In Concert with Jen de los Reyes: Mid-career survey exhibition and publication
The first mid-career retrospective of influential social practice artist, organizer, and educator Jen de los Reyes* Canadian-born, Ithaca, NY-based Reyes has made a concerted effort to live and make work in accordance with her principles, including pragmatic organizing practices informed by her early years in punk music communities and recent anti-corporate and anti-racist direct action
Key projects of Reyes’ include flagship social practice conference Open Engagement (2007—2019) which showcased and launched a generation of socially engaged art; community urban garden Garbage Hill Farms in Chicago’s Southwest Side; The Disappearing Birds of North America: 389 Birds on the Verge of Extinction, a multi-faceted project with 389 artists and designers; and presentations including “Matching Minorities//Doubtful Doubles” (2020), an online workshop which called out racist practices in museums and educational institutions.
This retrospective exhibition, organized by Anthony Stepter, Astria Suparak and Nick Wylie, illuminates more than twenty years of artmaking, organizing, writing, and radical teaching by Jen de los Reyes. Through careful consideration of her life and career, patterns emerge that connect Reyes’s work to broader social contexts and art movements.
On the occasion of this exhibition, Co-Prosperity has produced a three book risograph publication series contextualizing the artist’s career and impact. The publication includes essays by Sampada Aranke; René De Guzman; Tom Finkelpearl; Eliza Gregory, Mark Menjivar, and Lexa Walsh; Zoë Heyn-Jones; Lee Painter-Kim; Stephanie Parrish; and Anthony Stepter, Astria Suparak, and Nick Wylie. Publication was designed by Josh Cook and Oscar Solis.
The opening reception for the exhibition will take place on Friday June 21 from 6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Public Programming
Class In Progress: LAND: Art, Ecology, and Environmental Activism
Saturday, June 22, 2024, 3:00 p.m.
Free admission
As part of the Pedagogies section of this exhibition, Reyes will be sharing a glimpse into her own classroom. Class In Progress: LAND: Art, Ecology, and Environmental Activism outlines the syllabus, content, motivations, and assignments from her forthcoming class. In this moment of climate collapse the relationship of art to the land has an urgent new meaning. The course surveys artist’s engagement with land from a material, historical, spiritual and political perspective.
The talk will consist of twelve micro lectures that are a portrait of the weekly progression of the semester. Attendees will leave with an in progress reading list, and draft assignments and engagements.
Artist Talk Radio Broadcast
Wednesday, June 19, 12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
lumpenradio.com + www.lumpen.tv
WLPN-LP 105.5FM
Broadcasting on Lumpen Radio, tune in for an artist talk by Reyes interspersed with song selections related to the artist’s practice. The live broadcast will be archived and available for listening at the exhibition.
Dance Party
Friday, July 26, 2024, 7:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
As a nod to over a decade of Open Engagement dance parties that capped off each of the annual convenings, the exhibition will close with a dance party that will bring together some of the conference’s favorite DJs.
How to Make a Scene
Saturday, July 27, 2024 3:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m. at Co-Prosperity and streaming live on lumpen.tv
www.lumpen.tv
Join Jen de los Reyes and a panel of artist organizers from Chicago past and present as they discuss their projects and practices as part of a series of talks in collaboration with Art + Design Chicago.
If there's an overarching ethos to Jen de los Reyes’s art practice, it might be: how should a person be? The existential question, investigated by writer (and fellow Canadian) Sheila Heti in her 2010 novel, encompasses both life and work—the intersection where Reyes’s expansive, genre-defying practice comfortably exists. For Reyes, teaching, organizing, farming, making, and living are all of a piece; each facet of her work/life seamlessly bolsters the other areas.
In Concert With Jen de los Reyes, a mid-career retrospective lovingly curated by Anthony Stepter, Astria Suparak, and Nick Wylie in coordination with the artist, deftly illustrates Reyes’s decades-long commitment to modeling how art can serve as a catalyst for a more ethical, sustainable, caring way of life.
The earliest work on view, Daughter Mother Daughter: Joy Luck Experience, consists of the artist watching the end of the film The Joy Luck Club with her sister and mother. It’s a simple, everyday activity yet one layered with emotion; it’s personal and political, playful and deeply considered. It cleverly paves the way for the work that has followed, separated here into the themes of ecologies, pedagogies, and scene building, though it could be argued that any project could fit into each of those sections.
For The Disappearing Birds of North America: 389 Birds on the Verge of Extinction, Reyes invited 389 artists to depict one of the birds highlighted in a National Audubon Society report on the species at risk of extinction due to climate change. The renderings are installed in a vast wall collage; the beauty and diversity of the birds makes the impact of the human-made climate crisis tangible and painful. The project is accessible and action-oriented (proceeds from a planned book will go toward conservation efforts); it invited in others and is informative without being heavy-handed or overly didactic. Such is Reyes’s way.
Open Engagement, the itinerant social practice conference that Reyes founded and ran for over a decade, is depicted through conference materials and takeaways. Perhaps the artist’s best-known project, Open Engagement was where I first learned about Reyes’s work, via the 2017 justice-oriented iteration, which was headquartered at UIC. I was just beginning to write about Chicago’s art community, and Reyes was one of the first artists to make me feel that there was an exciting current of energy pulsing through the city.
Though all these projects are awe-inspiring and illustrative of Reyes’s oeuvre, it is the artist’s teaching materials that feel the most representative. According to the publication that accompanies the exhibition, Reyes knew from a young age that she wanted to be an art professor. On display are a grid of Reyes’s syllabi over the years, ranging from courses on the history of social practice to the potential of printed media to the relationship of art to land. A cursory look through the pages is like a window into Reyes’s mind. Beautifully designed and carefully crafted, the classes are rich in material while also lending considerable attention to student’s wellbeing. An ethics of care agreement urges students to “approach conflict with care” and “make as much space as you take.” One poetic class assignment requires students to view either the sunrise or sunset each day and write down their observations.
If you’ve ever had the privilege of hearing Reyes’s speak, you’ve likely noticed her intrinsic, easy ability to impart knowledge. As such, this exhibition offers an abundance of information, through past lectures, books and other reading materials, and from the aesthetic and well-designed projects. (Reyes makes social practice and sustainability look good.) To me, the biggest takeaway of the artist’s work is her generosity. Through her teaching, community building, and small-scale, big-impact farming, Reyes models a holistic way of working and living that is more just, more caring, more beautiful. Like the best social practice art, Jen de los Reyes makes work that remakes the everyday; her “art is the forgetting of art.” Or, as artist Sister Corita Kent—one of Reyes’s lodestars put it, “The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.” Through Reyes’s unflagging work ethic, she’s inviting us to catch on.
-Kerry Cardoza
Artist's Bio:
Jen de los Reyes, born in Winnipeg, Canada, is an artist, educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. With roots in the Riot Grrrl and DIY music scene, her practice incorporates pedagogical, ecological and organizational methodologies. She founded and directed Open Engagement, an international conference on socially engaged art that was active from 2007–2019. She worked within Portland State University from 2008–2014 to create the Art and Social Practice MFA program with a curriculum focused on place, engagement, and dialogue. She is the author of several publications, most recently Defiantly Optimistic: Turning Up in a World on Fire. Reyes was the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she taught in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies. She is currently Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity and Equity at the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. She splits her time between Chicago, where she founded Garbage Hill Farm, and Ithaca, NY. She describes herself as “defiantly optimistic, a friend to all birds, and proponent that our institutions can become tender and vulnerable.”