Newcity Chicago December 2021

DECEMBER 2021

The World Famous Glenn Miller Orchestra Harris Theater - Millenium Park December 14 Tickets available online at www.harristheaterchicago.org and through the box office

DECEMBER 2021 Arts & Culture 8 Unapologetic Boldness Art DECEMBER 2021 Newcity A conversation The Art Institute of Chicago with Ayana Contreras models thoughtful stewardship of Ray Johnson's practice ............................ 3 8 12 A Beautifully Dance Dangerous Place Hyde Park School of Dance The Stockyard Institute surveys its past and its updated Nutcracker ........................ 4 4 18 Design Is This the End of the Tiki Bar? Chicago handshake is a very Chicago drinking card 4game............... 6 We asked local Pacific Islanders 4 8Mood: Vessels ............................................... 26 Dining & Drinking “You Will Always be Different” “Don’t be afraid 5 0of Italian wine!” .............................................. Ted Ishiwari’s Chicago story Film It’s not the end 5 2of movies ......................................................... Lit Gioia Diliberto talks “Coco at the Ritz” ................................ 5 4 Music Beyond livestreaming.................................... 5 7 Stage What is the American 5 9Dream worth?................................................. Reviews A selection from our digital 6 2vastness........................................ 3

Letter from the Editor EVEN WHEN WE DO NOT plan an issue around But there is hope, too. In “Unapologetic Boldness,\" a specific topic, themes often organically emerge from Ayana Contreras specifically focuses on the positive, a collection of unconnected stories. In our December “full of larger-than-life possibilities, despite oppres- issue, America's heightened reckoning with racism sion,\" and Chay Yew, in a part of our conversation surfaces again and again. about Chicago theater, sees a better future emerging from all the turmoil that the artistic community has “Is This the End of the Tiki Bar?\" explores the legacy undergone the last couple of years. Here is what he had of colonization and its manifestation in a long-pop- to say when I asked him about it: ular genre of cocktail lounge. In “You Will Always be Different,\" Ted Ishiwari discusses a lifelong grap- I think change is hard. There’s now a new gen- pling with racism along with his father's ordeal of eration of artistic leaders of color, nationally. being uprooted and sent to a Japanese internment And when they turn to me, they say, you know, camp during World War II. The new musical, “Para- you were one of the first few that started it. And dise Square\" explores cultural appropriation in music I didn’t realize that.… But the wonderful thing and dance, suggesting that it can be both a positive is, Chicago’s always been in the forefront of and negative force. And in “What Is the American many things, including change in theaters. So, Dream Worth?,” Alaudin Ullah and Chay Yew dig with what has happened at Victory Gardens and deep into the specific challenges of immigrants and also at Writers Theatre, it’s happening around their children, and the stereotyping that can hold the country. And I think, addressing some of them back from full participation in society. these concerns is for the betterment of the com- munity, and also for the theater community. Newcity DECEMBER 2021 So, for Victory Gardens, it had to occur the way it had to occur. …it blew up and the people finally took the theater back, which was a sweet thing to say about what Victory Gardens has always stood for. It’s for the people. And I think in terms of this theater [Writers], there was a reckoning about behavior, and they are now rectifying it. Because I’ve never been to the first day of rehearsals where we have a thir- ty-minute anti-harassment conference, which is actually so specific, compared to everything I’ve done. The good thing is, the Chicago theater community is trying to figure out how to be bet- ter. And it’s never going to be perfect. There’s always going to be little bumps on the road. And one thing you can trust about Chicagoans is, they will speak up, when there is something that needs to be addressed. So, all these changes during the pandemic, maybe it will make for a better theater commu- nity when we emerge out of this. On that note of hope that we can all embrace, we'll say goodbye to 2021 and see you in 2022. Have a great hol- iday season. — Brian Hieggelke 4

Annie Leibovitz December 7, 2021 at 7:00pm Live at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance You know her portraits, now hear from the legendary photographer herself. Join Annie Leibovitz for an exclusive event to mark the publication of her latest collection, Wonderland—a series of photographs chronicling her encounters with fashion over the years. Get tickets and explore the fall lineup: chicagohumanities.org

Newcity DECEMBER 2021 Contributors ON THE COVER Cover Illustration and Design TARA BETTS (Writer, “Unapologetic Boldness”), former Newcity Lit Editor, Dan Streeting is the author of “Break the Habit,” “Arc & Hue,” and “Refuse to Disappear.” She is the Inaugural Poet for the People Practitioner Fellow at University Vol. 36, No. 1421 of Chicago and founder of Whirlwind Learning Center. Tara can be found on twitter at @tarabetts and on instagram at @chitownbetts. PUBLISHERS SALLY BLOOD (aka Sandy Morris) (Photographer, “Unapologetic Brian & Jan Hieggelke Boldness”) is a portrait photographer who also shoots stills for TV Associate Publisher Mike Hartnett and film in Chicago. You can view her work at sallyblood.com. EDITORIAL PIA SINGH (Writer, “A Beautifully Dangerous Place”) is an independent Editor Brian Hieggelke writer and curator from Mumbai, India. Her research focuses on community Managing Editor Jan Hieggelke engaged arts practices at the intersection of art and design, and she is the Art Editor Kerry Cardoza founder of “by & for,” a solidarity initiative organized by emerging curators, Design Editor Vasia Rigou for local artists, in response to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dining and Drinking Editor JOHN GREENFIELD (Writer, “Is This the End of the Tiki Bar?”) is co-editor David Hammond of the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago and a columnist Film Editor Ray Pride for the Chicago Reader. He is the creator of The Mellow Chicago Bike Map Music Editor Robert Rodi and The Iconic Chicago Restaurants Map. Stage Editor Sharon Hoyer SHAWN SHIFLETT (Writer, “You Will Always be Different”) is a novelist ART & DESIGN and the author of “Hey, Liberal!” (Chicago Review Press), the story of Art Director Dan Streeting a white boy going to a predominately Black and Latinx high school in Senior Designers Chicago just after the MLK riots. He is an associate professor at Columbia Fletcher Martin, Billy Werch College Chicago. shawnshiflett.com. Designer Stephanie Plenner NATHAN KEAY (Photographer, “You Will Always be Different”) MARKETING is a photographer in Chicago. nathankeay.com. Marketing Manager Todd Hieggelke OPERATIONS 6 General Manager Jan Hieggelke Distribution Nick Bachmann, Adam Desantis, Preston Klik Retail price $10 per issue. In certain locations, one copy is available on a complimentary basis. Subscriptions and additional copies of current and back issues available at Newcityshop.com. Copyright 2021, New City Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Newcity assumes no responsibility to return unsolicited editorial or graphic material. All rights in letters and unsolicited editorial or graphic material will be treated as uncondition- ally assigned for publication and copyright purposes and subject to comment editorially. Nothing may be reprinted in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. Newcity is published by Newcity Communications, Inc. 47 West Polk, Suite 100-223, Chicago, IL 60605 Visit NewcityNetwork.com for advertising and editorial information. Subscribe at Newcityshop.com

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Newcity DECEMBER 2021 Boldness UnBaoplodlnoegsestic Exploring Intergenerational Connections in Ayana Contreras’ Energy Never Dies: Afro-Optimism and Creativity in Chicago by Tara Betts photo by Sally Blood If you haven’t heard it’s questionable “ENERGY NEVER DIES: AFRO-OPTIMISM AND CRE- 8 Ayana Contreras whether you’ve ATIVITY IN CHICAGO” elaborates on the intergener- on the radio, been listening to ational connections between Black artists in the city Chicago radio at as a method that has offered hope not just to people who enjoy the work, but the people who create it and all. Contreras is the music director at seek ways to own what they made. Through interview Vocalo Radio, 91.1 FM, the country’s snippets, analyzing records, magazines and songs, Contreras takes readers on a journey of how that leg- first urban alternative format station, acy still reverberates in Chicago’s artists. as well as the host and producer Could you talk a bit about some of of “Reclaimed Soul,” which airs on your interviews, artifacts and ideas Vocalo as well as WBEZ, where she that led to “Energy Never Dies”? covers the rich history and craft of “Energy Never Dies” is the product of myriad encoun- soul and R&B with an ear toward ters with kismet. Some of my favorite discoveries Chicago’s deep musical legacy. Con- revolve around what I initially believed was the story treras, a reviewer and a columnist of a thing, and how that belief shifted as I learned more for DownBeat, has written a book to about it. For instance, I bought a Stax Records fan-club talk about the subject that she knows publication at a record store in Memphis without exam- ining it because I love that Memphis-based soul label. It wasn’t until I got home that I discovered that it was in an intimate, well-researched, and an issue of the publication that dealt exclusively with at times, poetic style. the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s orga- nizing efforts here in Chicago. So, the story of the thing



became a story of Stax using its platform to amplify social causes, as well as a deeply Chicago story of self-determination. You documented the history of so many places in Chicago that influenced generations of artists, yet they no longer exist. What are some of the lessons that Black creatives have learned from their precursors here? Newcity DECEMBER 2021 From my vantage point, the main learning has been around attitude… a stride… a way of being that permeates Black Chicago. Sort of an unapol- ogetic boldness, full of larger-than-life possibilities, despite oppression. “Energy Never Dies” really delves into the stories of the improbable successes (Ebony magazine, “Soul Train,” Earth, Wind & Fire) that give us something to believe in. Self-determi- nation is also a big part of the way in which we move (as in “okay, this is how the mainstream is operating, and we might be locked out of that, so we just might have to create a shadow operation to get this done”), and many of those improbable successes were built around creating something to fill a need. As your book unfolds, there’s that sense of generations of artists teaching and impacting younger artists who learn the craft by creating, making and performing. How do you think that practice continues today? There’s a long-storied tradition of teaching art- ists in Chicago actively raising up the next gener- 10 ation of creatives from Gwendolyn Brooks mento- ring a young Don L. Lee, who became Baba Haki Madhubuti to Brother Mike Hawkins mentoring Noname, Saba and Chance The Rapper, among hundreds of other talented youth, but there’s also a passive impact that has occurred through media made here. I remember hearing Common’s “Invocation” on Chicago is a close-knit city like that. Curtis WGCI in high school or reading a Jet magazine on my grand- Mayfield resounds so clearly in “Energy Never Dies.” mother’s coffee table and feeling like I was a part of that thing, Could you share a bit about how he was (and is) and that connection was important. And very Black. such a powerful figure and a song we deeply need by Mayfield as 2021 ends and we enter 2022? As much as this book documents stories that should be recovered and celebrated, were there Curtis Mayfield captured the tenor of mid-twentieth cen- stories that you left out of the book? I’d love to tury Black Chicago arguably more prolifically than any other hear about at least one of those. sole songwriter. From whisper-soft love songs (“The Makings Of You”) to odes of empowerment (“We’re A Winner,” “Move I don’t think I could have possibly included all the stories, On Up”). I have an ongoing DJ set at the 95th Street Dan Ryan which is a testament to the stuff we are made of. A lot of what CTA station through the Rebuild Foundation, and every time has been interesting to readers so far has been how I tease I play “We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” the energy out the interconnections of seemingly disparate segments of bouncing off the commuters is palpable. So epic, so powerful, Black Chicago. For instance, the fact that the Staple Singers some fifty-odd years later. performed for the opening of a legitimate business enterprise run on the West Side by the Conservative Vice Lords. Along those lines, as a young Catholic schoolgirl my grandmother “Energy Never Dies: Afro-Optimism worked as a seamstress for the Nation of Islam, sewing the and Creativity in Chicago” by Ayana Contreras, modest women’s garments. University of Illinois Press, 184 pages

