-year-old law student, a longtime pet shop owner and community activist, and a real estate lawyer burdened and blessed by his affiliation with a family that has ruled the ward for more than half a century.

Dick Durbin, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, Congressman Dan Lipinski, the firefighters’ union, and the Fraternal Order of Police, as well as the Tribune and the Sun-Times. Even the White Sox organization, vaunted political powerhouse that it is, has contributed $1000 to his campaign. When these endorsements are considered together with the aforementioned poll numbers, it certainly seems as if Thompson is the favorite to win.

Nevertheless, both Kozlar and Sullivan seem optimistic, each presumably hoping they can garner enough votes to hold Thompson under fifty percent and force a decisive April 7 runoff. If this happens, it also seems more than likely that supporters of the third-place candidate (who would be out of the running) will choose to throw their support behind whichever remaining option is not Thompson. Those predictions are murky at best. As early voting continues and the race heads into its final hours, what does seem clear is that the 11th Ward, for the first time in recent political memory, is seriously considering a divorce from the deeply-rooted political family that has governed it—directly or by suggestion—for the last fifty years.

Patrick D. Thompson

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Skepticism in the 7th

BY LAUREN GURLEY

“S

ometimes I can drive through one area of my ward and feel like I’m in a third-world country and that ain’t right. It’s just not fair to have a block that has five boarded up homes and no one seems to care,” said Lashonda “Shonnie” Curry, a 7th Ward aldermanic candidate to an auditorium of University of Chicago student activists at a People’s Lobby event in early January. One of Curry’s plans as alderman is to create an ordinance that holds banks accountable for maintaining the upkeep of foreclosed properties in the ward.

Curry is one of eight candidates running for alderman in 7th Ward. The oblong ward, which includes parts of South Shore, South Chicago, Calumet Heights, Pill Hill, Jeffrey Manor, and South Deering, has the second-most candidates of all the fifty aldermanic races in Chicago. Most of the recent media spotlight, though, has focused on Curry, incumbent Natashia Holmes, and Keiana Barrett, chief of staff under former 7th Ward Alderman Sandi Jackson.

In February 2013, Rahm Emanuel appointed Holmes, one of sixty-five candidates, to the position of alderman when Sandi Jackson, wife of former Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., was forced to resign after pleading guilty to accounts of tax fraud. While Sandi Jackson was one of the city’s highest-profile politicians, frequently in the national media, Holmes, who moved to the 7th Ward ten years ago from Florida, has maintained a decidedly low profile over the past two years. She declined to be interviewed for this article.

“There’s a strong sentiment that people don’t want someone who has been appointed by the mayor. A strong sentiment that 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

it’s time to relinquish her role as alderman,” said Curry in an interview with the Weekly. According to a recent Sun-Times article, the $2 million Emanuel Super PAC, which is contributing funds to the reelection bids of the mayor’s most loyal City Council supporters, is supporting Natashia Holmes.

Yet Holmes received only 484 signatures on her election petition, just eleven more than she needed to make it onto the ballot. Her petition was then challenged by several members of the community, possibly linked to opponent Keiana Barrett’s campaign.

“Based upon my engagement with my neighbors as I’ve been door-knocking, one of the common things that I hear is many don’t know who the current alderman is,” Barrett told the Weekly in a phone interview. When Sandi Jackson resigned from her position as alderman, she advocated for Barrett to take her place, but Emanuel, purportedly taking a stance against the cronyism that has defined 7th Ward politics for years, selected the unknown Holmes. Since being forced to relinquish her post under the convicted Jackson, Barrett has been working as a top administrator at CPS. Barrett declined to say whether or not she would support the mayor in the upcoming election.

“What’s been missing is found leadership,” Barrett said. “Leadership that has a comprehensive and sustainable plan for redevelopment that’s going to address public safety, that’s going to address economic development and job creation as well as ensuring that we have high performing neighborhood schools.”

When asked how she is assuring voters that her term as alderman will not look like Jackson’s, she responded simply with, “My name is Keiana Barrett.”

¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2015

“I’m proud of my reputation and my brand of leadership,” she continued. “My role as chief of staff was to implement the vision of Alderman Jackson, now as an aldermanic candidate my plan is to execute and deliver my plan for how we transform and sustain the 7th Ward.” According to many accounts, Barrett ran Jackson’s office, while Jackson travelled to and from D.C. throughout her term.

This election will be the first in three decades in which neither a Jackson nor a Beavers will be on the ballot. William Beavers, a former cop who was also convicted of tax evasion, served as alderman of the ward from 1983 to 2006 and was succeeded by his daughter, Darcel. Understandably, many residents of the 7th Ward are disillusioned with their alderman’s office. “ ‘They all say that they’re going to do something and then they get into office and they do nothing.’ That’s what [residents of the ward] say,” Curry says. Curry, who was fielded by the People’s Lobby, a left-wing activist and political organization, is arguably the most progressive of the candidates on the ballot, and has been endorsed by the People's Lobby's aldermanic slate, Reclaim Chicago.

During a recent evening phone bank at her campaign headquarters on 71st Street, Curry discussed the challenges of running a grassroots campaign.

“A major hurdle especially when it’s grassroots is running up against the machine,” she says. “It takes dollars to run a campaign successfully and effectively.

“The reality is that I’m running up against Natasha who was appointed by the mayor, so she’s Rahm’s pick,” she continues.

“And I’m also running up against Keiana Barrett who’s Sandi Jackson’s former chief of staff and those are Jackson dollars be-

hind her.”

Curry’s top priority as alderman is reducing crime and incarceration by increasing community dialogue with the police through the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program as well as the number of police on foot and bike.

“My goal is to make sure that I’m improving my community, engaging in a community policing strategy that takes a comprehensive, holistic look at the variables that contribute to crime,” she says. “I believe that mass incarceration is not the answer, and that we can’t talk about crime until we talk about education and jobs. So we have to make sure that we’re holding our government accountable for creating jobs in our community that our young people can obtain.”

Alongside her husband, Pastor Yehiel Curry of Shekinah Chapel, Curry has been organizing in her community for nearly two decades, and cites her father’s work on Harold Washington’s campaign as a major inspiration for her decision to enter Chicago politics.

“I am running because of what I’ve been seeing in this neighborhood,” she says.

“I believe there are many people like me... who live in communities like mine who had a vision for what their lives in their communities could be like and it did not come to pass. Not because they didn’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps…It happened because barriers were put in place—institutional barriers—that prevent people from having access to that slice of the American dream,” said Curry.

In spite of the intense competition among the candidates, there is a general consensus about the major issues facing the ward: crime, unemployment, unresponsive city services, and food deserts are among

ELECTIONS

From a large field, the 7th Ward will bring a new face to City Council

zelda galewsky

the topics that came up repeatedly in conversations with the candidates and at debates.

Since the 1970s, residents say, what was once a middle-class ward with good schools and a robust economy has a taken a dive for the worse. Anna Johnson, a forty-year resident of the ward and stayat-home mom, remembers the days when there were strip malls and grocery stores

being built in her ward.

“On 106th and Torrance, there used to be little mom-and-pop grocery stores, she says. “But they’re no longer there. There needs to be something that people can walk to. Something like Jewel or Walmart.”

Johnson has a long list of 7th Ward woes, including toxic air pollution leaking from nearby factories like the animal food company Agri-Fine and steel company A.

Finkl & Sons (“You can’t go outside without your eyes burning”) and poorly funded public schools (“Bathrooms weren't up to standard and I'm just talking about the regular stuff: workable toilets, tissues, soap”).

Barrett and Curry attest to a similar decline.

“Having grown up in South Shore in the early 1970s, I realized that the community was a much different place. It was

comprised of working-class families, many of which worked at the U.S. Steel mill on the Southeast Side of Chicago and were very much engaged in supporting small businesses that were in our community—a lot of cohesion amongst neighbors and there was a vibrancy,” says Barrett, who moved back into the ward from Kenwood only two years ago.

“I noticed that things began to diminish over time, services began to diminish,” said Curry. They became infrequent, just lackluster, you know, something as simple as trash collection. Alleys were once clean.

Trash was once picked up regularly.”

Notwithstanding its many troubles, the 7th Ward is teeming with resources, including miles of lakefront, rich housing stock, access to public transit, undeveloped land, and the Chicago Lakeside Development. Of course, each of the candidates has a vision for how these resources should be tapped into. Each claims the 7th Ward could elect a strong, accountable leader this time around. Other candidates for the race include financial director Flora “Flo” Digby (who was recently endorsed by the Sun-Times), information technology manager Gregory Mitchell, Joseph Moseley II, community organizer Margie Reid, and City employee Bernie Riley.

