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Make your nominations on the ballot below!

Up until the nominating period ends at noon on Friday, December 9th, you can return to your ballot here at chicagoreader.com/best to nominate in additional categories or change your nominations.

Voting on the most nominated finalists will begin on January 18, 2023.

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Michael and Helen Cameron launched Uncommon Ground in 1991 as a tiny coffeehouse at Grace and Clark near Wrigley Field, eventually expanding it into a full-service restaurant and music venue. In 2007 they added a second location on Devon, which they recently closed to spend more time with family. In 2014 the original Uncommon Ground added Illinois’s first certified organic brewery, Greenstar. 

The Wrigleyville coffeehouse earned a special place in rock history in February 1994, when it booked the Chicago debut of an unknown singer-songwriter named Jeff Buckley. After Buckley died in a drowning accident in May 1997, Uncommon Ground held a tribute night in his memory. What started as a way to honor a friend grew into an international phenomenon, and this month Uncommon Ground hosts its 25th Jeff Buckley Tribute. Proceeds benefit a youth scholarship fund at the Old Town School of Folk Music. 

In 1994, Nick Miller from Jam Productions reached out to me. Sony and Columbia had contacted him and said, “Hey, we’re about to sign this young kid by the name of Jeff Buckley.” He’d gotten his start at this coffeehouse in the Village in New York City called Sin-é. For his first tour across the country, he wanted to play similar little cafes. I’d known Nick for a while, so when he asked if I’d help, I was like, “Yeah, sure.” He sent me Jeff’s four-song demo, Live at Sin-é, and I thought, “This guy’s incredible.” 

Nobody in Chicago had ever heard of Jeff Buckley—he’d never played here before. Nick and I invited all our industry friends and other songwriters and friends to come and see the show—it was kind of a who’s who of the local music scene at the time. It was February, and during the performance, there was this giant snowstorm. The fireplace was going and the windows were all steamed up. We had candles everywhere and little twinkly lights. It was pretty magical, especially his performance—he played solo and you could hear a pin drop. 

After the show, we hung out and had some wine. He came with his manager, and I don’t know why, but in Chicago they gave him a Crown Victoria. Of course it got stuck along Grace Street. So we got into a snowball fight trying to push the car out—we were laughing our butts off. 

Months later my brother called and said, “Hey, are you sitting down? I just read the Chicago Tribune. You need to flip to the music section.” Greg Kot had written that Jeff Buckley at Uncommon Ground was the best concert of the year. The rest of the list were artists like Bob Dylan and Sinead O’Connor who played big venues and stadiums. It was a little surreal, and it definitely put us on the map musically. 

I was very thankful to Greg for that recognition. Never in a million years would I expect something like that. And it did sort of change the dynamic. 

Because of that solo show, we started getting calls from artists who played bigger places and wanted to play stripped-down acoustic sets. I was a huge fan of this UK artist, David Gray. He called me personally (this was before email and everything), and I thought someone was playing a joke on me. He was playing an afternoon show at Schubas, and he asked if he could come by and do an evening gig. 

Train played Uncommon Ground because the head of Sony wanted to hear them once more before he decided whether to sign them. So Train got signed at Uncommon Ground—the guy from Sony jumped up and said, “I’m gonna buy everybody’s dinner tonight. We just made up our minds!” Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles set up a coffeehouse tour because she wanted to do what Jeff had done. I’m almost positive we were the one and only coffeehouse she ever played. There were like 40 middle-aged men sitting three feet away from her. Maybe it was a little too close? A few days later, I read that she’d canceled the tour.

[In 1997], my brother and I were thinking of opening a midsized rock club. Every month I was producing shows at a different rock club, to get a feel for what it would be like to own something of varying sizes. On the night we were informed that Jeff had been lost, I was producing a show at Schubas, and I was actually performing with my band. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was friends with Anastasia Davies, who booked Schubas at the time. She walked up onstage and gave me the news. They still hadn’t found him, but they didn’t expect him to survive.

I pinch myself all the time because of the weird things I’ve experienced and the people I’ve met because of something I started long ago. In year two, I’d reached out to Mary Guibert, Jeff’s mom, and we became friends. A couple years later she wanted to show an early documentary about Jeff on a west-coast tour. She knew that I was born in Seattle, where it was screening at the Experience Music Project, and she asked if I wanted to come help her with the event. I was like, “That’ll be great. When I get done, I’ll go see my family.” 

