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Krista Franklin has a recurring fantasy in which she burns all her journals. 

“Watching the flames dance in a fire pit glowing from the kindling of my memories,” she writes in “On Time,” one of several lyrical essays included in Solo(s): Krista Franklin, a catalog of visual art and poetry by the Chicago-based artist. It was published in September, on the occasion of her exhibition of the same name opening at the DePaul Art Museum, which is on view through February 19.

I enjoy the shock of this confession flash my therapist’s neutral expression at my glee, every journal I’ve written transmuted to ash.

Me: I took an entire composition notebook from 20xx, and fed chunks into the metal teeth of the shredder until every bluebaby line was in ribbons.

Therapist: And how did that make you feel?

Franklin’s answer is redacted by way of a thick black line. 

In poetry, this method of self-censoring is known as erasure—the application of which is straightforward and obvious in this essay; we don’t know how Franklin felt about destroying her composition notebook. But in Franklin’s visual art, the idea of erasure transcends mere form or convention. Her writing and visual art practices are in constant communion, especially in her collage work, which features text and images from vintage magazines (mostly from the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s). 

In these collages, the text that peeks through serves as the underpainting, a technique in which artists apply a base layer of their chosen medium, which informs the rest of the work. Franklin’s chosen medium is her own diaristic writings—a different approach to the productive destruction she fantasizes about by flame. 

“I’ll have a sheet of paper . . . and I’ll just start writing,” she says. “It’s usually things that I don’t necessarily want the viewer to see or to fully access. You might be able to see one or two words, but it could be anything. It’s usually me ranting about something that’s going on in my life that I’m not satisfied with, or being frustrated about something, and then using the paint, using the collage, using the other images to kind of fade it out. Not completely obscure it—because I do like the idea of the handwriting as texture, as a drawing gesture—but I also want the messages that I’m putting under there to be buried.”

Franklin is hardly the first to underpaint collage with text, nor will she be the last, as the form enjoys a resurgence in popularity of late. She wants the hidden messages to draw viewers in, beckoning us closer, but we are held back at arm’s length. There is rich interiority to Franklin’s work, and she is rightly protective of that.

Franklin uses her own diaristic writings as underpainting, a technique in which artists apply a base layer of their chosen medium.Credit: Dabin Ahn.

Franklin is a surrealist, a practitioner of a movement dedicated to divulging the unconscious mind through art. The practice has blended art and literature since its inception in the early 20th century. Early on in her practice, Franklin was heavily influenced by “AfroSurreal Manifesto,” a poem written by D. Scot Miller in 2009. Franklin’s 2018 exhibition at the Poetry Foundation, “ . . . to take root among the stars.,” grapples with her own practice through the surrealist lens. The exhibition, as described by the Poetry Foundation, “uses articles sourced from vintage Ebony magazines that address or make transparent space travel and radical imaginings.” A majority of the works from that project are included in Solo(s).

“‘ . . . to take root among the stars.’ in particular, was a very heavy-handed gesture of mine to try to parse out where I could see those evidences of surrealist activity in music, in books that were particularly written by or about Black people in the African diaspora,” Franklin says. “I was really trying to figure out: What is surrealism? How does it operate? How does it play out in my work?”

She is still discerning those answers, but the core tenet of surrealism, to excavate the unconscious, is embodied in the semiconcealed underpainting—or rather, the underwriting—that Franklin has elevated to a form of visual poetry.

“What is happening with surrealism, and what you’re hearing and seeing out of the artists, especially the women artists [in the early 20th century], has to do with that hidden world, that interior landscape that we’re so often taught to hide,” Franklin says. “Historically, a woman who was too free was going to get herself in a lot of trouble. I think [surrealism] really speaks to that passion that bubbles up.”   

Surrealism is not a form that remains in the era of its post-World War I origins; its foundational antiestablishment tenets are still very much at play across the practice. In 2012, Franklin founded the artistic collective du monde noir (originally known as AfroSurreal Chicago) along with fellow artists Devin Cain and Alexandria Eregbu, who together studied historical and contemporary AfroSurrealism, ultimately producing a performative exhibition in 2015 at Columbia College called “Marvelous Freedom: Vigilance of Desire, Revisited,” showcasing the work of Chicago artists of color making art through an AfroSurrealist lens.