Despite the media buzz surrounding Holmes, Barrett, and Curry, it’s difficult to predict which candidate the 32,000 registered voters in the 7th Ward will elect on February 24th. A February 3 poll by Ogden & Fry for Aldertrack found that half of the voters surveyed in the area still hadn’t decided whom to vote for in the race. Natasha Holmes was leading with fifteen percent, followed by Barrett with ten percent, and Curry and Gregory Mitchell with seven percent. The lack of commitment is not surprising considering the number of candidates and the dearth of campaign funds.

“Building brand identity is very expensive and in a crowded field, money will play a large factor deciding who makes the runoff,” Ogden & Fry said.

Although Johnson says she will support Curry on February 24, many residents of the ward that she has talked to are skeptical that any of the candidates can produce change. Given the history of the 7th Ward—and the history of ward politics in general—it’s easy to understand why residents aren’t jumping to rally around any of the candidates.

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

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Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia

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arcia has been the clear choice for endorsements from a number of independent organizations with progressive and public interest-oriented platforms. The Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization, the oldest independent political organization in Chicago, has proudly endorsed Garcia as well as a number of progressive aldermanic candidates. C. Betty Magness, Administrative Vice Chair of IVI-IPO, released a statement saying that they would not have supported Emanuel had he applied for their endorsement because “most of his answers would not have been progressive enough.” Garcia has also garnered the support of United Working Families, an independent political organization, the Progressive Action Project, a public interest organization, and the Chicago Teachers Union.

“It’s plausible to think the [red light cameras are] warranted in about fourteen-percent of the locations where they’re at. The rest are there to pickpocket Chicagoans, as are many other policies in terms of this administration’s fees, fines, and penalties.”

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

Garcia addressed a question about the city’s controversial red-light cameras, which have earned the city over $500 million since 2002, directly after Alderman Bob Fioretti answered a similar question and said he would abolish them. In his response, Garcia cited a Texas A&M study commissioned by the Tribune which showed that the cameras were often ineffective in increasing safety at intersections and sometimes even increased the probability of rear-end crashes. The report also showed that Emanuel’s administration was using comparatively short yellow light times in some locations, slightly under the federal standard, and still ticketing drivers. Garcia called for independent oversight to determine which cameras were safe to keep, and said that all the rest should go.

¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2015

Alderman Robert “Bob” Fioretti

ioretti has received the endorsement of the Green Party of Chicago for his leadership in the City Council’s Progressive Caucus and opposition to many of Emanuel’s conservative policies. The Chicago Police Sergeants Association also endorsed Fioretti in early January, citing his promise to hire 500 new officers if elected. In December 2014, as Amara Enyia announced her withdrawal from the mayoral election, she voiced support for Fioretti. In a statement, she declared that Fioretti has “shown a consistent commitment to communities of color throughout Chicago” and demonstrated a “dedication to everyday citizens.”

“We need to reform the TIFs, and this time publicly reform them.

TIFs do serve a good purpose, but at the same time it’s served the downtown more than it’s helped in our communities that have been languishing and going into disrepair. ” Fioretti responded to a panelist’s question on his past comments lambasting the secrecy around the Emanuel administration’s use of Tax Increment Financing funds, including a comment that called TIF the “heroin of city economics.” Fioretti has said he would change of the use of TIFs to try to help communities. His claim that Emanuel has used TIF funds mostly to improve downtown has echoed a widespread criticism of the administration. Garcia stated that the TIF program had “gone on steroids,” and suggested using some of the funds to put a down payment on the city’s pressing pension obligation.

Businessman Willie Wilson

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ilson has been endorsed by West Side Congressman Danny K. Davis (D-7th), who declared Wilson “a man of compassion who has demonstrated a willingness to give back.” Former Cook County Board of Review Commissioner Robert Shaw withdrew from the mayoral race and offered his support to Wilson, saying he was proud to do so because he has known Wilson for many years as a “church man who believes in God.” Wilson has spoken out in the last month against Emanuel’s acceptance of fifteen trade union endorsements.

In Wilson’s view, Emanuel accepted these endorsements in order to demonstrate an improved relationship with organized labor, but Wilson argues that the endorsing unions lack diversity and do not represent equal opportunities for minorities in Chicago.

“The African-American community here, I think they’d rather have food on their table and pay rent than a park.”

Wilson responded to a question from a panelist on his proposal to re-open the small Meigs Field airport, which has now been converted into the Northerly Islands park. The panelist questioned whether the public would support such a proposal, given the controversy over projects like the Obama Presidential Library’s proposed use of parkland. Wilson said he thought Chicago has plenty of parkland, and that community members would appreciate the $300 million a year and the jobs he claims Meigs Field would create.

Mayoral Face Off

BY MARI COHEN AND EMILIANO BURR DI MAURO

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illustrations by javier suárez

n February 10 the DuSable Museum hosted the final mayoral debate, which touched on a number of issues facing Chicago’s African-American community. While all five mayoral candidates participated, most of the heat was on incumbent Rahm Emanuel, the only candidate with a mayoral record to defend, and the frequent target of critical questions from panelists and fellow candidates. Emanuel, who told the audience it was like “ being at the dinner table with three teenagers,” tried to bring most of his responses back to his favorite talking points and laundry lists of his administration’s accomplishments, even when these responses didn’t address the question at hand.

Over the course of an hour panelists were able to elicit answers from all candidates on a variety of topics, from campaign contributions and Emanuel’s controversial red-light cameras, to development in South Side neighborhoods and school closings.

The responses of all candidates ranged from restrained and focused to pointed, aggressive, and even funny. The Weekly presents here a few of the debate’s standout quotes and their contexts, as well as an overview of each candidate’s endorsements.

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s the incumbent in the mayoral race, Emanuel has, unsurprisingly, received endorsements from various prominent colleagues and organizations. Former mayor Richard M. Daley and Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush have expressed their support for Emanuel. “I am pleased to step out from the ranks of the undecided,” said Rush.

Emanuel has also received the endorsement of President Barack Obama. While other mayoral candidates have said that they are unsurprised by Obama’s backing of Emanuel, they also believe that Obama is too disconnected from the Chicago community to be able to meaningfully endorse any candidate.

In the last week alone, Emanuel has garnered support from both the Tribune and the Sun-

“Too many kids in the city of Chicago have had their childhood stolen due to gun violence. We are fighting gun violence—it’s been part of my whole life to make sure I take on the Washington and NRA gun lobby, and make sure that our streets are safe. And I do bear, and everyone bears who’s an adult, an accountability.”

Mayor Rahm Emanuel

Times. Mayoral challenger Bob Fioretti has said that he is disappointed but unsurprised by the Tribune’s announcement. Another challenger of Emanuel, Willie Wilson, calls the Tribune’s endorsement “mind-boggling,” as the publication has recently raised questions about Emanuel’s campaign fundraising. Both newspapers endorsed Emanuel in the 2011 mayoral elections. Planned Parenthood Illinois Action has also declared Emanuel their candidate of choice; before announcing the decision, CEO Carole Brite stated that their endorsement would take into account how candidates work with healthcare providers for policies that affect women’s health.

“This is an opportunity that comes once in a life. I don’t want to wait for another president from the South Side of Chicago so we can get that library. We have a chance here.”

Candidate Garcia asked the mayor if he felt responsible for the homicide and shooting numbers in Chicago during his tenure. The mayor cited his own record on pressing for gun laws, which includes an F rating by the NRA. In a questionnaire given to all candidates by the Chicago Tribune, Rahm stressed the need to pass a state-level gun store ordinance, which would require Illinois gun stores to adopt certain practices designed to reduce illegal gun purchases and use.

A panelist asked the mayor why the University of Chicago couldn’t simply propose to open the Obama Presidential Library on the land it already owns across the street from Washington Park and, in doing so, avoid controversy over use of parkland. Emanuel addressed the question vaguely rather than specifically, saying it was Obama’s decision and that he, Emanuel, would address all concerns the president’s foundation had about the library in order to ensure that the South Side of Chicago receives the library and the jobs and educational opportunities it would create. The day after the debate, the Chicago Park District voted unanimously to approve transferring parkland to the city for the library if the University of Chicago’s bid is selected, a move that the Obama Foundation said “improves Chicago’s bids” for the library.

Former Assistant to Mayor Harold Washington William “Dock” Walls

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alls received endorsement from the Illinois Herald, which said they “proudly and defiantly” offer their support for Walls, citing the unfair exclusion of independents from mayoral debates.

