50 flags for a new May Day

This past Wednesday (April 30) marked the second anniversary of Michael Piazza's death and a group of us commerated that date with a public placement of 50 flags at the Hyde Park Art Center garden 5020 S. Cornell. The piece '50 flags for a new May Day (43008 Michael Piazza)' stands through May Day, a day that Michael Piazza held with much regard politically and artistically. The utility flags were a common object and symbol Michael used to portion off lines of demarkation, map sites and generally identify markers of significance throughout the city. He also used them to draw with, leaving ideas and speculation around Chicago. These flags were part of many pieces including a collaboration with Harold Jefferies from Little City entitled '1000 flags for a new Jeruselum' that was last seen publicly on October 12, 2003 in Columbus Park.

Schools as Prisons

Located at the HPAC currently is a collboration between Bert Stabler and Paul Mack and their students. Bert Stabler writes: "Ideology" describes the invisible, sometimes unspoken beliefs and values that help a social group to live and work together. Ideologies in our society are communicated through mass technology like TV and the Internet, and through very personal groups, like families and neighborhoods. But some of the most interesting places are in between, in the medium-sized public spaces where large groups meet and interact face to face. Places like churches, schools, shopping malls, and prisons all bring together people who have opposing roles (pastor/parishioner, teacher/student, merchant/consumer, guard/prisoner), working under a lot of pressure to make society function as smoothly as possible. We call these places "institutions."

Church, school, prison, and the mall are all places where Americans flock to meet one another, for reasons they can't fully understand or describe. The two
institutions focused on in the title, schools and prisons, have a lot in common, Both are places where people are compelled by law to learn how to acclimate
to the larger society. The other two we mentioned, malls and churches, are places in which people come together voluntarily in order to take part in the
shared life of the society. But, as with schools and prison, the goal is to meet the needs (or fix the mistakes) of the individual person.

Working in Gilbert, Arizona, Paul Mack's photography class took inspiration from an urban legend which held that the school had originally been intended as either a
shopping mall or a women's prison. They used Adobe Photoshop to speculate on their familiar spaces transformed into a different kind of institution.
Bert Stabler's classes, in Chicago, made a robot that, in the manner of Voltron or the Transformers, creates a person out of these institutions, in the same way
these institutions help to define us as members of a larger group.

WSYR 88.7 fm resurfaces at HPAC

Faiz Razi, resident visiting composer with Stockyard Institute this year showcases powerful sonic project of 50 micro works on April 26 at the Hyde Park Art Center 24 hour open space. The pieces were broadcast through WSYR 88.7 fm radio with a live feed from our workspace. Killer graf artist Zeb gives impromptu workshop on graffiti with local youth. Sonic pieces to be posted soon.

Version 08 Dark Matter

Versionfest opens this weekend and runs around the city in a host of venues until April 27. Version and Edmar's many efforts (Lumpen, Select Media Festival, more) which has always represented 'Dark Matter' in a rather direct way, pays homage this April to artist, writer, scholar, activist, Greg Sholette who coined the term some years ago. Dark Matter, the theme of this years versionfest identified the enormous population of unrecorgnized or unrecognizable producers who sat below the radar and conversation of the (local) art market in Chicago. Chicago, the D. M. city of the United States will be activated over the next couple of weeks. Stop by the Viaduct Theater on Saturday and Sunday, visit the Co-Prosperity Sphere and pick up a copy of the new publication Proximity Magazine. www.versionfest.org

Jason Foumberg on Piazza

Eye Exam
Log-rolling

Jason Foumberg

Community-based actions and collaborations are distinct traits of Chicago art’s scene. As the new form of public art, bearing no resemblance to the hulking steel monsters that preside in our municipal plazas, they include practices fermented in the grassroots political era of the 1960s and continue today under the banner of pedagogy, which is a strangely academic term for something that involves many beyond the ivory tower. Social sculpture became the key phrase in the 1960s, initiated by German artist Joseph Beuys, to provide the theoretical groundwork for an art form centered on people and actions, not materials and aesthetics. The art of inclusion swiftly took hold in Chicago with the help of several key figures, and many today teach at our universities, for socially engaged art often features an educational effort. One trailblazer in this arena was Michael Piazza, who, for close to thirty years until his death in mid-2006, spurred community initiatives in prisons, with the mentally disabled, in parks and on the streets.

