September 6, 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 39 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 Christian Belanger, Mira Chauhan, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback, Yunhan Wen Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Maria Babich, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli Radio Producers Erisa Apantaku, Andrew Koski, Lewis Page Social Media Editors 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 Publisher

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.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

THE INTERVIEW ISSUE This Interview Issue, the fourth of its kind, contains eight interviews with artists, activists, writers, and residents of Chicago.

You’ll find in these pages our conversations with a documentarian, a DJ on the brink of a world tour, a writer from “the free newspaper,” and the editor of a young magazine. We also bring together multiple voices from the city’s Black philanthropic community, an anti-violence campaign, a group of asylum seekers from Africa, and an artist collective from Englewood.

In every issue of the Weekly, we strive to bring light to people and issues that get overlooked or misrepresented in traditional media. But sometimes even our stories can’t capture the whole narrative, our words insufficient. It’s a lesson from Chicago journalist and interviewer Studs Terkel that we’ve long taken to heart—there are some things we can’t say any better than our subjects could themselves.

So in this issue, rather than put each narrative in our own words, we open ourselves up to the whole story, as it happened to the people we spoke to. And as much as possible, we try to get out of their way.

an alternative voice

“They’re all struggling. And yet journalism survives!” olivia stovicek...4 in the center of the ring

“Art showcases and gallery shows are more than just slapping an artist on the wall.” lois biggs...6 out of order

“You can tell when something’s been over-fucking-cooked.” christopher good...8 an ecosystem of giving

“We sometimes just don’t recognize the powers of the everyday acts of organizing, kindness, and giving.” bridget vaughn...10

seeking a home, without a country

“No one leaves their home without the fear of what’s behind them.” sarah conway...12 a new lens on life

“Whenever I’m out, I look up, because I feel like once upon a time, I didn’t look up enough.” elaine chen...15 from summer nights to the long haul

“I know people that care about where they live are doing something about it.” julie xu & sebastián hidalgo...16 more than just optics

“It all feeds back into humanity...giving a humanity to people.” anna aguiar kosicki...20

Cover illustration by Adelaido Olea

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An Alternative Voice Ben Joravsky on journalism’s history and future AS TOLD TO OLIVIA STOVICEK

I

feel that one of the great miracles in recent journalism, if I may, is that that swagger and freedom that the Reader represented when it was flush with cash has somehow survived to one degree or another through all these difficult financial times.

It’s easy to be on top of the world, cocky and cool, when you’re rolling in the dough, but when you’re struggling...if you still maintain that sense of mission, it is really impressive.

Ben Joravsky has been writing for the Chicago Reader for most of its forty-six-year history, freelancing on a regular basis since the early eighties and becoming a staff writer in 1990. Focusing on local politics, Joravsky has written about everything from Chicago’s school board to flawed marijuana laws. His politics column has notably kept a critical eye on tax increment financing (TIF), a program in which certain property taxes are diverted from their normal uses; theoretically the funds are used to promote development in blighted areas, but in practice the mayor has significant discretion over their use.

In 1990, Joravsky wrote a piece about a first-term alderman, Edwin Eisendrath, running for Congress against a revered incumbent. Eisendrath lost that fight, but this July he led a group of investors that bought the Sun-Times and the Reader, prevailing over the seemingly all-but-certain success of a bid by tronc, the publisher of the Tribune. I spoke with Joravsky about the Eisendrath deal, his trajectory in Chicago journalism, the Reader’s history and voice, and journalism’s survival I lived briefly in Chicago in the late seventies, and then I left for a couple of years. That first time I was living in Chicago, I was well aware of the Reader; I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I came back to Chicago in ’81...and I started really systematically pursuing my career as a journalist.

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At some point I knew I wanted to break into the Reader, and so—I forget, the years just go by, I think it was like ’83 or ’84—I started small, go to a meeting and write something up, and they liked it, they bought it. And then they bought another one, and then another one. I did a profile of a guy named James Bevel as the first feature I ever did for the Reader. It was on the cover—I was so thrilled! That was in 1984, and I still have it—I saved it and I framed it, it’s on my wall.

They had this attitude of, we’ll read anything, so show us what you got. We’ll read it, and if we like it, we’ll run it. We make no promises. They just kept liking ’em, and pretty soon they were asking me to write stuff, and that’s how it began.

They’ve always given me so much freedom: freedom to pursue the story I wanted to pursue, no matter how quirky or off the trail. I got to write every conceivable kind of story for the Reader, everything you might imagine…

I did something throughout the nineties called Neighborhood News that doesn’t exist anymore. And it was exactly what it said. Oh my goodness, I did so many. Every neighborhood in the city I’ve written about. It could be a zoning spat, or some lady would complain the city wasn’t recycling Christmas trees like they promised—I wrote about it. The city had this street repaving machine that was killing trees—I wrote about it. It was like a slice of life of Chicago, and they gave me the freedom to write about it. And I would try to do it in a way that would explain to readers how the city worked. Why did they decide to use this street cleaning device, and what does that say about the city?

So what was the Reader like back in the eighties? I don’t want to sound like one of those guys that’s like, “Aw man, you shoulda seen the city in the old days,” but the Reader was such a special place. It had

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SAGE COFFEY

such a strong identity and such a very clear sense of purpose and mission. And it was so fabulously successful.... They had a sense of what cool was, they understood their audience so well, and the community was growing, and the Reader was growing with that community.

I’ve been writing about politics for the Reader on a regular basis since about ’85. But to a certain degree I inherited a perspective, and that perspective is independent. The Reader was born in the aftermath of the antiwar movement...of the 1968 Democratic Convention...of the

assassination of Martin Luther King and the eruption of rioting on the West Side— these are like insurrections, I could go on and on, there were so many of them....

And the Reader was sort of the voice of that, politically speaking, to a degree. It was that notion that we’re going to have an alternative voice to the mainstream voice that you read in the daily newspapers, and we’re going to be independent of sort of the established world of Chicago, and they were.

The Reader in 1983 waved the flag, without any ambiguity, without any

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doubt, without any hesitation, with pride for Harold Washington. It’s the only white thing in Chicago that was just unambiguously for Harold. The Sun-Times and the Tribune were dithering, “Oh, oh, we’re so scared, on the one hand this, on the one hand that.” And the Reader was like, “Yeah! We’re proud, we wear our buttons.”

That kind of sums up the Reader, you know? The movement that led to Harold is part of the same movement that led to the Reader, it’s just the white side of town. So to me that’s what the Reader is: the voice of independence of the establishment.

I’m obsessed with politics, I always have been. I grew up in Evanston...My family was a voracious reader of newspapers, we got three newspapers a day, and I was just obsessed with Chicago. Daley was this giant mythical figure—I was fascinated with his political machine. I didn’t like it, I would never join it, but fascinated with it. When I moved back to Chicago in ’81, I just jumped right in as happy as can be.

And then all of a sudden here’s Harold Washington, man, like, wow! The greatest ever, that I’ve ever met, covered, written about. No one can even come close to him in terms of his intelligence, and his charisma, and his sense of humor, and his knowledge...The resistance he got from white people, it’s embarrassing really. I was a white kid, middle-class kid, I was sheltered from all the kind of prejudice that Black people had to face on a regular basis. But I got a sense of it when I saw the utter spasm of hysteria that erupted over Harold’s victory in the Democratic primary in 1983; I’m like, are you kidding me?

On one level, Harold Washington’s years in office and the resistance being faced from white people, white politicians, corporate Chicago, was frightening. [On another,] his response was exhilarating.

So I’ve been hooked ever since. And then when Daley took over—I gotta admit, in so many ways I had the blues when Harold died, I didn’t get over it for years. So many people in Chicago were rejoicing because Daley was the mayor—that motivated me, you know what I’m saying? “He’s not as great as you think, people.” So that’s how I got hooked.

T

here’s a level of skepticism and disbelief in Chicago about what our leaders say, and that’s the direct result of journalists pointing out the

inconsistencies, the hypocrisies, the double standards, the deceit.

In terms of what I do, I feel I’ve made a contribution on at least three levels to people’s attitudes about government. One is my coverage of the schools; one is my coverage of TIF and municipal financing; and the third is my general coverage about mayors. And I’m really proud of the work I did on the Olympics. The Reader was the only publication that was consistently [criticizing Mayor Daley’s effort to bring the Olympics to Chicago that ended in 2009]— well, I was the only guy writing about it, so it’s really [that] they gave me freedom to just hammer away at that—and everybody [else] was on the bandwagon.

I started writing about [TIFs]—such an obscure topic, such an esoteric, arcane thing. It’s the perfect device for Chicago politicians who are looking to set up a source of money, because it’s a hidden tax that has a very convoluted explanation.

And so it’s really easy to bore people with your explanation of how it works. When they lose interest, you can just let the money flow in. And then it was largely used to redevelop the downtown, and all of corporate Chicago, including the newspapers at the time, were aboard that effort to transform the downtown and surrounding areas. And TIF was devised to do it. So they weren’t gonna criticize it.

So once again, it’s the independence of the Reader.

I first stumbled upon [TIFs] in the nineties—remember I told you I was doing these Neighborhood News stories, so I’d write about a new shopping mall, and they’d go, “Yeah, it’s being paid for with TIF financing.” The first TIF story I ever wrote was 1987, the very first TIF deal, and I’m very proud of that story because most of the criticism of the TIF program is in that story, quoting municipal finance geeks who were citing some of the potential problems with the program.

I had written an article here, a column there over the years, but I began to connect the dots in [the early 2000s]. I discovered all this stuff about [TIFs]; I’d write a column and nobody would do anything, so [I’d think], “I know, I’d better write another column,” and then one column led to another and another.

That’s when I made the great realization about journalism that if you want to have an impact with journalism, man, you’ve

got to be stubborn. One time’s not gonna do it—two times, three times, four times, you’ve got to keep coming back. You can’t be afraid of making a nuisance of yourself or people making fun of you. “Oh, you’re writing another TIF story man, why do you write about them all the time?” “Why aren’t you writing about them?” That would be my comeback.

And then I became really into it. Like, wow, what a scam! It got almost fun to write about because it is such a scam, and I think it says so much about Chicago.

