Within minutes of the doors’ official opening, most of the crowd had assembled. They stood in bunches in the open area near the projector screen, moving to look through rows of artwork or to find a good seat. Continue reading
Bridgeport
Looking In, Looking Out
Project Onward’s “Smile With Your Mind” at Bridgeport Art Center
ELIJAH ALVARADO
When I first met Blake Lenoir, he was hesitant to speak to me. After I introduced myself, he looked at me for a long time before tersely telling me his own name, age, and background. Our initial conversation was marked by long pauses and short answers. Continue reading
South Side Stories
An interview with Andrew Marikis
ISABEL OCHOA GOLD
Story Club, a nonfiction read-aloud, began in a Wrigleyville bar as a way to combine disparate forms: the freshness of the amateur and the consistency of the professional, the personal prose of the stand-up and the eloquent emotion of the slam poet. Continue reading
Ain’t No Fish in the Percolator
Maria's serves some damn good coffee
Paul Durica congratulates the winner of the “Twin Peaks” costume contest. BEA MALSKY.
This weekend, Maria’s was overcome with nineties nostalgia as the Bridgeport community bar hosted a crowd of clairvoyant detectives, agoraphobic orchid growers, Hawaiian-shirted shrinks, and log-cradling ladies. Continue reading
Making a Scene
Bridgeport Film Club gets outside the box
Director Eugene Park, cinematographer Tracy Pitts, and lead actor Wanda Jin in production for “Self-Deportation: The Untold Tale of a Marginal Woman.” Courtesy Conner Keeffe.
Scripts which open with a character waking up will be rejected,” instructs the call for script submissions on the website of the Bridgeport Film Club. Among the other guidelines: “No special effects or choreographed action.” Continue reading
Achy Breaky Hearts
A week before Valentine's Day, heartbreak comes to the Co-Prosperity Sphere
The Co-Prosperity Sphere’s main area, a wide-open space with soaring ceilings, should seem vast, but tonight it feels intimate, filled by a low hum of conversation and the sounds of the three-man band warming up. Continue reading
Expat Unity
"Bindu" at the Bridgeport Art Center
PAULA GARRETT-ELLIS
A seemingly simple dot, the Bindu is in fact a powerful Indian symbol that represents the point at which creation begins and may become unity. In a collaborative exhibition at the Bridgeport Art Center named after the Bindu, artists Paula Garrett-Ellis, Mareev Vaid, and Stacey Sirow explore the symbol’s deeper meaning in a collection of works that spans folk art, contemporary printmaking, sculpture, and photography. Within these pieces, the artists search for unity in a clash of cultures and customs—between India and America, past and future, tradition and modernity. Continue reading
The Chicago Picasso
Public art on 16mm at the Co-Prosperity Sphere
MIKE WARHOT
The Co-Prosperity Sphere is pretty bare. About thirty attendees sit on benches and chairs before the screen. The topic is public art in Chicago in general, and the Chicago Picasso in particular: a fifty-foot untitled sculpture in the Loop, dedicated to the city in 1967. Continue reading
An Admirable Assault on the Senses
Steve Sherrell's "Mixed Bag" at 33 Contemporary
“Pin the Tail” by Steve Sherrell
Steve Sherrell’s “Mixed Bag” is less jumbled than the title lets on. The new exhibition, hosted by 33 Contemporary at the Zhou B Art Center in Bridgeport, puts bold outlining and a canvas’s meticulous, geometric subdivision into correspondence with canvases removed from their stretchers, literally slit apart and stitched together again. Insistently, distinct shapes and broad fields of color contrast with canvases that are dismounted and distressed, minimal and morbid. But Sherrell’s digitally rendered “Mashups” anchor the exhibition by proposing a compromise—looking less consciously contrived, but remaining unscarred, intensely intricate, and exuberantly colorful. Continue reading
Literary Picture Show
An interview with Bridgeport writer John Hospodka
STEPHANIE KOCH
A story of stories, John Hospodka’s “South Side Trilogy” is the narrative of a neighborhood that is at once real and out of this world. Told through art, video, poetry, prose, voice recordings, and song, the multimedia work follows the lives of a few residents of Hardscrabble, Chicago, a fictional neighborhood based on Bridgeport. Continue reading