DANCE The University of Chicago is host to nearly 100 ARCHITECTURE arts organizations, initiatives, and academic THEATER programs. Experience world-class visual, DESIGN performing, cinematic, and literary arts at VISUAL ART Court Theatre, the Smart Museum of Art, the MUSIC Logan Center for the Arts, the Film Studies LITERATURE Center, the Department of Music, Arts + Public FILM Life, Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, UChicago MEDIA ARTS Presents, DoVA, the Oriental Institute, the UChicago Library, the Neubauer Collegium, …AND MORE Theater & Performance Studies, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and many, many more. With a vast network of artists, faculty, students, and community partners presenting exciting, thought-provoking work, you’ll want to make UChicago your next cultural destination. Above: Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center (CMDC)’s world-famous Hiplet Ballerinas perform at the Logan Center. arts.uchicago.edu • 773.702.ARTS • @uchicagoarts

by Pia Singh Newcity DECEMBER 2021 “The essential elements of witness which do not vary increasingly territorial, the ramifications of which have been historically include: consistency between words and actions; devastating for rethinking large-scale social reform. While boldness which urges the witnesses to confront existence as a the lives we lead in the arts are to some degree interdisci- permanent risk; radicalization leading both the witnesses plinary in their essence, seldom do we see this reflected in and the ones receiving that witness to increasing action; the design of these institutions. We assume that specializ- courage to love (which, far from being accommodation to an ing or focusing on a specific skill is “more” valuable, enforc- unjust world, is rather the transformation of that world in ing a disciplinary hierarchy that places one skill or discipline behalf of the increasing liberation of humankind); and faith over another. This moves us away from a greater under- in the people, since it is to them that witness is made.” standing of a shared common purpose that brought us to the arts in the first place. It is in this context that “Stockyard — Paulo Freire Institute: 25 Years of Art and Radical Pedagogy” at the 12 “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” 1970 DePaul Art Museum provides some perspective on how integrative, interdisciplinary institutional building can accommodate a multitude of perspectives and house con- versations and projects that are open to interpretation. The Stockyard Institute can be read as both a pedagog- of social and economic ical collective and a nomadic artist-driven practice. Its turmoil, each of us are activities include experimental arts education, projects navigating some level rooted in cooperative knowledge-building and cultural pro- of crisis. From social duction through radio broadcasting, music and perfor- welfare, healthcare, childcare and education, the long mance. For the duration of the exhibition, its practices are shadow cast by the pandemic has come to reveal how the presented through a public archive, visual documentation, lives of those most vulnerable have been pushed further testimonies and in-situ objects uprooted from communal into insecurity, forcing us to reassess our relationship with spaces, in order to compose a relatively holistic view of a caretaking and notions of power. There have been debates lived practice. Presented in the rarefied context of the around the role of power in relation to the institution: from museum, the exhibition is a curatorial undertaking by the White House in upholding the tenets of American Rachel L.S. Harper, who aims to present a “pro-spective.” democracy, to the responsibility of museums to their audi- She considers the exhibition a prelude to Duignan’s vision ences, to the lack of funding in Chicago Public Schools for the next twenty-five years, where the artist and his col- that leaves a large amount of childcare on the backs of laborators dream of expanding the Stockyard Institute, in working parents. It is a gargantuan task to imagine an collaboration with the museum, to imagine a Chicago intentionally caring paradigm in the face of apathetic social model of an arts education department. While the exhibi- structures. Over the last decade, we’ve also observed muse- ums and educational institutions tout the term “interdisci- plinary” regarding new pedagogic approaches and public RIGHT programs. Institutions, rife with insecurities like competitive tenure positions and lean departmental funding, have grown Aerial view of “Pedagogical Factory,” 2007. Photo: courtesy Michelle Litvin and Jim Duignan



14 Newcity DECEMBER 2021

tion itself resists aligning with a standard solo or group DECEMBER 2021 Newcity presentation, its format exemplifies the dispersed author- ship of Duignan’s practice, so much of which aims for no 15 singular aesthetic or wholeness. Chicago-based scholar and curator Mary Jane Jacob describes a lived practice as “an ever evolving work of art” and it is through this lens that Duignan’s practice can be situated as not only lived but embodied; a space where the artist’s process and its byproducts live within a continuum of human evolution. To experience the exhibition is to understand the nature of lived practices. While researchers and academics have placed much emphasis on defining the field of social prac- tice, there are also practices that embed artistic practice within communities. In the anthology “The Art of Direct Action: Social Sculpture and Beyond,” professor of art theory Karen van den Berg describes this as an anti-eco- nomic “social turn” where artists are trying to understand how to shape and transform social relations. Duignan’s practice and the Stockyard Institute function inside and outside the institutional sphere, pushing social action in dialogue with the city’s diverse citizenry. Occupying “avail- able spaces”—vacant buildings, garages, empty lots, city parks and playgrounds—to transform them into safe spaces for Chicago’s youth, Duignan addresses ideas through projects that can best be described as conceptual community interventions. Working itinerantly as a public studio, radio station, open-resource center, collapsible per- formance space and nomadic school for thinking about open, experimental pedagogic structures, his practice is a site for emergence. (An emergent system is one where the whole may be more than the sum of its parts.) Much like ordered systems, which are concerned with relations, and organizing systems, concerned with connections, emer- gent systems are those in which presence is pushed to the foreground. In order to find common awareness and val- ues within a community, Duignan and his collaborators spur processes through careful collective inquiry into the grey areas of community problems. Generously supported by former DePaul Art Museum curator and director Julie Rodrigues Widholm, interim director Laura-Caroline De Lara, assistant curator Ionit Behar and David Maruzzella, Duignan, Harper and Maru- zzella have compiled a meticulously detailed monograph to support the exhibit, reflecting on the collective nature of the Stockyard Institute and its processes. A whole view of the Stockyard Institute, like most organic systems, is practically impossible. It can only be described from different points of view and, in this way, attempts to do so through the catalog. To posit the early days of the Stockyard Institute in the mid-nineties, when Duignan began to work with Chicago’s youth in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, would be factual. But it wouldn’t do justice to the long form of the artists’ practice. LEFT “Constellation,” 2021, images, objects, notes, dimensions variable. Image courtesy Jim Duignan and DePaul Art Museum

Born in Chicago to immigrants of Irish and Russian a low-watt transmitter into class, he later cut his teeth with descent, Duignan was the eldest of five siblings. His for- friends in the back alleys of Waveland Avenue, where Duig- mative experience of care extends back to his mother, nan fondly recalls the impetus for “Planter Boxes” Bruna, and his great-grandmother, Manya, who spent (2006-present). Hiding schoolboy contraband like pen much of her adult life in the footsteps of Russian commu- knives, secret messages and smoke tins, he sees the boxes nist feminists and progressive female reformists like Jane as a communication network that taps into the silenced, Addams. He fondly recalls the influence of their ideologies oft hidden voices within the city. It is here that we find a on his urge to center care, describing how growing up with tender tribute to Duignan’s longtime collaborator and con- a father who worked as a policeman left him with an ceptual partner, Michael Piazza (1955-2006), whose pres- aversion to coercive, male-dominated and patriarchal ways ence encircles a large part of the Stockyard Institute. of being. Personal experiences with homicide, suicide Duignan met Piazza as an MFA student during their time and a missing brother spurred his early inclinations to at the University of Illinois Chicago. Under the heavy influ- navigate the city on his own terms. Spending most of ence of conceptualism, French Situationists, Fluxus and his time in the city’s institutions, he would visit the Hull Joseph Beuys, they were moved by Chicago fixtures such House where his great-grandmother taught, attend studio as Julia Fish, Carlos Cortez, Martin Puryear and Charles art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, spend time at Wilson, collaborating in informal ways both within and out- the Garfield Park Conservatory Fern Room and traverse side the arts community. Deeply bonded by their love for the rural landscapes of Argo, Illinois and Westville, Indiana, this city and their disdain for the limitations of art school with family. But Duignan insists his most meaningful pedagogy, they claimed the city’s public spaces as their influences came from the city’s streets. Parks, abandoned studio, engaging contested histories, politics and issues lots and alleyways informed an early understanding and affecting the working classes. The “Austin Tourist Bureau” navigation of risk. (2002), “DuSable Life House” (2001), and “Constellation” The “Gang-Proof Suit,” 1995-2000, was a turning point (2021), speak of their intimate entanglement in both work Newcity DECEMBER 2021 for Duignan. On being invited to what is now the San and life, embedding their legacy within Chicago’s mythic Miguel Middle School, to work with a group of middle and civic history. “It is a show about tactics and tech- school dropouts, Duignan considered how to develop an niques,” Duignan says. “We were people and issues hiding experimental art school pedagogy. In an abandoned, infor- in plain sight. We knew what we had to do. At the root of mal school on 48th and Damen, the group collectively that lay the question, ‘What kind of community do you want addressed the sixth-graders’ fears of gang-related gun to live in?’” He recalls wandering and hanging out with violence, radically reimagining how they could reclaim Piazza, allowing the work to channel through them much agency within their community. In a space freed of judg- like receivers of a radio transmission. ment and fear, removed from the prying eyes of priests, Harper speaks to this “flow state” Duignan and Piazza teachers and parents, they took time to build trust, and in embraced as a uniquely Chicago style of operating: turn, placed their questions and concerns on a shared wall, “Through their life and times, they engaged with neighbor- 16 yielding imaginative solutions to systemic problems. This hoods that were personal to them, navigating personal space continues to be home to the Stockyard Institute, a questions as artists of how to move through life together. nod to the Union Stockyards that once occupied the land. It wasn’t a pure conceptual or theoretical experiment for Duignan’s youth appears surreptitiously throughout the them.” Working in informal, intuitive ways, each project, exhibition. The “Taft High School Eagle,” 2021, made of interaction and event are symbols that characterize their local found wood, symbolizes the artist’s multiple forma- function. Harper emphasizes that the objects themselves tive trajectories—as a student of Taft High School, a stu- in no way delineate the boundaries of the work of the dent from the Chicago Public School system and a former Stockyard Institute. They do, however, feel like totems of Eagle Scout. A tent made of military canvas lined in gold the “life forces” that once drove them into being. Engaging lamé, “Adaptive Operations + Stockyard Institute,” 2021, with the depth of each project one quickly realizes how a aspires to create a space for visitors to safely discuss, lived practice is opposed to the paradigm of the museum. question, argue and contemplate their place within the The presence of the Stockyard Institute’s collaborators is Stockyard Institute’s lifelines. In the tent, a mobile radio felt in their images in both the catalog and in a fifteen- station fills the airwaves with programming, serving as a minute digital video in the exhibitions archive. Duignan’s provocation and extending the Stockyard Institute’s long longtime collaborators, Davion Mathews, Jeff Kowalkowski history of broadcasting into the Lincoln Park neighborhood. and Lavie Raven of the University of Hip-Hop, are felt in the By activating a frequency lower than that used by federal collective consciousness that moves through the space. regulatory bodies, Duignan and his collaborators infiltrate At the heart of the Stockyard Institute is an intellectual cor- the system with sounds and voices from the ether. He nerstone that is often missed in educational institutions: likens the experience of the radio station to his time spent love and care. Care that can be described as an ethical rela- at school listening to “anything but the teacher.” Sneaking tionship based on both feelings of affection and a deep sense of service, requiring and producing sympathetic bonds that tie each collaborator to the other. At the Stock- RIGHT yard Institute, titles and hierarchies are tossed out the win- dow and brick and mortar is razed to allow all to rebuild Students visit the Stockyard Institute archive, 2021. ideas together. The depth and quality of its relationships are Photo: courtesy Zoey Dalbert and DePaul Art Museum

a testament to the Stockyard Institute and its work, as col- Placing youth and participant voices front and center, DECEMBER 2021 Newcity laborators like Raven and Mathews continue to partner Duignan has created and fostered a practice that crosses with Duignan in pedagogic experiments across the city. neighborhood and disciplinary lines. Without taking the 17 role of pedagogue too seriously, it is through constant A room titled “Playgrounds” is at the summit of the exhi- play—with ideas, words, positions and discussions that a bition. Advocating for the city’s playgrounds as sites for process of discovery is initiated, creating emergent path- democracy in action, Duignan and architectural historian ways to understand and address what Buckminister Fuller Jennifer Gray collaborated in 2014 to circulate their version called “wicked problems.” While institutionally, disciplinary of a 1905 pamphlet (also on view at the exhibition’s archive). boundaries are effective in naming needs, it is only too A stark confrontation with an empty “See Saw” (2014), and often that well-laid strategies and syllabi fall short. By a wall-mounted, static “Chicago Swing” (2016), serve as determining the desires of the participants he engages reminders of the racialized, political and class-based impli- with first, Duignan moves away from a neoliberal, capital- cations of power that taint children’s experiences of free- ist, need-based economy. Duignan reverses an age-old dom and play, safety and risk. Making care an act that is institutional assumption of what-is and what-is-needed either provided or not, the psychological impact of the to a future facing what-is-desired and what-can-be. If the static “flying machine” as Duignan calls it, makes a mark Stockyard Institute can be seen as a guiding energy with on anyone whose freedom is curtailed. Both pieces, made those who come into contact with it, as a space for ambi- of salvaged wood, operate as symbols of control, cooper- tion, exploration and a will toward unfulfilled human need, ation and division. The latter incorporates wood from a perhaps we can address educational reform beyond the police barricade as a nod to Duignan’s relationship with limitations of disciplinary boundaries and hierarchies. It his father. The fourteen-foot “See Saw” is a simple yet is in this that Duignan sets an example of how careful equally charged object in its immovability. Disquieted, I attention, uninterrupted imagination and open heart-felt question the reasons why there aren’t better policies to communication could manifest a world-yet-to-be. protect at-risk youth as I am deeply troubled by the deep- seated communal divide on the grounds of race, class, “Stockyard Institute: 25 years of Art and Radical Pedagogy” gender and sexuality in America. In the academic world, is on view through February 13, 2022. A supporting catalogue these conversations often arise and I think of the negative ramifications in intellectualizing these issues. It seems of the same name is available at the DePaul Art Museum, futile to ideologize the suffering of people in classrooms. providing scholarship on the work of Jim Duignan and the In lieu of this, what value does the Stockyard Institute’s Stockyard Institute with contributions from Rachel L.S. Harper, provide us with to exorcize social evils, and what does this have to do with interdisciplinary play? Jorge Lucero, David Maruzzella, Allison Peters Quinn, Nato Thompson, Jennifer Gray and Julie Rodgriues Wildholm.

