Growing Home Inc. is a USDA-Certified Organic urban farm, workforce development center and non-profit social enterprise based in Englewood. They produce more than 35,000 pounds of produce annually, while serving more than 3,500 people through their food access program and providing job training and assistance services for 100 Chicagoans. Growing Home was recently awarded a […] The post Growing for Good with Green Thumb appeared first on Chicago Reader.Read More

Rates of suicide have skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and mental illness is more prevalent today than ever before. However, the societal causes of mental illness are still not widely recognized, so people who suffer mental illness are often treated as though the problem is entirely their own to solve. A new novel, released by Chicago publisher Heeler Books in April, aims to change that. 

A Revolution of the Mind by Chicago author MV Perry, is a striking work of autobiographical fiction that explores mental illness and its manifestations throughout the narrator’s life. The narrator, Ellen “Boo” Harvey, hopes to build a social movement like the civil rights struggle, but the goal of this movement would be to address mental illness and the societal structures that make it so widespread.

Perry is able to write with such insight into the problem of mental illness because he has spent basically his whole life with a disability, advocating on behalf of similarly situated people—first as a psychiatric unit volunteer, then as a master’s student in urban mental health studies, then as a Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) grantee organizing mental health consumers for political advocacy. Now, Perry is incorporating an Illinois organization called the Legislative Consumer Leadership Conference, which is dedicated to mental health policy and legislation for the consumer. Perry draws from this background when shaping the character of Boo Harvey, a mentally ill advocate for the mentally ill. 

Ultimately, A Revolution of the Mind is a book about the inherent inequality of capitalism and the hopelessness that causes so many of capitalism’s subjects to suffer from mental illness. Fans of the writer Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, will certainly connect with the book, as it opens with this essential quote from Fisher: “The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness as an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.”

Boo Harvey hopes to do exactly that—repoliticize mental illness by building a social movement—and she takes enormous strides throughout the book, even as she struggles with her own mental health. Growing up in a wealthy white family in the North Shore suburbs, Boo is hyper-aware of the massive scale of injustice in her city. Perry describes it perfectly, writing that: “The story of Chicago, city of broad shoulders and underground abortions, is a story of adjacent inequality. This fact is both homicidal and suicidal, for the same core reasons, though these take on vastly different forms of social ills, none of which are desirable, all of which are potentially fatal.” Mental illness is one of those fatal consequences, but instead of addressing this crisis, Chicago’s politicians have spent a miniscule amount of their massive budget on the people’s mental health. 

A Revolution of the Mind by MV Perry
Heeler Books, paperback, 482 pp., $19.99, heelerbooks.com

A Revolution of the Mind follows Boo from her birthplace to California for college, and back to Chicago, where she works with Jude Freedman, a “suicidal advocate for the mentally ill.” Boo also struggles with her own mental illness, but she and Jude demonstrate that people with lived experience are the ones who have the most insight into the problem. However, as Jude points out, people with mental illness are often shut out of policymaking, so the system does not reflect their often revolutionary goals. People like Boo, Jude, and Mark Fisher understand, through experience, that mental illness is a lot more than one person’s issue. As Boo says to Jude, reminiscent of Fisher, “I don’t have a sophisticated understanding of suffering. They tell you it’s mainly in the brain, but that’s a matter of conjecture. Depression, mania, and schizophrenia do not exist in states of nature, and cannot be physically identified as body pathologies . . . I’d say it’s more about environment. About culture, politics, structures, ideas, and ways of life and how we engage with and against them. How it induces fear, harm, and safety in myriad combinations. Our body enables suffering by predisposing us to it, but the root lies not in the body. It’s in the world.”

This insight would lead one to question just about everything regarding how politicians treat mental health—or don’t treat it, because not many are willing to invest the necessary resources to match the scale of the problem. Fortunately however, there are some trying to change that—such as 33rd Ward alderperson Rossanna Rodriguez Sanchez, who has been an outspoken advocate for increasing public mental health funding. She has been a leading sponsor of the Treatment Not Trauma ordinance, which would send non-police mental health emergency workers to people in the midst of a mental health crisis, because around half of people killed by police suffer from one or more disabilities—something that Perry touches on throughout the book. Sanchez has also advocated for reopening and expanding the public mental health clinics that previous mayors closed—something that Mayor Lightfoot promised to do on the campaign trail, but quickly backed away from once in office. 