The record of Piazza’s varied projects, spanning decades, is currently collected and on view at the College of DuPage, and the legacy of his actions and collaborations ripple through the lives of his friends, collaborators and students. In one of his workshops, at the juvenile detention center, Piazza helped the participants explore their newfound bound way of life in conceptual terms, beyond painting or drawing. For instance, the sculpture "Lot" from 1995 is a round poker table with handcuffs drilled around the perimeter standing in for the prison poker players. Such objects were exhibited in the first-ever art reception held in the detention center and attended by the public. "Lot" helped the prisoners think through what exactly constitutes the notion of fun while incarcerated, and it also presented outsiders, or the public, with an idea of what "community" meant on the inside.

Piazza’s collaborators did not always take the form of his family, friends or fellow artists. Jim Duignan, co-curator of the retrospective exhibition, called Piazza’s life and art "a seamless, uninterrupted action." For Piazza, living in Logan Square also meant making art there, which meant connecting with the neighborhood’s residents, some of whom were in the juvenile prison where he vitalized the art programming. He inspired the idea that living can be artful by simple creativity, such as creating a connection where none had previously existed. This could include initiating conversation and making introductions, or a festival in the park. Most of the art objects on view also push this notion of readymade objects that simply need to be brought together. Collage and assemblage are the results of this process, a literal fusion of art and life.

Piazza’s longtime colleagues, including Duignan, Bertha Husband, Brian Dortmund (all co-curators of the exhibit) and wife Laura Piazza came to loathe the term "collaboration," sensing that it was a misused idea among artists. From then on they would refer to their projects as "log-rolling," an activity that required the same amount of balance from all workers in order to keep afloat. It was around this time that Piazza took part in founding Axe Street Arena, a gallery and social space at the Milwaukee, Diversey and Kimball intersection. This served as home base for Piazza’s projects—which he would probably never term "his" projects, but rather the community’s—including an exhibition for graffiti artists that brought together many of the city’s taggers, most of whom were familiar to each other only by their tags, not faces. Axe Street Arena is remembered as a hotbed for the new type of social sculpture. In 1998, nine years after Axe Street closed, the newly formed collaborative art group Temporary Services, now based in Rogers Park at Mess Hall, kicked off their exhibition program with a memorial to Piazza and company’s old Logan Square space.
It seemed Piazza was always a sort of revolutionary of the disenfranchised, giving voice to those who many would rather never hear from, such as prisoners and graffiti artists, and those who have no platform. One project was simply making a copy machine available to people producing zines and other DIY literary ventures. The cost of copying was their only overhead, and so Piazza erased that burden. Duignan explained that through these communal interactions, Piazza was breeding the type of city he wanted to live in; like an underground alderman, he picked up the community’s interests and facilitated their progression into shapely, lovely things.

Piazza’s subjects—gangs, prisoners, graffiti—may seem beyond repair, and his projects may seem counterproductive to the practice of "art." But it was exactly this quality of stroking against the grain that turned on other like-minded artists, and in the end produced more and more self-motivated individuals. Much of his writing and his legacy deal with overthrowing the deathly trappings of consumer capitalism, and in this way he was a theorist of punk attitudes, and a composer of mute voices. In Piazza’s own words: "It is best to listen to the many voices that until now have been silenced."

The Work of Michael Piazza shows at the Gahlberg Gallery at the College of DuPage, 425 Fawell, Glen Ellyn, (630)942-2321, through April 19. (2008-04-01)

Library donated to Zawadi Project

Kathyrn Carr from Francis Parker School in Chicago organized a mass donation of hundreds of books for the children of the Zawadi Project which meets on alternate Saturdays in the Austin community. The often 50-60 children from the Austin community will be able with Francis Parker's staff, parents and children generosity be able to bring books home for the summer. The significant donation triples the amount of books our small library has accumulated over the last two years. For more infromation on the Zawadi Project click on Projects. Stockyard Institute has been working with Zawadi Project for the last 8 years. Contact us if you can aid in any capacity.

Denmark residency 2008

from rum46 calendar

august - september
School for Non-Productive Learning.
RESIDENCY; Jim Duignan (Chicago) - artist and initiater of the STOCKYARD INSTITUTE and the exhibition project Pedagogical Factory Project in public space; Jim Duignan in co. with rum46
Talk;- on language, learning, context, Exhibition; Presentation of the project All the Things We know...you know. School for Non-Productive Learning, made for Pedagogical Factory, Hyde Park Art Center Chicago 2007 - sound, video, photo, poster and text. By Tanja Nellemann, Ditte Lyngkjær, Barbara Katzin, Lise Skou, Grete Aagaard. Residency organized by rum46.