IS THIS THE END OF THE TIKINewcity DECEMBER 2021 18 BAR? We asked local by John Paci c Islanders Greenfield what they think

DECEMBER 2021 Newcity 19 I ASKED But to most people in the mainland United States, the term DAN TAULAPAPA is probably more likely to be associated with so-called “tiki McMULLIN, culture,” aka “Polynesian pop.” That is, fanciful depictions of a New York-based writer, artist and filmmaker “of Samoan and Irish-Jewish descent,” to define the Pacific islands—borrowing indigenous imagery from plac- the word “tiki.” Their work often focuses on their Indigenous heritage. (Taulapapa McMullin iden- es like Hawaii, Easter Island, Tahiti and New Zealand—found tifies as a fa‘afafine, a Samoan third gender identity, and uses “they” pronouns.) in drinking establishments, restaurants, dinner theaters and “Tiki is a deity, similar to Adam or Prometheus, other places of amusement. who went from island to island lifting the sky and bringing fire from the earth,” they responded. The tiki design aesthetic was launched in California in the The term can also refer to a carved image of a god or ancestor. s by white men like Donn Beach, founder of the restau- Hala Kahiki in River Grove. rant Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood, and Victor Jules Photo: John Greenfield Bergeron, Jr., who opened Trader Vic’s bar in Oakland. These places featured palm trees; paintings of Polynesian women; “beachcomber” decor like fishing nets, glass floats and star- fish; and tiki carvings, masks and spears. Tiki bars specialized in complex “tiki drinks” based on rum and fruit juice with elaborate garnishes and names like the Zombie, the Mission- ary’s Downfall, and the Mai Tai, the moniker of which was supposedly taken from a Tahitian word for “the best.” The trend picked up steam in the postwar era, when Amer- ican GIs returning from the Pacific theater were nostalgic for the sights, sounds and flavors of the South Seas. The aes- thetic lost popularity in the early s, maybe in part

Newcity DECEMBER 2021 because the bamboo and thatched roofs prevalent in tiki bars But amidst all this supposed fun, there have been lingering were uncomfortably reminiscent of the huts U.S. soldiers were questions about the genre. For example, is the whimsical use burning in Vietnam. of Pacific Island terminology and iconography —particularly Tiki culture saw a revival in the nineties due to renewed religious imagery like tiki carvings and moai, Easter Island interest in midcentury design, fashion, and all things retro. The statues—in these establishments su iciently respectful of ac- 20 twenty-first-century craft-cocktail revolution led to a new tual Polynesian cultures? And does this lighthearted take on appreciation of the early tiki drink recipes, and saw the open- Oceania inappropriately gloss over the more uncomfortable ings of hipster-friendly nouveau-tiki bars across the nation. aspects of the region’s history and modern-day reality? To Polynesian pop enthusiasts, tiki venues are places of When the cocktail lounge Lost Lake opened in Chicago’s relaxation, nostalgia and escape from everyday life on the Logan Square neighborhood in January , my sense was mainland. I’ve had a fondness for the genre since I was a kid that its owners, who are white, were mindful of these issues. in the seventies, when a member of my Ashkenazi extended While the place was branded as a tiki bar—for example, its family owned a tropical-themed hotel in Miami Beach called website was LostLakeTiki.com—and served the traditional The Hawaiian Isle. drinks in a beachcomber setting, the decor and drinkware For tiki culture fans, going to such a venue can be an were nearly devoid of tikis. immersive experience. There’s the kitschy, often windowless In the wake of the George Floyd police murder and renewed decor; the aloha shirts and sarongs worn by the sta ; the calls for addressing past and present racial injustices, tiki ven- soothing Hawaiian music or faux-global “exotica” tunes played ues have come under increased scrutiny, with some people on the sound system; the food, typically Chinese-American arguing that the format may be irredeemably flawed. Leading cuisine with tropical influences, or Hawaiian-style o erings; the charge has been the Pasifika Project, “an organization and most of all, those strong, sweet drinks served in tiki mugs. founded by and created for individuals of Oceanic descent Given the grim realities of the Chicago winter, it’s no surprise within the hospitality and spirits industry,” which has a read- our region has long been a hotspot for Polynesian pop. There ing list of tiki criticism on its website. are at least ten tiki venues (although not all of them identify as “The drinks genre itself is rooted in colonialism and imperi- such) across the Chicago region. These range from Three Dots alism,” argues cofounder Samuel Jiminez, a Californian of and a Dash, a nightclub that opened in the downtown River Samoan and Mexican-American ancestry, in a conversation North nightlife district in , last year on the beverage website Punch. “To me, there’s no to The Breakers, a tiki-Chi- way around it. To me, non-appropriative tiki doesn’t exist. It’s nese restaurant in business not a thing. It can’t be a thing.” since , located almost It was a sign of the times in August when, as Lost Lake Hala Kahiki in October . fifty miles away in far-north- reopened after an eighteen-month hiatus during the pan- Photo: John Greenfield west suburban Crystal Lake. demic, the bar announced it was rebranding from a tiki lounge

The back bar at AO Chef Shangri-La Hawaiian Hideout in in February . February . Photo: John Photo: John Greenfield Greenfield to a “tropical” one. This included a menu know what other local tiki venue owners, many of whom are switch from old-school faux-Polynesian beverages to Latin-American cocktails people of color, think of this controversy. Most importantly, like margaritas, piña coladas and mojitos. what do Chicago-area Pacific Islanders have to say on the The restaurant news website Eater Chi- cago reported that Lost Lake’s decision subject: Are tiki bars, restaurants and dinner theaters inher- came after years of feedback from multi- ple people in our city’s hospitality and ently disrespectful of their heritage? social justice activism communities, who argued that white folks opening a tiki bar First I check in with McGee. In he worked with the DECEMBER 2021 Newcity was harmful to people of color. One of them was Chicago bartender and activist local restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You to open the Ashtin Berry, who’s Black, and is the only local person quoted in the article, aside from the Lost Lake sta ers themselves. aforementioned Three Dots and a Dash, which features plenty According to Eater, criticism of tiki as a genre with “racist of Polynesian religious imagery. McGee was apparently so and colonialist baggage” by Berry and others at the annual Chicago Style cocktail conference, organized by Lost Lake into the concept at the time that his bar even featured mugs co-owner Allison Shelby and two other white women, led to the cancellation of the event. “The myth making of tiki… is with his bearded, bespectacled, tiki-fied likeness. white supremacy at the expense of Polynesian and Pacific Islander traditions,” Berry told the website. But McGee confirms my suspicion that when he and his Lost Lake spokesperson Carrie Sloan, who’s white, indi- partners opened Lost Lake two years later, they kept it tiki cated that the bar owners are now on the same page with their critics, telling Eater via email, “It’s become clear that tiki carving-free in an e ort to be more considerate of real Poly- culture cannot be divorced from cultural appropriation and colonialism, which is the reason for the shift to ‘tropical.’” nesian cultures and people. “Our intent was to distill the spirit However, Berry was unimpressed by Lost Lake’s change of the first tiki bars down to their essence—fun, tropical, trans- of heart towards tiki, telling Eater she still doubts that Lost Lake’s owners actually care about people of color. portative. We eschewed typical tiki motifs—tiki idols and the 21 Some key voices, however, were missing from the Eater like had no place here—in the hopes of creating a di erent, piece. Conspicuous by his absence was Lost Lake co-owner Paul McGee, Chicago’s most famous mixologist and the lead- more welcoming vacation hideaway.” ing figure from our city’s s tiki revival. I also wanted to “Over the six-and-a-half years since opening, as people and as a business, we’ve done a lot of learning and growing and changing,” McGee says. “By listening to activists like the founders of the Pasifika Project, our understanding has grown— and along with that, the changes we needed to make became clearer. During the summer of , we finally stopped using the word ‘tiki’ as a descriptor.” When I stop by, Lost Lake’s decor, which had always been minimalist by tiki bar standards, is almost spartan. Gone are the glass fishing floats hanging in the front window, the fishing basket light fixtures over the bar, and the pu erfish chandelier. A picture of a woman in a grass skirt has been taken down, a rock wall is covered with a curtain, and fake skulls have been removed from the fish tank. Unlike the last time I visited, sta members aren’t wearing aloha shirts, and vintage R&B, not typically heard in tiki bars, is playing on the sound system. A bartender says these changes are part of the rebranding.





Newcity DECEMBER 2021 Ii-Epstein says she appreciates Lost Fellow Halau i Ka Pono student Cyn- eos. It ends with the final wedding kiss Lake switching its terminology from “tiki” thia Ohata is a doctor of family medicine from the Elvis movie “Blue Hawaii,” fol- to “tropical.” “Honestly, I think I’m going of Native Hawaiian, Japanese and Chi- lowed by an image of a nuclear testing to start changing my language to use nese ancestry, who grew up in Hawaii. blast at Bikini Atoll with the word “Aloha” that word instead myself.” She says she’d be willing to perform in a and a smiling emoticon. Chicago Public School teacher Lorel tiki venue at “an event that was thought- Taulapapa McMullin also published a Madden, who’s of \"Native Hawaiian, Irish, ful,” but otherwise probably wouldn’t poem called “Tiki Manifesto,” that begins: German and Portuguese” ancestry, grew choose to spend time in such a place. 24 up in Chicago. She studies hula at Halau Via email, she says, “The heart of the Tiki mug, tiki mug i Ka Pono dance school in Oak Park. Hawaii that raised me to be connected My face, my mother’s face, Like Ii-Epstein, Madden takes a to the 'Aina’ [“Land”] and to understand my father’s face, my sister’s face somewhat dim view of tiki culture. “The how the shape of the land a ects when Tiki mug, tiki mug way tiki imagery is used in bars and and where the rain falls which then restaurants, they do misappropriate it. a ects the shape of the land and what White beachcombers in tiki bars drinking It’s kitschy, and there’s no real under- grows there... and what a pikake flower zombie cocktails from tiki mugs standing of what it actually means.” or a white ginger or a yellow ginger The undead, the Tiki people, However, she’s performed hula at the flower smells like... and how I might tell my mother’s face, my father’s face Tiki Terrace and speaks positively of it. you about it with a flutter of my hands The black brown and ugly that make “A lot of fundraising goes on there for the paired with a gentle inhalation and a customers feel white and beautiful Hawaiian community, like for people luxurious blink while my hips carve a protesting against the thirty-meter tele- pattern like an ocean's meditation... and The poem just gets angrier from scope they’re trying to build on sac- how this knowledge and connection there. But Taulapapa McMullin tells me red land on Mauna Kea on the Island can teach beauty and respect and the process of creating these works was of Hawaiʻi.” appreciation as a way of life... is not in cathartic, and they’re pleased by the She also has kind words for owner those tikis.” recent movement toward tiki venues Phil Zuziak, arguing that it doesn’t make Samoan American artist Dan Taula- “cleansing themselves of this patina of a di erence that he’s not a Pacific papa McMullin has used art to make colonialism and racism.” Islander. “His heart is in the right place, caustic critiques of tiki culture. One of “Yeah,” Taulapapa McMullin says, and it’s like it’s his adopted culture.” them is a forty-five-minute film called “Why not just call it a tropical bar and “ Tikis” that juxtaposes lighthearted, have Polynesian performers there and stereotypical and/or racist depictions of celebrate our culture in a healthier way the Pacific Islands in pop culture, includ- that doesn’t disrespect our religious fig- ing tiki bars, with clips that show the ures. I’d feel more comfortable in a bar Lorel Madden, second from left. darker side of the region’s history, such like that. Maybe I’d meet some Pacific Photo courtesy of Halau i Ka Pono as military propaganda and protest vid- Islanders there and we’d have a hoot.”

