Come see Secret Rites at the Festival of Dionysus' gallery opening and performances!

The International Bedlam Society and the Chicago Art Department come together to bring you three nights of bacchanalia to finish off your winter blues once and for all. This Spring Equinox festival will be held for three Saturdays in March to celebrate the coming season and the god of revelry with theatre, games, food, and drink!

Gods and Mortals mix at this immersive evening hosted by the Son of Zeus himself. Become witness to the Secret Rites in this lush, verdant indoor atmosphere where wine, milk, and honey flow literally from the walls! Explore the darker side of your psyche and participate in the spectacle of the night! A little sparagmos never did anybody harm...

Each evening will feature different musical guests and an ensemble performance of eight Greek theatre favorites. Written and assembled by the International Bedlam Society, these scripts are pulled from the Ancient Festival of Dionysus and the Greek Masters--Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and more. See your favorite stories; Zeus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Theseus, Hippolytus, Achilles, Orestes and Pentheus. Retold for the modern, ADD and television-soaked audience, these plays are bawdy, dark, and sharp.

Musicians starring for our opening night on the 13th is Kirtan with Amy and the Ananda Bliss Tribe! More updates to come with final lineups for each evening

Gallery Opening on Friday March 12th!

Join us Friday, March 12th at Chicago Art Department for the 2nd Fridays Pilsen Art Walk, we will feature greek-inspired art made by Chicago artists and be available to answer any questions about the festival!

Performances on March 13th, 20th, and 27th!
7:00pm: Opening musicians
8:00pm: Performances
10:00pm: Closing musicians

Gallery Exhibition Opening - Free.

Performances - $7 donation, $5 with costume! (21+ Ask First:Respect Community:Leave No Trace:Party Responsibly:Dress To Kill)

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The Festival of Dionysus Schedule
Gallery Opening Friday March 12 - 6-10pm
Secret Rites, Saturdays 3/13, 3/20, 3/27 - 7-11pm

Chicago Art Department
1837 South Halsted, Chicago IL

For questions about exhibition or performances, please contact CAD resident artist Dietrich McGaffey at dietrich.mcgaffey@gmail.com.

International Women's Day (8 March) is marked as a day when people all over the world celebrate the idea of WOMAN as mother, inventor, lover, artist, peacemaker, revolutionary, and maker of history. On the evening of March 8th  you are invited to celebrate this  day at Chicago Art Department, where twenty-three women will gather to celebrate, educate, make artwork, share memories, discuss issues, and have a little fun. Through the artwork each artist will show her unique approach to celebrating this day for. This exhibition celebrates and gives voice to topics and struggles that are globally unique to women, and will  include the showing of archival materials and traditional edible goodies. Come and revel in the strength and vitality that is WOMAN.

International Women's Day Group Show
March 8th, 6-10 pm
@Chicago Art Department
1837 S. Halsted

On Tuesday, October 13, 2009 at 5:05pm, Martha Gonzalez, a life-long resident of Pilsen was a victim of a fatal hit-and-run incident at the intersection of 18th & Halsted in Chicago.  She was walking westbound across Halsted when she was struck by a northbound car and subsequently stuck by the northbound No. 18 CTA bus following the vehicle.  The driver of the first vehicle involved is still being sought after.

The Martha Gonzalez Memorial Committee (MGMC) are asking for you to  sign a petition as fellow concerned citizens, if you would like to see the intersection of 18th Street & Halsted improved for safety.  Several of their demands include:  No Turn on Red Signs, Left Turn Signals, Numbered Pedestrian Signals, Photo Enforcement cameras, Protection of the sidewalk against drivers cutting corners, Yellow Pedestrian Crossing Signs, Improved Timing, etc...All reasonable requests to improve pedestrian safety!

MGMC is working with Alderman Daniel Solis and other city officials in order to work on making 18th and Halsted a safer intersection for the Pilsen community.

Once there are at least 1,000 signatures the petition will be taken to the Alderman's office, CDOT and OEMC.  The road to change and a safer community for you and your family starts with one concerned citizen at a time.  Please let that person be you!

Please visit the web-petition and sign TODAY!!!

Michael Una is a Chicago based sound and installation artist as well as a synthesizer engineer.  His work investigates how vibrating waves of energy and human consciousness interact. He utilize traditional musical instruments, handbuilt analog electronics, video processes, digital synthesis, and repurposed objects to build harmonic wave patterns. These patterns are projected into physical space, creating a unique and temporary audiophysical experience.

Octophonopod consists of eight speakers and an accompanying audio-reactive LED display housed within eight paper lanterns. The speakers are fed by four CD players, i.e, eight mono channels of sound run through four car stereo amplifiers. I composed an eight-channel sound piece to run through the system, generating light and sounds in a calming, ambient fashion.

The Beat Bike is a bicycle-controlled drum machine A movement-controlled audio generation/manipulation system, built from scratch. Translates gestures and dance into sound.

