May 24, 2017

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent 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. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 4, Issue 31 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Director of Staff Support Baci Weiler Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner

Politics Editor Adia Robinson Music Editor Austin Brown Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Editors-at-Large Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger, Jake Bittle, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback, Ellie Mejía Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Maria Babich, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Carrie Smith, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producers Andrew Koski, Lewis Page Social Media Editors Emily Lipstein, Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang, Baci Weiler Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma, Lizzie Smith Data Visualization: Jasmine Mithani Webmaster

Sofia Wyetzner

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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. Over the summer we publish every other week.

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Cover photo collage by Jasmin Liang

IN CHICAGO

A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

Sanctuary City Status Reaffirmed On Sunday, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel announced his One Chicago campaign, which champions Chicago as a city that welcomes everyone regardless of their background. Its motto, “Three million Chicagoans. Three million stories. Three million reasons to stand together,” doesn’t mention one particularly relevant three million: the $3 million in federal funding that Chicago stands to lose due to its sanctuary city status. Fortunately, the number, while seemingly high, is a significant drop from the initial estimate of more than $1 billion in denied federal funding. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced this past week that because of a federal judge’s ruling, the government can only punish sanctuary cities like Chicago by denying them grants given by the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security.

While there will still be a drop in funding for state and local law enforcement agencies, according to Rahm’s spokesman Matt McGrath, “Chicago’s values are not for sale.” Let’s hope it stays that way.

A “Payday Loan” for Chicago Public Schools $389 million, plus unknown interest rates, to be paid off over an unknown time period, to unknown sources—that will be the price of keeping CPS open through the end of the school year, according to Rahm’s Friday announcement. Derided as a “payday loan” by progressive aldermen and the CTU, the $389 million is being borrowed against the $467 million in block grants that the state owes CPS. It remains unclear when, if ever, that money will arrive from Springfield. As part of the happy trend, the loan will have to be paid back by CPS somehow, even if the possibly-promised Springfield money never comes. The good news is that schools will stay open till June 20, and part of the owed teacher pensions will be paid. Those two perennial questions are thus laid to rest, at least until the next payment comes due.

Washington Park Homes Redevelopment to (Finally) Begin The CHA announced last week that its redevelopment of the Washington Park Homes, which has been pushed back every year since it was first announced in 2008, will finally start construction later this year. The new development will fill the empty site of the former high-rise public housing complex, which stood at 45th Street and Cottage Grove until it was demolished in 2002 as part of the CHA’s long-delayed Plan for Transformation. According to the developer, Brinshore Michaels, the development will include a series of three-story walk-up buildings running down Cottage Grove as well as a number of retail storefronts and a central plaza for community events. In keeping with the pattern of other Plan for Transformation redevelopments, only around one-third of the developments will be set aside for CHA residents, with another third of the units designated as affordable housing and another third rented out at market rate. This will likely result in less than fifty public housing units, as compared to hundreds in the old development’s high-rises. The CHA blamed the years of delay in starting the project on the ambiguous “financial hurdles” it has dealt with since the 2008 financial crisis, but the Weekly’s previous investigation into the agency’s redevelopment of the State Street Corridor found that the CHA has been flush with capital funds even as its redevelopment construction has slowed down significantly since around 2010, and furthermore that according to the Chicago Housing Initiative, most of the funds have come from city and federal coffers, not from private interests.

Little Village Unilever Factory Gets a Mayo-ver Chicago’s world-famous mayonnaise factory is getting a makeover! The factory, which produces Hellmann’s Mayo products, is a sprawling 196,000 single-story structure. As one might expect with such a facility, local residents have been unhappy with the eyesore and increased traffic volume due to trucks entering in and out of the facility at regular intervals. In an attempt to alleviate these complaints, Unilever will reroute their exit away from homes on 26th Street and plant an astounding 420 trees to create “beautiful landscaping and buffering” between residents and the massive industrial facility. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Alderman Ricardo Muñoz of the 22nd district hope these changes will satisfy local residents and allow the factory to continue to grow and provide jobs to Little Village residents.

IN THIS ISSUE tronc, save the reader

The pay is so bad that most of the editorial staff work a second part-time job or freelance on the side just to get by. adam przybyl....................................4 more say from the south side

“ You could generate bad consequences with good intentions.” yunhan wen......................................6 priority in planning

“The whole problem with the development corporation is a lack of faith in the deliberative capacity of the people.” olivia adams......................................8 79th street remembers

“I would have stood out here as long as we needed to.” andrew fan.....................................10 cracks in the foundation

“If you’re not really involved behind the scenes, you don’t know.” mari cohen & christian belanger..12 charter school chokehold

“[CPS wasn’t] planning this process. It was just haphazard, ‘Let’s open a charter school.’” olivia adams....................................16

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MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

Tronc, Save the Reader

The city’s preeminent weekly faces an uncertain future under its past and future leader

BY ADAM PRZYBYL

O

n Friday, May 12, the unionized editorial staff of the Chicago Reader unanimously voted to authorize a strike. Their decision was, in some ways, an act of desperation. Twentyeight months after forming a union, they had not yet reached a contract with the owner, Wrapports, LLC. Last year, in response to a contract proposal calling for better salaries and a retirement plan, the company countered with “no salary increase and a severance package to consist of one day’s pay for every year worked,” according to a blog post by Ben Joravsky, a veteran political writer at the Reader.

Less than seventy-two hours after the vote, the Reader’s staff learned that the existence of the paper itself could soon be in jeopardy. Tronc, the parent company of the Chicago Tribune, had announced its bid to acquire Wrapports, which also owns the SunTimes. In accordance with a request from the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, the Sun-Times published an ad the next day seeking another buyer. If nobody submits a bid by May 31 tronc can seal the deal.

While Jim Kirk, publisher and editorin-chief of the Sun-Times—and a former business editor at the Tribune—reassured his staff that tronc would continue running the Sun-Times as an independent entity, the same could not be said about the Reader. In an email to the Reader’s staff a few days later, Kirk said, “It’s a little early to say definitively what will happen with the Chicago SunTimes or Reader.”

The uncertainty surrounding the Reader’s fate is magnified in the context of its recent circumstances. Since being purchased by Wrapports in 2012, the Reader has experienced layoffs and cuts at all levels of operation, going from fortyseven full-time and part-time staff to thirtyone as of last September. The loss of staff has resulted in loss of content—between 2013

4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 24, 2017

and 2016, the average issue length dropped from seventy-seven pages to forty-six.

The remaining Reader staff has been scrambling to keep things running. Their reward, in most cases, has been meager pay and little communication from Wrapports.

Most staffers have not received a raise in over a decade—not even for cost-of-living adjustments. The day of the vote, some staff members taped printouts of their salaries to an office window to show the extent of the situation. The top salary, at $55,000, was for Joravsky, who’s been a staff writer for the Reader since 1990. Many were below $40,000, even for editors and writers with years or decades of experience.

In a 2013 interview with Chicago magazine, Michael Ferro, who was the chairman of Wrapports before dropping his shares and conducting an all-but-hostile takeover of Tribune Publishing in 2016— shortly thereafter naming it tronc—had nothing but vague praise for the Reader: “The Reader is what we wish everything was like. Self-sufficient. They make money.

Great morale.”

If that was true in 2013, it is no longer the case. Philip Montoro, the Reader’s longtime music editor, said the Reader no longer breaks even. Moreover, the pay is so bad that most of the editorial staff work a second part-time job or freelance on the side just to get by—adding an extra ten, twenty, or thirty hours of work to an already full workweek.

Montoro thinks that with the right investments, the Reader can turn things around. Paying employees better and hiring back some of the staff would lead to more content and readers. Ironically, many of the eliminated positions from the past few years have been the ones directly responsible for generating revenue, like advertising executives and marketing directors. If these positions are filled again, maybe the Reader

can start subsisting on ad revenue again.

It’s unclear how this will sound to tronc.

For one thing, the Reader may need to reunionize. According to Craig Rosenbaum, the executive director of the Chicago News

The uncertainty of the Reader’s fate under tronc lies in more than just the contract.

If the deal goes through, Ferro, as chairman of tronc, will oversee the publication of several major daily newspapers, including

Ferro, as chairman of tronc, will oversee publishing of several major daily newspapers, including the Tribune and SunTimes, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Somewhere among these giants, the Reader will have to get his attention.

Guild, if the Reader is handed over in an asset sale instead of a stock purchase, and most of the current employees are rehired, their union will have to be recognized again.

That may be a tough sell at tronc, which seems to view unions with suspicion and where most journalists are not unionized.

When tronc gave an up-to-2.5 percent raise to all its journalists last year, it excluded its unionized journalists at the Baltimore Sun, who later lodged a complaint that they were unfairly left out. Even if they do keep their union, there’s no telling how long it will take to agree on a fair contract.

the Tribune and Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. Somewhere among these giants, the Reader will have to get his attention.

Much ink has been spilled debating the merits of Ferro’s media empire aspirations.

Some think his push toward digital content, monetization of reader data, and flashy projects like the celebrity lifestyle magazine Splash or the Sun Times Network might be able to save print journalism.