“Jane Byrne had an even more thin resume than mine when she was elected mayor of the city of Chicago. Now, we’re not saying that she did a great job, but Jane Byrne did not sink the city of Chicago as it’s sinking now under Mayor Rahm Emanuel.”

Walls responded to a panelist question about his “thin” resume, which includes being an assistant to former mayor Harold Washington, a position he expressed pride in during the debate. Walls has run unsuccessfully for office multiple times, including two bids for mayor in which he garnered less than ten percent of the vote.

But Walls rejected the idea that his background might disqualify him from the position and continued to go on the attack against Emanuel, citing the number of blacks under the poverty line and the vacant lots around the city, and saying at one point: “Blacks have not been treated better under this administration than they were under Jim Crow.”

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Anne Marie Miles

Jedidiah Brown

Bankrolling in the 5th

Can the 5th Ward's aldermanic challengers overcome Hairston's fundraising lead?

BY PATRICK LEOW Jocelyn Hare 12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

ÂŹ FEBRUARY 18, 2015

illustrations by jean cochrane

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s the 5th Ward’s incumbent alderman of sixteen years, Leslie Hairston is no stranger to the perennial blossoming of challengers who loudly critique her rule over this district by the lake every four years.

It was once Oscar Worrill, a city employee from South Shore, who used to alternate between themes of economic development and public safety in his attacks on Hairston during his three separate and consecutive runs for the seat, beginning in 1999. His fundraising was virtually nonexistent, and he never got more than a quarter of the vote against an incumbent whose grip on the ward seemed impregnable in

ELECTIONS

2007.

Anne Marie Miles followed Worrill in 2011 as Hairston’s most prominent challenger. Miles, an attorney with a largely self-funded campaign, enjoyed ties to the University of Chicago thanks to her marriage to Emil Coccaro, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. Miles ran a campaign based on improving the business climate in South Shore but, like Hairston’s previous challengers, barely made any inroads given her opponent’s near-universal name recognition. She earned only a tick over twenty percent of the vote. In a year with unprecedented turnover in the City Council, Hairston’s fuss-free victory was a decisive triumph.

Hairston’s road to another term is far rockier this year. This race has seen a redux of Miles’s campaign, with the same foundation of extensive self-funding and the sounding of familiar arguments based on hopes for a brighter economic future.

But it has also seen the entrance of firsttime candidate Jocelyn Hare, a fellow at the Harris School of Public Policy who grew up in Champaign, Illinois, and has worked in Gary, Indiana as a consultant for Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson.

Both candidates have voiced an almost constant stream of criticism of Hairston’s long tenure since the race began in earnest at the turn of the year. Their critiques are not ideological in nature. 5th Ward residents are assured a voice that heavily scrutinizes Rahm Emanuel’s policy agenda in his possible second term.

Hare, just thirty-four, runs a campaign based on a promise to break cleanly from local leadership that is no longer responsive to the political convictions of young people in the ward. Hairston and Miles, she argues, represent an older generation of politicians who do not reflect policy concerns of the ward’s younger residents. “To make really smart policy about education and crime, you have to have the voice of the youth…and I’m way more committed and connected to the youth than either Leslie or Anne Marie are.”

“This may shock you, but you know more about policy than your elected officials,” she recently told a group of young voters at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We’re going to build a better democracy by regular folks running for office, rather

than people who must just have their little fiefdom of power.”

In Hare’s interpretation of the current political landscape, Hairston embodies that fiefdom of power in the ward, her position buttressed by financial interests that are rarely interested in introducing fresh blood into the Council as a goal unto itself. According to Aldertrack, at press time Hare has an estimated $18,093 on hand, roughly thirteen percent of the current $134,158 war chest for Hairston. Hairston’s edge over Miles is smaller, with Miles and her husband having poured in over $30,000 ($35,289 total) of their money into the race.

These large disparities in campaign

the neighboring 4th Ward, also anchored in Hyde Park. Printed matter outreach was minimal for Hairston’s previous campaign.

Fees for printing, postage, mail house services, and media production services can quickly add up, and it is apparent that even the most rudimentary media outreach is prohibitively expensive for candidates without significant financial backing. A campaign war chest like Hairston’s, of more than $100,000, means that candidates are able to do more than just look for free publicity in local media, or rely exclusively on person-to-person outreach.

Since the start of calendar year 2014, unions have contributed more than $50,000 to Hairston’s PAC, enough to compensate for her lack of access to the funding of Mayor Emanuel’s Chicago Forward PAC. financing have real consequences on how candidates reach voters. Hairston and her allies have blanketed the ward with at least five separate mailers, most of them touting her ultimately unsuccessful support of an ordinance that would push the city’s minimum wage to fifteen dollars. In contrast, Miles has only released two mailers thus far, and it is unlikely that Hare or any other challenger in the race will be able to reach voters by mail or media advertising before the February 24 election date.

A single mailer to residents in a ward resembling the 5th costs upwards of $15,000, a figure obtained through combing expenditure reports of Alderman Will Burns’s 2011 campaign for the position in

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here are two main sources of Hairston’s fundraising lead. The first reason for Hairston’s continued wealth is Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s consistent support. Alderman of the neighboring 4th Ward from 1991-2010, Preckwinkle has donated over $18,000 to Hairston, support also accompanied by her well-oiled South Side political organizing.

Hare finds Preckwinkle’s support at odds with political realities in the Ward.

“Toni is a loyal person, and she’s committed to supporting Leslie, even if Leslie’s not the best choice for Alderman.” For her part, Hairston defends Preckwinkle’s financial support for her campaign, noting that it is

borne only of their “great working relationship.”

The second major source of Hairston’s fundraising lead has been unions: the Chicago Teacher’s Union; Service Employees International Union; and American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) make up three of Hairston’s four largest donors. Since the start of calendar year 2014, unions have contributed more than $50,000 to Friends of Leslie Hairston, enough to compensate for her lack of access to the funding of Mayor Emanuel’s Chicago Forward PAC—a super PAC aimed at supporting the administration’s most loyal aldermen.

Union donations to Hairston constitute a sum that alone almost trumps contributions to the rest of the 5th Ward field.

Outsized union influence can also be seen elsewhere this year. All eight other members of the Progressive Caucus have seen an influx of union donations that ensure they have the most cash on hand in their respective races, inoculating them from the barrage of negative ads that accompany their defiance of Mayor Emanuel’s policy desires.

Hare thinks that union loyalty to Hairston is unsurprising yet undeserved, given that Hairston’s consistent support for unions has not translated into any effective policy change. Although Hare has laid out pro-union positions, she is nevertheless frustrated at how large union contributions end up perpetuating the political status quo in Chicago. “Nobody from AFSCME has ever talked to me,” she says. “They don’t even give a chance to the challengers.”

Miles goes even further than Hare in criticizing the role of union money in the race, explaining that Hairston’s marriage to union interests will be relevant to the pension debates set to occur at some point in the next four years. To her, Chicago’s public pension debt and the polarized political debate that surrounds it create uncertainty that jeopardizes the economic well-being of the city. With an overwhelming concern for the city’s municipal bond rating, Miles insists that re-electing someone who “voted for pension politics” would only prolong the prevailing economic hurt: “I think [union support] can backfire for her in this ward,” she says.

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

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et, in these municipal elections, it is not simply union support, ties to financial interests in the Loop, or the endorsement of powerful political figures like Preckwinkle and Emanuel that ensure that certain candidates enjoy financial advantages over others. It’s a simple calculus: incumbency status in Chicago is by far the best predictor of a candidate’s financial position, controlling for other considerations like race, ideology, and geography.

By and large, the forty-three other incumbents in the city running for election have access to funds that will almost certainly be unavailable to their challengers. Incumbency status alone explains almost half of all variation in the amount of money that a candidate receives in that election cycle, far outstripping any other salient factor that distinguishes candidates from each other.

As such, Alderman Hairston’s significant financial advantages are simply in keeping with citywide political realities—realities that Anne Marie Miles believes necessitate a systematic solution. Miles is a strong proponent of the public financing of campaigns in Chicago, a proposition that is admittedly unlikely to become a reality even if Miles and like-minded challengers are to be elected, given the huge benefits that non-private financing currently accord to the members of the City Council.

Still, there is hope for Miles and Hare.

For one, Alderman Hairston’s fundraising in this cycle is underperforming a baseline established by her previous runs for office. At this point in the election cycle four years ago, at a time when the economy was far worse and when Hairston was not widely expected to be in a competitive race, she raised over $180,000—only slightly below her 2015 level, even though she is currently engaged in her toughest race since her initial election.

