How can grassroots organizations, artists, and designers shift the flow of culture in Chicago from a set of institutions grounded in the urban core, to celebrate the vast cultural array on the city’s periphery? Join Van Alen Institute inside the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the Chicago Architecture Biennial‘s 2017 Special Project Sites for a variety show of fast-paced performances, presentations, and provocations that shifts the cultural conversation from east to west, featuring:
Chicago Sinfonietta (performance of L’air pour l’air, a Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017 participant project, featuring costumes by SO-IL and Ana Prvački beginning 4 p.m.); Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Special Projects Assistant Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Art Institute of Chicago; Faheem Majeed and Andrew Schachman, Co-Directors, Floating Museum; Meida McNeal, Arts and Culture Manager, Chicago Park District; Moves Me Soul Dance Company; and Shannon Stewart, Executive Director & CEO, Inspiration Corporation
Presented with:
Participants
Chicago Sinfonietta is a professional orchestra dedicated to modeling and promoting diversity, inclusion, and both racial and cultural equity in the arts through the universal language of symphonic music. Our core values are built around being bold and daring in all aspects of our work, providing a source of connectivity through music, and ensuring and inspiring a continued investment in diversity and inclusion in classical music.
Floating Museum is a collaborative arts organization that creates temporary, site-responsive museum spaces to activate sites of cultural potential throughout Chicago’s neighborhoods. They exist in the continuum of artists examining their relationship to institutions by engaging local artists, historians, and organizations in events that challenge traditional museum thinking and generate community engagement and conversation.
Focusing on progressive thinking and practice across all design disciplines, the Department of Architecture and Design at the Arts Institute of Chicago features a collection of 250,000 objects grounded in works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. The department’s diverse holdings also include works by contemporary architects such as Elizabeth Diller, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Lindy Roy, and MOS (Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample) and cutting-edge designers like Hella Jongerius, Konstantin Grcic, Stefan Sagmeister, and Joris Laarman.
The Chicago Park District’s Arts & Culture Unit envisions parks as vital cultural spaces that encourage all Chicagoans to explore and embrace the visual and performing arts and their power to enhance individual quality of life, neighborhood development and community dialogue. There are a variety of arts programs offered throughout the Chicago Park District including the arts partners in residency, a nationally recognized partnership that allows not-for-profit arts organizations to be housed in Chicago Park District field houses. In order to increase the quality and quantity of cultural arts programs and activities throughout Chicago, 13 parks have been identified as cultural centers.
Move Me Soul is a youth dance company that fuses technique, performance, positivity and creativity. Teens move beyond their limits on and off stage. Today more than 150 teens participate throughout Chicago in several programs that develop dance technique, spoken word artists while enhancing their character. The programs additionally provide college readiness workshops, field trips and performance opportunities. The company presents 3 main stage concerts during its Winter, Spring and Summer seasons.
In an atmosphere of dignity and respect, Inspiration Corporation helps people who are affected by homelessness and poverty to improve their lives and increase self-sufficiency through the provision of social services, employment training and placement, and housing. Inspiration Corporation’s innovative foodservice training program, based in their own restaurant space, Inspiration Kitchens educates, trains, and helps participants with job placement in the industry.