Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo

Love In The Time Of Resistance

April 7 - May 7, 2026

A Co-Prosperity window show and activation showcasing an incomplete collection of art and design in response to operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, MN, created by artists near and far. 

The posters, banners, buttons, stickers, whistles, zines, and other items gathered were created in response to the Operation Metro Surge, which was focused in Minneapolis, but affected all of Minnesota. As communities came together to look out for each other, artists and non-artists produced pieces that spoke to feelings that many were experiencing…

What is gathered here for this exhibition is in no way everything that was created. It is an incomplete archive. That said, it is emblematic of the larger response of art and design.

This show is presented anonymously. In short, it is by and for those in Minnesota who experienced Operation Metro Surge. It is by and for those who grew accustomed to falling asleep to the sound of helicopters. It is by and for those who stood on street corners in freezing temperatures with nothing more than whistles in order to keep their neighbors safe. It is by and for those who love their community and those who lost members of their community.

Tuneful Places 
John Carson / Martin Folan / Max Guy / Léann Herlihy / Niamh Schmidtke / Frank Wasser

Curated by Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch 

Opening reception Tuesday 7 April, 4-7pm

In April 2026, Ireland’s Askeaton Contemporary Arts continues a growing relationship with the city of Chicago, presenting a series of exhibitions bringing together artist-led activities of the Irish art scene and American Midwest. As part of this initiative Co-Prosperity host Tuneful Places, a group exhibition exploring artists that disrupt and challenge representations of geography, state and capital within an Irish idiom.

John Carson’s American Medley embodies a tour to fifty locations in the United States famed in popular music, from ‘What Made Milwaukee Famous to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ and more in-between. Postcards and Polaroid photographs were initially sent back to Carson’s native Belfast, displayed during the conflict of The Troubles of Northern Ireland in the window at one of Carson’s favourite haunts, Delany’s ‘American-style’ diner. Carson’s chase of the American dream is one of myth-busting – Frank Sinatra’s crooning ‘Chicago is my kind of town’ is juxtaposed with an image of a mound of rubble from a demolition site that constitutes what Carson actually saw when he visited here.

Martin Folan (1955-2014) worked with the Traveller community of Limerick, realising collaborative artworks that addressed the inherent racism towards indigenous ethnic communities in Ireland. At that time, and today throughout the island, large stone boulders are placed at roadside parking and traffic lay-bys as barriers to prevent Travellers practicing a traditional nomadic way of life. The boulder, in this form, represents exclusion. In 1991, Take Away The Stone was realised - a large fiberglass replica of a rock pushed over seven days in the Irish landscape, followed by a pilgrimage of hundreds demanding civil rights and respect for Traveller identity. 

Max Guy’s No Reason sees him annually film Chicago’s Saint Patrick’s Day Parade and the famous ceremony of dyeing the city’s river green. The green dye is mixed by Plumbers Union Local 130 and is so saturated that its colour can be easily altered in video post-production technology. Guy enacts this alchemy, as a mediation on the cultural significance and shrinking of Chicago's Irish diaspora and the ecological implications of the water’s flow. 

Léann Herlihy’s The Long Internecine Quarrel is an account of the artist’s court case against Ireland’s taxman, the Revenue Commissioners. In a whirlwind of administrative chaos, Herlihy was denied a tax break offered by the Irish state for art. Their public billboard artwork was categorized by authorities as an advertisement and form of self-promotion, devoid of artistic merit. After several unsuccessful appeals, Herlihy gathered a folder of evidence and initiated legal proceedings, winning their case in the latter half of 2024.

Niamh Schmidtke’s Drafting communication, drafting climate, drafting futures is a fictional exchange between the wind, represented as Aos Sí (the supernatural race in Celtic mythology considered true spirits of nature) and a multinational venture capital firm. Mimicking passive-aggressive corporate chatter and policy Schmidtke researched while on an artist residency at the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, they ask how value is ascribed to nature, and how global finance’s role in climate breakdown becomes evident. 

Frank Wasser debuts a new video and salvaged sculptural arrangement, recalling the recent closure of The Complex, one of Ireland’s key experimental cultural venues. Falling prey to the increasing gentrification and profit-seeking of the Dublin’s inner city, Wasser salvaged pub signs from the venue and transports them to Chicago, while onscreen he creates a spiralling narrative, addressing the intrinsic desire for grassroots cultural production and artistic communities to rally against the blatant aggression of contemporary city policy and corporatization.  

A programme of audio artworks and interviews with exhibiting artists will feature on LUMPEN FM, broadcasting WLPN-LP 105.5FM and at www.lumpenradio.com 24 hours a day.

Askeaton Contemporary Arts is an artist-led organisation based in the west of Ireland since 2006. An ongoing residency programme creates critical cultural encounters in the midst of the Irish countryside each summer, while public programmes and exhibitions in Askeaton and elsewhere over two decades have found innovative public contexts and resilient relationships for new forms of artmaking to emerge. 

askeatonarts.com

Tuneful Places is supported by Culture Ireland, Hyde Park Arts Center’s Jackman Goldwasser artist-in-residence programme, EXPO Chicago and The Irish Consulate of Chicago 

Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo

SEPARATIONS
Eli Show + Angela Zonunpari
Saturday, Jan. 31 – Saturday, Mar 14, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 31st 6 - 10pm

In SEPARATIONS, artists Eli Show and Angela Zonunpari explore the arbitrary boundaries between art and life, and how they intertwine if given space and time. As “incidental collaborators,” they navigate the mysticisms of creation and the everyday utility of objects. By easily transitioning between these “separations,” they show connections between their art practices and their lives. The artists are based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

Artist Bios

Eli Show (he/him) is an artist living and working in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He attended the University of South Dakota and went on to receive his masters in fine art from Syracuse University in New York where he lived for a number of years. Show is the preparator (“the builder of exhibits”) at the Old Courthouse Museum; a member of Hooks (formerly We All Have Hooks For Hands) for over 15 years, touring the country multiple times and releasing records worldwide; and recently served as the Art Director for Headlights Theater, a local nonprofit bringing professional dance and music performances to parking lots.
http://elishow.com
https://elishow.studio
https://weallhavehooksforhands.com

Angela Zonunpari (she/her) is an artist and editor living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; with roots in north and northeast India. Her interdisciplinary practice includes texts and textiles. She received her masters in arts journalism from Syracuse University, New York, and before that pursued her education, lived, and worked in New Delhi and other parts of India. Currently, Zonunpari is the managing editor of Arts Midwest’s storytelling program. She has worked at Fresh Produce and Ipso Gallery in Sioux Falls, and with nonprofits and newsrooms in the U.S. and in India.
http://angelazonunpari.com/
https://nobusinessmagazine.com

Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo

Photo(s) by Robert Chase Heishman for Bob.

Carrier

Curated by Bosco Bae and John Neff
Saturday, Jan. 31 – Saturday, Mar 14, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 31st 6 - 10pm

Artists: Gregory Bae, Rashayla Marie Brown, Robert Chase Heishman, Kiku Hibino, Kellie Romany, olivier,
Maggie Wong

Carrier is a group exhibition centered on a sixty-foot-long paper and tape collage scroll by the late Chicago-based Korean-American artist Gregory Bae. The work was created from non-alphabetical printed elements, such as punctuation marks and technical graphics, cut from radio instruction manuals. Carrier brings together a group of primarily Chicago-based artists, several of them collaborators and friends of Bae, to respond to the scroll.

Structured around a “score” developed by the curators, the exhibition invited the artists to engage with the scroll as a prompt: something to be read, misread, translated, withheld, or activated. The works exhibited consider how meaning is formed through fragments, omissions, and margins — elements that are often present but overlooked.

Bae’s scroll draws from three radio instruction manuals, sources designed to transmit information clearly and efficiently. By isolating punctuation, diagrams, and residual marks from these texts, Bae redirected attention away from instruction and toward what remains once printed language is stripped of its intended functions. The resulting visual abstraction evokes multiple reference points at once: ancient scrolls, Modernist musical notation, and the gestural mark-making associated with Abstract Expressionism. Bae described his interest in the “leftover margins, blank negative shapes, disassociated symbols and punctuation” that tend to disappear when systems prioritize clarity, order, and rule-following.

At the exhibition opening, Bae’s scroll will be presented fully unrolled for the first time. The opening will also include a talk by co-curator John Neff, who spent several months attempting to make a single-shot, high-resolution image of the entire scroll. That project began in conversation with Bae prior to his death and continued afterward, raising questions about authorship, access, and the limits of documentation. Neff’s talk reflects on those attempts and on the challenges of translating an object that resists easy re-presentation.

Following the opening, the scroll will remain concealed for the duration of the exhibition. This decision emphasizes the tension between presence and absence that runs throughout the project. With the scroll physically hidden, its influence will persist through the works, performances, and discussions it has set in motion.

The exhibition will conclude with a series of closing performances from Kiku Hibino (March 13) and Rashayla Marie Brown (March 7). These events will continue the exploration of the scroll as a score, particularly through sound and musical interpretation, and may include collaboration with Lumpen Radio.

An exhibition booklet, featuring an essay by Dr. Bosco Bae along with Neff’s interpretation of a 2019 interview he conducted with Gregory Bae about the scroll, will be printed at the end of the exhibition. The publication will also include a collaborative syllabi extending the exhibition’s inquiry into pedagogical and collective forms of knowledge-sharing.

Rather than positioning Gregory Bae’s work as a singular legacy, Carrier treats the scroll as a living site of exchange. The exhibition foregrounds how shared histories, relationships, and informal systems of learning continue to shape artistic practice, often through what remains unspoken, unseen, or unresolved.

Performance by Rashayla Marie Brown on March 7, 2026; Saturday @7:00pm

The End(s) of Suffering
Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB)

Duration: 30 Mins

RMB will compose a vocal landscape inspired by Greg Bae's scroll and friendship-building practices in general, using a microphone and looper with her own voice. This performance will incorporate gestures and elements of ancestral veneration from a variety of traditions of which RMB is a practitioner, including Buddhism and Lucumí. 

Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) is an undisciplinary™ artist-scholar working across performance, photography, and film to examine power, ethics, visibility, and perception. Her globally exhibited projects include Embassy of Foreign Artists, Geneva; Metrograph, NYC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Slamdance Film Festival, Park City; and Turbine Hall, Johannesburg. RMB holds degrees from Yale and SAIC and is completing a PhD at Northwestern Performance Studies focused on reparations and collaboration. RMB also hosts the podcast, Rage to Master, on creative survival in chaotic times.

Performance by Kikù Hibino on March 13, 2026; Friday @ 7:00pm

OFF.Manual 
Kikù Hibino 

Duration: 30 minutes

OFF. Manual is a high-volume noise performance that responds to Gregory Bae’s interest in “leftover margins” and “disassociated symbols”—elements that disappear when systems prioritize clarity, order, and rule-following. The performance activates these excluded elements, pushing beyond regulatory frameworks into chaos and toward new order. That new order, once formed, becomes the next structure to be dismantled.

Working across five sound sources, including guitar and bass amplifiers, the thirty-minute work moves through four states: Infinity, and/or, Excess, Ghost.

Kikù Hibino is a Chicago-based sound artist and director of Signal Noise, an independent platform for experimental sound and video art. Working across installation, performance, and recording, he uses voice, text, and noise to create tension between music and non-music while exploring non-linear temporality within time-based media.

Recent releases include Sky Trajectories (Superpang, 2024) and Fell to Fern (Superpang, 2022). His forthcoming collaboration with Merzbow, Rococo ∞ Echomatter (Superpang, 2026), explores excessive ornamentation and discontinuous editing within noise composition.

Hibino’s work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Wrightwood 659, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago Cultural Center, Elastic Arts, and Hyde Park Art Center, among others.

Detrás de Nosotros Estamos Ustedes: Behind Us We Are You
Atlan Arceo-Witzl
November 1st - December 12th, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1st, 4:-00-6:00PM

How might a public-facing commercial space be used to serve the voices of common people? A storefront that no longer sells products but instead tells stories of resistance. A place to pull up a chair and commune with neighbors. An autonomous printshop built to express dreams, ideals, and play. Each window display declares, “people over profit!” The collective of characters known as the Chican@ Mythmakers live in a hybrid world of the ancient-now where they speak of truth, dignity, and self-determination. Détras de Nosotros Estamos Ustedes reflects on the power of culture. The artist draws inspiration from liberatory political graphics, cultural ephemera of the Midwest, and the rich mythistory of marginalized people. In the face of societal tumult and rising American fascism, there are many roles to play in dismantling hierarchical systems of domination. ¡Manos a la obra!

About the Artist:

Atlan Arceo-Witzl is a mixed-race Chicanx visual artist, creator, and educator based in Chicago, IL. He received his Bachelor's degree in Studio Art from Skidmore College with concentrations in printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. In addition to his daily work as a shop tech and educator at Columbia College Chicago, he maintains his own art and freelance graphic design practices collaborating with various organizations. He is an active member of the Chicago Printers Guild as well as Instituto Gráfico de Chicago, a collective of Latinx printmakers from across the city.