Yet many are skeptical of Ferro’s ability to run a media business. The Sun Times

MEDIA

ROHAN MCDONALD

Network is a good example. While still at Wrapports, Ferro pushed for its creation, a $14 million investment into a site that would have a presence in seventy U.S. cities and aggregate the most interesting or entertaining stories from each city. But its overworked and underpaid editors and interns were pushed to create as much content as possible, often at the cost of quality. Two years after it was founded, the Network ceased to exist; all the while, the Reader was losing employees left and right.

Montoro says projects like the Sun Times Network are a sign that Wrapports, and by extension Ferro, wasn’t interested in supporting the Reader. The company felt comfortable throwing $14 million at a project that failed quickly, yet only a fraction of that would be needed to give everyone at the Reader a small raise or bring back a few employees. Now that the Reader will be

back under Ferro, he might keep the Reader around while continuing to fire employees, or try to change it into some kind of digitized content platform like the Network.

Some of the Reader’s staff, dreading the coming acquisition by tronc, have expressed hope that somebody else will buy the Reader before the fifteen days are up. Maya Dukmasova, a staff writer at the Reader, suggested on Twitter that the Reader be turned into a foundation, like Harper’s Magazine. In 1980, Harper’s was in a tough spot—some estimates had the paper losing $2 million a year—when the MacArthur Foundation stepped in, bought it out, and made it a nonprofit. It is now able to cover its costs through ad revenue and subscriptions.

The odds are stacked against this kind of buyout. As the Reader has had to rely more on the Sun-Times for certain functions over the years, the Sun-Times in turn has become

more synchronized with the Tribune. In 2014, Wrapports sold the Sun-Times’ suburban outlets to Tribune Publishing, and the Tribune took over circulation of the Sun-Times in 2007 and printing in 2011. With so many facets of running the Reader already closely integrated with tronc, anybody else interested in buying the paper is at a significant disadvantage.

For now the Reader will have to wait and see. But in some ways, the fight for better pay and more investment goes beyond the Reader. For Joravsky, it was about the future of journalism.

“I’m the old guy in the room,” he said.

“The young kids think the world is just the way it is,” but things used to be much better for journalists. Many of the Reader staff are still young. “What about when you want to buy a house? Have kids?” he asks. “You’re not going to stick around in journalism the way it’s going.”

The case for serious journalism is that it holds the most powerful people accountable, whether through persistent questioning or comprehensive investigation.

But Joravsky thinks the value of the Reader lies also in its specific place among Chicago’s media institutions as a voice of dissent. He remembers when bringing the Olympics to Chicago was on the table and almost everyone in the city was on board. But the Reader went against the grain. Throughout its history, the Reader has also reported tough, politically unpopular stories on segregation, police torture, and school funding; ran one of the first profiles of Barack Obama in 1995; and has been known for its meticulously-edited features on everything from World War I to Chicago’s infamous “lipstick killer” of the 1940s to a tiny radio station run by Christian fundamentalists near the Wisconsin border.

The Reader occupies a unique role in Chicago’s media landscape that often allows its stories to have the kind of impact generally associated with larger, betterfunded organizations. A recent Reader investigation into the abusive practices at Profiles Theatre led to its closure a few days later. “Journalists dream of having that kind of effect,” Montoro said.

Saving the Chicago Reader will undoubtably be costly, and may even mean that funders will have to continue to operate at a loss. The cost to the city and its culture, if it folded, however, would be far greater. ¬

MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

More Say From the South Side As the Obamas promise community benefits from the presidential center, South Siders push to #GetItInWriting

BY YUNHAN WEN

I

n the airy hall of the South Shore Cultural Center (SSCC), the audience screamed with excitement when former president Barack Obama walked in with the first renderings of the planned Obama Presidential Center (OPC) in Jackson Park on May 3. The OPC is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for investment in the South Side—and the audience had reason to be excited, as the former president, with his usual charisma, introduced a “transformational” plan that’s supposed to revitalize the nearby neighborhoods with employment, training, and business opportunities.

Although the library won’t be completed for another four years, this transformational plan has already been set in motion by Michelle and Barack Obama’s personal donation of two million dollars, half of which will fund a summer job program aimed at training young people to later work at the center.

“We want to make sure that some of those young people can get trained, so people don’t say, ‘Why didn’t you hire anybody from the neighborhood?’ And the contractor says, ‘We didn’t have anybody who was trained,’” Obama said. “Well, let’s start the pipeline now so that we can start getting some of those folks trained.”

According to a Tribune article, one million dollars from the donation will go to One Summer Chicago, a city initiative that aims to train young people by funding summer jobs and internships, and another million will go to Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance to open apprenticeship pathways for young adults underrepresented in the building trades.

Obama also promised that eighty percent of the construction hires will be from local communities and estimated that in addition to the 200 to 300 permanent jobs within the presidential center, more than 2,000 jobs will be created in the 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 24, 2017

surrounding areas and 5,000 citywide.

The Obama Foundation also formed an “Inclusion Council,” composed of leaders from civic and corporate groups, in October 2016, to ensure diversity and the fairness in the development process.

Every time the former president finished a point of his plan for the presidential center, the audience roared with approval and affection. As Mayor Rahm Emanuel pointed out in his opening speech, “President Obama never lost touch with Chicago, and Chicago never lost touch with President Obama.” Within the town hall, this sense of solidarity and love seemed to be stronger than ever.

However, outside the spacious hall of South Shore Cultural Center, there were also doubts and fears, embodied by members from Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) holding a large sign with three letters on it: CBA, the acronym for a community benefits agreement.

Ever since Jackson Park was selected as the location of the presidential center, local organizations started mobilizing, using a variety of strategies, to ensure that benefits will indeed go to the surrounding neighborhoods. Among the various groups, four organizations—Southside Together Organizing for Power (STOP), Bronzeville Regional Collective (BRC), Prayer and Action Collective (PAC), and KOCO— formed the Obama Library South Side Community Benefits Agreement Coalition and have been advocating for a CBA signed by the Obama Foundation, the University of Chicago, and the city of Chicago. A CBA is a legally binding agreement that is signed between a real estate developer and community groups affected by such development; once signed, the CBA would require the developer to provide specific amenities to the local community. For communities adjacent to the OPC, the

specific benefits include hiring from the community, promoting Black businesses, providing affordable housing to prevent the dislocation of current residents, facilitating transportation, investing in education, and ensuring the sustainability of development.

The CBA Question A CBA from the Foundation is not universally welcomed. The Woodlawn, Washington Park and South Shore Community and Economic Development Organization (WWPSS), previously profiled in the Weekly, is one of the skeptics, even though it shares similar goals to the CBA coalition. According to its new website, WWPSS aims to “build and strengthen commercial corridors, support business and non-profit incubation, development and recruitment, coordinate workforce development, and implement an inclusive housing strategy.” WWPSS was founded by Pastor Torrey Barrett, founder of Washington Park-based KLEO, and Reverend Byron Brazier, pastor of the Apostolic Church of God in Woodlawn; it is still in the process of selecting its board members. In an interview with the Chicago Defender, Brazier called CBA “an affront to America’s first Black president—Obama,” since “it suggests we don’t trust him.”

However, if WWPSS is not embracing the CBA strategy, short of just presenting their ideas to the Foundation, it remains unclear exactly what kind of strategies it will use to lock down community benefits.

What is clear is that WWPSS and its yet-to-be-determined tactics are more favored by establishments. On March 18 at the Woodlawn Summit, Michael Strautmanis, vice president for civic engagement for the Obama Foundation, stated that the Foundation would take a more passive role in shaping what development

will look like to the affected neighborhoods, and it would let WWPSS lead the process.

Such an endorsement is in sharp contrast to the Foundation’s treatment of the CBA coalition. According to Daphne McKee Xi, a UofC student and organizer for the CBA coalition, when the CBA coalition talked to Michael Strautmanis, they received a clearcut “No.” On May 3, Alex Goldenberg, another leading organizer for the CBA coalition, was arrested for trespassing as he was passing out flyers pushing for a CBA outside the SSCC (He returned unfazed to a CBA coalition meeting on May 5).

Work in Progress It should be noted that there is little personal animosity from CBA organizers toward WWPSS. They are trying to achieve similar goals, though through different methods. When asked whether there is competition between WWPSS and the CBA coalition for popularity from residents near the OPC site, McKee Xi responded with a shrug. “There are people who show up in large meetings of both organizations.”

Naomi Davis, one of the founding members of BRC, gave a more determined response, writing, “let us respectfully say that any attempt to pit the black grassroots versus the black middle class is a false narrative we firmly reject.” However, coalition members acknowledge the difference between the two groups. “Brazier and Barrett’s organization supports some trickle-down measure, and their hearts are in the right place,” said McKee Xi. “However, you could generate bad consequences with good intentions.”

Although WWPSS is collecting opinions and advice from all South Siders, the lack of a CBA to ensure an equal distribution of benefits worries more grassroots organizers.

On the other hand, the CBA coalition has its own shortfalls. First of all, it consists

POLITICS

The model for the Obama Presidential Center shows that it will be a campus instead of a single building.

Neighborhood activists are making efforts to prevent dislocation and ensure community benefits.

