Friday, December 11, 6 – 9p: “Gifted”

Twelve Chicago artists explore the concept of a gift economy in “gifted,” an exhibition of free distribution. The December 11th experience at Mess Hall in Rogers Park presents various forms of sustainable art through community-driven works, educational scenarios, patterns, and handmade objects. Artists Jerico Prater, Cori Williams and Elspeth Vance engage the community through on-site projects: Prater provides a method to communally craft wallpaper, Williams supplies context and materials for community castle-building, and Vance collects and disperses secrets. Experiential workshops by Etta Sandry and Camila Rosas invite participants to cook and eat; Sandry offers solutions for the public to preserve local food while Rosas shares her heritage through pancakes. Richard Chiang demonstrates recycled origami-folding techniques and Abbie Wilson facilitates the playful use of public spaces through the distribution of “guerilla swings”. Christina McClelland, Bridges Black and Felisa Prieto present patterns: McClelland through commuting schedules, Black in the form handmade emergency ponchos, and Prieto through assembled fabric scraps. Melissa Leandro engages participants by sharing accessories that comment on social trends, and Josie Gluck offers agricultural beads for temporary adornment and future growth. United by their common goal to distribute sustainable art, these twelve artists come together for one night at Mess Hall. Come to participate, leave “gifted.”

Saturday, December 12, 6-9p: Celebrate! Celebrate? The Politics and Tactics of Visualizing a People’s History

Curated by Aay Preston-Myint and Nicolas Lampert

“Celebrate! Celebrate?” features four different poster series that visualize various people’s history and invites the viewer to contemplate the politics and the tactics of graphically celebrating people and events from the past. Significantly, how do these images operate? Do the images affirm our struggles, inspire, teach, and critique? Do they simplify history and rob struggles of their complexities? Do they accomplish both? The show invites these questions, varied opinions, historical context, and more.

Featured work:

“Summoning A New Queer Reality” is a collection of prints featuring queer revolutionaries, tricksters, activists, and troublemakers from the contemporary era and the recent past, all of whom have helped make the world a weirder, more beautiful, and safer place. The series was conceptualized and edited by the organizers of Chances Dances, an LGBTQ DJ crew, artist/activist platform, and microgrant foundation, and was drawn and printed by Aay Preston-Myint at the No Coast Collective studio in Chicago, IL.

“Celebrate People’s History” is an on-going poster series curated by the Brooklyn-based artist/activist Josh MacPhee. The Celebrate People’s History poster project began in 1998 and has produced over 50 two-color posters by different artists that each highlights an historical example of popular struggle and resistance. The posters have been put up in the streets around the world, appeared as postcards, and have been displayed in homes and classrooms as a teaching tool. The series is distributed by the Justseeds Artist’s Cooperative.

“Whacked Ladies: Female Victims of Political Assassination” is a print series by Milwaukee-based artist Makeal Flammini. The 21 woodcuts and papercuts focus on women from around the world who have been assassinated or murdered for various political, social, and religious reasons.

“Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas” are images from an upcoming 2010 book on Microcosm Press by the Justseeds Artist’s Cooperative. The book is aimed at a high school audience and features black-and-white illustrations and short text celebrating various individuals from the Americas who worked for social justice.

Sunday, December 6, Opening Reception 6pm to 10pm

Monday, December 7, 10am – 7pm (open hours)

INTRA EXTRA 2009 – Foreclosure Repeating Performance (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009..) by Moritz Majce and Herwig Kopp

The repeated, continued circumnavigation of a space. The performance Intra Extra is being repeated every year – circumstances such as location, forms of locomotion, and duration of the performance may change thereby. The performance is filmed each time by a camera that is installed inside the space that is being circled. The performance does not stop until it is interrupted by external effects. The video recording of the previous years´ performance is destroyed after the following performance has taken place. Intra Extra is about structures of repetition, it is a play with the interspace between inside and outside. Up to now, the focus has been on renowned art institutions but in the light of the worldwide economic crisis the artists decided to leave the art context in a narrower sense and respond to this situation. On 5 December 2009 they will be circling around an evicted empty house near Chicago´s Marquette Park. The area around Marquette Park is specifically and severly affected by what is called the housing crisis – people are losing their homes, entire streets are vacant, countless houses are threatened by eviction – a haunting atmosphere. Documentation of the performance will be shown at the exhibition. www.moritzmajce.info; www.katapult.org/moritzmajce/intraextra

A few things going on this week….