At the Experience Music Project, Mary had put me in charge of the green room, which is this giant bunker at the bottom of the theater. And she goes, “I have some special guests, but I’m not going to tell you who.” The elevator door opens, and Chris Cornell steps off with Susan Silver, who was his wife at the time. Literally a minute later, the elevator opens again and Brad Pitt walks out. 

So for about 30 minutes Brad Pitt, Chris Cornell, and I are sitting around this coffee table sharing Jeff Buckley stories. They were there because Chris was a friend and Brad was a huge fan. And I was just helping Mary. 

Then Brad Pitt says, “Hold on, I’m gonna go get my filmmaker and my cinematographer. We’re gonna do that again.” I ask, “We’re gonna do what again?” He says, “We’re gonna share all these stories again, but this time I wanna get it on film.” Because he was trying to do a different documentary. So somewhere there’s a half hour of this footage that I’ve never seen. Whenever I see Mary, I ask, “If you talk to Brad again, would you tell him I’d love to have a copy of that?” Because people don’t believe me. 

In year ten, I decided to do one night at Uncommon Ground and a second night at Metro, because so many people were flying in for the performances. That year, there were more international performers than performers from the United States. People were coming from Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands to pay tribute to Jeff. I couldn’t believe it. When I told Mary, she said, “Oh, I’ve got to come in.” So for 15 years she’s been flying in too. Her niece, Jeff’s cousin Alison [Raykovich], has come with her for the last eight or nine. They’re like family now—we call Mary our “rock ’n’ roll mama.” 

One of the best parts about doing this is you get to be the great connector—you get to introduce all these amazing performers to each other. Over the years, some really great relationships have been formed. Artists will go on tours together or sit in with each other’s bands. There’s all this connectivity and camaraderie. It seems like everybody comes together for their love of Jeff Buckley and checks their egos at the door. It’s fantastic to watch it happen in real time.

[The production] is pretty loose. If you’re gonna perform at a Jeff Buckley tribute, you better have the chops, right? We want people to do what Jeff did and completely rearrange a song. My favorite thing is when the audience doesn’t even recognize it until the artist starts singing because they’ve made it their own. If you want to come in and impersonate Jeff, that’s OK, but that’s not really what this is about. It’s about the spirit of the music and making it yours and paying him tribute as a musician and performer in what you do. 

We were going to do two nights at Metro for the 25th tribute show, but now we’re doing them at Uncommon Ground. We spoke to a lot of extremely famous performers that have been Jeff Buckley fans for a very long time, and we got a lot of early commitments when people were unsure about the pandemic, how venues would reopen, and whether or not they could book tours. But when things opened up, most of those acts started peeling off one by one. They’re touring as much as they possibly can, while they can.

I’ve always thought, “Let’s see if people still want to come.” But as soon as I put the tickets on sale, they sell out in like 15 minutes. There’ve been years where I’ve gotten hundreds of submissions from people who want to fly in on their own dime to pay tribute to Jeff. It just keeps on rolling.

I hope this story inspires people who aren’t familiar with Jeff to listen to the album Grace. Then they’ll get it. Dial that up and it’ll change your musical life. If you haven’t experienced it, you need to experience it. If you’ve experienced it and you want to see some very passionate musicians perform it, come to one of the tributes. 

Around 300 performers have flown to Chicago to pay tribute to Jeff’s music. It’s like the Jeff Buckley pilgrimage to Grace Street. And when people come and walk around the side of the building and look at the street sign, they say, “You’re kidding—he played on Grace Street?”

The title is probably a coincidence. I never got to ask him about it personally, so I can only speculate. But it was crazy when the album came out. I was like, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

Read More

Michael and Helen Cameron launched Uncommon Ground in 1991 as a tiny coffeehouse at Grace and Clark near Wrigley Field, eventually expanding it into a full-service restaurant and music venue. In 2007 they added a second location on Devon, which they recently closed to spend more time with family. In 2014 the original Uncommon Ground added Illinois’s first certified organic brewery, Greenstar. 

The Wrigleyville coffeehouse earned a special place in rock history in February 1994, when it booked the Chicago debut of an unknown singer-songwriter named Jeff Buckley. After Buckley died in a drowning accident in May 1997, Uncommon Ground held a tribute night in his memory. What started as a way to honor a friend grew into an international phenomenon, and this month Uncommon Ground hosts its 25th Jeff Buckley Tribute. Proceeds benefit a youth scholarship fund at the Old Town School of Folk Music. 

