Previous Mellon Collaborative Fellowship

NEVER THE SAME

In 2013, Chicago artist and activist Daniel Tucker and Art Historian Rebecca Zorach expanded a project called “Never the Same” which, since 2010, had sought to archive and document the history of Chicago’s rich storehouse of politically and socially engaged art practices.

Beginning in the fall of 2010, Zorach and Tucker began facilitating conversations about the possibility of archiving and documenting the history of Chicago’s rich politically and socially engaged art practices. In spring 2011 they began conducting interviews for the oral history portion of the project and in October of that year launched a website (never-the-same.org) with the first 15 interviews. The groups and individuals interviewed spanned the geography of the city and were active in years ranging from the late 1960s to the present. The interviews generally focus on a specific project or event, though many cover the full range of the career or organization being profiled. Most of the interviews covered projects that have been incompletely documented or lacked representation in online resources, making basic firsthand accounts of the history of the projects and people readily available online in a search-optimized format for the first time. Rhetorically, the interviews foreground transformation and localism, as a way to intervene in the ongoing and increasingly prominent discourse around social art practices that lack language to deal with the catalytic effects that events, groups and sustained artistic collaborations have on the social fabric of a given place.

Never The Same also included a physical and material archive that started with the personal collections of the organizers and was opened up to include ephemera donated by interview subjects and others. This dimension of NTS began with seed funding provided by the Propeller Fund administered by ThreeWalls and Gallery 400. The Website

Symposium

June 7, 2013, Logan Center for the Arts
Artists and activists have increasingly taken to creating their own archives independent of major institutional affiliation or support. This gathering brought together both new and established examples of this work from across North America and paired them with exciting practices happening in Chicago. This day-long forum explored some of the ambitions, issues, and concerns emerging from these diverse and instructive models. Karen Stanworth (Toronto).

Hairbraider’s Summit
October 20, 2013, Gray Center Lab

The Quieto Pelo! (Mappy Hair!) project (Liliana Angulo Cortes with Sydney Stoudmire), the Illinois Association of Hair Braiders, and the United African Organization are organized a summit on braiding and natural hair styling practices in African-descent communities in the Chicago area. 

Course

Never The Same: Summer Seminar On Chicago Socially and Politically Engaged Art Histories
July 4 – 30, 2013

This class explores Chicago’s rich socially and politically engaged art histories through reading and discussion of primary and secondary texts, deep engagement with archival materials and interviews that are part of the Never The Same archive and oral history project (see http://never-the-same.org/), and independent research conducted by the students. Students will gain a basic understanding of the history of these art forms in Chicago, discuss the theoretical and political questions that have been interwoven with art practices here over the past 50 years, collaborate with one another on new tools for analyzing, interpreting, and presenting this history, and develop independent or small group projects in art practice, curatorial work, and/or research. The class includes site visits and guest presentations, including artists who will be part of Never The Same’s October 2013 exhibition. Students will have opportunities to contribute to the exhibition, including the availability of a small budget. 

The class is scheduled with two intensive seminar/laboratory phases and one long independent research and production phase (during which we meet weekly as a group). We invite applications from practitioners and students of art, art history, activism, archival science, and related fields. Anyone may apply regardless of enrollment in an institution of higher learning. Willingness and ability to work independently is required. 

Performances

In conjunction with the exhibition Unfurling: Five Explorations in Art, Activism and Archiving, Never the Same invited Extinct Entities, an artistic/curatorial collaborative, to present three commissioned performances by Alexandria Eregbu, Tomeka Reid, and Baraka de Soleil. Each artist was asked to create a new work inspired by the Affro-Arts Theater—a South Side art space initiated by Kelan Phil Cohran and others in 1967 and closed at the insistence of the city in 1968. Extinct Entities is a collaborative project by Erin Nixon, Anthony Romero, and Anthony Stepter that investigates possibilities for reengaging with art spaces that no longer exist. A free publication produced in collaboration with Brandon Alvendia will be available throughout the run of the exhibition.

Exhibition

Unfurling: Five Explorations in Art, Activism, and Archiving
A Never The Same Exhibition
September 24–October 20, 2013
Gray Center Lab

Never The Same commissioned five artists and scholars to produce work that activates archival materials related to Chicago’s rich history of politically and socially engaged art: Liliana Angulo Cortés (with Sydney Stoudmire), Jayne Hileman, Faheem Majeed, Dan S. Wang, and Extinct Entities (presenting Brandon Alvendia, Alexandria Eregbu, Tomeka Reid, Baraka de Soleil).

The exhibition inaugurated the Gray Center’s new studio space at The University of Chicago’s historic Midway Studios. It will present new work by five individual artists or groups of artists working in local, socially engaged, art research and practice. The selected artists approach Chicago as a site of engagement from a variety of perspectives: as life-long Chicago dwellers, former residents, or newer and temporary residents. Taking inspiration from the Never The Same archive, they extended their investigations using forms such as mapping, archiving, performing, curating, braiding, typesetting, and imagining.

Fellows

DANIEL TUCKER

Daniel Tucker works as an artist, writer and organizer developing documentaries, publications and events inspired by his interest in social movements and the people and places from which they emerge. His work has been exhibited at institutions including Mass MoCA (North Adams, MA), Gene Siskel Film Center (Chicago, IL), Park Avenue Armory (New York City, NY), Werkleitz Biennial 6 (Germany), Centro José Guerrero (Spain) as well as streets, protests, and rooftops.

REBECCA ZORACH

Rebecca Zorach was Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago and affiliated with the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Departments of Romance Languages, and Cinema & Media Studies. Current bio.