COURTESY OF THE OBAMA FOUNDATION

of organizations from three community areas (PAC is not a geographically defined organization), but not all communities that are affected by the OPC. However, with a legally binding contract such as a CBA, the stakeholders who sign on to the agreement are the ones with the real legal protection from gentrification and dislocation—and according to the coalition’s website, there are only signatures from KOCO, BRC, STOP, and PAC. This is despite the fact that, according to KOCO’s Executive Director Jawanza Malone, some community members from Washington Park have joined the coalition via BRC. Second, the specifics of the CBA are yet to be decided. Although the general principles listed on their website hit everything that the affected communities will ask for, from employment, housing, and education, to sustainability and transportation, the terms and conditions of

the CBA haven’t been particularized and codified. “The Law Project is responsible for negotiating the specific contract with the legal teams from the University of Chicago, the City, and the Foundation,” said McKee Xi. “But the negotiation is never open in the first place, since they don’t want a CBA.” The Law Project is a project of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights to provide high-quality pro bono legal services to community nonprofits and small businesses, and it has been providing legal aids to the coalition from the beginning.

There is a looming problem with the generalized form in which the CBA is currently presented: although all the current stakeholders agree on general principles, they could disagree about the specifics of the contract if the three institutions ever agree to negotiate. And internal conflicts are foreseeable if the coalition ever succeeds in opening up the negotiation—although

Malone does not see it that way.

“Everybody wants the same thing, and that’s why we have this broad-based support.

So it’s not a situation where Woodlawn wants this and Washington Park wants this, and everybody is vying for a finite amount of resources and we are in competition with each other—which is what we feel Brazier is creating,” Malone said. “What we are talking about is a situation where everybody comes together to advocate for what we all need, and our advocacy involved making sure the resources are distributed in a way that support what everybody needs across the board.”

“People know that [different communities are differently affected by the OPC] going in,” Malone added. “Everybody who’s been a part of the meetings has voiced clear understanding that this is a series of concentric circles, where the epicenter at the site of the presidential center is gonna

have the biggest splash, in terms of where resources are assigned. But the reality is, those ripples that flow out are going to provide support for all of the neighboring communities… It would allow us to establish a Black business corridor, which is one of the things that we’ve been asking for in the benefits agreement. That doesn’t just help a block; it helps a series of blocks and provides access to resources that have been nonexistent in this part of the town. So whether you are a block away from a new reach-out establishment, or you are half a mile away from a new reach-out establishment, that’s gonna be infinitely closer than having to go to another part of the city or suburb and get something that you need…It’s going to be a boon to the region, not just to a particular area.”

Like WWPSS, which received skepticism from some local residents about its board selection process, the CBA coalition MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

still faces the challenge of remaining transparent and fair when selecting the demands it will make of the Foundation, university, and city. “What we are trying to do is to brainstorm the specifics of the CBA in a large room with all the participants, but in the end, we have to refine and finalize the requests with fewer people,” said McKee Xi. “This is not to say this is a closed-door procession, but decision-making is a tedious process.”

The Struggle Goes On In the end it falls to the decisions and attitudes of the Obama Foundation, the UofC, and the city. During the presentation at the SSCC, Obama himself emphasized diversity. “What I’m afraid a lot of people are concerned about: jobs, contracts—how does it work? And here’s our bottom line: we will exceed whatever historic or legal goals have been mandated in terms of minority or women-owned business participation.”

At the same time, he pointed out that this would not happen at the expense of hiring qualified candidates.

However, the worry was never about the emphasis on diversity itself, since most stakeholders believe in the former president’s goodwill. The concern is all about the process by which diversity is obtained and whether it will polarize the South Siders or benefit the worst-off. The only institution that the Obama Foundation provided to ensure this process, in addition to working with WWPSS, is the Inclusion Council formed in October. Among the initial members of the Inclusion Council, only Melody Spann Cooper, of WVON Radio on 87th and Cottage Grove, and Perri Irmer, CEO of the DuSable Museum, are from the South Side. Consequently, many of those who are responsible for diversity are out of touch with the lives of residents who will be affected most immediately by the OPC. Behind the desire for a CBA lies the anxiety and fear of those who are disconnected from the establishment.

And it is such anxiety that the Obama Foundation could address with binding institutions instead of paternalistic arguments which claim that the Inclusion Council knows what it is doing and a CBA is “pretty narrow tool” (as Strautmanis, the Foundation vice president for civic

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¬ MAY 24, 2017

engagement, told WBEZ). The Obama Foundation is not even willing to talk to the CBA coalition, while relying heavily on WWPSS, which has not even laid out a specific strategy.

However, even with the Foundation’s endorsement of WWPSS, the CBA coalition has not backed down.

On April 18 during the coalition’s town hall meeting at Hyde Park Academy, Naomi Davis passionately appealed to the audience, “Don’t build homes we can’t afford—can I get an amen for that?” and her call was responded fervently with a roaring “Amen.”

Linda Haywood, a resident in public housing for seventeen years in Woodlawn who was once homeless, stated forcefully, “I refuse to be moved.” The town hall ended with a crowd chanting repeatedly, “What we want? CBA! When we want it? Now!” On May 5, two days after the Foundation’s reception at the SSCC, the CBA coalition leadership gathered at the office of STOP to call people who’d showed up and left their contact information during the town hall, and to discuss with them the strategies they should use to call their aldermen and express their desire for a CBA. According to a May 19 email from PAC, 5th Ward Alderman Leslie Hairston would not support a signed CBA. “I feel distressed, but not discouraged,” McKee Xi told the Weekly during the leadership meeting, commenting on the lack of support from the Foundation, city, and UofC. “When public officials say ‘No,’ it doesn’t mean ‘No’ for protestors. Although I don’t want to say getting a CBA now before the construction is not important, this will be a long process and we are not going home.”

“We will continue doing what we are doing…the same thing, you know, the fight for a community benefits agreement that’s been passed across the country, started out the same way, where the developer [favored] governmental philanthropy as opposed to a benefits agreement, to prevent accountability measures from being enacted,” Jawanza Malone said after Hairston’s rejection. “Through the process of a campaign, which oftentimes is a multiyear campaign, eventually everyone arrives a point where they enter the negotiation and a benefits agreement is enacted. So I don’t believe that we are in a different problem than any other case study.” ¬

Priority in Planning

South Side United seeks greater community involvement in Obama library development process

BY OLIVIA ADAMS

O

f the 150 individuals who attended the first Washington Park Summit on April 1, only fourteen actually lived in the neighborhood, according to the Hyde Park Herald. Cecilia Butler, longtime Washington Park resident and president of the Washington Park Resident’s Advisory Council, called the meeting “insulting” due to the lack of notice given to neighborhood residents. The event’s Facebook page listed only fourteen attendees, and an event posted on the neighborhood bulletin website EveryBlock did not appear until less than a week before the event.

“What we need in Washington Park is first to let the community know about what’s happening,” Butler said in a phone interview with the Weekly. “Twice I asked, ‘how many in this room live in Washington Park’ and I could never hit the twenty-person mark. So somebody did not do their job.”

Organized by the South East Chicago Commission, which recently became independent of the University of Chicago, the Washington Park Summit—which follows in the path laid by the Annual Woodlawn Summit, now in its eighth year—included an update on the Obama Presidential Center. While Jackson Park was ultimately selected as the site for the library over Washington Park, Butler feels that area residents, including those in her neighborhood, have been “forgotten” and “ignored” amidst efforts to plan for and discuss the impact of the presidential library, which is set to break ground in 2018, on the neighborhoods that neighbor Jackson Park. The emergence of a new communityorganizing group, South Side United

(SSU), seeks to address the concerns for the residents of Woodlawn, Washington Park, and South Shore.

Gabriel Piemonte, the founding member of SSU, noted in an interview with the Weekly that while the Obama Presidential Library and its planning process concern his group, SSU was actually created in response to a more specific event: 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran’s public announcement on March 28 of a new organization aimed at advising the Obama Foundation on community needs regarding economic development.

This advisory organization, now known as the WWPSS (“Woodlawn, Washington Park and South Shore Community and Economic Development Organization”), is the result of a $250,000 grant given by the Chicago Community Trust to a consulting firm called Next Street in order to determine what a community organization in the southeast corner of the South Side could potentially look like. WWPSS is also widely considered to be a brainchild of Rev. Byron Brazier, a Washington Park resident and leader of Woodlawn’s Apostolic Church of God, among other institutions and organizations. But according to Piemonte, residents received little notice that plans for a community development corporation were already underway, or that funding for such an organization had already been secured.

South Side United came about primarily as a reaction to the WWPSS and its lack of resident input. “[WWPSS] was literally announced in South Shore, and nobody knew that they were included in this idea,” Piemonte said.

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“It was announced at a 5th Ward meeting, [but] Leslie Hairston [the ward’s alderman] … was not physically there for this meeting.

Which appears to have been an intentional decision. She wasn’t sure what to do, but she had to kind of play ball, so she let them present.”

Piemonte sees this failure to inform residents as part of a larger trend in Chicago development, wherein underdeveloped areas become targets for “blue ribbon” committees and planning corporations but in the end receive little actual support from the city.

He cites Block 37, Maxwell Street, and the destruction of public housing in the 1990s and early 2000s as earlier examples of this pattern.

The WWPSS organization, still lacking an official name, finished a campaign earlier this month to solicit applications for a twenty-one-member board. Nine of those positions will be filled by representatives of the Woodlawn, Washington Park, and South Shore neighborhoods. The other seats will presumably be filled by representatives from the other institutions and organizations involved. The organization did not respond to the Weekly’s request for comment.

