$20 General Public | $10 CAC Artist Members | FREE for BOLT, FIELD/WORK, HATCH, and LAUNCH Residents

During this panel conversation, we will learn from first-hand accounts of dynamic artists about what it takes to bring a large-scale endeavor into fruition through a combination of artistic vision, strategic planning, and project management.

Three artists will share their experiences and lessons learned in the process by reflecting on distinct examples of large projects.

• Erica Mott on Mycelial: Street Parliament
• Hương Ngô on To Name It Is To See It
• Erik L. Peterson on Ashland​

This workshop is part of the FIELD/WORK Core Curriculum, a series of FIELD/WORK Residency sessions that are open to the public. CAC welcomes you to join us at 5:30pm for social time with refreshments, with the program beginning promptly at 6:00pm.

Learning Objectives

• Better understand how to steward an ambitious project from conception, design, and development to on-the-ground realities
• Explore resources to help manage logistics (time, space, resources, legal issues, etc) and relationships (with collaborators, host organizations, funders, and other constituents)
• Develop skills sets to boost confidence in your ability to improvise as things change along the way

Guest Speakers 

Erica Mott is a former researcher and international development worker turned actor, choreographer and director. As a performance maker and cultural organizer, she utilizes body based forms (movement/song/realtime action with objects) in immersive environments and extensive cross-disciplinary  collaborations to transform discarded materials and histories and disregarded spaces and stories. Through her immersive yet intimate performance installations, she captures and heightens the magic and mystery of the mundane and invites communities to re-view and re-envision shared spaces and practices.

Her original work for the stage has been featured across the world at such venues as Roulette & Grace Space (New York City), CRICOTEKA Museum & The Audio Art Festival (Krakow, Poland), Rawabet Theater (Cairo, Egypt), International Theatre Festival (Novi Sad, Serbia),  Festival Cervantino (Guanajuato, Mexico), Steirischer Herbst (Graz, Austria), Queer Arts Festival (Rostock, Germany), NES Artist (Skagastrond, Iceland), City of Women Festival (Ljubljana, Slovenia) as well as the locally at Chicago Cultural Center, High Concept Labs, The Dance Center Columbia College, Links Hall, MCA, The National Museum of Health and Medicine and Chicago’s many parks.  

Erica is a recipient of several awards including Amnesty International’s Patrick Stewart Human Rights Fellowship, The Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Camargo Fellowship Residency, Djerassi Residency, Banff Center Specialized Residency Programme, Ragdale Foundation Residency, NES Artist, MacArthur Global Connections Grant, 3Arts Award and the Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award. She is a former core troupe member of the internationally renowned performance art troupe, La Pocha Nostra.

Erica Mott was named one of the “Top 5 Game-Changing Dance Makers in 2015”, one of Chicago’s top culturemakers in NewCity’s “Players 2016: The Fifty People Who Really Perform for Chicago” and recently one of fifty artists for Chicago’s “50x50 Neighborhood Arts Project”, an initiative through the City of Chicago for their “Year of Public Art”. Currently she is a part time lecturer in the Department of Performance at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago. ericamott.com

Hương Ngô (Huong Ngo, Ngô Ngọc Hương, 吳玉香) is an interdisciplinary artist whose conceptual practice connects the personal and the political, giving material form to histories which have been rendered invisible and interrogating the ideological origins of their erasure. Having grown up as a refugee in the American South, Ngô creates work that reframes the hybrid, the imperfect, and the non-fluent as sites of survival and knowledge. She is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (BFA Fine Arts, 2001), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA Art & Technology, 2004), and was a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (2012). She was recently awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) for her research, begun at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in France and recently presented at DePaul Art Museum (2017), that examines the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons.

Her work, which has been described as “deftly and defiantly decolonial” by New City and “what intersectional feminist art looks like” by the Chicago Tribune, has been exhibited at the MoMA (2018), MCA Chicago (2004, 2016, 2017), Para Site HK (2017), Nhà Sàn Collective (2016), the Queens Museum (2014), The Kitchen (2011, 2014), and the New Museum (2012) among others. She has been awarded the DCASE Individual Artist Program Grant (2017, 2018), the Illinois Arts Council (2018), Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT residency (2016-17), Rhizome Commission (2011), and has been in residency through the Camargo Foundation Core Program (2018), LATITUDE Chicago (2015), and SOMA Mexico (2014). She has taught at the MoMA, Pratt Institute, and Parsons The New School for Design and is currently Assistant Professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. huongngo.com

Erik L. Peterson is a Chicago-based public artist, sculptor, and museum educator.

Drawing on the vocabularies of traditional arts media along with architecture and transportation infrastructure, Erik L. Peterson creates site-specific installations, public artworks, urban performances, edible sculptures, and neon artworks that challenge a viewer’s sense of space and self. Teasing out the absurdities of social convention with wry humor, his projects give viewers agency to experience the physical act of perception. Peterson’s unconventional approach to materials and his commitment to audience engagement serve to activate the public realm in new and unexpected ways. His art transports the pedestrian into a space of subtle strangeness and surprise, offering viewers a new way to participate as members of, and in the space within, a complex and changing public.

Erik’s work been featured in solo exhibitions at the Arts Club of Chicago, Open House Contemporary, EXPO CHICAGO, Bert Green Fine Art, Waubonsee Community College, Project 1612, Chicago Artists Coalition; large-scale public art projects and performances for the Broadview Hotel in Toronto, the Downtown Norfolk Council, Chicago Department of Special Events & Cultural Affairs (DCASE), and Pick Museum of Anthropology; and in group shows at The Franklin, Ralph Arnold Gallery at Loyola University, Arizona State University, Eastern Illinois University, University of Nebraska–Omaha, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Columbia College, and the Chicago Artists’ Coalition among others. Peterson is a founder of Hyde Park Kunstverein (HPK), an experimental “community museum” and Qeej Hero, a cross-cultural video game featuring an ancient Hmong musical instrument. He holds a B.F.A in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition to his artmaking practice, Peterson is the Manager of Family Programs and Student Engagement at the Smart Museum of Art. Peterson recently completed Ashland, a sculptural bench made from reclaimed ash wood, located in Edgewater Beach as one of the featured artists in the City of Chicago’s Year of Public Art in 2018. eriklpeterson.com

Moderated by Meida Teresa McNeal, the Director of Honey Pot Performance, an Afro-feminist collective dedicated to critical performance & public humanities. She received her PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and her MFA in Choreography & Dance History from Ohio State University. Over the past two decades, Meida has produced numerous creative projects as both a solo artist and with Honey Pot Performance, with works performed in Illinois, Rhode Island, Ohio, California, and Trinidad. She has received many grants and awards supporting her creative work including National Endowment for the Humanities, a 3Arts Award in Dance, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist award, and a 2018-19 Co-Mission Fellowship at Links Hall. Positioning her work as an Independent Artist and Scholar at the intersection of performance studies, dance and critical ethnography, she has taught courses in dance, critical performance ethnography, and black diasporic cultural production at Northwestern University, Brown University, Governors State, and Columbia College Chicago. Meida also works with the Chicago Park District as Arts & Culture Manager supporting community arts partnerships, youth arts, cultural stewardship, and civic engagement initiatives across the city’s parks and cultural centers. 

Location

Chicago Artists Coalition
2130 W. Fulton Street (look for our dedicated entrance at 2132 W. Fulton Street!)
Chicago, IL