“We’re bringing big mirrors to the spaces and places we work; supporting the community engagement process as agents of change to be ambassadors for the transformative power of the arts. We are here to activate public space by nurturing vibrant and interconnected communities. We provide a vision for public work through creative platforms that honor individual and collective experiences. Accessible Quality.”
– Collective Vision Statement of Arts and Culture Team of Chicago Park District; 2018.
Arts in the Park: The People’s Studio is the community guided and region-specific work across the Arts and Culture team to support vital arts programming in parks across Chicago. This work brings together park staff and patrons, local artists, and other community stakeholders to increase both civic engagement and public investment in parks as cultural sites.
The Chicago Park District became a centralized system in 1934 during social reform and the settlement movement in response to rapid industrialization and urbanization that most impacted factory workers and immigrants. During this time, the parks served as spaces to find solace from issues in overcrowding, public health, and education by providing libraries, field-houses, gyms, green spaces for community and recreation. Park field-houses became sites for doctor visits, language classes, dance programming, woodcrafting studios, music classes or simply a place to get a shower or hot meal. Aligned with the early 20th century movement of social reform and settlement houses, Chicago parks shaped neighborhood transformation, helping to build whole and healthy humans by providing social and cultural programs as well as open and accessible green spaces.
Today, the Chicago Park District has over 500 parks and over 250 field-houses. In addition, there are 15 Cultural Centers that act as hubs for arts & culture across the city’s 77 neighborhoods. Geographically dispersed across the city grid, park Cultural Centers provide high-quality, wide-ranging, affordable, and diverse cultural programming. Some Cultural Centers have cultural partnerships with local artists and cultural organizations to increase the range of programming. Many run after-school or summer programs including arts specialty camps and summer arts rotations. Others have visual arts exhibition space, auditoriums or other kinds of performance space. Each Cultural Center is different and works to reflect the distinct needs and interests of the neighborhood it is embedded within. It is the work of the Arts and Culture Unit in the Chicago Park District to support these hubs in continuing to provide cultural programming to these vibrant community centers.
The Arts & Culture Unit envisions parks and cultural centers as space that encourage all Chicagoans to explore the arts and their power to enhance quality of life, neighborhood development, and community dialogue. The Arts & Culture Unit connects Chicagoans to arts experiences in their local parks through events and programs that help develop understanding, knowledge, and appreciation of a wide variety of art forms and processes, and their diverse and unique cultural expressions. By integrating arts and culture into all Chicago neighborhoods, we strive to encourage a lifelong commitment to arts learning, neighborhood expression, and cultural advocacy.
Master Classes
Through collaboration with various artists, the Arts and Culture team was able to hold various master classes held for the artists of the parks to deepen their practice. These included:
Exhibition & Installation Techniques. Ryan Education Center at the Art Institute
History and Techniques of Casting. Ridge Park Ceramics Studio
Wheel Throwing, Pit-Firing, and Raku. Athletic Field Ceramics Studio
Pedagogy and Practice of AfriCOBRE with Douglas R. Ewart. Mozart Park
Working with Natural History to Explore New Techniques, Installation, and Exhibition for Woodcraft. Field Museum
Wooden Artifacts. South Shore Cultural Center Gallery
Theater of the Oppressed. Pulaski Park
Pedagogies in Dance and Master Class: Shorts in Contemporary, Break-dancing, and West African Dances. Pulaski Park
Devising Real Stories with Albany Park Theater Project
Listening Sessions and Support
Uplifting the work of Chicago Park District’s cultural instructors started with a series of meetings to name the assets and the needs. In these meetings, cultural instructors set priorities together around curriculum, validation and highlighting of the work (feeling seen and heard), professional development, what collaboration could look like, limited capacities not currently understood across the district, sharing of resources, and marketing. The work that came after was strategic capacity-building and widening possibility.
Outcomes that came from these meetings included: master classes to deepen craft, curriculum shares, open houses and open studios, discipline-specific events, exhibitions, field trips, and gatherings, more meeting times to build community, online sharing platform to cross-pollinate, highlighting cultural instructors in various public-facing forums
Shape-Shifting in The Commons: Resource Share at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
“All that you touch you change
All that you change
Changes you.”
– Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower
Shape-shifting is the kind of magic that allows the body to take on new forms, transcend borders and barriers, and practice new ways of being. Chicago educators and youth regularly practice shape-shifting to both survive and thrive. How can we tap into our magic as shape-shifters for transformation?
In a public program curated by Mallory Craig and hosted at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago arts educators came together to share facilitation strategies, curriculum-building processes, and lesson plans to re-imagine how personal and social transformation can be practiced through the radical and magic process of shape-shifting.
Above: Children’s Garden in Dvorak Park, ca. 1910. Chicago Park District Records: Photographs, Special Collections, Chicago Public Library.
Below: Instructors from South Side parks attended a workshop so that they could teach birdhouse-making, ca. 1935. Chicago Park District Records: Photographs, Special Collections, Chicago Public Library.
Community Rhythms
Community Rhythms is a free day of dance in the parks with the goal of making high-quality dance programming accessible. Classes and performances were curated by the rotating Community Rhythms planning committee headed by Mallory Craig.