Boo discusses the protests around these mental health clinic closures several times in the book, which takes place throughout that same time period. Boo and Jude also travel to Springfield to advocate against former governor Bruce Rauner’s seven-figure mental health budget cuts throughout the book. Today, the lack of mental and physical health care in low-income communities plays a big part in many crises in Illinois, including suicide, substance abuse, and gun violence. 

Boo is forced to listen to fearmongering about Chicago crime from her family when they have political discussions at the dinner table throughout the book, including when her Aunt Mary says, “Oh, the crime in the city . . . That’s why we should stay on the North Shore.” However, Boo points out that these same family members’ conservative politics are a major factor driving the violence in the city, including both their budget cuts to mental health care, and their steadfast support for policing and incarceration, which hoards most of the public resources that could otherwise go to social programs that have been proven to reduce violence. As Boo points out in an argument with her brother: “There are blocks in Austin where we spend a million dollars on incarcerating people. If someone tells me we have the money to do that but don’t have the money for education, I call bullshit.”

Perry’s Boo Harvey is an enthralling character, and you can’t help but root for her and the movement that she hopes to build, especially if you also suffer from a mental illness or love someone who does. Boo writes and speaks in very relatable and accessible language, and the scenes that Perry paints are very impressive—including legislative visits and long nights working with the amazing character Jude, and college parties, classwork, and existential crises with a variety of likable people in California. 

As someone who shares a similar background as Perry, including growing up in a segregated, mostly white and wealthy area of Chicago and suffering from mental illness (“There were blunt, horrific truths about American history—even very recent history, even the present day—that had been dismissed from our upbringing. The psychic implications of these omissions were wide-reaching”), I connected on a personal level with the novel, and found in it great potential for solidarity. Even though the book discusses very difficult topics, like depression and suicide and racism and poverty, it does so in a way that is easy to connect with. I highly recommend the book to anyone in the city, whether you are from the north, south, east, or west side—and especially downtown in the center of the city, where there has been increased security measures put in place by Mayor Lightfoot, who seems intent on turning Chicago into even more of a police state than it already was. 

While Boo is certainly my favorite character in the book, Perry writes with insight through several characters, including Kamil, a Black boyfriend of a cousin who says, reminiscent of Baldwin, “You know, honestly, I wouldn’t want to be white. When you’re white, nobody tells you when you’re wrong, at least not in the ways that I’m told to check myself. You can go years being laughably incorrect and nobody tells you anything. Nobody tells you what’s in your blind spot. They teach you that you don’t have blind spots. It’s an identity of self-deception. If you want to go through life thinking people get what they deserve and the world is fair, you can do that. If you want to go through life thinking that you’re capable of extraordinary talent even as all signs point to your ordinariness, you can do that. If you want news and history that suits your biases, it’s all over the place. You can hold it up, call it the arrogant truth, and elect leaders around it. I don’t see that as a fulfilling life, and that’s why I don’t want it. It’s complacent and insecure at best. I can’t imagine how it would feel to be so distant from your fellow humans and have this vague fear surrounding your view of their existence. I wouldn’t want to be on the other side of the line, no matter how big the house or how enormous the fortune.”

Ultimately, A Revolution of the Mind is a great Chicago novel, and it is something that every white Chicagoan should read. Boo’s journey reminds us of the root of many of society’s crises: some people have so little precisely because others have so much. Boo tells her dad,“The city is trying to spend 90 million dollars training new police officers, and therefore it is not strapped for money. There are large stocks of wealth that have been diverted from various authorities and tax districts and set aside for private developers. Chicago has the money. It’s only broke when it needs to allot one million to keep mental health clinics running. It’s racist, frankly.”

The only way to change things, Boo says, is through political struggle that attempts to change the structures that produce inequality in this city, state, country, and world. This can only be achieved through movements, not politicians. People like Boo and Jude, and others with lived experience of mental illness, poverty, housing and food insecurity, racism, and police brutality, should be at the center of policymaking around those issues. Until that happens, and until the necessary investments are made, people will keep dying from interpersonal violence, suicide, substance abuse, and more. Boo recognizes this, but ultimately she concludes that individual change is still possible, and through that collective change becomes more attainable. Perry writes, “A higher ground within this world is possible through the triumph of the mind. It is possible through the courage to recognize that one’s suffering is joined with the suffering of all, and to rearrange the terms of how one lives according to that recognition.”