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DIFFERENTYou Will Always be Newcity DECEMBER 2021Ted Ishiwari'sIN 1966, MY FAMILY MOVED from the far Northwest Side of Chicago to the DePaul University Chicago Story area. While attending Oscar Mayer Elementary School for sixth grade, I was almost immediately 26 “adopted” by a tight-knit circle of friends, and Ted Ishiwari was among them. Our childhood by Shawn Shiflett stomping grounds were rougher around the edges back then and a far cry from the affluent neighbor- hood it is today. But even though there was a sprinkling of derelict houses and street gangs to dodge, in most ways our lives were full of indepen- dence. During bone-chilling winters, we’d play basketball at the DePaul Settlement House gym or ice skate on one of Lincoln Park's frozen lagoons. In the humid heat of summers, we’d play twelve-inch softball on McCormick Seminary’s athletic field, and then ride our bikes to the Fullerton Avenue beach for a cool dip in the lake. The bicycle path that stretches for miles along the lakefront of the city was almost strictly the domain of kids as the adult bicycle craze still hadn’t gotten underway. CTA commuter trains gave us quick access to Wrigley Field for a Cubs game, to downtown, or to Comiskey Park all the way on the city’s South Side, if we felt daring enough to check up on the White Sox. Whether from actual events or from the rose-tinted lens of memory, I am inclined to say that much during that stage of my life was good. Throughout the decades, I have remained in on- and-off-again contact with Ted and thought of him when I began to write a series of personal histories on “Race in America.\" This is the result of multiple interviews conducted over a span of three years, in phone conversations, email and text messages.

Ted Ishiwari. Photo: Nathan Keay

Newcity DECEMBER 2021 TED ISHIWARI: Many of these facts and dates concerning Ishiwari Home is Chicago and the house where I’ve lived for the family history are verified by “stacks of random notes” NEXT PAGE last sixty-three years on Sheffield Avenue. I have two that Ted’s father, Hiroshi Ishiwari, wrote in Japanese Ted’s grandfather sisters, Chiye and Tomi, who are ten and eleven years and kept in his desk drawer. Hiroshi went by the and family (1917). older than me. Mom was your typical be-careful-of-ev- name “Roy,” possibly an Americanized shortening 28 Ted’s father, Hiroshi erything mom, but my father, who was forty-four when of his given name. Years after Roy’s death in 1986, (a.k.a. “Roy”), I was born, is where I got most of my family history. Ted gave the notes to Reiko Tokiyama, the wife of is seated to the far left with his My grandfather was a tailor. He came from Japan to his nephew, Brian Tokiyama. Reiko, a Japanese hands folded. Seattle, Washington in 1903. By 1905 he was living in national, translated the writing into English. 1 Brooklyn, New York to learn how to design and make In 1921, my mom was born in Ventura, California, which Iva Toguri was one clothing in the westernized fashion. He returned to the of the so-called West Coast and married my grandmother, another Jap- is outside of Los Angeles. I’m not sure how she met my ‘Tokyo Roses” who anese national, in 1908, in Alameda, California. And then dad, because one was up in northern California, and served as English- beginning in 1909, my father, his two brothers and the one was in southern California. They courted and got speaking radio voices first of two sisters were born. Once my grandfather married right before World War II. What‘s interesting is for the Japanese government during learned western tailoring, they all picked up and went that my mom and her parents went to Japan to meet my World War II. A U.S. back to Japan in 1919, just after World War I. My father father’s family and get their okay for the marriage. This citizen, she was was seven years old. If you put the timeline together, was one year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Har- convicted of treason Japan wanted to become like the rest of the world, and bor. Iva Toguri1 was also in Japan at that time, and my after the war and served six years and my grandfather thought he could make some money mom and Iva were acquaintances. I heard stories that two months in prison. dressing Japanese citizens in the new style. That was President Gerald the whole idea. there were people following my mom and her parents Ford pardoned Toguri in 1977 after it was My father didn’t like it in Japan. It was too structured, in Japan. Caucasian people. (According to Roy Ishiwari’s discovered that too rigid, and he thought, “I’m out of here.” As a fifteen- notes, his wife, Aiko Ishiwari, was followed by U.S. military witnesses testifying year-old teenager, he hopped on a freighter, went back police in Japan.) Then my mom came back to the United against her had to the United States, and ended up living in the San committed perjury. Francisco/Oakland area. This was in the 1920s and well States, war broke out, and Iva Toguri was not allowed In 2005, she to leave Japan. She was a UCLA graduate, very learned, could speak eloquently, and the Japanese government was awarded the before World War II. So, growing up, I was hearing all used her. Meanwhile, my mother and father got put in Edward J. Herlihy these family stories from before I was born, and it’s fas- an internment camp in Arizona for Japanese Americans. Citizenship Award cinating to me how my father went back and forth They didn’t talk a whole lot about what it was like for by the World War II between countries. them there, but that’s where my sisters were born. Veterans Committee.

DECEMBER 2021 Newcity 29

Newcity DECEMBER 2021 30 Roy Ishiwari wrote about being bused from the Gila criminatory. The jobs were in Chicago. My dad said, “We River War Relocation Center in Arizona to Idaho just couldn’t go back to California. The memories were with other male Japanese American prisoners. There, too bad.” they picked potatoes and other crops. For one day’s work on a sugar beet farm, he earned $4.50. When From Roy Ishiwari’s notes: harvesting ended, the internees were bused back to “For our marriage, we rented a house [in Los Angeles]. We the internment camp in Arizona. repainted, put in a new door, brought new furniture for the bedroom and living room and brought new appliances After the war, Iva was released from Japan, my family for the kitchen. I had a new wife, but in April, we were was released from Arizona, and they all immigrated to informed that the Japanese would be expelled from the Chicago. This is what I was told: that Chicago was con- state of California. The photograph in the Los Angeles sidered an open city to Japanese Americans. There was Times showed that Pearl Harbor was seriously damaged… a lot of industry here, and the industries weren’t too dis- Soon after that, the FBI came and searched our house.

Most Japanese were kicked out of their workplace. Our As I’ve already said, Chiye and Tomi, which translate DECEMBER 2021 Newcity bank account was frozen, but we could receive 100 dollars… to “wisdom” and “wealth” in Japanese, were born in the I thought our family would also be placed in a camp Gila River internment camp in 1942 and 1944. I was born 31 somewhere, so we packed our stuff. White people who were ten years later. I remember my dad saying, “We wanted allegedly our friends said they would buy our new furniture you to have an American name.” I think it was from Ted PREVIOUS PAGE at one-third of the original price. People who wanted our Williams, the famous major league baseball player. Not Ted and his family, newly fixed house came and said they had got an agreement Theodore. Ted, a nickname. My parents would not speak 1961. From left: from the landlord to move into the house as soon as we to me in lengthy Japanese conversations. It was always Ted's father Hiroshi, moved out. They came to our house once or twice a day as in English. I remember my dad saying, “I have this Ted's sisters Chiye if it was their own house and asked us again and again accent. I don’t speak very good English.” I believe he felt and Tomi, Ted's when we were going to move out. My wife yelled, 'Get self-conscious when speaking to his American super- mother Aiko, and Ted. out, get out!' and cried. We got a notice from the FBI and visors where he was a steel-rule die maker, or to his went to the City Hall. They took our fingerprints. There friends, and he wanted to make sure that his children 2 we received our number[s] for the first time. After that could speak English well. I guess my parents’ rationale My sixty-six-year-old I was called by my number, not by my name.” was, If we teach them two languages, they’re going to self is disturbed that get mixed up and then speak like us. That was their fear. I laughed and was Ted continues: impressed by Ted’s So, Chicago was a destination city, a place to relocate Did you feel like you were different from us use of the word “Jap,” to for a lot of the Japanese Americans from all of the ten [Caucasian and Latinx friends]? but as I recollect, internment camps in the west. My family originally set- my sixth-grade self tled on Chicago’s South Side around 43rd Street. They No! I felt like everybody else. thought that Ted stayed there from 1945 until 1954 and were part of the was making the white flight from the neighborhood. They felt racial prej- How about with girls? point that he was udice, and they actually had racial prejudice against the his own man just African Americans moving into the area. I guess my sis- The only time I would feel different that way is when I got like the rest of us. ters experienced some name-calling or rock throwing? our class pictures, and my parents would look at J___ or Something bad coming home from school. I was born M___, or… I can almost still name all the Japanese girls. in 1954, and then I think we moved in 1955 or 1956 to My parents would ask, “What’s their last names?” be- Chicago’s Near North Side. cause they were trying to see who was in the neighbor- In the 1960s, as a little boy, I was attracted to all the hood and if they remembered family names from Califor- westerns and war movies on TV. They used the word nia, church or other community organizations that my “Jap,” and the Japanese were always the bad guys. I parents belonged to in Chicago. So that would be the wanted to be on the good guys’ side [laughs]. I think the only recognition that I was Japanese, too, as opposed to way I processed this was I had a division where I may being with you and the rest of our group of friends, think- have been Japanese, but I was also an American, and ing I was just another one of the guys. But the Chicago what the Japanese did, they were bad. JA’s were a pretty close group, and for the most part my One day during lunchtime, I was walking across the parents’ generation all banded together. playground of our grade school, Oscar Mayer. Some- body hit a softball, and it was coming right at me. I I can remember that you were good at deflecting. stopped and thought, Better catch this. No, I can’t catch In math class, you had a compass, and it broke, and this because I’m not playing. Then I started moving again, you said, “It’s cheap. It’s Jap,” and we [a few friends and the ball dropped. I just heard, “Get that Jap off the present] all cracked up just hearing that from you. field!” The guy was angry that I was in the way. It was It was a very quick thing. I was impressed.2 I also the first time I heard what was directed toward the evil remember, a year later in seventh grade, you were people on TV being directed at me. I was like, Whoa! the first person to tell me that there were internment That confused me. I placed myself in one demographic camps. You just said, “Most of us [Japanese and not in the other, and now I’m finding out… maybe Americans] were in camps.” And I somehow got I’m… I don’t know. the point, but then the conversation moved on. One conversation I do remember having was my fam- ily talking at the dinner table about being an American. Your first anecdote, about the compass…as soon as you “Yes,” my father said, “you’re a Japanese American, and an American first, and Japan and Japanese are really said it, I thought of my cousin, Don. (Don was a Kawamo- different. But…” (Ted, sitting across from me, taps his finger to, Ted’s mother’s side of the family. According to Ted, his mom firmly on my dining room table for added emphasis.) “You will and Don could be “...very vocal, sometimes volatile, and were always be different here. You deserve to have all of the known to show their feelings on their shirt sleeves.”) He went American rewards or goals that all Americans have, but they’ll always look at you differently because you look to Lakeview High in Chicago. Those types of feelings with different.” I’m sure I’m paraphrasing. I just remember him were tripled, especially with the war movies. He him saying, “You will always be different.” That, fifty would say, “That’s a Jap!” or if we reversed roles while years later, is something that has stuck with me. playing war, he would say, “I’m the dirty sneaky Jap.” He referred to products using that vernacular: “This is a cheap Jap product.” He didn’t hold back how he felt about