In a blog post on the “Off the Cuff ” section of the SSU website, Piemonte suggested as an alternative to the WWPSS model the creation of separate local development councils for Woodlawn, Washington Park, and South Shore, in order to ensure that residents have real power over what developers can and cannot build in their neighborhoods. The councils would work together at a broader level as a united, resident-led organization. Modeled in part after the North Kenwood Oakland Conservation Community Council, these councils would be incorporated by ordinance to ensure that their decisions are binding. However, while most councils of this type have an appointed board, Piemonte advocates for an elected one.

“The whole problem with the development corporation and what it represents in Chicago culture is a lack of faith in the deliberative capacity of the people,” Piemonte said. “So what we think we need is a different model of how we think about how neighborhoods can make decisions.”

Thus far, Woodlawn has shown the most progress in actually developing the kind of council that Piemonte is imagining. The Woodlawn SSU group is primarily comprised of residents from East Woodlawn who first organized together in

COURTESY OF THE OBAMA FOUNDATION

opposition to the building of the University of Chicago’s new charter school campus at 63rd Street and University Avenue. Those organizing efforts also focused on a lack of community input and awareness. According to Piemonte, attendees at the SSU meetings in Woodlawn have begun discussing the steps to incorporation, although no official documentation has been prepared yet.

South Shore residents appear interested in the concept and continue to discuss it, but not with any concrete steps on the horizon.

Washington Park residents, however, are less enthusiastic.

“We’ve gone to Washington Park, we went to the [Washington Park Resident’s Advisory Council] and we presented,” Piemonte explained. “People were very interested and they said ‘Well, we’ll get back to you.’ They didn’t. We called, we didn’t hear back. They can be a very slow, deliberative group.”

Part of this reluctance likely stems from Washington Park’s history in terms of community development propositions. In 2009, Chicago’s loss for the 2016 Summer Olympics spelled a massive lost opportunity for Washington Park, and again in 2016 it lost the Obama Presidential Center to Jackson Park. Rather than jump headfirst into development organization plans, neighborhood leaders like Butler want to ensure that as many residents as possible are informed about their options before making any decisions to join a multi-neighborhood organization like SSU.

“We’re up in the air,” Butler said of her neighborhood. “It’s all about first letting our community know.”

Butler remains uneasy about joining not only SSU, but also the Obama Library South Side Community Benefits Agreement Coalition, which includes the Woodlawn-based organizing group Southside Organizing Together for Power, the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO), the Bronzeville Regional Collective, and the Hyde Parkbased Prayer and Action Collective.

Although she has been considered a major proponent of Community Benefits Agreements for new developments in the past, Butler firmly believes that neighborhoods must be fully informed and united before drafting any resolution regarding community action for or against development measures. Furthermore, she believes that the neighborhoods immediately surrounding the presidential library and their residents should be given priority in organizing efforts like the creation of a CBA. “KOCO needs to leave this particular issue alone,” Butler said of the Kenwoodbased organization’s significant involvement in the Coalition and the push for a CBA, believing that those living closest to Jackson Park should spearhead the debate. “But, whatever opportunities that are out there, we do need to take advantage of them. But first, I want to let my community know, be aware of it.”

SSU shares much of its concern with the Coalition. According to Jawanza Malone, Executive Director of KOCO, Piemonte and others now involved with SSU have previously attended community meetings organized by the Coalition, but no meetings have taken place since SSU was formed.

And although the Coalition does not have any official stance on its relationship with SSU, Malone hopes the groups will work together in the future.

“I would like to see them join the Coalition,” Malone said. “I think they would be a powerful ally in this fight.”

As SSU increases its membership and further develops its plans for the implementation of local development councils, Malone’s vision remains a possibility.

Piemonte, while suspicious of the WWPSS organization, does not describe himself or his community organizing efforts as antidevelopment. But the problem, and the motivation behind SSU’s creation, lies in who dictates the course of development on the South Side, where residents have historically received little in terms of decision-making power when developers become interested in their neighborhoods. SSU aims to attract developers, but on residents’ own terms.

“Obviously, the development corporation is a group of people thinking ‘Well, people are going to want to build near the Obama Presidential Center,” Piemonte said. “And that makes sense to us. We think that’s great. We have to decide what’s gonna get built.” MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

Members of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity

79th Street Remembers

Residents come together to mourn lost loved ones and pray for an end to gun violence

BY ANDREW FAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY JASON SCHUMER

O

n Saturday morning, the sound of honking cars echoed up and down 79th Street. Passersby were responding to a group of young people waving signs reading “Free Prayer” and “We Believe,” as part of the Prayer on the 9 prayer line and peace march.

Organized by local pastor John Hannah, who leads the New Life Covenant Church, the event is aimed at protesting gun violence and remembering lost loved ones. Last year, the march attracted an estimated 2,000 participants, who lined up along a nearly two-mile stretch of 79th Street. This year, heavy rain and approaching thunderstorms drove many indoors, but hundreds of people still congregated along the street, clutching umbrellas and donning clear plastic ponchos.

To Ashley Johnson, a youth ministry leader at New Life who lost a cousin to gun violence, the day was about supporting those still struggling with the death of a loved one long after the death.

“The first day after a loved one dies there’s someone there, but afterwards things become much harder,” Johnson said. “Today, it’s really about letting the community know that the lives that have been lost, even long ago, have not been forgotten, that we are here, that we

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 24, 2017

are mourning with them, that we love them, that they are not alone.”

Ann White, a Bronzeville resident and New Life Covenant member, echoed Johnson’s sentiment as she took shelter from the rain in a doorway on the corner of 79th and Ingleside.

“I think this march is important as a way to pray for the community and let people know that we care,” White said. “Violence can spread rapidly, even if it might not be happening on my block today.”

The street has faced mounting difficulties in recent years, including a spike in gun violence. In 2014, CPS teacher Betty Howard was killed by a stray bullet as she was working a second job at a real estate office on 79th Street.

Her death sparked anger in the community and helped spur the creation of a new nonprofit, the Greater Chatham Initiative.

Some residents, like Thomas Adams, hope that these kind of initiatives and the work of institutions like New Life will help revive the street.

“The impact of these efforts is that the neighborhood is already taking a slight turn for the better,” Adams said. “79th used to be a lot more hectic but so far this year it has been relatively calm. We all want to see things get better throughout the city.”

Eventually the unrelenting rain forced organizers to reschedule the march.

Some residents decided to march anyway.

At the far end of the march route, next to the Dan Ryan, well over a hundred men from the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, clad in their fraternity’s black and gold colors, advanced down the center of 79th Street, shielded from the rain under dozens of umbrellas.

Other residents returned to New Life. At the corner of 79th and Cottage Grove, about a dozen people formed a circle and began to pray after hearing news of the cancellation.

One man cried out, “thank you for allowing us to be your vessels and servants, oh God.” The prayer concluded with cheers.

Among those in the prayer circle on the corner was Sharon Winston, who emphasized her continued dedication to ending crime in her neighborhood.

“Even though it’s in the rain, we want to emphasize just how dedicated we are to the cause and how its important to us, regardless of the weather,” Winston said. “I mean, I would have stood out here as long as we needed to just to prove how much we want to help with the issues of crime and the issues going on in the city of Chicago.” ¬

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Sharon Winston (left) Tawana Turks (right)

Ashley Johnson

Ann White (left) Michelle Reed (right)

Thomas Adams (center) with Taysha Brown (left) and Johnathan Lewis (right)

MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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Cracks in the e Foundation Former employees of Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation allege mistreatment

BY MARI COHEN & CHRISTIAN BELANGER

PHOTO COLLAGE BY JASMIN LIANG

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 24, 2017

n mid-March, the New York Times published a warm profile of Theaster Gates’s new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., describing his creations as “monumental structures that echo abstract canvases elsewhere in the institution, but are embedded with unsung stories of black laborers and entrepreneurs.” Part of the piece also detailed how Gates’s Rebuild Foundation, a nonprofit organization that aims at neighborhood and community revitalization through arts-related projects, had acquired the dismantled pieces of the gazebo in Cleveland where twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer in November 2014. Rebuild would use the pieces, the article said, to create a memorial for Rice later this year at the Stony Island Arts Bank, the organization’s South Shore home and exhibition space.

But behind the glowing newsprint, several Black staff members at Rebuild were reportedly troubled by the nature of the Tamir Rice memorial, and the ways in which their concerns were received by higher-level staff. “They were asking Black workers to provide voices and perspective for the gazebo, because Theaster didn’t know what the fuck he wanted to say about it,” said Darren Wallace, who was, at the time, Rebuild’s cinema education coordinator. Wallace recounted that, during all-staff meetings held from October of last year until the last week of January, employees raised criticisms about the exhibit’s promotion of, as Wallace puts it, “the wanton consumption of Black death and violence.” These criticisms, Wallace said, were then taken up by the steering committee in charge of arranging the exhibit, and incorporated into the language that would be used to program the memorial. Gates declined to comment about criticisms of the gazebo exhibit.

The story about the gazebo is just one example of a work environment described by former employees of Rebuild and Gates’s other organizations as disorganized and marked by troubling power dynamics.

In addition to Wallace, the Weekly spoke with Anansi Knowbody, a former gallery coordinator at the Arts Bank, and two former employees, one at Rebuild and one at another of Gates’s organizations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid damaging their connections within Chicago’s art scene. Wallace and the other former employees also expressed concerns

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about whether Rebuild’s approach to socialpractice art has the interests of South Side communities in mind.