*No Yoga This Sunday*

 

Sunday, November 22, 5pm – 7pm

Precious Cargo: The Great Lakes & St. Lawrence River

 

 

In conjunction with the release of AREA magazine’s Peripheral Vision issue, Precious Cargo: the Great Lakes & St. Lawrence River is an interactive workshop by Paul Lloyd Sargent presenting recent research and artwork exploring the history of the St. Lawrence Seaway. / Mixing academic research, activism, and art practice with multimedia elements and hands-on mapping activities, this workshop will draw from Sargent’s personal collection of nautical navigational charts, games, videos, photographs, news clippings, books, pamphlets, and other ephemera to examine the impact of the shipping industry on the ecologies, economies, and communities along the St. Lawrence Seaway and around the Great Lakes region of North America. / Attendants are encouraged to bring their own maps, nautical charts, and lake/seaway shipping-related ephemera!

Report back from Honduras, We-Stopped-the-Eviction Celebration + Card Weaving!!

We would love to see you at these exciting events this weekend!

Friday, November 13, 7:00-9:00p
Honduran Human Rights Delegation Report Back

Attend a report back on the ongoing crisis in Honduras.

A delegation of Chicago area activists went to Honduras to witness first-hand what mainstream media outlets have done little to expose.

On June 28th 2009, Honduran military kidnapped the democratically elected president and tossed him out of the country. However, despite harsh repression and a disintegration of civil rights, people have been resisting non-stop and building on a movement to reinstate their president, but even moreso to reinsert the people into the democratic process.

Images and sounds from the resistance will highlight discussions on how to get involved in supporting the spirited resistance in Honduras

A Part of Mess Hall’s Transnational Solidarities Series:
Transnational Solidarities III: Honduran Resistance in Action!

Saturday, November 14, 6:30-8:30p
We-Stopped-the-Eviction Celebration!

We are celebrating the successful community campaign to stop the wrongful eviction of the Bledsoe Family! Everyone is welcome. We must continue to support one another, and to struggle side by side, if we are to successfully enforce our economic rights.

Share food (optional pot-luck), Music + Discussion (Kids Welcome)

Sunday, November 15, 12:00-4:00pm
Sewing Rebellion: Card Weaving Workshop with Special Guest Alexander Iwasa

Card weaving is a form of Iron Age technology performed all over Latin America, Africa, Asia and in Chicago. Yarn is threaded through tablets or cards to form a work area to weave through. Please come and learn this skill, talk shop, and snack!

Materials will be provided, but if you have extra yarn, and/or dead decks of playing cards we can punch holes in to weave through, please bring them!
more on Card Weaving: http://www.primitive.org/weaving.htm

When asking yourself why do you spend Sunday afternoons once a month to alter, mend or make a new garment?

Consider for a moment, the great deal of disposable apparel goods in the world! Hurtful to the buyer, more hurtful to the seller, if they only knew it, and most hurtful to the maker! Can we imagine a system, getting long lasting apparel, where the workers were paid a living wage? Can we resolve to purchase nothing but garments made by workers who are paid a living wage? Instead of having, as we too often have now, very low paid workers producing disposable goods?

The Sewing Rebellion proposes to start honoring the labor of the garments you already have, by repairing and remaking them, increasing their life, and creating a hybrid garment made of cheap off-shore labor and your labor!

As winter sets in around the country, dig through your closet to find what sweaters need a mend, or trousers, which will last another season with a patch here or there.

Sunday, November 15, 4:30-6:00p — FREE YOGA!
This is an hour long hatha yoga class, beginners are welcome.  Students should bring their own yoga mat and any other props they wish to use.

This week…

… Don’t miss this Friday! 7-9pm

Is It Written in the Stars?
Global Finance, Precarious Destinies

A lecture by Brian Holmes

This lecture and slideshow explores a strangely beautiful artwork – Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium, by Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway – as a visual allegory of contemporary life beneath the glittering lights of the financial sphere. What uncharted constellations have come to guide our creaturely destinies? The experience of networked derivatives trading, the nature of the meta-commodity that is bought and sold and the aesthetic of the “creative cities” that have grown up around the electronic exchanges all slowly coalesce into the larger figure of a predatory society, where each individual’s most intimate fate seems to involve gnawing away at the collective fabric that spawned our increasingly precarious existence. Chicago, it turns out, is something like the global capital of derivatives. The lecture tries to offer a clearer understanding of what the traders in the pits really do and how their obscure mathematic formulas have reshaped the material world that we live in. But it also attempts to conjure up other horizons.

AND! 

Saturday, November 7, 6:30-9:00pm

Three Poets & a Country: Kishwar Naheed, Fehmeeda Riaz, Azra Abbas

“While the war front shifts to AFPAK, the terrorist bombs and the drones kill hundreds, and the war finds endorsement yet again from western feminists; join us as we tell you the other story: the story of decades of repression, the story of brave resistance, and the story of continuous betrayal.

We shall recite feminist expressions of self, sexuality, freedom and dissent through the lives and works of three ground-breaking women poets. We shall contextualize these expressions in broader historical and political backdrop and voice the representations of wars as instruments of destruction of humanity.

Brainstorm with us as we find common threads for building solidarity across the divide. Let’s ask questions!!!”

