Concerts

“Once we found out Tyre Nichols was murdered, we were, of course, distraught,” said Thornton. “But once we heard he was part of our skateboarding community, we were hurt on a whole nother level because this feels like losing a family member. We felt like doing something in his honor, as we would for anyone else in the community.” 

As attendee Blake Davis performed a rendition of Sam Cooke’s “It’s Been a Long Time,” the crowd swayed together in solace. Damon A. Williams, vigil guest and cofounder of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, invited attendees to remember not just Nichols, but all other victims of police brutality. He noted that “community and love” are the solutions to “deal with everything we’ve been going through.” He asked attendees to make eye contact with the people around them and tell them, “I love you.” 

Moreover, as he concluded his speech, Williams’s final message encapsulated the vigil’s prevailing attitude: resilience. 

“The only way we can make more freedom is to live and embody freedom,” he said through the megaphone. “Write your poems and sing your songs. But don’t do them alone. Know that you are not an individual—you are part of a collective experience, and we are trying to create this new world.” 

Photographer DuWayne Padilla was at the vigil on behalf of the Reader and shared this slideshow.

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Drawing is a foundational art form, which may make it one of the most difficult to exhibit. The line between a schematic and a doodle and a cohesive final product can be, well, sketchy. Some of the pieces in Western Exhibition’s second “Drawing Biennial” are keenly aware of this flexibility and use it to their advantage.

Journie Cirdain’s Seattle to Salem straps viewers in for a road trip of a drawing (or, according to the artist, a drawing of a road trip). It’s the wondering and wandering of place after place, elevated backseat doodling lushly executed. Other works recall the uncomplicated allure of drawing through their materials—Jenny Crowe’s ballpoint pens and magic marker, Cathrine Whited’s colored pencils. 

Though nostalgia is tempting, there is too much skill here to reduce these pieces to back-of-the-classroom binder paper. From Ryan Travis Christian’s haunting graphite Going Back to the EU to Geoffrey Todd Smith’s intoxicating zig-zags, the show can’t be pinned by adjectives.

Rachel Niffenegger, Implant in the electric heady universe, 2022Courtesy Western Exhibitions

For every tightly controlled detail (Robyn O’Neil’s microscopic animal drawings) there is a loose flash of the hand (Lilli Carré’s inky root vegetables). For every faint sketch, a bold blotch. There are drawings on canvas and paper and panel, drawings on concrete, drawings on the floor. Maybe what this exhibition does best is demonstrate that the way to present a cohesive set of drawings is to forgo any attempt at cohesion at all. With such a talented cadre of artists, this show is all the better for it.

“The 2023 Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial”Through 2/25: Tue-Sat noon-6 PM, Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago, 312-480-8390, westernexhibitions.com

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Suddenly the audience was enveloped in darkness. We awaited the commencement. Two screens turn on, showing poetic verses scrolling up. Then, the music started flowing through the space, conducted by Asante Owusu-Brafi, Angel Bat Dawid, and Ishmael Ali as they sat under a somber blue light. Ethereal sounds and light piano keys echoed. I see a black swing set, without the swing, in the middle of the stage and then Nereida Patricia walks on, reciting words with a force that shakes the room. The music shifts towards deeper and darker notes. The screen is slowly changing, and the words rise anew. They read, “ON EARTH GRAVITY IS NOT UNIVERSAL AND NO ONE FEELS ITS PULL THE SAME.” This sense of time and space spiraled out of control throughout the play, titled TRAP DOOR, but this line alone held so much weight.

Angel Bat Dawid performing in TRAP DOORCredit: Courtney Morrison

The screen goes on to read, “ON THE MOON THE FORCE OF GRACE OVERCOMES GRAVITY HERE, GIFTED BUTTERFLY WINGS FROM THE GODS OF TRANSFORMATION/ANGELS GUIDE THEIR SISTERS BELOW.” A lingering sense of hope persists throughout the performance at Steppenwolf Theatre, hand in hand with despair, pain, violence, and death. Just as I grasp onto the words on the screen, they move away as we are introduced to the other performers: Emily Yan Neale, Jarais Musgrove, and Lileana Pryde Davis Moore, or Lily. A live feed of the performance is being projected behind the stage on a curtain and is showing Lily’s point of view via a GoPro attached to her body. We as an audience are experiencing both the play and live recording in real time but due to a delay in the feed, there is an altercation of time. A shift if you will. This pertains to how differently we all experience time especially in terms of racial violence and privilege. The performers recount and experience moments of violence while the audience looks on from a distance. While looking at a screen, even more distance is created. We are not experiencing the same sense of time nor the same sense of gravity.

