POSTPONED to 05/07

04/16 – Bridging Diasporic Divides: Synthesizing Family Through Visual Art | Natasha Moustache

Drawing from my experience as a first-generation person of African descent my arts practice centers around reassembling the fracturing I witnessed early on between the African and Black American communities. I use photography and domestic installation to synthesize family galleries as a way to connect experiences, rituals, and cultural signifiers that permeate the Diaspora. In researching this topic I’m thinking about cultural inheritance, colonial influence, shared generational traumas, and in particular creolization; how can we bridge the gaps between various African Diasporic groups in service of connecting us across oceans and manmade borders? How can we create new family archiving that narrows those cultural gaps between the African immigrant community and the Black American community and beyond? My work views the Diaspora through the lens of Eduard Glissant’s rhizome theory. I’m interested in ways to visualize the nuances of cultural experiences and signifiers – African and Caribbean artists and writers that work in similar ways. I find artist/writer interviews, film, and post-colonial theory particularly helpful to build language. I’m interested in the thoughts of other POC and BIPOC artists who identify as part of the African or Latinx diaspora.

Natasha Moustache is a photographic installation artist based in Chicago. Moustache’s practice utilizes portraiture and narrative documentation exhibited within intricately fabricated worlds that evoke themes of home, familial lineage, and cross-cultural commonalities centering the African Diaspora. Moustache received their BFA from Simmons College in 2004. In 2005 they were awarded the Center for Photography at Woodstock AIR residency at the age of 22. They continued their arts practice in Boston, Ma while foregrounding their photojournalist and freelance career in the subsequent years. In 2019, they enrolled in Chicago Columbia College to pursue their MFA where they were awarded the Stuart Abelson Travel Fellowship and later the 2021 MOCP Snider Prize Honorable Mention. Moustache’s work has been exhibited at the Houston Center for Photography, the International Center for Photography, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and the Hyde Park Art Center. Most recently, Moustache was a Latitude AIR in January 2023 and debuted their first solo show at the C33 Gallery in Chicago in April 2023. Their second solo show is currently on view at the Lubeznik Art Center in Michigan City, IN.

04/23 – Good Relative: Creating Kinship with Fire and More-Than-Human Beings | Lydia Cheshewalla

I started researching prairie ecosystems, unintentionally, as a child through the fact of location. Growing up in rural Northeastern Oklahoma on my tribal reservation, I interfaced daily with an ecoregion, simultaneously natural and man-made, existing at the crossroads of stewardship and exploitation. The Great Plains ecoregion, spanning across the central portion of what is known primarily as the Midwest of America, is an environment geologically created through tectonic shifts and glacial retreats. It is cultivated by the Indigenous peoples of the area through the repeated and intentional application of fire to land. This practice of prescribed-burning was understood to be part of a deep and complex relationship of place that considered not just human needs or desires but also what was beneficial for more-than-human beings, such as bison, butterflies, plants, and the earth itself. The resulting prairie ecosystems were sites of ecological diversity, interdependence, and sustainability with nutrient-rich soil whose large swaths of grasses reflected light away from the planet with a global cooling effect. Its root systems sequestered carbon more effectively than forests. However, in the wake of settler colonialism, the nutrient abundance of prairieland soil became the foundation for large-scale agriculture and Indigenous practices of prescribed-burnings and land stewardship diminished as colonialism spread across the region. It contributes to environmental issues such as habitat loss, poor soil and water quality, loss of insect + plant + animal diversity, species extinction, and preventable wildfires—ongoing issues that continue to worsen, contributing directly to climate injustice.

Illinois, regarded as the prairie state, has seen some of the greatest loss of prairie ecosystems, including more recently the destruction of the 8000 year old Bell Bowl gravel prairie which was home to an endangered bee. What impact does loss of local ecosystems have on climate justice and community health? How can we combat and remediate colonial misinformation surrounding fire ecology and land stewardship as we consider climate change long term in the Midwest? How can we harness our collaborative strengths to create expansive ecosystems of care? How do we witness the role of beyond-human beings in the creation of ecosystems of care?

Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Through the creation of site-specific land art and ephemeral installations that are grounded in Indigenous land stewardship practices and kinship pedagogies, Lydia engages in multivocal conversations about place and relationship. By working within a framework of change and collaborating with beyond-human kin, she rejects Capitalist reliance on scarcity, immortality, preciousness, and waste production in the creation of value and remains responsive (responsible) to the realities of shifting ecologies in an age of climate crisis. Her work has been shown at Generator Space, the Union for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Comfort Station, Harold Washington Library, and the Center for Native Futures (Chicago, IL) among others. She was awarded a 2020 Tallgrass Artist Residency and participated in the 2022/23 Chicago Art Department Think Tank: On Mending. She has been filling the bucket with water to see if it leaks.

04/30 Who Owns Our Block? An Exploration of Local Property Ownership in Chicago |
fern ramoutar

The focus of Who Owns Our Block? is to create a zine that equips residents and organizers to understand rental housing dynamics in our neighborhoods and also fosters new opportunities to build solidarity in support of affordable and livable housing for all. The zine will contain critical information about local landlords, rental prices, and housing conditions. In collaboration with local artists and printing presses, a distinct zine will be made for each block in the city of Chicago.

The project uses a series of computer programming and GIS mapping tools to automatically compile and analyze publicly available data and archives. The zine will translate this information via maps and data visualizations, housing-related memes, and art made by folks living in each neighborhood. In this way, the zine will serve both as an informational tool as well as a piece of art for local residents to enjoy.

The commodification of rental housing has systematically limited the ability of poor and working class people to access safe, stable living conditions. Some questions I am interested in exploring: (1) What are the causes and consequences of this commodification for people’s everyday lives? (2) What are compelling visual strategies for communicating these ideas? (3) What connections exist between art and propaganda in the 21st century? (4) How should our artistic practices uplift and support community-based organizing efforts?

fern ramoutar is an artist and a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where she is pursuing a PhD in Economics. She is a Black, queer woman from the Caribbean diaspora, born and raised in Toronto, and currently living in Chicago. Her research investigates the causes and consequences of segregation and racial inequality. Outside of school, fern is invested in supporting local efforts to think and build beyond the existing structures of racial capitalism. She also uses film, poetry, and prose to explore the various ways that local communities collectively practice freedom. Although these practices are often invisible in the “data” that she studies as an economist, she believes they are essential to understanding the true nature of any neighborhood, city, or region, across space and time.