Wallace’s own time at Rebuild culminated in the creation of the Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition (an alliance between Rebuild employees and a pair of outside arts and organizing groups) and a subsequent attempt to form a union.

Both endeavors fell apart after Wallace was laid off in the middle of March. But on April 20, the complaints of Rebuild staff burst onto the public scene when the Rebuild Foundation’s Twitter account suddenly went rogue, sending information about the staff ’s concerns and criticisms of Gates’s project across the web before quickly being deleted later that night. One of Rebuild’s top employees, Amy Schachman, resigned for undisclosed reasons shortly after the incident.

Gates, in a phone interview with the Weekly, said that Wallace’s and other employees’ concerns are off base, and that while Rebuild may have struggled to communicate its work to the public, it nevertheless deserves praise for its contributions to the South Side.

While Theaster Gates has long been a darling of the art world, the Chicago political establishment, and the media, Wallace’s story calls into question the foundation on which Gates has built his fame: that his art helps empower Black Chicagoans.

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he Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition was formed in the aftermath of the February 16 Ethical Redevelopment salon, one in a series of monthly, invitation-only workshops on development bookended by two public convenings in June 2016 and June 2017.

The salons are hosted by the Place Lab, a University of Chicago organization headed

by Gates and structured around the idea of ethical redevelopment, a development philosophy that “makes the case for mindful city-building,” according to the organization’s website. The guest list at any given salon is a who’s who of civic-minded artists, community organization leaders, and creative development organization leaders from across the country; a few residents of surrounding communities make it in, too. While Wallace wasn’t invited to the February 16 event, he told the Weekly he asked Place Lab COO Lori Berko if it was okay for him and his partner, Shani

Akilah—co-founder of Philadelphia-based labor rights organization Black and Brown Workers Collective (BBWC)—to attend the event. According to Wallace, Berko said yes.

At the event, Akilah began a Facebook livestream; the Weekly was able to obtain the video footage. During a breakout discussion group, Akilah began asking questions about the Arts Bank and whether community support was obtained for the project. Most of the other members of the discussion group were from various organizations around the country and couldn’t answer the questions about the Arts Bank. When they didn’t receive answers, Akilah became confrontational. Berko came over and told Akilah that filming was not allowed, and Akilah and Berko engaged in a heated discussion: Berko insisted that the salon was a closed event, and Akilah responded, “It’s a closed event that shouldn’t be a closed event.” Berko then told Akilah and Wallace that they were no longer welcome at the event. Akilah and Wallace left, with Akilah and Berko continuing to argue as Berko ushered them out.

Berko did not respond to requests for comment by press time.

The next day, according to Wallace, Rebuild management—Amy Schachman, Jacqueline Stewart, and Sabrina Craig— called him in and asked him to explain what had happened the night before. “I told them, but I also told them we felt uncomfortable that we were asked to leave, and were asking very genuine questions. And they were totally just unreceptive to that,” said Wallace. “And I told them that what I felt that night, I felt was a part of a pattern of discrimination against specifically Black workers.” Wallace said his supervisors then asked him to compile a list of complaints and send them over. But Wallace decided that, rather than simply pass along his own criticism, he would confer with other employees and draw up a longer set of demands. He also wanted to start the process of forming a union for Black artists at Rebuild and, to that end, began meeting with union representatives and lawyers, as well as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Gates declined to comment on the specific events of the February 16 salon or Rebuild’s response to Wallace. However, he said, “Unfortunately for the artists who made these comments, they basically were invited into a private space and treated it as

if it were a public space, when in fact they were guests in something that was really just a private meeting.”

On February 19, three days after the salon, Wallace emailed his supervisors a letter that announced the formation of the Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition, designed to “stand in complete solidarity with current/previous Rebuild Foundation employees.” It gave point-by-point detail of the alleged mistreatment of Rebuild employees, including unequal and unfair pay for frontline staff, an “assumption of criminality” that affects treatment of Black staff members, retaliatory behavior toward internal critics and whistleblowers, and “the hiring of a white managerial class to oversee black laborers.” The Coalition’s list of demands called for Rebuild to hire a Black community engagement liaison from Greater Grand Crossing, establish a community advisory committee, hold community forums on “anti-gentrification strategies,” and create an independent HR department. It called for the resignation of Schachman, then the director of programs and development, and Gates.

Wallace, who is also the creator and cofounder of the Kinfolk Collective, a group of Chicago-based artists, spoke with the Weekly about his own experiences with these problems since he came to Rebuild last July. He claims that he was told when he was hired he would be working to find other teaching artists for Rebuild; instead, he said, he mostly ended up shooting promotional spots, or videos for grant applications. He said this was part of a general structure of disorganization. Other ex-employees who spoke with the Weekly also remarked that workplace expectations often shifted, and that communication was sometimes lacking. “I’d be sending emails that were getting unanswered, and just really trying to hold it together,” said a former employee who worked at another of Gates’s organizations, adding, “You just can’t move forward on projects ’cause you can’t get answers.”

According to Wallace, some Black employees also felt tokenized in the space.

“I noticed this had been a common theme with a lot of other workers, specifically the Black workers. We felt that we were only in that space working because we were Black; we were supposed to be the face of the community,” Wallace said. “Our job titles and descriptions were switched at a whim.”

One ex-employee, who was let go from MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

their job at Rebuild a couple of years before Wallace arrived and wished to remain anonymous because of their fear that being identified might damage their career, echoed Wallace’s sentiments. “You’re just there for affect,” they said. “You’re not there to be this intelligent black person. You’re not there to outshine him. You’re not there for that.”

The employee also detailed the circumstances of their own firing, alleging that, without their knowledge, they had trained their own successor, an “old friend” of Gates’s. “I was asked to meet with this woman far before she was even brought in and I didn’t understand why. She didn’t really have any knowledge of what I was doing,” they said, later adding “It was like, ‘let me have this [person] teach us everything that [they know] and once we see how [they run] these programs then we don’t need [them] anymore.’”

The feeling that Black employees were only there to serve as expendable frontline symbols was exacerbated by what the letter described as “the hiring of a white managerial class to oversee black laborers.”

In person, Wallace was even more blunt, noting that Akilah’s BBWC, which helped found the Coalition, “[uses] this term called a ‘plantation politics,’ which they’ve identified in a few nonprofits, specifically nonprofits that are supposed to engage marginalized communities. That is, they put Black and brown faces on the front line and give them very little job agency.”

In response to these accusations, Gates emphasized the fact that Rebuild and its sister organizations are Black-led and diverse. Of the eleven Rebuild employees, he said, nine are Black; the remaining two include a white secretary and the sinceresigned Schachman. “And if you look across Arts + Public Life, the Place Lab, it’s an amazingly and grossly diverse staff that I handpicked,” he said. But when Wallace was at Rebuild, he said, there were five managers, all of whom were white.

Some of them were employed through the UofC’s Arts + Public Life initiative—which includes the Place Lab—so they were not all a part of the mostly-Black Rebuild staff that Gates described. Wallace said it was difficult to keep track of which employees were paid by Rebuild and which were paid by the UofC. A former employee at one of Gates’s organizations, who agreed to speak with the Weekly on condition of anonymity, also 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 24, 2017

said that few of the people in higher-level positions in those organizations were Black.

They noted, too, that most of the managerial staff was female. “I know that when I got in I was like, ‘Oh, why is it all pretty white and Hispanic women running every single organization?’” the former employee said, later adding, “You were looking around and you were like, ‘This is like a power situation, not an empowerment situation.’”

On February 20, the day after he sent the letter to management, Wallace was placed on suspension without being told why, he said. Feeling that his rights had been infringed upon, he filed charges against Rebuild with the NLRB. Though Wallace was quickly reinstated, he alleges he subsequently experienced a series of retaliatory actions, such as being asked to log his hours on a timesheet, which he hadn’t had to do before since he was a salaried employee, and then having his pay withheld until the sheet had been reviewed.

He said that no other employees were asked to log hours that way. On March 21, he was laid off from Rebuild, shortly after he taught his last class.

According to Gates, investigations into Wallace’s job were unrelated to him voicing his concerns. Instead, he said, Wallace was found not to be doing the hours he had been hired for.

“In the case of Darren, he was the highest paid part-time person on the staff and probably contributed the least,” said Gates. He said that Wallace should have been spending more time working to make change in the community, rather than criticizing Rebuild’s work. He has the same response to most critics—why don’t they build something, too?

“People feel that the only thing they can do is scream and I wish that they would be partners with me in change,” he said.

Meanwhile, after Wallace left Rebuild, the Coalition’s efforts to begin a union faltered, he said. “After I got fired in midMarch, the Coalition was officially over, because the retaliation that took place against me just scared the shit out of all the other workers. They felt like the press wasn’t picking this up, there’s nothing we can do.”

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allace isn’t the only former Rebuild employee who became disillusioned after a stint spent working at the foundation. In December 2015, Anansi Knowbody, a Chicagobased filmmaker, began a job at Rebuild

as a gallery attendant; initially, he said he enjoyed it. “It felt very much like a family.

It felt very much inviting and very warm and something that I wanted to be a part of,” he said. “It was great. We started off having team meetings, meeting every day, really being interested in one another’s lives.” To be closer to work, he moved into an apartment building near the Arts Bank that was also owned by Rebuild.