Compounding the relative disadvantage that Alderman Hairston suffers compared to the forty-three other incumbents currently running for election is the fact that incumbents in black-majority wards in the South and West Sides enjoy a much smaller advantage than their colleagues in the other parts of the city. A wider look at South Side campaign financing hints at a few potential upsets threatening long-established incumbents.

The 9th Ward’s Anthony Beale, first elected in 1999, has only slightly more than double his closest challenger’s cash on hand; the 21st Ward’s Howard Brookins, first elected in 2003, has not yet cleared the $100,000 mark.

This might suggest that groups looking to upend the city’s prevailing political order might be well-served by directing funds to14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

ward challengers running against relatively cash-poor incumbents, in wards where every dollar donated goes further than far more expensive North and Northwest Side races.

This close to the election, however, those hypotheticals likely matter very little to the three candidates jockeying to represent the 5th Ward. In typical Chicago fashion, campaign rhetoric in this race often teeters into vitriol.

Hairston takes pains to highlight that Miles has been endorsed by the 5th Ward’s Republican committeeman, and that her campaign is being run by Core Strategies, a consulting firm dedicated, primarily, to getting more Republicans elected. Although this is officially a non-partisan primary, Miles is running as a Democrat. Tom Bowen, once a close aide of Rahm Emanuel, is running Hare’s campaign, an indication to Hairston that Hare’s lackluster fundraising hasn’t prevented the challenger from contracting expensive consultants.

Hare paints Miles as part of the 1%, and insists that Hairston has not done nearly enough to bridge the “huge and clear” divide between Hyde Park and South Shore, the product of Chicago’s history of racialized segregation, during her time as the ward’s alderman.

And Miles reserves harsh words for Hairston’s conduct during the campaign, accusing her of violating campaign laws by including campaign literature in her ward newsletters. “I was dismayed to find that she, as an attorney, would behave so unethically,” Miles says. To her, Hairston’s tactics in this election are simply a continuation of previous transgressions, most notably the alleged vote-buying in November 2014’s elections that is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. Then, she linked casting a vote in the federal general election to raffled-off prizes, a short-lived attempt to boost turnout numbers in the ward.

Money is not determinative in the 5th Ward race, and there are numerous examples of challengers overcoming financial odds stacked against them to ascend to the City Council. Mailers slipped under doors and people stationed on street corners to spread the good news are the product of Hairston’s financial advantages, and will certainly offer her a huge edge in name recognition that her challengers can not hope to match in a low-turnout election. But in the last stretch of this race, that money will also have to be in support of a message that paints a rosy future for the 5th Ward if Hairston hopes to avoid a runoff in the toughest race of her career.

¬ FEBRUARY 18, 2015

Mourning Englewood’s Alderman

JoAnn Thompson’s sudden passing shifts the 16th Ward aldermanic race

BY ELEONORA EDREVA

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tragic twist in the closely watched 16th Ward aldermanic race came last Monday with the sudden passing of incumbent JoAnn Thompson. Thompson was running for a third term in her ward (which includes the neighborhoods of Englewood, Gage Park, and Chicago Lawn) when she died of heart failure two weeks after a scheduled operation. She was fifty-eight years old.

Over the nearly eight years she spent on City Council, Thompson’s major accomplishments have included bringing a Whole Foods to Englewood and organizing an annual music festival in the neighborhood. Before successfully running for office in 2007, she served as a lieutenant at the Cook County Jail, keeping the needs of ex-offenders as a priority during her time as alderman. She was also seen as a figure of hope in the community due to her openness about overcoming a period of homelessness and alcoholism in the early nineties.

As Thompson’s loved ones grieve over the unexpected loss, the rest of the city waits to see what her passing will mean for the election. The race in the 16th Ward was the only one in the city to pit two incumbent aldermen against each other: current 15th Ward Alderman Toni Foulkes was Thompson’s top challenger. This came as a result of the ward remap of 2012, which transferred a large part Englewood from the 15th Ward to the 16th.

This remap left Foulkes without the support of the neighborhood’s African-American population, which had previously made up a significant part of her backing base in an otherwise largely Hispanic ward.

Both Foulkes and Thompson have been members of City Council’s Black Caucus; Foulkes’s decision to run in the 16th Ward brought disapproval from the group, which

had agreed to support all incumbent candidates. The two aldermen had very different support bases, reflected in their endorsements; Thompson was a loyal ally of Mayor Emanuel and had Emanuel’s backing against Foulkes, a staunch critic of the mayor. Emanuel released a public statement after Thompson’s death, writing that “Englewood has lost a tireless advocate and Chicago has lost one of its dearest friends.”

Foulkes found support from community organizing and advocacy groups, including endorsements from the Chicago Teachers Union, Take Back Chicago, and the Englewood Political Task Force. John Paul Jones, the president of the Sustainable Englewood Initiative, lamented the history of elected officials in the 16th Ward, which he calls the “heart and soul” of Englewood. He said aldermen have historically remained unengaged with the community. Although not particularly impressed with either one of the incumbent alderman, he’s hopeful about Foulke’s potential election, as she “has a better track record of meeting with the people” than Thompson did.

As Foulkes was the most formidable opponent in Thompson’s fight to keep hold of her ward, she is expected to become the frontrunner in the race following Thompson’s passing.

The other candidates, including Stephanie Coleman, Cynthia Lomax, and Jose Garcia, are less known. There was a brief dispute over whether or not Thompson would remain on the ballot, but it has been decided that her name will be taken off, although the votes already cast for her will factor into election results. Neither the 16th Ward office nor Foulkes’s campaign could be reached for comment on the issue.

The Body’s in the Background

stephen urchick

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BY STEPHEN URCHICK

y what right does someone exhibit a doormat as artwork? Billy McGuiness’s twelve-foot wide dirt-monument gets on the wall as part of “Migrant Files,” a three-artist—McGuiness, Jaxon Pallas, Austen Brown—show currently up at ACRE Projects in Pilsen, on the basis of a pretty good idea. McGuiness’s mat began as a strip of canvas—the same stuff you’d stretch into a painting. He laid it on the floor, just past the visitor’s door to Division XI of the Cook County Jail. It ended as an intricately anony-

mous record of human movement over time and a self-proclaimed (although decidedly tongue-in-cheek) “high-modernist object.”

But the strictly cerebral level of McGuiness’s work, and the propositions of the other two exhibiting artists, isn’t what “Migrant Files” is out to question, though. The show seems comfortable with conceptual art.

Rather, “Migrant Files” asks us to consider a principle of conceptual art: the gap between the art object and the idea that justifies it to gallery-goers. The exhibition transforms this

VISUAL ARTS gulf into a statement on the link between decontextualization and dehumanization, especially in difficult political or socioeconomic environments. In short, we’re nothing without our background info.

McGuinness is not a painter here. He gives up the direct action of authorship as we’re accustomed to think of it (working with a brush and maulstick), letting the marks of

“Migrant Files” leaves its mark at ACRE Projects in Pilsen

hundreds of individuals quietly come together in a randomized whole. He’s consequently very attentive to concerns from the fifties and sixties about the role and identity of the painter. The site-specificity of McGuiness’s work matters, as it’s the only part of the work that he has direct agency over as maker. “Second floor visitor’s entrance” belongs to McGuinness’s body of “foot-traffic” canvasses that have been placed in soup-kitchens and homeless shelters.

This time around, rather than the site where basic necessities such as sustenance or shelter are satisfied, McGuinness instead documents movement at the place where loving family and friends arrive to meet less material necessities: the need for news, companionship, and belonging.

A penal system hardly makes these needs its first priority. In fact, the penitentiary project could be described as doing much the opposite.

It blatantly disregards that prisoners are social creatures, largely erasing them from society for the duration of their sentence. “Second floor visitor’s entrance” similarly erases the particularity of individual bodies. It’s impossible to correctly attribute the lint balls and footprints that make up the artwork’s only legible content. McGuinness’s canvas registers glimpses of people, clues indicating their presence, but leaves the beholder clueless as to who they are, or what brought them to the jail in the first place. Like an incarceration number, the dirt smudges are gestures that can’t tell you anything meaningful about a human being.

It’s only at the scale of the exhibition, however, that “visitor’s entrance” really drives home this notion of gesture without the capacity for empathy. Conceptual art at times proves infuriating because the data needed to appreciate it isn’t always contained inside the object. A work like “Visitor’s entrance” only transcends its status as a stained piece of fabric once we

grasp where it came from, what determined its upbringing.