Also,

YOGA CLASS, Saturday November 7, OOPS — That’s supposed to be:

Sunday, November 8, 2:00 – 3:15. All ages welcome.

Late October Goings On…

Tuesday, October 27, 7-8pm (& every other Tuesday through December): Next Objectivists Poetry Meeting

The next objectivists are the world’s only autonomous workshop dedicated to the study & reproduction of the principles and practices of the outsidereal. This week were’ reading the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. All meetings are free & open to the public. Beginners welcome! For more information and copies of the reading material, send an e-mail to:  nextobjectivists@gmail.com.

Thursday, October 29, 8pm – 10pm: Film, Cities and War – A film screening and discussion series by Enos Williams

This project examines the subtle effects of war, effects that scar a nation, cause a sort of “karmic fall – out” even on generations that did not participate in the war or non combatants during a war. We will screen The 2nd Heimat which is about a group of film and music students in Munich between 1960 and 1970. It is a German, made for television, series written and directed by Edgar Reitz. We will use this film as a model with which to examine the after shocks of war in a broader sense deeper than usually presented on screen in films from any country.

 

Sunday, November 1, Noon to 5pm: Day of the Dead Performance & Celebration

The multi-talented team of Leah Bult, Amanda Lilleston, James Rost, Colin McRae, John Kannenburg, Jessica Guidry, Yuan Ma, Emilia Javanica-White, Reed Esslinger, and Megan Reynard, travel from Ann Arbor to host a special Day of the Dead Celebration with music, mask making, performance, art making.    Come and raise the dead!

Insurgent Theater blogs about their ULYSSES’ CREWMEN performance at Mess Hall

This was an awesome performance on September 1 that was well attended.

http://ulyssescrewmen.blogspot.com/2009/09/show-4-mess-hall-chicago.html

A quote from someone who responded to the above blog post:

I found it very interesting to see the reactions of passers-by outside the window to Mess Hall during your performance.
People would double-take, and then do a silly sort of dance outside the window to peer through the posters hanging on the glass in an attempt to see what exactly was going on.
Mostly curiosity, some had slight concern.
The concerned people made me wonder if there was a possibility of a police officer joining your cast.
Great show, I like the few changes you made, and I can’t wait to see it again. and again. and again.
Love,
Your Groupie

Everybody’s got (More) Money Issues

During the months of August and September, AREA Chicago and Mess Hall are organizing an exhibition and event series to expand the content of AREA#8 and continue the conversations about money and its relationship to our work and lives. As the recession deepens, we are continuing the discussions started by the contributors in Issue #8 and offering new points of entry in the topics covered. In addition, this marks the launch of a year of programming at Mess Hall on the crisis of capitalism and the building of a neighborhood solidarity network in Rogers Park. Everybody’s got (more) money issues will culminate at the end of September with a city-wide event titled “Who is going to save us? We are.”    For more information contact Jerome Grand grandj@gmail.com or see areachicago.org

 

EXHIBITION – August 9-30, 2009

Exhibition with contributions by/about: Humanizing a timeline of the financial crisis, Bert Stabler, Isolationism, Larry Shure, Rogers Park Money, Chicago Political Workshop, Reading Table, Cindy Waldeck, Anti-Redlining, Journal of Ordinary Thought, Exploring Chicago’s Economies, Ashley Weger, Neil Brideau, Neily Jennings, InCUBATE, The Artist Run Credit League, Samuel Barnett, Food Not Bombs, and more. 

 

EVENT SERIES [Events are held at Mess Hall (6932 N Glenwood) except where otherwise noted.] Details also here

 

Sunday, August 9 3-6pm 

Opening of Exhibition with readings and discussion. Join contributors of AREA#8: Daniel Tucker, Chicago Political Workshop, Ashley Weger, Bert Stabler, and others. 

 

August 10-13, 4-7pm

Open/Reading Hours. 

Mess Hall will be open for people to stop by and spend time reading and viewing the exhibition. Check the Mess Hall Calendar for additional Open/Reading hours.  

 

Saturday, August 15, 12-4pm 

Open gathering to envision a year of programming at Mess Hall around the crisis of capitalism. Join Mess Hall keyholders to think and discuss ideas for teach-ins, lectures, workshops, reading groups, film screenings, exhibitions, and more.   

 

Sunday, August 16, 1-5pm 

Finding the surplus, turning the surplus into resource, and using the resource.

With readings, discussions and food with contributors Raechel Tiffe, Food Not Bombs, Temporary Services, Rebuilding Exchange, InCUBATE, Wade Tillett, Neighborhood Writing Alliance and more.

 

Saturday and Sunday, August 22-23, 12-6pm

During the Glenwood Ave Arts Fest

In conjunction with the Glenwood Ave Arts Fest in Rogers Park: Experiments in barter and exchange & Humanizing a timeline of the financial crisis. 