The original “Marvelous Freedom” exhibition happened in Chicago in 1976. Franklin and her collaborators referenced the title because they were trying to track and trace the influence of the international exhibition. “How can we extend that to the present moment and look at Black contemporary artists in the city who are making art in that vein, who may not even know that it’s surreal work?” they wondered.

Franklin is interested in exploring what it would take to create a new world, one that might not make sense through the schema of what we expect and exist within today. She feels Chicago is ripe for this exploration.  

“There’s a spirit of radicalism here,” Franklin says. “A resistance. Troubling the status quo, saying no. Protest. Resisting anything that might impede upon anyone’s freedoms. That is really a spirit, an energy, that keeps me here, and that’s very much tied into the surreal. This real world that we’re living in—it’s not doing the job.”

Nowhere is Franklin’s fondness for Chicago more apparent than in Library of Love, a project first staged in 2014 at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life/Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. At that time, Franklin was fixated on heightened levels of violence in the city. Just shy of a decade later, Franklin and Ionit Behar, an associate curator at DePaul Art Museum, revisited and restaged Library of Love for “Solo(s).”The project remains Franklin’s visual love letter to a city in turmoil, in which visitors are invited to enter a home library setting filled with books about love. There is music playing and comfortable furniture; there are fresh flowers that Franklin herself tends to weekly. Beauty flourishes here, amidst the city’s chaos.

“If we understand an invisible library as mental, hidden, lost, censored, or one that does not yet exist, then tangible libraries do not repress mental libraries—they are only their mental support,” Behar writes in the Solo(s) catalog. “Invisible libraries like Library of Love take us to the very foundations of our humanity. Like libraries, love in its broadest form can be both visible and invisible, and it is present everywhere in Franklin’s practice—as a writer, performer, and visual poet, and especially as a human being—Library of Love encapsulates Franklin’s philosophy of life.” 

“We have to make a new world,” Franklin says. “And that to me is a part of the surrealist ideologies, to create a new world, to allow new worlds to emerge that may not make sense to you. I like that about this city . . . I feel like being in touch with the Chicago surrealists of the past has really helped me to understand that legacy that happens here.”

As a part of the revisited “Marvelous Freedom” exhibition, Franklin, along with April Sheridan and Ben Blount, designed a republication of “AfroSurreal Manifesto” in book form.

Sheridan is the special collections manager at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a longtime friend and collaborator of Franklin’s. Sheridan printed all of the letterpress pages in what would become Franklin’s 2018 artist book, Under the Knife, a truly stunning volume that Candor Arts, the publisher, described as “Part memoir, part treatise, part collage and experiment . . . an excavation; a dig at the sites of the construction and demolition of the poet/artist’s selves.” Portions of Under the Knife are also included in Solo(s).

“Krista is always timeless,” Sheridan says. “She’s always doing her own thing in a way that is moving between writing and collage and visual work. Sometimes they’re separate, and sometimes they’re together, but they’re always doing a really similar kind of work. It’s like she’s creating these dreamscapes for us.” 

Sheridan says she feels like visual artists are sometimes the best writers, and Franklin’s work is testament to such.

“I can be more intimate with the writing,” Franklin says. “There are things I can do in the writing that I’m not capable of doing in the visual art. I like the idea of it being underwriting, or giving further, deeper understanding of the concepts that I’m kind of working through in my [visual art] practice. The concepts vary. For me, it really is about history, it is about time—past, present, future—and the combination of those things, the amalgamation of that continuum. But then also there’s a lot in my work, mainly in my writing, that has to do with looking at the self, deep self-analysis.”

And here is where Franklin’s true identity as a surrealist comes into play. It is not only that she creates surrealist art, it is that the very act of her creation is in and of itself a surrealist act. “It’s tricky,” she says. “Because surrealism in and of itself morphs, it’s an organic body.”

