http://www.timeout.com/chicago/articles/art-design/69354/news-worthies
AREA Chicago reports on the city’s hidden histories
By Lauren Weinberg
Even though Chicago-based Boeing has contributed millions of dollars to the arts nationwide, local antiwar group Kick Boeing to the Curb had a sneaking feeling the manufacturer wouldn’t underwrite its performative protests. So the other artists and activists attending AREA Chicago’s 2007 How We Fund workshop helped the group find alternative grants, AREA Chicago cofounder and editor Daniel Tucker recalls, suggesting that his organization made that connection possible.
AREA, which stands for Art/Research/Education/Activism, brings Chicagoans from those four fields together by publishing a free, eponymous biannual publication and coordinating public events throughout the year. (How We Fund, for example, took place at the Hyde Park Art Center in conjunction with its exhibition “Pedagogical Factory.”) On Saturday 6, AREA Chicago releases its seventh issue, 1968/2008: The Inheritance of Politics and The Politics of Inheritance, with an afternoon of performances and readings at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum. That night, it holds its second annual Wants and Needs benefit auction at 511 North Noble Street.
Tucker, a 25-year-old Louisville, Kentucky, native who moved to Chicago in 2001 to attend SAIC, started AREA Chicago in May 2005. At the time, he had already organized several networking events for local art and activist organizations including the Austin-based Stockyard Institute, which carries out art-related outreach projects in underserved Chicago communities. When Stockyard Institute founder Jim Duignan asked Tucker if he would like to continue his networking efforts through a publication, AREA Chicago was born; the Stockyard Institute published the first three of its six issues.
Tucker says he and the advisory group he assembled to plan AREA Chicago “didn’t conceive of it as a Time Out or Chicago Reader.” With a print circulation of only 5,000, the publication targets Chicagoans working in the arts, at nonprofits or in schools rather than a general audience. Volunteers distribute new issues to about 20 venues throughout the city that Tucker characterizes as informal “community centers,” including Quimby’s, the Heartland Café and the Southwest Youth Collaborative.
Each issue tackles a different theme; the fourth issue, for example, reported on criminal and community justice. Instead of just focusing on policymakers reforming the prison system, Tucker explains, writers also sought out the philanthropists funding community-justice initiatives, conceptual artists who work with prisoners, documentary filmmakers and “high-school teachers creating what are called ‘restorative justice peace circles’ to keep kids from getting violent…. Instead of producing theories, we look at what people in Chicago are actually doing.” The all-volunteer writing staff has included numerous members of the Chicago art world, such as Temporary Services’ Salem Collo-Julin; Green Lantern founder Caroline Picard; SAIC professor Claire Pentecost; and Rebecca Zorach, a University of Chicago art historian.
Issue No. 7, which Zorach guest edited with Chicago writer and audio producer Aaron Sarver, investigates the history of 1968 “that hasn’t been written” rather than “well-documented” events like the DNC protests, Tucker says. Several pieces examine the long-neglected role of artists in Chicago’s various 1968 protests, chronicling the Black Arts Movement and the Chicago Artists Boycott. The issue also explores “intergenerational dynamics in politics and culture in Chicago,” Tucker says, “specifically between people from that period—baby boomers—and younger people today.” He cites the transcript of a dialogue AREA Chicago coordinated in October between Bob Crawford, who photographed the Black Arts Movement’s work in the 1960s, and his daughter Margo Crawford, a historian of that movement, as a feature that reflects both those themes.
At 68 pages, Issue No. 7 is about twice its predecessors’ size. The page count isn’t the only sign of growth: AREA Chicago just completed a residency at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and after functioning without an office for years, in March it moved into a Logan Square storefront. This week, it launches Five Questions About Art in Chicago, an online series of interviews with 40 local artists, and in January it will bring its popular People’s Atlas project to Around the Coyote. These initiatives advance what Tucker considers to be AREA’s ultimate goal: to be “a documentary about the city and about the people who care about the city—but also want to change it for the better.”
For more information and to read AREA Chicago, visit areachicago.org.