The audience experienced the play in real time and via a live feed that operated on a slight delay.Credit: Courtney Morrison

Jagged movements, sensual waves. The performers move throughout, interacting with each other and the architecture of a sex swing in the middle of the stage. Some of their movements replicate swinging while others are a bit more violent. The stage, set up as a sidewalk, holds multiple meanings; games of hopscotch act as a playful metaphor for childhood on one side, sex workers can be seen walking down the cracked pavement on the other. These bleed into each other and blur time. Patricia says, “Every minute the sidewalk gets hotter and hotter. Apartment buildings and hair salons burn for insurance money creating a pink haze that sits below the clouds. It scorches the tops of skyscrapers causing a rain of metallic silver to fall on unsuspecting pedestrians below.” The sidewalk holds multiple experiences and timelines. On one end, children use chalk to draw a competitive game while on the other, that same white chalk is used to outline someone’s body at the scene of a crime. Later on, Jarais yells into a fan next to a tracing of Patricia’s body with glitter inside. The screaming can barely be heard, as if yelling into a void. Who is paying attention to the deaths of trans women of color? “Where did all my sisters go? I was looking for them and then they disappeared,” Patricia says. 

(CA)

In “Gifted Wings,” the artists’ tools of excess feel liberatory.Credit: Dabin Ahn

A week after Patricia’s collaborative and riveting TRAP DOOR, an iteration of the performance finds a short-term home at Jude Gallery. Born from a conversation between artist Yae Jee Min and Nereida Patricia at Min’s birthday party some two years ago, “Gifted Wings” is a duo exhibition that explores spiritual resilience as praxis. The two artists and Jude Gallery organizer Francine Almeda planned out the show just months after both artists moved out of Chicago. Although the opening falling a week after TRAP DOOR was a happy accident, the timing feels fortuitous. Almeda opened the gallery up for Cristobal and me the Monday after the opening, and there was a palpable afterglow left over from Friday’s spirits. Debris—mostly glitter—was swept into a corner, and various champagne flutes and coupes were carefully placed to the side. 

“Gifted Wings” opens with Min’s Floating in compression. The painting’s markings are otherworldly condensation trails where the sky meets the deep aquamarine of the sea, and the strokes come together to evoke a distorted image of a creature in flight. The sheer size of the work in comparison to the rest of the show allows it to be a meeting place in Jude’s first room, where I imagine the angels and birds from Patricia’s Colored People’s Time skim its surface. There is a swirling pool within this glass-beaded, glittering acrylic painting, that—amidst the composition’s disappearing figure, blue-winged form, and central Black angel—works as one of the show’s many abstract entry points into Patricia and Min’s mythos.

Nereida Patricia’s Vertical AscentCredit: Dabin Ahn

In a visual sense, I was curious how the pairing of the artists would play out, whether their disparate vibrancies would feel disconnected or disjointed, but the effect was the opposite. Placed against one another the works are resonant. After each examination of beaded relief and sequined stroke, I found myself searching the pieces for more–color, meaning, and texture. The artists’ tools of excess feel liberatory.

After lingering in the first room, I walked quickly through the back corridor, passing another of Min’s diptychs, and Patricia’s If you give a dog a bone, to watch TRAP DOOR. In the viewing room, a giant platform heel, functioning as a seat, rests atop a gravel floor. The projection on the wall screens a 36-minute video of the performance, which features innumerable angles from the three stagings the artist completed with her troupe. In between the Sunday performance and the Friday opening, Patricia and videographer Asante Owusi-Brafit edited all the footage together in one take, taking the pair 12 hours. Headphones on, my foot grazed the gravel below the platform, and I watched and listened to TRAP DOOR, whose video format emulates the same cacophonous joy and strife as the in-person experience. 

Gallery visitors can sit atop a giant platform heel to watch the documentation of TRAP DOOR.Credit: Dabin Ahn

Considering the image of a sequined platform in the sky, in Vertical Ascent, and the often abstract and mythic subjecthood that TRAP DOOR employs, the hardness of the gravel below the high heel drives home the gravity of the life and death at stake here. Patricia encourages audience members to consider the physical reality of the sidewalk as a site of “sex work and also memorials, a common place for a lot of people and ideas.”

The extended metaphor of gravity, or lack thereof, rings true throughout the entire exhibition. With the increased visibility of trans women in the public sphere, most often affluent white trans women, the material reality of surviving as a trans woman of color remains arduous. Patricia revels in this paradox of trans visibility—transforming it— playing with the immaterial and the mythic as a partial solution. She and her accomplices harness the spiritual, as her fellow performers declare, “I found God in myself and I loved her.” This proclamation, from Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf, poignantly situates TRAP DOOR and its video iteration within the lineage of choreo-poems and plays written about the experiences of women of color. 