I think my great success and great triumph with TIF stories, is that after all these years of writing them, the public knows that those three letters T-I-F equals B-A-D. They may not know the details, but they know the city’s up to no good, they know it!

I’ll read the Tribune and they’ll say, “The mayor says it’s a great tool for economic development. Critics say it’s a slush fund.” Oh, I love it, I go, “Critics, who? You mean me? Not gonna show me any love, huh?” I have determined that if I was a journalism school teacher, [I would tell students to] never say “critics say.”

Usually it means it’s the truth, but you’re afraid to come out and say it.

I

think that the acquisition of the SunTimes and the Reader by Eisendrath and the labor unions and the collective of investors that they put together was the best thing that’s happened to the Reader and the Sun-Times in the last ten years.

On many levels. But the basics: it saved both papers. Because there’s no doubt in my mind that the Tribune was going to swallow them both. When they said, “Oh no, we’re going to keep it going,” yeah right.

Every journalist in Chicago knew that promise wasn’t going to be kept. Because journalists...they’re skeptical people. So the purchase of the Sun-Times and the Reader...keeps alive the notion of two independent voices [in Chicago news].

And please let me make this as clear as I can, I will never understand the editorial voice of the Chicago Tribune. Never. Ever.

I don’t understand why they think it would be appropriate to have this whacked-out, free-market, libertarian drivel in a city that’s so liberal. Nobody in Chicago talks this way. All right, that’s not true, some people do. You might get a few eggheads from the University of Chicago, like

libertarians or something—but nobody you would ever want to hang around with talks this way! You know what I’m saying?

Eighty percent of the city year after year votes Democratic. They didn’t even endorse Hillary. They endorsed Gary Johnson. It’s a joke! And then when I thought about that owning the Sun-Times, I was so sad. And the Reader? The free newspaper? Free not just in cost, but free in spirit—they’re gonna own that? No, this is like a nightmare! And then there’s Eisendrath and the unions—I love it—they snatched it away! Right away from the Tribune. So I don’t know where it’s going; I have no crystal ball. But I’m really happy right now.

I think it’s amazing that the Reader still has so much of its swagger, and I see it in a lot of the younger writers; they kind of remind me of myself back in the day. Journalism is surviving. I mean, I don’t know how it’s surviving, but there’s this whole new generation of journalists.

I can’t believe it sometimes. All the models don’t work, no one is making any money, nobody’s figured it out. They’re all struggling. And yet journalism survives! It’s a great thing...particularly now in the age of Trump. You’ve got millennials writing articles now, you know what I’m saying, and it’s like god bless every single one of them, I love it. God, I sound like, “A day will come!” But the good days will come, and I do believe they’ll eventually figure out a way to make money at these things, and they’ll start forcing people to pay for the content that they are just taking.

I look at the new era of journalists, and I think they’re great, a lot better than they were during the Daley years. I think there was a lot of complacency in Chicago in general in the nineties and [the 2000s], and it was reflected in the journalism. I don’t see that complacency now; I feel a sense of urgency. So I feel in some ways that journalism is getting better. I know that sounds weird, but I think that journalists are doing a great job. Oh my god, paid so little, so unstable, they get these owners that buy them up and don’t know what they’re doing. And yet people just keep plowing ahead. So in some ways it’s really just a beautiful thing. ¬

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

In the Center of the Ring

CIRCUS Magazine founder Bianca Betancourt seeks “the trending and the undiscovered”

BY LOIS BIGGS

B

ianca Betancourt, founder and editorin-chief of CIRCUS Magazine, sits in the magazine’s 18th Street storefront.

A neon CIRCUS logo casts her curls in electric blue light while Cherokee, her eight-year-old German Shepherd, greets passersby with howls.

CIRCUS, which aims to cover “the trending and the undiscovered,” is based in Pilsen but has a large readership on the West Coast, in London, and in Central and South America. Betancourt is hard at work on CIRCUS’s second print issue, aims for a fall release, and hopes to “keep creating and being able to tell more stories.” In the meantime, she tells us her own.

I’ve been doing CIRCUS now for four years. I started it when I was nineteen, when I was still at Columbia College. I’ve always loved magazines; when I was growing up I’d always get a stack full of subscriptions in the mailbox. But as I grew older through college, as I became a little more educated, a little more aware of how publications and media are made, I got really frustrated because when I was spending a lot of money on the really gorgeous cover of a magazine, the content would be really lackluster or it would be all ads.

I was in the midst of figuring out my voice as a writer and was surrounded by a lot of creative people and artists, so I was like, “How can I bring these people together to make something new?”

There’s a lot of websites and publications that cater to the creative and say they’re featuring up-and-coming artists. But I feel like CIRCUS goes beyond who’s cool and what they’re doing. We really want to figure out their story, what inspires them to create and why they keep creating and the hardships they have while creating. I always want to make sure the profiles we do, no

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matter how big or how small the person is, are relatable to our readers.

How did you get the idea to open a CIRCUS space?

I was in a spot a year ago where I was really ready to move, was very ready to leave Chicago. I tried to get jobs postgrad.

Everything was like, “Oh, you don’t live in New York, we can’t hire you.” Or jobs here, I would get an interview and I’d never hear back. It was so immensely frustrating, and I was just like, “What I can I do to make myself happy?” And then one of my best friends came to me and she was like, “You shouldn’t move, you should just push through with the magazine a little more and I think you’ll reap the rewards.” I really thought about what would make me happy, and the idea of the studio came about.

It was a really frustrating process. I tried to get a business loan from two different entities in Chicago and they were stringing me along for months saying my idea was great, my business plan was great, but when it came time to ask for money, they were like, “Oh, this seems really risky.” I was really grateful that I had a friend who had an inheritance come through and was willing to help me out, so I had a very small personal loan that basically paid for the security deposit for the space, which only left me with a little bit. People tell me all the time, “You built this space out of nothing,” but I really did, because I couldn’t get loans from anywhere. So because I made this happen, when we have events and have people coming in I’m just kind of shell-shocked that it worked, that somehow it happened.

[During the CIRCUS space opening event in June] we had music, people were checking out the clothes and the fashion

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presentation; we had some drinks going, and art on the walls. It was really nice to see people really interacting with the art, being interested, asking who the artists were, and what their story was. I feel like you don’t get that at a lot of art shows, you just have people coming in and chugging a PBR and being there because it’s cool to do. We’ll do events more sparingly if it means we’ll have them curated better, so they don’t become that. I want people to be interested, to be able to reach out to the artist and talk to the artist, to be curious about their story.

I’ve consistently had the artists that I’ve put in the studio or in past events we’ve had always tell me that the shows we do are the best shows they’ve ever been in—I think because of that interaction. Art showcases and gallery shows are more than just slapping an artist on the wall. What story are you trying to tell? What is your intent with these images? Why these people?

You describe yourself as a “writer but woman first.”

I feel like women writers and women journalists are always told that in order to be taken seriously we need to put our emotions to the side, to put our feelings to the side, basically to write like a man or think like a man. My pieces that have had the biggest responses from people have been personal pieces or been stories that had a personal touch to them. If people just want to read a hard news story, that’s what the newspaper is for.

It’s really important for me to be authentic as a writer, which is why even though I have a journalism background and am a trained journalist, I kind of step away from calling myself a journalist now. I feel like the era of being a writer but not stating

your opinion is slowly dying because in this day and age, in the Trump administration, all we have is our beliefs and our opinions.

What stories are you most proud of?

One was called “To My Future Daughter” and I literally wrote it at two in the morning crying over my high school boyfriend, who was a terrible person. I was just crying and I was recalling a conversation I’d had with my mother time and time again when I would come home crying because of something he said or did. She told me very simply that young girls deserve to be happy.

That just really stuck with me. I never really talked about my personal life with my parents—it’s just how we are—but when I was in college by myself in a new city far away from my family I remembered my mother saying that to me, and so I wrote a piece about that. I published it at two in the morning, not expecting anyone to read it, and woke up the next day to dozens and dozens of comments, [to] messages of people I knew and people who didn’t even like me being like, I needed to read this, I’ve experienced this, thank you for being honest.

I think that’s a common comment I always get from people, thank you for being honest.

So there was that one, and there was also one called “Another Hair Think Piece” that I did, talking about when I moved to Chicago, and between having internships and school and balancing my life, I was so tired of straightening my hair every single day, so I just started to go natural. [And I was] dealing with feeling insecure about that and trying to become this new person— my mother very much wanted me and my siblings to assimilate to American culture as much as we could growing up. I wrote about being with my new boyfriend at the time,

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and how when he saw me for the first time with my curly hair, he just smiled and said that it looked like who I was meant to be.

How is CIRCUS responding to the current political climate?

I feel like having alternative media in this time is so important, and it’s so important to reflect what youth are thinking and what millennials are thinking because we are the ones inheriting this mess of a world. Even when you look at mainstream companies, it’s every day we find out that some rich social media head is in correlation with Donald Trump. It makes your stomach sick. God, it’s so nice to have these other platforms where you can be free to criticize and you can just be who you are, and you’re not going to be scrutinized for it. I feel like CIRCUS just existing in and of itself is kind of our form of rebellion against this administration.

What is CIRCUS’s relationship to the Pilsen neighborhood?

The clothes I sell here, because they’re all handmade and because they’re all made by very young, independent artists, they’re a little more expensive than other things you’d find in the neighborhood solely because they’re not mass-produced. If someone were to come to me and say, “Your clothes are too expensive,” or “What are you trying to promote for the neighborhood?” honestly all I can say is that one hundred percent of the artists in here are women, queer, or people of color, and all of the price points are what the artists decided themselves.

Everyone’s welcome here just to hang out, just to talk, you don’t need to come in and buy something, that’s not the point of the space.

I feel like there’s a big divide: we need to find the balance between financially bettering the neighborhood and keeping in mind who’s been here for decades. How do we find that balance, how do we make it a better neighborhood for everyone?

What’s the story behind the “hype ain’t shit” mural?

It’s funny because I was arguing with a

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friend who was helping me open the space and he was like, “Why are you going to put that on your wall front-and-center? Hype is everything.” And I’m like, “No, it’s not.”