His work is driven by a foundational urge to draw whilst working to redefine midwestern identity and place as a hybrid ancient-contemporary-nowness. Being a second generation printmaker and a third generation educator influences his use of graphic forms in the relief print tradition while also instigating a curiosity in print process and ephemera. He is intrigued by everyday rituals, icons, symbols, totemic objects, communication, and translation. Not only are these things records of ourselves, but of culture, beliefs, and our multitudes of being. The political heritage of print media as well as the vibrant soul of the Chicago Imagists fuel his practice. A satirical cartoon style infused with the flattened aesthetics of mesoamerican and Mexican folk art are employed alongside an admiration for hand-painted signs. His work synergizes elements of image and text in moments of humorous mestizaje. Passing phrases, political movements, and palpable relics of the past, are reimagined towards a liberated future for all. 

Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo

Stuffed
Fat Pervs Unite
November 1st - December 12th, 2025

Curated by: Anna Mirzayan

Featuring work from: Jesse Egner, Ren Buchness, Tore Hallas, BOARLORD, Zoë Schneider, Jaqc Garcia

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1st, 4:00 - 6:00PM

Unruly bodies, filth, excess, ephemeral encounters… STUFFED explores the intersection of fat and queer communities through the fantasy space of perversion. Some pieces directly engage with mythology and biblical struggle, while others make public the private of cyber intimacy. By featuring all fat, queer artists, the works in this show illuminate the vibrant communities that have blossomed at the intersection of fat liberation, queerness, and anti-imperialist struggles. 

Anti-fat bias is sometimes known as ‘the last acceptable bias.’ Though this is clearly both problematic and untrue, it does highlight how deeply rooted anti-fatness is in our society, and how uncomfortable many people are with confronting it. The history of anti-fat bias has always been intertwined with systemic racism, sexism, and classism; the burden of fatness is felt most acutely by communities marginalized in other ways by capitalist imperialism.

STUFFED eschews mainstream narratives about body positivity, instead harnessing the powerful dread conjured by the obesity epidemic, and explores the intersection of fat and queer communities through the frequent framing of both as kinds of perversion. It exposes the historical and contemporary intersections of fatphobia with anti-queerness and transphobia, as outgrowths of broader cultural pathologization in modern Western medicine. By featuring all fat queer artists in order to illuminate the vibrant communities that have blossomed at the intersection of fat liberation, queerness and anti-imperialist struggles, the exhibition will queer the notion of perversion itself by reframing and embracing it as solidarity-building, specifically between fat and queer/kinky communities.

STUFFED is informed by fat studies scholars like Dr. Caleb Luna, whose work against healthist-futurism is an outgrowth of queer theorist Lee Edelman's treatise against heteronormative reproductive futurism. Luna theorizes fatness as a confrontation with one’s own mortality, which in turn inspires fear and repulsion. The exhibition contains several artworks that explore the intersections of pathologization and perversion, ephemera and pleasure. STUFFED embraces the temporary fantasy realms that are created through solidarity between fat bodies and other ‘unruly’ subjectivities.These spaces of excess don’t last–they necessarily come together for a short period of time and then decompose; don't despair! Here, temporary pleasures are celebrated for their fleeting nature. We’re all just cruising through utopia. 

Artist bios:

Jesse Egner is a queer artist and educator currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Often taking the form of playful and absurd photographic portraiture of himself and other individuals, his work explores themes such as queerness, body image, collaboration, humor, and play. He received his BA from Millersville University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from Parsons School of Design. His work has been exhibited and published globally and is included in the permanent collection at the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. He is a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship recipient and has participated in residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska; Studio Vortex in Arles, France; Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York; the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont; and TILT Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Jaqc Garcia is a queer, nonbinary, latine multi-disciplinary artist and curator whose work explores the intersections of community, fatness, food, and sexuality. They received their BFA in Studio Art from the University of Houston Clear Lake and their MFA in Printmaking at Ohio University. Their work has been shown both nationally and internationally including in ELLIO Fine Art in Houston, Texas, Dairy Barn Arts Center in Athens, Ohio, KINK Contemporary in Cleveland, Ohio, and University of Sharjah in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. They were awarded 2025 Gamblin Emerging Printmaker Award. They organize Fat Print- a yearly print exchange portfolio with a varying theme exclusively for fat artists by fat artists.They are the founder of Fat Artist Network, a non-profit organization that serves as a resource to find information on fat art, fat artists, fat art lectures, fat artist talks, and connect fat artists to each other. They currently work as an Adjunct Professor at San Jacinto Community College and Lonestar College, and as a Programs Assistant at DiverseWorks. 

Zoë Schneider (she/her) works in sculpture, video, and installation to critically examine the complexity of fat identity. Schneider holds an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan (2018), and a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts (2009). In Canada, Schneider has exhibited solo and group exhibitions in Regina, Saskatoon, Estevan, Guelph, Mississauga, Lethbridge, and internationally in Denmark, Germany, and the United States. Schneider’s first international solo exhibition will take place in Pittsburgh, PA in the Fall of 2024. Schneider is the 2021 recipient of the Visual Award for Female Artist, Jane Turnbull Evans Fund from the Saskatchewan Foundation for the Arts and has received multiple artist grants from SK Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts. Schneider lives and works in Regina, Treaty 4 Territory, Saskatchewan, Canada.

BOARLORD is a fat trans South Asian artist, writer, sex worker, independent videogame developer, and unrepentant furry. Fat liberation through fat perversion is her life’s work. Her short, experimental videogames are designed to help fat transsexuals access pleasure. Their ongoing development is generously funded by her Patrons. Additionally, BOARLORD is a two-time National Magazine Award finalist for her essays on fatness. Her bylines have appeared in Literal Bimbos, Hazlitt, and The Outline. She has been quoted extensively in the likes of WIRED, 404 Media, and The New Yorker. She presently lives in Toronto working on her non-fiction debut for Strange Light. 

Tore Hallas works within themes of fatness and queerness, and fatness as queerness; religious ontologies and intention; as well as photographic and cinematographic reflection as both theme and method. Primarily with video, photography and text, as well as teaching with a focus on empathetic feedback. Economic structural and interpersonal oppression, personal narratives, and the intersectionalities of violences and positionalities are undercurrents in his works, along with travelling as both physical displacement and symbolic quest, and the interaction between the world and the othered body and mind. He holds an MFA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, is the recipient of the Danish Arts Councils career program ‘The Young Artistic Elite’, as well as the Poul Erik Bech Foundations Art Prize and the 15. Juni Foundations Honorary Art Prize, and has exhibited both nationally and internationally in USA, Sweden, UK, Finland, Germany, Portugal & South Korea. His works are part of the collections at Vejle Museum of Art, Malmö Museum of Art, Sorø Art Museum, The Danish Arts Foundation, and ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art.

Ren Buchness (they/them) is a contemporary artist & fat, queer activist based in Tucson, Arizona. By combining painting & performance, they aim to foster dialogue and understanding of the fat, queer, and trans experience within the current political and social environment in the United States. In 2013, they received their BFA in Studio Art from Florida State University, and in 2018 earned their Master of Fine Art with a focus in painting & video from the University of Arizona. They currently teach a variety of fine art courses including figure drawing and watercolor painting at local colleges and universities. Ren’s work has been shown in multiple galleries across the country. Their work has also been featured in several publications both nationally and internationally.. They are also committed to cultivating a stronger trans and queer community through event planning and marketing with Fluxx productions, a local non-profit focused on queer community and creativity. Most days, you can find Ren in the studio, creating works of art that celebrate and explore the fat, queer experience.

Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo

When There is No One Left to Sit
Sayeda Misa Sourour
September 19th - October 24th, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, September 19th, 8:00pm - 11:00pm

When There is No One Left to Sit presents recent works by Sayeda Misa Sourour. Images on film capture scenes from across Cairo—the artist’s familial home—alongside sculptures gesturing toward the form of the Monobloc chair.

 The “plastic chair” is perhaps the closest any common object has come to a platonic ideal. It occupies a transcultural, international seat as a designed object, carrying within it the potential to unite the globe in a state of post-xenophobic euphoria.

This two-year project began in Egypt in the summer of 2023. The images are less an attempt at spectacle than an act of commemoration—not tied to a singular event or time, but to the condition of being-in-place. Photographs of these manufactured seats function as portraits of neighbors, family reunions, elders, patrons of the afternoon sun, and observers of the bustle.

Upon returning stateside, a character—perhaps a universal mascot—became clear: the chair, specifically the Monobloc. An empty chair carries more than its shape—it carries absence, memory, and traces of lives not present. 

Empty plastic chairs, light and fragile yet robust and resistant to the elements, came to bear the weight of absence as they cradle the weight of the individual. This ubiquitous symbol—an old friend across nations and cultures—exceeds the role of personal memory or loss. The Monobloc becomes textile, becomes prayer, becomes wood, becomes grown, becomes sturdy, becomes weightless, becomes reoccupied—in spirit, by spirit.

An object of daily endurance, it reminds us that even in times of atrocities, the act of sitting holds the possibility of continuity, of community, and of resistance. To sit, to pause, to gather—these are gestures that persist despite systemic demands that we remain unsettled.

While continuing this work a year later in Egypt, just hours from the border, rest felt impossible. When genocide unfolds just beyond the crest, how can one repose when bombs fall like rain just two hours away? How can the feeling body rest when each moment brings another neighbor to martyrdom?

And yet, our bodies and hearts are tired. The belief that rest—or being-in-community—will liberate us and our global family has become strained. Many do not sit—not because they refuse, but because they do not remain with us here. When opportunities for rest become fewer, we must reimagine our effort and struggle as play, as performance, to transmute the heavy weight into lightness.

Sayeda Misa Sourour is an Egyptian interdisciplinary artist, designer, and fabricator currently based in Chicago, IL. Stories are welded, joined, carved, and curated in her designs. Mediums span from furniture, sculpture, puppetry and performance. She explores the tension between humor and cultural concern. Sourour critiques the experience of being Arab in the western world, searching for a place to rest from the absurdity of it all.

Sourour holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2025, she co-founded Bodock Gallery in Chicago. Her work has been shown in various galleries, with exhibitions at Comfort Station (Chicago, IL) and Design Museum of Chicago. She has performed at Electric Forest (Rothbury, MI), Elastic Arts (Chicago, IL), Links Hall (Chicago, IL), In the Heart of the Beast Theater (Minneapolis, MN), among others.

Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo

Two Roses and a Briar Pipe
Scherben and the Goethe-Institut Chicago
September 19th - October 24th, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, September 19th, 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Exhibiting artists: John Neff, Morag Keil, Connor Crawford, Adrian Piper, Jasia Rabiej

In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1978 film DESPAIR, a chocolate manufacturer named Hermann Hermann slowly goes mad against the backdrop of Weimar Germany’s descent into fascism. As his wife drifts in and out of the narrative with her artist lover Ardalion, Hermann concocts a doppelganger scheme in order to stage his own murder. The title of this exhibition is taken from a nondescript still life painting that Hermann glimpses in the artist’s studio of two rosebuds and a tobacco pipe. On the back of the canvas someone has drawn a crude swastika. The artist claims offhandedly that it was drawn by his neighbor’s son, and only Hermann reacts in rational alarm. Filming both political and psychological fragmentation with characteristic detachment, Fassbinder blurs the boundaries between sanity and delusion to reveal the two faces of social life - one floral, labored, and mundane, the other scrawled and violent.

Taking its cue from the dual qualities of this painting, this exhibition brings together works by five established and emerging artists based in Berlin, Vienna, and Chicago whose work conveys a shared sense of alienation and political inefficacy. As isolationist and illiberal tendencies increasingly dominate the relationship between the U.S. and Europe, the artists in this exhibition focus on more subtle, individual senses of division and disassociation. In prop-like sculptures and installations, these works play with the staging and performance of national and social identities. Drawing on architectural history, social media, and banality and routine as both subjects and source material, these works suggest a quiet sense of futility and rupture.

This exhibition is presented by Scherben and the Goethe-Institut Chicago, and is co-curated by Tarik Kentouche, Lorenz Liebig, and Leah Gallant. It will open in Scherben’s Berlin space in spring 2026.

Artist-Run Berlin

Wed, 09/24/2025 6:30 PM

Panel Discussion | A conversation on Berlin's changing art world with Marc LeBlanc, James Krone, and Lorenz Liebig

Join us for a discussion with artists, curators, and gallerists Marc LeBlanc, James Krone, and Lorenz Liebig on Berlin's evolving art scene. The discussion will explore the influence of artist-run spaces in shaping the city’s creative landscape, the roles of the art market and government funding, and points of comparison with Chicago's arts infrastructure.

This program will be moderated by Leah Gallant, Program Curator at the Goethe-Institut Chicago. It accompanies the exhibition 'Two Roses and a Briar Pipe,' which is co-presented by Scherben, Co-Prosperity, and the Goethe-Institut Chicago.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

James Krone (born in Chicago, lives and works in Berlin) is an artist, curator and writer who has exhibited internationally over the last two decades. In 2022 he founded the exhibition space Louche Ops in Schöneberg, Berlin, which he programs and directs.

Marc LeBlanc is an independent curator and the founder and owner of M. LeBlanc, one of Chicago’s premier galleries for international contemporary art. Prior to opening M. LeBlanc, LeBlanc worked as an independent curator, advisor, and writer, organizing over forty exhibitions for galleries in Berlin, Cologne, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Following his international curatorial work, LeBlanc served as the Director of Programming for Art Los Angeles Contemporary and on the host committees of several benefit art auctions supporting research in healthcare sectors, specifically for autoimmune disorders, HIV/AIDS, and reproductive health initiatives. In addition, he wrote numerous reviews and conducted interviews for magazines like Artillery, ArtReview, and Numero. LeBlanc received a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 before completing his Masters in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008.