Together, Min and Patricia’s abstract works in “Gifted Wings” produce a rousing and spiritual effect. There is a blissful unknown in the places their pieces go and yet a clarity in their shared revelings of transformation. Their works are entry points, or trap doors, created to give us a glimpse into the artists’ shared worlds. Though there are heavy truths to the stories told, “Gifted Wings” floats us to the edge of a black hole, where all things are flattened and pulled in at once, equivocated, and “A butterfly SIX feet FIVE inches tall in PLATFORM heels with a POST-OP PUSSY serving cunt,” laughs, gleefully telling us these stories from her point of singularity. (JR)

“Gifted Winds”Through 3/5: by appointment, Jude Gallery, 629 W. Cermak, Unit 240, judegallerychicago.com

Read More

Drawing is a foundational art form, which may make it one of the most difficult to exhibit. The line between a schematic and a doodle and a cohesive final product can be, well, sketchy. Some of the pieces in Western Exhibition’s second “Drawing Biennial” are keenly aware of this flexibility and use it to their advantage.

Journie Cirdain’s Seattle to Salem straps viewers in for a road trip of a drawing (or, according to the artist, a drawing of a road trip). It’s the wondering and wandering of place after place, elevated backseat doodling lushly executed. Other works recall the uncomplicated allure of drawing through their materials—Jenny Crowe’s ballpoint pens and magic marker, Cathrine Whited’s colored pencils. 

Though nostalgia is tempting, there is too much skill here to reduce these pieces to back-of-the-classroom binder paper. From Ryan Travis Christian’s haunting graphite Going Back to the EU to Geoffrey Todd Smith’s intoxicating zig-zags, the show can’t be pinned by adjectives.

Rachel Niffenegger, Implant in the electric heady universe, 2022Courtesy Western Exhibitions

For every tightly controlled detail (Robyn O’Neil’s microscopic animal drawings) there is a loose flash of the hand (Lilli Carré’s inky root vegetables). For every faint sketch, a bold blotch. There are drawings on canvas and paper and panel, drawings on concrete, drawings on the floor. Maybe what this exhibition does best is demonstrate that the way to present a cohesive set of drawings is to forgo any attempt at cohesion at all. With such a talented cadre of artists, this show is all the better for it.

“The 2023 Western Exhibitions Drawing Biennial”Through 2/25: Tue-Sat noon-6 PM, Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago, 312-480-8390, westernexhibitions.com

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Suddenly the audience was enveloped in darkness. We awaited the commencement. Two screens turn on, showing poetic verses scrolling up. Then, the music started flowing through the space, conducted by Asante Owusu-Brafi, Angel Bat Dawid, and Ishmael Ali as they sat under a somber blue light. Ethereal sounds and light piano keys echoed. I see a black swing set, without the swing, in the middle of the stage and then Nereida Patricia walks on, reciting words with a force that shakes the room. The music shifts towards deeper and darker notes. The screen is slowly changing, and the words rise anew. They read, “ON EARTH GRAVITY IS NOT UNIVERSAL AND NO ONE FEELS ITS PULL THE SAME.” This sense of time and space spiraled out of control throughout the play, titled TRAP DOOR, but this line alone held so much weight.

Angel Bat Dawid performing in TRAP DOORCredit: Courtney Morrison

The screen goes on to read, “ON THE MOON THE FORCE OF GRACE OVERCOMES GRAVITY HERE, GIFTED BUTTERFLY WINGS FROM THE GODS OF TRANSFORMATION/ANGELS GUIDE THEIR SISTERS BELOW.” A lingering sense of hope persists throughout the performance at Steppenwolf Theatre, hand in hand with despair, pain, violence, and death. Just as I grasp onto the words on the screen, they move away as we are introduced to the other performers: Emily Yan Neale, Jarais Musgrove, and Lileana Pryde Davis Moore, or Lily. A live feed of the performance is being projected behind the stage on a curtain and is showing Lily’s point of view via a GoPro attached to her body. We as an audience are experiencing both the play and live recording in real time but due to a delay in the feed, there is an altercation of time. A shift if you will. This pertains to how differently we all experience time especially in terms of racial violence and privilege. The performers recount and experience moments of violence while the audience looks on from a distance. While looking at a screen, even more distance is created. We are not experiencing the same sense of time nor the same sense of gravity.

