Hyde Park Art Center, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, will host its latest Center Sunday, an all-ages program filled with art making activities, workshops, and artist talks, held on the first Sunday of each month. This month’s program, fully in-person on August 1, from 1-4 p.m., features Resident Artist Workshops for Abolition and Freedom, which are art making workshops led by current Hyde Park Art Center resident artists Aaron Hughes, William Estrada and Dorothy Burge; a performance by performance artist Izah Ransohoff activating a new exhibition by Heather Brammeier; and time capsule making for children with Once Upon Our Time Capsule. The event is free and open to the public, and pre-registration is encouraged at hydeparkart.org.
Photo credit, l-r: Artist Dorothy Burge in her studio at Hyde Park Art Center. Photo courtesy of the artist and Hyde Park Art Center. Izah Ransohoff performance. Courtesy of the artist. Once Upon Our Time Capsule art making. Courtesy of Once Upon Our Time Capsule.
Monthly Center Sundays are curated by Ciera McKissick, Hyde Park Art Center Public Programs Coordinator, as a means of introducing the community to the myriad ongoing offerings at the Hyde Park Art Center for all ages, interests and skill levels; the August Center Sunday programming includes:
Art making: Resident Artist Workshops for Abolition and Freedom
- 1-4 p.m.
- Art Center Parking Lot
Art Center current Jackman Goldwasser Residency artists Dorothy Burge, William Estrada, and Aaron Hughes lead a series of art making workshops around the themes of abolition and freedom. Burge will host a memorial quilt making workshop for people that died from COVID-19 while incarcerated; Estrada will use his street art cart to host a printmaking session with a new "Abolition/Freedom" print design; and Hughes will host a Manifest Abolition Democracy banner painting workshop connected to his Autonomous Democracy project. Participants will be invited to help make artwork and discuss what freedom and abolition mean to them.
Dorothy Burge is a fabric and multimedia artist and community activist who is inspired by history and current issues of social justice. Burge received her Masters of Arts in Urban Planning and Policy and her Bachelors of Arts in Art Design, both from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of Blacks Against Police Torture and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials; both are cultural collectives seeking justice for police torture survivors. Burge is also a member of the Women of Color Quilter’s Network (WCQN), with her quilts being part of several WCQN exhibitions. She received a 2017 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist fellowship and is an Envisioning Justice Commissioned Artist.
William Estrada grew up in California, Mexico, and Chicago. His teaching and art making practice focus on addressing inequity, migration, historical passivity and cultural recognition in historically marginalized communities. He documents and engages experiences in public spaces to transform, question, and make connections to established and organic systems. He has worked as an educator and artist with Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Hyde Park Art Center, SkyArt, Marwen Foundation, Urban Gateways, DePaul University’s College Connect Program, Graffiti Institute, Vermont College of Art and Design, Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, and the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Aaron Hughes is an artist, curator, organizer, teacher, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. He works collaboratively in diverse spaces and media to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, deconstruct and transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes develops projects that deconstruct militarism and related institutions of dehumanization, operating in solidarity with the people most impacted by structural violence. Hughes works with a variety of art and activist projects including Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, About Face: Veterans Against the War, and emerging Veteran Art Movement.
Performance: Izah Ransohoff Activating Heather Brammeier Exhibition Opening
- 1:30-3 p.m.
- Cleve Carney Gallery and Gallery 2, First Floor
This Center Sunday will mark the opening of artist Heather Brammeier’s solo exhibition Maybe Never, a show that ruminates on experiences of fragmentation, grappling with the relationship between aspiration and what exceeds one’s perspective. Brammeier has built immersive installations that incorporate contrasting colors and structural forms to engage viewers’ spatial boundaries and concepts of relation. To activate the exhibition opening, performance artist Izah Ransohoff will give a performance in which movement meditation approaches the geometric landscape of Brammeier’s installations as a site of play and shifting bodily perceptions.
Heather Brammeier is a sculptor, painter, and installation artist whose work continues the function of childhood play into adulthood. Through innovative use of materials and deceptively simple design, Brammeier creates visual puzzles that invite movement in and around the artwork. The artwork tests physical and perceptual boundaries, mirroring emotional and psychological limits. Vertiginous stacking, attention to surfaces, and the use of light and shadow elicit contemplation of safety and threat, love and loss, and the complexity of emotional experience.
Art making: Once Upon Our Time Capsule
- 1-4 p.m.
- Art Center Parking Lot
Hyde Park Art Center is a community partner for Once Upon Our Time Capsule, a new initiative for children across Chicago to make Time Capsules this summer that tell the story of 2020 and 2021 from their perspective. As the young generation transitions from the pandemic into the recovery phase, they are invited to have a moment to pause, look back on what was good and what was hard, recognize how brave they have been, and look forward to better things ahead. The time capsules created will be a part of a Giant Time Capsule to be revealed this fall at Harold Washington Library.
About Center Sundays
The first Sunday of nearly every month, Hyde Park Art Center is activated throughout for the public, neighbors, and families, with intergenerational art making activities, artist workshops, artist talks, open studios, curatorial tours of its exhibitions, community collaborations, music and small bites. Center Sundays are free and open for all.
About the Hyde Park Art Center
Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections.
For more information on Hyde Park Art Center’s public programs such as Center Sundays, please visit www.hydeparkart.org.