JUNE 2019 WHO REALLY BOOKS IN CHICAGO + EVE EWING Give the gift of cultural intelligence NEWCITY December 2018 SEPTEMBER 2020 NOVEMBER 2020 FEATURING MARIA G A S PA R AND FALL ARTS PREVIEW MAY 2020 A SPECIAL ISSUE: GUEST EDITED BY Scoop Jackson A ND Tara Betts May 2019 Perfect Visions: Feb 2020 WHAT’S GOING ON ARTISTS, POETS AND WRITERS RESPOND TO Eleven Leaders on RACIAL INJUSTICE AND POLICE BRUTALITY BreAarktiosutst How the Twenties June 2020 JULY 2020 Will Roar in Chicago WHAT’S GOING ON JUNE 2020 Newcity TORONZO CANNON Newcity_May2019_coverFinal.indd 1 4/14/19 1:52 PM Newcity_Feb_2020_final.indd 1 1/19/20 10:06 PM 10/15/18 1:55 AM 1 Newcity_NOV_BOC_FOB-3.indd 1 newcityshop.com

those types of things, so I think I got that from Don, who DECEMBER 2021 Newcity got it from how American society viewed Japanese prod- 33 ucts at that time. (This was right before Toyota, Sony and other Japanese companies earned American consumers’ confi- We went to Oscar Mayer through sixth grade. And ABOVE dence by consistently producing superior quality products.) then we were all transferred to Arnold Upper Grade Ted Ishiwari. Photo: Center, which people would more commonly think of Nathan Keay. I also remember being at the dinner table and getting as a junior high—seventh and eighth grades. What scolded for using “Jap.” My Dad said, “Don’t use that was Arnold like for you, right across the street from word, and anybody who uses it toward you, he or she’s Waller High School? not your friend.” I think that’s still very apparent today, something you don’t refer to yourself as, and something So, instead of going to Mayer, this small neighborhood you don’t refer to your friends as. school that was a few blocks away from where I lived, I was maybe three-quarters of a mile away from Arnold. Were your parents angry about getting sent There was a much more diverse student body at Arnold to the camp? than there had been at Mayer. I don’t think there were any Black kids at Mayer. I know there were Hispanics, It’s not like they had a lot of material wealth. But just whereas Arnold was… mentally, you could easily still say that even if you have nothing, you lost everything…a sense of being or inde- Thirteen-percent Black. pendence. Yeah, I could see them…anybody saying something like that. But as far as showing anger… In Yeah, I don’t know what Waller was at the time, as far general, the Japanese are very honorific to whoever’s as its racial makeup, but it was totally different from ruling over them. Japan wasn’t that far removed from the feudal system. It just turned over in the late 1800s Mayer, too. (I mentioned to Ted that Waller was about fif- from the Shogun and lords and whatnot. But that’s not ty-percent Black at the time he and I were attending Arnold. to say there weren’t also Japanese Americans who pro- When I became a freshman at Waller, the white student pop- tested what was happening to them during World War ulation had plummeted to thirteen percent.) II and even got incarcerated for that. Did you feel an inner community with the other kids who were Japanese American? Did you talk, have your own jokes, a system of support? I didn’t have that kind of a Japanese American network. I didn’t go to the Japanese church as much as I should have. The church I went to was called Christ Congrega- tional Church. It was on Buckingham and Halsted. Then there was the Buddhist temple, which was right in Old Town, and another Buddhist temple in Uptown. Every summer the JA community would have the Resettlers’ Picnic. Maybe that wasn’t the official name, just what my parents called it. It was huge and held at different places depending on the size of the JA community at the time. I remember it being in Wheeling, Illinois, and at Caldwell Woods [a Chicago-area forest preserve]. But for me… I had you guys, friends from school. You guys were my base, my foundation for… Am I doing things okay? I looked at you guys as my barometer. DURING THE REAGAN YEARS, $20,000 reparations went to everybody who had been interned in the camps during World War II. My mom had already died in 1974, and my dad had died in 1986, but my sisters each got paid as did one of my brother-in-laws. I remem- ber conversations with my brother-in-laws at a family gathering where they were sarcastic about the repara- tions settlement. “Great, $20,000. Now I can go buy a car.” It was that tone because it was 1988 and intern- ment happened in 1942. A lot of internees had died, and many family descendants who had survived them were out of luck.

Newcity DECEMBER 2021 Our first year at Arnold, we heard of a shooting at have anything to worry about. You’ve got some dark in Waller. A white student with a rifle shot indiscriminately you.” She was being funny. But to hear that says some- 34 at students in the auditorium. That caused some con- thing about how people react or are able to talk about cern amongst my family. When my sisters went to Waller, something that for one group of people could be the it was a pretty good school, and they did really well, but scariest thing on earth, and for the other group, it’s not since then the student body had changed. During eighth even frightening. grade at Arnold, there were race riots at Waller. We My parents started to feel pressured, worried again. started hearing some commotion outside of the sec- I can remember them saying to each other, “Do we have ond-floor windows of our classroom, and everyone went to move?” There was that definite racial fear. They just to see what was happening. Down below, Arnold’s park- said, “You’re not going to Waller.” It was very, very ing lot was filled shoulder-to-shoulder with Black stu- impressed upon me that I had to go to Lane. “You have dents who were pushing, shoving and yelling. They must to do well on the entrance exam.” My mom was making have noticed us staring at them. Then I remember glass sure I traveled the straight and narrow. She’d say, “You’re breaking, bricks or rocks flying through the windows. At not going out with those kids until you finish studying,” that point, those who had enough sense ran for the door and, “Oh, my gosh, you didn’t do well on that test? Your across the room. I ducked under a desk and then basi- cally crawled to the door. We stood there in the hallway graaaaaades!” (In 1968, Lane Technical was an all-boys waiting, scared, and then the principal ordered us to go vocational high school, and you had to pass an entrance exam to the gymnasium. in order to attend there. Many boys went to Lane to avoid Chi- cago’s newly instituted desegregation plan, a plan that stipu- lated students must go to high school in the same district as I’M NOT SURE IF THIS WAS after MLK was shot or after where they live. For Ted and me, that school was Waller.) the riot that I just described during eighth grade at Ar- nold, but in my homeroom, we were all talking about LANE WAS HUGE, five-thousand kids. Maybe in that what to do after school was let out. The directions from freshman class there are four- or five-hundred people ABOVE our teacher were, “Do not stop anywhere, just go you were seeing for the first time. Lane took students Ted with his wife, straight home.” I don’t know how my name got brought from all across the North Side of the city. We had every Trudy (seated) and up in the conversation, but in front of the whole class, different type of kid or social demographic coming to their daughter, this one Black girl looked at me, and said, “You don’t that school. Sophie, 2019.

Where it was supposed to be safer for you Lane was a predominantly white school? DECEMBER 2021 Newcity than at Waller? Yes, lots of Polish Americans, Italian Americans, Irish 35 Yes, absolutely. Lane was the school where my parents Americans. Lane was also maybe four- or five-percent thought I wouldn’t be discriminated against, picked on Asian. What Lane didn’t have was a lot of African Amer- or have my life threatened. But the Vietnam War was icans. I’m sure that Blacks played it downlow in that en- starting to escalate, and the country was very anti-com- munist, anti-red. Anything like that was bad, and be- vironment, based on what I experienced. (A month or so cause American soldiers were being killed by the Viet- after Ted’s initial interview, he remembered that there had been namese, Asian stereotypes were easy to make. There a Black/white racial incident in Lane’s lunchroom during his were kids at Lane who felt emboldened to express their senior year, 1971-72. In a text message, he wrote, “I wasn’t in hostilities. This guy, Phil, constantly bullied me. We were the lunchroom when this occurred, but I did hear of chairs be- in the same homeroom and shared the same locker. The ing thrown.”) abuse didn’t start off immediately, but after a couple of weeks, it was “You fucking gook. You slant.” I would say, Even the teachers… I remember coach P_____. There “I’m not a gook. I’m not even Vietnamese.” “Then you’re was a roll call at the beginning of the year, and he said, a fucking Jap,” he’d say. “You’re a chink.” “No polacks in my class this year.” I guess being Polish, he could easily say that, but doing that enables that type Phil was a white kid? of behavior. Yes, white. He would kick or punch me in the back be- After graduating from Lane, I went to the U of I [Uni- cause he sat directly behind me. And then he would versity of Illinois] in Champaign, and the white kids trash my stuff in the locker, just mess things up. The had the same attitudes as when they were in high worst, though, was he would spit into the sleeves of my school, right? Now they were of draft age and maybe coat before I got to the locker. I could feel the wetness internalized their racism more, but it was still there. when I slipped into my coat. He just kept doing it, or he I remember December 7, your birthday. I was coming would say, “I didn’t do it,” or he wouldn’t deny doing it. home from class, and I got bombarded by snowballs, It was very difficult. I’d be ready to go home at the end students yelling, “It’s Pearl Harbor Day, get the Jap!” of the school day, and I'd tentatively stick my arms into my coat. Nothing today. All right, I’m cool. You watch (Ted attended several of my birthday parties when we were some of these bully movies on TV. I know what they’re kids, and he’d remembered, decades later, that I was indeed going through. born on December 7. For readers who appreciate irony, it should also be mentioned that Iva Toguri, the Japanese Amer- How did it end? ican scapegoated as the infamous “Tokyo Rose,” was born on July 4.) I went right up to my homeroom teacher, Miss B____, sitting at her desk at the front of the room. I diplomati- Another story: During my sophomore year, there were cally said, “There’s stuff happening in my locker, and I some racial issues, tension on campus between whites don’t know who’s doing it, but can I get moved to a dif- and Blacks at U of I. It went on for a few weeks, and ferent locker?” Her eyes went straight to Phil. When I there were a lot of notifications from the university about got back to my desk, he immediately asked, “What did what to do and what not to do. Fistfights were breaking you say? What were you talking about?” I just kept say- out or whatever. One evening, it was dark. A friend ing I wanted a different locker. of mine, Danny, who’s also Japanese American, and I were at a snack shop, which was in the middle of a So, the locker stuff stopped because I got reassigned whole series of dormitories. As we left the snack shop, to another locker, but not the constant verbal stuff, there were maybe a dozen or so Black students who the punching, or Phil would knock me with his elbow were thirty or forty feet away. As soon as we opened or shoulder. He was a big guy, and the prejudice he the door and walked out, they all looked at us, like, Are had was not isolated to only him at Lane—again, prob- these guys a threat? And as far as Danny and I were ably because of the war. Other kids would say, you’re a concerned, we were looking at them, thinking, Are we “gook,” a “Jap,” a “commie chink.” Every day, one kid going to run or are we going to do something? This didn’t called me “Ming the Merciless,” the villain with Asian look good. Coincidently, one of the Black students lived facial features from the 1930s Flash Gordon series in our dorm, recognized Danny and me, and spoke up played by a white actor. immediately to his friends. He said, “It’s okay. You don’t want to mess with those guys because they know Interestingly, when I attended Lane’s thirty-year class karate.” And then Danny and I just kept walking, like, reunion, I was at a table with some guys, and Phil Yeah, we know karate [laughs]. Neither of us knew any- showed up. He sat down next to me and introduced thing like that. There was David Carradine’s “Kung Fu” himself even though we all had nametags on. I totally [TV show] or Bruce Lee. Those days have passed, but panicked, waiting for something from the past to come I think there was this perception or stereotype that all up, but there wasn't any recollection by him of those Asians know martial arts. past deeds I described. He didn’t remember me at all. So, the fact that you had a personal contact there outside of the snack shop… He was making sure you guys were okay?

That’s my thought. He may have defused the situation. In your opinion, what is causing the current wave I don’t remember his name, but I know his dorm room of hate crimes against Asian Americans?3 was right next to mine. The past administration and the former President’s rhet- AGAIN, OUR GENERATION… We grew up with a lot of oric concerning the pandemic has just legitimized an- stuff, right? Baby boom, World War II is over, but then ti-Asian feelings and encouraged actions against Asians there was the red communist threat, the Vietnam War, with words and violence. When our leaders say things and just a lot of anti-Asian sentiment. I would say that like COVID-19 is the “China virus” or the “kung-flu,” it even throughout my working career, every once in a just makes it easier for people to target all Asians. Peo- while, a manager or somebody will let out a racial pejo- ple are dying because of COVID-19, suffering, and in rative against Asians. I’ll think… It’s there. It’s in them. very dire situations. I am hopeful that the current admin- They just let it loose without looking at their audience. I istration can defuse some of this situation or at least tell them, “You can’t say that. Maybe when I’m not here, point us in a better direction. but when I’m here, you can’t say stuff like that.” Is there anything you want to say that you haven’t TRUDY AND I HAD A CONVERSATION with Sophie over said? (Ted glances at his notes.) Easter. (Trudy is Ted’s wife. Sophie is their full-grown daugh- ter who is half Asian American and half white.) I think that the killings in Atlanta may have only been two or three I remember one guy at Lane asked me, “Do Asian girls weeks old. Sophie said that she’s not impacted by anti- have pussies that go sideways?” What am I supposed Asian American sentiment much because her commu- to tell him? nity, the people in her circle of friends, don’t associate her as being Asian or part of the group bringing SINCE THE START of these interviews with Ted, COVID-19 into the country. I get it, this process Sophie Newcity DECEMBER 2021 the world has been rocked by the coronavirus has gone through, and would call it “white passing.” But pandemic. There has been the proliferation of do I believe it? I think that it’s important as she gets old- Black Lives Matter protests, including the er, wherever her life takes her, that she’ll understand part nationwide social unrest that came after the of her is a part of the dialogue we’re having here. videotaped murder of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There It sounds to me, Ted—and you can correct me has also been a significant uptick in hate crimes if I’m wrong—that you don’t quite trust that Sophie against Muslims, minority groups of color, Jews and will be completely accepted into the white world. Asians, such as the mass shootings in Atlanta, That you feel she’s got to, like your dad told you, Georgia on March 16, 2021 by a lone white gunman remember who she is? that left eight Asian women dead. Almost exactly 36 two months after those shootings, I met with Ted That’s almost a trick question, because you don’t nec- again, this time at his house, the same one where essarily want to be accepted into the white world. You he had lived when we were kids. As we sat at his want…” (And here Ted pauses, struggling to find the right kitchen table with my recorder between us, I words, his open hands and splayed fingers repeating the same noticed, through a window overlooking his small emphatic gesture, one of shaping and defining an invisible backyard, a full-grown coniferous tree that hadn’t sphere) “…to be accepted in a bigger world, one that’s been so much as a sprout during our childhoods. inclusive of all of us. I think to be accepted into the white I was struck with a comforting sense that his world is what the Asian American community tried to parents, long since passed away, were in the house, do throughout the twentieth century. No, we’ll never be too, his father probably working at his steel-rule die accepted in the white world, so it’s not something we bench in the basement and his mother over by the want to strive for. We want to be in a world where it’s stove, quietly whipping up a meal. Whenever Ted’s not labeled as the white world. It goes back to that one mother had wanted her son’s attention, she would story where all of a sudden, I’m on the playground at call out in a voice laced with loving demand, Oscar Mayer, and I find out that one guy hitting a soft- “Ted-deeeee!” He’d immediately break from one ball thinks I’m a “Jap.” Just say, “Hey, get off the field,” or of our ultra-competitive miniature hockey games “Get the fuck off the field,” or “Are you playing or are you played on the dining room table, and hurry off to not?” Treat me like everybody else. go and see what his mother wanted from him. Once, when I was thirteen and already edging above Ted Ishiwari lives with his wife, Trudy. 3 Ted's father, Mr. Ishiwari, in height, I tried to With formal training in Electrical Engineering “A survey found impress him with my knowledge of, and opposition and Business Administration, he is a practicing to, the Vietnam War. “Oh!” he said. “You're talking that one in three like a man now!” And he turned away, making it Information Technology (IT) Project Asian Americans Manager. Ted’s daughter, Sophie, is a worried about clear by means of a compliment that he did not want student living in Pennsylvania. His sisters, becoming victims to engage with me in a conversation about the war Chiye Higashide and Tomi Tokiyama, of hate crimes.” or politics. Fifty-three years later, I asked Ted, — New York Times live in Hawaii and Florida, respectively.

