Recommended Events This Week: Theaster Gates at Archeworks and “Project Cabrini Green”

Landon Bone Baker Architects is thrilled to be in the preliminary stages of a project with Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates. More details will be posted as the project evolves, but in the meantime you can learn about his multidisciplinary practice from the artist himself next Monday at Archeworks.

7 Projects
Theaster Gates| Monday, April 4, 2011 6:00pm

If pressed to describe Theaster Gates’ work in one word, it would be “transformative.” In his performances, installations, and urban interventions, Gates-an artist, musician, and cultural planner, as well as director of arts program development for the University of Chicago-transforms spaces, relationships, traditions and perceptions.

Join us as Theaster discusses the energy he has put into new works over the last two years. He will talk about the relationship between his art practice, myth making and urban stewardship and how slippery these relationships are.

Space is limited. Please RSVP Online. This event is free and open to the public.

Archeworks is located at 625 N Kingsbury (at Ontario) in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Find directions on our website.

We are also excited about the installation Project Cabrini Green by artist Jan Tichy in collaboration with Marwen students. Beginning this past Monday, the installation occupies the last remaining high-rise building of 1940s-built public housing development Cabrini-Green and “will be visible in the evenings during the four-week demolition period.”

Working from the themes of home, community, and public housing, Marwen students generated poems or texts that were then recorded and subsequently translated into pulsating LED light displays which will, in effect, “tell” the story of Cabrini Green through light. Taken together, these LED light displays create a community of “voices” that evoke the very absence of the people who once inhabited the building and neighborhood around it.

To highlight this historic moment and powerful public art project, Marwen would like to invite our students and their families, friends of Marwen, and our many supporters and advocates to join us for this special event. After the exhibition opening at Marwen, we will take a walk through the Cabrini Green neighborhood and approach the pubic light art display on foot, guided by the artist and his team of collaborators. Together we will experience the magnitude of this powerful project, the power of art to educate, to affect change and consciousness, and to give voice to the voiceless.

This Friday, April 1, Tichy will lead a walking tour from 7-8pm following the reception for Territories opening at Marwen’s Untitled Gallery the same evening. Marwen is located at 833 N. Orleans St.

You can read more about Project Cabrini Green in recent coverage by the NYTimes, Chicago Reader and Chicago Tribune.