The audience experienced the play in real time and via a live feed that operated on a slight delay.Credit: Courtney Morrison

Jagged movements, sensual waves. The performers move throughout, interacting with each other and the architecture of a sex swing in the middle of the stage. Some of their movements replicate swinging while others are a bit more violent. The stage, set up as a sidewalk, holds multiple meanings; games of hopscotch act as a playful metaphor for childhood on one side, sex workers can be seen walking down the cracked pavement on the other. These bleed into each other and blur time. Patricia says, “Every minute the sidewalk gets hotter and hotter. Apartment buildings and hair salons burn for insurance money creating a pink haze that sits below the clouds. It scorches the tops of skyscrapers causing a rain of metallic silver to fall on unsuspecting pedestrians below.” The sidewalk holds multiple experiences and timelines. On one end, children use chalk to draw a competitive game while on the other, that same white chalk is used to outline someone’s body at the scene of a crime. Later on, Jarais yells into a fan next to a tracing of Patricia’s body with glitter inside. The screaming can barely be heard, as if yelling into a void. Who is paying attention to the deaths of trans women of color? “Where did all my sisters go? I was looking for them and then they disappeared,” Patricia says. 

(CA)

In “Gifted Wings,” the artists’ tools of excess feel liberatory.Credit: Dabin Ahn

A week after Patricia’s collaborative and riveting TRAP DOOR, an iteration of the performance finds a short-term home at Jude Gallery. Born from a conversation between artist Yae Jee Min and Nereida Patricia at Min’s birthday party some two years ago, “Gifted Wings” is a duo exhibition that explores spiritual resilience as praxis. The two artists and Jude Gallery organizer Francine Almeda planned out the show just months after both artists moved out of Chicago. Although the opening falling a week after TRAP DOOR was a happy accident, the timing feels fortuitous. Almeda opened the gallery up for Cristobal and me the Monday after the opening, and there was a palpable afterglow left over from Friday’s spirits. Debris—mostly glitter—was swept into a corner, and various champagne flutes and coupes were carefully placed to the side. 

“Gifted Wings” opens with Min’s Floating in compression. The painting’s markings are otherworldly condensation trails where the sky meets the deep aquamarine of the sea, and the strokes come together to evoke a distorted image of a creature in flight. The sheer size of the work in comparison to the rest of the show allows it to be a meeting place in Jude’s first room, where I imagine the angels and birds from Patricia’s Colored People’s Time skim its surface. There is a swirling pool within this glass-beaded, glittering acrylic painting, that—amidst the composition’s disappearing figure, blue-winged form, and central Black angel—works as one of the show’s many abstract entry points into Patricia and Min’s mythos.

Nereida Patricia’s Vertical AscentCredit: Dabin Ahn

In a visual sense, I was curious how the pairing of the artists would play out, whether their disparate vibrancies would feel disconnected or disjointed, but the effect was the opposite. Placed against one another the works are resonant. After each examination of beaded relief and sequined stroke, I found myself searching the pieces for more–color, meaning, and texture. The artists’ tools of excess feel liberatory.

After lingering in the first room, I walked quickly through the back corridor, passing another of Min’s diptychs, and Patricia’s If you give a dog a bone, to watch TRAP DOOR. In the viewing room, a giant platform heel, functioning as a seat, rests atop a gravel floor. The projection on the wall screens a 36-minute video of the performance, which features innumerable angles from the three stagings the artist completed with her troupe. In between the Sunday performance and the Friday opening, Patricia and videographer Asante Owusi-Brafit edited all the footage together in one take, taking the pair 12 hours. Headphones on, my foot grazed the gravel below the platform, and I watched and listened to TRAP DOOR, whose video format emulates the same cacophonous joy and strife as the in-person experience. 

Gallery visitors can sit atop a giant platform heel to watch the documentation of TRAP DOOR.Credit: Dabin Ahn

Considering the image of a sequined platform in the sky, in Vertical Ascent, and the often abstract and mythic subjecthood that TRAP DOOR employs, the hardness of the gravel below the high heel drives home the gravity of the life and death at stake here. Patricia encourages audience members to consider the physical reality of the sidewalk as a site of “sex work and also memorials, a common place for a lot of people and ideas.”

The extended metaphor of gravity, or lack thereof, rings true throughout the entire exhibition. With the increased visibility of trans women in the public sphere, most often affluent white trans women, the material reality of surviving as a trans woman of color remains arduous. Patricia revels in this paradox of trans visibility—transforming it— playing with the immaterial and the mythic as a partial solution. She and her accomplices harness the spiritual, as her fellow performers declare, “I found God in myself and I loved her.” This proclamation, from Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf, poignantly situates TRAP DOOR and its video iteration within the lineage of choreo-poems and plays written about the experiences of women of color. 