It’s so easy to build a brand these days, you just need a logo, you need some Instagram content, you need some followers, then you have a brand, quote-unquote. As a writer and a media maker I can see right through it all, because I know if you’re not a storyteller, I know if you’re not a writer, I know if your heart isn’t into what you’re doing.

I feel like everyone just wants their fifteen minutes right now, so they decide to make a magazine or decide to make a

brand or to make some T-shirts. It’s so easy to gain hype, but then what comes after it?

My brand advisor Javier Suárez directed me to this really cool muralist who does a lot of text-based art, and I was like, screw it, let’s see what this looks like. We’ll eventually switch this out, probably in a few months, but for now I think it’s the perfect statement.

What do you hope for CIRCUS’s future?

The next issue is heavily featuring women in music. So I would love to do some sort of celebration of that issue, a big show filled with the people that we feature, the singers,

the DJs, the producers, everything. I feel like it would get an amazing crowd, I feel like it would be super successful; it’s just the matter of having the right venue and resources.

If we were to get bigger, I would want to stay in Chicago just because it’s what inspired us in the first place, it continues to inspire us, and there’s no other, in my opinion, publication that’s featuring these young creatives in an authentic light. The magazines in Chicago are a little antiquated and bought out by big companies, or all about ads, or [really] thin. It’s really nice to keep this happening and be a voice for voices that are unheard. ¬

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

Out of Order From child DJ to engineer to world tour artist, Jana Rush works backwards

BY CHRISTOPHER GOOD

WILLS GLASSPIEGEL

F

rom the day she got her first ghettoblaster while growing up in Chatham, Jana Rush–– aka JARu––has always been connected to Chicago music. Her ascent into the scene reads like folklore: at ten years, she called Kennedy-King’s WKKC 89.3 FM to schedule an audition. “Once they were done laughing,” Rush tells me, the DJs showed her the ropes, and juke icon Gant-Man took her under his wing. By 1996, Jana had put out a single and a split 12” with DJ Deeon on the legendary house label Dance Mania, where she was billed as “The Youngest Female DJ.” But in the two decades between “The Armageddon 1996” and last year’s “MPC 7635” EP, Rush had been away from the public eye and, for the most part, out of the scene. “ You know, I’m not much of a communicator––typical engineering student,” she jokes.

Rush had been busy “adulting”—she settled upstate in Antioch, started working as an X-ray technician and volunteer firefighter, and put herself through engineering school. Between the jobs, the homework, and the four-hour commute to UIC, there wasn’t much time for producing.

And yet, even the late DJ Rashad was asking her when she was going to get back to music. “I think he was ticked off [that I wasn’t creating], but he was like, ‘Okay, you come back when you’re ready.’ And even then, I knew: it wasn’t time for me to do anything, it wasn’t time for me to say I was committed, quote-unquote. Because I really wasn’t! But I think it worked out for the best.”

In the early 2010s, Rush returned to Chicago’s near West Side, graduated from UIC, and started releasing tracks again. “Once I wrapped up that part of my life, I knew it was time to do what I’d been wanting to do forever. I was like, right now, this is my time. I don’t have to do anything else for anyone, so I’m just going to do it for me.”

Then, she got a message on her Soundcloud from Lara Rix-Martin, the head of Objects Limited—an up-and-coming label “focused on female identifying/non-binary electronic musicians.” Rush says “she made me realize that this music world is mine if I’m serious and want to take it.”

Rush is serious, and people are paying attention. In July, Objects Limited released her debut LP, Pariah––a off-kilter blitz through juke, acid, hip-hop and footwork. Now, she’s working on a sophomore album, crowdfunding a vinyl pressing of Pariah, talking with booking agents, trying to get her passport sorted out for an upcoming European tour––and working at an oil refinery and as a CAT-scan technician.

Still, Rush made time to stop by WHPK 88.5 FM for a track-by-track conversation about Pariah. Our talk is excerpted below.

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3. DIVINE

4. ??? ??

I did this one way, way back, when I got my MPC 2000 XL* after my first X-ray job––so that was probably 2004. For then, it was too weird! I had some obscure jazz CD, and I just took it and started playing with the filter––basically, what I’m trying to say is that the jazz track sounds nothing like this at all. And I just kept working on it; this track didn’t come together in one day. Actually, I dedicated this one to my uncle. He had passed away in like 1995; all of a sudden he just fell out. I think this is appropriate for him.

So, this is a funny name for a track...

*An Akai sampler popularized in hip-hop production

Well, I don’t really want to say too much, because this is a sample [laughs]. It’s an obvious one, too. But I just decided to juke it out!

Speaking of juke––something that stands out to me about Pariah is how it runs through so many uniquely “Chicago” styles.

Well, I’d say I hadn’t settled with a genre yet!

You know, me with music, I’m just gonna keep going until I figure out where I fit most.

My presence is kind of lukewarm with the footwork community––though you have some people that know the history, know where I stand with Rashad and the Teklife crew––because I didn’t really come around on the scene very much and didn’t put many tracks out. [But] I guess what I’m trying to say is that footwork isn’t the endall. If it doesn’t work out with footwork, I’m going to do something else! I like music in general. One of my favorite producers isn’t even a footwork producer, it’s Timbaland!

You know--whatever happens happens.

MUSIC

5. BREAK IT

6. NO FUKS GIVEN

9. ACID TEK 2

12. FRENETIC SNARE

“Break It” was a track I made under pressure, and the deadline––well, I wasn’t going to make it, basically. But I got to the studio and pushed that track out in about twenty minutes, had it mixed and everything!

When I come from work at the oil refinery, and I’m tired as fuck because I’ve been out in the sun all day, I just go: ‘This is what we’re going to do.’

I kind of work backwards: a lot of people start out with the sample first, they cut the samples and they get that all situated. I did the drums first, then I found some vocals and started pounding it out.

This track right here, I didn’t even like it when I did it. I just gave it to Lara. [But] this was when she was like, “let’s do an album this time.” I had just bought some 303 emulator* and I was trying to figure out how to work it, how to put it together with the drums and everything.

I made this last year for a little Bandcamp comp. I wasn’t floored by it––I was just like, “This is a basic acid track,” while everyone was like, “Oh, this is cold!” But I really recognized that people like this and it’s a good track when I was out in LA and going to a party, and as I entered, they were playing it! I didn’t know the DJ or how he got the download, but it was going off.

Traxman was on me about it too; he was like, “Sis, I am playing this in Japan, they love it!” And I was, like “Whatever!” But in LA, I was like: “Hey, this is something.”

There are a ton of breakbeats on this one–– do you think of it as a jungle track?

Do you think there’s a common thread to your production?

Well, what my music has in common is that it’s typically crazy––and it sounds chaotic, but it’s not. In my mind, it works out. I guess that’s one reason why I like Venetian Snares.

When my mom listens to his tracks, she’ll be like––“what is this noise?” But you know, it makes sense to me, and that’s how my music is.

There’s a recipe for footwork; there’s a recipe for the subgenres of footwork.

There are recipes for everything, but I don’t typically follow the recipe, with the arrangement, with the beat. Like I said, some of this lukewarmness is my fault, so I’m not going to bitch and moan about it.

A lot of critics love that you broke those formulas––how do you respond to that buzz?

I mean, I love it. I got to the point one day where I just felt like crying. And I’m not one to be on feelings-type stuff, so for me to feel like I wanted to cry–to be getting recognized [...] I feel like an imposter, basically, and I definitely don’t feel like this is my best music. But it’s very inspiring to be better, and just keep going at it, and stop being defeated all the time!

*A “squelchy” Roland synthesizer made famous by acid house Is acid house a big influence for you?

First record [I owned] was an acid track–– that was “Land of Confusion” [by Armando].

I was really heavily into acid house when I was a teenager––like Acid Tracks Vol. 3 , that was the shit. They had a track on Vol. 2 called “Box Energy” [by DJ Pierre], that was killer. Plus, all Tyree’s stuff, like “Video Crash.”

Do you normally produce in a home studio?

I produce a lot in my home studio, but I try to have a setup where I can produce anywhere. I take my equipment around with me a lot [because] I look at my equipment like a sketchpad––you know, if you’re an artist, you take your sketchpad everywhere.

I sketch when I’m out, and when I come home, I’ll listen to the projects and pull it together.

What’s the strangest sample you’ve ever used on a track?

I used a Minnie Riperton sample in a track on my Soundcloud–– she’s the lady with the high voice that Mariah Carey tried to emulate! Again, no one would know that was her, but that was one of her tracks––I don’t even know which one it was now! I love her sound; I love her band from back in the day.

In terms of sampling, the person whose footsteps I’d want to follow is J Dilla. The way you flip a sample can do so much for a track. To me, messing around with samples is not just finding a sample and pushing a button and saying, “Ah, yeah, I got it up to 160 BPM.” I like to play around with it.

Does the “Tek” in the name have anything to do with Teklife?

It has nothing to do with Teklife. But I guess it would’ve been cool to lie and say yeah [laughs].

11. CHILL MODE I like the seductiveness of this track. You know, this is one of the last tracks that I did for [Pariah], so I was under a lot of time constraints. I feel like this track could’ve grown a little bit more, but at the same time, I like the simplicity of it because I hate when tracks are overproduced. You can tell when something’s been over-fucking-cooked!

What’s your mindset when you sit down to record something?

You know, a lot of the time, when you start making [a] track, it’s not time to actually make the track. Your best ideas don’t come when you’re thinking about it, or when you’re like, “I need to come up with an idea.”

It comes when you’re playing around, and end up like––“Man, this is awesome!”

It’s jungle-y, but no, not a jungle track–– because in that scene, they’re very particular about their sound and their snares. So if you throw an amen break* on a track and be like, “Ah, I’m a jungle producer now”––you’re gonna get disrespected. So I call it what it is: jungle-y, breakbeat-y. Still, I really like this track! * A drum break from “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons, widely regarded as the mostsampled record ever.

So, what’s next for you?

Well, at the beginning of the year, I’ll be getting over to Europe––so where my mind is right now is getting a passport….

I’m excited, but I also know it’s hard work, and that touring can beat you to death.