Jaxon Pallas’s work with a July 4, 1976 edition of the Detroit News neatly formulates this thought, as a kind of overture for “Migrant Files.” He’s reproduced some articles and put them behind glass as inkjet prints. He’s taken other articles and pasted them against glass—the windows of ACRE Projects itself.

Both uses bring the newspaper down to the level of an empty gesture. Behind glass, the newspaper is sterile and abstracted from the reality of holding it in hand and reading it.

Over glass, it’s mere material—wallpaper. In either case, the paper stops being a compressed version of the concerns and anxieties of a specific place (Detroit) in time (July 4th, 1976).

What’s more, without attribution to Pallas, this newspaper doesn’t exist as art. It might just convince you that ACRE’s building has been abandoned. Without insight, without elaboration, without context, this newspaper is trash—at the most fit for a library’s periodicals collection, but otherwise alien to a gallery.

If it doesn’t sound convincing that markers devoid of context are all that threatening, consider Austen Brown’s “Looking for the Bright Spot,” a series of shale core samples laid out on the floor, in a line, as a seemingly sequential order. “Bright Spot” belongs to Brown’s ongoing artistic investigation of North Dakota oil extraction. For the miners, boom-bust practices often leave them as mobile and detached from the normal rhythms of society as McGuinness’s homeless or inmate cohorts.

The shale samples themselves are placed right in the path of the room’s entryway and are not fixed to the ground by any epoxy or mounting. People can easily run into the artwork—as they often did, throughout the exhibition’s opening evening. The result is that its physical position is disrupted, and frequently.

Here’s a moment where context would be helpful: ACRE ultimately expressed a kind of coolness that folks were tripping over “Bright Spot.” Various hands nonchalantly nudged the pieces back into place after each collision.

ACRE invited this sort of interaction by arranging the room as they did. It challenged even those visitors who would have, for example, accepted Pallas’s newspaper as “artistic” without prompting. A blanket overestimation of every object in that room allowed rocks—simple rocks—to attack a real person’s self-confidence. “Migrant Files” thus attends to the nuance in the conditions of objects, and the conditions of the people they often track or represent, from a variety of vectors. Without the right kind of context, real persons can fade into smudgy footprints, and unsmiling stone will make you blush at a bump.

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

VISUAL ARTS

Art from All Corners

zoe makoul

T

BY ZOE MAKOUL

here aren’t many places where a thin wall is the only boundary between the bodiless face of an angel from a medieval church and a large oil painting of six very hairy naked men. The seventeen micro-exhibitions that collectively make up the “Objects and Voices” exhibit at the Smart Museum of Art vary significantly in style, time period, and place of origin, but their curators all share a relationship to the Smart. In the museum’s special fortieth anniversary exhibit, the collection of voices is immense, ranging from professional museum curators who discovered their passions years ago, to Chicago schoolchildren still in search of theirs.

Although the micro-exhibitions are dissimilar and the galleries are arranged for the casual wanderer, the exhibit as a whole is surprisingly cohesive—even the move from “Mark Rothko: From Nature to Abstrac16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

tion,” curated by Russell Bowman, to “Between Two Worlds: Asian/American Modern Art,” feels natural. The Smart’s cleverly placed temporary gallery walls make each transition refreshing rather than disharmonious, and many of the curators kept interactions between disparate subjects in mind.

In “Interaction: British and American Modernist Design,” curator Alice Kain explores not only the British and American Arts and Crafts movements, but also the role Chicago and the UofC played in housing it. There, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Window,” geometrically enticing with brown leaded-glass accents, stands tall beside a series of ornate silverware and bowls.

The versatility of “Objects and Voices” speaks to the expansiveness of the Smart’s collections. It reflects the time curators spent digging through the archives. Wu Hung, a Smart Museum consulting cura-

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“Objects and Voices” at the Smart Museum

tor, professor of art history, and director of the UofC’s Center for the Art of East Asia, curated the micro-exhibition “Rong Rong’s East Village,” which explores the progressive Chinese art developed in Beijing suburb Dashanzhuang, especially the photography of Rong Rong. He describes choosing which pieces to include as an exhilarating process.

“I found this set of photography and it was important for me,” he says. “I know the photographer, and I teach a class [on him].” Every curator is equally passionate about his or her area of expertise.

The collection’s standout pieces were as varied as their exhibitions. Lorna Simpson’s “Three Seated Figures,” in the “Times and Places that Become Us” exhibition, is a triptych of nearly undistinguishable Polaroids of a seated, pregnant African-American woman from the nose to the knees which, together with precisely worded gold plaques (“her story,” “Prints,” “Signs of Entry,” “Marks,” “each time they looked for proof ”), deftly suggest a story of abuse and a culture of cold empiricism. Jacques Callot’s “Les Misères et les malheurs de la guerre,” from “War Portfolios in Teaching,” consists of eighteen etchings, originally published in 1633, focusing on the experience of soldiers in wartime. While one portrays young men eagerly volunteering to fight, others show the same soldiers raiding a house, desecrating a church, and ultimately being brutally attacked by subjugated peasants.

One particularly engaging micro-exhibition was “The Museum Classroom: Responsive Art from Beasley Academic Center,” curated by Shannon Foster, her teaching artist Candice Latimer, and her fifth-grade class. After studying Alice Neel’s “The City,” Michiel Simon’s “Still Life with Fruit and Flowers on a Draped Ledge,” Jeff Donaldson’s “Victory in the Valley of Eshu,”

and Chinese mingqi sculptures, the students created their own art pieces. In response to “Victory,” two groups used the original as a template, and replicated the objects portrayed: a man wearing suspenders with his arm around a woman, with a distinctive eye surrounded by petals in the foreground.

Rather than simply echoing the original, the students’ new versions emphasized the less obvious details of the screenprint.

The students’ liberal use of colorful, nearly pointillistic dots highlights the vividness of the original. The block letter “Victory” spelled out on the bottom of the original is nearly undetectable, but it dominates the students’ versions. In the pupil of the eye, two figures pose self-consciously, but one group opted to forgo the original composition, and instead painted two smiling adults with a smiling child between them. All the figures sport blue shirts with reflective pink hearts in the center. On their shirts, words like “honest,” “love,” “gentle,” and “beauty” are bold in black paint. Rather than capturing the look of “Victory,” the students extracted and re-expressed its underlying emotion.

“The Museum Classroom” serves as a good representation of “Objects and Voices” as a whole—an unexpected plurality of expressions that forms, somehow, a unified patchwork. From fifth-graders to Wassily Kandinsky, the range of art is huge at the Smart right now, but each micro-exhibition is linked by the excitement and expertise of its curator. The miscellany of voices unifies the exhibitions in a celebration of diversity in artistic expression.

Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through June 21. Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm. (773)7020200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

CALENDAR

BULLETIN Nonprofit Radio Station Interest Meeting What kind of work goes into creating a radio station— not just a show, but an entire station—from scratch?

Bridgeport’s Public Media Institute, the same institute that puts out periodicals like Proximity Magazine, runs the Co-Prosperity School, and coordinates the annual Version Festival, was given a license by the Federal Communications Commision to build a brand new low-power FM radio station, broadcast out of the studio that Co-Prosperity Sphere will become, from the ground up. This weekend, the Institute will host a public interest meeting for the up-and-coming nonprofit station, which will serve all of Chicago and is the Institute’s self-proclaimed “most ambitious media project to date.” As the station will be the result of collective effort on the part of Chicagoans and “musicians, artists, thinkers, critics, activists, and instigators” worldwide, PMI wants anyone who is interested in this concept to come to this “call for sounds” to learn more about the project and help shape its future.Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Sunday, February 22, 2pm.

Free. No prior radio experience necessary. (773)837-0145. publicmediainstitute.com (Maha Ahmed)

Code and Cupcakes Workshop Like mother, like daughter, the saying goes. But in the world of computer science, Mom isn’t always knowledgeable enough to teach her daughter the ropes. Enter Code and Cupcakes. This program, which comes to the South Side next week, instructs moms and their daughters in coding and designing websites together. It is the brainchild of Jen Myers, a computer scientist, tech educator, and single mother who wanted to expand the project of introducing young girls to STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education to include their mothers. During the four-to-five-hour workshops, mothers and daughters learn basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which they use to design a website, and break for cupcakes. Pairs create webpages about topics such as a favorite TV show or animal, and use what they learn to express their passions. Myers’s plans for the future of Code and Cupcakes focus on sustainability and accessibility: there is a scholarship fund to subsidize the workshop fee and resources from workshops are going up on the organization’s website. The organization will follow next week’s Pilsen workshop with a Hyde Park edition in April. Code and Cupcakes at BLUE1647, 1647 S. Blue Island Ave. Saturday, February 21, 1pm-5pm. $35 per pair. (312)624-9655. codeandcupcakes.net (Emily Lipstein)

Chicago Style: Philanthropist & Entrepreneur Willie Wilson, Chicago Mayoral Candidate The Institute of Politics will be hosting Willie Wilson—a self-described “philanthropist and successful entrepreneur” and a candidate in the upcoming mayoral election—for an informal conversation with students and the public about his platform for the upcoming election as well as his career in business and politics.

