Chicago Artist Group Portrait 2015 - Info and Reading Options

The Internet Archive:

<div>On Saturday, June 20th, 2015, ALL self-identifying Chicago Artists were invited to sit for a group portrait on the steps of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL  </div><div><br /></div><div>Over 600 artists arrived to be included in the portrait.  The open ended and non-discriminating gesture brought a diverse array of practitioners from across the city to form this historical moment.  </div><div><br /></div><div>Organized by Jason Lazarus</div><div>Photo Assistants:</div><div>Aron Gent</div><div>Patrick Putze</div><div><br /></div><div>Many thanks to give:</div><div><br /></div><div><a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/mcachicago" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);" rel="nofollow">Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago</a><span style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"> volunteers and staff who were so thoughtful, collaborative, and willing, with special mentions for </span><span style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">curator </span><a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/steven.l.bridges" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);" rel="nofollow">Steven L. Bridges</a><span style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"> and </span><a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Madeleine-Grynsztejn/280641098615793" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);" rel="nofollow">Madeleine Grynsztejn</a><span style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"> for immediate openess and enthusiasm, </span><a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/julie.r.widholm" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);" rel="nofollow">Julie Rodrigues Widholm</a><span style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"> for immediate support,</span><br style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);" /><a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/DuncanRobertAnderson" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);" rel="nofollow">Duncan Robert Anderson</a><span style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"> for logistics, </span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"><a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/abraham.ritchie" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;" rel="nofollow">Abraham Ritchie</a> for social media,<br />Elena Grotto for non stop coordinating, (all those prep meetings paid off)!<br /><a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/sylvie.hayeswallace" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;" rel="nofollow">Sylvie Hayes-Wallace</a>, <a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/kevin.weil.79" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;" rel="nofollow">Kevin Barrett Weil</a>, <a class="profileLink" href="https://www.facebook.com/danielstephenmiller" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;" rel="nofollow">Daniel Stephen Miller</a> for being first points of contact for many excited attendees.  And most important, <br />ALL ATTENDEES for being super patient and lovely!<br />PS thank you to the immovable pigeon for bearing symbolic load and providing comic relief!</span><br /></div><div>----</div><div><br /></div><div>The Original Invite:</div><div><br /></div><div><div style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:14.6181812286377px;background-color:rgb(233,234,237);"><div class="_4-u2 _36i5 _4-u8" style="border-width:1px;border-style:solid;margin-bottom:12px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"><div class="_1w2q" style="padding:12px;"><span class="fsl" style="font-size:14px;"></span><div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed">OPEN INVITE TO ALL CHICAGO ARTISTS<br /><br />Dear Chicago Artists,<br /><br />You are warmly invited to stand in a group portrait, rain or shine, on the front steps of the MCA Chicago on Saturday, June 20th, mark your calendars! Given the unique light/shadow situation that changes all day on front steps, it is looking likely that the photograph will need to be made at 12:30pm, and the plaza is open to attendees to socialize and primp starting at 11:30am...stay tuned for a confirmation of these times!<br /><br />Arrival and Check-In: 11:30am-12:30pm<br />Photoshoot: 12:30pm-1:15pm <br /><br />EVENT INFO HERE:<br /><a href="http://bit.ly/GrpFoto" style="color:rgb(59,89,152);text-decoration:none;" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/GrpFoto</a><br /><span class="text_exposed_show"><br />---<br /><br />The group portrait will be owned by everyone and become part of the public domain! It is my intention to not ‘own’ this photograph but to put it online for anyone to print, alter, distribute as they see fit (as this seems to happen anyways in our image culture)...in other words, I want to have it in the public domain where I think it belongs and watch it move around, mutate, and engage a greater audience. <br /><br />For any minors who wish to join in the moment, please bring your parent or guardian sign a release form provided at the event.<br /><br />If you have questions about this, email [email protected]<span class="word_break"></span>om</span></div></div><div class="_1w2q" style="padding:12px;">---</div><div class="_1w2q" style="padding:12px;"><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">EPILOGUE </p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;"><br /></p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">"The most powerful human forces are found in the meeting of the face and the gaze. Only there do we exist for one another. In the gaze of the other, we become, and in our own gaze others become. It is there, too, that we can be destroyed. Being unseen is devastating, and so is not seeing." --Karl Oove Knausgaard, New Yorker, 2015</p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">On June 20th, 2015 I organized a group portrait on the iconic, three-tier, front cascade of steps to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Billing it through email solicitations, social media, and press as an invite to any ‘Chicago Artist,’ the final decision of whether that label successfully applied was left up to the individual.</p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">The notion to create this moment was personal and collective. Having recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Media at the University of South Florida, Tampa I had recently come to obsess on all of the significant relationships and experiences I’ve had in Chicago, a place where I became interested in art while working at a conceptual theatre in Hyde Park in 1999. Newly post-MFA in 2003, I began to experience many moments of doubt and precarity.</p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">Twelve years later and about to leave the city, I can say for sure that whatever talent or work ethic I might have employed, the city MADE me. Chicago artists ambitions, thoughts, tweets, criticisms, ingenuity, writing, profundity, collectivity, pragmatism, and single-mindedness MADE me. I have belonged to many communities while in Chicago–institutional or medium-based, communities based on attitude, humor, poverty, privilege, empathy, criticality, collectivity, in-communities, out-communities, moments of bodies and minds coming together that only lasted one night. Communities based on drunk musings and mutual desire. Some of the most transformative communities are unplanned, totally liquid, and may last a moment at best.</p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">One of the most profound moments of the Chicago Artist Group Portrait was two weeks prior when talking to a former student who displays much talent and future promise. When I asked her if she planned to attend the portrait, she replied that she didn’t feel like she was part of the Chicago artist community. I asked her to explain, but I immediately understood her point of view. These memberships are intensely subjective, impetuous, and momentary. For all of the goodwill a collective moment may create, her response was the perfect irritant to a tidy narrative, and charged the edges of the actual portrait as violent and revelatory.</p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">Solidarity with a community, momentary or otherwise, can soften and embolden in a career that is at the end of the day still based on stretches of solitude and salt to create meaning. Perhaps with the collectivity of myriad networked communities, a sense of solitude is most important to keep in focus?</p><p style="margin:6px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">Still, having that many bodies together in 2015 feels RADICAL! Through proximity, feeling the sweat and heat of those past community members is beyond eroticism. There is undeniable goodwill here, but still, individual sitters generate heat yet cast shadows on each other. There is a front and a back. There is the loud shirt and the averted gaze. There is the nausea of claustrophobia, the social anxiety, the benign and unknowing dog. What to make of all of this?</p><p style="margin:6px 0px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;">History will tell us, or not. More likely, these community thresholds will be crossed by our minds and our hearts before our bodies catch up. Where our body ends up is a footnote to the real story.</p></div><div class="_1w2q" style="padding:12px;"><p style="margin:6px 0px 0px;font-size:14px;line-height:17.5636348724365px;"><span style="line-height:17.5636348724365px;">--Jason Lazarus, August 2015</span><br /></p></div></div></div><div style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:14.6181812286377px;background-color:rgb(233,234,237);"></div><div style="color:rgb(20,24,35);font-family:helvetica, arial, sans-serif;font-size:12px;line-height:14.6181812286377px;background-color:rgb(233,234,237);"><div><div class="_5y52" style="margin-top:14px;"><div class="clearfix _3o7x" style="margin-bottom:6px;"></div></div></div></div></div><div><br /></div>

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