So I’m trying to take care of myself more, and actually get to the gym instead of just talking about it––because if you think about it, you’re just performing, but DJing is an endurance sport. If you show up and you’re not ready, you’re gonna crash.

You don’t want to do that in front of your fans…. You might think that fans come and go, but in reality, people invest in you. If you’ve got people investing in you and you are fickle about what you’re doing, then it’s harder to get people interested, because they don’t know if you’re playing or not.

So I just want to give my all, give one hundred percent to the people that got me to this point. I didn’t get myself to this point.

I made the music to get noticed, but the fans are what sustain you––so if you can’t put in for them, then you’re dead [laughs]. Jana Rush will perform at Laura in Wicker Park, 1535 N. Ashland Ave., on September 9, 10pm–4am. Tickets $10. Info at facebook. com/ThemFlavors. She will also perform at the Hideout Inn in December.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

An Ecosystem of Giving

Black philanthropists on the endless diversity and importance of giving AS TOLD TO BRIDGET VAUGHN

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ugust was Black Philanthropy Month: a campaign started in 2011 to connect the often “silo-ed” world of Black giving, as Jackie Copeland-Carson, the campaign’s founder, described it. Last month, South Side Weekly Radio broadcast interviews between reporter Bridget Vaughn and members of the Black philanthropic community. Every week offered a different viewpoint on giving back, including how corporations give back to the communities where they operate, how individuals give, and how groups of people collectively join forces to make a greater impact. Below are excerpts from those conversations. Listen to the full interviews online at southsideweekly.com/ssw-radio.

JeNyce Boolton JeNyce Boolton is the vice president for regional community relations at U.S. Bank.

She talks about philanthropy from a corporate perspective, especially how it relates to the African-American community.

What’s really important is the impact of your work, your ability to demonstrate how your work within the community, with your constituency, has made a decided difference. I know for me personally as a corporate donor, I like to hear about some of the stories of your success, so maybe if there’s an individual that went from, you know, maybe barely going to high school to actually attending college—those sort of stories that really kind of paint the impact and really show what the success is for an individual—that’s important. But again, it’s also the financial health of an organization and their ability to really have some sort of sustainability as an organization, but also with the individuals that they support.

That’s important.

I had, just by way of example, a site visit with After School Matters—we support that organization with their apprenticeship program, and that infuses having a job but also the arts as well. And what was really meaningful for me was talking with leadership and talking with the students who are in the program, finding out from them personally what is it they like about

the program, what are you getting out of it, how is this gonna make you a better person, if you will. So I think working with the constituency [of ] an organization, that’s really important, and it also really adds that flavor and color to the work that an organization does. I can look at an application and it’s very different to read on paper what an organization is doing versus seeing it live and in action, and that’s what’s important. It very much personalizes the work that the organization is doing and our partnership or potential partnership with the organization.

Jackie Copeland-Carson Jackie Copeland-Carson is the founder of Black Philanthropy Month. She talks about her experience with fundraising and why it’s important to highlight Black philanthropy.

In the early 2000s, I was living in Minnesota.

And I was realizing people I studied with in West Africa twenty years ago were suddenly in my church, or their kids were going to my daughter’s school. I was just running into this cross section of the country’s Black diaspora coming to live in the Twin Cities for opportunities. It’s a cold place, but at that time there was a lot of opportunity.

The Twin Cities...was kind of a United Nations of Black people. And of course, a longstanding African-American community.

So because I lived and worked in Africa and I always had this interest in global issues, and had worked in philanthropy for so long, I was doing a lot of volunteerism and just pro-bono consulting to start an African women’s nonprofit around how they could get fundraising. And that is what I had been doing a long time in the African-American community as well.

It’s been really exciting because we sometimes just don’t recognize the powers of the everyday acts of organizing, kindness, and giving, which I always say are the glue that has held our community together through good times and bad, throughout our history. And it’s not surprising that after

twenty years of research it’s still documented that Black people give the highest proportion of their income to charity. And if you add it all up, it’s about $12 billion a year from African-Americans alone, and approximately $11 billion if you just count African immigrants. And that doesn’t count Black people from Latin America and the Caribbean living in the U.S., because there is this global, new diaspora. So at a minimum, Black folks living in the U.S., old and new diaspora, give [around $23 billion a year].

(Ed. note: This number includes both charitable donations and international remittances.)

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF SUBJECTS

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¬ SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

PHILANTHROPY

Corliss Garner & Andreason Brown BMO Harris Bank VP of Community Affairs Corliss Garner and Forefront COO Andreason Brown are advisory board members of the African-American Legacy (AAL), an initiative of the Chicago Community Trust started in 2003. Garner and Brown speak on the three pillars of the African-American Legacy— grant-making, community engagement, and collective giving—and their current funding program, Empowerment for Peace.

Corliss Garner: I see [grant-making, community engagement, and collective giving] feeding off one another. In my mind, I envision kind of this circle, right, where the giving piece of it—getting folks inspired about philanthropy and giving them a vehicle to be philanthropic—allows us to fund more organizations, which allows them to expand their work in the community, and allows us to then hear from that community about the work that they’re doing, which we then share again with those folks who want to be philanthropic, so that they know that there are causes out there that they can help support.

Andreason Brown: This notion of collective giving is all about community, right? We really want to create this ecosystem of giving, whether you have $25 or $25,000 to give.

How do we create an ability for everyone in our community to give and support.

CG: And I think that’s critically important, what Andreason just said, particularly in the Black community, where folks may not have the capacity to be philanthropic in the way that they think philanthropy exists, right?

They think you need three or four zeros behind that number to be philanthropic, where you can say, I have $100 to give for the entire year. But I see a need in our community, I want to be a part of the solution to that need, but I don’t think my hundred dollars is really gonna do a lot, right? But where can I put that hundred dollars, with other people who are putting a hundred dollars, and be impactful in a collective way? ...We’re raising our hands to say: African-American Legacy is that vehicle. So if you only have a hundred dollars a year to give, but you want

Liz Thompson Liz Thompson is president of the Cleveland Avenue Foundation for Education (C.A.F.E.).

Education is the primary focus of C.A.F.E.’s philanthropy, which has supported numerous organizations dedicated to student success.

Thompson talks about how she and her husband, former McDonald’s CEO Don Thompson, work to support Black Chicago through various enterprises.

to do something for the community, and you want to leave a legacy, and you want to be impactful, park your dollars with us, because we’re going out to the street. We’re hearing what’s happening in the community, and we understand what’s happening at the street level. And we then use that information to inform our work and you can see how your philanthropy is being executed.

AB: I attended one site visit, and one organization that I was exposed to was in [the] Englewood neighborhood: the Crusher’s Club, which provides an alternative to gangs. They use boxing as a means of an alternative to gangs. And to sit and talk with these young people about what causes the frustration and the angst in their lives and the challenges they’ve gone through, and how this program has given them an outlet and a way to redirect their frustrations and their challenges, was just really really powerful. And you can see that this program is really changing the trajectory of lives. Because you can hear from them— where they were, where they are—and you can see the potential for where they could go.

And after that site visit I kind of sat back and said, you know, this really is what AAL is about. This is what we’re trying to do. It’s not that ivory tower, high-level work that we’re immersed in. It’s actually on the ground, in the community, actually having the impact.

When we talk about pure philanthropic giving, we think about it in three ways.

The first way is—you know, everybody has friends and family, and they’re gonna ask you to contribute to their causes. We take so much joy in being able to do that: hey, we’ve got our annual dinner, can you buy a table? A friend of mine has a cause for a domestic violence shelter: You know, Liz, it’s the annual giving time, can you give?

Absolutely. Right? So there is that bucket of giving where it will continue as long as we’ve got money, we’re gonna continue to give to the causes that are near and dear to our friends and to our family. The next way we think about it, the next bucket, is in our strategic investments, where we consider the money that we are able to contribute to organizations that have causes that are near and dear to our heart. So for example, college access and success. We invest in organizations that help young people get to and through college. So we feel like when we invest a dollar in an organization like that, it’s different than us helping a young person pay their tuition through college.

When we invest in these organizations, we feel like that dollar is multiplied because they’re now helping hundreds of people get to and through. And so we think of strategic organizational investments.

Then we have a third bucket. And this bucket we don’t talk about a lot, but it’s a bucket that involves making sure that things that are important to the African-American community can continue on. Things like the Black Ensemble Theater. Right? We do not invest heavily in the arts, simply because we are STEM people—you know, [my husband and I] are both engineers, we invest heavily in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. But there are organizations and institutions in Chicago that, but for the

support of the community, would not exist.

And we feel like those institutions are important to exist. And so we invest in them.

Again, a favorite of ours is Jackie Taylor and the Black Ensemble Theater. It’s important that people see art that comes from us, that is about us, that is produced by us. And as long as organizations like that exist in the community, and as long as we’re blessed to be able to, we will contribute to see that they exist. So that’s kind of how we think of our giving.

A good majority of our giving is based here in Chicago. We are proud Chicagoans.

Proud Chicagoans. You know what, there’s enough need in this city to last a lifetime.

I often say to people: I really love that our world is so much more of a global world now. You have young kids at certain schools that have to take a trip every year around the world to China and work in that community.

Or go to Africa and work in that community.

And I applaud that. I love how we’re in a global community. However, I do say, on one of those trips, instead of paying the airfare to go halfway around the world, get in the car and drive two miles and let’s help the kids on the other side of the city of Chicago.

In addition to being a global city, let’s be a local city. So Don and I have decided to focus our philanthropy right here at home.

If other people want to give globally, that’s wonderful, we applaud that because we need it. We are Chicagoans first. ¬

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Seeking a Home, Without a Country

Long government processing times for asylum seekers have led to a housing crisis for a vulnerable group AS TOLD TO SARAH CONWAY

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sylum seekers occupy the uncertain ground between outsiders and refugees. Unlike refugees, who are pre-screened by the government and can access public assistance upon arrival, asylum seekers find their own route to the U.S.—sometimes illegally, sometimes by visa—and are ineligible to receive any government assistance while awaiting a decision on their cases.