Lorenz Liebig, born 1993 in Salzgitter DE, is an artist and curator. He graduated from HBK Braunschweig in 2021 with a Diploma in Fine Arts and a Bachelor in Art, Teaching & History. Since 2020 he has been co-founder & artistic co-director of Scherben e.V. in Berlin. His artistic works have been shown at the Mönchehausmuseum (Goslar), the Kestnergesellschaft (Hanover), the Kunstverein Braunschweig and the Shoot The Lobster Gallery (New York City), among others.

Notes on Resurge 2025

Violet Jordan

At Resurge, eight artists wrestle with ideas of self, contemporary queer culture, othered and controlled bodies, and the threat that our existence poses to fascist thought. The two nights of performances were all orchestrated together. Performances existed in conversation with each other. Each night flowed with changing artistic visions leading us through a collective of ideas.

A journey of self-acceptance through the wisdom of a mystery man, Hesam Salehbeig’s Formless: An Introductory Discourse on Crazy Wisdom sets the tone for the festival by dancing around subject matter. Salehbeig’s disembodied voice welcomes us into the space to see the artist bathed in a projection of themselves, dressed in whites and golds. The space is filled with the sounds of muffled wind and scents of jasmine. Bells ting as Salehbeig chants. They spend the majority of the performance chanting and telling us a story of their time with a man who taught them how to become formless. Their story is steeped in Vedic thought, magical thinking, and feels  Hasem’s performance was a magical suggestion on actualizing their transfeminine form. During the wandering monologue, much of what they tell us feels placeless, as if they are realizing it as they speak to us.

A wall moves and reveals Camila Arévalo arching their stomach upwards. She is painted red and has candles sticking out of her body. There is a pool of water surrounded by votives with red candles. A bucket of apples sits near the pool. The air has shifted to be confrontational, sexual, visceral, and dark in contrast to the previous light, wandering meditation on self. Hasem lights the candles and kneels next to her. Puñal y Herida is an act of becoming a conduit to the overlooked feminine. We see her hold herself up as the candles drip down. Overhead, we hear harsh whispered chants. The femininity referred to in this piece is not just Arévalo’s but is something divine and outside of any individual. We are invited to light candles, place them in the pool, and take a bite of an apple. In this moment, we have an opportunity to see the piece in a much more intimate light. 

Kezia Waters channels a much louder spirit in Exodus. Entering in short curls and a banana skirt to the tune of a piano player, they greet the audience with a voice that is inviting and excited. They dance around the set singing and swinging a jar filled with blood. The performance is confrontational; it engages with a violent history through storytelling, irony, and visceral imagery. Pouring the blood on the American flag, Waters sings that they are “Proud to be an American”. The actions develop and fall apart, deconstructing Waters’ self - and ultimately the spirit of Josephine Baker that they are channeling. They ask us to engage with America’s history of racialized violence that pervades black Americans’ lives through a whirlwind of hysteria performed in a flash of artistic presence. 

The final performance of the night returns to slowness. Ále Campos and Sungjae Lee circle the stage, shimmering in the light in Orbital. With sound from Young Joon Kwak’s Gitter manifesto delving into the social connotations of glitter, ranging from wealth, ecological terror, and queer resilience, we see both performers practice becoming that glitter. With no use of any actual glitter, they both have found ways to redirect light on the audience and fill not only its physical characteristics but also engage with glitter’s storied past. Campos starts in the center, sitting on a mirror and slowly painting every inch of their body with silver paint. During this, Lee slowly orbits Campos. Covered in tiny mirrors, they spin and stretch and slowly project the light from above outwards. Spending the entire length of the manifesto in slow movements, the performance switches once it is over. Lee changes places with Campos, and ‘Blind” by Herecules and the Love Affair plays. Upbeat and seductive dance finishes out the performance. Campos and Lee deliver a performance of the research on what it means to be reflective and all that entails.

The two nights flow in a similar way. Performances oscillated in tone and played off of each other. We see artists moving us into the next piece. Imagery changes quickly. Sounds, scents, and presence completely shift from one to the next. At times, we don’t get rest, one performance playing into the next.

The second night begins much like the first: outside of the space. Efrén Arcoíris spent the majority of their day in the front windows inside of a pink, ethereal tableau to prepare for her performance, Hypnos Colombina. Arcoíris had space to lounge and create. As the audience arrived, they began to perform. Music played on the street where we watched. She performed to the glass that encased her. Starting with slow movements constructed of her own poise and dramatic crumbling. Like a girl trapped in a music box, she reacts to the changing melodies. The performance feels like the audience looking in on something existing outside of our time and space. Our attention is called to three cups marked with three tarot cards - the High Priestess, the Empress, and the Queen of Swords. We are invited to cast coins into the cup of our choosing. The work works with ritual and story telling using a language that feels familiar yet obscure. Her tableau vivant is a fantastical act of connecting with canon while creating her own. We end by being guided into the space by Arcoiris to see Rose Hernandez sitting in a mostly dark gallery.

Rosé Hernandez presents herself with dripping balls of ice, red hands, and harsh lighting for her interactive work Tender, The Wound. As the audience settles in, she gazes back at all of us. Her makeup is extreme, a grotesque mixture of harsh white and dripping red. As we take her in, she points to an audience member. An acolyte brings them to sit across from the artist. They are asked if they would like to ‘touch or be touched.’ Hernandez swaps between handing ice off and touching audience members with her cold hands, and having her hands held back so the audience member can touch her. Pointing towards her own emotional vulnerability and touch starvation, Hernandez forms a connection with different audience members. The fifth time someone chooses to touch her and gives her a deep hug, we see a tear glimmer under the lights. She goes through interaction after interaction, allowing us to watch this process and how each gesture stacks on top of the next one. The performance is as much a gesture of vulnerability for her as it is for us.

Overhead, Amari Amai greets the audience, trying to get our attention by asking for individuals' names. We face a stage, unsure of where Amai is located. When he arrives, he states, “Welcome to the White Man’s Heaven”. This begins Sky Fulla Angels. Amai’s performance is a theatrical monologue - an exercise in naming and re-naming. The power that naming something holds - the power to obscure, the power to remember, and the power to rewrite reality. They question if their own transition and eventual re-naming results in the death of the black girl they once were. They name specifically how the white man uses naming to maintain white supremacy. Amai spends the second half of the performance ruminating on pain and human suffering. He names his students, ones he's lost to the police state, ICE, and the current genocide in Gaza. The performance asks us to name the pain of the world as a way to engage with it - to dissect the shroud that white supremacy places over the pain of those it wishes to colonize. Ultimately, Amai asks us to grieve with him for those whose names have been obscured.

Érika Ordosgoitti takes us directly into the bureaucratic surveillance state that is currently occupying America in Canto a la Madre: Variaciones sobre el Zamuro. A performance of withholding information, Ordosgoitti has the audience playfully engage with temporary tattoos of guns, clocks, basketball logos, and more. As the audience approaches, further information slowly leaks out about what these are. Information direct from ICE on how to identify gang members for deportation includes the details of the very tattoos we are playing with. They offer us clothing of the same variety. The entire time, we are recorded and projected for all to see. As we all become further incriminated in fitting the descriptions of the gang members Ordosgoitti and their assistants are searching for, they begin choosing different members of the audience to take to the front of the stage. Ordosgoitti exposes the terrifying farce that is the process of identifying someone as needing to be deported. Qualifications that are so general that many can be made to fit if needed. One member is removed and taken from our sight. We watch on a screen as they are taken to a second location. We are left with strange and uncomfortable feelings. Guilt. Fear. Confusion. Much of what unfolded before us was rooted in an incredibly contemporary reality - something that we were just complicit in by witnessing. The tension breaks with a poem of grief.

While Resurge was a festival highlighting queer performers, it contained so much more. Performances touched heavily on the intersections of identities and how that plays with the state we all are in. As an audience, we were asked to do much more than simply celebrate queer life, but to engage with difficult feelings from our relationship to white supremacy, the active decline of freedom in America, and the ways queer bodies are socially subjugated. Performances swung hard and dug deep into the lives and fears of the performers, and were heartfelt, honest, and had a deep desire to ask audiences to truly confront uncomfortable realities.

Resurge Chicago: Queer Performance Uprising —
September 5–6, 2025 · Co-Prosperity, Chicago

Schedule —
Fri, Sept 5 · 7–10 pm — Performances
Sat, Sept 6 · 4–6:30 pm — T4T Open Mic
Sat, Sept 6 · 7–10 pm — Performances

Resurge is launching a response from the Co-Prosperity Programming Council to the recent hits Chicago’s experimental performance ecosystem has experienced since COVID. 

Earlier this year we collaborated on the Bridge Performance Incubator (with Hyde Park Art Center), which culminated in June 2025 showcases at Co-Prosperity. Resurge builds on that momentum, and we hope both programs return annually to keep space, resources, and visibility to the Chicago performance community.

Featured Artists —
This year’s lineup brings together a formidable group of artists working across movement, ritual, drag, installation, storytelling, and audience-embedded performance. Expect durational transformations, shimmering acts of queer joy, embodied histories, intimate exchanges, and radical reimaginings of self and community.

2025 artists include:

Efrén Arcoíris · Kezia Waters · Ále Campos · Sungjae Lee · Amari Amai · Camila Arévalo · Hesam Salehbeig · Erika Ordosgoitti · Rosé Hernandez

Detailed Schedule:

Fri, Sept 5 · 7–10 pm · Performances by:
Camila Arevalo, Hesam Salehbeig, Kezia Waters, Alé Campos + Sungjae Lee (with music from Young Joon Kwak)

Sat, Sept 6 · 4:00-6:30 pm
T4T Open Mic (SIGN UP REQUIRED)
come perform a short queer something on a stage presented by Genderfucked Productions!

10 folks will be selected prior to show day, prioritizing artists of color in an effort to advance racial equity within our trans community. Performers will be notified via email the week of the performance.

 MASKS ARE REQUIRED when not performing.

If you are not selected, DON'T WORRY, you may still have an opportunity to perform!! There will be a designated amount of time for ~wildcard~ performers who will be selected at random on the night from those who show up and still want to get on stage. 

T4T is an intentional space for transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming artists to share their creative craft(s) with us on stage! We hope you join us for a night full of laughter, music, and art that pushes beyond the binary!

7–10 pm · Performances by:
Rosé Hernandez, Efrén Arcoiris, Érika Ordosgoitti, Amari Amai

Artists Bios —

Efrén Arcoíris (they/them) is a Chicago-based artist and educator of mixed Mexican and Appalachian roots. Their interdisciplinary practice—spanning performance, installation, sculpture, and drawing— weaves together ancestral histories, queer existence, and radical imagination into a vibrant, living tapestry.

Exploring dynamic landscapes between the spiritual and the mundane, the internal and external, the natural and artificial, Arcoíris uses their body and spirit to activate objects and environments into contemporary folkloric narratives.

They are the co-founder of Burning Orchid, a performance art collective creating dance and film works since 2015. Arcoíris has performed and exhibited internationally across Mexico, Russia, and Japan, with. appearances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Miami Art Basel, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Post-Butoh Performance Festival in Chicago, and the Shiryayevo Biennale in Samara, Russia.

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Kezia Waters is a Storyteller/ Performance Artist located in Chicago, IL. Their work lives between the worlds of ethnography, folklore, ritual and the living archive. Through surrealism they try to find things that are Holy, Whole, and Holds. A humanist fairy. They have performed in the Biennale d’art Performative de Rouyn-Noranda of Canada, Dazibao Gallery in Montreal and Recto- Verso in Quebec City and numerous galleries around Chicago. Kezia was a 2023 In-Session Fellow at ThreeWalls, studying the Performance and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston and also an Adjunct Professor of Acting & African American Theatre at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. Kezia is also a Jeff Award nominated Theatre Director.

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Ále Campos (b. 1994, Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performance maker whose elastic studio practice is anchored in the vernacular of drag and their persona, ‘Celeste’. They generate live performance works that are often rhapsodic and mediated by technology, unfolding from and into the mediums of sculpture, sound, text, video and installation. Their work tends to dissect perception and the relational, both aspects that are inherent to the medium of performance. Drag is a conceptual framework through which they consider performance making, specifically the stage and its borders, the malleability of the gaze, how to de/construct an image and how to handle time. Drag is a necessary instrument for them to step into liveness. It is their approach to challenging how we are witness to ourselves and each other, on and off stage.

They received a BA from Bennington College (2016) and an MFA in Performance at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (2022). Their work has been shown at the Hyde Park Arts Center, NO NATION, Comfort Station, Heaven Gallery, Ruschwoman, Chicago Artists Coalition, Jude Gallery, Roots & Culture, Elastic Arts, SITE/less (Chicago, IL), Lane Meyer Projects (Denver, CO), Collar Works (Troy, NY), September Gallery, The 405 Project (Hudson, NY), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), SS Gallerie (CDMX), BMOCA (Boulder, CO), Pamplemousse Gallery (Richmond, VA), Public Space One (Iowa City, IA), Crab Shack x Fjord, and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). They’ve attended ACRE Residency and are a recipient of the 2022 James Nelson Fellowship Award at SAIC and the City of Hudson’s Tourism Board Grant (2021). They were a 2023 BOLT artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition and were named one of the ten New City 2023 Breakout Artists of Chicago. 

