City As Site
City As Site examines issues of spatial justice through public actions, performances, and ephemeral installations between the North Lawndale and South Lawndale communities in Chicago. Led by Gaspar, fourteen Black and Latinx youth from across both communities used their own bodies, sound, and found materials to stage public narratives about their relationship to their communities. The six-week project attempted to expand the public art dialectic to include a variety of public art making and site-interventions across Chicago’s West Side, a historically sparse and underrepresented area for arts and culture. Youth artists learned to use interdisciplinary arts methods to create transitory, experiential and performative projects that initiated dialogue between the physical geographies and psycho-geographies of daily life. Together, we examined our social living conditions and used creative means and experimental approaches to generate new images and stories. Invited artists and architects guided youth through weekly workshops and outings, such as Sebastian Alvarez, Carla Duarte, Alexander Eisenschmidt, Olivia Gude, and Benjamin Thorp. Project assistant, Emily Grelck, supported the sessions and the eventual book project documenting the series. The City As Site book can be ordered here. Below are just a sample of documentation from our workshops.