The denial of federal benefits, such as food assistance, paired with long delays and denials of the right to work leaves the United States alone among developed countries in its treatment of asylum seekers, according to a 2013 Human Rights Watch report, “At Least Let Them Work”.

Many arrive with little to no savings, and it can take up to three years for asylum cases to process, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; it used to take just six to eight weeks. The delay is the result of a perfect storm that has clogged the U.S. asylum system since 2014: an influx of Central American immigrants and an ongoing global refugee crisis driven by the Syrian Civil War. Even acquiring the right to work can be a struggle: Asylum seekers in the United States are prohibited from working until at least 180 days have passed (150 days after filing and 30 days of filing) since they submitted the asylum application, unless they are granted asylum sooner.

“Our system is inhumane,” laments Melanie Schikore, the executive director of the Interfaith Committee for Detained Immigrants in Mt Greenwood. “It leaves an asylum seeker with the choice between homelessness while their case processes, or working unauthorized which can jeopardize a pending case,” says Schikore. For just over three years, her organization has provided housing and support to asylum seekers and refugees through the Marie Joseph House of Hospitality for Women in Hyde Park as well as a men’s home in Cicero.

Asylum seekers from Africa have been hit especially hard in Chicago. They disproportionately make up seventy percent of all participants at centers like Heartland Alliance’s Kovler Center, which predominantly serves asylum seekers with active cases in Chicago. Over fifty-five percent of Kovler Center’s clients are homeless at intake, and four out of the top five countries of origin are in sub-Saharan Africa.

These are three stories of Africans caught up in the asylum seeker housing crisis.

Names and certain details of these stories have been changed to protect the identity of asylum seekers with active cases.

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¬ SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

Amina Amina is an asylum seeker from Somalia living in West Ridge. She’s been waiting six months for her work permit to arrive so she can work to pay her rent.

I want you to know that an asylum seeker is someone that is forced out by circumstance.

No one leaves their home without the fear of what’s behind them. Somalia had no peace, and there was a different kind of suffocation in the refugee camp in Djibouti. The trauma from your past is baggage you bring with you to America, too, and it finds a way to creep back into your life.

I came to Chicago during a cold December in 2016 with my two children, ten-year-old Mohammad and eight-yearold Zahra, with nothing. We didn’t even have coats. We floated from sleeping on the streets in West Ridge to staying with Somali families who would throw down a mattress for us in their basement laundry rooms during the winter. Every week we would move to a new place, and sometimes that was outside. For me, that feeling of being alone in the darkness of the laundry rooms where we slept triggered my memories of what I ran from in Somalia.

I didn’t anticipate the problems I faced

here. I knew no one, but I thought at least I was coming to a country run by a developed government. But there was no help from the government. I found myself on the street roaming from place to place.

This had an impact on my children.

Every day I would walk Mohammed and Zahra to school, but with no steady place to live, their grades would drop. At the same time, I wasn’t allowed to work to get money to provide for us. This stress took a toll on my mental health and morale.

In the beginning I was so depressed.

In my heart, I would ask myself, “Why aren’t people helping me?” But today, I realize there are so many good people who have helped me along the way—you can call them good Samaritans. When I moved into this basement, it was empty with just two mattresses on the ground. Now, it is furnished. Just yesterday, volunteers were here visiting me. These people really changed how I view my life now in America.

But the biggest thing I can celebrate is the therapy and medical treatment that I have received at Kovler Center. It’s helped me regain my faith in humanity. Once I get my work permit, I will be able to provide for my own children. I dream of studying very hard and becoming a nurse. That’s my goal in America: to educate my children and myself.

IMMIGRATION

Paul Paul left his country of Congo Brazzavilletwenty years ago after his parents disappeared. After he settled in Canada to pursue his PhD, his wife was deported from their home due to a visa renewal delay stemming from a university strike.

Paul says his wife’s deportation triggered his past trauma of losing his parents to state violence.

Paul, who is now in his forties, sought asylum in the U.S. and spent nine months in an Uptown homeless shelter with two young children and an infant.

Always I saw the only way to make my life better was to study. So I kept studying and working to achieve my two master’s degrees in chemistry and biochemistry of natural products, then I moved on to acquire my PhD in Canada.

Everything changed when I started to struggle with my PhD scholarship. Because of issues outside of my control, my wife was deported to Congo Brazzaville from Canada.

A particular judge decided that she had to be deported because of issues that arose from my student visa. It was a black situation.

I’ve always carried the trauma of my parents’ disappearance; I spent twenty years without my family, so I had tried to create a new family with my wife, and then government was again shattering everything that I had built, only this time it was in Canada. In my mind, I thought, this is a cycle.

I arrived in Chicago with a baby, a five-yearold, and a seven-year-old, with no mother.

Imagine your kids asking, “Where is Mom?” For me, the asylum process has been a jump into the unknown. There you are floating around in the darkness, looking, but every possible door feels blocked. You don’t have a work permit and you don’t have housing. You have nothing.

At first we stayed at a hotel downtown, but at $300 a day I realized we couldn’t stay there, and the only option was to go to a shelter. I heard to head to Uptown for temporary housing. I remember arriving there on a Friday, and on Monday I had a meeting with the case manager who said we could stay for a few months.

For me it was great, but for my kids it was crazy. They lived in better conditions in Canada. All we had now was a single room with four beds and one space for baggage and clothes. They would say, “Dad, are you sure we are in the right place? Why are we in a small room with many beds and everyone around us is screaming and making noises?

It’s like they are sick.”

You see real life in a shelter. It’s a place where you can see every level of society, and their struggle.

Everything changed when I met a man who had heard about my qualifications. He called me one day and said, “Oh my god, you are not in a good place. The U.S. should really want you here with your skills.” I said, “No, sir, I’m really here in the shelter.” He discovered that I have more than fifteen years’ experience leading labs, and I was researching cosmeceuticals, a sort of marriage between cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, in Canada.

He told me, “I have the money and you have the brain. Let’s start a business.”

Now, I live in a home with my children and I’m a cofounder, principal scientist, and the doctor of our lab in the northwest suburbs. I have Americans working for me, and I pay their salaries. I’m doing cosmetics and I’m working with the FDA to make natural products. I love this work.

I’m waiting for my asylum interview these days. After I get asylum, I will apply for my wife to come. When she is here it will be the best thing for everyone. For my kids, and for her, too.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DANIEL ROWELL

Imam Ousmane Drame Ousmane Drame is an immigrant from Mali and the imam of Masjid Al Farooq, a mosque that has served African immigrants and African American in Calumet Heights since 2002. As a community and spiritual leader, he has provided emergency housing for asylum seekers predominantly from West Africa for the past ten years.

We had no plan in mind to host asylum seekers. It just sort of happened. The houses were intended for people coming from the prison system who were struggling at finding housing and reintegrating into the community.

Although the reasons behind the problems of these two groups might be different, at the end of the day they are facing the same issue: they have no place to live.

If someone has West African blood, any mosque in the city will tell them to go to Imam Ousmane on the South Side. Our first asylum seeker found me in 2007. She was running from government persecution in the Ivory Coast, and I thought to myself, we can’t turn her away, so I found a space for her.

Asylum seekers are often nervous and scared. Many of the asylum seekers we have helped are running from oppressive governments, slavery, female genital mutilation, and forced marriages.

I’ve seen with my own eyes the massive delays in the asylum system. It went from nine weeks to two or three years to get your call. We tell asylum seekers they have six months here so they don’t feel too comfortable, but in the end, we would never ask them to leave. Where would they go?

The housing helps them to some extent, but it isn’t the same as if they had a professional therapist or psychologist. At the end of the day, I’m an imam and I can treat the spiritual aspect, but there is a lot of mental trauma too, just like our brothers from the prison system.

Now, I’m overseeing six houses with about twenty-six formerly incarcerated Muslims and eleven Muslim asylum seekers about four blocks from the mosque. All this housing was funded by Muslims in the Chicago area.

Nine out of ten times, when they get asylum, they get work and they move on. It makes me feel good because at least we were able to help someone become self-sufficient. This report was produced

by City Bureau, a Chicagobased journalism lab.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

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STAGE & SCREEN

A New Lens on Life

Reginald Rice on tracing a path through filmmaking AS TOLD TO ELAINE CHEN

I

was a dissenter. I retaliated against a lot of things, but more so I retaliated against the way people tried to color the world for me. I questioned, and I didn’t realize until I got older that I was always questioning why things have to be the way they are. I was deeply invested in my imagination, and cinema was that environment that sort of told me: you can create, these ideas can come out of you and unfold, and you can create the reality that you want through this particular medium.

Reginald Rice—he goes by Reggie— is a thirty-three-year-old documentary filmmaker. In 2016, he participated in Kartemquin Film’s Diverse Voices in Docs, a professional development program for emerging documentary filmmakers of color. He recently created a short film on 57th Street Wines, and he is finishing up Tracing Our Path Through Bronzeville, a feature-length documentary highlighting cultural institutions and artists in Bronzeville.

I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in the Englewood area. My mother and father, they took me and my brothers to the show [cinema] just about every weekend, especially in the summer. I began to take a liking to film, but more so storytelling—the storytelling art form interested me the most.

Even today people say bad things about Englewood. They don’t understand that it’s just various pockets of environments where bad things happen. It’s not everywhere, like, violence is not everywhere. With the imagination that I had, I created Englewood out of something beautiful. The elders that lived in my community—their stories were like movies to me. Even my parents! There were times when my mother would pull out the box of family pictures, and she would tell stories about our family and experiences, and I would see these stories visually. It was almost like sitting around a fire, having that storytime experience. So that was, that was

dope.

I went away to college and actually my concentration was Philosophy and History, [which] really gave me the substance to write and to create, to see visually. Boteus, Plato, Seneca—you had these individuals who were almost persecuted for thinking differently, seeing the world differently.

They understood that, “Okay, my reality is not what I want it to be, but I can create my reality. I might be confined within a circle to be able to think, but I’ll influence my reality through generations.”

But I think the most critical time when I decided that I was going to go into film was in 2010. I went to Egypt, studied abroad for the summer. I was so surprised that a lot of the information I read in books in undergrad didn’t really portray the experience that I got there. I think that ethics in that space was more valued and appreciated than possessing material objects, which really put me in awe.