In 1994, Nick Miller from Jam Productions reached out to me. Sony and Columbia had contacted him and said, “Hey, we’re about to sign this young kid by the name of Jeff Buckley.” He’d gotten his start at this coffeehouse in the Village in New York City called Sin-é. For his first tour across the country, he wanted to play similar little cafes. I’d known Nick for a while, so when he asked if I’d help, I was like, “Yeah, sure.” He sent me Jeff’s four-song demo, Live at Sin-é, and I thought, “This guy’s incredible.” 

Nobody in Chicago had ever heard of Jeff Buckley—he’d never played here before. Nick and I invited all our industry friends and other songwriters and friends to come and see the show—it was kind of a who’s who of the local music scene at the time. It was February, and during the performance, there was this giant snowstorm. The fireplace was going and the windows were all steamed up. We had candles everywhere and little twinkly lights. It was pretty magical, especially his performance—he played solo and you could hear a pin drop. 

After the show, we hung out and had some wine. He came with his manager, and I don’t know why, but in Chicago they gave him a Crown Victoria. Of course it got stuck along Grace Street. So we got into a snowball fight trying to push the car out—we were laughing our butts off. 

Months later my brother called and said, “Hey, are you sitting down? I just read the Chicago Tribune. You need to flip to the music section.” Greg Kot had written that Jeff Buckley at Uncommon Ground was the best concert of the year. The rest of the list were artists like Bob Dylan and Sinead O’Connor who played big venues and stadiums. It was a little surreal, and it definitely put us on the map musically. 

I was very thankful to Greg for that recognition. Never in a million years would I expect something like that. And it did sort of change the dynamic. 

Because of that solo show, we started getting calls from artists who played bigger places and wanted to play stripped-down acoustic sets. I was a huge fan of this UK artist, David Gray. He called me personally (this was before email and everything), and I thought someone was playing a joke on me. He was playing an afternoon show at Schubas, and he asked if he could come by and do an evening gig. 

Train played Uncommon Ground because the head of Sony wanted to hear them once more before he decided whether to sign them. So Train got signed at Uncommon Ground—the guy from Sony jumped up and said, “I’m gonna buy everybody’s dinner tonight. We just made up our minds!” Susanna Hoffs of the Bangles set up a coffeehouse tour because she wanted to do what Jeff had done. I’m almost positive we were the one and only coffeehouse she ever played. There were like 40 middle-aged men sitting three feet away from her. Maybe it was a little too close? A few days later, I read that she’d canceled the tour.

[In 1997], my brother and I were thinking of opening a midsized rock club. Every month I was producing shows at a different rock club, to get a feel for what it would be like to own something of varying sizes. On the night we were informed that Jeff had been lost, I was producing a show at Schubas, and I was actually performing with my band. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was friends with Anastasia Davies, who booked Schubas at the time. She walked up onstage and gave me the news. They still hadn’t found him, but they didn’t expect him to survive.

I pinch myself all the time because of the weird things I’ve experienced and the people I’ve met because of something I started long ago. In year two, I’d reached out to Mary Guibert, Jeff’s mom, and we became friends. A couple years later she wanted to show an early documentary about Jeff on a west-coast tour. She knew that I was born in Seattle, where it was screening at the Experience Music Project, and she asked if I wanted to come help her with the event. I was like, “That’ll be great. When I get done, I’ll go see my family.” 

At the Experience Music Project, Mary had put me in charge of the green room, which is this giant bunker at the bottom of the theater. And she goes, “I have some special guests, but I’m not going to tell you who.” The elevator door opens, and Chris Cornell steps off with Susan Silver, who was his wife at the time. Literally a minute later, the elevator opens again and Brad Pitt walks out. 

So for about 30 minutes Brad Pitt, Chris Cornell, and I are sitting around this coffee table sharing Jeff Buckley stories. They were there because Chris was a friend and Brad was a huge fan. And I was just helping Mary. 

Then Brad Pitt says, “Hold on, I’m gonna go get my filmmaker and my cinematographer. We’re gonna do that again.” I ask, “We’re gonna do what again?” He says, “We’re gonna share all these stories again, but this time I wanna get it on film.” Because he was trying to do a different documentary. So somewhere there’s a half hour of this footage that I’ve never seen. Whenever I see Mary, I ask, “If you talk to Brad again, would you tell him I’d love to have a copy of that?” Because people don’t believe me. 

