Join Sixty Inches From Center for the 2024 Chicago Archives + Artists Festival! This year’s festival embraces the theme of embodiment. Throughout this 3-day gathering, we’ll explore the ways archivists and artists preserve the legacies of our communities via talks, performances, music, and workshops.

We will have our usual festival offerings, including our Archive Roll Call, an artist-designed Photo Booth (hosted by artist and Sixty Visuals Editor Ireashia M. Bennett), and a series of archive digs and unfurlings—a term and format we’re borrowing from Never The Same’s 2013 project Unfurling: Five Explorations in Art, Activism, and Archiving. This will also be a continued celebration of our recently-released book Case Studies in Collaboration, published by For the Birds Trapped in Airports.

The space will be adorned with a site-specific installation by artist and Sixty contributor Natalia Villanueva Linares, and with a new mural by artist and Sixty Collective Co-Lead Katia Perez Fuentes. We will close out the night with our usual Festival Wind Down featuring BAILAR Y LLORAR 🎭 (a.k.a. DJ Jungyal & Light of Your Vida).

This year’s festival is co-curated by Kate Hadley Toftness, Tempestt Hazel, and Christina Nafziger.

The Chicago Archives + Artists Festival is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and Teiger Foundation. This festival is also 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.
ACCESSIBILITY NOTES

**Masks are required for those who attend and we will have HEPA air purifiers throughout the building and in the primary event space. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided during every panel of the event. Read more about accessibility for this venue and event in our Accessibility Guide.

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DAY TWO // Saturday, August 3rd

Unfurling Hour with Patric McCoy, Ankit Khadgi, and Gerber/Hart Library and Archives
5:30pm – 6:30pm CST

If you love the thought of getting up close and personal with the rarely seen materials from incomparable Chicago collections, this is your chance. We have invited some of our favorite archivists, collectors, and artists to choose a selection of materials from their archives that compliment the festival’s themes and topics of conversations. For this night of the festival, we’ve invited photographer and art collector Patric McCoy, writer a curator Ankit Khadgi, and the caretakers of the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives–one of the largest repositories of LGBTQ+ content in the world–to choose materials from their archives and ephemera collections that speak to the rich history of queer life and culture in Chicago across time and generations. Join us prior to the roundtable to explore these materials and hear stories from the archives.

Archiving in Times of Cultural Erasure + Censorship: A Roundtable Discussion
6:30pm – 8pm CST

Speakers: Maira Khwaja (Invisible Institute, Chicago Police Torture Archive), Jose Luis Benavides (Artist), Fawn Pochel (Saulteaux) (First Nations Garden), Anita Sharma (Visual Arts Archivist, Research & Archives Associate for What Is Seen & Unseen: Mapping South Asian American Art in Chicago); Co-Moderators: Erin Glasco (The Blackivists, Interrupting Criminalization, Shift Collective), Tempestt Hazel (Sixty Inches From Center)

How has embodiment been used as a strategy when a people’s history, community, and culture is being displaced, erased, or suppressed? What embodiment and preservation strategies have been used to preserve the histories of communities that have experienced high levels of cultural erasure or censorship? What does preservation look like in the face of genocide, political aggression, and global devastation? What methods and strategies have communities used to ensure the safety of their material records, histories, and culture? What are the repositories for preservation that intentionally do not center institutions or their conventional material forms? We invite you to join us in a roundtable conversation with artists, archivists, writers, and community organizers to discuss these topics and more. Live CART (Communication Access Real-time Translation) will be provided.

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Tags: 2024 Chicago Archives + Artists Festival: Embodying the Archive: Day Two, Ankit Khadgi, Chicago, Chicago Archives + Artists Festival, Christina Nafziger, DJ Jungyal, Erin Glasco, Experimental Station, Fawn Pochel, Hyde Park, Ireashia M. Bennett, Jose Luis Benavides, Kate Hadley Toftness, Katia Perez Fuentes, Maira Khwaja, Natalia Villanueva Linares, Patric McCoy, Sixty Inches From Center, Tempestt Hazel.