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Global displacement comes to the stage with Theatre Lumina’s Song of Home, one of many acts of the 2022 Physical Theater Festival Chicago that invites a shared humanity within the immediacy of live performance. Throughout the week, organizations will present a range of pieces including theater, music, juggling, clowning, and more. Marc Frost and Alice da Cunha, the festival’s cofounding couple, curate the participation of international physical theater organizations with such a spread in mind. 

Physical theater lives in the articulations of movement and acting, physicality and theatricality. Da Cunha and Frost met studying theater in London and experienced the vibrant and broad theatrical world of the city and the festivals it offered. Attending live entertainment was rather common, and da Cunha would bring friends to the London International Mime Festival. Growing up in Brazil and Portugal, she attended festivals where she was invigorated by the atmosphere and busyness of multiple performances happening simultaneously, the audience moving about and witnessing as well as being a part of live theater’s irreproducibility. She worked at theater festivals while attending school. Just prior to moving to Chicago, she worked at the Casa Festival in London. 

When speaking with the couple, I imagine a Venn diagram in which physical theater nestles in the conjunction of various performance arts, including theater, dance, and more. When I tell her that, da Cunha says, “I think studying in Europe gave us a certain perspective on what physical theater might be and what those Venn diagrams might be.” She and Frost can define and redefine the bounds of physical theater each year in curating the festival, which is now in its ninth edition. 

Physical Theater Festival Chicago
Sat 7/16, 2-8 PM, Nichols Park, 1355 E. 53rd, free; then 7/18-7/24, Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee; see physicalfestival.com for complete schedule and ticketing information

The Physical Theater Festival features different theatrical organizations each year. 2022’s festival will welcome a circus company, clown performers, and groups that fuse drama, song, dance, and ritual. The festival uses an open call to seek submissions from organizations worldwide. Da Cunha and Frost reach out to friends and contacts to submit. They also read reviews of theater festivals such as the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, pursuing groups that were favored well. 

Says da Cunha, “The artists and the shows make us connect to different communities every year depending on the country where they come from or the subject of the show and that’s awesome. . . . We hope to keep everyone that we’ve gathered. And then we have other opportunities to reach out.” She continues, “I know that there are people that are very connected to their own communities and make suggestions.” 

They are supportive of popular groups from Chicago communities as well. Past festivals have featured the city’s own the Era footwork crew, which performed their original piece The Testament. This year, Company To X For, a Chicago-based grassroots contemporary circus company founded by artists Liam Bradley and David Chervony, will be performing Surface Tension, which explores queer friendship through juggling, weight sharing, acrobatics, and dance. 

As the festival has seen unconventional presentation formats in the last few years, the couple approaches this year’s iteration with a program that responds and anticipates. Combining virtual, outdoor, and formal indoor theater performances allows opportunities for unprecedented accessibility, and for the audiences who viewed the festival virtually in 2020 (many of whom were viewing from another country) to return. For example, that year included The Woman Who Dreamed by Cia de Teatro Manual, a company based in Brazil. The piece was constructed for a virtual audience, responding to the pandemic’s shifting demands on theater performance. Da Cunha hopes that communities of her native Brazil will be among those the festival has gathered as returning audience members.  

The festival in 2020, she reflects, “was the first time that I could have a Brazilian audience in a physical festival. Because it was virtual, and it was a Brazilian company. So, I had people from the city where I was born, which was Rio de Janeiro, attending the festival at the same time as some people that have always come to Physical [Theater Festival] . . . And it was what was possible, but it was good to market in some way and to learn those lessons right off the bat and the good that came from that.” 

The festival will open on July 16with family-friendly shows in Nichols Park, such as a magic show by Alexander the Amazing (aka Alexander M. Knapp), an African drumming performance by Kuumba Nia Arts from Oxford, England, and hip-hop and street dance by the Chicago outfit BraveSoul Movement. The kickoff is part of the city’s Night Out in the Parks program. 

The festival then moves to the Den Theatre in Wicker Park for ticketed workshops and performances, including Song of Home (7/19-7/20). Performed in Spanish and English, it follows the lived experiences of three displaced women coming to the United States. Chicago-based Theatre Lumina, led by artistic director Monica Payne, fosters cross-cultural collaboration and international exchange by drawing from diverse artists, subject matter, and influences. This production will be sharing the stages of the Den Theatre with companies from the UK and Argentina, as well as local artists. Kuumba Nia and their fellow UK artists, Unlock the Chains Collective, collaborate on the piece Sold (7/21-7/23), about Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born enslaved woman who became an abolitionist and the author of a narrative about her life (the first such narrative published in the UK).

