Temporary Services: Art Work and The Free Store
@ Gallery 400
400 S Peoria St, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Wednesday, January 27th, from 5PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, March 6th
Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics, is a newspaper and website that consists of writings and images from artists, activists, writers, critics, and others on the topic of working within depressed economies and how that impacts artistic process, compensation and artistic property. The independently published, 40-page newspaper is distributed throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. The exhibition features a display of the newspaper, a distribution site for the Chicagoland area, and multiple events related to economic sustainability in the arts.
The Free Store is a nomadic, temporary free store that irregularly visits a variety of Chicagoland neighborhoods. The Free Store, open during all gallery hours, invites you to be involved: come to the store, bring stuff you want to give away, and take stuff that you want. There is no restriction on what you can take, you don’t have to trade or barter. Just take it.
The Free Store takes as inspiration the long-running gift-economy tradition of swap shops, free shops and other similarly named initiatives where materials and services are offered free of charge. Free stores had a brief heyday in the U.S. during the late sixties, with perhaps the most famous example being the free store run by the radical theater/community-action group the Diggers in the San Francisco Bay area.
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