“Franklin & Drake to St. Louis & Ohio”
A project by Chemi Rosado Seijo with Bobby Hill and neighbors

Organized by Kristin Korolowicz and The Franklin

Opening Reception: Saturday, August 16, 6-10 PM
From August 16 to September 13, 2014

In his upcoming exhibition, San Juan-based artist Chemi Rosado Seijo responds to the architectural structure of The Franklin and interactions he has had with neighbors in the Chicago community of East Garfield Park. One of these encounters was with Bobby Hill—DJ, painter, and next-door neighbor—who has lived on West Franklin Boulevard for more than thirty years. Seijo and Hill will work together to produce a series of paintings based on individuals who live (or have lived) on the block, along with a sound piece that transforms door-to-door song requests into a musical portrait of the community.

Complementing the installation within the structure of The Franklin, Seijo plans to organize a series of social actions at all four points that comprise The Franklin block. Here he will create new works by dragging the removable white walls of the exhibition space to one street corner at a time, arranging them into improvised skateboard obstacles, and skating on them with other skaters. Sejio aims to involve passersby and whoever else wishes to participate. This collective mark marking results in a formal composition that the artist envisions as being a painting, a drawing and a registry of action.

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BIO:

Chemi Rosado Seijo (b. 1973. Lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is an artist whose practice juxtaposes architecture and the urban landscape, work and social action, and art and its history. In “Historia sobre Ruedas (History on Wheels),” his 2005 project with Art in General, Seijo mapped Manhattan from the perspective of a skateboarder, re-drawing the city in terms of its skating sites. For another project, “Tapando para Ver (Closing to See)” (2001), which culminated in a book, Seijo covered up parts of text from newspaper clippings with charcoal leaving only specific words, suggesting that all language might be a form of manipulation and drawing attention to the degree to which commercial information is controlled by the media. Since 2001, Chemi Rosado Seijo has worked with the occupants of El Cerro, in Puerto Rico, painting all of the houses in the village in different shades of green. Over several years, and through negotiation and collaboration with the people of the community, over 100 buildings have been painted. Seijo has participated in numerous exhibitions and biennials including the Whitney (2002), Prague (2005), Havana (2006), and Pontevedra (2010). He has received grants from Creative Capital and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and his work was most recently featured in the group exhibition “Beyond the Supersquare” at The Bronx Museum of Arts in New York.

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Tags: dock 6, East Garfield Park, The Franklin