In year ten, I decided to do one night at Uncommon Ground and a second night at Metro, because so many people were flying in for the performances. That year, there were more international performers than performers from the United States. People were coming from Germany, Denmark, France, Italy, the UK, and the Netherlands to pay tribute to Jeff. I couldn’t believe it. When I told Mary, she said, “Oh, I’ve got to come in.” So for 15 years she’s been flying in too. Her niece, Jeff’s cousin Alison [Raykovich], has come with her for the last eight or nine. They’re like family now—we call Mary our “rock ’n’ roll mama.” 

One of the best parts about doing this is you get to be the great connector—you get to introduce all these amazing performers to each other. Over the years, some really great relationships have been formed. Artists will go on tours together or sit in with each other’s bands. There’s all this connectivity and camaraderie. It seems like everybody comes together for their love of Jeff Buckley and checks their egos at the door. It’s fantastic to watch it happen in real time.

[The production] is pretty loose. If you’re gonna perform at a Jeff Buckley tribute, you better have the chops, right? We want people to do what Jeff did and completely rearrange a song. My favorite thing is when the audience doesn’t even recognize it until the artist starts singing because they’ve made it their own. If you want to come in and impersonate Jeff, that’s OK, but that’s not really what this is about. It’s about the spirit of the music and making it yours and paying him tribute as a musician and performer in what you do. 

We were going to do two nights at Metro for the 25th tribute show, but now we’re doing them at Uncommon Ground. We spoke to a lot of extremely famous performers that have been Jeff Buckley fans for a very long time, and we got a lot of early commitments when people were unsure about the pandemic, how venues would reopen, and whether or not they could book tours. But when things opened up, most of those acts started peeling off one by one. They’re touring as much as they possibly can, while they can.

I’ve always thought, “Let’s see if people still want to come.” But as soon as I put the tickets on sale, they sell out in like 15 minutes. There’ve been years where I’ve gotten hundreds of submissions from people who want to fly in on their own dime to pay tribute to Jeff. It just keeps on rolling.

I hope this story inspires people who aren’t familiar with Jeff to listen to the album Grace. Then they’ll get it. Dial that up and it’ll change your musical life. If you haven’t experienced it, you need to experience it. If you’ve experienced it and you want to see some very passionate musicians perform it, come to one of the tributes. 

Around 300 performers have flown to Chicago to pay tribute to Jeff’s music. It’s like the Jeff Buckley pilgrimage to Grace Street. And when people come and walk around the side of the building and look at the street sign, they say, “You’re kidding—he played on Grace Street?”

The title is probably a coincidence. I never got to ask him about it personally, so I can only speculate. But it was crazy when the album came out. I was like, “You’ve gotta be kidding me!”

Read More

Anna Martine Whitehead’s solo exhibition, “Notes on Territory: Meditation,” at Roman Susan, is an invitation to imagine new ways of survival. The bulk of the gallery is taken up by a seven-by-nine-foot wooden platform strewn with books and throw blankets; a woven canopy hangs above it, forming a compact sanctuary of sorts. The sculpture has the same dimensions as the crawl space that Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman on the run from her captor, lived in for seven years. To put your body in proportion to the space, to crawl inside of it—as visitors are encouraged to do—is heavy, but that’s not the takeaway that Whitehead envisions. Instead, they think there is something liberatory to be gained from putting one’s body in this space.

“This is in no way what her space looked like,” Whitehead says. “This is not a re-creation of suffering. I’m very opposed to rehearsing suffering.”

The back of the sculpture is enclosed by a shiny metallic sheet, silver on one side, gold on the other. The base—made of wood sourced from the trees around Lathrop Homes, many of which were felled for the redevelopment—holds a loose library of books relating to abolition, liberation, and radical thought, from Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. 

Whitehead first learned about Jacobs’s story about seven years ago, eventually reading her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, one of the few extant first-person narratives told from the perspective of an enslaved woman. The book details Jacobs’s childhood, her decision to flee a sexually aggressive captor, the years she spent in hiding, and then her eventual journey north to freedom. The crawl space Jacobs lived in was roughly the size of a contemporary prison cell (other than in height—Jacobs’s space was three feet tall at its highest point), a poignant coincidence for Whitehead, whose work often references the prison industrial complex.

The project was first staged in 2019 at the Chicago art space SITE/less. The iteration at Roman Susan includes a calming ambient noise component, made in collaboration with Sofía Córdova, that encourages quiet contemplation. On the walls behind the platform are a series of spare paper collages. They depict metamorphic creatures, part human, part animal, with redacted text from Assata Shakur’s autobiography or James Carr’s Bad. The outline of the figures echoes the floor plan of Cape Coast Castle, a historic site in present-day Ghana where Africans were held in dungeons before being put on ships and sold off to slavery.