Wilson’s campaign emphasizes his up-by-the-bootstraps story and his move to Chicago in 1965 with “only twenty cents in his pocket.” Wilson started by owning five McDonald’s franchises, and went on to found Omar Medical Supplies Inc. He also founded Willie Wilson Productions, a television production company that created the WGN gospel program “Singsation,” which he hosts himself. Despite his seventh-grade education, Wilson’s platform emphasizes his business acumen and issues neglected by Mayor Emanuel’s leadership: school closings, job creation, and public safety.

At the event, Wilson will give an overview of himself and field students’ questions. The conversation will be accompanied by a meal from a Chicago restaurant. University of Chicago Institute of Politics, 5707 S. Woodlawn Ave. Wednesday, February 18, 7pm-8pm. Free. (773)834-

4671. politics.uchicago.edu. (Andrew Koski)

Whose Public Space Is It Anyway?

Examining Chicago’s Bid for the Obama Presidential Library The Obama Library has been a source of controversy for the city since its announcement. The city’s remaining bids are proposals made by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Chicago. Incorporated in the UofC bid is the use of Chicago public parkland, a proposal met by plenty of resistance. What is the relationship between the UofC and South Side communities? What roles do democracy and issues of access to public space play? And who stands to benefit from this proposal? The Illinois Humanities Council will ask and answer such questions with a panel featuring President and CEO of Friends of the Parks Cassandra J. Francis and Donna Sack, the executive director of Association of Midwest Museums. The panel will be moderated by Chicago Tribune columnist Melissa Harris. Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St. Wednesday, February 18, 1pm-2pm. Free. prairie.org (Clyde Schwab)

STAGE AND SCREEN They Don’t Give a Damn: The Story of the Failed Chicago Projects The Chicago Housing Projects were infamously unsuccessful and had a profound impact on the people who lived there. Mismanaged and run-down, the projects were far below federal standards, forcing the Chicago Housing Authority to launch the Plan for Transformation, a moonshot program meant to revitalize 25,000 housing units. They Don’t Give a Damn: The Story of the Failed Chicago Projects tells the stories of the 16,000 families removed from their homes by the CHA and how the demolition and redevelopment of the projects shaped the worldview and identities of those most affected. Based on the book Where Will They Go?: Transforming Public Housing by Dr. Dorothy Appiah, the film was adapted by director Kenny Young. The screening will be followed by a discussion with Young, Appiah, two producers, cinematographer Jeffrey T. Brown, and Audrey Petty, editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Friday, February 20, 7pm. Free. (773)702-2787. filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu (Will Craft)

Chicago Filmmakers’ Dyke Delicious Series Presents: New Work From Tello Films A group of local filmmakers are pushing against the erasure of queer women in film, centering their work on characterizing real queer lives and mitigating the sense of isolation in media. On Saturday, Doc Films will be presenting a duo of artists whose contributions to this work are particularly notable. Julie Keck and Jessica King from Chicago’s Tello Films present “brave and challenging content with a lesbian twist” by distributing webisodes such as Nikki & Nora, Rent Controlled, and Kiss Her. Doc Films is hosting this subversive crew for a discussion of their work and screening of some of their skilled collection in collaboration with Chicago Filmmakers. Doc Films, 1212 E. 59th St. Saturday, February 21, 4pm. chicagofilmmakers.org (Zach Taylor)

The Property “Okay, so there’s this new opera called The Property.”

“Cool.” “And it’s got a sort of klezmer, traditional Jewish musical influence.” “Okay, a little off-beat but I can dig it.” “Yeah, and it kinda makes sense, because it’s about this Jewish family who goes to Poland to reclaim

some land they lost during WWII.” “Okay, got the title.” “Except it’s adapted from a graphic novel?” “Wait, what?” “Yeah, weird.” “But how are they gonna make something so visual work as opera, which is basically defined by its relationship to music?” “No clue. But the premise seems cool, and the composer’s an award-winning wunderkind with the Lyric Opera, so why not try it out?” “I dunno, man...” “Come on, it’s like $20 next Wednesday, and it’s right on 60th. Let’s do it.” “Eh, why not? Sounds kind of experimental but playful, too.”

“Great! I’ll get the gang together.” Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. February 25 through 27. Wednesday, 7:30pm; Thursday, 7:30pm; Friday, 1pm. $20-$25.

(773)702-2787. lyricopera.org (Austin Brown)

tory, the lecture series “Missing Pages,” which started November 20 and runs through March, is designed to address larger themes of politics, culture, race, and personal identity. The largely unknown figures and topics will be presented and discussed by nationally known speakers, and while their subjects never received much recognition in common memory or the media, now they take center stage. All this series asks of its audience members is that they remain open to what they might not have known and be willing to pick up a pencil and fill in history’s forgotten pages. DuSable Museum, 740 E. 56th Pl. Through March. Various Thursdays, 6:30pm. $5. dusablemuseum.org (Emiliano Burr di Mauro)

Bad Grammar Theater

VISUAL ARTS

Those interested in the written word will find their fix at Bad Grammar Theater, where every third Friday of the month both established and up-and-coming Chicago-based authors read their original prose aloud.

The reading series provides a forum for local authors to share their work with an audience and transform the written word into a dramatic performance in a relaxed and respectful setting. Powell’s Bookstore University Village, 1218 S. Halsted St. Friday, February 20, and every third Friday of the month, 6pm-9pm. Free. (312)2439070. badgrammartheater.com (Sophia Sheng)

Book Release Party: It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time Angela Jackson conjures images of the Deep South while weaving tales of individualism in her new book, It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems. This Saturday, listen to the tales directly from the poet as she reads selections from the book. Jackson’s blank verse stanzas— short, succinct, and filling—draw on her experience navigating society in Greenville, Mississippi before moving to the South Side of Chicago with her family.

Her poems offer intersectional commentary on race, coming of age, and actualization. Accompanying Jackson are performances from Awthentik—a fresh, cutting rapper whose mixtape Popular Misconception combines pop culture references and unique samples to offer a biting critique of culture as we know it—and avery r. young, a native Chicago writer with a soulful voice, who combines comedy, gospel, and jazz influences to create striking songs that tackle serious topics.

Logan Center Penthouse, 915 E. 60th St. Saturday, February 21, 7pm. Free. (773)702-2787. arts.uchicago.edu (Kanisha Williams)

1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed The societal collapse of the late twelfth century BC is a sort of locked room murder mystery, allowing for a very large room. The occupants of the Eastern Mediterranean—Babylonians, Egyptians, Mycenaeans, and more—had spent three centuries building sophisticated and interwoven civilizations, but the opening of the eleventh century found these civilizations disappeared or dispersed. The metaphorical gun of civilizational destruction has been traditionally placed in the hands of the mysterious Sea People, who supposedly swarmed across the region, upending all that came before. At this free event at the Oriental Institute, Eric Cline, a classics professor at George Washington University, will argue that the blame has been unfairly pinned on the Sea People, rather than a more realistic collusion of environmental catastrophes and human conflicts.

The Oriental Institute, 1155 E. 58th St., Breasted Hall.

Wednesday, February 25, 7pm-9pm. Free. (773)702-9520. collapse.eventbrite.com (Adam Thorp)

Missing Pages Lecture Series

ArtShop Every year, the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) dedicates Gallery 5 to ArtShop, and every year Gallery 5 is filled with the artistic creations of kids from all across the South Side. The ArtShop is an extension of Pathways, an arts education program based out of HPAC that serves CPS students from kindergarten through 12th grade. The program aims to enrich students with rigorous art training, and provide them with the opportunity to refine their talents and showcase their work to large audiences. ArtShop is one of the showcasing events for teens involved in the Pathways program.

Every work is entirely self-directed: the artists execute their vision with no source material. The title of this year’s ArtShop is Collective Possibilities—each piece is inspired by a myth of each student’s choosing, including their own imagination.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue Chicago.

March 1-April 19. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free.