As is Franklin’s body—all of ours are. Nothing needs to stay the same.

“Solo(s): Krista Franklin”Through 2/19: Wed-Thu 11 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sun 11 AM-5 PM, DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton, 773-325-7506, resources.depaul.edu/art-museum, free

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Krista Franklin has a recurring fantasy in which she burns all her journals. 

“Watching the flames dance in a fire pit glowing from the kindling of my memories,” she writes in “On Time,” one of several lyrical essays included in Solo(s): Krista Franklin, a catalog of visual art and poetry by the Chicago-based artist. It was published in September, on the occasion of her exhibition of the same name opening at the DePaul Art Museum, which is on view through February 19.

I enjoy the shock of this confession flash my therapist’s neutral expression at my glee, every journal I’ve written transmuted to ash.

Me: I took an entire composition notebook from 20xx, and fed chunks into the metal teeth of the shredder until every bluebaby line was in ribbons.

Therapist: And how did that make you feel?

Franklin’s answer is redacted by way of a thick black line. 

In poetry, this method of self-censoring is known as erasure—the application of which is straightforward and obvious in this essay; we don’t know how Franklin felt about destroying her composition notebook. But in Franklin’s visual art, the idea of erasure transcends mere form or convention. Her writing and visual art practices are in constant communion, especially in her collage work, which features text and images from vintage magazines (mostly from the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s). 

In these collages, the text that peeks through serves as the underpainting, a technique in which artists apply a base layer of their chosen medium, which informs the rest of the work. Franklin’s chosen medium is her own diaristic writings—a different approach to the productive destruction she fantasizes about by flame. 

“I’ll have a sheet of paper . . . and I’ll just start writing,” she says. “It’s usually things that I don’t necessarily want the viewer to see or to fully access. You might be able to see one or two words, but it could be anything. It’s usually me ranting about something that’s going on in my life that I’m not satisfied with, or being frustrated about something, and then using the paint, using the collage, using the other images to kind of fade it out. Not completely obscure it—because I do like the idea of the handwriting as texture, as a drawing gesture—but I also want the messages that I’m putting under there to be buried.”

Franklin is hardly the first to underpaint collage with text, nor will she be the last, as the form enjoys a resurgence in popularity of late. She wants the hidden messages to draw viewers in, beckoning us closer, but we are held back at arm’s length. There is rich interiority to Franklin’s work, and she is rightly protective of that.

Franklin uses her own diaristic writings as underpainting, a technique in which artists apply a base layer of their chosen medium.Credit: Dabin Ahn.

Franklin is a surrealist, a practitioner of a movement dedicated to divulging the unconscious mind through art. The practice has blended art and literature since its inception in the early 20th century. Early on in her practice, Franklin was heavily influenced by “AfroSurreal Manifesto,” a poem written by D. Scot Miller in 2009. Franklin’s 2018 exhibition at the Poetry Foundation, “ . . . to take root among the stars.,” grapples with her own practice through the surrealist lens. The exhibition, as described by the Poetry Foundation, “uses articles sourced from vintage Ebony magazines that address or make transparent space travel and radical imaginings.” A majority of the works from that project are included in Solo(s).

“‘ . . . to take root among the stars.’ in particular, was a very heavy-handed gesture of mine to try to parse out where I could see those evidences of surrealist activity in music, in books that were particularly written by or about Black people in the African diaspora,” Franklin says. “I was really trying to figure out: What is surrealism? How does it operate? How does it play out in my work?”

She is still discerning those answers, but the core tenet of surrealism, to excavate the unconscious, is embodied in the semiconcealed underpainting—or rather, the underwriting—that Franklin has elevated to a form of visual poetry.

“What is happening with surrealism, and what you’re hearing and seeing out of the artists, especially the women artists [in the early 20th century], has to do with that hidden world, that interior landscape that we’re so often taught to hide,” Franklin says. “Historically, a woman who was too free was going to get herself in a lot of trouble. I think [surrealism] really speaks to that passion that bubbles up.”   

