City As Site
City As Site (2010) examines issues of spatial justice through public actions, performances, and ephemeral installations between the North Lawndale and South Lawndale communities in Chicago. Led by artist Maria Gaspar, fourteen Black and Latinx youth from two communities used their bodies and neighborhoods to stage public site interventions that questioned how we engage with our everyday environment. The six-week project attempted to expand notions about public space, belonging, borders, political divisions, and social connections. Collectively, the group experimented with various art-making processes, including performance, sound, sculpture, and installation. Throughout this project, Chicago’s West Side, a historically sparse and underrepresented area for arts and culture, became a space for possibility and production. Youth artists learned to use interdisciplinary arts methods to create transitory, experiential, and performative projects that initiated a dialogue between the physical 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, such as Sebastian Alvarez, Carla Duarte, Alexander Eisenschmidt, Olivia Gude, and Benjamin Thorp, guided youth through weekly workshops and site interventions. The National Endowment of the Arts funded the project with community support from Enlace Chicago and fiscal support from the Chicago Public Art Group. 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 a sample of documentation from our workshops.
