Claire Ashley, Hyegyeong Choi, Laura Davis,
Jason Dunda, John Henley, Alison Ruttan

Hyde Park Art Center

September 1 - November 2, 2020

How do we make art in the face of a pandemic? Why do we want to? How do we look at color and form for entertainment while police are murdering Black people and Indigenous people without repercussion or justice?

Major shifts are happening all around us. Assumptions about ourselves are falling away, proving to be false, and worse, heavily manipulated to facilitate unspeakable violence. Not directed at everyone, just some of us. For the benefit of people who already have more benefits than they ought. We have been trained to avoid seeing. Cracks in our systems made clear by the end of commerce as usual leave us seeing structural problems that have been part of our culture since it was a culture.

Slow, along with 50 other artist-run spaces, has been working toward Artist Run Chicago 2.0, at the Hyde Park Art Center. We planned our participation before physical distancing was a thing. George Floyd was still alive when we decided to show art responding to a play about language and power.

We don't want to return to the gallery to get back to normal. Normal has shifted. We don't want to signal our virtue by putting things out into the world that identify us among the righteous. Smug separations are scant balm in the face of crumbling institutions and dying compatriots.

We are aware that we haven't brought something directly responding to Black Lives Matter, nor the environmental changes needed to avoid the next pandemic. We dug deep to review our motivations, our ethics, our values. A good return to public exhibition amplifies small voices, the everyday people and places, in favor of the institution or the famous. We recommit ourselves to the value of the indirect response. Bearing witness shapes the new nation. The stories we tell, the heroes we laud, our willingness to reflect what we see. These things author better value structures, develop empathy, inclusion, and monitor policy. Art helps us develop better skills for observation. Observation of visual information as well as indirect observation focused on ideas, patterns, unseen structures. We rely on these tools to make sense of the world shifting and unfolding around us. We are trying to dissolve old boundaries; we are working with the theatre community as our participation in Artist Run Chicago 2.0. A play that challenges the seat of authority and explores the manipulated language that props up that authority. Claire Ashley, Hyegyeong Choi, Laura Davis, Jason Dunda, John Henley, and Alison Ruttan all made art in response to Jerry Lieblich's play The Barbarians. We will stage a theatrical reading of The Barbarians, directed by Jonathan Green, during the run of the show. We can't wait to meet you in the new cultural forefront. We can't wait to start the work of visualizing new and better normal.