Dreaming Inside History: Chicago's Alternative Pedagogies on Screen

A film screening, discussion, and shared meal which unpacks and revisits histories of alternative art and design education, in and outside schools, across several decades of Chicago history. Featuring works from Chicago Metro School, an autonomous CPS high school “without walls” founded in the 1970s; the Stockyard Institute, a DIY art school and radio station for grassroots community organizing founded in 1995 in the Back of the Yards neighborhood; Street-Level Youth Media, a collective amplifying youth voice, equitable access to new media, and civic awareness; Video Machete, founded in 1994 as a collective of activists, students, and media-based artists running youth media workshops across the city; and Eleanor Boyer & Karen Peugh’s La Maestra (1984), a look at Pilsen’s Maria Luisa Michel Almonte, a flower shop-based community arts and crafts teacher. Including newly-digitized footage, the featured work shows students and teachers (sometimes indistinguishably) asserting what it looks like to practice art and design education in an alternative context, and why taking such pedagogies to the margins of institutionality is meaningful for some and necessary for others. Join us for a conversation and food after the screening alongside the presence of students, teachers, and filmmakers involved. Programmed by Inga, a Pilsen bookshop, and hosted by Watershed, a space for thinking across and with art & ecology.

 

This program is supported by Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund in partnership with Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.