Join us to celebrate the Winter Solstice and the turn of the season – a flag by Carolina Fernandez Del Dago will come down, and a flag by Maryam Taghavi will be raised for the winter.

Maryam Taghavi is a Tehran-born artist currently residing in Chicago. She employs a post-studio, site-specific practice to weigh and intervene in existing modes of production. She is interested in an interchangeable role as both observer and participant, and locates agency in the role of the trickster. As a maker, she never pretends to be wholly outside of the taxonomies and fantasies produced by art institutional structures. Her work could be seen in a lineage of institutional critique that seeks to demystify and explicate contemporary art’s relationship to labour, production, and discourse. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as LAXART, Queens Museum, Exterressa Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, Sullivan Galleries, and Sazmanab Gallery among others. Her work is interdisciplinary, existing in photography, installation, video, publication, drawing, and performance. For more information, please visit maryamtaghavi.com.

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After sharing flags at Cuckoo’s Theater for the past two years, and across the city as part of the 2019 Terrain Biennial, Roman Susan is proud to add a new artist-made flag collection to our ongoing Community-Hosted Art Collections.

At the December 21 flag-raising, past Woman’s Club flags by Carolina Fernandez Del Dago and Nancy Lu Rosenheim will be on view. We are seeking interested households to host the works for the coming season. If you’d like to share a flag with your neighborhood, please join us this Saturday, sign up to host, and give a home to creative culture in our neighborhood!

Roman Susan Art Foundation assembles exploratory art collections in order to place contemporary works of art in the lives of local residents. Community members help maintain and expand the collections, hosting the work, and sharing it with family, friends, and neighbors at their home. At regular intervals, the art is transferred to another host, circulating the works throughout our community. New artwork (and new collections) will be added periodically, putting art in more homes, expanding the narrative from household to household. For more information about Community-Hosted Art Collections, please visit romansusan.org/collections.

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Woman’s Club installs artist-made flags at 7077 North Ashland Boulevard, the former location of the Rogers Park Woman’s Club. Exploring ideas around social work, community engagement, public welfare, literacy, migration, and gender, Woman’s Club celebrates area residents, past and present. This series is a collaborative initiative organized by Cuckoo’s Theater and Roman Susan Art Foundation.

The Rogers Park Woman’s Club was founded by ten women in 1891, expanding to more than 900 members and working for over a century to provide social and cultural services in North Chicago before disbanding in 1996. Early projects undertaken by RPWC included establishment of a public library and reading room, and the founding of pre-elementary school education – the former incorporated into the Chicago Public Library, the latter into the Chicago Public School system in the late 19th century. On the 25th anniversary of RPWC, the organization commissioned a clubhouse built at 7077 North Ashland Boulevard, which housed RPWC activities into the early 1980s. For more information, view The Rogers Park Woman’s Club: Following the Organization of Early Philanthropic Movements, Americanization Classes and Educational Justice by Leah Levine.

Cuckoo’s Theater purchased the historic site in 2016 and are in the process of rehabilitating the interior to become a dedicated performing arts center for Rogers Park. Cuckoo’s Theater produces works that expose the discomforts of human nature. By navigating the struggle as a community, we seek to find light within the darkness in the hopes of creating a brighter future. For more information, please visit thecuckoostheater.com.

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Tags: Carolina Fernandez Del Dago, Cuckoo's Theater, Maryam Taghavi, Nancy Lu Rosenheim, Rogers Park, Roman Susan