They are currently a lecturer in Performance at SAIC and are an active, participating member of the drag and nightlife community in Chicago, currently holding the title of resident performer / co-producer of Rumors, a monthly event that showcases some of the city’s premiere performers and DJ’s.

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Sungjae Lee (he/they; Chicago, IL) is a visual artist, educator, and writer whose practice centers around the visibility and varied representations of queer Asians. He has presented his works globally in South Korea, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and the US. He has had residencies at ACRE, High Concept Labs, HATCH Projects, Fire Island, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Arts, and Yaddo. He was selected for 2025 Queer | Art | Mentorship, the 2024 Chicago Artadia Awards Finalist, 2022-2023 Kala Art Institute Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund 2021-22, and the 2020 AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship. He received his B.F.A. in Sculpture from Seoul National University and M.F.A. in Performance Art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Amari Amai is a Black transmasculine storyteller and worldbuilder born and raised in Chicago. As a Great Migration baby with roots in Jackson, Mississippi, Amari’s work is rooted in oral tradition and ancestral embodiment on and off the page, using poetry, folklore, soundscapes, and performance to bend time and immortalize the lives of the disappeared and forgotten. Their work has received support and fellowships from Tin House, Periplus Collective, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Hyde Park Art Center, The Watering Hole, Vermont Studio Center, and Earthseed Black Family Archive Project. Amari is the founder of Crossroads Writers Collective, a communal writing group for Black queer folks based in Chicago. As a 2025 Pushcart Prize and 2025 Best Small Fictions Nominee, they are currently at work on their debut poetry collection with an accompanying series of performances. Find out more at amariamai.com

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Camila Arévalo (San Antonio - Colombia, 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and animal working at the intersection of performance art, video, sculpture and Installation. Her work creates alternative and even fictional narratives, post-human mythologies, and ways of subverting domination hierarchies starting from the body. She exposes her position as an artist in relation to discussions on gender, trans-feminism, sexuality, desire, and identity politics; the discursive construction of history, the illusion of post-colonialism and the metaphysical belief in humans' natural position of privilege over the planet.

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Hesam Salehbeig (they/them) is an Iranian artist based in Chicago, working across architectural theory, time-based media, and performance art. Their practice explores the intersections of body, gender, psyche, sound, and space through site-specific narrative experiences that investigate the layered entanglements between internal states and external environments. Combining architecture, multimedia installation, storytelling, and performance art, Salehbeig creates immersive, participatory works that shift audiences from passive spectatorship to active engagement and collective embodiment. These works empower participants to play a more creative and collaborative role in their environment, fostering psychological transformation, emotional awareness and resilience .

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Erika Ordosgoitti (Caracas, 1980) lives in Chicago, Illinois. A performance and audiovisual artist and poet, Ordosgoitti holds a degree in Arts with a specialization in New Media from the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón in Caracas. Over the past 25 years, their research has focused on the study of the concept of freedom in relation to art.

Ordosgoitti is known for their site-specific interventions in public spaces, called "fotoasalto" (photo-assaults), which are performative declarations of freedom meant to bear witness to its fleeting existence and inspire new acts of disobedience. Risk is a significant element in their artistic practice. Their work explores the mechanisms of power that operate on behavior, using her own body as a fundamental signifier and contested space, recognizing it as the primary target of power and, therefore, the primary vehicle for freedom.
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Rosé Hernandez is a visionary artist, choreographer, educator, and arts administrator whose multidisciplinary practice moves through the intersections of spirituality, Latinx culture, and transgender experience. Her work engages in diasporic reclamation, exploring ancestry, belonging, and survival through a post-colonial lens.

Rosé’s performances are living rituals — visceral, resonant acts that reshape the atmosphere. Her body becomes a threshold, a point of crossing where energies converge, stirring the room and summoning the presence of spirit and ancestral memory. In each work, she moves with the audience as witness, sharing in the charged, unspoken power of ritual performance.

As co-director of Burning Orchid, a performance collective dedicated to pushing the boundaries of form, Rosé collaborates to craft immersive experiences that challenge societal norms and honor the multiplicity of human expression. She also co-piloted the Bridge Performance Incubator with Sofía Gabriel at the Hyde Park Art Center, in partnership with Co-Prosperity Sphere, a platform for performance artists to develop new works in dialogue with curators, peers, and audiences.

Her work has been presented internationally at the Museo de la Ciudad de México, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and Shiryaevo Performance Biennale in Russia, as well as in notable venues and festivals including Defibrillator Gallery, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Links Hall, the Chicago Cultural Center, Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival, and Human Resources LA.

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About Resurge Chicago: Queer Performance Uprising
Resurge is a gathering of queer performance artists from across Chicago, presenting bold, risk-taking work. The festival honors queer ancestors, amplifies queer futures, and sparks new possibilities for live art in a city where experimental performance spaces are increasingly under threat.

Resurge was conceived of and organized with the hard work of volunteer Programming Council members Rosé Hernandez, Bobby Luck, Mark Jeffery and Ruby Que.

Resurge is partially funded by:

The LGBTQ Community Fund, an operating grant from the Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust with support from the Chicago Community Trust.

The Reva and David Logan Foundation

and the Joyce Foundation

No “taxpayer funds” were used to fund this queer magic, despite recent homophobic media attacks to the contrary. 

subVersion Summer Camp is a Do-It-Together series of gatherings and calls to action!  MOST PROGRAMS EVENTS and MEALS are FREE TO THE PUBLIC. To help fund the camp you can donate and become a Camper and pin for $25, or become a Parent of a Camper for $100. ( or make yer donation at Co-Prosperity)

We have invited artists, educators, musicians, filmmakers, activists, designers, and workers of all stripes to converge in Chicago this summer to help us make posters, music, t-shirts and merit badges while we make friends, comrades, and plans. Let’s make camp.

Join us in Bridgeport, the Community of the Future (and beyond), for ten days of camaraderie, fun and resistance to the spread of fascist culture. subVersion Summer Camp will foster collective re-education through public conversations, workshops, classes and happenings. We’ll present a broad range of creative forms of protest, and participants will be able to choose their own solidarity adventure… kickball or tag, puppets or banners, ballots or stink bombs? Schedule is below.

THURSDAY, JULY 17TH

Printervention:Exhibition - 6:00PM - 10:00 pm

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

subVersion Summer Camp will open with a selection of prints and posters exhibited in the gallery where most of our Art Building will take place. Most of the works on display ones printed by Public Media Institute and Lumpen Magazine over the past few decades. Some are ones we have collected over the years and many are ones created for Summer Camp. Come make or share your own.

We will be freely distributing stickers, zines and prints we have made for Summer Camp. You can stop by and pick some up to display in your neighborhood or street corner.

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Meet the Lost Boys - 6:00 - 7:00 PM

Hosted by: Lizzy May

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

A performance & a spell: come meet the lost boys and devise a ritual for community, resistance, magic, and mischief. Neverland is an unpoliced world: a space where chosen family and the spirit of the dance floor are guides. We invite you to witness a scene from our queer rewrite of Peter Pan. After the scene, we will guide you to join in spell‑casting, moving with us to weave a ritual of connection and queer magic. 

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Hand Coloring LED LIGHTS: A Workshop for a New Muralism - 6:00 - 7:15 PM

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

This workshop experiments with hand coloring / hand tinting ubiquitous LED storefront lights in service of a new CoProsperity initiative--a community wheatpaste wall (10x30') on the south wall of the building.  Workshop attendees will experiment handpainting LED lights to be permanently installed as a new 'diy frame' around this community wall.  
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Easy Peasy Papier - Mache 101 for Adults - 6:00 - 9:00 PM

Hosted by: Jen Grant

@ 1048 w 37th st. Unit 102 ( Trash Castle Studio, in the Bubbly Dynamics building )

Think outside the piñata! Let's start at the very beginning to learn, collaborate, and experiment with the cheap and cheerful art of papier-mâché. Meet us at Trash Castle for an introduction to the basic tools and techniques pretty much anyone can use to take an idea and turn it into an object.

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The Box - Social Exploration through Community Devising - 7:00 - 10:00PM

Hosted by: Kevin Aoussou

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

This is a workshop to explore our responses to the current moment, inviting artists of all mediums to be in creative exploration.  If you are a physical or visual performer, please join us for a community conversation, followed by a community creative jam session!

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Squiggle Build - 8:00 - 10:00 PM

Hosted by: ¡Anímate! Studio

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Play, dream, and collaborate to transform familiar materials into imaginative landscapes. Throughout the event, help create (and re-create!) a one-of-a-kind experimental creation—out of pool noodles! Together we can build new spaces and imagine new possibilities.

FRIDAY JULY 18TH—

Hand Coloring LED LIGHTS: A Workshop for a new Muralism continued - 12:00 - 5:00 PM

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Workshop attendees will continue handpainting LED lights to be permanently installed as a new 'diy frame' around this community wall.

Mending is Power - 6:00 - 8:00 PM

Hosted by: Parvathi Krishnan

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

What if the skill to repair the things we wear to death was quite literally at your finger tips? Mending our clothing is empowering. It gives the wearer the choice to extend the life of something they want to keep in their closet and out of the landfills. Learners will gain basic sewing skills like threading a needle and mending techniques like patching or parachute stitching to carry home. Instead of adding a well loved garment to a "to-mend" pile, we can tackle it together one thread at a time! RSVP HERE!

Please bring a garment you would like to mend (small holes, rips, and tears work best!)

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Failure as a Doorway - 6:15 - 7:00 PM

Hosted by: Madison Mae Parker

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

Failure as a Doorway: A performance lecture on failure inspired by Jose Esteban Munoz, Hanif Abduraqqib, Caroline Polachek, and The Labyrinth.

Part performance lecture, part movement/somatic exploration of failure, and undoing our relationship to perfectionism and production, with a relocation of where our relationship to making might begin. 

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The Covenant of The Dead: The Resident Evils of Race,Space, and Decay - 7:15 - 8:15 PM 

Hosted by: L Ditaway

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

A workshop that explores how an apocalypse doesn't have to look like a zombie film or an aggressive war zone but it can also look a lot like the  south side of Chicago. So how do we thrive in a disaster that isn't as recognizable? In this workshop we'll break up into three groups, XXX amount of days till, When the Asteroid Hit, and the walking dead. Where we will strategize harm prevention plans while cross examining previous natural disasters, epidemics and human conflicts. We will create a memory map of loss whether of time, inclusion, opportunities,  life, and etc  specific to our communities. In order to connect  the causes of harm so the last group can focus on world building off of our collective memory. What small, medium, and  large actions can we take to make our communities more accessible and easier to navigate? While also forming a cycle of habits that can prevent future harm from realizing.

Decentralized Knowledge and Contemporary De-Schooling - 8:30 - 9:30 PM

Hosted by: Earl Power Murphy

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

An introductory discussion into alternative ways of Learning; nurturing a collective Narrative; and shifting from Knowledge ownership towards stewardship. Thinking of ourselves as caretakers and active contributors to our shared Story.

SATURDAY JULY 19TH

Printervention: Wheatpasting - 1:00 - 3:00 PM MOving to 2-4pm due to rain

Hosted by: Marszewski

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St
Assemble at the Research house by 3 pm • instillation moves to Co-Prosperity at 3:15pm

Learn how to wheatpaste printed posters and more onto the exterior wall of Co-Prosperity. We will be using prints from the PMI archive as well as those made during the subVersion Summer Camp.

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Printervention: Neighbors United RISO Poster Build Workshop - 1:45 - 3:15 PM

Hosted by: Javier Viñuela

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Neighbors United for Migrant Support is a mutual aid organization based in Hyde Park which provides free legal services for asylum seekers in their applications. This workshop will host an orientation/teach in on our services directed towards Spanish speakers to be able to conduct interview translations, and to get a network of people to accompany our community members to court, as well as a RISO poster session emphasized on ways of resistance, protest, and informative actions. Overall, this will be an opportunity to connect and build community around a paramount cause in the country nowadays.

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Tie Dye Power - 3:00 - 6:00 PM

Hosted by: Jim Dye

@ Parking Lot across the street from Co-Prosperity

Show your colors while you are on the street. Learn how to tie dye your own shirt. There will be an short introduction on different ways to tie dye at 3:00PM. Come by during the program hours and you will be able to tie dye your own shirt. Bring a cotton shirt to the workshop or buy one of our blanks.

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Protest Music: Song Writing Lab - 3:30 - 5:00 PM

Hosted by: Stacy Erenberg and members of The Nest, directed by Bridgeport Music Collective

@ Bridgeport Music Collective • 3201 S Morgan St,

Participants will use voice, percussion, pen and paper to write songs that:

* Can be used as a way to communicate tactics, strategy and important messages of hope and resistance to people in liberation struggles.

* Use lyrics and melodies of both known and newly created chants/songs to educate, inspire, and influence change in society.

Led by Stacy Erenberg and members of The Nest, an incubator for voice training, performance, and improvisation.