I mean, the hospitality was amazing.

Before I went, a lot of people were like, oh don’t go over there. I was like—I come from Englewood, it can’t be that bad. I think that when you’re from a place, or when you see a place for yourself and you really go in without judging, you get the full experience. I knew people who never went to Englewood and then they go and they’re like, “Oh, it’s just everyday people doing everyday things.”

I mean, you have your bad, but there’s a lot of good. That’s what I found in Egypt.

So that’s when I was like, I’m going to be a documentary filmmaker. You know, I’m going to get my camera, I’m going to take these classes, and I’m going to try to pursue this.

After a long pause in the conversation, he looks up through his black, thick-rimmed glasses and chuckles. “I’m sorry, it’s hard to talk about myself. I mean, it’s easy to talk about film and all of the things I enjoy…”

I started the Bronzeville documentary.

BRIDGET VAUGHN

I came out of pocket to finance this.

Sometimes I didn’t have any way to commute but through public transportation, so I would have all my equipment and I would get on the CTA bus and people would be like—what are you... you must be doing something. And I would get to these places and sometimes my camera wouldn’t work, sometimes I would forget a significant piece that I needed. But I made it to this point.

The story of Tracing Our Path Through Bronzeville primarily begins with: what does it mean to tell a story? We have people who come in, and they just wanna shoot

a movie, but they don’t really investigate what it’s really like to be an artist. Initially I didn’t paint, but I started painting because I had to understand what it was like.

[When painting,] sometimes you can be like “here’s a mistake I made,” but somehow it works its way into the picture.

I’ve taken advice from the artists, and they say: “It’s all jazz. After layer on top of layer on top of layer, you find…synthesis, you find your image.” The painting gave me insight on this esoteric aspect. It’s like, are you controlling this paintbrush or is there something beyond you that’s dictating how you lay that paint on?

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

When you begin a film, you have it on paper. What you have written down is guidelines, but the film becomes a living being in itself, and you have to cooperate. If you go against it, sometimes you don’t get the best results, but if you allow the film to unfold and sort of feel your way through, it’s like the story grab you by the hand and say: “This is what it gonna be.”

I try not to do what everybody else is doing. When you get a camera, it’s fun to just get out and shoot things.

But if you really want to include the storytelling art form, I wanna do things that are true to what I desire to do, and that’s to tell stories that are rarely shared.

I met Derrick Westbrook, the sommelier at 57th Street Wines. You don’t have a lot of black guys who are wine connoisseurs—it shocked the hell out of me! I was like, Thank god, here we are, we had an opportunity that barely gets told.

[Since doing film,] I learned how to see differently. I take walks, or whenever I’m out, I look up, because I feel like once upon a time, I didn’t look up enough. I’ve learned to look past people’s flaws and really listen to them. I’ll give you an example: when I was growing up, there were some drug addicts, some drunks in the corner, and you would be like: “Why are these people here?” And then you’ll see them with a Vietnam War hat on one day, and you’re like: “These are these vets!”

Everyone seems to have—at least the people I’ve crossed paths with—a purpose for where they are.

I think my motivation is to expose people, to break people’s lens away from the traditional or common narrative. I think that’s what documentary film is about. It’s about dismantling cultural barriers and exposing people to preserve aspects of life that humanize us. I feel like we have a lot of political documentaries out there, about social activism, but I don’t think there are enough documentaries that are like: after we protest, after we come to work, we should remember to enjoy life.

If something is really working on your spirit, time and the environment that you’re occupying become irrelevant, and you engage. That’s what art does. It’s almost like medication. 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

From Summer Nights to the Long Haul Resurrection Project campouts build youth leaders and community ties AS TOLD TO JULIE XU

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very few weeks this summer, a block in a South Side neighborhood was taken over by peace marches, workshops, free food, and an all-night campout. This is the Resurrection Project’s Increase the Peace campaign, a youth-led program that grew out of the tragic drive-by shooting of high school senior Naome Zuber in the fall of 2016. Naome was riding in the back seat of a car when a stray bullet ended her life. Her death galvanized her community; since then, other neighborhoods from Little Village to Englewood have come together as well, on these warm summer nights, to think about structural ways to stop gun violence long after the campouts end.

The Weekly spoke with three organizers from the Increase the Peace campaign, and photographed the last event of the summer (see following spread).

¬ SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

Elizeth Arguelles Youth leader in the Increase the Peace campouts and Little Village resident I was born in Mexico but was raised in Chicago. I have two brothers. They are the motivation for why I do these campouts. I don’t want to see them in the headlines any day that people get shot. I do community work across Chicago—Back of the Yards, Englewood, Little Village, Pilsen—and I’m involved because I feel like if I don’t take a stand and I don’t get involved, no one is going to do it for me.

[What] I would like to see in Chicago is more opportunities for underserved communities. What I would like to see is centers that are safe and that create a culture of nonviolence for teens, for youth. And most importantly what I would like to see are programs that reach out to youth that help expand their skills and their knowledge.

I feel positive that community members and community stakeholders are going to take action. That they are going to be catalysts of change in their own neighborhoods. I’m not really focusing on legislation, because I know it’s hard and more complicated. What I’m trying to focus on this year is the community taking action…that’s why I feel positive. I

know people that care about where they live are doing something about it.

After the summer, I’m planning on creating deeper relationships in Chicago.

Just because I know that an Increase the Peace campout is not enough. It’s a start; it’s a great way to come together and celebrate our culture. But I know that there needs to be more than that, so for that I will create lasting relationships that will help me to create more programs, more projects for the summer for the winter, for the fall and just not stopping.

It’s a long fight, but I’m not stopping.

I remember where I come from. I come from a family of strong people. I come from a neighborhood of strong people. And if sometimes I feel like I can’t keep up or things are getting harder, I remember all the people that are expecting for us to do something, expecting for us to [make] change. And knowing that I represent a strong community, it makes me remember to keep moving forward.

An ideal world would be a place where the community can come together and have peace. For me, peace is having opportunities to move forward, having education access, having housing access, having healthy food.

For me, that would be the ideal community— having all those things.

ACTIVISM

Berto Aguayo Community organizer with The Resurrection Project In September [2016] I joined the [Resurrection Project] as a community organizer focused on safety and nonviolence with a large focus in the Back of the Yards area. A month into my new role, a sixteenyear-old girl gets killed right in front of our office. I gathered our community together and some of our youth and tried to strategize a response—what we are going to do? The youth were tired, but they didn’t want to do the same thing over and over, and they said, why don’t we do something different?

Why don’t we just camp out? And then we convinced ourselves at that table—yeah, why don’t we just do that?

I started organizing and we gathered in a span of two days; we gathered twenty community partners. In a span of five days, we gathered two hundred people for our first action, and then from then on I wanted to make sure that we continued for the long term and start preparing for some real social change.

So what we did was for everyone that stayed until five in the morning, we offered them a free leadership training. And sure enough we [got] more than fifty people, and some who are young leaders, to start doing peace actions all across the city. So then with our training and with our support, now they’re the ones doing these actions. If you see, I’m in the background, I’m just chilling, because the idea is to give them the space to lead their own actions, their own communities, and that’s what we’ve tried to do.

This [was] like phase one of Increase the Peace—really making sure we identify leaders, recruit leaders through our campouts, and train them. And the second phase is to start mobilizing people in these actions for the larger cause of peace, and that’s where we’re really at right now.

The next phase is agenda-making and specifying our demands. We got a whole

bunch of young people that are down for the cause, that are ready for the fight. And all we got to do now is sit down at a table and make an agenda together—by young people, for young people.

What does it look like? Does it look like potentially asking the city to expand the One Summer Chicago youth employment program to include more youth and to be year-round? That could be one of the demands. Another one of the demands could be at the state level, advocating for a senate bill, one which will fix the formula in order to get more funding for some of our public schools, so that young people don’t feel the need to join gangs because they got what they need at school. At the federal level, it could look like federal background checks, right? But, these are all possibilities of what we could specify. But I’d rather our young people sit down at a table and make those demands, than for me to say, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing.”

The idea is to have a youth-led initiative where young people can see themselves as agents of change. We try to create young people who start seeing peace as something cool. Like peace, that’s something that’s lit, that they want to be a part of. And that only happens when you have young people making actions like these. When young people decide that they want to fight for peace, they know what other young people will be attracted to. So that’s what we try to do: create young leaders who can be warriors of peace on the street with what we teach them in the classroom.

The whole idea is about having community policing. So what we think about is, at one point or another, the police will leave. You won’t see them here all night, and I always tell them, this is what community policing looks like. These are all people who are taking over a block all night long, actively policing our neighborhoods and policing ourselves. It doesn’t look like a police officer—we don’t have guns or badges. What we do have is our fight for peace. That’s what we fight for.

Jose Muñoz Vice president of community ownership with The Resurrection Project [What people in Back of the Yards] wanted to do was one, reclaim that safe space and create a safe space for people to come out and continue to be able to come out into the streets and enjoy life. But they also wanted to change the narrative of how people saw their community. The vast majority of people that live in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, and I would say all neighborhoods in Chicago, are not committing crimes. And what these young people wanted to do was to be able to highlight that there was some very positive things that were happening in the community. And if we highlight those things then we can get more people involved and engaged and not only taking care of the community but also increasing the peace in their communities. And that’s how this initiative was born.

We see Increase the Peace as a platform to get young people civically engaged. They’re learning about the importance of voting; they are registering people to vote. The summer project of going into six different neighborhoods throughout the city is completely youth-led. They’re cleaning up the—literally cleaning up the streets in their neighborhood. Going out there and engaging residents and having dialogue with folks about

issues that are happening in their community.

And the other thing is that they’re connecting with local organizations in their community. So as we are moving around different communities and we’re getting youth that want to get involved, we are also trying to connect them to local organizations that are doing good work in their community, so they can continue to do this for not just a whole summer but also the winter, fall…as they go back into school.

Many of the youth in their communities are looking for outlets to be connected with other young people, but also [with] other things that are happening in their community.

And many of the communities that we are going to, there aren’t many after-school programs or outlets for them to even have fun and engage with each other. Jobs, more of a focus on education, cleaner streets—[these are] all the real social determinants of health that are root causes of a lot of the violence in our community.