Together, Min and Patricia’s abstract works in “Gifted Wings” produce a rousing and spiritual effect. There is a blissful unknown in the places their pieces go and yet a clarity in their shared revelings of transformation. Their works are entry points, or trap doors, created to give us a glimpse into the artists’ shared worlds. Though there are heavy truths to the stories told, “Gifted Wings” floats us to the edge of a black hole, where all things are flattened and pulled in at once, equivocated, and “A butterfly SIX feet FIVE inches tall in PLATFORM heels with a POST-OP PUSSY serving cunt,” laughs, gleefully telling us these stories from her point of singularity. (JR)

“Gifted Winds”Through 3/5: by appointment, Jude Gallery, 629 W. Cermak, Unit 240, judegallerychicago.com

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Don’t lie. You’ve sat up like a fool and cried over a love interest before, just like the rest of us. SZA’s ability to tap into that universal experience is what makes her work so good. At times her lyrics sprain the heart. On “Gone Girl,” from her long-awaited second album, SOS, she sings, “I need your touch, not your scrutiny”—which might have you recalling a partner you let toy with your emotions a little too long. But even when her songs sound sad or emo on the surface, you’d be remiss to tag them with such limiting labels. SZA will release you into whatever makes musical sense at the time—you could be crying one minute and p-popping the next.

The Saint Louis native is an anti-star. SZA’s career is peppered with public spats with record-label execs, revelations that she’s been scared of success, and long breaks between releases. None of it matters. She consistently creates music that’s highly relatable, relentlessly quotable, and widely celebrated, and her virality on TikTok and her collaborations with artists such as fellow genre-bending star Doja Cat (they won a Grammy last year for their single “Kiss Me More”) both demonstrate how many souls her work can reach.

SZA’s 2017 full-length debut, Ctrl, was certified triple platinum and largely adored. Since then, her collaborations with a variety of artists, including rapper and producer DJ Khaled and R&B singer Summer Walker, have kept her in the public eye, but fans were frothing at the mouth for new solo material. By SZA’s own admission, SOS is “super alternative” (as she put it in a December interview with Hot 97). The evidence is everywhere too: there’s the shout-out from Taylor Swift, the feature from Phoebe Bridgers, and songs such as the spin-around-your-room-singing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs acoustic heartbreaker “Nobody Gets Me.” As SZA leaps from hip-hop to indie rock to achy, syrupy soul, she proves herself an artist you can’t pigeonhole. You just have to let go and dance along.

SZA Omar Apollo opens. Wed 2/22, 8 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, $190-$736, all ages

Read More

Don’t lie. You’ve sat up like a fool and cried over a love interest before, just like the rest of us. SZA’s ability to tap into that universal experience is what makes her work so good. At times her lyrics sprain the heart. On “Gone Girl,” from her long-awaited second album, SOS, she sings, “I need your touch, not your scrutiny”—which might have you recalling a partner you let toy with your emotions a little too long. But even when her songs sound sad or emo on the surface, you’d be remiss to tag them with such limiting labels. SZA will release you into whatever makes musical sense at the time—you could be crying one minute and p-popping the next.

The Saint Louis native is an anti-star. SZA’s career is peppered with public spats with record-label execs, revelations that she’s been scared of success, and long breaks between releases. None of it matters. She consistently creates music that’s highly relatable, relentlessly quotable, and widely celebrated, and her virality on TikTok and her collaborations with artists such as fellow genre-bending star Doja Cat (they won a Grammy last year for their single “Kiss Me More”) both demonstrate how many souls her work can reach.

SZA’s 2017 full-length debut, Ctrl, was certified triple platinum and largely adored. Since then, her collaborations with a variety of artists, including rapper and producer DJ Khaled and R&B singer Summer Walker, have kept her in the public eye, but fans were frothing at the mouth for new solo material. By SZA’s own admission, SOS is “super alternative” (as she put it in a December interview with Hot 97). The evidence is everywhere too: there’s the shout-out from Taylor Swift, the feature from Phoebe Bridgers, and songs such as the spin-around-your-room-singing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs acoustic heartbreaker “Nobody Gets Me.” As SZA leaps from hip-hop to indie rock to achy, syrupy soul, she proves herself an artist you can’t pigeonhole. You just have to let go and dance along.

SZA Omar Apollo opens. Wed 2/22, 8 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, $190-$736, all ages

Read More

“Everyone knows him because of his glasses. He’s the kid.” 

Campaign volunteer Ava Gal gestured to William “The Kid” Guerrero, the 21-year-old artist running for a council seat in the 12th Chicago Police District. It was 6 PM on a Friday night in early February, and Guerrero’s supporters waited for guests to arrive at his fundraising party at Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez’s office. Once an accessory to an old Halloween costume, Guerrero’s thick, lensless frames now serve as both the focal point of his face and a political message. On the left side they’re painted white, with the words, “We are the Future” sprawling across the temples. Untouched, the right is black. 