Chicago’s South Asia Institute presents Arts & Culture Ravi Shankar: Ragamala to Rockstar, A SAI Collection/Image: Apparatus, Inc. Retrospective of the Maestro’s Life in Music An exhibition of concert poster art, photography and film celebrating“the godfather of world music.” Through March 5, 2022

Art Who Cares About Ray Johnson? The Art Institute of Chicago Models Thoughtful Stewardship of an Artist’s Practice By Alexandra Drexelius For the artist Ray Johnson, the envelope Ray Johnson. Untitled (Double Silhouette), 1993. Promised gift of The William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson. provided a repository to transmit his two © Ray Johnson Estate foremost activities: letter-writing and Newcity DECEMBER 2021 collage-making. One, a pedestrian mode of well as researchers and scholars. The the breadth of Johnson’s production, this communication, the other, a seminal art form outcome of these efforts is an expansive presentation of so-called Johnsonalia of the twentieth century, Johnson’s corre- publication and a major survey of Johnson’s differentiates itself for the ways in which it spondence and art merge under the stamped creative endeavors, “Ray Johnson c/o,” that foregrounds and models the immense care cover of an envelope. In a typewritten opened to the public on November 26. that Wilson took to preserve Johnson’s life document dated April 1, 1964 and titled Curated by Caitlin Haskell with Jordan Carter, and work. “Correspondance Art”—an intentional the exhibition brings together the full misspelling that permeated his writings— assortment of Johnson’s enterprises from his Johnson is best known for his popularization Johnson frets over the precarious distribution time as a student at Black Mountain College of mail art through the founding of the New of sixty-two envelopes containing letters and to the years before his death, where he York Correspondence School, which gained fastidiously arranged paper scraps. He resided in relative solitude in Long Island. broader attention through a 1970 exhibition imagines the sequencing of these collaged The checklist includes paintings, collages, organized by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney fragments, ordered from smallest to largest, postcards, publications, drawings, design Museum of American Art. However, outside falling apart in heedless hands. Without flyers, writings, mailings and extends to the of sporadic and often strained partnerships visible import or advance instructions from material remnants of ephemeral performanc- with museums and galleries, his output was the sender, these envelopes invite violent es and events. While past exhibitions, such characterized through his tendency to openings: in the swoop of an animated finger as the groundbreaking 1999 traveling disavow and discard. In the context of the the careful compositions could spill out of exhibition “Correspondences,” attended to fifties and sixties—the decades best order. Once art matter, now junk mail. Johnson poses a solution for elevating his postal activity beyond the status of non-art: “Would sending the stuff to a Museum and a Curator assure these little baby seeds of an Art class–ification?” Con- sidering the implications of this action, he concludes, “At this moment I wish to be taken quite seriously.” In November of 2018, Johnson’s “stuff” was sent to the Art Institute of Chicago. The contents of this shipment constituted a major gift: The William S. Wilson Collection of Ray Johnson. This gift contains thousands of materials—ranging from correspondence to special projects to artworks—mailed by Johnson and collected and archived by his longtime friend and collaborator Bill Wilson. Cataloguing of this gift began in the summer of 2019 through a collaborative research group composed of internal colleagues, as 38

TowardCommonCause.org

Newcity DECEMBER 2021 ART TOP 5 represented in Wilson’s archive—Johnson reminiscent of figures, icons or unidentifiable lampooned the gestural discharge of scripts for a classified vernacular. Layering 1 Bani Abidi: The Man Who Abstract Expressionist painters and avoided chopped-up, defaced, drawn- and paint- Talked Until He Disappeared. firm affinities with emerging movements such ed-over scraps of colored paper, images and Museum of Contemporary Art as Pop Art and looser networks of artistic text, these collages were visually equivalent Chicago. A spare but strong survey practitioners working within and around the to the kind of wordplay and pastiche of photographs, video, prints and auspices of Happenings and Fluxus. Labeled embodied in Johnson’s epistolary endeavors. installation work, exhibiting dark as a “master of the throwaway gesture,” a In “Ray Johnson c/o,” over forty collages that humor and tenderness, hinting at “flop artist” and a “name-dropper,” seemingly would ordinarily be framed and hung on the the absurdity of bureaucracy and everything Johnson touched turned to trash wall are instead mounted in a vitrine and nationalism. Through June 5, 2022 and yet Wilson was there to recover it. presented, in Haskell’s words, as “discrete sculptural objects,” such that both the fronts 2 Young, Gifted and Black: “Ray Johnson c/o” opens with a presentation and backs are visible; this animated The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family of Wilson’s original three-ring binders, presentation of Johnson’s moticos recalls Collection of Contemporary Art. brimming with plastic sleeves that he used for how they would have been used and Gallery 400. A traveling group cataloguing and storing printed matter mailed circulated by Johnson in the 1950s. In exhibition that features a thrilling array to him by Johnson. Arranged in chronological another gallery, the curators deliberately of work by contemporary Black artists, order and spanning from Johnson’s birth in display his collages alongside the original exploring topics from identity to 1927 to his death in 1995, the binders situate envelopes that served as the vessels for their abstraction, remaking art history in the exhibition within the haptic space of the delivery to Wilson, thus simultaneously the process. Through December 11 archive. While this installation is not interac- blurring and sharpening the distinctions tive, several of the binders are opened for between art and non-art that preoccupied 3 Views From Somewhere: display and visitors are invited to flip through Johnson through his career. By providing Sara Greenberger Rafferty. scans of binders on the Art Institute’s website. innovative curatorial presentations and Document. Using wit and a keen Wilson’s archival methodology carries over to scholarship, Haskell and Carter assert that sense of composition, Rafferty the caption convention applied to artworks care is not static, but rather responsive and creates image-based works that and other materials in the collection—when evolving. mine the history of photography to appropriate, his chronological cataloguing make sense of the digital world. system, or the “WSW number,” is used Following Johnson’s death and sympathetic Through December 18 alongside Art Institute of Chicago accession to his expressed wish to be taken seriously or object numbers. over thirty years earlier, artist and writer Dick 4 Rachel Harrison: Assorted Higgins wrote in \"Print Collector’s Newslet- Varieties. Corbett vs. Dempsey. In generating a situation where the visitor ter\": “The important thing is that the work not For Harrison's first gallery exhibition comes to understand the ways in which be lost, that it and the message go out into in Chicago, she unveils four new Wilson looked after Johnson’s work, the the world, somehow, via a sympathetic sculptures, as well as wall-mounted curators also underscore the ways in which gallery or a museum show or whatever. He works, that take both art history and care is not neutral. Despite their close made the paradigm, and it is up to us to pop culture as inspiration. Through friendship and collaboration, Johnson and make it our own.” Prescient of the value of January 8, 2022 Wilson could be at odds with one another, these messages since his initial correspon- particularly when it came to questions of dence with Johnson in 1956, Wilson worked 5 Ray Johnson c/o. Art Institute display. Johnson assiduously oversaw the dutifully for decades to ensure that the life of Chicago. A selection of installation of his artwork and sometimes and labors of his friend would go out into the collaborative mail art projects and provided annotations to mailings he sent to world. Now, in the ongoing research, collage work that attempts to assess Wilson, which instructed how materials presentation and stewardship of this the artistic contributions of an should be kept or displayed in relation to one acquisition, the Art Institute has adopted both enigmatic artist. Opens November 26 another. However, as Haskell notes in her Johnson and Wilson’s practices into its own introduction to the catalogue, Wilson’s paradigms. Sent, received, unpacked, 40 decision to display materials on the wall or in catalogued, puzzled over, deciphered and frames were not always in keeping with John- made new once more, Johnson’s little baby son’s desires. seeds continue to circulate—their indetermi- nacy invites ever-dynamic meanings hatched In an exceptional effort to reaffirm original from sweet nothings. artist intent, a central gallery contains a vitrine of Johnson’s early collages or “moticos” \"Ray Johnson c/o\" is on view at the Art displayed in the round. Johnson’s moticos Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan, are like collaged characters—their silhouettes through March 21, 2022.

THE ARTS CLUB OF CHICAGO CORBETT VS. DEMPSEY 201 East Ontario Street 2156 W. Fulton Street 312 787 3997 773 278 1664 [email protected] / artsclubchicago.org [email protected] / corbettvsdempsey.com Tues–Fri 11-1 | 2-6, Sat 11-3 (subject to change due to COVID-19) Tues–Sat 10-5 Sept. 30–Jan. 29 ���������� Hannah Levy: Surplus Tension Nov. 19–Jan. 8������������ Rachel Harrison, Assorted Varieties Through March 2 �������� Garden Project: Chicago Mobile Makers DAVID SALKIN CREATIVE THE BLOCK MUSEUM OF ART 1709 W. Chicago Avenue, #2A At Northwestern University 504 228-7034 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, IL @DavidSalkin / davidsalkin.com 847 491 4000 Nov. 6–Dec. 18 ����������� Arshad Faruqui [email protected] / blockmuseum.northwestern.edu Wed 12-8, Thurs–Sun 12-5 DEPAUL ART MUSEUM Free and open to all - Check website for visitor info Jan. 26–July 10 ����������� A Site of Struggle: American Art Against At DePaul University 935 W. Fullerton Avenue Anti-Black Violence 773 325 7506 [email protected] / artmuseum.depaul.edu CARL HAMMER GALLERY Wed–Thurs 11-7, Fri–Sun 11-5 Sept. 9–Feb. 13 ����������� Stockyard Institute: 25 Years of Art and Radical Pedagogy 740 N. Wells Street Sept. 9–Feb. 13 ����������� Learned Objects: Studio Works by William Estrada, 312 266 8512 [email protected] / carlhammergallery.com Regin Igloria, Nicole Marroquin, and Rochele Royster Tues–Sat 11-5 Nov. 5–Jan. 7 ������������� IMAGINED LANDSCAPES: Francois Burland, DEVENING PROJECTS Joseph Parker, Grace Graupe Pillard, 3039 W. Carroll Avenue David Sharpe, Hollis Sigler, Kahn and Selesnick, 312 420 4720 Mary Lou Zelazny, Henry Darger [email protected] / deveningprojects.com Sat 12-5 CARRIE SECRIST GALLERY Nov. 14–Dec. 30���������� Guzzo Pinc: Fantasia Nov. 14–Dec. 30���������� Allison Wade: Cosmic Fishing 900 W. Washington Blvd. 312 610 3821 DOCUMENT [email protected] / secristgallery.com Tues–Sat 10:30-6 1709 W. Chicago Avenue For entry, Directory: #201 312 535 4555 Through Dec. 18��������� Was/Is/Ought: Whitney Bedford, Antonia Contro, [email protected] / documentspace.com Tues–Sat 11-6 Stephen Eichhorn, Brendan Getz, Diana Guerrero- Nov. 7–Dec. 18 ����������� Sara Greenberger Rafferty: Views from Somewhere Maciá, Anne Lindberg, Chuck Ramirez, Kay Rosen, Jan. 7–Feb. 26������������� Anneke Eussen Scott Stack, Dannielle Tegeder + Sharmistha Ray, Oli Watt and Augustine Woodgate ENGAGE PROJECTS CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY 864 N. Ashland Avenue 312 285 2998 1637 W. Chicago Avenue [email protected] / engage-projects.com 312 266 2350 Wed–Sat 12-6 (no appointment necessary) [email protected] / edelmangallery.com Dec. 3–Jan. 15 ������������ Jacqueline Surdell, Raheleh FIlsoofi Open by appointment, Tues–Sat 10-5:30 Dec. 10–Feb. 5 ������������ Jeffrey Wolin: Faces of Homelessness and Cameron Downey CHICAGO ARTISTS COALITION 2130 W. Fulton Street, Unit B 312 491 8888 [email protected] / chicagoartistscoalition.org Wed–Fri 11-5, Sat 12-4 Please contact Chicago Artists Coalition for more information.