“These collages feel like either armor or building a transformer,” Whitehead says. “I think that’s what I’m thinking about these as: hybrid beast forms.”

While the collages may seem disparate from Jacobs’s crawl space, both reference a type of architecture of containment. “I guess my question was: how do people survive in these places?” she says. “I was trying to draw this connection between survival through the slave castles, onto the slave ship, onto the plantation, and then survival all the way to now, through prison. How do you survive that? And I felt like her work gives us some tools for thinking, for understanding ways to survive in relationship to architecture that is meant to not support human survival.” 

For Whitehead, there is also a woman-centric element to this work—“that women make spaces into homes that aren’t really meant for them and their families to live in.” Indeed, Jacobs’s crawl space was located in the house of her grandmother, who provided a bed for her to sleep in, and covertly brought extra blankets during the winter months. 

Whitehead will be present at the gallery on Thursday afternoons throughout the duration of the show, encouraging visitors to spend time inside the piece. And on November 10, artist and dancemaker Jay Carlon will be activating the installation at 5 PM.

“I think there’s something to learn from being with your body inside the space, but I don’t know what exactly it is,” Whitehead says. Jacobs referred to her secret hideaway as her “loophole of retreat,” a sort of liminal space that provided a nominal sort of freedom. Reading her autobiography, which is available for perusal at Roman Susan, one is struck by Jacobs’s formidable psychological capacity, her refusal to be broken down by the system of slavery. Living for so long in a space that didn’t allow for standing, or even comfortably sitting up, that had no proper window to the outside world, seems like an unimaginable hardship, but it was one that Jacobs chose. Her later life was no less remarkable, not only writing her book, which she hoped would convince readers of the true degradations of slavery, but also doing relief work and even founding a free school for formerly enslaved people. Whitehead considers the components of the exhibition to be an offering of sorts, for visitors to do what they want with, to forge their own connections.

Their hope is that the piece will take on a more permanent form outdoors, maybe in a public park. An area near Lathrop Homes would be a fitting site. She really wants people to climb into and interact bodily with the piece, and bringing it outside the gallery walls will only expand its reach, its possibilities.

“Notes on Territory: Meditation” Through 11/20: by appointment Wed-Thu 1-6 PM, Sun 3-6 PM, Roman Susan, 1224 W. Loyola, text 773-270-1224 or email [email protected], romansusan.org  

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Chicago Reader 2022 print issue dates

The Chicago Reader is published in print every other week. Issues are dated Thursday. Distribution usually happens Wednesday morning through Thursday night of the issue date. Upcoming print issue dates through December 2022 are:

11/24/2022

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2023 print issue dates

The first print issue in 2023 will be published three weeks after the 12/22/2022 issue, the final issue of 2022. The print issue dates through June 2023 are:

1/12/2023
1/26/2023
2/9/2023
2/23/2023
3/9/2023
3/23/2023
4/6/2023
4/20/2023
5/4/2023
5/18/2023
6/1/2023
6/15/2023
6/29/2023

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Alt-rock five-piece Smut formed in Cincinnati in 2014, and within a couple years, their shoegaze-dappled heavy rock had caught the ear of Bully front woman Alicia Bognanno, who offered them a crucial tour-support spot. In the time since Smut’s previous full-length, 2017’s End of Sam-soon, they’ve relocated to Chicago, dialed back the aggression in their wall of sound, and shifted to a more plaintive approach to songwriting. The band’s new How the Light Felt (Bayonet) leans into shoegaze’s ocean-size capacity for tranquility, and this gentler approach sharpens every little detail. They toy with elements from outside shoegaze’s blissful lexicon, though they don’t all land gracefully; the brief drum ’n’ bass loop that perks up a lonesome guitar melody on “Morningstar” goes over a lot better than the cheesy record scratches that stumble into the acoustic picking on “Unbroken Thought.” Smut excel when they console, such as on the restorative “After Silver Leaves.” Front woman Tay Roebuck sings about a former lover who called her by another woman’s name, a painful relationship that her younger self grew out of when she no longer needed the validation; her kindhearted, mellow vocals could help someone in a similar spot imagine a better future for themselves.

  Smut’s How the Light Felt is available on Bandcamp.