(773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org. (Kanisha Williams)

The Density of the Actions Density is the distribution of a mass per unit of volume or, for London-based, Argentine-born artist Varda Caivano, the substance of labor that can be packed into each square inch of canvas. Her first solo exhibition in the states, The Density of the Actions, will open at the Renaissance Society on February 22. Each piece in the series presents a rumination on the physicality that it took to make the painting—layers of paint are “rubbed, scratched, and reworked” so that each stroke is dense with time, invoking not just one moment, but many. The exhibition is sure to be dynamic, the paintings “vulnerable, unfolding, failing, becoming, and disappearing.”

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. February 22-April 19. Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety. org (Kristin Lin)

Until it becomes us Rituals—actions and beliefs prescribed by traditional, regulatory performance for the sake of individual progress—are both personal and communal. Jesse Butcher, an artist and current photography instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, intends to showcase his investigation of these private rituals, beliefs, mantras, and longings in his solo exhibition, “Until it becomes us.” This is Butcher’s first solo exhibition in Chicago since 2010, sure to be a culmination of his most recent exploratory work, which starts from the claim that we are all “cognizant islands longing for a personal Pangaea.” Ordinary Projects at Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St., fifth floor. February 20-March 20. Opening reception Friday, February 20, 6pm-9pm. ordinaryprojects.org (Zach Taylor)

Did our high school history textbooks cover everything we needed to know? The DuSable Museum doesn’t think so. Aiming to reveal the people, places, and events that haven’t gotten proper credit for shaping his-

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

CALENDAR

Objects and Voices: A Collection of Stories Rummaging through a family attic, you might find collections of past significance that have accumulated with the long-settled dust. After seeing these disparate objects in the same space, patterns of meaning begin to emerge. “Objects and Voices” is exactly this type of eclectic collection, a celebration of the objects both forgotten and validated by time. Curated by a diverse array of individuals ranging from university professors and artists to graduate students and professional curators, this show is the second of the Smart Museum’s fortieth anniversary exhibitions. Curator Tours, led by some of the twenty-five collaborators featured in the exhibition, will give you a foray into micro-exhibitions like “Fragments of Medieval Past” or “Asian/American Modern Art.” It might be worthwhile to add this exhibition to your own collection of memories. Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. February 12-June 21.

Tuesday-Sunday, 10am-5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm.

Opening reception Wednesday, February 11, 7:30pm-9pm.

(773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu (Kristin Lin)

Wxnder Wxrds Gallery 5 at the Hyde Park Art Center currently features recent work by Mexico City-based artist Nuria Montiel. Pieces included in the exhibition, titled “Wxnder Wxrds,” were produced during Montiel’s 2014 Jackman Goldwasser residency at HPAC, during which she brought her mobile printing press—La Imprenta Móvil—to various public sites around Chicago, including Sweet Water Foundation, Hull House, and the National Museum of Mexican Art. Monteil engaged visitors at each site in conversations on art, politics, and civic life while making her prints, which transform bits of collected dialogue into abstract visual poems. Through public production and installation of the prints around the city, Montiel’s project explores the relationship between art and social participation.

“Wxnder Wxrds” exhibits Montiel’s prints and installation documents, as well as reflections on the artist’s community-centered creative process. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through February 21. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Kirsten Gindler)

I Am American This land is your land, this land is my land. From sculpture to paint, from first-generation immigrant to Native American, twenty-five artists explore the different dimensions and definitions of American identity. “I Am American” is a traveling exhibition that, by virtue of its destinations across the U.S., challenges viewers to reflect on their own place in the nation and what it means to inhabit a space with people who may not share the same answer. In Chicago, the exhibition will be housed at the Zhou B. Art Center. Go with questions about the exhibition’s title. Chances are, you’ll emerge with more than twenty-five answers. Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Through February 14. Monday-Saturday, 10am5pm. (773)523-0200. zhoubartcenter.com (Kristin Lin)

Ground Floor Marking the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Hyde Park Art Center, “Ground Floor” features artworks from prominent Chicago MFA programs, creating a biennial showcase of emerging talents so new they haven’t even begun their careers yet. The twenty artists, selected from over one hundred nominations, represent a wide range of mediums, forms, and universities: Columbia College, Northwestern, SAIC, the UofC, and UIC. These artists have also had the chance to exhibit at September’s EXPO Chicago in HPAC’s booth. This unique program, showcased throughout the entirety of HPAC’s ground floor gallery space, offers the chosen artists a

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helpful push toward a career in the art world; “Ground Floor” alumni include two artists who have recently displayed artwork at the Whitney Biennial. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through March 22. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart. org (Sammie Spector)

Migrant Files Life exists in transitory setting—we find ourselves in different places for different reasons, and sometimes not by choice. The Migrant Files presents three studies of the forced mobility imposed upon the modern lower class. Through video, Austen Brown transports viewers to the oil fields of North Dakota, where laborers work on short-term contracts and live in mobile homes, simultaneously transitory and stationary. Billy McGuinness takes us to the kitchen floors of Cook County Jail, where he painted three monochromatic canvases.

And, finally, Jaxon Pallas shows us the aesthetics of abandonment in his print works on the great falls of the American economy. ACRE promises an expanded public program to supplement this exhibition. Catch the exhibition before it moves on; travel in discomfort through America. ACRE Projects, 1913 W. 17th St. February 8 through March 2. Sundays and Mondays, 12-4pm. acreresidency.org (Kristin Lin)

Mana Contemporary February Open House For some, Sunday afternoons mean lox, bagels, and cream cheese. For others, football. For you, it could be the February Open House at Pilsen’s Mana Contemporary Chicago. Wander the enormous building, designed by Chicago architect George Nimmons.

Explore more than fifty art studios (all open to you!).

Admire the relatively large oil paintings of postmodern Icelandic artist Erró, who trained in all the standard European ways but has arrived at a style marked by his assemblages of public figures—artists, politicians and despots, etc.—and a heavy-handed use of American comic book imagery. There will also be performances and exhibitions from a variety of foundations, funds, and societies. The fourth floor of the building will be utilized by one of Chicago’s premier dance crews, THE ERA, for a footwork workshop. Mana Contemporary Chicago, 2233 S. Throop St. Erró exhibiton until April 30, 2015. Open Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm. Free. (312)8500555. manacontemporarychicago.com (James Kogan)

The Aesthetics of Struggle Chicago artist Raymond Thomas brings forward a collection of his recent works in his exhibition “The Aesthetics of Struggle,” an exploration of the idea of art as its own form of activism. Exhibited at the United Foundation for Arts and Technology, these mixed-media presentations seek to understand the connections between identity, religion, race, politics, and culture in the twenty-first century. Drawing inspiration from the impact of AFRICOBRA and the Black Arts Movement of the sixties and seventies, Thomas analyzes collective social existences of our times. United Foundation for Arts and Technology, 1833 S. Halsted St. February 13-March 6.

Free. ufat.org (Lauren Poulson)

MUSIC Swans and Xylouris White Just as the ancient Zen koan asks, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” one might ask today, “What is the sound of being punched in the stomach repeatedly but in, like, a really cool way?” The unequivocal answer to that question would be Swans. Less of a musical

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group than a force of nature, this experimental project of Michael Gira first gained notoriety in New York’s No Wave scene of the early 1980s alongside peers, Sonic Youth. They’ll be making a stop at Pilsen’s Thalia Hall this Saturday, along with Cretan lute player George Xylouris and Australian multi-instrumentalist Jim White, who will play as the duo Xylouris White. This one-two punch of a lineup promises to be a sonic endurance test, challenging but rewarding to all those who are willing to tough it out. If you do manage to get a ticket, don’t forget earplugs. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Saturday, February 21, 9:30pm, doors at 8pm. $25 in advance; $30 at door. 17+. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com (Juliet Eldred)

FuzZz at Reggie’s Whether you’re riding high or feeling low in the wake of this past Valentine’s Day, there is no better comedown from the commercialized love-blitz than a dose of brainy funk. Chicago-based band FuzZz is helmed by Dave Freedman and Sliman Bensmaia, both longtime instrumentalists whose other…interests have brought them to the neurobiology and neurology departments at the University of Chicago. The five-piece funk band has kept it cool with a combination of revamped covers, bold originals, and instrumental improvisations since 2011, and will headline a night of jazz and funk at Reggie’s this Saturday. Brass band leader and tuba virtuoso Amir Gray will also take the stage. Reggie’s Chicago, 2105 S. State St. Saturday, February 21, 9pm. $5. 21+.