Cultural Center Initiative
The Cultural Center initiative supports a network of fifteen parks spread across the city through supporting these cultural centers in spending the allotted arts-specific funding they have. These designated parks are considered cultural centers based on having several or all of the following cultural priorities:
A cultural center should have anchor arts partnership: Arts partner in residence, local park agreement, or long-term contractor.
After school arts programming: Discipline-specific classes, Park Kids rotations, partner offering
Summer Day Camp arts programming: Specialty camps and summer arts rotations
Cultural Programming for diverse park patrons: Including special recreation, families, senior adults, teen groups or preschool.
Special program offerings: arts programming on school days off, hosting community artists/art groups, CAN programs or events
Collaboration with or impact on other parks in the area: Professional development, arts showcases, arts-focused events w/other parks
Cultural Center support entails working with park staff, patrons, and arts partners to develop classes, events, and trips that meet parks where they are at and bring cultural programming that is neighborhood specific and relevant to what is already happening at the park and who is there while also introducing exciting, innovative, and high-quality arts experiences. Cultural Programming buddget included part contractual budget and part supply budget. Just a few examples of this included:
An ensemble-created performance and workshop documenting stories and experiences of people on the Southside of Chicago with Free Street Theater
Installation of gallery tracks and curatorial support for seasonal arts exhibits
Screen-printing workshop and Field Trip with Spudnick Press for Summer Camp
Woodcraft Exhibition Curatorial & Installation Support
Visiting Teaching Artists for Teen Groups, Summer Camps, Adult Classes, and Special Events
Outfitting a Park Classroom with Standing Mirrors, Dance Floor, & Wall Barres to Transform into Dance Space
Supporting Open Calls for Djs, Musicians, and Performance Artists for Events
Performances and workshops with Deeply Rooted Dance Company
Field Trip to Black Ensemble Theater
Kiln Servicing
Arts in the Park: The People’s Studio represents a sampling of initiatives collectively held by the arts and culture team at the Chicago Park District. The work above features initiatives from 2015 - 2018. Made Possible by the creative and dedicated work of: Meida Mcneal, Leah Woldman, Nikki Jolly, Kimeco Robenson, Angela Tillges, Gibran Villalobos, Danielle Littman, Marcus Davis, Patsy Diaz, Sean Heaney, and Mallory Craig. The work continues to evolve in an evolving team and stands on the shoulders of many arts and culture park stewards before.
Park Portraits
During the Winter and Spring of 2015-2016, Sean Heaney and Mallory Craig used the Inferno Mobile Recording Studio to document and archive the the work of Chicago Park’s cultural producers to bring awareness to their work and the resources available. These interviews were produced as Park Portraits. You can find more of that work and other Park Portraits through Inferno Mobile Recording Studio.
Park Portraits act as a public story archive to showcase the past, present, and future of Chicago’s parks and Cultural Centers through documenting peoples’ experiences and memories of interacting with park spaces, programs, and arts instructors. These audio features served to represent the diverse range of local Chicagoans who use and activate the parks as rich creative spaces, bringing to life the importance of arts and cultural resources.
In Fall 2015, during Chicago Artists Month, under the direction of Meida McNeal and Angela Tillges, the Arts and Culture team co-curated and presented the exhibition Arts in the Parks: The People’s Studio at Truman College. In this exhibition, the work of cultural producers and community members who use the parks as their canvas, stage, and space for creative dialogue through mediums of data visualization and a series of interactive and participatory events to amplify the topics of community creative development, youth as public artists, and public play. These events included:
Re: Center: Cultural Organizing in the Parks
What role do the parks play in neighborhood cultural organizing? What processes have citizens developed to shape the arts community within their neighborhood? Through an interactive dialogue co-moderated by DeShawn Green (Performing Artists from Chicago High School for the Arts) and Michael Rohd (Center for Performance and Civic Practice) with the citizens, artists, and park employees leading the work, three distinct cultural organizing projects in Englewood, Austin, and West Rogers Park were highlighted. These projects exist to re-imagine cultural priorities and programming that speak to the interests of each neighborhood.
In Our Own Words: Youth Development and the Arts
Chicago is home to a vibrant youth development and youth arts community. We see the artistic work of young people on stages, gallery walls, and parks across the city but we rarely have the unfiltered conversation with the youth to hear, in their own words, what youth value or find challenging about the work they do. In this unfiltered interactive discussion hosted at Austin Town Hall Cultural Center, participants were invited to engage with youth involved in several different arts projects as they performed, presented, and hosted an open-forum dialogue on their roles of development of arts in Chicago.
The Art and Nature of Play
In this public dialogue and community walk, participants were invited to discover the Art and Nature of Play at North Park Nature Village Center. Highlighted in the dialogue was the work of urban playground designers, academics, and curators; a tour of Walking Stick Woods and the year-round outdoor Forest Play School; and hands on play activities for children and adults. In keeping with principles of popular education, dialogue was shared through a fishbowl model rather than a panel with Chicago Park District’s Kidsmobile; Jim Duignan of a Plea for Playgrounds; FrankenToy Mobile; and Neighborspace Jardincito project. Participants were invited to enter in and out of the conversation in this informal but generative dialogue.