But Knowbody also remembers feeling, much like Wallace, that his position as a Black employee working on the first floor of the Arts Bank sometimes meant taking on different responsibilities than he had expected. “When I came, I didn’t expect that it was going to be all these social initiatives,” he said. “I didn’t know that my presence as a Black face, as an urban Black face, as an educated urban Black face was just solely to promote the company.”

Around August of 2016, Ken Stewart left his post as CEO of Rebuild, according to his LinkedIn, and Gates took over as executive director. Knowbody said that he was enthusiastic about the change, to the point where he wrote Gates a letter expressing his “praise and reverence.” But the leadership change led to other changes in management, like Gates bringing in Schachman to replace Knowbody’s old supervisor, who he said had left a couple of months earlier.

Knowbody said that after Schachman took over as his boss, the tenor of meetings changed, becoming less familial and more businesslike. Ultimately, he thinks he was fired from Rebuild because of a remark that he made in one of these meetings.

“I made a comment one day, and I was like, ‘I don’t know why we’re making this change because tomorrow it’s going to be something completely different,’ because that’s kind of the nature of the environment you’re working under,” he said. “And when I made that comment, I was met with a really harsh look and I was asked to step aside and told that if I didn’t want to be there I could leave.”

One Monday shortly after that meeting, Knowbody came to work, and said that Schachman told him that his position had been dissolved, and that he was being let go. “There was no interest in securing me elsewhere. And no reasoning why my position was being dissolved,” he said. “I literally relocated to live around the corner from the Bank because I was invested in it.

I was invested. I wanted to be part of the

community. I wanted to be part of all the different things.”

Last week, he started a job as a baggage handler at O’Hare; from his home, it’s nearly a two-hour commute. He said that he’ll continue his involvement with art and noted that he doesn’t feel much differently about working at the airport than he did, at the end of his time there, about his work at Rebuild: “I’m not getting any more or less fulfillment working here, moving bags for a corporate conglomerate, than I was for a smaller conglomerate, just coming in on a half-day to present myself.”

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n the early evening of April 20 this year, a series of since-deleted messages began to appear on the Twitter account of the Rebuild Foundation. While the tweets partially regurgitated the demands written in the Black Artists and Artisans Labor Coalition document, they also added additional commentary, calling ethical redevelopment a “code word for gentrification” and accusing Gates of “artwashing,” a term used to describe situations in which the presence of artists contributes to the redevelopment of a neighborhood by profit-driven developers and leads to displacement.

The tweets were removed shortly after they went up. Soon after, Rebuild posted a statement from the board of directors to their website, which they tweeted out on April 26. In its public statement, the Rebuild Foundation said that “these demands express misconceptions about the work that we do,” and reiterated the nonprofit’s commitment to “culture-based, artist-led, neighborhooddriven transformation, guided by our core values: black people matter, black spaces matter, and black things matter.”

The statement labeled the incident a hacking, and stated that Rebuild was “working with Twitter, the FBI, and the Chicago Police Department to identify those responsible.” Gates said that he’s not yet sure whether the Twitter account was hacked from the outside or whether it was simply accessed by someone who had Rebuild’s login information. He said that Rebuild is an organization with “a lot of trust in the employees who work with us,” and so there were a variety of people who may have had access to the Twitter account.

Gates said he felt that the investigation was progressing well, but that he wanted to speak to people privately before making any public announcements.

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According to Wallace, the move to send the tweets was not officially authorized by the Coalition. In fact, he said he still doesn’t know who wrote them.

“They tweeted a lot of sensitive information that really endangered a lot of workers within the space, and a lot of people were really pissed about that, and people pointed fingers, not claiming or owning up to it,” said Wallace. “It created a lot of distrust within the coalition, and at that point we decided just like it’s officially defunct, there’s nothing positive that can come from this.”

Meanwhile, sometime after the tweets appeared, Schachman resigned. Gates would not give a reason why, but he did say that there was a “tremendous amount of pressure” on the Rebuild staff after the accusation was made public. Schachman could not be reached for comment.

Gates said that Rebuild is now taking steps to address some of the concerns about its project. The public statement in response to the tweets mentioned that Rebuild would soon hold a “public forum for a conversation with current and former staff, black artists, and neighbors,” which Gates said would be held in August. He also said that Rebuild was developing a business plan in order to address what he calls the “information gap” between Rebuild’s work and public perceptions of its work.

“We were all scratching our heads like, ‘How is it that the work that we are wanting to do is so grossly misunderstood?’” Gates said.

But critiques of Rebuild, especially those accusing Gates’s projects of causing gentrification, are not new. According to the tweets, “The Rebuild Foundation under Theaster Gates treats community development as an artistic medium to express the artists’ desires rather than a social practice/experimental strategy for neighborhood transformation.” Critics have periodically raised concerns about Gates’s projects and their potential for spurring gentrification, but they’ve mostly been drowned out by widespread and laudatory media attention. For example, a mostly favorable New Yorker profile in 2014 ended with a quote in which Hamza Walker, a UofC curator, said Gates “represents a way” to fix problems in struggling neighborhoods.

Gates regularly appears on ArtReview’s lists of the most powerful people in the art world.

Other voices, however, have argued that

Gates’s work contradicts his very purpose: revitalizing South Side neighborhoods.

The tweets referred to a 2014 article in Art Monthly in which Larne Abse Gogarty, an academic at Humboldt University in Germany, argued that Gates’s work operates “in compliance with a system that perpetuates the social issues it attempts to improve” and uses Gates and Rebuild as an example of a troubling trend in social practice art in which wealthier, well-connected artists willing to cooperate with corporate developers and politicians receive the most acclaim. In contrast to Rebuild, Gogarty pointed out, the longstanding South Side Community Art Center operates with a tight budget and a mostly volunteer staff.

Gates views these criticisms as a problem of miscommunication, rather than any fundamental flaw in Rebuild’s strategy.

He said he understood that “disempowered communities” might be frustrated when they feel like they don’t have a say in development processes, and chalked this up to Rebuild not having the “full infrastructure yet to be able to message and market all the great things we do,” referring to Rebuild’s free arts and culture programming. Furthermore, he said, critics are taking out their frustrations with “the real oppositions and the real power sources”—though he wouldn’t say who these were—on him, and the solution isn’t to point fingers at individual artists. He’s proud of his work revitalizing Greater Grand Crossing and especially saving the Stony Islands Arts Bank from demolition.

“I’m not the problem. And artists are not the problem of cities,” he said. “And the fact that an artist like any other neighbor might want to clean up their space or take a building that was going to be fucking demolished—really? a 24,000 square foot building that was gonna be demolished?— and use his or her personal resources in order to try to restore that building, where there’s no TIF money, there’s no government incentive, just so that culture can happen.

I feel like that should be applauded, not critiqued.”

And most ex-employees the Weekly spoke with agreed that their criticisms weren’t aimed exclusively at Gates himself.

Often, they pointed to other frustrations they also had, like the general working environment at Rebuild, or the foundation’s connection to the University of Chicago, which employs Gates as a professor, supports a number of his organizations (the Place Lab is a UofC initiative, as is Gates’s

Arts Incubator on Garfield Boulevard), and has long been a major player in urban development on the mid-South Side.

Still, for Wallace, the praise that Gates and his organizations receive across the city serves as a frustrating reminder of a campaign that failed to take hold. Right now, he’s working at the Chicago Home Theater Festival; on the festival’s first night, he listened to an artist talk about their latest creation, a set of wall-sized quilts depicting scenes from the Jim Crow era. The artist said they took inspiration from Edward Williams’s “negrobilia” collection, which is comprised of stereotypical, racist objects, like furniture and signage, and is hosted at the Stony Island Arts Bank. “They were just praising the building and Theaster so much and it’s just like, ‘Oh my God, if people only knew.’ But I felt like nobody really wants to know,” Wallace said, later saying, “Can you imagine that? Like you work in this terrible institution, right, but everywhere you go these other fucking exhibitions and gallery openings—people are praising the fuck out of it.”

The anonymous ex-Rebuild employee had a similar observation: “If you’re not really involved behind the scenes, you don’t know. If you haven’t been brought on board, you don’t know. Because from afar it looks wonderful. It looks great,” they said, adding, “You know what I’m saying? But you don’t get employed by him.”

Wallace can take some solace in the fact that, after being served with the Coalition’s letter of demands, Rebuild has put the Tamir Rice exhibit indefinitely on hold, according to Wallace. But the Coalition itself has dissolved, and the NLRB closed its investigation into Rebuild after determining it didn’t have jurisdiction over the foundation. Wallace himself is moving to Philadelphia in the summer, where he’s going to keep directing movies, and help BBWC figure out how artists can unionize.

“Honestly, I promise when I was applying to work [at Rebuild], everyone within my collective was praying I get the job. I was really excited because I honestly felt this would be like a platform for transformation,” he said, adding, “A lot of people with money are actively invested in seeing this project succeed.

It’s just overwhelmingly intimidating to a lot of people who know what the fuck is really happening in that space. It’s just so unfortunate, you know. It just really is. I’m ready to put this shit behind me.” MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

Charter School Chokehold Roosevelt University study points to CPS charter school policy as contributing factor for CPS budget shortfall

BY OLIVIA ADAMS

C

hicago Public Schools’ perennial funding woes have occupied headlines since time immemorial, but recently, the bad news seems to be increasing in both quantity and severity.