Read More

Anna Martine Whitehead’s solo exhibition, “Notes on Territory: Meditation,” at Roman Susan, is an invitation to imagine new ways of survival. The bulk of the gallery is taken up by a seven-by-nine-foot wooden platform strewn with books and throw blankets; a woven canopy hangs above it, forming a compact sanctuary of sorts. The sculpture has the same dimensions as the crawl space that Harriet Jacobs, an enslaved woman on the run from her captor, lived in for seven years. To put your body in proportion to the space, to crawl inside of it—as visitors are encouraged to do—is heavy, but that’s not the takeaway that Whitehead envisions. Instead, they think there is something liberatory to be gained from putting one’s body in this space.

“This is in no way what her space looked like,” Whitehead says. “This is not a re-creation of suffering. I’m very opposed to rehearsing suffering.”

The back of the sculpture is enclosed by a shiny metallic sheet, silver on one side, gold on the other. The base—made of wood sourced from the trees around Lathrop Homes, many of which were felled for the redevelopment—holds a loose library of books relating to abolition, liberation, and radical thought, from Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. 

Whitehead first learned about Jacobs’s story about seven years ago, eventually reading her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, one of the few extant first-person narratives told from the perspective of an enslaved woman. The book details Jacobs’s childhood, her decision to flee a sexually aggressive captor, the years she spent in hiding, and then her eventual journey north to freedom. The crawl space Jacobs lived in was roughly the size of a contemporary prison cell (other than in height—Jacobs’s space was three feet tall at its highest point), a poignant coincidence for Whitehead, whose work often references the prison industrial complex.

The project was first staged in 2019 at the Chicago art space SITE/less. The iteration at Roman Susan includes a calming ambient noise component, made in collaboration with Sofía Córdova, that encourages quiet contemplation. On the walls behind the platform are a series of spare paper collages. They depict metamorphic creatures, part human, part animal, with redacted text from Assata Shakur’s autobiography or James Carr’s Bad. The outline of the figures echoes the floor plan of Cape Coast Castle, a historic site in present-day Ghana where Africans were held in dungeons before being put on ships and sold off to slavery.

“These collages feel like either armor or building a transformer,” Whitehead says. “I think that’s what I’m thinking about these as: hybrid beast forms.”

While the collages may seem disparate from Jacobs’s crawl space, both reference a type of architecture of containment. “I guess my question was: how do people survive in these places?” she says. “I was trying to draw this connection between survival through the slave castles, onto the slave ship, onto the plantation, and then survival all the way to now, through prison. How do you survive that? And I felt like her work gives us some tools for thinking, for understanding ways to survive in relationship to architecture that is meant to not support human survival.” 

For Whitehead, there is also a woman-centric element to this work—“that women make spaces into homes that aren’t really meant for them and their families to live in.” Indeed, Jacobs’s crawl space was located in the house of her grandmother, who provided a bed for her to sleep in, and covertly brought extra blankets during the winter months. 

Whitehead will be present at the gallery on Thursday afternoons throughout the duration of the show, encouraging visitors to spend time inside the piece. And on November 10, artist and dancemaker Jay Carlon will be activating the installation at 5 PM.

“I think there’s something to learn from being with your body inside the space, but I don’t know what exactly it is,” Whitehead says. Jacobs referred to her secret hideaway as her “loophole of retreat,” a sort of liminal space that provided a nominal sort of freedom. Reading her autobiography, which is available for perusal at Roman Susan, one is struck by Jacobs’s formidable psychological capacity, her refusal to be broken down by the system of slavery. Living for so long in a space that didn’t allow for standing, or even comfortably sitting up, that had no proper window to the outside world, seems like an unimaginable hardship, but it was one that Jacobs chose. Her later life was no less remarkable, not only writing her book, which she hoped would convince readers of the true degradations of slavery, but also doing relief work and even founding a free school for formerly enslaved people. Whitehead considers the components of the exhibition to be an offering of sorts, for visitors to do what they want with, to forge their own connections.

Their hope is that the piece will take on a more permanent form outdoors, maybe in a public park. An area near Lathrop Homes would be a fitting site. She really wants people to climb into and interact bodily with the piece, and bringing it outside the gallery walls will only expand its reach, its possibilities.

“Notes on Territory: Meditation” Through 11/20: by appointment Wed-Thu 1-6 PM, Sun 3-6 PM, Roman Susan, 1224 W. Loyola, text 773-270-1224 or email [email protected], romansusan.org  

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