Surrealism is not a form that remains in the era of its post-World War I origins; its foundational antiestablishment tenets are still very much at play across the practice. In 2012, Franklin founded the artistic collective du monde noir (originally known as AfroSurreal Chicago) along with fellow artists Devin Cain and Alexandria Eregbu, who together studied historical and contemporary AfroSurrealism, ultimately producing a performative exhibition in 2015 at Columbia College called “Marvelous Freedom: Vigilance of Desire, Revisited,” showcasing the work of Chicago artists of color making art through an AfroSurrealist lens.

The original “Marvelous Freedom” exhibition happened in Chicago in 1976. Franklin and her collaborators referenced the title because they were trying to track and trace the influence of the international exhibition. “How can we extend that to the present moment and look at Black contemporary artists in the city who are making art in that vein, who may not even know that it’s surreal work?” they wondered.

Franklin is interested in exploring what it would take to create a new world, one that might not make sense through the schema of what we expect and exist within today. She feels Chicago is ripe for this exploration.  

“There’s a spirit of radicalism here,” Franklin says. “A resistance. Troubling the status quo, saying no. Protest. Resisting anything that might impede upon anyone’s freedoms. That is really a spirit, an energy, that keeps me here, and that’s very much tied into the surreal. This real world that we’re living in—it’s not doing the job.”

Nowhere is Franklin’s fondness for Chicago more apparent than in Library of Love, a project first staged in 2014 at the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life/Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture. At that time, Franklin was fixated on heightened levels of violence in the city. Just shy of a decade later, Franklin and Ionit Behar, an associate curator at DePaul Art Museum, revisited and restaged Library of Love for “Solo(s).”The project remains Franklin’s visual love letter to a city in turmoil, in which visitors are invited to enter a home library setting filled with books about love. There is music playing and comfortable furniture; there are fresh flowers that Franklin herself tends to weekly. Beauty flourishes here, amidst the city’s chaos.

“If we understand an invisible library as mental, hidden, lost, censored, or one that does not yet exist, then tangible libraries do not repress mental libraries—they are only their mental support,” Behar writes in the Solo(s) catalog. “Invisible libraries like Library of Love take us to the very foundations of our humanity. Like libraries, love in its broadest form can be both visible and invisible, and it is present everywhere in Franklin’s practice—as a writer, performer, and visual poet, and especially as a human being—Library of Love encapsulates Franklin’s philosophy of life.” 

“We have to make a new world,” Franklin says. “And that to me is a part of the surrealist ideologies, to create a new world, to allow new worlds to emerge that may not make sense to you. I like that about this city . . . I feel like being in touch with the Chicago surrealists of the past has really helped me to understand that legacy that happens here.”

As a part of the revisited “Marvelous Freedom” exhibition, Franklin, along with April Sheridan and Ben Blount, designed a republication of “AfroSurreal Manifesto” in book form.

Sheridan is the special collections manager at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a longtime friend and collaborator of Franklin’s. Sheridan printed all of the letterpress pages in what would become Franklin’s 2018 artist book, Under the Knife, a truly stunning volume that Candor Arts, the publisher, described as “Part memoir, part treatise, part collage and experiment . . . an excavation; a dig at the sites of the construction and demolition of the poet/artist’s selves.” Portions of Under the Knife are also included in Solo(s).

“Krista is always timeless,” Sheridan says. “She’s always doing her own thing in a way that is moving between writing and collage and visual work. Sometimes they’re separate, and sometimes they’re together, but they’re always doing a really similar kind of work. It’s like she’s creating these dreamscapes for us.” 

Sheridan says she feels like visual artists are sometimes the best writers, and Franklin’s work is testament to such.

“I can be more intimate with the writing,” Franklin says. “There are things I can do in the writing that I’m not capable of doing in the visual art. I like the idea of it being underwriting, or giving further, deeper understanding of the concepts that I’m kind of working through in my [visual art] practice. The concepts vary. For me, it really is about history, it is about time—past, present, future—and the combination of those things, the amalgamation of that continuum. But then also there’s a lot in my work, mainly in my writing, that has to do with looking at the self, deep self-analysis.”