Virtual events, including two international panels and a performance, will be accessible for free on the festival website and the panels will be available on the Facebook page. Frost describes how virtual performance makes for a different relationship among audience members compared to live performance: “It’s not a natural audience interaction. So they’re so present and vulnerable with one another in a way that we’re not necessarily asked to be in a dark theater.” 

“The State of the Performing Arts 3.0.,” a conversation among theater producers, actors, and directors on the ever-changing performing arts world, will be on July 17at 10 AM. At noon, da Cunha and Frost will moderate a panel discussion titled “Teaching Physical Theater.” A preview excerpt of Spain- and Israel-based company La Percha Teatro’s performance of Marrano, A Tale From the Inquisition is available for free on the website at any time during the festival. 

This year, past adaptations and iterations of the festival’s different formats will play out in real time. Frost explains how the pandemic has influenced him and da Cunha to organize the festival in a calmer way, as they have learned “not how to work harder, but to work a little smarter and just more intentionally. 

“And I think we were enriched. I’m not saying I thought of all this at the time, but in retrospect, I can really see how great it was to have a ten-day festival and do a virtual ten days indoors and do an outdoor fest. And so, everything is sort of finding its way into this latticework for the ninth edition.” 

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The New Vanguard is a creative coalition that seeks to unite Black and other POC creatives who currently work as separate entities under one banner. The coalition was recently launched by Eric “Phero” Lopez, who acts as chief creative officer, and his cofounders—chief of legal counsel, Eddie Sanders; chief of strategy and operations, Pilar McQuirter; and chief of new business, Juan Sanchez.

The quartet’s aim is to amplify creatives’ work by supplying resources and access, while also landing them equitable pay. They’re storytellers and world-builders whose drive is to take Chicago’s artists and mold them into ambassadors for the city—ones who can take their narratives “beyond the walls and streets of their neighborhoods,” Lopez says. 

Though only formed at the beginning of 2022, the New Vanguard’s roster boasts 14 people whose talents run the gamut of entertainment, sports, music, fashion, and visual art: artists Brandon Breaux, Nikko Washington, Julian “Logik” Gilliam, Tubs, Armani Howard, Adrian Octavius Walker, and Crowezilla; fashion designers Sheila Rashid and Alex Carter; plant studio Semillas; musicians Joey Purp and Elton “L10” Cheung; and athletes Jayden Reed and Malik Elzy.

In that little time, the creative coalition has landed partnership deals for its roster with Google, Adidas, Bacardi, Showtime, Facebook, Lululemon, Samsung, Arcteryx, Lifewtr, Nifty Gateway, WNBA, McDonald’s, and the White Sox.

Prior to launching the New Vanguard, Lopez worked as an art and creative director at ad agencies Havas and the Annex, where he gained experience, and then started his production house, Cold Chillen. He saw both as learning from two different schools; while Havas gave him experience in corporate settings, Cold Chillen allowed his entrepreneurial side to flourish. Both helped him see the deficiency in Black and POC representation in the agency, nightlife, entertainment, and art worlds.

It’s not only important for the creative coalition to be as inclusive and diverse as possible but to also remain in Chicago. This conception becomes all the more impactful with the group’s nonprofit arm, the New Vanguard Foundation, which plans to be an educational resource for emerging creatives—and their hope to open a permanent space in the city. “This is something that we feel is lacking,” Lopez says. “It’s something that we wanted to start here in Chicago and we’re super excited to keep it here in Chicago.”

The Reader spoke with Lopez about the nuts and bolts of his organization, what a creative coalition means to him, and the community work that the New Vanguard hopes to accomplish.

Tara C. Mahadevan: What prompted you to start the New Vanguard?

Eric “Phero” Lopez: The higher I climbed up in corporate America, the less I saw people who look like me. The higher I climbed, the more I realized that we have the capabilities to do this ourselves. It’s not rocket science at the end of the day. It’s really understanding what the scope of work is—understanding the brief—and it doesn’t take a team of 100 people in a five-million-dollar building to actually create this work. Nowadays, with technology, some really great ideas, and a really strong work ethic, it means that we can do it too with a team of ten.

I also realized that we’re taking advantage of this talent—agencies take on the fuller budget scale of the scope of work, yet the artist only gets a small fee. Why is that? Why don’t artists own their LLC, why don’t artists own their publishing? Why don’t they own their distribution? Why can’t artists have their own scope when it comes to the content team? If each artist were to run as a brand versus doing whatever to get paid for their craft—if we were to be a little more organized and have more of an entrepreneurial spirit, then the budget goes a lot further.