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Disarming Police: Protest and Direct Action Tactics - 4:00 - 5:00 PM

@Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

Disarming Police:  Practical, tactical methods for doing what you want to, with minimal interference from police.  

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Summer Camp BBQ - 5:00- 6:00 PM

Parking Lot across the street from Co-Prosperity  • 3219 S Morgan St

Enjoy a subVersion Summer Camp BBQ with us.

Printervention: Silk Screen Printing - 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Hosted by: Hoofprint

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Join members of Hoofprint as they pull screens on paper and apparel. Stop by during the Bar B Q and grab some fresh prints to take home with you.

SUNDAY JULY 20TH

Histories of Counterinsurgency from Latin America - 12:00 - 2:00 PM

Hosted by: Katie Zien

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

A discussion of histories of counterinsurgency, with a special focus on the Cold War in Latin America

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Printervention: Protest Posters - 12:30pm - 3:30 pm

Hosted by: CHema Skandal!

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

A basic workshop for people interested in making posters to communicate loud ideas. Attend “PROTEST POSTERS” so you can print yours and take them home.

Registration for this event is required, sign up here!

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Printervention: Wheatpasting - 12:30PM - 3:30 pm

Hosted by: Marszewski

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

We continue to wheat paste our Co-Prosperity Wall. We will also set up button making, money stamping and continue to silk screen paper and apparel.

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Zines of Revolution: Displaced Voices and Reclaiming Home - 3:30pm - 5:00 pm

Hosted by: Maco Soto, Melanie Diaz, & Spencer Harrigan

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

This workshop is an immersive workshop designed to empower participants to reclaim and amplify their narratives through the radical medium of zine-making. It begins by delving into a brief subversive history of zines, highlighting their role as a DIY, anti-establishment platform for marginalized voices and counter-narratives. We will then explore examples of zines and center around addressing the theme of one’s sense of “home.” We will discuss migration, immigration, and diaspora, demonstrating how personal stories become acts of resistance and community-building against dominant, often dehumanizing, portrayals. Finally, participants will be guided through a hands-on zine creation session, encouraged to translate their own unique journeys of home, displacement, and belonging into tangible, self-published acts of revolutionary truth-telling.

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Sobre las olas - 4:00PM - 6:00 PM

Hosted by: Contratiempo: Juanjose Rivas

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

El sonido es un fantasma: viaja, se filtra, transforma y se disuelve. Lo que heredamos no siempre hace ruido, pero nos atraviesa. A veces canta como una melodía olvidada en una feria. Este taller invita a les estudiantes a sumergirse en la arqueología íntima de sus propias herencias sonoras. A través de la escucha expandida, la apropiación, la escritura y la composición espontánea, construiremos un paisaje sonoro compartido compuesto de migraciones, ruidos, genealogías fracturadas y armonías inconclusas.

(SPANISH PROGRAMMING)

Register for this program by emailing talleres@contratiempo.org

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Summer Camp BBQ - 6:00PM - 7:00 PM

Co-Prosperity  • 3219 S Morgan St

Enjoy a subVersion Summer Camp BBQ with us.

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Take It Down, Build It Up: Short VIDEO WorkS - 7:00PM - 9:00 PM

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

This screening of experimental videos highlights work interpretively documenting collective action surrounding the War on Terror, George Floyd protests, Anti-Vietnam War actions, Standing Rock protests, efforts to critique and dismantle Confederate monuments, and an intervention by drag queens at a Donald Trump casino. 

MONDAY JULY 21ST

"The Artist as Leader" - 6:00PM - 8:00 PM

Hosted by: Tom Tresser

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

The Artist As Leader - Say What? It's time to take your creative chops into public life, buster. The Far Right kicked the shit out of the arts during Culture Wars 1990 - and we took it. The result: MAGA America. So, we need you to either run for local office or help someone you respect run. And to do so as a champion of the public sector, science, the rule of law, peace, equity, and creativity. Are you up for the challenge? It's just democracy and the planet on the table. No biggie.

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[Power] Of the People - 6:00PM - 7:15 PM

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

“Ain’t no power like the power of the people…”

 What is power? What can an empowered collective build together? What can the act of play teach us about structures of power? 

During this teach-in about power and its many implications, we will be playing movement based Theater of the Oppressed games, shaping ideas, and co-creating gestures of possibility. There will be zine templates and collage materials to support visual interpretation from our collective experiences of the hour. Visual and historical models of collective autonomy will be brought in for discussion and include worker and BIPOC led journalism, artists and organizers of the past and present such as Augusto Boal, bell hooks, The Black Panther Party for Self Defense, Emory Douglas, Rebecca Solnit, Robyn Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Mariame Kaba and more. 

“…‘cause the power of the people don’t stop!”

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Workplace Protocol Toolkit Workshop by Chicago Community and Workers’ Rights - 7:15pm - 8:15 PM

Hosted by: CCWR (Chicago Community Workers Rights)

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Join CCWR for a workshop on their new 'Workplace Protocol Toolkit'—a resource to help workers and employers create clear procedures if federal, state, or local agents come to the workplace. Learn how to protect your rights, request a workplace protocol, and keep all workers safe, regardless of immigration status.

TUESDAY JULY 22ND

Building Maroon Infrastructures: Counter-territories, Counter-logistics, Survival Programs - 6:00 - 8:00 PM

Hosted by: Muindi Fanuel Muindi 

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St 

This workshop explores maroon infrastructures as living, adaptive systems that resist the coercive order of Empire while creating conditions for planetary abolition. Drawing from AbdouMaliq Simone’s concept of “the surround,” we will examine how fugitivity gives rise not only to escape but to world-making—to infrastructures that hold refusal and endurance in dynamic tension.

Using the analogy of a communal meal, the workshop will unpack four interwoven dimensions of maroon life: (1) Administrative Statements as recipes for collective care; (2) Technical Implements as tools for survival, concealment, and mobility; (3) Built Environments as fugitive architectures and escape routes; and (4) Dramatic Elements as the actors and forces shaping maroon dynamics.

Participants will engage historical and contemporary examples—from the Underground Railroad and quilombos to Black Panther survival programs and diasporic counter-logistics—to explore how these infrastructures unsettle dominant systems while prefiguring alternative futures.

This is not a workshop about nostalgia or heritage, but about practice—how we prototype autonomous forms of life under conditions of constraint, through relational tactics of care, evasion, and insurgency. Together, we will trace the rhythms, tools, and spatial strategies through which maroon communities have survived, adapted, and rehearsed the impossible.

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Plant life is abundant and so are you! An invitation to water your relationship with plants - 6:00 - 8:00 PM

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Seed collection, plant cuttings, food, medicine, nature-based arts! Scarcity mindset is out; creating abundance through relationships with plant life is in! Before you go to the store to buy veggies, flowers, or a new houseplant, learn how you can grow your own with what you already have in your home (or in your friend/neighbor’s home). 

Take small moments to become familiar with plant relatives that surround us. When you’re ready, you can take steps to tend to and share the bounty. 

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Screening of 'La montaña', 2023 - 8:00PM - 10:00 PM

Hosted by: Contratiempo

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

A film log of the maritime journey of a delegation of seven indigenous rebels from Chiapas to Europe in the midst of the pandemic. During the Atlantic crossing, the story and generational change of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) is narrated, based on the idea that in order to change the world we must first change the way we look at it. Squadron 4-2-1. The documentary will have English subtitles.

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Queer Everyday: Collage & Talk - 8:00PM - 10:00 PM

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Queer Everyday is a hands-on workshop where we share stories about queer identity, everyday life, and feeling at home (or not). We start with a talk and short freewriting, then turn words into colorful collage pages for a zine we make together. Come, chat, cut, collage!

WEDNESDAY JULY 23RD

VOZU Workshop - 5:45PM - 8:00 PM

Hosted by: Lumpen Radio: Juanjose Rivas

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

This is a collective-building workshop of hybrid technological instruments. It is based on the idea of planned obsolescence and tech recycling as a means of resistance. Through the assembly of an auto amplified wind instrument, we will work with recycled materials–electronical residues and obsolete components– to transform them into autonomous sonic devices.

THERE IS LIMITED AVAILABILITY TO THIS WORKSHOP. YOU MUST RSVP @ lumpenradio@publicmediainstitute.com

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Zine Club at Life on Marz - 7:00 - 9:00 PM

Hosted by: Cynthia Hanifin

@ Life on Marz Community Club • 1950 N Wetern Ave

For our Zine Club Chicago on Marz event at Life on Marz in July, we'll invite attendees to create pages for a collaborative zine with the theme Subversion. The zine will be distributed in print and digitally to the community.

Raise Your Voice with Intangible Choir - 7:30- 9:30 PM

Hosted by: Julie Pomerleau

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Intangible Choir is a community choir that meets twice monthly at Tangible Books. Join us to learn how to raise your voice with energizing vocal warm ups. We'll perform some protest songs and you can sing along with us!

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Perfect Pancakes - Subversive Digital Media - 7:30 - 9:00 PM

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

A crash-course in creating subversive digital media! After introductions and a brief survey in subversive video history & appreciation, we will demo a writer's room style workshopping session, discuss production design on a small budget, and produce a small simple piece prepared for minimal acting skills. Finally, there will be a screening of "Perfect Pancakes", a subversive daytime talkshow. Participants will build skills and confidence in creating their own subversive media.

THURSDAY, JULY 24TH

Climate Wayfinding - 6:00PM -9:00 PM

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Many people are looking at the climate crisis with distress and grappling with the question: “what can I do?” Climate Wayfinding is a proven program created by The All We Can Save Project for holding questions and gaining clarity, courage, and community for our climate journeys. In this mini-workshop, participants will look inward, outward, and forward to identify and activate their unique contributions and explore key capacities for climate engagement.

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Theatre of the Oppressed Workshop - 8:00 - 9:00 PM

Hosted by: Daphne Agosin

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

The goal of this workshop is to get to know each other better to develop trust and discover shared goals among colleagues and participants. To build courage together. Courage can come in following up, in patience, in dedication, in healing, in creating... This workshop is meant to reflect on how we confront fears, conflicts and contradictions in a way that can bring us closer instead of apart. 

One exciting and special thing about Theater of the Oppressed and devised theater is that everyone is invited fully, not only to follow along, but rather to investigate collective decision-making. We facilitate and not direct; we acknowledge that everyone is a leader in their own endeavors and that is celebrated. 

In the equation of oppressed and oppressor, which TO bases its structure in, there is no side we want to be in. No progressive feels content in either spot; we are trying to build systems rid of both entities. But in these workshops people may fall on both ends of those categories, and that is the nature of our organizing times. How much that will affect our work together is another open question to investigate in this workshop. 

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Clowntown Presents: Year 2045 - 9:00 - 9:30 PM

Hosted by: ClownTown

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

Join ClownTown in the year 2045 to celebrate the death of the billionaire class. In shadow puppet glory, ClownTown will recount the tale of the fated revolution... 

ClownTown is a collective based in Humboldt Park that hosts monthly(ish) parties, installations, and performances with absurd themes, freaky plotlines, and anti-capitalist directions. This performance comes from a recent party titled: Year 2045, the Future is Calling. 

FRIDAY, JULY 25TH

Mock Congress - 5:30 - 7:00 pm

Hosted by: David Nasca

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

Imagine we all just pulled the emergency stop lever on our train wreck of a "democratic" government and had a chance to rewrite the constitution? Many countries eventually realize that their constitutions actually suck and do just that, and our most exhausted founding fathers who got everything right provided us with that emergency exit. Join us in a mock constitutional congress (and in mocking Congress) as we think about ways to restructure the US constitution to promote progressive politics and bring democracy back to the people.

The Battle of Halsted: Labor & Justice - 7:00 - 8:30 PM

Hosted by: Under the Tree Podcast & Pilsen Community Books

@ Cermak & Halsted

Join us in recreating a pivotal moment in Chicago and labor history! The great labor uprising of 1877 arrived to Chicago and nearly brought the city and it's business titans to its knees -- mass strikes, walkouts, running battles and fiery speeches from labor leaders incited violent reprisals from police and national guard troops resulting in the deaths of over 30 civilians. With striking parallels to our current political moment, our re-enactment of this uprising hopes to ensure that this history and the lives lost are memorialized and the lessons carried forward.

More info here https://www.chicagolaborhistory.org/home

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Bass Camp PARTY - 8:30 - 11:30 PM

Hosted by: Teddy Sandler (tdy)

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

Riding the wave of dance. Feel each campy beat with a fab DJ lineup (TBA) of underground selectors and music makers, propelling the next gen of Chicago rave. Sthesia collabs with subVersion to present Bass Camp at Co-Prosperity.

SATURDAY, JULY 26TH

Printervention: Migrant Solidarity Zine Print-Run - 11am - 2pm

Hosted by: CHema Skandal!

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

Zines are an awesome and fun communication tool! This workshop is an introduction to everything a Zinester should know. Join us, learn and share, make a migration-related zine and create community.

Registration for this event is required, sign up here!

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Impulse & Intention: A Mindfulness Collage - 2:00 - 4:00 PM

Hosted by: Lily Cox

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

This society raises us to lean heavily into impulses that aid the empire and to repress all else. Collage is a beautiful way to lean into impulse through the chosen images, and intentionality through what is fixed to the page. Let’s practice mindfulness through art! 