These youth, as they are getting engaged, are starting to realize that these problems are much bigger than some simple solutions. They know that marching alone is not going to help, an overnight campout alone isn’t going to help. That to really create change in their communities they have to come together, get organized, and start pushing for resources to come to their communities that will help provide them with what they need, but for others around them.

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

Left: Children from the Back of Yards neighborhood take turns trying to hit a piñata as it rises and falls, pulled by a string controlled by Increase the Peace youth leaders.

Below: Youth leaders partake in a ribbon cutting ceremony for the reopening of St. Michael’s Community Center, which had been closed in the early 2000s reportedly due to increased criminal activity on the premises.

PHOTO ESSAY BY SEBASTIÁN HIDALGO

W

eekly photographer Sebastian Hidalgo attended the last Increase the Peace campout of the summer. On August 4, dozens gathered outside of St. Michael’s Church in Back of the Yards for games, music, and food to celebrate the community center’s reopening after over ten years.

This photo essay reveals that even at events designed to bring peace to the neighborhood, conflict is still present. But it also offers a vision—a literal glimpse, through a hole in a door—of a model of peace that, for example, doesn’t involve police, whose presence at the event is mentioned in the captions but not photographed. The essay concludes with a bus ride home, but the work necessary to bring true peace to the community lays yet ahead.

18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

ACTIVISM

Left: Inside, a family from the neighborhood gives away homemade cake. Tensions were high as rival gang members prepared to play a game of basketball. CPD officers on patrol paced in and out of the community center, offering a watchful eye on the group.

Below: Berto Aguayo, lead organizer of Increase the Peace, tries to mediate a dispute between the rival gangs after threats of violence were made on the court.

“We’re all trying to concentrate as organizers to bring both sides of the neighborhood together,” Aguayo said, “but the wounds are so fresh—sometimes things can’t work out.”

Right: After both gangs agree to leave amicably, organizers offer rides back home as a safety precaution. Chris, 16, right, is a Back of the Yards resident and Increase the Peace trainee.

“For me [Increase The Peace] is something special,” Chris said, “because here in Back of the Yards, we don’t have anything. It’s good to try to make the community a better place—you know, no shootings, no drugs, just peace. That’s what we been doing.” ¬

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

More Than Just Optics

The Englewood Arts Collective on making space for art in the neighborhood AS TOLD TO ANNA AGUIAR KOSICKI

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he Englewood Arts Collective is a group of nine artists, working in diverse media, who came together earlier this year to influence public perceptions of Englewood and improve access to art within the neighborhood. I sat down with Collective members Tonika Johnson (a photographer), Janell Nelson (a graphic designer), and Joe Nelson (a muralist) to talk about the forming of the Collective and its plans for the future.

Tonika Johnson: Most immediately we have our second group exhibition in November at Kusanya Cafe in Englewood, to kind of introduce ourselves to the community. Our first was in Lincoln Square.

Joe Nelson: We brought Englewood to Lincoln Square, which was kind of nice. We picked up everything and imported it to a new environment.

Tonika: And we had some really good conversations. There were people who were like, “Oh, I’ve never been to Englewood,” so it was really community building, talking about art in Englewood.

Janell Nelson: ‘Cause let’s keep it real: Chicago is a segregated city and that’s a whole other story on the roots of that and how it came to be. You can just drive through the city or ride the Red Line from one end to another and you’ll see the color change. And so it comes out in your interactions with different people from different neighborhoods, and they get shocked. On different sides of the city different people may never meet in ways that [they would in] another parallel cosmopolitan city, like New York.

Tonika: Just identifying ourselves is like an act of resistance.... Just acknowledging that we exist and we’re from Englewood already is going to challenge the narrative, so hopefully from this point forward as we continue to evolve, no one will be shocked if they find out some artist is from Englewood, ’cause 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

oftentimes growing up people were like, “Oh, you’re from Englewood,” and it was like...

Yeah.

Janell: It was like, “Oh, I would have never guessed you were from there,” and I’m like, “Why?” There’s so much coded language that comes out in biases and there’s a certain perception of “the hood,” and what does that look like, and what do people look and act and talk like when they come out of that, and we’re just like, look, y’all, we’re here, this is what we do. We’re creative— Joe: And just trying to build.

Tonika: And creative people are everywhere, and our community is not one monolithic thing. We just want to represent ourselves and give back and challenge what people think of Englewood.

We do want to focus on public art and beautifying our neighborhood.

Definitely I think all the things we do, regardless of the medium, can be transferred over to public art. I mean, [ Janell] is a graphic designer, I would love for some video projections to be done; we have a poet—that can be displayed visually. We want to be able to have a public art project that we can do in the community.

Janell: Yeah, we have a lot of ambitions. One of our members, Felix [photographer and technician Felix Will]—this may be longterm—has some goals in regard to kids and youth programming, and we all are on board with that. We have to figure out what we do first and how we pivot, and we would love to eventually connect to schools, and I would love to have a typography seminar and, like, just talk about fonts.

Tonika: And we can definitely, because we are not establishing ourselves as some complete separate organization from the really good community work that’s already being done by RAGE [Resident Association of

¬ SEPTEMBER 6, 2017

Greater Englewood]. They’re actually strong supporters of our organization because they realized they focused a lot on the traditional community activism and volunteerism, and none of them are identifying themselves as artists. So they want to support anything that we can come up with that would help the youth programming they’re doing. They don’t have an identified artist who they can lean on to do some art programming, so we would hope that we can be that group that provides different artistic programming for youth and adults.

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onika: It started on paper first. Open Engagement is an arts conference, where they host programming around a central theme, and this one that they had in Chicago was “justice,” and so I was really interested in hosting some kind of panel discussion. Once I started thinking about what would coincide with the theme, I came up with the idea that it would be cool if, you know, all of us Englewood artists got together to talk about challenging the narrative that currently exists around Englewood.

JASON SCHUMER

So I had submitted for us to have a panel discussion about Englewood, art, and challenging the narrative and we did the panel discussion and it was really great. A lot of people were engaged and wanted to get in contact with us, so after that it pretty much cemented the idea that this is like, for real.

Joe: And we had crossed paths several times before, just growing up and going to college and stuff.

Janell: A few of us have origins with Gallery 37, a Chicago arts program that started focusing on children and youth. We’re talking twenty, maybe even twenty-five years ago, we were all teenagers, and there was a Block 37 downtown—which is where that mall is now across from Macy’s. It was a vacant lot, and we had arts programming there. So we’re talking like years of people’s paths crossing.

So Tonika started it, gave it a name, got some people together, and that’s how it started.

Tonika: Well, since we’re so new, we’re just in discussion about what we want to do first. We really wanted to focus on increasing access to

ARTS art in Englewood and really complementing a lot of the community initiatives that are currently going on with art, ’cause that’s one area that isn’t as robust as everything else that’s going on.

Janell: I think our tagline as of right now is “Reframing the narrative from the inside out.” If you google “Englewood”—and some of that is changing right now, because of the current arts initiatives that are going on with programs and entities like RAGE and so forth—in general, the narrative of Englewood is not a positive one. We are not a people of a single story, and no one is, but I think I can kind of speak for the group when I say all of us are enthusiastic about just representing ourselves. We all hail from Englewood—some of us still live there—and it’s not a place of only negativity. There’s a lot of beauty that comes from it and still resides in it, and Tonika’s absolutely right when she says we want to make art more accessible and demystify it and use art as a catalyst for community engagement and community pride. It all feeds back into humanity, you know, like giving a humanity to people.

Tonika: We really want to provide a platform for artists in Englewood to be visible. We’ve chartered our own paths separately as individuals and artists, but we kind of had to do that outside of Englewood. We really want to lend that back to the community of younger artists who wants the opportunity to

have a platform. I know personally, I’m telling y’all right now—I want to be able to have an actual space in Englewood, a multipurpose art space the community can access. Outside of Kusanya Cafe, there really aren’t many dedicated spaces for art to occur. One of our other members, Pugsley [street muralist and rapper Pugs Atomz], his mother used to have an organization that did art programming for youth in Englewood, but it doesn’t exist now.

I would love to bring something like that back to Englewood.

Joe: That was one of the weird things about us connecting, too. Even though we were all from Englewood, we met each other outside of Englewood—we never really met each other inside of the place where we all stay.

Tonika: I think the goals that we have are very realistic and can actually occur before all the other building up of Englewood occurs. I know they have this programming called the Thrive now, where they’re trying to reinvest in different businesses. That’s great, but in between, a collective like us can help get art in those places until then. I don’t think until then Englewood should have to look like a place without art until businesses start to come. So I think it’s very realistic, what we want to do, and we’ll eventually start seeing funding to do some little public art projects.

Janell: Yeah, little pop-ups and things— it starts with the artists. Look at what is

happening with Detroit in another way, you know. A vibrant artistic community after economic ruin.

in Englewood, so it won’t look so crazy if you see a group of kids walking down the street with their cameras or talking about a website.

Joe: And Miami is the same way, and Boston’s the same way.

Janell: Or having a little meeting in the middle of the park that’s talking about some potential sculpture project. And one of many discussions we’ve had internally— so you’re catching us at the onset of the group, but I think that there’s an interesting intersectionality, or lack thereof, between art and class and especially art as a viable access point for career as a lifestyle. It can be much more than a hobby. It can be much more than, “Oh that kid can draw, oh that’s cool, what are you going to do for the rest of your life?”

As far as we’re concerned, to demystify means to just help shine a light on the many different ways you can define art. Art is not one thing; people are not one thing; we all have different career paths and different titles to ourselves. But art is more than just a career.

It is therapy, it is something that can help a community feel proud and help reflect the communities to other communities. And it’s more than just optics. It’s a representation of a people. ¬

Tonika: It’s true. Art definitely adds value.

That’s our contribution to adding value to Englewood.

Janell: And it can be an economic engine, too.

Tonika: And then to really normalize it, too.

Most artists, when discovering they like art, are a little different than whatever group it is they associate with or identify with. So growing up on 62nd and Loomis I knew I was a little different, but I didn’t know that these people existed, that there were others— Janell: Yeah, finding your tribe, right?