I think that was the biggest strong point for us when we started the New Vanguard—saying, “We need this creative coalition in Chicago.” There is just a lack of not only representation as you climbed up, but there was a lack of ownership and resources and tools in Chicago. We had to go to either New York or LA or Miami to have some of these resources.

We never properly got the resources or the tools that we deserve. That’s why it’s so important for us to do it here—to start with our own people to have that proper representation. We’re talking about a fully diverse team from Chicago, who are actually creating new change and telling stories better than some of these agencies are. And that’s the real purpose of why I started this whole thing.

What does a creative coalition mean to you?

We call the New Vanguard a creative coalition because we see it like a union. We’re not an agency, we’re not a record label, we’re not a company. We are a unity between different business owners who are coming together as a village to create not only resources and tools, but a fair act of how we get paid out as well. The word union is a vintage word. Of course, we respect them because we are a working-class city—we’re honoring that. For us, it’s the idea of having unified arts and people of color coming together and saying, “Hey, we stand together. We’re going to share these resources and we’re going to keep this momentum and money within us to make sure that we all drive to success.”

Does each artist operate as their own brand under the New Vanguard?

Absolutely. Each artist owns their own business and has individual teams underneath their own umbrella. We come in and help out with giving them that structure. It’s a creative audit. 

It’s really understanding the sense of where they’re at as businesses and as owners.

How have you been selecting the talent you want to work with?

We really look for work ethic. We’re very particular in making sure that the talent we’re looking at has an undeniable work ethic and is looking to scale, but at the same time has a beautiful story and a perspective that’s beyond Chicago. We want to make sure that our talent is thinking beyond the walls and streets of their neighborhoods. How do you represent your neighborhood and put your city on the map while having a say in the industry?

What are you doing that’s focused on community and the city?

We’re super excited to announce that the New Vanguard has a nonprofit called the New Vanguard Foundation. We’ll be creating workshops and panels, and teaching the next generation of diverse creatives how to properly run a business and how to actually create the resources and tools to teach them how to be artists themselves. It’s about education. We see a lot of people who are really creative or really great at their craft, but don’t properly understand how to make it into a living. Biggest thing for us is to teach you how to create a legacy and make sure you get to do what you love. But at the same time, you should get the proper payment as well.

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The Chicago Blackhawks are a rebuilding organization now. After having so much success in the early 2010s, they are one of the worst teams in the National Hockey League today. With the 2022 NHL Draft on the horizon, they need to be smart.

Of course, they would love to have New Jersey Devils all-star Jack Hughes on their team. In that 2019 NHL Draft, Chicago had the third pick and took Kirby Dach. That was a mistake but they can still get something out of Dach as long as they keep developing him.

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Eloy Jimenez made an impactful return to the Chicago White Sox lineup Wednesday, homering in his first game in over two months.

Jimenez was activated from the 60-day injured list before the afternoon finale of Chicago’s three-game series against the Minnesota Twins and started in left field. It marked his first game with the White Sox since April 23, when he suffered a right hamstring strain while running to first base.

After striking out in his first at-bat Wednesday, Jimenez blasted a towering two-run homer in the fourth inning that just snuck around the left-field foul pole, tying the score at 3-3. It was the second homer of the season for Jimenez and his first since April 17.

Jimenez tied the game again in the seventh inning with a two-out RBI single that evened the score at 6-6.

Jimenez’s productive return to the lineup was offset, however, by an injury to White Sox third baseman Yoan Moncada, who left the game after fouling a ball off his right foot in the sixth. The team announced that X-rays were negative and diagnosed Moncada with a right foot contusion.

After belting 31 home runs as a rookie and then homering 14 times in just 55 games during the COVID-shortened 2020 season, Jimenez has been plagued by injuries over the past two seasons, appearing in just 66 total games since the start of the 2021 season.

Jimenez, 25, batted .222 in 11 games with the White Sox before suffering the hamstring injury in April and eventually undergoing surgery. He batted .246 with two homers in 57 at-bats during his recent rehab stint at Triple-A Charlotte.

The White Sox announced Jimenez’s return amid a flurry of roster moves before their game against the first-place Twins. Chicago also recalled right-hander Jimmy Lambert from Charlotte, placed infielder Jake Burger (hand) and right-hander Vince Velasquez (blister) on the injured list, and transferred infielder Danny Mendick to the 60-day IL.

ESPN’s Jesse Rogers contributed to this report.

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