(312)949-0120. reggieslive.com (Olivia Myszkowski)

Joshua Radin at Thalia Hall Touring to promote his sixth studio album Onward and Sideways, Joshua Radin will bring his hushed melodies and airy arrangements to the Thalia Hall stage. Since his debut in 2004, Radin has sold millions of singles and thousands of albums, and has worked with musicians such as Benmont Tench (of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) and Jimmie Haskell (of Simon & Garfunkel). As a “purveyor of plaintively pretty folk-pop,” the Cleveland native built his fan base largely by having his music featured in numerous films and television shows, most notably Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy. If you’re not already a follower of Radin’s and are just in need of some soothing tunes, be sure to check out his latest single “Beautiful Day,” featuring Sheryl Crow. Joining him

at Thalia Hall will be Andrew Belle and Cary Brothers, both accomplished musicians in their own right. Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Friday, February 20, 8pm. $26 in advance; $36 at the door. (312)526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com (Shelby Gonzales)

Wayne Wonder at the Shrine Let this upcoming Sunday be a winter Wonderland.

(Get it?) Take yourself (and someone special, if you so choose) to The Shrine to be transported from the bleak Chicago cold to the tropical streets of Jamaica by the music of Wayne Wonder, a Jamaican native whose signature voice winds and grinds over surging pop beats.

He’s been bringing his followers the sweet and sexy sounds of R&B-infused reggae for twenty-six years, beginning with his first single “You Send the Rain Away.”

This Sunday, he’ll be sure to dazzle with sparkling selections from his expansive discography, including Billboard hit “No Letting Go,” and upbeat tunes from his most recent album (and his first in five years), My Way. Take a date this Sunday to “Drop it Down Low” amid the hypnotic beats of the tropics as Chicago experiences Wonder’s wonders for the first time. The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Sunday, February 15, 10pm. $25.

(312)753-5681. thesrhinechicago.com (Kanisha Williams)

Mike Hicks at Reggies Mike Hicks, whose music consists of a fusion between blues, soul, and funk, all anchored by a strong moral message, will play this Thursday at Reggies. Hicks’s songs, often upbeat with fantastic support from an eighteen-piece brass group, are strongly reminiscent of his hometown of Nashville. He’s currently touring with blues legend Keb’ Mo, but the talented young artist presents a compelling blend of influences of his own, clearest on his most recent album, This is Life. Join Hicks along with guitarist Casey Wasner and Chicago native and bassist PJ & Soul. Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, February 19, 9pm. $10-12. 21+. (312)9490120. reggieslive.com (Clyde Schwab)

WHPK Rock Charts

WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station at the University of Chicago. Once a week the station’s music directors collect a book of playlist logs from their Rock-format DJs, tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to popularity that week.

Compiled by Andrew Fialkowski and Dylan West

Artist / Album / Record Label 1. Sleater-Kinney / No Cities to Love / Sub Pop 2. Steve Gunn and Black Twig Pickers / Trailways Ramble (single) / Thrill Jockey 3. Viet Cong / Viet Cong / Jagjaguwar 4. Various Artists / Local Customs: Cavern Sound / Numero 5. Electric Eels / Accident b/w Wreck & Roll / Hozac 6. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma / A Year With 13 Moons / Mexican Summer 7. Various Artists / Doom Chuggy / Thrill Jockey 8. Various Artists / Cold Waves of Color / Color Tapes 9. Napalm Death / Apex Predator - Easy Meat / Century Media 10. Call of the Void / Ageless / Relapse 11. Co La / Hegemony of Delete / Primary Information 12. Kouroush Yaghmaei / Gol-e Yakh/Del Dareh Pir Misheh [Rerelease] / Ahang Rooz 13. Parquet Courts / Content Nausea / What’s Your Rupture?

14. Acid Baby Jesus / Selected Recordings / Slovenly 15. Pet Sun / Feel Like I’m Going Away / Sleepless

QUEER

Lola von Miramar Presents “One hundred and fifty years. You’d think that’d be sufficient time to, you know, not kill people.”

Lola von Miramar

arno mayorga, instagram.com/arnomayorga

Cultura’s bilingual drag show gets political

BY DAN CRONIN

T

he show starts a little late, but that’s part of the charm—drag queens are never on time. Cultura in Pilsen does not normally host drag shows, but it is hosting one tonight. While waiting, the clientele sips PBR and obscure German pilsner, speaking in Spanish, English, and Spanglish about the décor. The walls feature Día de los Muertos paintings: one is a black and white print of the Chiquita logo with a skeletonized Chiquita Banana lady.

The piece distracts me long enough for the drag show to begin, and I write it off as a

cute, seasonal Chiquita ad campaign.

Cultura houses contratiempo and Gozamos, two organizations dedicated to enhancing bilingual cultural activity in Chicago. The space hosts a diverse array of events, from workshops and concerts to— apparently—the occasional drag show.

Tonight’s drag show, “Lola von Miramar presents Abolition of the Duck: A Literary Drag Cabaret,” is bilingual. The show will feature three drag queens: the aforementioned Lola von Miramar (Larry La Fountain-Stokes), Horchata La Tata (Brian Antonio Garcia) and Jezebel À GoGo (Jeremy Saxon).

Moira Pujols, the executive director of contratiempo, introduces the show. This is Lola’s first time performing in Chicago, but she’s performed in New York, Ann Arbor, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Montreal, and San Juan. If Ann Arbor sticks out, it should— Lola is based in Ann Arbor, where she is a professor in Latino/a Studies and Span-

ish. Or rather, Lola’s dear friend Larry La Fountain-Stokes is a professor in Latino/a Studies and Spanish. Pujols explains that there will be a book signing of Abolición del pato (Abolition of the Duck) after the show: “Lola von Miramar will be signing books for her best friend, Larry La Fontaine.”

After this introduction, Lola rushes the stage, purse in hand. She’s in highcamp drag: a blue and white geometric dress, with makeup done for the back row.

As she settles on stage she makes more jokes about her best friend Larry. After, she lip-syncs Carmen Miranda’s “South American Way,” a bilingual song. She’s goofy, a lot of fun. When she finishes, she invites up the next performer, Horchata La Tata.

Horchata comes to the stage wearing a mask that Lola later steals and starts wearing herself. Underneath the mask, Horchata has painted on severe eye makeup that seems to go all the way to her temples.

Straddled by the edges of her eye makeup is a giant, curly fauxhawk wig. The whole look is topped off by a plume of feathers that wraps around her back. Horchata slays a lip-sync performance before reciting a slam-style narrative of her complicated relationship with her mother. After, Jezebel À GoGo saunters onto the stage. She’s dressed as the Statue of Liberty, clutching a makeshift torch which she later refers to as a dildo. Jezebel walks slowly, commanding the respect that the Statue of Liberty deserves. She launches into her story of immigrating to America from Panama and fighting to fit in.

Both of the performances are emotion-

ally heavy, but drag gags such as Jezebel removing two cans of Coke from her breasts keep the evening light. Lola walks a similarly fine line during a reading from Abolición del pato after Jezebel’s performance.

As Lola explains, “In Puerto Rico, duck is a stigmatized term used to talk about homosexuality.” The book is about the intimate relationship between drag, cross-dressing, and activism in Puerto Rico. While reading, Lola comments on the frequency of hate crimes against gay people in and outside Puerto Rico: “One hundred and fifty years. You’d think that’d be sufficient time to, you know, not kill people.” For Lola, drag performance in Puerto Rico is not just about resisting prescribed gender, but also a way to comment on the complicated race relations and political situation on the American island territory.

Just as she starts to get heavy again, she stops the reading and lets the music play.

Horchata La Tata and Jezebel À GoGo return to the stage, and Lola orders the whole room to dance along. At first, a lot of people just stand and sway a little. This changes when the drag queens start commanding people to move and dragging people into salsa dances. By the end of the song, the entire room is giggling and dancing, and some are even buying books, all because a drag queen told them to.

I walk out of Cultura discussing the merits of the drag queens, talking about gay rights, and translating parts of the evening for friends. It’s not until a while after my night with Lola and friends that I Google the skeletal Chiquita Banana lady that hung in the corner of the room.

I find the same image in an article written by Elvin Yavuz and published by Gozamos, one of the organizations housed in Cultura. It was not a special Día de los Muertos Chiquita Banana advertisement campaign. It was a piece by Nicaraguan artist Carlos Barberena designed to protest controversial farming practices by Chiquita—they use a toxin when farming that is harmful to the environment. Hidden in plain sight underneath the mass-produced, iconic images of capitalism, the political messages in Barberena’s art remind me of the subversion hidden in those men in dresses with goofy senses of humor, fierce make-up skills, and Cokes for breasts.

FEBRUARY 18, 2015 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19