Join us for the third “How To Make a Scene” conversation on Saturday, July 27, 2024, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM, with a panel discussion from 3:30 PM – 4:30PM.

Moderator Jen delos Reyes will speak with panelists Joanne Aono (Director of the alternative art project, Cultivator – Chicago Art Exhibitions & Farm Art Projects), along with Brian Holmes & Claire Pentecost (Watershed Art and Ecology, Chicago)

This conversation between four artist organizers focused on ecologies will take place, fittingly, in the “Ecologies” section of the exhibition “In Concert with” showcasing the work of De Los Reyes and her collaborators for the past 20+ years.

How to Make a Scene is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.

How to Make a Scene is a conversation series about artist-run cultural ecosystems of the 1980s and 1990s in Chicago. The series launched June 20th on Lumpen Radio, and continues through October with more radio broadcasts with the live conversations started at Co-Prosperity on July 13th, 2024. This series is a collaborative effort between the Public Media Institute and MdW, with support from the Terra Foundation for American Art as part of the city-wide initiative, Art Design Chicago.

The project aims to connect veteran artist organizers with those working today through a combination of intimate events at Co-Prosperity, broadcasts on Lumpen Radio, and live streams on LumpenTV. The series offers audiences trailheads for further exploration of Chicago’s storied history of alternative gallery spaces, independent publications, and socially engaged collectives.

The series continues through fall to include sessions moderated by Ben Foch, Nicole Marroquin, Mary Patten, and Greg Ruffing, with more names to come!

All of the panels will be archived on Mixcloud, Vimeo, and the 2024 MdW Atlas, which will be printed as a book in 2026.

ABOUT THE PANEL
Moderator Jen de los Reyes, born in Winnipeg, Canada, is an artist, educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007–2019. She worked within Portland State University from 2008–2014 to create the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. She is the author of several publications, most recently Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies. She is currently Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity at the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She splits her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY. She describes herself as “defiantly optimistic, a friend to all birds, and proponent that our institutions can become tender and vulnerable.”

Panelist Joanne Aono is a visual artist, curator/administrator, and holistic farmer. Her research- based drawings, paintings, and installations address identity, immigration, and the environment. She directs the alternative art project, Cultivator – Chicago Art Exhibitions & Farm Art Projects and serves on the exhibition committee of the Riverside Arts Center. Aono has received several Chicago DCASE grants, an Illinois Arts Council grant, and an Artist Run Chicago HPAC grant.

Cultivator was founded in 2015 with the first exhibitions in Aono’s Ravenswood studio and on Bray Grove Farm in north central Illinois where the artist moved to in 2014. Since then, thirty-two artists have exhibited their art with the alternative arts venue. Cultivator with Aono have been featured in Lumpen Magazine, Bad At Sports, Hyperallergic, and in an Arts Midwest film.

Panelist Brian Holmes is a polyglot essayist, artist and researcher, focusing on political ecology. He lived in Paris from 1990 to 2009, where he worked with artist-activist groups, served as translator and English editor of Documenta X publications and was on the editorial board of the journal Multitudes, while publishing across Europe and the world, in edited books, museum catalogues, radical journals, tracts, websites, etc. Upon returning to the United States he took up online cartography as a visual research practice and began working closely with the environmental art group Casa Río in Argentina. In Chicago he has been a member of the Compass group and more recently of Deep Time Chicago. With the latter group he has engaged in extensive collaborations with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (now Geoanthropology) and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Anthropocene Curriculum program (now Anthropocene Commons). Brian’s cartographic work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and at Gallery 400, both in Chicago; at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; at Artists’ Alliance in New York; at the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon; at Centro Cultural Parque de España in Rosario, Argentina; and at Antenna in New Orleans. He is co-founder of the space (with Claire Pentecost) Watershed Art and Ecology in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

Panelist Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer whose poetic and inductive drawings, sculpture and installations test and celebrate the conditions that bound and define life itself. Her projects often address the contested line between the natural and the artificial, focusing for many years on food, agriculture, bio-engineering, and anthropogenic changes in the indivisible living entity that animates our planet. Since 2006 she has worked with Brian Holmes, 16Beaver and many others organizing Continental Drift, a series of seminars to articulate the interlocking scales of our existence in the logic of globalization. She is also a founding member of Deep Time Chicago, dedicated to cultural change in the Anthropocene. She is co-founder of the space Watershed Art and Ecology in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago.

A sample of Pentecost’s exhibition venues include dOCUMENTA(13); Whitechapel Gallery; the 13th Istanbul Biennial; Nottingham Contemporary; the DePaul Art Museum; the Third Mongolian Land Art Biennial; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Times Museum, Guangzhou. Institutions inviting her to lecture include MIT; CalArts; RISD; Northwestern University; Rice University; The University of Virginia; Creative Time Summit and many others. She is represented by Higher Pictures, New York, and is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Official Website

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Tags: Ben Foch, Brian Holmes, Bridgeport, Chicago, Claire Pentecost, Co-prosperity, Greg Ruffing, HOW TO MAKE A SCENE, Jen De Los Reyes, Joanne Aono, Mary Patten, Nicole Marroquin