Tonika: Exactly, and I had to go to high school and college to be exposed to other people who were interested in art and then to find people who were from my community, I found out I wasn’t a stranger or weird.

So by us existing, even if it were just by name only, to be able to let people in the community know that it is normal to be a kid that likes to do murals, illustrate, graphic design, photography...If anything, I would love for us to be a part of normalizing that

The Englewood Arts Collective is currently building a mailing list and encourages anyone interested to sign up for information about future programming and community activism opportunities at englewoodartscollective.org.

EVENTS

BULLETIN Community Business Academy Info Session Sunshine Enterprises, 503 E. 61st St. Thursday, September 7, 6pm–7pm. Free. (773) 904-9800.

RSVP at bit.ly/SEnterprises Are you a local entrepreneur looking for a way to grow your business? Maybe Sunshine Enterprise’s Community Business Academy can help. With the goal of “growing businesses in struggling communities,” the academy will teach you business principles and match you with experts in your field.

(Adia Robinson)

Volunteer Deputy Registrar Training Avalon Branch, Chicago Public Library, 8148 S. Stony Island Ave. Saturday, September 9, 9:30am–11am.

bit.ly/EWAC8RegistrarTraining Are you a registered Cook County voter and want to play a more active role in the democratic process? Then you should come down to the Avalon Branch library this Saturday for training to become a volunteer deputy registrar. After certification, you will be able to sign up voters anywhere in Illinois.

You must register at EWAC8@att.net with your name and address. (Andrew Koski)

McKinley Park Community Tree Plantin McKinley Park, 3849 S. Hermitage Ave. Saturday, September 16, 9am–1pm. Registration at bit.ly/McKinleyParkOpenlands. (312) 8636250. openlands.org McKinley Park is one of the lucky recipients this year of Openlands’s Fall Treeplanters Grants, which fund a community tree planting day on parkland. Volunteers can

look forward to planting such species as bur oak, bald cypress, and Kentucky coffee—but you’ll have to go to find out just what your neighborhood will get. ( Julia Aizuss)

Chicago Art Department, 1932 S. Halsted St., Ste. 100. Opening reception September 8, 6pm–10pm. Through September 28. Saturdays, noon–5pm, or by appointment. (312) 735-4223. chicagoartdepartment.org

MCHAP Tête-à-tête ITT S.R. Crown Hall, 3360 S. State St. Saturday, September 16, 9:30am–noon. (312) 854-8200. chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org Learn from contributors to the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) about the goals of this recent initiative. The MCHAP was launched by the College of Architecture at ITT to recognize architectural achievement in North and South America.

This event is part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. (Adia Robinson)

VISUAL ARTS The Pre-Vinylette Society

The International Showcase of Women Sign Painters features the work of more than sixty sign painters from nine countries. This group show displays only the work of female artists, in text-based works on wood, metal and glass. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Meeting of Styles 2017: Wall Jamz 2200 W. 59th St., and the intersection 36th St. and Albany Ave. Saturday, September 9, noon–7pm. bit.ly/MOSChicago With the thirteenth installment of this threeday extravaganza, Chicago’s longest-running graffiti event on its second day features live “Wall Jamz” in West Englewood and

SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

EVENTS Brighton Park. The “Jamz” will be attended both by several graff crews and individual artists—and, perhaps, you. Stick around in the evening for the Meeting of Styles after-party, at South Loop brewery Baderbräu. ( Julia Aizuss)

Super Sunday Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Sunday, September 10, 1pm–5pm. Free. (773) 324-5520. hydeparkart.org Every so often, the HPAC hosts a Super Sunday, and every time, yes, they are super worth it. September’s includes family art-making activities, several exhibition receptions, and open studios. Of particular note are a film screening of a documentary concerning art-as-Alzheimer’s-therapy and a public critique with the artists featured in the “Front & Center” exhibition. ( Julia Aizuss)

Mie Kongo: Unknown game series 4th Ward Project Space, 5338 S. Kimbark Ave. Artist reception Sunday, September 10, 4pm– 7pm. Through October 14. Saturdays, 1pm–5pm, or by appointment. 4wps.org Tokyo-born and Evanston-based, ceramicist Mie Kongo now heads to Hyde Park to present her multidisciplinary work, which ranges from ceramic to porcelain to twodimensional art. The exhibition prioritizes “sincere playfulness,” like a sculptural assemblage in which a peach tree branch dons pale pink stoneware as a delicate sort of boot. ( Julia Aizuss)

The Making — a preview with Faheem Majeed Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Tuesday, September 19, 6:30pm–8pm. Free.

(773) 241-5458. facebook.com/BlackstoneBikes In collaboration with Blackstone Bicycle Works and the youth education program at the Experimental Station (the Weekly’s home base), artist Faheem Majeed and choreographer/artistic director Carrie Hanson will preview an excerpt of their film The Making. Majeed is one of three visual artists, and also the director, for the creation of the large-scale painting that will be featured in the film. This event will include performances and conversations. (Roderick Sawyer) 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

MUSIC Work on The Sabbath featuring Meagan McNeal Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island Ave. Sunday, September 10, 5pm–8pm. (312) 857-5561. rebuild-foundation.org A regular Sunday event designed to build community and foster healing through listening to a different artist each week, this upcoming installment will feature neo-soul and R&B singer Meagan McNeal. McNeal is sure to soothe the soul with her “grace, power, and control.” (Nicole Bond)

Get IN It Music Fest Guaranteed Rate Field, 333 W. 35th St. Saturday, September 16. Doors 1pm. $35–$150. bit.ly/GetINIt If you don’t already have a ticket to see Wu-Tang at Riot Fest, then head to the park formerly known as Comiskey for the best hip-hop festival lineup of the weekend, boasting headliners Fifth Harmony, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Prince Royce, Jeremih, DNCE, Fat Joe, Lupe Fiasco, and others, with surprise guests. It’s also a good cause—a portion of the proceeds will go to Get IN Chicago, which seeks and funds initiatives to combat youth violence. (Andrew Koski)

Summer Sunday Concert Series in Nichols Park Nichols Park, 1355 E. 53rd St. Through September 17. Sundays, 4pm–6pm. Free. hydepark.org/parks Every Sunday is rocking in Nichols Park this summer. Bring a lawn chair or a blanket to catch the last few: blues/rock by Moji & The Midnight Sons on September 10 and funk

by Neal O’Hara on September 17. (Andrew Koski)

Camp Lo The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Thursday, September 21. Doors 7pm, show 8pm.

21+. $20 standing, $25 per seat, $30 VIP tables.

(312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Twenty years after their debut album, Camp Lo brings their latest work, Ragtime Hightimes, to this South Side performance. In this album, the hip-hop duo from the Bronx

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and their collaborator Ski Beatz are “pushing past boundaries while staying true to their creative vision.” Also performing will be the Los Angeles–based band Urban Renewal Project. (Adia Robinson)

The Skatalites Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Thursday, September 21, 1pm. 17+. $15 advance, $18 day of show.

(312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Originally formed over fifty years ago, The Skatalites are considered one of the founding bands of the ska genre. As the band gained fame, they backed young artists from Toots and The Maytals to Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer. Even after ska developed into rocksteady and later reggae, the band reformed in the eighties to tour and bring their up-tempo ska beat worldwide. Featuring original alto sax Lester “Ska” Sterling and vocalist Doreen Shaffer, this legendary group should not to be missed. (Andrew Koski)

STAGE & SCREEN All Def Comedy Showcase The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Thursday, September 7. Doors 7pm, show 8pm. $10. therevival.com Twelve Midwestern comics will tickle your funny bone for a chance to appear on Russell Simmons’ All Def Comedy show coming to HBO this fall. Chastity Washington will host; the featured comics include Baldhead Phillips, Doc Love, Just Nesh, Martini Harris, Shanie D., M. Dubs, and Jay Deep. (Nicole Bond)

C.R.E.A.M. The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Saturday, September 9. Doors 8:30pm, show 9pm. $15 general admission, $10 students. the-revival.com Don’t tell the Wu-Tang Clan, but in this case, C.R.E.A.M. stands for Comedy Rules Everything Around Me. The comics Em Brown and Lem Slaughter host a variety show that showcases stand-up, sketch comedy, poetry, music, and “Special Surprise Guests” at the historic Hyde Park venue. ( Joseph S. Pete)

The Revival Hour The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Saturday,

September 9, 16, and 23. 7:30pm. $10 general admission, $5 students. the-revival.com This weekly sketch and improv show curated

by Molly Todd features solo comedy and musical performances from various artists throughout the South Side. Come for the hour, and, on September 9, stay for the C.R.E.A.M. (Nicole Bond)

Movies in the Parks: Trolls Hermitage Park, 5839 S. Wood St. Saturday, September 9, 8pm. Free. All ages. (312) 7476179. chicagoparkdistrict.com Treat the kids to a first back-to-school weekend outing to watch the Dreamworks film Trolls, and see if they can recognize the voice of Justin Timberlake as the grumpy troll Branch. Movies in the Parks season ends soon, so don’t wait until next summer. (Nicole Bond)

Jeff Fort and Fred Hampton: A Revolutionary Love Story Congregational Church of Jefferson Park, 5320 W. Giddings St. Through Sunday, September 10.

Various dates and times. $10. (847) 859-9760. chicagofringe.org Although not on the South Side, this is worth the trek to Jefferson Park’s Fringe Festival.

Playwright Steven Long’s theatrical roots go far back to his days at UofC Lab School. His play comes from conversations with a family friend, who just happened to be the parole officer to Blackstone Rangers founder Jeff Fort. From these conversations, combined with months of research, Long tells the story of how the lives of Fort and Chicago Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton overlapped and how they contemplated merging their two organizations. (Nicole Bond)

Comedy Butcher Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan St. Monday, September 11, 8pm–10:30pm. $10.

(773) 837-0145. coprosperity.org So maybe you can’t make comedy shows on the weekend, or The Revival wasn’t enough for you. In that case, head on over to the Co-Pro on Monday (or every second Monday of the month) for what claims to be “the South Side’s best stand-up show.” ( Julia Aizuss)

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