The Sound Suit

Michael just won the first grant from Scale Well, a Chicago based "Angel" Investor fund, to produce hand made musical instruments such as the Beep It Deluxe.  The Beep it is a Beep-it Deluxe is a handmade optical theremin, housed in a handsome laser-cut bamboo case and featuring a big chrome button and 2nd oscillator for enhanced modulation.

Beep-it Deluxe emits a square-wave tone reminiscent of 8-bit video game music. A light sensor determines the overall pitch of the instrument, while a knob on the side can be adjusted to induce a warble into the tone for all of your sci-fi and rhythmic needs.  Beep It Deluxe will be sold at the new Pilsen Gallery N0T0X

Here's a Picture of Beep It:

"I'm There: A Birthday Celebration for the City of Chicago" is meant to give a celebratory real-time, ground level look at the current state of three pivotal neighborhoods in Chicago- Wicker Park, Wrigleyville and Pilsen. Each neighborhood will be represented visually by a photographer and musically with a DJ from each hood.

The overall basis for the party is to celebrate the birthday of Chicago by giving an insiders look into three neighborhood pillars that shape the unique social zeitgeist of the city as a whole.

Each photographer and DJ collaborated to take unique shots for a one night only photography exhibit that is meant to produce a truly unique and personal journey into their neighborhood and lives as influential artists in the city.

Food and beer: America's Dog will be providing tasty treats, 404 Wine Bar will be sampling some spectacular wines along with a food pairing and Bleeding Heart Bakery is putting together a cake of epic proportions. There will be a hosted Old Style bar from 7-8, with a donation-based wet bar after that.

Photographers:

Clayton Hauck
Kyle LeMere
Nick Haas

DJs:

Kid Color
DJ Baby Magdalene
DJ Pullano

Come out and celebrate the birthday of the City of Chicago with a night of art, music, food and of course, Old Style!

If you're a facebook fan, here's the event listing!

Date: Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Location: Chicago Art Department. 1837 South Halsted
Time: 7 pm to 11pm

Corbett vs. Dempsey is a private art gallery specializing in mid-20th century American art, with an emphasis on Chicago painting and works on paper from 1940 to 1970. From their website:

"We represent a diverse group of artists and artist estates, with historical works drawn from various American modernist traditions, including figural expressionism, American scene, social realism, surrealism, magic realism, the Chicago imagist groups, and myriad middle-American approaches to abstraction. Corbett vs. Dempsey also works with contemporary artists who connect, in one way or another, with these lineages. We pledge no specific stylistic allegiances, but instead choose to support and pursue that art which moves us. We love the American modernist traditions and their kin, but are also enthusiastic about Fluxus and the expanded arts scenes of the '60s in the U.S., Europe, Japan, South America and elsewhere, and will carry art and artifacts of this movement when available. And we are always on the lookout for unusual objects, be they artistic, industrial, musical or "other." As a special area of concern, we're fascinated by those intersections between the visual arts and music - places where the arts cross paths, as they do often in modernist painting and jazz, for instance."

Currently CvsD is showing "Peter Brötzmann Wood & Water: Works on Paper", which runs until March 27, 2010. This is the gallery's second solo exhibition of artwork by Peter Brötzmann, who is perhaps best known as a musician, but has been consistently making and occasionally exhibiting visual art in Europe and America since 1959. In 2007, CvsD mounted the first major survey of Brötzmann's artwork in the United States, a show that focused heavily on his large paintings and constructions. Now, two years later, Wood & Water features his recent small-scale work on paper, including woodcut prints and watercolors.

Also part of this exhibition (in what CvsD calls "The East Wing" of the gallery), is work by Chicago artist Harold Haydon. In 1936, age 27, Haydon set out to make an illuminated version of Fyodor Dostoevsky's 1866 classic Crime & Punishment. His notion was to create ink drawings for the novel that would overlay the text on each page, illustrating the action, for instance, as Raskolnikov kills Alena or as he confesses to Sonya. The process began with rough sketches for a total of 10 sample pages. These were refined over several generations, then the final version was transferred to a typeset page, sitting right over the scene that to which the image referred. For some reason, Haydon's illustrated Crime & Punishment was never brought to fruition. We are left with this very suggestive selection of ten finished proof pages, presented with some of the artist's initial sketches and a page of font calligraphy.

For more information about this show and the gallery, please visit Corbett vs. Dempsey's website.

go love

The Chicago Art Department's Tube Series this month features Galina Shevchenko.  Galina is a Moscow born, Chicago based artist that works with visual media in the form of installation and live performance.  She loves to combine vernacular visual elements with archetypical and cultural icons creating exquisite combinations of high and pop, classical and postmodern. Her piece for the Tube series is titled "go love" and is a poetic video contemplation on the domain of feeling. Accessible through a window, the piece is a window itself that grants instant access  to subconscious controversies. The viewer is teased with its vulnerable messages and seductive lines.

