Christopher Good
When you reduce 11599 S. Stony Island to its individual components, it’s simple enough: wood, mulch, concrete, clods of dirt. But the Bike Park at Big Marsh, like any good bike park, is more than the sum of its parts. Since its opening last November, the park’s stairs, ramps, curves, and jumps have become a two-wheeled proving ground—and the only space of its kind on Chicago’s South Side.
Wildness: Relations of People & Place is a rare bird. It’s a collection bound not by genre or intended audience, but by a singular theme: that “human and wild communities are entangled, and can work toward collective health and self-renewal.” And so, across four parts and two-dozen essays, editors Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer recast mankind as a part of nature, one of many species, hitched to everything else in the universe.
Christopher Good
Like some of the best restaurants, Calumet Fisheries is famous for being unassuming. It still sits where it has for the last seven decades, with the 95th Street bridge down the road and the scaffolding of the Chicago Skyway downriver. The surroundings have transformed over the years—the shack currently overlooks twin industrial silos—but the same words are emblazoned under the same red shingle roof, and the same fresh catches lie inside.
Katia Perez
Dogs on the South Side shouldn’t need to drive all over the city to get out more and exercise.”
Jasmin Liang
The National A. Philip Randolph Pullman Porter Museum, which sits across from Corliss High School on 104th and Maryland, occupies a unique space both citywide and nationwide. After twenty-one years in operation, it remains the only black history museum in the country to focus specifically on labor history.
Terry Evans
In the middle of an empty room was a Plexiglas cube—and at the bottom of the cube, a fine sheet of black powder. An imaginary moonscape? An abandoned terrarium? Perhaps anticipating these questions, Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann, the Chicago-based artists behind the installation Prevailing Winds and Relative Distances, pasted several pages of text around the room.
One of the most striking motifs found in The Disco’s of Imhotep, the newest album by Chicago musician Jamal Moss (stage name Hieroglyphic Being), isn’t musical at all: it’s a single word. “Kmt,” a simple anglicization of Egyptian hieroglyphs, is scattered throughout Moss’s discography. Here, it lends its name to “The Sound of KMT,” but earlier this year it served as the title for a collaborative album with his cousin Noleian Reusse in a project called Africans with Mainframes.
In The Weight of Shadows, his first book, Orduña recounts a lifetime as the “other”.
Ellen Hao
“You can’t walk aside no one’s body and ever think that you could be them.”
Forms of Communication, Alberto Aguilar
“That was the most pizza we’ve ever eaten in our lives.”