Artist Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford brings to the Arts Club of Chicago garden a modern-day take on the classical “gipsoteca,” or cast room, reconsidering the neoclassical copy with a garden of multiples gone slightly awry. Imagery of The Art Institute’s Nemean Lion sculpture displays alongside an homage to youtube cat videos and an eighteenth century marble Hercules. Hulsebos-Spofford talks with historian Jonathan Levy (Associate Professor in History and the College, The University of Chicago) about the role of reproduction in taste-making, value, status-signaling, and social relations. Following the conversation, stay tuned for a performative activation of the garden, kicking off a constantly-multiplying array of reproductions throughout the project’s duration.

Free and open to all. RSVP requested.6:00 pm – 7:30 pm.

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford: Garden Gipsoteca is the latest in the Arts Club’s series of commissions exclusively by Chicago artists for this uniqe public space. Launched in March 2014 with Sarah and Joseph Belknap’s Afterglow, an installation of suspended phosphorescent faux rock ‘meteorites,’ the Garden Projects have ranged from expansive sculpture and 2-D paintings to the most recent The Playhead of Dawn, a collaborative sound and software project by visual artist Jeny Kendler and sound artist/ programmer Brian Kirkbride, inviting passersby to experience a massive dataset of birdsong from around the world. Other artists commissioned by The Arts Club for its Garden Project series have included: Marshall Brown, Robert Burnier, Luftwerk, Claire Pentecost, Erik Peterson, Richard Rezac, Edra Soto, and Amanda Williams.

About Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford:
Hyde Park-based Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford is a visual artist and Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Indiana University Northwest. He is also the co-director and founder of the collective Floating Museum. His work has been shown at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The UCSD Art Gallery, The Glass Curtain Gallery and The Hyde Park Art Center, among other spaces. He has held fellowships at the Sculpture Space, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, the Brown Foundation Program at the Dora Maar House, and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. His work has been supported by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Propeller Fund, the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Sicily. Recent exhibitions and projects include a public project by Floating Museum titled River Assembly on the Chicago River, an exhibition titled How to give life to a mountain at the DuSable Museum and a British Council Arts and Social Practice Fellowship.

About Jonathan Levy:
Jonathan Levy is a historian of economic life in the United States, with interests in the relationships between business and economic history, political economy, legal history, and the history of ideas. His research and teaching span the 19th and 20th centuries and are concerned with global and comparative questions. His first book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard University Press, 2012), is a history of risk in the United States. The book has a dual focus, tracing the simultaneous rise, in the context of slave emancipation, of a new individualist creed that equated freedom with risk-taking and a new corporate financial system of risk management. Freaks of Fortune won the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award, and the American Society for Legal History’s William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.

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Tags: Artist Talk & Activation, Chicago, jeremiah hulsebos-spofford, Jonathan Levy, Near North Side, The Arts Club of Chicago