A Pilsen native, Guerrero is the youngest person running for a Chicago Police District Council seat. The council is the product of a two-pronged city ordinance passed in July 2021. Centered on police oversight, accountability, and public safety, the initiative created two new bodies, the District Councils and the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. Each of the city’s 22 police districts will house councils comprising of three people elected in regular municipal elections every four years. This February, Chicagoans can vote for the very first District Council representatives. 

Even with Pilsen’s population of 80,011, Gal says Guerrero has been a familiar face for years—around coffee shops, streets, and community events. When she saw that he was running for the 12th Police District Council in October, she reached out to him over Instagram. Now, months later, the Westinghouse College Prep senior volunteers for his campaign, trading Friday nights with friends for Guerrero’s fundraising party. 

“Public safety is a really big topic right now, but there are so many different opinions and outlooks, that you never really know what’s going to happen,” Gal says. “We’ll go down to Ukrainian Village, and there’ll be an old man with no shoes on yelling about property taxes, and then other places, we’ll have people who are super open and thankful to have these conversations.” 

Guerrero believes that Gen Z can help bridge this ideological divide. He says that police misconduct and brutality have poisoned the city, stewing bitterness and distrust among Chicagoans. Finding no alleviation to these problems in the current system, Guerrero sees infinite potential in youth voices. Although Chicago just witnessed its lowest voter turnout (46 percent) for a midterm election in the past 80 years, turnout for youth voters appears hopeful. In the 2018 midterm elections and for Illinois governor, youth voter turnout reached 40 percent. On a national level, 27 percent of young people, ages 18 to 29, turned out to vote in the 2022 midterm election—the second highest youth turnout rate for a midterm election in the past 30 years. 

Not only do young people have the innovation to create non policing alternatives, but also they have the bandwidth to, as he puts it, “reeducate people in order to pursue peace.” 

Though youth often comes with inexperience, Guerrero’s resume boasts local, community centered political experience. After a semester studying photography at Robert Morris University Illinois (prior to its 2020 merger with Roosevelt University), he dropped out and campaigned for Jon Ossoff in Georgia, seeking to boost Latinx civic engagement. In the city, he spends time studying up on the dark money problem. He also spearheads and photographs community events, such as Mural Movement. Moreover, he grew up in a single parent household, serving as a role model for his three younger siblings—the importance of strong leadership has “surrounded [him] from a very young age.” But Guerrero says his premature foray into municipal politics is not a choice. 

“If you’re part of the older generation, you’re responsible for making me run. I shouldn’t have to,” he says. “I’d rather be in college, having fun, partying, but I can’t. I have everything to lose because of the older generation.” 

William Guerrero speaks at a recent community meeting. Credit: Paul Goyette

Trailing behind the renewed Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the city’s new Police District Councils are no coincidence. Communities of color often bear the burden of fatal police violence and brutality, with Black and Latinx Americans three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. If elected, Guerrero seeks to sever the vicious cycle of police brutality and back door deals that have affected him and his community. He is an advocate of Treatment not Trauma, a model for public mental health infrastructure that includes city-run mental health centers and a 24-hour crisis response hotline that dispatches mental health workers instead of police officers. According to Collaborative Community for Wellness, the risk of being killed by police is 16 times greater for individuals with untreated mental illness than for other residents. With a platform focused on de-escalation, Guerrero hopes to “bring humanity” to the table. 

Guerrero has secured multiple endorsements for his campaign, including that of Alderman Sigcho-Lopez of the 25th Ward, who lent Guerrero his office space for a recent fundraising party. 

“We need to empower young people because they’re the ones who are affected by police brutality,” Sigcho-Lopez tells the Reader over the phone. “[Guerrero] is well-qualified because he’s active, present, and listens to the youth—he is learning, empowering, and creating more spaces.” 

At the fundraiser on February 3, both Gal and Guerrero wrestled with Guerrero’s pit bull terrier Harley, mustering feeble attempts to keep her attached to her leash. She’s a former fighter dog and rescue that Guerrero adopted a month ago to keep him company.

As he slipped Harley a slice of pizza, Guerrero explained that his young age shouldn’t scare off voters. 

“Yeah, I might not have been here when all these politicians were corrupting Pilsen for the past 20-some years,” he quipped, “But I’m here now.”

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“Everyone knows him because of his glasses. He’s the kid.” 

Campaign volunteer Ava Gal gestured to William “The Kid” Guerrero, the 21-year-old artist running for a council seat in the 12th Chicago Police District. It was 6 PM on a Friday night in early February, and Guerrero’s supporters waited for guests to arrive at his fundraising party at Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez’s office. Once an accessory to an old Halloween costume, Guerrero’s thick, lensless frames now serve as both the focal point of his face and a political message. On the left side they’re painted white, with the words, “We are the Future” sprawling across the temples. Untouched, the right is black. 