And here is where Franklin’s true identity as a surrealist comes into play. It is not only that she creates surrealist art, it is that the very act of her creation is in and of itself a surrealist act. “It’s tricky,” she says. “Because surrealism in and of itself morphs, it’s an organic body.”

As is Franklin’s body—all of ours are. Nothing needs to stay the same.

“Solo(s): Krista Franklin”Through 2/19: Wed-Thu 11 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sun 11 AM-5 PM, DePaul Art Museum, 935 W. Fullerton, 773-325-7506, resources.depaul.edu/art-museum, free

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Since the turn of the new year the Denver Nuggets have beaten the Boston Celtics, Cleveland Cavaliers and LA Clippers, and have taken over the top spot in the Western Conference alongside the Memphis Grizzlies. Two-time defending MVP Nikola Jokic is putting together his third legitimate campaign for the award and is getting big-time contributions from teammates Jamal Murray, Michael Porter Jr. and Aaron Gordon.

But don’t expect Denver to shake Memphis easily. The Grizzlies have won seven in a row. While those wins have come against lesser competition than the Nuggets’ recent stretch, Memphis will have plenty of opportunities to prove it can be the top team in the West with two more contests against the Nuggets to come in the next few months.

Memphis has already proven it can fend off the third-place New Orleans Pelicans, having won the past two games between them. Still, the Pelicans have a claim in what is shaping up to be a three-team race in the West, as New Orleans is still just two and a half games behind Memphis and Denver.

Meanwhile, the Celtics managed to outlast the Nets’ recent hot streak to keep hold of the top spot in the Eastern Conference. Boston could also be getting a huge break in its quest to keep that spot with Kevin Durant set to miss a month of action just in time for two high-stakes meetings between the Nets and Celtics in the coming weeks.

Note: Throughout the regular season, our panel (Kendra Andrews, Tim Bontemps, Jamal Collier, Nick Friedell, Andrew Lopez, Tim MacMahon, Dave McMenamin and Ohm Youngmisuk) is ranking all 30 teams from top to bottom, taking stock of which teams are playing the best basketball now and which teams are looking most like title contenders.

Previous rankings: Week 1 Week 8

Sam Boyhtari makes spellbinding shoegaze with the band Greet Death in Flint, Michigan, but for the past few years he’s also been part of a four-piece group based in Chicago. In August that band, Brady, released their debut album, You Sleep While They Watch (Flesh & Bone). They use shoegaze’s weather-system scale and amniotic warmth without saturating their music in wall-to-wall distortion. Instead Brady prioritize clarity, which is most noticeable in Boyhtari’s vocals—throughout the album he articulates himself calmly and clearly, and his lyrics about our misbegotten world ride high in the mix so you don’t miss a single harrowing word. On the epic closing number, “Catherine,” Boyhtari weaves together several tragic end-of-life narratives, loading them with the clinical detail of a reporter’s notes. But his serene demeanor and the band’s clean, focused playing lend the song a flicker of hope—or at least the sense that the pain of grief can be softened by your chosen community.

Brady Spread Joy headline; Wad and Brady open. Tue 1/17, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $5, 21+

Read More

Juanita Irizarry delivered a gut punch of a speech at the December 14 meeting of the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners. You could say she hit it out of the park.  

That’s hard to pull off when you’ve only got two minutes to make your case.

But Irizarry, speaking as executive director of Friends of the Parks, also spoke from the heart. In the scant time allotted members of the public to comment, she took a clearly painful stand.    

The subject was construction in Humboldt Park.

If you know Humboldt Park, you know that its 128-year-old Stables and Receptory Building on West Division Street is a pinch-me stunner. A sprawling, turreted, multi-gabled storybook retreat, it might have been lifted from the banks of the Rhine before it landed here—out of place and time—at the western end of the stretch of Division that is the Paseo Boricua, an area that was once home to German immigrants and is now the hub of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community.