EPIPHANY CENTER FOR THE ARTS JEAN ALBANO GALLERY 201 South Ashland Avenue 215 W. Superior 312 421 4600 312 440 0770 [email protected] / epiphanychi.com/exhibitions/ [email protected] / jeanalbanogallery.com By appointment only. Email [email protected] to schedule. Wed–Sat 11-4 Oct. 15–Dec. 11����������� Michelle Wasson: On Feronia Always by appointment Oct. 29–Dec. 3 ������������ Tag, You’re It Nov. 30–Dec. 5 ����������� Art Miami 2021 - Bonnie Lautenberg Nov. 6–April 9 ����������� Agave! Nov. 13–Dec. 31���������� Emanate ARTISTICA! Hollywood Meets Fine Art Nov. 20–Dec. 31���������� Rod Slemmons: Negatives Nov. 5–Jan. 5 ������������� Allison Zisook: Record Covers Nov. 5–Jan. 5 ������������� Gallery Artist Group Show GALLERY VICTOR ARMENDARIZ KAVI GUPTA GALLERY 300 W. Superior Street 312 722 6447 Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd., 835 W. Washington Boulevard [email protected] / galleryvictor.com Kavi Gupta | Elizabeth St., 219 N. Elizabeth Street Tues–Fri 10-5:30, Sat 11-5, Sun–Mon closed By appointment only. Email [email protected] to schedule. Thruogh Dec. 31��������� Scapes: Group Landscape Show 312 432 0708 GOLDFINCH [email protected] / kavigupta.com Visit online at website-kavigupta.artlogic.net/ 319 N. Albany Avenue Closing Dec. 18 ���������� Surface Is Only a Material Vehicle for Spirit 708 714 0937 goldfinch-gallery.com curated by Kennedy Yanko (Elizabeth St. | Floor 2) Fri–Sat 12-4 and by appointment Closing Dec. 18 ���������� Jessica Stockholder (Washington Blvd. | Floor 2) Nov. 14–Dec. 18���������� Mari Eastman: Night Life, Gallery 1 and 2 Closing Dec. 18 ���������� Jeffrey Gibson: Beyond The Horizon (Elizabeth St. | Floor 1) Closing Dec. 18 ���������� Abstraction and Social Critique (Washington Blvd. | Floor 1) GRAHAM FOUNDATION KEN SAUNDERS GALLERY, LTD 4 W. Burton Place 312 787 4071 2041 W. Carroll Avenue, Suite C-320 [email protected] / grahamfoundation.org 312 573 1400 Visit our website for gallery and bookshop hours and information. [email protected] / kensaundersgallery.com Follow us on social media @grahamfoundation Tues–Sat 11-4 and by appointment Through Dec. 18��������� The Available City, Chicago Architecture Biennial Opening Nov. 6 ���������� Anjali Srinivasan Opening Nov. 6 ���������� Dante Marioni GRAY Opening Nov. 6 ���������� Sarah Vaughn Richard Gray Gallery, Hancock: 875 N. Michigan Avenue, 38th Floor LOGAN CENTER EXHIBITIONS Mon–Fri 10-5 University of Chicago at the Reva and David Logan Center Gray Warehouse, 2044 W. Carroll Avenue 915 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637 Tues–Fri 10-5, Sat 11-5 773 834 8377 [email protected] / loganexhibitions.uchicago.edu 312 642 8877 Please check the gallery’s website for details on hours and procedures for visiting. [email protected] / richardgraygallery.com July 17–Dec. 12����������� Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams Oct. 22–Dec. 17����������� Alex Katz: The White Coat (Gray Warehouse) LUBEZNIK CENTER FOR THE ARTS HILTON | ASMUS CONTEMPORARY 101 W. 2nd Street, Michigan City, IN 716 N. Wells Street (River North) 219 874 4900 Mon–Sat 11-6 [email protected] / lubeznikcenter.org Mon, Wed–Fri 10-5, Sat–Sun 11-4, Tues closed 3622 S. Morgan Street – Morgan Arts Complex (Bridgeport) Please check LCA’s website for more details. By appointment only Oct. 25–Feb. 25 ����������� Nature Now 312 475 1788 [email protected] / hiltonasmus.com Through Jan. 22 ��������� David Yarrow: Changing Lanes (Bridgeport)

MADRON GALLERY POETRY FOUNDATION 1000 W. North Avenue, Third Floor 61 W. Superior Street 312 640 1302 312 787 7070 [email protected] / madrongallery.com [email protected] / poetryfoundation.org Mon–Fri 9:30-4:30, evenings and weekends available by appointment Oct. 18–Dec. 17����������� For And Nor But Or Yet So, Bob Faust Please contact gallery for more information. Installed on the exterior of the Poetry Foundation building McCORMICK GALLERY RHONA HOFFMAN GALLERY 835 W. Washington Boulevard 312 226 6800 1711 W. Chicago Avenue [email protected] / thomasmccormick.com 312 455 1990 Tues–Thurs 10-4 [email protected] / rhoffmangallery.com Nov. 11–Jan. 8������������ Dusti Bongé: Southern Exposure: works from the estate Tues–Sat 11-5 Please schedule an appointment through Tock: MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY exploretock.com/rhonahoffmangallery Oct. 29–Dec. 18����������� Nancy Rubins: Sculpture & Drawing 451 N. Paulina Street 312 243 2129 SMART MUSEUM OF ART [email protected] / moniquemeloche.com Tues–Sat 11-6 At the University of Chicago Through Dec. 18��������� David Antonio Cruz: icutfromthemiddletogetabetterslice 5550 S. Greenwood Avenue Through Dec. 18��������� Introducing Ariel Dannielle: We Outside! 773 702 0200 January 2022 ������������� Dan Gunn: of the land behind them [email protected] / smartmuseum.uchicago.edu Tues–Sun 10-5, Thurs 10-8 MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY July 15–Dec. 19����������� Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, PHOTOGRAPHY and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 At Columbia College Chicago Sept. 23–Dec. 12���������� Smart to the Core: Medium / Image 600 S. Michigan Avenue 312 663 5554 WESTERN EXHIBITIONS [email protected] / mocp.org Sun 12-5, Mon–Wed 10-5, Thurs 10-8, Fri–Sat 10-5 1709 W. Chicago Avenue, 2nd Floor Reserve tickets at mocp.org 312 480 8390 Sept. 10–Feb. 20���������� American Epidemic: Guns in the United States [email protected] / westernexhibitions.com Tues–Sat 11-6 THE NEUBAUER COLLEGIUM Nov. 6–Dec. 18 ����������� Jessica Campbell: “Gigantomachinations” in gallery one FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY Nov. 6–Dec. 18 ����������� Dan Attoe: “Pandemic Paintings” in gallery two At the University of Chicago WOMAN MADE GALLERY 5701 South Woodlawn Avenue 773 795 2329 2150 S. Canalport Avenue, Suite 4A3 [email protected] / neubauercollegiumgallery.com 312 738 0400 Open by appointment [email protected] / womanmade.org Through Jan. 16 ��������� Ida Applebroog: Monalisa Thurs 12-7, Fri–Sat 12-4 Jan. 27–April 10 ��������� Arnold Kemp: Less Like an Object Dec. 2–Dec. 20������������ Small Works Members show for WMG members and More Like the Weather and supporters Jan. 13–Feb. 12 ����������� Word of Mouth juried by Rosalyn D’Mello PATRON GALLERY WRIGHTWOOD 659 1612 W. Chicago Avenue 312 846 1500 659 W. Wrightwood Avenue [email protected] / patrongallery.com 773 437 6601 Tues–Sat 11-6 and by appointment [email protected] / wrightwood659.org Dec. 11–Feb. 12 ���������� Greg Breda: “Stills” Through Dec. 18��������� Romanticism to Ruin: Two Lost Works of Sullivan and Wright Reservations Required. No Walk-ins. Tickets at wrightwood659.org Through Dec. 18��������� Shahidul Alam: We Will Defy

Dance Hyde Park School of Dance in \"The Nutcracker.\" Photo: Marc Monghan. Tradition and Fresh Takes version of the holiday staple—a family favorite replete with roles for dancers of all ages— Hyde Park School of Dance Brings An Updated Nutcracker since its founding almost thirty years ago. In Back to Mandel Hall past productions 250 student dancers age seven and up would don colorful, sparkling By Sharon Hoyer costumes of snowflakes, toy soldiers, sugar plums and mice and perform for family and Newcity DECEMBER 2021 After a year of cancelled or virtual holiday hundreds—presents an extra level of friends in the biggest show of the year. HPSD programs, dance companies are gearing up complexity. And if that cast historically includes founding artistic director August Tye says a again to stage their biggest ticket seller and children, well, there’s a whole other set of safe return to the costumes and lights meant the most famous ballet of all time. Much has difficult public health questions and risk that all the performers would need to be changed since the winter of 2019, and the assessments to sort through. vaccinated. Currently only children aged performance world is gingerly tiptoeing back twelve and up are approved for vaccination, into theaters, hoping to fill or mostly fill seats The Hyde Park School of Dance grappled so this year's cast will be significantly and entice the senses of masked audiences with these questions as they prepared to smaller—a mere 150. As consolation to the while following pandemic protocols. Staging bring “The Nutcracker” back to live audienc- younger kids, HPSD is compiling a video big spectacle pieces like “The Nutcracker” es at University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall mashup of footage shot during classes—Nut- with casts of dozens—in some cases December 10-12. The school has staged a cracker Stars of Tomorrow. “They’re very disappointed they won’t be staged this year,” 44