Her work is represented by PSYMBOLIC Multimedia label and can be found at

http://www.psymbolic.com/unlock.html?key=/artists/galina_shevchenko

Galina's work is represented by Moka Gallery Chicago

This show explore nostalgia, how we see the past and draw on it in our culture today. People may idealize a certain time or place but doing so requires that we pick and choose only the bits that work with our ideas. Cultural Excavation is a kind of architectural dig, we look into our past and our culture and select those parts to which we choose to give value. Many people draw on these items or ideas to create works of art. In this show we bring together pieces of art made in just this way with a selection of radio programs from the 1930s and 40s. These radio programs are not simply mood pieces to compliment the visual side of the show, or cultural artifacts, they are still entertainment. As much as they provide a time capsule of this period, they can also provide some interesting insight into who we are today.

Participating artists include Wayne Bertola, Virginia Broersma, Allison Rae Butkus, Seth Gershberg, Chris Hales, Jennifer Hines, Jennifer Jackson, Sarah Leitten Amanda Paulson, Marta Sasinowska, Kirsten Strauss and Aaron Wooten. Old Time Radio enthusiasts Christopher Piatt and Ben Valentine will present a series of radio programs including Dick Tracy, Lord Haw Haw, X Minus One, Fibber McGee And Molly, The Adventures Of Babe Ruth and many others.

Exhibition opening is Friday February 12, from 6-10pm. Please email Kirsten Strauss with any questions.

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REFRIGE REMIX

mixed media collage on iceboxes

Work Days:
February 20th, 21st - Noon to Midnight

February 27th 28th - Noon to Midnight

Workshop: 3510 N. Halsted St.

This former auto body shop comes to us courtesy of a 70-year old Greek immigrant who now uses it only to park cars during Cubs games.  His family is paying for heat and insurance, and we have until the start of the baseball season to use it.  We expect paint and materials donations from Sherwin Williams.  Alderman Tom Tunney (44th) and his staff are helping make all these arrangements because they want Lake View to gain a reputation for public art and as an artist-friendly ward.

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We are looking to have 4-6 refrigerators remixed by the end of the first week in March.

We then hope create 6-8 more by the end of April.

These will be displayed in a group show at the Lincoln Park Zoo for the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day.  80,000 visitors are expected at that.  Two weeks later, they will move to Brookfield Zoo for an equally big show.  Before and after these event s they will be on display in downtown office buildings, "Pop-Up" spaces in the Loop, high traffic locations in Lake View and Renaissance Row (75th Street).

These Art Refrigerators will then be handed to families in need of working refrigerators (if they are declared "energy efficient and do not contain dangerous refrigerant), or they will remain as traveling art works, helping to raise money for the  Business and Economic Revitalization Association (BERA) in the south side Chatham neighborhood.

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EXAMPLES OF OTHER VERSIONS OF THIS PROJECT
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 http://www.havana-cultura.com/EN/visual-art/fridges-art-project/cuban-painter.html

http://www.nbm.org/exhibitions-collections/exhibitions/the-art-of-recycling-the.html

http://www.insidetoronto.com/news/local/article/119773--fridge-doors-become-canvasses-for-art-display

RE-FRIDGE is part of the Green Office Challenge (www.chicagogreenofficechallenge.org)

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MORE TO FOLLOW
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MARCH PROGRAM

REFRIGE REMIX

mixed media sculpture with iceboxes

Work Days: February 20th, 21st - Noon to Midnight

February 27th 28th - Noon to Midnight

Workshop: 40 E. Garfield Blvd

This is the old Schulze Baking Company (Butternut Bread) bakery-- at the time, the largest bakery in the United States.  It occupies a full city block, and has seven floors of light and build space.  It has a Terra Cotta exterior, and it is where more than a billion sandwiches got their starts. The new owner and the local alderman have cleared the way for its use by artists-- believing that art is always good for a neighborhood.    We will have heat and materials, and this represents a long term build space for artists and their projects.

Already in on this project in big ways:

Brompton Auto Parts

Abt Appliances & Electronics

Smith Moving Company

UPS

Sherwin Williams Paint

Chicago Art Department

Black Rock Arts Foundation

Chicago Department of Environment

Chicago Department of Water Management

Chicago Department of Family and Support Services

Alderman Tom Tunney (44th)

Alderman Pat Dowell (3rd)

Alderman Fredrenna Lyle (6th)

and, artists like you.

Contact: nathan@chicagoartdepartment.org

Beyond The Pedway is a weekly video podcast dedicated to discovering creative companies in sweet home Chicago. Created by Tim Jahn, Beyond The Pedway seeks to learn about the people behind Chicago’s creative companies, what they do, and why they do it in Chicago. A song from a local Chicago band is featured during the intro and credits of each episode.

Tune in every Friday to discover something new about Chicago! You can also subscribe to their RSS Feeds and get episodes on iTunes. Finally, BTP also posts has live interviews, allowing you to sit in the room with me as Tim interviews companies for future episodes of Beyond The Pedway. During the shoot, you can chat with Tim or send him a question via Twitter that you think he should ask!

Check out the video made about Chicago Art Department, and of course the main page for Beyond the Pedway's latest piece!