Designed by the Chicago firm of Frommann & Jebsen (also responsible for Schubas Tavern), this Disneyesque architectural cream puff was built to shelter equipment as well as horses, and initially included the office of landscape architect Jens Jensen, then the Humboldt Park superintendent. An official Chicago landmark, it’s also on the National Register of Historic Places. The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture has occupied space there since 2002, and in 2014 it was granted a 99-year lease with an annual rent of one dollar for the entire building. Standing alone against a backdrop of parkland lawns and paths, it’s been a commanding presence.

But last summer, neighbors and preservationists say they noticed something surprising: some kind of construction was underway next to the stables. What was going on? A long trail of FOIA requests later, here’s what they found: in 2020 the museum had been approved for a $750,000 grant from the state to make repairs and to construct a modest, low-slung, 1,500-square-foot archives building nearby.  

This was mystifying, because the building that was taking shape last summer was much larger. The people who researched it say drawings submitted after construction started show a two-story structure, measuring as much as 6,800 square feet, that would stand nearly 40 feet tall. By early fall, partially completed, it was already blocking views of the museum’s landmark home and marring the pastoral setting. No city building permits had been issued, and, in spite of the fact that work was taking place on public land with impact on a publicly owned landmark property, there had been no public notice, hearings, or chance for community input. In September, after a 311 complaint, the city building department issued a stop-work order. In November, Humboldt Park residents Kurt Gippert and Maria Paula Cabrera (who had both unsuccessfully opposed state designation of this area as a Special District to be known as “Puerto Rico Town”) posted a protest petition at Change.org that gathered nearly 1,400 signatures.

Gippert presented the petition to the Park District at the December 14 meeting and asked that the partially completed building be demolished. He was one of a half dozen protesting speakers, including Mary Lu Seidel, Preservation Chicago’s director of community engagement, who summed the situation up as “a gross abuse of their lease” on the part of the museum. “They applied for a state grant without CPD’s permission, dramatically changed the scope of that grant, did not amend the grant with the state, and started construction without permits, without approval from CPD, and without input from the public,” Seidel said.

So, how did this happen? Simple mismanagement? An ignorant but innocent screwup? That seemed to be what museum president Billy Ocasio was saying when he told Block Club Chicago in October that “some honest mistakes were made.”

But Ocasio, a onetime senior advisor to former Governor Pat Quinn, is a 16-year veteran of the City Council (where, to his credit, he voted against the infamous parking meter deal). The protestors say there’s no way he was ignorant of city and state permits and other requirements.  

Here’s what Irizarry told the board: “The idea that they can start building illegally in a park is a dare to all of us to make them take it down.”

“Museum director Billy Ocasio and his team are not people who don’t know that they need a permit,” Irizarry said. 

“I know these things as a lifelong Humboldt Parker who lives in the 26th Ward where Alderman Billy Ocasio was alderman for decades,” she continued. “I worked and volunteered with a number of nonprofits and committees that aligned with his policies. . . . I cochaired the committee that developed what became his affordable housing set-aside policy and participated on his affordable housing committee. . . . I tell this story as a donor to the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture and as one to whom Billy Ocasio has been very important personally, politically, and professionally.

“I want to make an important point knowing that oftentimes conflicts like these get reframed in all kinds of ways to distract from the actual issue at hand. You can be Puerto Rican, love the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, be deeply engaged in organizing activism to keep our community in that space, and not believe this is an appropriate action. We urge you to respond accordingly.”

When Friends of the Parks noted in a December newsletter that they’re considering legal action in this matter, I called Irizarry to ask about it. She said it would be a last resort, but her board has authorized it if necessary. She added that FOTP thinks demolition is in order. To let the building go on to completion “would represent terrible precedent,” she said.  

Gentrification is a divisive issue in Humboldt Park, and it’s one of the ways that things can get reframed, but not the only one, Irizarry told me. “The other thing that is real is that a lot of the politics within the Humboldt Park Puerto Rican community break down in relation to people’s politics about the status of Puerto Rico. If you believe in statehood for Puerto Rico versus independence for Puerto Rico, and you live in Humboldt Park, you end up on different sides of local political battles, based on those alignments.”