Recently, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Forrest Claypool, his CPS CEO, were forced to walk back statements that CPS schools would close weeks early if the state did not provide more money after a judge threw out their last-ditch lawsuit claiming the state’s public school formula is racially discriminatory. CPS was forced to take out a $389 million high-interest loan to keep schools open, which some aldermen compared to a “payday loan” and does not even entirely fill the budget gap. On top of that, the district is attempting to wring another $467 million it says the state owes it to make its pension payment next month, facing yet another bond rating downgrade if it does not make the payment.

Mayoral and CPS officials put much, if not all, of the blame for the district’s disastrous finances on Governor Rauner’s budget stalemate with Democrats in the General Assembly. For Stephanie Farmer, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Roosevelt University, however, there’s another place to look within CPS itself when considering the causes of the district’s crises—charter schools.

In a study co-written with Ph.D candidates at Loyola University and the University of Illinois at Chicago and published last month in partnership with the Project for Middle Class Renewal, Farmer examined the relationship between public school closures and charter expansion between 2000 and 2015. The study suggests 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 24, 2017

that the CPS charter policy, or lack thereof, is partially responsible for the current budget crisis. Furthermore, its policy recommendations challenge the school system to take accountability measures more seriously, especially with regard to charters.

Using data from CPS, the Illinois State Board of Education, and the U.S. Census, analyzed with ArcGIS mapping software, Farmer’s team documented and compared changes in school-aged population, the locations of closed schools, the locations of new charters, and whether neighborhood public schools were deemed underutilized, overcrowded, or efficient. Analysis of these data points lead the researchers to three major conclusions: that the magnitude of CPS’s debt is mostly hidden, that the nature of charter expansion and placement has been all but unplanned, and that charters have diverted a significant amount of money from neighborhood public schools.

Farmer began compiling data for this study three years ago, when she began studying school closures following the 2013 shutdown of forty-nine CPS schools.

Her experience in school finance research, however, reaches back to 2000 when she studied the relationship between schools and tax increment financing (TIF) districts.

In a phone conversation with the Weekly, Farmer cited the tendency for new charters to be opened in neighborhoods with declining school-age population as the most surprising finding in this new study.

“This indicated to me that [CPS wasn’t] planning this process,” Farmer said. “It was just haphazard, ‘Let’s open a charter school’ without necessarily connecting it to the need across the school system.”

According to the study, eighty-five percent of the 108 charter schools opened between 2000 and 2015 were located in areas with a decreasing school-age population.

Sixty-two percent were opened in areas with “high” school-age population loss, defined as a decrease of twenty-five percent or higher.

Between 2004 and 2015, CPS employed two policies when targeting schools for closure. The Renaissance 2010 (Ren10) initiative, announced by then-Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2004, sought to close sixty to seventy existing schools in exchange for one hundred new selective enrollment, contract, and charter schools. This initiative spoke to a new era of CPS governance that prioritized the “school choice movement,” now largely associated with conservatives such as Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos; rather than parents sending their children only and always to the local neighborhood public school, they would now have a range of choices for their child’s education without having to depend on private school options.

The criteria for closure depended primarily on a new performance rating system tied to scores on the ITBS and ISAT tests for elementary schools and the PSAE for high schools. According to Farmer’s study, which defines the Ren10 period as 2001 through 2009, seventy-three schools were closed and replaced with eighty-seven new ones— sixty-eight of them charters, or seventyeight percent of the total.

According to a 2007 study from the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research, CPS received complaints for its lack of transparency regarding its decisions to close schools for underperformance. Mounting pressure influenced CPS to adopt a “turnaround” policy, where low performing schools would undergo complete staff overhauls rather than close.

The election of Emanuel in 2011 brought a new system that relied on testing performance as well as enrollment to dictate school closures. In an attempt to “rightsize” the district, the mayoral-controlled Chicago Board of Education determined that schools with a class size average of less than 24 were “underutilized” and those with an average over thirty-six were overcrowded.

Previously, schools with utilization percentages—the percentage of average students per classroom with respect to the Board of Education’s “ideal utilization” of thirty students per classroom—below sixtyfive were also considered underutilized.

A 2013 study by public school parent

activist coalition Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education and CPS data research project Apples to Apples found, however, that during the 2012-13 school year, forty-seven percent of charter schools fell into the “underutilized” category. Farmer points to this discrepancy as evidence for CPS’s carelessness with regard to building unnecessary charter schools while simultaneously closing neighborhood ones.

“The opening of these [charter] schools is not in relation to where the actual need is,” Farmer said. “And so this is problematic when we’re in such scarcity—financial scarcity that is—that we can’t do this in a haphazard way.”

The CPS policy towards charter proliferation has changed in recent years, albeit only slightly. In 2015, Claypool announced a new warning policy meant to target underperforming charter schools for closure. Four schools, including two single-site charter schools, received closure recommendations in November 2015. In a CPS press release, Claypool said that the closures “were made to ensure better outcomes for students, and signal to charters not performing well, that they need to either improve or pack their bags.” Three of those schools, including Amandla Charter School, which the Weekly reported on in February 2016, remained open after appealing to the Illinois State Charter School Commission (SCSC), which is controlled by appointees of Governor Rauner .

Despite this show of toughness against underperforming charter schools, the results of Claypool’s policy demonstrate an important distinction between singlesite schools like Amandla and powerful networks of charters like Noble, which has eighteen separate schools. Two of the four schools targeted for closure in September 2015 were single-site schools, even though they make up only about twenty percent of the 135 charters currently operating in CPS. Single-site charters also tend to be the brainchildren of teachers and social justice advocates, whereas networks are oftentimes not. Farmer notes that Claypool’s policy works to “eliminate [the] competition from the bigger chains.”

Farmer also noted that these two styles of charters differ in their financial interests, where networks tend to garner more support from “venture philanthropists” with deep pockets.

“That’s an interesting dynamic, especially when you’re talking about how, at this same time, the financial sector is seeking

EDUCATION

to erect a charter bond market,” Farmer said.

“And of course, these charter bonds would be paid back with public revenues.”

According to Crain’s Chicago Business, the city’s charter schools sold $215 million in bonds between 1999 and 2014.

Confirming this number, however, proves impossible due to a lack of easily accessible data regarding charter school finances. Only twenty-seven percent of all Chicago charter schools filed audits with the Illinois State Board of Education in 2015. Those thirtyfive schools reported a combined debt of $277 million. Based on that number, Farmer’s study speculates that the total charter debt runs around $1 billion.

Obtaining financial data about the city’s charters can prove challenging; just twenty-seven percent of them filed mandatory audits with the Illinois State Board of Education in 2015, reporting a combined debt of $277 million. Based on that number, Farmer speculated that the total debt of charter schools runs around $1 billion.

This debt, according to the study, is also wrapped up in the siphoning of resources from neighborhood schools to charter schools. The CPS adoption of Student Based Budgeting (SBB), a system in which schools are funded per student rather than per teacher, contributes to a “recursive cycle of student enrollment decline and budget cuts.” When a student moves from a neighborhood public school to a charter school, those tax dollars move with them.

Neighborhood public schools feel the brunt of this loss, as overhead costs do not decrease with fewer students. Schools are then left with the choice to keep the school librarian or pay the electricity bill, while charters receive more money with every new student.

Farmer describes charter debt as “off-the-books,” in part because of lack of transparency. According to the state law governing charters, all charter schools are required to submit independent audits annually to “its authorizer and the State Board.” This doesn’t appear to be common practice, however.

Charter schools can also receive grants and private funding, but neither this information, nor the total share of charter debt, is included in the CPS Comprehensive Annual Financial Report.

“That kind of lack of accountability and transparency is very problematic because then the public doesn’t understand...the sheer magnitude of debt,” Farmer said.

“Especially in light of how the debt itself

has been used to justify school closures. Or, how the debt itself is being used to justify these cuts to education.”

Farmer’s report concludes with three policy recommendations: an immediate moratorium on charter school expansion, the creation of more accountability measures for charter schools, including a “school facility planning process,” and abolishing the SCSC. The final measure addresses a charter school closure loophole of sorts, in which schools recommended for closure by the Chicago Board of Education can appeal to the SCSC to remain open. Three of the four charter schools threatened with closure in 2015 found success with this channel.

Farmer says this method enables the SCSC to “bypass local control.” She also contends that this was always the primary aim of the SCSC, as it was based on legislation from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization known for authoring legislation establishing or expanding conservative ideals and spheres of influence in city halls and statehouses throughout the country. “[The SCSC] was established not to have this kind of neutral regulatory body,

it was established as a political body in its conception,” Farmer said.

In addition to highlighting the accountability and transparency problems for which CPS has been criticized previously, this study provides tangible data for the relationship between charter schools and school closures. A member of Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education, an education research organization, Farmer expects her work to serve as a foundation for new research efforts focused on the free market school choice aspirations of DeVos and the Trump administration, exemplified by its support of vouchers that would allow public school students to attend private or religious schools with taxpayer money.

“In the study, I talk about how student based budgeting allows for the per-student allocation to travel with the student from a neighborhood school to a charter school,” Farmer said. “That’s precisely a voucherlike model. So [with] the lessons that we learn from this study...we can perhaps anticipate what would happen if we moved to a voucher-like system. So that’s where the next, I think, movement is going to take shape.” ¬

COURTESY OF THE PROJECT FOR MIDDLE CLASS RENEWAL

While “underutilized” neighborhood schools are closed, charter schools opened within walking distance siphon off students.

MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

EVENTS

BULLETIN Immigration: Hoy en Inmigración National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St. Saturday, May 27, 9:30am–5:30pm.

Free. bit.ly/HoyenInmigración Únanse a Hoy para esta serie de talleres que discutirá tus derechos como inmigrante.

Los talleres van a cubrir como responder a ICE cuando llegan a tu puerta, mantener los beneficios de DACA, asegurar tus finanzas en el evento de deportación, y más. Los talleres estarán impartidos por el Consulado General de México en Chicago y el Resurrection Project. La mayoría de los talleres estarán impartidos en español.

Join Hoy newspaper for this series of workshops on your rights as an immigrant.

Workshops will cover responding to ICE at your door, maintaining DACA benefits, managing your finances in the event of a deportation, and more. Workshops will be taught by the Consulate General of Mexico in Chicago and the Resurrection Project.

Most workshops will be held in Spanish.

(Roderick Sawyer, trans. Claire Moore)

CPRT 2017: The Uneven Geographies of Housing Choice Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St. Tuesday, May 30. 5:30pm–6pm reception, 6pm– 7:30pm program. Free. bit.ly/CPRT2017 Learn about the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program in Chicago by joining the Chicago Policy Research Team and Chicago Fair Housing Alliance as they present their policy report, “‘Not Welcome’: The Uneven Geographies of Housing Choice.” The report examines income discrimination and the participants in the HVC program. (Mira Chauhan)

The People Speak: Voices Against Violence Kennedy-King College Theater, 740 W. 63rd St. May 30, 7pm–8:30pm. Free. bit.ly/TPSVoicesAgainstViolence

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Behind each news update about violence in Chicago is a story. The Chicago Reporter, Young Chicago Authors, and Public Narrative are coming together to give the people of Chicago a voice and tell these stories. Among other participants, the poets of Young Chicago Authors will discuss the emotional implications of living with violence. (Mira Chauhan)

VISUAL ARTS Curators Create Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St. Through July 7. Monday–Saturday, 8am– 6pm, Sunday, 8am–12pm.(773) 843-9000. bridgeportart.com Curators Create, which opened last week, showcases the work of the artists that curate some of Chicago’s great art galleries.

See work from Mary Ellen Croteau, Charles Gniech, Dolores Mercado, and others. As there are many more artist/ curators in the area who could be featured in an event like this, Curators Create could become a biannual event at the art center.

(Adia Robinson)

“A Constant Struggle” Panel Discussion: Strategies for Empowering Youth of Color Beverly Art Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, May 31, 7pm. (773) 445-3838. beverlyarts.org Housed within the Beverly Area Arts Alliance’s ongoing art exhibition on the legacy of ongoing racism in present-day inequality, this panel discussion will deal with one part of that legacy. Featuring individuals involved in social justice movements, social services, and teaching and youth programming, the panel will be moderated by Kathleen McInerney, a Saint Xavier professor who studies privilege and education policy. ( Julia Aizuss)

Underground Comedy Night Produce Model Gallery, 1007 W. 19th St. Sunday, May 28, 6pm–9pm. Free. produce-model.com Produce Model’s summer hours might only be Saturday afternoons and by appointment, but catch an extra glimpse at their current exhibition this Sunday, when the three artists featured in “Worldplay” (Alberto Aguilar, Jesse Malmed, and Alex Bradley Cohen), as well as several others, will participate in what the gallery’s event description is calling a “(literal) underground comedy night.” Go and have a laugh, then report back to us on what that means. ( Julia Aizuss)

MUSIC Jody Watley The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, May 25. 6pm doors, 7pm show. 21+. $28–$60. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Don’t miss Grammy Award–winning artist Jody Watley at the Promontory! Since the 1980s her music and music videos have been at the forefront of some of the most groundbreaking trends and movements in modern pop culture, so she’s sure to still stun with her moves and vocals. (Maddie Anderson)

Katastro and Pacific Dub: Best Friends Forever Tour Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, May 25, 8pm. 17+. $13, VIP Meet and Greet $40.

(312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Join Katastro and Pacific Dub at Reggies for what they’re calling a Best Friends Forever Tour—or #BFFTour, if you’re so inclined to share. Katastro combines sounds of blues, rock, funk, and hip-hop, while Pacific Dub boasts, fittingly, a “coastal vibe” to their “innovative alternative-rockreggae.” The bands will also be joined by

Aaron Kamm and the One Drops and the Concrete Roots. (Roderick Sawyer)

Evergrey / Seven Kingdoms / Need / Ascendia Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Friday, May 26.

8pm doors. 17+. $20–$25, VIP Meet and Greet $40. (312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Reggies will host a night of “beautiful but brutal” and “chaotic but calculated” sounds sourced all the way from Florida to Toronto to Sweden, featuring metal bands Evergrey, Seven Kingdoms, Need, and Ascendia.

(Maddie Anderson)

STAGE & SCREEN Maurice Sendak’s Tales from the Brothers Grimm The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Wednesday, May 31, 6pm. $5. (866) 811-4111. the-revival.com The Revival will stage a live reading of Maurice Sendak’s take on the Brothers Grimm’s notoriously dark “Fairy Tales.” You might recognize Sendak from the iconic classic Where the Wild Things Are, where the wild rumpus started. The Hyde Park improv group says it’s appropriate for ages seven and up. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Yo-Yo Ma Peace Concert St. Sabina Church, 1210 W. 78th Pl. Sunday, June 11, 4pm. $20. (312) 294-3000. cso.org/concertforpeace Join cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and the Children’s Choir for a music concert presented in partnership with Saint Sabina’s that celebrates and promotes more peace within Chicago. This program will include work by Dvořák, Joplin and Ellington. All donations and net ticket proceeds will benefit Saint Sabina’s anti-violence and “Strong Futures” employment programs. (Roderick Sawyer)

The Ladylike Project, a network that partners local artists with local community organizations, is coming to Pilsen with a comedy-afterschool programming duo.

With Brittany Meyer headlining and Shirley Blazen hosting, several standup comedians will bring their talents to support Future Ties, which runs afterschool and summer programming for kids in Parkway Gardens, a Greater Grand Crossing apartment complex “hit particularly hard by gun violence.” ( Julia Aizuss)

The Chicago Home Theater Festival has merged art and culture with community since 2012, with over five hundred artists and 5,000 neighbors convening in dozens of neighborhoods to share meals and experiences in each other’s homes. Against the backdrop of a hyper-segregated city, the gatherings center on connection and inclusion. This year’s festival offerings span a wide range of interests from the poetry of Frankiem Mitchell and Orin Frazier to tarot reading from healer Rhonda Wheatley, along with many other performances to suit practically every palate. Hosts include Northwestern professor E. Patrick Johnson, WBEZ reporter Natalie Moore, artist and DIY impresario Mykele Deville, and TRACE artists Marcus Davis and Alexandria Eregbu. (Nicole Bond)

The Soul of It: Shinemen + American Shoeshine

Among All This You Stand Like A Fine Brownstone

Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Friday, May 26, 7pm–9pm. Free. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org

eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Through Thursday, June 8. Fridays, Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $40, discounts available for seniors, students, and groups. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org

Funny Grabs Back: Future Ties Pinwheel Records, 1722 W. 18th St. Friday, June 2, 8pm–11pm. Free, purchase of raffle tickets encouraged. $5, $20 for five tickets.

Black Cinema House presents a shiny double feature. First, Chicago filmmaker Eleva Singleton’s 2015 documentary Shineman looks at the legacy of Chicago shoe-shine entrepreneur Bill Williams, through the lens of local politicians and historians. Then comes American Shoeshine, in which filmmaker Sparky Greene chronicles the shoeshine industry from its early beginnings. Vintage footage and photo stills help tell the story of race and class in society, as will “original Chicago shoe-shine stands” from Theaster Gates’s own collection. (Nicole Bond)

Chicago Home Theater Festival Locations and times vary. Sunday, May 14– Monday, May 29. Bronzeville: Sunday, May 14; Kenwood: Thursday, May 18; Hyde Park: Sunday, May 21; Englewood: Monday, May 22; Pilsen: Tuesday, May 23; Wednesday May 24 Little Village; South Shore: Saturday, May 27.

Free–$65. chicagohtf.org

Enjoy this revival tribute that celebrates the life of Vantile L. Whitfield as well as, of course, the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial.

First performed to acclaim at eta back in the nineties, you now have a second chance to watch sketchbook vignettes of Black life come to together through Whitfield’s adaptations of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks—don’t miss out. (Roderick Sawyer)

Harvey Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. opened May 11–June 11. $15-$68. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Long before there was Donnie Darko or Wilfred, there was Mary Chase’s 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Harvey. The titular character is an invisible rabbit that stands six feet and three inches tall and may end up imprisoning the “carefree and kind” protagonist Elwood P. Dowd in a sanitarium. ( Joseph S. Pete)

WANT TO PITCH A STORY TO THE WEEKLY? 5pm on Thursdays is the Pitching Hour.

If you have an idea for a story, or want to discuss an article we’ve published, come to our office for Public Newsroom hours, every Thursday from 4pm to 8pm.

6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637

MAY 24, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19