Resident Artist Workshops for Abolition and Freedom

Join Hyde Park Art Center Residents Dorothy Burge, William Estrada, and Aaron Hughes for a series of art making workshops for abolition and freedom. Dorothy Burge will host a memorial quilt making workshop for people that died to COVID19 while incarcerated, William Estrada will use his street art cart to host a printmaking session with a new “Abolition/Freedom” print design, and Aaron Hughes will be host a Manifest Abolition Democracy banner painting workshop connected to his Autonomous Democracy project. Participants will be invited to help make work and discuss what freedom and abolition mean to them. Each program is open to all ages.

Aaron Hughes Banner Making Activity

1-3pm

Join our resident artist, Aaron Hughes, for a banner making activity inspired by his “Autonomous Democracy” project which is a series of posters inspired by the vibrant history of agitprop and the dissemination of political graphics during popular uprisings from the 1871 Paris Commune to the current movement for racial justice in the United States.

Artist Bio:

Aaron Hughes (US, b. 1982), is an artist, curator, organizer, teacher, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. He works collaboratively in diverse spaces and media to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, deconstruct and transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes develops projects that deconstruct militarism and related institutions of dehumanization. These projects often utilize popular research strategies, experiment with forms of direct democracy, and operate in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence. Hughes works with a variety of art and activist projects including Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, About Face: Veterans Against the War, and emerging Veteran Art Movement.

Dorothy Burge Quilt Circle Activity 

1-3pm 

Join our resident artist, artist and quilter, Dorothy Burge, for a collective quilting circle activity to honor those whose lives were lost while incarcerated due to Covid-19. Burge’s work will also be in conversation with the mission of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, an organization that seeks to address the traumas of police violence and institutionalized racism through access to healing and wellness services, trauma-informed resources, and community connection. Participants will join the artist in creating pieces that will later be used for one of her large scale quilt projects.

Artist Bio:

Dorothy Burge is a fabric and multimedia artist and community activist who is inspired by history and current issues of social justice. She is a self-taught quilter who began creating fiber art in the 1990s after the birth of her daughter, Maya.

Dorothy is a native and current resident of Chicago, but is descendent from a long line of quilters who hailed from Mississippi. These ancestors created beautiful quilts from recycled clothing. While she showed no interest in this art form as a child, she grew to treasure the quilts that were created by family elders. Her realization that the history and culture of her people were being passed through generations in this art form inspired her to use this medium as a tool to teach history, raise cultural awareness, and inspire action.

Dorothy received her Masters of Arts in Urban Planning and Policy and her Bachelors of Arts in Art Design, both from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of Blacks Against Police Torture and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials; both are cultural collectives seeking justice for police torture survivors. Dorothy is also a member of the Women of Color Quilter’s Network, (WCQN), and her quilts were part of several WCQN exhibitions including: And Still We Rise, We Who Believe in Freedom, Visioning Human Rights in the New Millennium, Yours for Race and Country: Reflections on the Life of Colonel Charles Young and Commemorating His Purple Reign: A Textural Tribute to Prince. Dorothy received a 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist fellowship and is an Envisioning Justice Commissioned Artist.

Heather Brammeier Performance

1:30 – 3pm (Performances every half hour)

This Center Sunday is the opening of artist Heather Brammeier’s solo exhibition Maybe Never. The show ruminates on experiences of fragmentation, grappling with the relationship between aspiration and what exceeds one’s perspective. Brammeier has built immersive installations that incorporate contrasting colors and structural forms to engage viewers’ spatial boundaries and concepts of relation. To activate the exhibition opening, the Center Sunday program will feature a performance by artist Izah Ransohoff. Ransohoff’s movement meditation approaches the geometric landscape of Brammeier’s installations as a site of play and shifting bodily perceptions.

Artist Bio:

Heather Brammeier is a sculptor, painter, and installation artist whose work continues the function of childhood play into adulthood. Through innovative use of materials and deceptively simple design, Brammeier creates visual puzzles that invite movement in and around the artwork. The artwork tests physical and perceptual boundaries, mirroring emotional and psychological limits. Vertiginous stacking, attention to surfaces, and the use of light and shadow elicit contemplation of safety and threat, love and loss, and the complexity of emotional experience.

Once Upon A Time Capsule Artmaking Activity

1-4pm 

Bring the kids and join us and Once Upon Our Time Capsule to create a time capsule that captures life during 2020-2021 from the perspective of our youth. As our young people transition from the pandemic into the recovery phase, we invite them to have a moment to pause, look back on what was good and what was hard, recognize how brave they’ve been, and look forward to better things ahead. The time capsules will be a part of Chicago’s Giant Time Capsule to be revealed this fall at Harold Washington Library.

Open Studios

2-4pm

Join our Radicle Resident Artists and the artists in our Creative Wing on our second floor for open studios for a peek inside of their practice at the Hyde Park Art Center.