Upcoming Events: February 12-21

FEB 12-13 Collectivism After Collapse: Chicago Activist Art Spaces, Collectives, & Projects

FEB 15 PLAYWRITING COURSE : The Art of Seeing Needs to be Learned — CLOSED

FEB 17 AREA/CPW reading group

FEB 21 SEWING REBELLION

AND here’s details…

NEXT OBJECTIVISTS, Tuesday, Feb 9, 7-10p (Every 2 weeks @ 7p on Tuesdays until May 4)

The Next Objectivists is the world’s only autonomous writing & reading workshop dedicated to research into & reproduction of the poetry & poetic techniques associated with the OUTSIDEREAL. We study a wide variety of radical poetics, from Objectivism to Black Mountain, from Dada to Language Poetry, from Gaucho to Negritude. Upcoming workshops will focus on ekphrasis & the work of Jose Hernandez, Basil Bunting, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Edward Sanders & many others. JOIN US! All events are free! No prior knowledge of poetry required!

CAA CONFERENCE: Collectivism After Collapse: Chicago Activist Art Spaces, Collectives, and Projects, Friday, Feb 12 & 13, from 7pm-on

The two-night event at Mess Hall is an open invitation to College Art Association conference attendees and the public to come to Mess Hall to informally gather, meet, and learn about Chicago art and activism, including an exhibition highlighting various Chicago-based collective art spaces, periodicals, campaigns, and activist art projects from 2000-2010. Come to Mess Hall and meet many of the people who are involved in this work!

PLAYWRITING COURSE: The Art of Seeing Needs to be Learned, taught by Ezzat Goushegir, Mondays, Feb 15-April 5, 6:30 -8p

Free course, limit 8 seats.
**Register by February 8**  Course is now full

This is an 8-week course for those who wish to develop or expand their creative writing in an enthusiastic and supportive workshop.

This course meets every week beginning February 15, 2010 each Monday from 6:30 to 8:00 PM. During these eight weeks, we will explore the possibilities of looking at things differently.  We will take the chance to challenge received wisdom with fresh perspectives. By exploring the deeper meanings of words, cultural images and dreams, we will make surprising discoveries and will learn how to transmute thoughts and feelings into dramatic form.

Through a series of exercises and readings, students will learn playwriting techniques and write short pieces for stage. At the end of the course there will be a public reading of the short plays developed in the workshop.

Ezzat Goushegir is from everywhere and nowhere, from the East and the West, North and South, from the land of poetry, rhythm, image and the pure silence. Love –as complicated as the truth– is the place of her existence. She is a life time student and teacher at the same time!  Theatre of truth is her profession. She currently teaches at DePaul University in Chicago.

AREA/CPW reading group meeting, Wednesday, Feb 17, 7-9p

Chicago as an Intellectual, Social, and Political Problem   • Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots, 1928-35, Randi Storch • Race, Space, and the Reinvention of Latin America in Mexican Chicago, Nicholas de Genova • Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton  ////// In conjunction with AREA, the Chicago Political Workshop is facilitating a reading group investigating practical and theoretical issues raised by contributors to the AREA #8: Everybody’s Got Money Issues. The impetus for establishing the reading group was an article written by CPW responding to issue AREA #8, which can be found at: http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/everybodys-got-money-issues/toward-more-coherent-anti-capitalist-theory-and-pr/

SEWING REBELLION, Sunday February 21, 1-4p

Sign up for this amazing playwriting course (& it’s free)…

New Playwriting course at Mess Hall: Feb 15-April 5
The Art of Seeing Needs to be Learned
Taught by Ezzat Goushegir

Free course, limit 8 seats.
Register by February 8 by sending an email with your name and contact info to
info@messhall.org
This is an 8-week course for those who wish to develop or expand their creative writing in an enthusiastic and supportive workshop.

This course meets every week beginning February 15, 2010 each Monday from 6:30 to 8:00 PM.
During these eight weeks, we will explore the possibilities of looking at things differently.  We will take the chance to challenge received wisdom with fresh perspectives. By exploring the deeper meanings of words, cultural images and dreams, we will make surprising discoveries and will learn how to transmute thoughts and feelings into dramatic form.

Through a series of exercises and readings, students will learn playwriting techniques and write short pieces for stage. At the end of the course there will be a public reading of the short plays developed in the workshop.

Ezzat Goushegir is from everywhere and nowhere, from the East and the West, North and South, from the land of poetry, rhythm, image and the pure silence. Love –as complicated as the truth– is the place of her existence. She is a life time student and teacher at the same time!  Theatre of truth is her profession. She currently teaches at SNL at DePaul University in Chicago.

Mess Hall
 is located at
6932 North Glenwood Avenue
Chicago, IL 60626
Morse CTA Red Line Train Stop
www.messhall.org

Tuesday, January 26: 7-10pm

Next Objectivists Poetry Workshop: 7-10pm

The Next Objectivists is the world’s only autonomous writing & reading workshop dedicated to research into & reproduction of the poetry & poetic techniques associated with the OUTSIDEREAL. We study a wide variety of radical poetics, from Objectivism to Black Mountain, from Dada to Language Poetry, from Gaucho to Negritude. Upcoming workshops will focus on ekphrasis & the work of Jose Hernandez, Basil Bunting, Tom Raworth, Rae Armantrout, Edward Sanders & many others. JOIN US! All events are free! No prior knowledge of poetry required!

Wednesday, January 27:  7-9pm

CPW Reading Group

/////Theme: Chicago as an Intellectual, Social, and Political Problem  ///

READINGS:

- American Project: An Historical-Ethnography of Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes, Sudhir Venkatesh
- Nature’s Metropolis, William Cronon
- The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, Ellen Meiksins Wood

you can download the texts at: www.dropboks.com (does not work w/Safari)
- clip on login
- email address: chicago.political.workshop@gmail.com
- password: 2008marx
- select the AREA/CPW Jan. 27 texts folder

Saturday, January 9, 7-9pm

Presentations on radical art history and critique of graphics of “Celebrate! Celebrate?: The Politics and Tactics of Visualizing a People’s History.”

Saturday, January 9th, 7:00pm-10:00pm

Come out to hear to great talks!

• Aay Preston-Myint on magical-political affect in the “Summoning a New Queer Reality” poster series
• Nicolas Lampert on the history of the monument controversy at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument.

There will also be an open discussion and critique of graphics of the Celebrate?, Celebrate? show that is currently up at Mess Hall.

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!