A Pilsen native, Guerrero is the youngest person running for a Chicago Police District Council seat. The council is the product of a two-pronged city ordinance passed in July 2021. Centered on police oversight, accountability, and public safety, the initiative created two new bodies, the District Councils and the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. Each of the city’s 22 police districts will house councils comprising of three people elected in regular municipal elections every four years. This February, Chicagoans can vote for the very first District Council representatives. 

Even with Pilsen’s population of 80,011, Gal says Guerrero has been a familiar face for years—around coffee shops, streets, and community events. When she saw that he was running for the 12th Police District Council in October, she reached out to him over Instagram. Now, months later, the Westinghouse College Prep senior volunteers for his campaign, trading Friday nights with friends for Guerrero’s fundraising party. 

“Public safety is a really big topic right now, but there are so many different opinions and outlooks, that you never really know what’s going to happen,” Gal says. “We’ll go down to Ukrainian Village, and there’ll be an old man with no shoes on yelling about property taxes, and then other places, we’ll have people who are super open and thankful to have these conversations.” 

Guerrero believes that Gen Z can help bridge this ideological divide. He says that police misconduct and brutality have poisoned the city, stewing bitterness and distrust among Chicagoans. Finding no alleviation to these problems in the current system, Guerrero sees infinite potential in youth voices. Although Chicago just witnessed its lowest voter turnout (46 percent) for a midterm election in the past 80 years, turnout for youth voters appears hopeful. In the 2018 midterm elections and for Illinois governor, youth voter turnout reached 40 percent. On a national level, 27 percent of young people, ages 18 to 29, turned out to vote in the 2022 midterm election—the second highest youth turnout rate for a midterm election in the past 30 years. 

Not only do young people have the innovation to create non policing alternatives, but also they have the bandwidth to, as he puts it, “reeducate people in order to pursue peace.” 

Though youth often comes with inexperience, Guerrero’s resume boasts local, community centered political experience. After a semester studying photography at Robert Morris University Illinois (prior to its 2020 merger with Roosevelt University), he dropped out and campaigned for Jon Ossoff in Georgia, seeking to boost Latinx civic engagement. In the city, he spends time studying up on the dark money problem. He also spearheads and photographs community events, such as Mural Movement. Moreover, he grew up in a single parent household, serving as a role model for his three younger siblings—the importance of strong leadership has “surrounded [him] from a very young age.” But Guerrero says his premature foray into municipal politics is not a choice. 

“If you’re part of the older generation, you’re responsible for making me run. I shouldn’t have to,” he says. “I’d rather be in college, having fun, partying, but I can’t. I have everything to lose because of the older generation.” 

William Guerrero speaks at a recent community meeting. Credit: Paul Goyette

Trailing behind the renewed Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the city’s new Police District Councils are no coincidence. Communities of color often bear the burden of fatal police violence and brutality, with Black and Latinx Americans three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. If elected, Guerrero seeks to sever the vicious cycle of police brutality and back door deals that have affected him and his community. He is an advocate of Treatment not Trauma, a model for public mental health infrastructure that includes city-run mental health centers and a 24-hour crisis response hotline that dispatches mental health workers instead of police officers. According to Collaborative Community for Wellness, the risk of being killed by police is 16 times greater for individuals with untreated mental illness than for other residents. With a platform focused on de-escalation, Guerrero hopes to “bring humanity” to the table. 

Guerrero has secured multiple endorsements for his campaign, including that of Alderman Sigcho-Lopez of the 25th Ward, who lent Guerrero his office space for a recent fundraising party. 

“We need to empower young people because they’re the ones who are affected by police brutality,” Sigcho-Lopez tells the Reader over the phone. “[Guerrero] is well-qualified because he’s active, present, and listens to the youth—he is learning, empowering, and creating more spaces.” 

At the fundraiser on February 3, both Gal and Guerrero wrestled with Guerrero’s pit bull terrier Harley, mustering feeble attempts to keep her attached to her leash. She’s a former fighter dog and rescue that Guerrero adopted a month ago to keep him company.

As he slipped Harley a slice of pizza, Guerrero explained that his young age shouldn’t scare off voters. 

“Yeah, I might not have been here when all these politicians were corrupting Pilsen for the past 20-some years,” he quipped, “But I’m here now.”

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“Everyone knows him because of his glasses. He’s the kid.” 