“This is my community,” she said. “I’m just trying to do this in ways that are least damaging. We need to pull together Puerto Ricans who are on the statehood side, Puerto Ricans who are on the independence side, Puerto Ricans who are happy to just stay a commonwealth. I’ve heard from a lot of independence movement folks who think that this is wrong. I’m trying to pull together folks across that spectrum to say, ‘How do we lead through this with integrity and common care for our community and our culture?’”

The museum did not respond to requests for interview or comment, but on their website, they say this: “The park district approved a cutting-edge 5,000 square foot archives and collections facility that will mimic the architectural beauty of the Museum’s building with the addition of a tranquil sculpture garden which will open in the Summer of 2023.”

Alderperson Roberto Maldonado, who’s represented the 26th Ward since he was appointed to replace Ocasio in 2009, also failed to respond to a request for comment; last Friday he withdrew his candidacy for reelection.    

The Park District says it is “currently evaluating the proper next steps and will continue to work with all relevant agencies to determine the future of the project.”

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Sam Boyhtari makes spellbinding shoegaze with the band Greet Death in Flint, Michigan, but for the past few years he’s also been part of a four-piece group based in Chicago. In August that band, Brady, released their debut album, You Sleep While They Watch (Flesh & Bone). They use shoegaze’s weather-system scale and amniotic warmth without saturating their music in wall-to-wall distortion. Instead Brady prioritize clarity, which is most noticeable in Boyhtari’s vocals—throughout the album he articulates himself calmly and clearly, and his lyrics about our misbegotten world ride high in the mix so you don’t miss a single harrowing word. On the epic closing number, “Catherine,” Boyhtari weaves together several tragic end-of-life narratives, loading them with the clinical detail of a reporter’s notes. But his serene demeanor and the band’s clean, focused playing lend the song a flicker of hope—or at least the sense that the pain of grief can be softened by your chosen community.

Brady Spread Joy headline; Wad and Brady open. Tue 1/17, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $5, 21+

Read More

Juanita Irizarry delivered a gut punch of a speech at the December 14 meeting of the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners. You could say she hit it out of the park.  

That’s hard to pull off when you’ve only got two minutes to make your case.

But Irizarry, speaking as executive director of Friends of the Parks, also spoke from the heart. In the scant time allotted members of the public to comment, she took a clearly painful stand.    

The subject was construction in Humboldt Park.

If you know Humboldt Park, you know that its 128-year-old Stables and Receptory Building on West Division Street is a pinch-me stunner. A sprawling, turreted, multi-gabled storybook retreat, it might have been lifted from the banks of the Rhine before it landed here—out of place and time—at the western end of the stretch of Division that is the Paseo Boricua, an area that was once home to German immigrants and is now the hub of Chicago’s Puerto Rican community.

Designed by the Chicago firm of Frommann & Jebsen (also responsible for Schubas Tavern), this Disneyesque architectural cream puff was built to shelter equipment as well as horses, and initially included the office of landscape architect Jens Jensen, then the Humboldt Park superintendent. An official Chicago landmark, it’s also on the National Register of Historic Places. The National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture has occupied space there since 2002, and in 2014 it was granted a 99-year lease with an annual rent of one dollar for the entire building. Standing alone against a backdrop of parkland lawns and paths, it’s been a commanding presence.

But last summer, neighbors and preservationists say they noticed something surprising: some kind of construction was underway next to the stables. What was going on? A long trail of FOIA requests later, here’s what they found: in 2020 the museum had been approved for a $750,000 grant from the state to make repairs and to construct a modest, low-slung, 1,500-square-foot archives building nearby.  