Dear Renad, To Gaza With Love - 2:00 - 3:00 PM

Hosted by: Rachel Hoffman and Leah Grynheim, Jewish Voice for Peace Chicago

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

Join us for an art-based workshop for young people to reflect and honor the experiences of Gazan Children and share their own thoughts and feelings through video and letter writing/art-making!

*This workshop curriculum is primarily for ages 8 years old and above.

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ScreenING OF Alfonso Arau's Mojado Power - 8:00 - 10:00 pm

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

The story centers on an undocumented worker, who after various escapades, constructs a plan to unify indocumentados(undocumented persons) and Chicanos. His emblem is a decal advocating “mojado power”, that is, the unity of all persons of Mexican origin in the United States.

SUNDAY, JULY 27TH

Working 2050: A Sci Fi Journaling Workshop for Hopeful Futures - 12:00 - 2:00 PM

Hosted by: H. Kappe-Klote

@ Tangible Books

In this immersive speculative fiction journaling workshop, participants will take on the role of a future worker: maybe you’re a gig nurse for algae farms, a digital janitor scrubbing legacy media, or a community defense baker in a flooded zone. We’ll use writing prompts, somatic cues, and short movement exercises to generate first-person speculative “journal entries” from these future selves. Then, we’ll talk: What does it take to keep working — and caring — in a future built on the wreckage of this one?

We’ll borrow from trauma-informed fitness, somatic narrative, speculative oral history, and very low-tech roleplay. 

What you’ll leave with: A written journal entry from your 2050 self, a character sketch for your future working body, some nervous system tools for surviving the present.

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project for a street corner - 2:00- 4:30 PM

Hosted by: L Napier

@ Co-Prosperity • 3219 S Morgan St

“project for a street corner” is a framework for artists/activists to devise creative protest within crowded public space. In this workshop and performance, you will collaborate with a group to create an experimental covert performance to change the behavior of an existing crowd, through your own performative intervention. During the workshop, you will observe a site, discuss how crowds behave within that site, and devise strategies to covertly change  crowd behavior through collectively using your own embodied behaviors. Then we will test out our strategies on-site. To map out what patterns emerge, our performative interventions will be video documented from above.

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Chicago Radicalism 101 Bus Tour - 3:00 - 6:00 pm- SOLD OUT

Hosted by: Paul Durica

@ Marz Community Brewing • 3636 Iron St.

Explore over a century of civil disobedience in Chicago on this bus tour, from the Lager Beer Riot to the DNC. Learn how the past has made our present and can help us to imagine a just, equitable future. This bus tour starts and ends at Marz Community Brewing Co. It includes beers and Non - alcoholic beverages.

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Travesuras Colectivas: DIY Art for Resistance - 4:30 - 6:00 PM

Hosted by: Alondra Jara

@ Research House for Asian Art • 3217 S. Morgan St

This two-part workshop explores poster-making as a powerful form of creative expression and collective resistance. Using a range of accessible, DIY approaches- such as printmaking, textiles, collage, and hand-drawn design, we'll create bold posters that reflect defiance, liberation, and imagining new futures in these times. 

Open to all skill levels and grounded in values of accessibility, care, and creative autonomy, this workshop centers art as a practice of community-building and liberation. Come to experiment, reflect, and connect!

Photo Credits: Sandra Oviedo

Numbers Game
Britt Ransom
June 27th - August 1st, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, June 27th, 7:00pm - 10:00pm

Numbers Game is an exhibition by Britt Ransom, the great-great-granddaughter of Reverdy C. Ransom and Emma Ransom, that traces the inheritance of spiritual leadership, social service, and civil resistance. Through sculpture, digital fabrication, archival media, and interactive optics, this exhibition excavates the layered history of Reverdy C. Ransom’s civil rights work in Chicago during the Progressive Era and connects it to present-day movements for racial and economic justice.

At the center of this exhibition is the story of Ransom’s founding of the Institutional Church and Social Settlement in 1896, located at 3825 Dearborn Street on Chicago’s South Side, a building that no longer exists. More than a place of worship, the church was a pioneering social experiment: one of the first Black-led religious institutions to integrate faith, education, physical health, community organizing, and social services under one roof. It included a kindergarten, nursery, gymnasium, library, and clubs for boys and girls, all aimed at serving the growing Black population migrating to Chicago during the early waves of the Great Migration. The Institutional Church stood as a vital response to the influx of Black Southerners seeking safety and opportunity in a city that was often just as segregated and economically punishing as the Jim Crow South they had fled.

Ransom was not alone in this endeavor. He forged strategic and lasting alliances with some of Chicago’s most prominent Progressive reformers, including Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus, and Bishop Samuel Fallows. These figures recognized in Ransom a peer—a leader whose theology was grounded in action, whose sermons catalyzed reform, and whose gathering space offered tangible services to the city’s most vulnerable. Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House, played a particularly significant role. She understood the risk Ransom was taking and the urgency of his mission. Shortly after the purchase of the old "Railroad Chapel" building that would become the Institutional Church, Addams helped secure its first external donation. Through her network, a check was sent from a philanthropist in California—marking the beginning of what would become a network of white and Black supporters committed to the settlement’s mission.

Addams’s support was not symbolic—it was strategic. She publicly endorsed the work of Ransom's settlement, visited regularly, and included it in broader coalitions of Progressive reform across the city. Alongside her were Rev. Graham Taylor of Chicago Commons, Mary McDowell of the University of Chicago Settlement, and Clarence Darrow, the famous criminal defense attorney. Darrow notably worked with Ransom during the 1902 Chicago Stockyards strike, helping to mediate racial tensions between Black strikebreakers and white union laborers. Ransom, risking personal harm, walked into the yards himself to convince the strikers that Black laborers were not their enemy, but fellow workers caught in an exploitative system. He then invited both Black and white laborers to his church for an unprecedented public forum, where dialogue—not violence—prevailed.

Despite these successes, Ransom’s greatest challenge—and his most dangerous act of resistance—came in the form of his public campaign against policy gambling, an underground lottery system that was thriving in the community during this time. Once he realized that his sermons were being used by congregation members to choose numbers for the game, Ransom spoke out in opposition. His campaign to expose those who were profiting from the game which ultimately led to a personal encounter with Policy Sam. In 1903, his church was bombed with the intent to kill him. Ransom survived, as did the settlement, though badly damaged. 

In this exhibition, Ransom’s work is represented through a symbolic vocabulary drawn from the Aunt Sally’s Policy Players Dream Book. In the dream-language of policy gambling—objects like the bell, book, key, train, ladder, lamp, and brick house, had coded meanings and specific numbers assigned to them within the game- players would then use these numbers to place their bets. Recontextualized here, they become metaphors of Ransom’s resistance: the bell sounding a warning, the book and lamp reflecting his intellectual and spiritual light, the key signifying access and transformation, the train representing migration and mobility, the ladder echoing his vision of racial uplift, and the brick house as both church and fortress. 

The 3D printed reimagined policy game objects—symbols of exploitation and coded hope—face black obsidian mirrors creates a space for reflection, divination, and reorientation. Traditionally used in spiritual practices for scrying and ancestral communication, obsidian mirrors serve as portals to the unseen, allowing one to look both backward into history and forward into possibility. Their dark, reflective surfaces suggest that knowledge is not always found in clarity, but in shadow, memory, and multiplicity. Here, the viewer is invited to confront the past not as something gone, but as a continuing presence—one that can still inform vision, intuition, and resistance. Recreated casts of policy gambling tickets appear throughout the exhibition, referencing original tickets that are now extremely rare; most were casually produced, used daily, and quickly discarded, making surviving examples—especially those with meaningful number sets—difficult to recover. 

Interactive teleidoscopes—optical devices that in this case, refract historical and present day images of significant sites in the Ransom story, create layered patterns. Inspired by the Ransoms’ visit to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where they encountered the Yerkes Telescope, these devices invite viewers to consider how history is distorted, repeated, and reframed through personal and collective lenses. Looking through them, audiences encounter archival images from the Ransom family alongside present-day scenes from South Side Chicago and Wilberforce, Ohio.

Lenses—both scientific and spiritual—serve as tools for examining how the past remains embedded in the present. The teleidoscope, allows us to see backwards in time, while the black obsidian mirror, rooted in ancestral and divinatory practices, invites inward reflection and intuitive knowledge. Together, these optical instruments challenge the viewer to consider history not as distant or static, but as something actively refracted through personal vision and collective memory. 

Other elements in the exhibition continue threads of time-space dialogue. 3D-printed roses recall the anonymous banker who donated fresh flowers to the Institutional Church every week—roses that were then handed out in saloons, pool halls, and street corners on the Southside of Chicago, offering beauty in the midst of despair as a way to call together community. These small gestures, like Ransom’s sermons, were both radical and restorative at the time calling people to come together.

Reverdy C. Ransom’s influence extended far beyond Chicago; he was a founding member of the Niagara Movement, the early civil rights organization led by W.E.B. Du Bois. At the movement’s 1906 meeting at Harpers Ferry, Ransom delivered his now-famous speech, The Spirit of John Brown, invoking the legacy of the abolitionist to call for moral courage, direct action, and racial justice. This powerful address positioned Ransom as a leading voice of prophetic resistance, linking the Black freedom struggle to broader histories of radical abolition. His work with Du Bois and the Niagara Movement helped lay the intellectual and organizational groundwork for the NAACP, cementing his national significance as both a preacher and civil rights pioneer.

Numbers Game also includes digitally fabricated architectural elements 3D Scanned and recreated from the Tawawa Chimney Corner House—Ransom’s family home in Wilberforce, Ohio, now being restored by the Bishop Reverdy C. and Emma S. Ransom Foundation. This structure grounds the exhibition in a spatial legacy of sanctuary, history, and forward vision, connecting the South Side of Chicago to one of the earliest centers of Black education in the United States.

Numbers Game also includes a selection of historical books that deepen the archival and narrative context of the work. These include an original Aunt Sally’s Policy Player’s Dream Book, published on Dearborn Street and used to interpret dreams into lottery numbers; The Pilgrimage of Harriet Ransom’s Son, an autobiographical text written by Reverdy C. Ransom himself; foundational histories of the AME Church; and an original souvenir book from the 1893 World’s Fair, where the Ransoms first encountered the Yerkes Telescope. Together, these texts anchor the sculptural and symbolic elements of the exhibition in lived, documented experience.

Through these varied components—sculpture, interactive media, archival documents, and metaphor—the exhibition frames Reverdy C. Ransom not only as a prominent bishop, but as a builder of moral infrastructure, someone who understood that justice required more than belief—it required buildings, coalitions, and the willingness to stand in the fire. Numbers Game insists that the past is not behind us. It is beneath our feet and reflected in our eyes—refracted, living, and unfinished.

Artist Bio:

Britt Ransom is an artist whose practice probes the lines between human, animal, and environmental relationships through sculpture and installations that are made using digital fabrication processes. Ransom’s work is systematic both in construction and in concept, often a direct reflection of observed microcosms found at the surface of our feet, developed in the web of a digital mesh, and made to explore the braided entanglements between ourselves and the other species of plants and animals with whom we share space.

Ransom is the recipient of the Heinz Endowment Creative Development award, Joan Mitchell Center Residency, Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator (LACI) Residency, and the ZERO1 American Arts Incubator. Her work has been shown most recently at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge), The Ogden Museum of Southern Art (New Orleans), Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans) Ohr-O’Keefe Museum (Biloxi), Honor Fraser (Los Angeles), Royale Projects (Los Angeles), and Schering Stiftung (Transmediale, Berlin).

Her writing has been published in Antennae (2024), In and Out of View: Art and the Dynamics of Circulation, Suppression, and Censorship (2021), Leonardo Journal published by MIT Press (2019), The 3D Additivist Cookbook (2016), and The Routledge Handbook on Biology in Art, Architecture, and Design, Routledge Press Essay (2016).

Ransom was the SIGGRAPH Studio and Art Gallery Chairs in 2017 and 2019. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Emma S. and Reverdy C. Ransom Foundation and Freedom to Grow Legacy Center in New Orleans. She received her BFA from The Ohio State University in Art and Technology (2008) and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in Electronic Visualization / New Media (2011).

Photo Credits: Melissa Tran

Changing Patterns: A Review of “Numbers Game” at Co-Prosperity
Christina Nafziger, 2025

To unearth historical materials and build an archive is laborious and emotional. To sift through the fading analog photos, the crumbling first edition books, and piece together a story that has strategically been ignored or devalued is not an easy task to complete. I imagine there being feelings of only getting the partial truth, of always feeling like a piece is missing, of wanting to do the story justice by preserving and telling the story in its fullness and complexity. Add in that the story is your own family history, and it becomes even more weighted…and what you may even have on your hands is your life’s work. This is the sentiment I felt while viewing “Numbers Game” by Britt Ransom, artist and great-great-granddaughter of Reverdy C. Ransom and Emma Ransom, whose legacy of civil resistance, community work, and lasting impact locally in Chicago and nationally is on full display.