DANCE TOP 5 1 The Nutcracker. Lyric Opera House. Christopher Wheeldon's spectacular adaptation, created for the Joffrey and set in Chicago during the 1893 World's Fair, makes the move to the Lyric stage. December 4-26 Hyde Park School of Dance in \"The Nutcracker.\" Photo: Marc Monghan. 2 Fires of Varanasi: Dance of the Eternal Pilgrim. Tye says. “And, of course, last year we Jonathan St. Clair. The battle scene, which has Harris Theater. Ragamala Dance couldn’t use everyone as well.” been a hip-hop piece in the HPSD production Company presents a reflection on for five years, gets updated again for 2021, death, transformation and rebirth Last winter HPSD, along with countless pitting studio/commercial hip-hop dancing through the classical South Indian theater and dance companies, moved to video mice against traditional street breakdancing dance form Bharatanatyam, in a and created a film version of the production soldiers. “It will be kind of a new-school-ver- performance dedicated to former using only their studio dancers—advanced sus-old-school and a neat twist on the battle Harris Theater president and CEO students who attend a set minimum number of scene,” Tye says. In addition to being more Patricia Barretto, who passed classes each week. Tye says it was a culturally respectful and responsible, these away in 2020. December 2 challenge to plan the video production amidst new sections provide a space for the students mercurial safety guidelines. “We pivoted and who practice forms other than ballet to show 3 Holiday Rhythms. Jazz pivoted,” she says. “We were going to film it off their talent and hard work in front of a large Showcase. Chicago Human live, but ten days before filming we were told audience. And surely it will be more interesting Rhythm Project's annual holiday we couldn’t and had to film each dancer to members of that audience who don't benefit concert of tap dance and separately. We had a great documentary necessarily relish seeing the same two-hour live music takes place at the filmmaker who did some amazing things with ballet year after year. intimate and festive confines of fading in and out and putting these dancers Jazz Showcase. December 7 back together like a puzzle. I can’t thank him Outrage and imperiousness over how to enough; it must have been a huge workload.” handle the sexist, racist and/or Eurocentric 4 Art Deco Nutcracker. This year’s production will also be filmed and parts of the Christmas canon is becoming as Athenaeum Theatre. available to stream, with virtual watch parties seasonal as pumpkin spice and fruitcake. A&A Ballet, led by former Joffrey the following weekend. Professional companies would do well to Academy artistic director Alexei take note of HPSD’s treatment of one of Kremnev, sets the traditional Live or at home, audiences will see an overall these historically sacred cows—the most holiday confection in the glitz of familiar “Nutcracker” ballet with tutu-ed performed ballet of all time and the financial 1920s America. December 4 snowflakes and flowers, which also includes buoy of countless ballet companies. Instead some contemporary takes and welcome of looking at Tchaikovsky’s most famous— 5 The Nutcracker. Mandel DECEMBER 2021 Newcity updates—notably to the party scene which and at the time of its writing universally Hall. Hyde Park School of contains a notorious parade of Asian and panned—composition as fully realized and Dance's annual student production Middle Eastern stereotypes. Nine choreogra- untouchable on one hand or blanketly weaves modern, hip-hop and phers contribute to the updated HPSD offensive and suitable only for the dustbin on traditional Chinese dance into the rendition, eight on faculty who work across a the other, HPSD has taken the approach of ballet, and contemporary music variety of dance forms, plus guest choreogra- keeping what serves their students and into Tchaikovsky's score. pher Hana Liu, who created a dance with changing what doesn’t. The result is the December 10-12 traditional Chinese movement, music and possibility of a living work instead of a dusty costumes in place of the original “Chinese tea” museum piece, an entertainment relevant to section. The slinky “Arabian coffee” dance has the young dancers it showcases while also been re-choreographed as a modern preserving music and performance that has piece by HPSD’s Horton instructor. And next heralded the season for generations. year, the production will include a new African dance section by faculty member Mark At Mandel Hall on the University of Chicago Vaughn. The mice and toy soldiers, who fight campus, 1131 East 57th, (773)493-8498. with swords in the original version, lay down December 10-12. $30, $25 seniors, $10 their arms and duke it out in a hip-hop battle, students and children 5-18, kids under 5 free. with beats mixed by breaking instructor hydeparkdance.org/tickets. 45

Design Newcity DECEMBER 2021 Par Excellence Redux: The Front 9 and The Back 9, Elmhurst Art Museum Drink Like a Local lore.” But most importantly, “The game also serves as a great way to welcome your friends Chicago Handshake is A Very Chicago Drinking Card Game to the city and warm them up before they take their initiation shot of Jeppson's Malört.\" By Vasia Rigou The setup is simple. Step one: Make sure Chicago’s history, culture and the city’s everyone has a beer or something else to drink most controversial liquor, the infamously bitter Jeppson’s Malört, all come into play at the expand their Chicago general knowledge—it while they play. Step two: Put a tallboy and a Chicago Handshake—a drinking card game also serves as one of the most genuine ways shot of the wormwood-based liqueur (that was that takes its name from a local tradition to get to know the city better. “Indeed,” says sold as a medicinal alcohol during Prohibition) involving a shot of Jeppson’s Malört and an out on the table so everyone can see what’s at Old Style tallboy. Tim Gillengerten, owner of Transit Tees, the boutique T-shirt company and design studio stake. Step three: Shuffle the deck and go. More than putting one’s knowledge to the test with trivia questions ranging from food to the known for Chicago-inspired clothing, accesso- blues, to architecture and to booze, the game ries and home goods, that’s behind it all. “The “The game works a bit like the popular drinking isn’t simply for locals who wish to sharpen or games ‘Kings’ and ‘Circle of Death,’ where cards will not only challenge the players’ knowledge of Chicago, but will help them learn players take turns flipping over a card and more about the city from their friends. It will be performing the action or challenge stated on sure to spark up conversations and memories the card,” says Kyle John Hollings, art director at Transit Tees, who designed the game. “The about the city’s history, traditions and local 46

cards in our game consist of a mix of card and signage found in old Chicago taverns and DESIGN TOP 5 types, ranging from themed categories, varied bars,” he says, adding that the illustrations events, and cards that have a persistent effect were inspired by advertising graphics from the 1 Chicago Architecture Biennial: DECEMBER 2021 Newcity on the player who drew them.” Think: “Speak 1920s and 1930s. The Available City. North in your best 1920s mobster accent,” “Take America’s largest international survey turns naming local breweries,” “Name the Both concept and design make Chicago of contemporary architecture takes highways that run through Chicago—by name, Handshake a drinking card game that’s over the Chicago Cultural Center as not by number.” The game ends when either practically begging to be played atop a sticky well as the city. Through January 2022 the “Last Call” card is drawn or when a player dive-bar table amid cheap beer and empty collects seven tokens. Said player must then shot glasses while the decades-old jukebox 2 All Together Now: Sound x proceed to drink a Chicago Handshake—a blares old rock tunes. But alas, the pandemic Design. Design Museum of curse or a blessing, depending on your upended all normal routines in our lives Chicago. An exhibition exploring the drinking preferences. including squeezing into a tiny booth with two parallels between design and music in or more Chicagoans (or wannabes) of legal Chicago’s creative culture.Through “We are constantly pulling ideas from everything drinking age. April 2022 that has to do with Chicago,” says Hollings. “We got inspiration from our experiences at Gillengerten weighs in: “We created pencil 3 Renegade Craft Fair. Revel bars and drinking with friends. We also drew concepts for this game at the end of 2019 Fulton Market. The biggest craft on experiences ranging from our memories to and planned on launching it in the summer of fair showcase in the world returns our love for everything Chicago. We found fun 2020 only to realize (in March of 2020) that home for the holidays and provides an ways to implement our favorite classic with the lockdown, we would not be able to opportunity to shop small. December commercials, local food staples, architecture, launch the game until friends were able to get 18-19, 11am-5pm sports, music, Chicago icons and everything together again,” he says. “Since then, we between.” Everything is fair game hence continued fine-tuning the concept, play-test- 4 Sung Jang: Given. Volume putting your knowledge to the test goes well ing it through Zoom and prepared for a 2021 Gallery. Found stones and beyond the ingredients of the Chicago-style launch. Finally in October of 2021, with lattice-form sculptures blur the lines hot dog—from your Chicago-themed tattoos, friends and family within our bubbles, we between humanity and nature as well to the philanthropic polar plunge, to our very decided that it would be the perfect time to as between art and design. Through own “Tamale Guy,” to dibs (holding a celebrate together again,” he says. “Drinking December 18 shoveled-out parking space after a heavy has been a popular activity over the past year, snowfall by putting chairs, laundry baskets or and now we can do it with our favorite pals, 5 Par Excellence Redux: The other items in the street to mark the claimed laughing and enjoying Chicago trivia with the Back 9. Elmhurst Art Museum. space), to the legalization of marijuana, to that Chicago Handshake.” Your last chance to visit a miniature commercial jingle you can’t stop humming, to golf course featuring playable works of the mayor herself. Beyond that, the game provides a rare art by local creatives. Through opportunity to watch someone you know drink December 10 Adding a dash of nostalgia to the playing the polarizing absinthe-like local elixir—a taste experience: the game’s retro design style. “I of legendary Chicago hospitality that whether had already concepted and designed a good or bad, is sure to be memorable. May Chicago Handshake graphic after being the real Chicago hardcore fans shine. inspired by the Old Style and Jeppson's Malört shields,” says Hollings. “It felt like a natural fit Chicago Handshake, A Drinking Card Game to carry over the name and the overall vintage is available for presale online ($22) and at look and feel to our drinking card game Transit Tees’ stores in Wicker Park (1371 concept. I thought the style resonated with the North Milwaukee) and Andersonville (5226 intricate handcrafted wooden bars, mirrors North Clark). 47

Mood—Vessel 1 Pagoda Red 1 2 4 Celadon Blue Double Gourd Vases 6 (pair), $1680 8 pagodared.com 2 Pols Potten, Amara Zoo Souvenir Vase, $688 amara.com 3 OKA Cariape Triangles Decorative Pot in Sand, $50 oka.com 4 Lost Girls Postmodern Turquoise Vase, $48 lostgirlschicago.com 5 Betwentys 3 at Humboldt House U Shaped Double Ended Bud Vase, $62 humboldthouseco.com 6 Bitossi at Haute Living Max Lamb Vase, price on request haute-living.com 7 Blu Dot Wonk Vases, $99 bludot.com 8 Cosmic Peace Studio at Humboldt House Painted Ceramic Vase, $38 humboldthouse.com 9 RRRES Mexico at South Loop Loft Woman 7 Ceramic Vase, $250 thesouthlooploft.com 10 Jonathan Adler 5 Gilded Gala Round Vase, $260 jonathanadler.com 11 Alison Berger Vessels at Holly Hunt Vessels Nuo-vase, price on request hollyhunt.com 12 Studio Sahil at Kollektif Sand to Glass Vase with Two Sands, $325 kollektif.com 13 Tanner Bowman X Asrai Garden Hot Mess Vase: Black with Pearls, $260 asraigarden.com 14 Christi Ahee at Neighborly 7 White Curvy Ceramic Vase, $46 neighborlyshop.com 15 Roy’s Furniture Vase 23546, $39 shoproysfurniture.com Newcity DECEMBER 2021 16 Jonathan Adler Bel Air Mini Scoop Vase, $102 jonathanadler.com 17 John Zabawa at EQ3 Air Vases, $49.99 eq3.com 18 Bruno Gambone at Pavilion Antiques Italian Ceramic Vase, $950 pavilionantiques.com 19 Alvino Bagni at Orange Skin Bubble Vase, $281-$418 orangeskin.com 48

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 DECEMBER 2021 Newcity 49

D&rDininkiinngg Somme Wisdom “Don’t Be Afraid of Italian Wine!” Especially During the Holidays By David Hammond For many of us, the Thanksgiving-Christ- mas-New Year's Day holiday trifecta is a time for Italian food, like lasagna, the feast of the seven fishes and panettone. One of the very best restaurant meals we had in the past year was at Formento’s. We tried fish, pasta and red meat, all done in the simple and classic Italian style, and through it all, sommelier Chuckiy Bement found wines that did what wines are supposed to do: they made the food taste even better. For years now, we’ve noticed that many Italian wines represent a huge value, punching way above their price point, delivering more than we’re paying for. So we decided to learn more about Italian wines—and why they’re priced so low—by talking to Bement, who, no surprise, leans heavily on wines from Italy in his job at Formento’s. When we had dinner at Formento’s, you Chuckiy Bement/Photo: Briana Jimenez and I talked about the low prices of Italian Newcity DECEMBER 2021 wine. Why are Italian wines such a value? varietals make buyers apprehensive. Most there's a plethora of amazing Italian wines at The amount of production that comes out of people enjoy consistency and knowing what an affordable price. Italy helps with the value as well as the fact they're getting when they buy a wine, so they that a lot of Italian wines are meant to be usually opt for a Chianti, Nebbiolo, Pinot Grigio What are some outstanding Italian drunk young. There's a huge draw to wines or Prosecco. I think my advice to consumers is wines—available at places like Binny’s— with quick turnaround, as seen by regions like to not be afraid of Italian wines! This is a that offer an outstanding value? Australia and New Zealand. I think almost any country that has drunk wine casually for wine region these days has readily available generations and has only been making serious • Castello di Ama Chianti Classico (about wines in the $10-$25 range, and another big wine since the 1970-1980s. Most varietals and $30). Located in central Italy in the Tuscany draw for Italian wine is the number of options styles of Italian wines are very approachable, region, Castello di Ama has been a longtime you can have. With so many choices, regions though many of the wines that consumers are favorite producer of mine; it’s a winery that and producers, it's nice to have a wide variety told to buy can be the most intimidating. cares as much about the expressiveness of of options when it comes to buying budget or Going to a store and buying a Barolo with no its wine as it does about its own identity. ready-to-drink wines. prior knowledge is a scary venture. So much The winery dates as far back as the eleventh of Italian wines beyond Amarone, Brunello di century. Their Chianti Classico serves as a Italian wines are not as well-known as Montalcino and Barolo can easily be con- go-to for anyone wanting to get an idea of French and California varieties. What do sumed right away and enjoyed with friends what Italian wines are about. Castello di we consumers need to know about and a meal. Wine is always a fun journey and Ama's Chianti is loaded with aromas from Italian wines? Consumers are intimidated by Italian wines. So many regional differences and dozens of 50