This was mystifying, because the building that was taking shape last summer was much larger. The people who researched it say drawings submitted after construction started show a two-story structure, measuring as much as 6,800 square feet, that would stand nearly 40 feet tall. By early fall, partially completed, it was already blocking views of the museum’s landmark home and marring the pastoral setting. No city building permits had been issued, and, in spite of the fact that work was taking place on public land with impact on a publicly owned landmark property, there had been no public notice, hearings, or chance for community input. In September, after a 311 complaint, the city building department issued a stop-work order. In November, Humboldt Park residents Kurt Gippert and Maria Paula Cabrera (who had both unsuccessfully opposed state designation of this area as a Special District to be known as “Puerto Rico Town”) posted a protest petition at Change.org that gathered nearly 1,400 signatures.

Gippert presented the petition to the Park District at the December 14 meeting and asked that the partially completed building be demolished. He was one of a half dozen protesting speakers, including Mary Lu Seidel, Preservation Chicago’s director of community engagement, who summed the situation up as “a gross abuse of their lease” on the part of the museum. “They applied for a state grant without CPD’s permission, dramatically changed the scope of that grant, did not amend the grant with the state, and started construction without permits, without approval from CPD, and without input from the public,” Seidel said.

So, how did this happen? Simple mismanagement? An ignorant but innocent screwup? That seemed to be what museum president Billy Ocasio was saying when he told Block Club Chicago in October that “some honest mistakes were made.”

But Ocasio, a onetime senior advisor to former Governor Pat Quinn, is a 16-year veteran of the City Council (where, to his credit, he voted against the infamous parking meter deal). The protestors say there’s no way he was ignorant of city and state permits and other requirements.  

Here’s what Irizarry told the board: “The idea that they can start building illegally in a park is a dare to all of us to make them take it down.”

“Museum director Billy Ocasio and his team are not people who don’t know that they need a permit,” Irizarry said. 

“I know these things as a lifelong Humboldt Parker who lives in the 26th Ward where Alderman Billy Ocasio was alderman for decades,” she continued. “I worked and volunteered with a number of nonprofits and committees that aligned with his policies. . . . I cochaired the committee that developed what became his affordable housing set-aside policy and participated on his affordable housing committee. . . . I tell this story as a donor to the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture and as one to whom Billy Ocasio has been very important personally, politically, and professionally.

“I want to make an important point knowing that oftentimes conflicts like these get reframed in all kinds of ways to distract from the actual issue at hand. You can be Puerto Rican, love the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, be deeply engaged in organizing activism to keep our community in that space, and not believe this is an appropriate action. We urge you to respond accordingly.”

When Friends of the Parks noted in a December newsletter that they’re considering legal action in this matter, I called Irizarry to ask about it. She said it would be a last resort, but her board has authorized it if necessary. She added that FOTP thinks demolition is in order. To let the building go on to completion “would represent terrible precedent,” she said.  

Gentrification is a divisive issue in Humboldt Park, and it’s one of the ways that things can get reframed, but not the only one, Irizarry told me. “The other thing that is real is that a lot of the politics within the Humboldt Park Puerto Rican community break down in relation to people’s politics about the status of Puerto Rico. If you believe in statehood for Puerto Rico versus independence for Puerto Rico, and you live in Humboldt Park, you end up on different sides of local political battles, based on those alignments.”

“This is my community,” she said. “I’m just trying to do this in ways that are least damaging. We need to pull together Puerto Ricans who are on the statehood side, Puerto Ricans who are on the independence side, Puerto Ricans who are happy to just stay a commonwealth. I’ve heard from a lot of independence movement folks who think that this is wrong. I’m trying to pull together folks across that spectrum to say, ‘How do we lead through this with integrity and common care for our community and our culture?’”

The museum did not respond to requests for interview or comment, but on their website, they say this: “The park district approved a cutting-edge 5,000 square foot archives and collections facility that will mimic the architectural beauty of the Museum’s building with the addition of a tranquil sculpture garden which will open in the Summer of 2023.”

Alderperson Roberto Maldonado, who’s represented the 26th Ward since he was appointed to replace Ocasio in 2009, also failed to respond to a request for comment; last Friday he withdrew his candidacy for reelection.    

The Park District says it is “currently evaluating the proper next steps and will continue to work with all relevant agencies to determine the future of the project.”

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Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

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