Through a constellation of historical images, documents, markers, handmade kaleidoscopes, and 3D-printed objects, Britt Ransom ushers the viewer into the past, coaxing us through the metaphorical wall that separates the history from present day, allowing us to step deeper into the archive. The artist tells Ransom's story: “[The] Ransom’s founded the Institutional Church and Social Settlement in 1896, located at 3825 Dearborn Street on Chicago’s South Side, a building that no longer exists. More than a place of worship, the church was a pioneering social experiment: one of the first Black-led religious institutions to integrate faith, education, physical health, community organizing, and social services under one roof. [...] The Institutional Church stood as a vital response to the influx of Black Southerners seeking safety and opportunity in a city that was often just as segregated and economically punishing as the Jim Crow South they had fled.” 

Their story—the reach and significance of the Ransom’s work—does not stop there. It is a history that is layered, with tentacles that spread out and touch others doing aligned work, such as Hull House founder Jane Addams and criminal defense attorney Clarence Darrow—but I won’t go on. If you want to learn more about the history unearthed, archived, and explored within the exhibition, read Britt Ransom’s essay on her family’s legacy. It is worth the read, just as it is worth preserving and considering through the eyes of an artist who has inherited the task of caring for the archive.

But what does it mean to care for an archive? For Britt Ransom, it does not mean to hide the materials away in a private storage space or library. Instead, she offers them up to viewers, creating pathways to learn, to understand, and to connect. Throughout the exhibition, there is a throughline of aesthetics fabricated by the artist. Deep indigo, purple, and lavender show up on laser-cut acrylic objects and 3D printed pieces, such as “Can a Nation So Soon Forget?”, a sculpture resembling a fallen building column with the piece’s namesake present on its side. Lavender roses are set beside various historical images, while other lavender objects such as a key, a train, an oil lamp, and a bell sit on little reflective discs on purple pedestals. Displayed under glass, more lavender rose petals lay next to a historic copy of The Time-saver. A Book Which Names and Locates 5,000 Things 5,000 at the World's Fair That Visitors Should Not Fail to See. The mixture of fabricated objects and elements of the archive entangle history and the present, what has come to pass and what remains with us today. The touches of purples and reflective surfaces give way for an air of mysticism, creating space for possibility, perspective, and magical intervention. 

As you might imagine with a title like “Numbers Game,” possibility and chance have a clear presence in the exhibition. 3D-printed replicas of policy tickets used in policy gambling can be seen in the show, and in the reading room located in the back of the space (curated by the artist specifically for the show), viewers can find books like Running the Numbers: Race, Police, and the History of Urban Gambling by Matthew Vaz, and Aunt Sally’s Policy Player’s Dreambook. The miniature lavender objects mentioned earlier bring to mind pieces in Monopoly, a game of chance, landlords, and gaining (and losing) wealth. For the artist, these Monopoly-like game pieces are “symbols of exploitation and coded hope.” Britt Ransom explains that policy gambling was “an underground lottery system that was thriving in the community during this time,” and her great-great-grandfather was firmly against it. You can’t win a game whose rules were designed for you to lose, and this was what Ransom and his community were up against. So how are you supposed to play a game when there’s no way to win? How can change happen when our current systems are built against communities based on race, class, ability, and more? The artist invites us to wonder—are we still stuck in the same pattern? (The answer is of course, yes.)

How can patterns be changed? This question comes to a head in Britt Ransom’s five Teleidoscopes, which are central literally and conceptually to the exhibition. Arranged in a circle, five lavender and purple sculptures, fabricated by the artist, invite the viewer to look into a small, triangle opening. Through the opening, a kaleidoscope of historical images can be seen, fragmented and brilliantly reflected into different parts. Each kaleidoscope forces a change in perspective, creating new imagery and new patterns. They encourage participation—the tool is there, and it is up to you to use it. The viewer is no passing body, but instead a fragment of a whole. Each prism of imagery can be rotated and spun, shifting the way we see, consume, and understand. We now see that history itself is fragmented and cracked, its legibility skewed by whoever has their hands on it. The act of viewing these archival images in this way reveals how easy it is for history to be distorted, warped, and reframed in a way that hides the truth of the story—a practice that continues to happen depending on the keepers of the archive. It is why so many stories are forgotten or never told, and how certain histories (often histories of BIPOC communities) are strategically left out of education systems and mainstream narratives. What Britt Ransom does so beautifully and brilliantly here is show us what someone with a deep understanding of and personal ties to a specific history can craft and create when the archive is in their hands. Yes, this exhibition is a history lesson (at least for me), but it is also a lesson in possibility, in perspective, in the archivist (or keeper of the archive) as creative force, and in the ways in which exhibition design can push the archive further into the present while creating a kaleidoscope of entries to the so-called past.

La Basurita
Mariposa Divina
June 27th - August 1st, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, June 27th, 7-10pm

A fable / crónicá:

My only childhood memory is my mother whispering in my ear, “Little basurita, one day you will die.” It turned me on. For the first time, I realized my godlike power.The secret name was revealed, and after wailing and a loud gasp, I could feel massive butterfly wings sprouting through my shoulder blades. I flew past my own desert grave, then reincarnated as MARIPOSA DIVINA, a transexual in a windy city far from home. My new life was no paradise, but I made friends with the serpent women, and we made a protective pact to watch each others’ backs and crochet our broken hearts together. 

[Mariposa’s poem of El Espejo:The Mirror, from when I was nine] Dec, 30, 2005

Con el espejo veo mi rostro

Y el espejo me cuida, no otro

Con el yo voy a estar

Y alli me voy a quedar

Con el veo cosas maravillosas

Fantasía, logros , y mariposas

Preparare mi veliz 

Para ir con él y ser feliz

Mi espejo se llama miguel

Y no me separare de el 

In the mirror I see my face

Only the mirror takes care of me, no one else

I will be with him 

And that's where I’ll stay 

With him I see wonderful things

Fantasies, realisations, and butterflies

I’ve prepared my suitcase 

To go with him and be happy 

My mirror’s name is Miguel 

And I will never separate from him 

La Basurita  is a tender, hopeful tragedy in three nonlinear acts, populated by glazed ceramic stransculptures and fabricated metal shapes wrapping around the landscapes of Co-Prosperity’s window exhibition spaces. The acts, in no particular order, and without giving away which window maqueta maps onto our many secret names, are as follows:  

ACT !  [ Pleasuregarden / Sueño con Serpientes ] 

Genderfluid fashion and giddy get-ups! Butterflies frolicking in the light of golden hour! When I close my eyes and the sun swirls on my lids, this is the dissociative parable of paradise I see. Here in the pleasuregarden I can play and flirt with the earth to my ass’s content. Writhing in pleasure, I multiply and bloom a thousand little deaths. 

Act ? [Darkness / Rot / Transformation ] 

I face my death over and over, then cross to the other side. Memento mori is ancient medicine.

 I lean into the mirror and take a selfie with my dark shadow selves. 

ACT </3 [ Exceptional Friendships / Creating stars ] 

Resting in my friends’ arms: is this where home is?. Even if it’s ephemeral I can trust we will find each other again in our memories, dreams, and promises. 

Visual reference points / inspiration: 

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Queen Califia’s Magic Circle in California, Ana Teresa Fernandez’s border performance art in heels, Javier Tellez’s human cannonball, Helio Oiticica’s Parangolés,  Asco’s walking murals, Ana Mendieta’s facial hair transplant performances, Adrian Piper’s Mything Being, Sofia Moreno’s trash gender art with needles, heels and snakes, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Sueño Con Serpientes chapter in Borderlands. 

Keywords:

Archetypes, matrilineal, faerie, frolicking, paradisepleasuregardens, trash/asco, turning windows into mirrors, inner child, world-making, fables, snake women, healing, rest, composure, holding self, dissociation, imagining, nonbinary faggotry and friends, sensual play, maquetas, disposability, fashion. 

Becoming Refuse: Mariposa Divina’s La Basurita

Noa Micaela Fields

In the song “La Basurita,” ranchera queen Beatriz Adriana exclaims, “Yo soy basurita / Soy basurita que arrastra el viento” (“I am trash, I am the trash blowing in the wind”). In a similar spirit, there’s a meme remix of Katy Perry’s “Fireworks” that fixates on the line, “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag,” and transforms the chorus into: “Cause baby you’re a plastic bag,” rather than “firework.” A self-deprecative reversal where the listener becomes refuse rather than incendiary spectacle. These could be two sonic epigraphs for Mariposa Divina’s window exhibition at Co-Prosperity Sphere, La Basurita, which leans into the role of trash as if it were a tarot archetype, embodying this reclamation to an extreme.

In America’s wasteful and necropolitical culture, Black and brown, working class, queer and trans people are also portrayed as and made disposable. Just as “queer” or “puta” reclaims a slur, to call oneself trash might be to celebrate possibilities in the inverted values of degeneracy, refusal, and worthlessness. Instead, embracing the dirty glamour in the everyday transforms shame into pride. To see a carousel of pleasure and wonder in one’s own quotidian actions which our society condemns, abuses, and tries to erase.

Take in the scene of a mannequin in the window styled in a trash bag halter dress: glistening and form-fitting, a Cinderella-worthy transformation, like Stephen Varble’s gender subversive “trash couture,” which incorporated eclectic found rubbish like milk cartons into other-worldly drag costumes for street art performances. Divina’s dress is displayed  in the window as if outside a boutique and not hidden in the shadows, willing any passerby to stop in awe and desire.

Divina reminds us we are surrounded by a plethora of waste available for us to repurpose as a vehicle for self-expression if we exercise a little resourcefulness—like Arte Povera (“poor art”), drawing on whatever’s readily available.  Art and poetry can consecrate these materials as portals, highlighting the refined visions they offer. Whole worlds, treasure where others see only trash.  I think of the baroque sentences of insurgent Chilean travesti writer Pedro Lemebel’s cronicas which spellbindingly describe quotidian lifeworlds of sex workers, mythologizing a streetwalker as “the wonder of the witching hour, a flash of mother-of-pearl catching the light in a city whorehouse.” This is no trick or illusion: just the larger than life but totally true story of us, as seen by us, told for us. 

For the exhibition’s description, Divina wrote a fable that similarly exemplifies reinvention as self-mythology, finding unexpected erotic pleasure in put-downs and reminders of fatality: 

My only childhood memory is my mother whispering in my ear, “Little basurita, one day you will die.” It turned me on. For the first time, I realized my godlike power. The secret name was revealed, and after wailing and a loud gasp, I could feel massive butterfly wings sprouting through my shoulder blades. I flew past my own desert grave, then reincarnated as MARIPOSA DIVINA, a transexual in a windy city far from home. My new life was no paradise, but I made friends with the serpent women, and we made a protective pact to watch each others’ backs and crochet our broken hearts together.

The fable has an arc of melodrama swinging from feelings of familial rejection to realizations of a secret name and creaturely transformation. (Isn’t melodrama widely  the trashiest TV genre?) Little basurita, one day you will die: skull motifs in the show cast death’s shadow, emphasizing the life and death stakes of existing on society’s fringe in conditions of precarity and risk, all the while also functioning as a memento mori, marking time’s passing and reminding us to embrace ephemerality. Even as La Basurita holds melodrama, it is also tender and hopeful. In one serene sculpture of self-embrace, glazed grey-blue ribbons trussing serpentine braided hair echo in gentle rhythm with matching teardrops and nails, an example of style as a form of emotional fortification, a protective armor when feeling vulnerable.

Each detailed ceramic tableau begs to be seen from all angles. While this wasn’t possible for all of the sculptures in a window display, Divina shrewdly placed some of their sculptures on revolving cake platters to provide the 360° views. Get up close to take in the texture of the glaze heightening the sheen of skin and flushed cheeks, or on-point colorful genderfuck dyke fashion accessories, like a leopard print harness, fishnets, and red heels. There is also slutty, big time sensuality, as in a ceramic bust of a pair of hips, sagging jean shorts exposing the jockstrap and rampant pubic hair underneath. 

The windows house three color-coordinated intermedia installations, situating the glazed ceramic transculptures alongside fabricated metalwork and fabric screen prints. There’s variety but also a satisfying rhythm in the visual vocabulary that appears across textiles and paintings with butterflies, hearts, and playful, genderfluid Spanish. I am staggered by the breadth of Divina’s talents in fashion, ceramics, metalwork, and painting separately, but even more by their vision for bringing it all together to suggest another world of possibility and transformation where other trash and misfits belong, too.

The Bridge Performance Incubator Showcase

 June 13th & 14th | 7:30-10:30 PM

@ Co-Prosperity (3219-21 S Morgan St)

 Join us for an inspiring evening of performance art, presented by ten dynamic artists who have spent the past ten weeks immersed in creative exploration at Hyde Park Art Center. This culminating showcase is the result of The Bridge Performance Incubator, a professional development program designed to spark bold ideas, nurture embodied practices, and support the creation of new work.

 Through a seminar-style course, artists engaged in deep dialogue, collaboration, and experimentation—receiving critical resources and guidance to evolve their practice and bring new or developing projects to life. 

This showcase celebrates their journey and the vibrant, ever-growing performance art community in Chicago.