 

Tuesday, August 25, 6-8pm  

at the Hideout, 1354 W Wabansia

Bars, (da) Business & Benefits: A Conversation about Social Consciousness, Community, and Giving Back

In conversation with leaders from Mucca Pazza, The Hideout, Backstory Cafe, Epiphany Church, Kuma’s Corner, Quennect 4, and Danny’s Tavern, among others.  

 

Here in Chicago, these small business owners have integrated fundraising for local social justice organizations into their business practices. Join a group of committed entrepreneurs, promoters, cultural workers and musicians for a conversation about the important role that independent business can play in raising consistent resources for activist and non-profit communities.  Conversation organized and facilitated by Kristen Cox, guest advisor for Issue #8, in collaboration with The Public Square. Snacks will be provided. 

 

Thursday, August 27, 7-10pm 

at Insight Arts, 1545 W Morse 

Teach-in and discussion on Solidarity Economies at Insight Arts with Mess Hall. 

 

Friday, August 28, 6-9pm

No Games Community forum: Olympics 2016 – Who Benefits and Who Will Pay? Economic effects of the 2016 Olympic bid.

 

Sunday, August 30, 6-9pm

Visualizing a Vision: Exhibition closing and collective critique. 

How do our representations of capitalism help us understand where we’ve been, where we are, and where we want to be? How do we visually represent the dynamics of capitalism and imagine a future beyond it?  With presentations by Rozalinda Borcila and Eric Triantafillou on the relationship between visual language and political imagination, followed by a collective critique of the exhibition and its visual work.

 

Thursday, September 17, Location and time TBD 

Revolt on Goose Island, Kari Lydersen book release and discussion. Event co-sponsored by Melville House Publishing. 

 

September Memorial for Franklin Rosemont.

Mess Hall will hold a memorial to commemorate the work and life of Franklin Rosemont. 

 

Late September, Location and time TBD

Who is going to save us? We are.

A culmination of conversations and inquiries on the future of structuring our work and lives.  

This weekend @ Mess Hall!

Friday, July 24, 7:00p-10:00p: NEXTOBJECTIVISTS Readings / Lectures
Guest Objectivist Eric Elshtain on the mechanics & dynamics of voice
It’s common to think of the ‘voice of the poet’ but beginning, as we do, with a consideration of effect, our guest objectivist will lead a discussion & workshop on the production of poetic voice, featuring readings by Ezra Pound, Dashielle Hammet, Arthur Sze & others. Throughout the Summer, the Next Objectivists will feature lectures and readings by local poet on specific passages and techniques of poetry from the outside.

July 25, 12:00p-4:00p: COMMUNITY SCREEN PRINTING WORKSHOPS
Every Saturday throughout the month of July from 12-4 we will be holding a screen-printing workshop. Everyone is welcomed! No experience needed! Together, we will build a light box for our use at the Mess Hall, build our own screens & printing boards, create original designs, & experiment with several printing techniques. & get this: some of our favorite ace printers be joining us as “guest instructors”!

Upcoming Workshops:

Workshop #4 (July 25)
Guest Printer: Aay Preston-Mynt
Projects:
–photo emulsion & burning screens
–printing on t-shirts (total DIY set-up!)
–1-color photo prints on t-shirts

Workshop #5 (August 1)
Guest Printer: tba
Projects:
–cleaning & reclaming screens
–photo emulsion & burning screens #2
–printing on t-shirts #2
–2-color prints on t-shirts

Workshop #6 (August
Guest Printer: tba
Projects:
–Building your own light box
–Setting up your own print stations (even if you live in a cramped little studio apartment)

Upcoming at Mess Hall

This Weekend!
July 18, 12:00p-4:00p: Community Screen Printing Workshop
Every Saturday throughout the month of July from 12-4 we will be holding a screen-printing workshop. Everyone is welcomed! No experience needed! Together, we will build a light box for our use at the Mess Hall, build our own screens & printing boards, create original designs, & experiment with several printing techniques. & get this: some of our favorite ace printers be joining us as “guest instructors”!

Workshop #3 Guest Printer: Mary Patten
Projects:

–build your own print board
–hand-drawing techniques & design
–poster printing media & techniques
–3-color posters

Sunday, July 19,12:00p-4:00p: Sewing Rebellion

Brunchluck & skill sharing DIY gathering. Take up arms (and fingers) against consumerist imperialism and fashionista culture! Remake something from your closet or from our FREE BOX. Learn or share sewing, knitting & fiber crafting skills.

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JOIN US ON FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=47908048387

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Mess Hall accepts donations of clothing, books, small housewares or electronics,  for its FREE bin at any time. Our green free bin is often on the sidewalk in front of Mess Hall offering these surplus items for FREE! Please contact us via info@messhall to schedule a drop off or stop by during one of our events.