Campaign volunteer Ava Gal gestured to William “The Kid” Guerrero, the 21-year-old artist running for a council seat in the 12th Chicago Police District. It was 6 PM on a Friday night in early February, and Guerrero’s supporters waited for guests to arrive at his fundraising party at Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez’s office. Once an accessory to an old Halloween costume, Guerrero’s thick, lensless frames now serve as both the focal point of his face and a political message. On the left side they’re painted white, with the words, “We are the Future” sprawling across the temples. Untouched, the right is black. 

A Pilsen native, Guerrero is the youngest person running for a Chicago Police District Council seat. The council is the product of a two-pronged city ordinance passed in July 2021. Centered on police oversight, accountability, and public safety, the initiative created two new bodies, the District Councils and the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability. Each of the city’s 22 police districts will house councils comprising of three people elected in regular municipal elections every four years. This February, Chicagoans can vote for the very first District Council representatives. 

Even with Pilsen’s population of 80,011, Gal says Guerrero has been a familiar face for years—around coffee shops, streets, and community events. When she saw that he was running for the 12th Police District Council in October, she reached out to him over Instagram. Now, months later, the Westinghouse College Prep senior volunteers for his campaign, trading Friday nights with friends for Guerrero’s fundraising party. 

“Public safety is a really big topic right now, but there are so many different opinions and outlooks, that you never really know what’s going to happen,” Gal says. “We’ll go down to Ukrainian Village, and there’ll be an old man with no shoes on yelling about property taxes, and then other places, we’ll have people who are super open and thankful to have these conversations.” 

Guerrero believes that Gen Z can help bridge this ideological divide. He says that police misconduct and brutality have poisoned the city, stewing bitterness and distrust among Chicagoans. Finding no alleviation to these problems in the current system, Guerrero sees infinite potential in youth voices. Although Chicago just witnessed its lowest voter turnout (46 percent) for a midterm election in the past 80 years, turnout for youth voters appears hopeful. In the 2018 midterm elections and for Illinois governor, youth voter turnout reached 40 percent. On a national level, 27 percent of young people, ages 18 to 29, turned out to vote in the 2022 midterm election—the second highest youth turnout rate for a midterm election in the past 30 years. 

Not only do young people have the innovation to create non policing alternatives, but also they have the bandwidth to, as he puts it, “reeducate people in order to pursue peace.” 

Though youth often comes with inexperience, Guerrero’s resume boasts local, community centered political experience. After a semester studying photography at Robert Morris University Illinois (prior to its 2020 merger with Roosevelt University), he dropped out and campaigned for Jon Ossoff in Georgia, seeking to boost Latinx civic engagement. In the city, he spends time studying up on the dark money problem. He also spearheads and photographs community events, such as Mural Movement. Moreover, he grew up in a single parent household, serving as a role model for his three younger siblings—the importance of strong leadership has “surrounded [him] from a very young age.” But Guerrero says his premature foray into municipal politics is not a choice. 

“If you’re part of the older generation, you’re responsible for making me run. I shouldn’t have to,” he says. “I’d rather be in college, having fun, partying, but I can’t. I have everything to lose because of the older generation.” 

William Guerrero speaks at a recent community meeting. Credit: Paul Goyette

Trailing behind the renewed Black Lives Matter movement of 2020, the city’s new Police District Councils are no coincidence. Communities of color often bear the burden of fatal police violence and brutality, with Black and Latinx Americans three times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans. If elected, Guerrero seeks to sever the vicious cycle of police brutality and back door deals that have affected him and his community. He is an advocate of Treatment not Trauma, a model for public mental health infrastructure that includes city-run mental health centers and a 24-hour crisis response hotline that dispatches mental health workers instead of police officers. According to Collaborative Community for Wellness, the risk of being killed by police is 16 times greater for individuals with untreated mental illness than for other residents. With a platform focused on de-escalation, Guerrero hopes to “bring humanity” to the table. 

Guerrero has secured multiple endorsements for his campaign, including that of Alderman Sigcho-Lopez of the 25th Ward, who lent Guerrero his office space for a recent fundraising party. 

“We need to empower young people because they’re the ones who are affected by police brutality,” Sigcho-Lopez tells the Reader over the phone. “[Guerrero] is well-qualified because he’s active, present, and listens to the youth—he is learning, empowering, and creating more spaces.” 

At the fundraiser on February 3, both Gal and Guerrero wrestled with Guerrero’s pit bull terrier Harley, mustering feeble attempts to keep her attached to her leash. She’s a former fighter dog and rescue that Guerrero adopted a month ago to keep him company.

As he slipped Harley a slice of pizza, Guerrero explained that his young age shouldn’t scare off voters. 

“Yeah, I might not have been here when all these politicians were corrupting Pilsen for the past 20-some years,” he quipped, “But I’m here now.”

Read More