 SCHEDULE:

 June 13. 7:30 - 10:30 PM

Artists: Reid Arowood, Pruthvish Dangat, Hannah Marcus, Makayla Lindsay, and Hesam Salehbeig 

Saturday, June 14. 7:30 - 10:30 PM

Artists: Amari Amai, Ry Douglas // Deacon Weekend Denis, Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Veronica Casado Hernández and Zach Sun

Produced by: Rosé Hernández & Sofía Gabriel

How To See In The Dark
Eva Davidova, Dakota Gearhart, Garrett Laroy Johnson, Alberto Ortega-Trejo
May 2nd - June 6th, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, May 2nd, 6-9pm

Workshop: Muindi Fanuel Muindi

Organized by Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines

Co-Prosperity Gallery is pleased to present How to See in the Dark, a group exhibition organized by CCAM, the Center for Concrete and Abstract Machines, opening on May 2nd. Artists Eva Davidova (NYC), Dakota Gearhart (NYC), Garrett Laroy Johnson (Chicago), and Alberto Ortega-Trejo (Chicago) respond to the unspoken headline of our contemporary moment: the d*rk enlightenment espoused by reactionary technopriests is upon us. How to understand this moment as artists, organizers, educators, workers, dreamers? A line from cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster often quoted by Chicago activist-artist stalwart Brian Holmes gives the show its wings: “If you want to see, learn how to act.”

Of course, the quippy “how to” offers no silver bullets, but How to See in the Dark does intend to mobilize the American can-do spirit. Emphasis on spirit. The viewer is asked to “stay with the weirder" to confront ways of thinking and acting we might have dismissed, a call to break open old convictions, and a challenge to step beyond closed systems of thinking, seeing, and acting. It is a meditation on the paradox of our times, an abandonment of purity politics. The exhibition wrestles with the cycles of history and nature, from witch hunts and genocides to tectonic shifts and cosmic phenomena. In doing so, the show challenges the viewer to reckon with the current moment on more-than-human time-scales, to accept that as a best case scenario, we find ourselves experiencing the solstice of a thousand years of darkness. Through this exhibition, the artist advocates for an intergenerational project rooted in revolutionary optimism, a collective shift towards a cyber-ecological spirituality (eco-techno-theo practices) that confronts darkness head-on without the promise of salvation. An Infopoetics workshop featuring scholar Muindi Fanuel Muindi (Chicago) is offered on Saturday, May 24th. A symposium with panels and more is offered on Sunday, June 1st.

How To See in the Dark: Closing Activations 

June 1st @ Co-Prosperity

3219-21 S Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60608 

Symposium: 11:00AM - 3:00PM

How to See in the Dark's symposium gathers artists, scholars, and activist's to refract the show's theme through their various socially engaged, activist, and philosophical practices: music, dance, image making, writing and computational media.

Panel 1: Signs, Signals, and Sigils 

Hosted by: Eva Davidova, Grace Grace Grace & Muindi Fanuel Muindi

11:00AM - 12:30PM 

while (experience == actual){

signified = signifying;

signifying = signified;

}
Processual aesthetic experience is born out of the ab- and adduction of sociopsychical ensembles. Signs, thought to be tethered inextricably to the thing they symbolize, are mutated at the molecular level by their co-imbricated perception and action. The signpost for the thing underway becomes the sign itself, signals sigilize becoming. This panel circumscribes aesthetic experience's "underway-ness", and follows its pointers to a literally magical nexus of technics, religion, scientific articulation, poiesis, that beckons ecosophic spiritual practices for a politics yet-to-come.   

Panel 2: Footwork, Rootwork, and Wakework 

Hosted by: Anna Martine Whitehead, Angel Bat Dawid, Thomas Defrantz, jada-amina

1:00PM - 3:00PM

Black life has never depended on the promise of light. Ever since the barracoon, the exit through the Door of No Return, the hold of the ship, Black people have learned to navigate the dark—not as deficit, but as depth—because the dual pressures of fungibility and fugitivity demand it. This panel explores how, in evading the perils of the searchlight, flashlight, spotlight, and limelight, Black survival has involved profound creativity in the fields of rhythm, ritual, and remembrance.

Closing Reception: 7PM - 10PM

Closing Performances: 8PM - 9PM

Following the symposium, How to See in the Dark's closing reception will run from 7-10 Sunday June 1. At 8:30, we will host a dynamic couplet of performances by artists Eva Davidova, Odette Stout, and Grace Grace Grace that works through the project's thematic emphasis on the immanence of vision.

Parallel to Hell
Le Hien Minh
May 2nd - June 6th, 2025

Opening Reception: Friday, May 2nd, 6-9pm

Le Hien Minh, Me So Horny, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

For her solo show at Co-Prosperity titled Parallel to Hell, Le Hien Minh presents a new body of work comprising two sculptures and a large hand-painted, site-specific text-based work. This body of work critically examines how American pop culture has impacted Vietnamese female identity. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including Hollywood films, American pop music, Vietnam War iconography, and traditional Vietnamese motifs, she weaves these elements together to create powerful objects that radiate an otherworldly aura. Le Hien Minh approaches this new work through a surrealist and metaphysical lens, blending fantasy and nightmare to create artwork that is both alluring and unsettling.

Untitled, Site-specific text-based work, 2025

Traditional Vietnamese handmade Dó paper, acrylic paint.

For the gallery’s large front window, Le Hien Minh applies traditional Vietnamese handmade Dó paper to cover the entire surface. Across it, she hand-paints a striking sentence in soft pastel pink: "One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you." Lifted from Nancy Sinatra’s iconic song and stripped of its original pop context, the phrase takes on a darker, more ominous tone. In this new setting, the words evoke the brute force of marching armies and the trauma of war. The delicate materiality of the paper contrasts with the threatening undertone of the text, amplifying the tension between fragility and power.

Text written by Gregory Jewett. Photo(s) by Laurel Hauge. Courtesy for the Artist and Co-Prosperity. 

The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it 
Mariel Harari
February 28–April 11, 2025 

Opening Reception: February 28, 6:00–9:00pm

The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it is a site specific window installation featuring new work by Mariel Harari opening on February 28 through April 11 at Co-prosperity. The work explores how human made systems impact organic beings. Physically, focusing on the way plants grow in relation to sidewalks, buildings and pollutants. Emotionally, investigating how memory can both reinforce imposed values and hierarchies, or be drawn on to untangle them.

The installation consists of fiber, sculpture, drawing, photo and video. A large blue textile presents something uncontained, images of an arm, thumb, bricks and sidewalk squares are stitched on to interrupt the blue. Hybrid sculptures present combinations of trees growing into buildings, self portraiture and limbs emerging from a cocoon of drawn memories, and plants growing from cracks in cement. The video strings together footage from Harari’s walks around Chicago, observing how and where plants contend with imposed environment, the encompassing nature of sky, and what can be learned from openness and softening contrived delineations.

The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it

Essay

By Christina Nafziger

Living in Chicago, you become both hyper-aware and oblivious to the architecture you move through. The architecture of this city pushes and pulls you in different directions, it forces you down certain paths while deterring you from others. Sidewalks, rows of houses, public parks, fences, and brick walls alter our path and influence our choices. Turn right and take the shady path under a row of trees, or turn left and avoid the uneven and cracked concrete? Through a mixture of planned and unplanned places and paths, our experience moving within this city is inevitably influenced by these structures. Whether we notice them or not, architectural elements are there, affecting our choices.

These are the details that artist Mariel Harari draws out in her exhibition The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it at Co-Prosperity. Through photography, textiles, video, and mixed media installations, Harari offers us a glimpse of a crack in a sidewalk, a tree that has grown bent to one side to avoid a wall, a column of bricks that was once perhaps a part of a building. Each piece draws attention to the details in the architecture around us that often go unseen yet continuously change and shape the way we engage with the world around us. 

What if architecture wasn’t just the buildings we see on our way to our favorite local haunt? Can our body be an architecture, one that is made up of moments and memories instead of bricks and concrete? This is the thread that Harari is pulling at as she unravels what shapes us. Like the tree that grows at an angle in order to catch the sun, the body acts and reacts based on our surroundings. Do we take the path of least resistance, or do we risk it all and choose to push through the crack in the pavement for a chance to thrive?

In The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, Harari leans into this connection between the body and architecture by not only inserting her likeness into the work, but also through the inclusion of small, almost hidden objects ripe with intimacy. In her piece that is the exhibition’s namesake, a wall of hand painted fabric cascades from the ceiling in mostly shades of blue. In the top center, the artist has sewn a self-portrait originally drawn in pencil. Surrounding the portrait are various patches sewn onto the fabric. In the middle of the piece, this patchwork creates the shape of a forearm and thumb. Within The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, just as throughout the exhibition, the viewer can find references to the human body: a leg, a limb, a foot, a face. But what is hidden quite literally underneath the surface of this piece are small parts of the artist herself. Locks of Harari’s hair can be found sewn into this large fabric piece, as well as the artist’s baby teeth. The body is fractured, pulled apart, and sewn back together through Harari’s own hand. 

Another materially ambitious piece is Tree, which beautifully blends hand painted cotton, ink, wood, color pencil, wax pastel, inkjet on silk, and more to form an installation that, like The possibility of an expanse and what interrupts it, has a quality of being fractured and mended. Emphasizing our surrounding environment rather than the body, Tree is both familiar and alien. Yes, it is recognizable as a tree, but the tree sports colors that don’t match with our reality. The branches, too, are representational, but a large, slightly opaque photo of a treetop next to a building creates a stand-in for this section of the tree. The artist cleverly plays with different opacities and materials in a way that fuses together fantasy and reality, forming an aesthetic that draws our attention to the tiny details in the environment that holds us—whether that be the architecture of our surroundings or the architecture of our bodies.

This oscillation between physical architecture and the body, between elements like bricks and limbs, comes to a head in Harari’s piece Cocoon Baby 2 (Feral). Hanging from the ceiling, this mixed-media piece has the head of a human (the artist’s self portrait) but with body parts that do not completely match the human-like features. Cocoon Baby’s limbs seem to be somewhat out of place, if they are not missing completely. Her torso seems to be opening up, as if we have caught her mid-transformation: the breaking of the cocoon. Elements of our surroundings can be seen on her body: a drawing of a brick column on her stomach, tree branches that sprout from her arms. Like each person’s identity, elements of the environment have found its way onto and into Cocoon Baby, causing her to bend, mold, and mutate into different shapes. However, there is an element of hope. Even while holding elements of her environment, even while containing her experiences and memories, Cocoon Baby is opening up. She is finding a way to live, to thrive, to transform into something beautiful under the circumstances, despite the systems she lives within. Like the weed that flourishes in the smallest of openings, Cocoon Baby finds a way.

Nearby is Brick Memory Brick; a small, brick-like sculpture made of slightly transparent biomaterial. We can almost see what’s inside, what memory this brick holds. For me, witnessing this piece was a grounding moment in the exhibition. We are all built brick-by-brick from the moments that made us. We are created from memories that influence how we move through the world, just as architecture shapes the way we choose our path. Will you be like this brick, static, unmoving, and unyielding until it crumbles? Or will we be like Cocoon Baby 2 (Feral), and break ourselves open? As the artist puts it, there is “possibility [in] an expanse.” Perhaps this crack in the sidewalk—this moment of rupture, this breaking open—is the chance we need to open up and transform, to flourish in spite of everything.

BAUBO UNEARTHED:
A Trove of Mystery
Laughter in the Face of Grief
A Conjuring
February 28–April 11, 2025

Opening Reception: February 28, 6:00–9:00pm

Co-Prosperity presents BAUBO UNEARTHED, a celebration of joyful resistance in the face of despair and oppression. The exhibition is a tribute to the ancient figure Baubo, whose bawdy humor served as a catalyst for transformation, breaking the grief of the goddess Demeter and restoring the cycles of life, as held in the lore of the Eleusinian Mysteries.  

Curated by Stephany Colunga, BAUBO UNEARTHED is presented as a museum-like display of mythic and historical narratives and artifacts alongside a contemporary art showcase. It features a diverse group of inter/national artists united by the spirit of Baubo, directly and by way of embodiment. Through sculpture, painting, performance, jewelry, video, and sound installation, the works (re)introduce this elusive figure, aiming to transmute collective grief, foster radical empathy, and ignite defiance through laughter.  

Baubo emerges as a symbol of unapologetic apotropaic joy, feminine rage, queer love, and the power of vulnerability, urging viewers to dismantle despair, engage with their suffering, and envision nourishing, interconnected futures. The exhibition emphasizes reclaiming agency and rekindling curiosity, wonder, and hope as acts of rebellion against oppressive systems.  

BAUBO UNEARTHED, Stephany Colunga’s curatorial debut, showcases work from around the world, gathering together artists in various stages of their lives and careers. This is a culmination of years of self-supported research—including a trip to the sanctuary of Demeter in Priene in southern Turkey where the Baubo votives were discovered, along with a visit to the Altes Museum in Berlin where the figurines reside. Colunga’s own contributions to the show include metal-work, ceramics, video, and installation, an evolution and unfolding of the sensitive, intuitive work she is known for.

A special evening of performances will take place on the Spring equinox, March 21st, from 7:00 to 10:00pm. These performances tie the exhibition to the Eleusinian Mysteries, which mark the return of Persephone from Hades and the renewal of life. This conjuring of spring will feature performances by Alicia McDaid (McDazzler), Karly Bergmann, Chicago band SHRIFT, and more. 

Contributing artists:
Crackhead Barney
KS Brewer
Amanda Joy Calobrisi
Stephany Colunga
Baylen Levore
Yolanda McLellan
Alicia McDaid
Helen Welton