What do you see when you walk down the street? How do you experience your neighborhood?

Join artist Todd Shalom, founder of the NYC-based arts organization, Elastic City, on a series of public, participatory walks through Pilsen. These walks are intended to make their audiences active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live and visit. The walks use sensory-based techniques, reinvented folk rituals and other exercises to investigate and intervene in the daily life of the city, its variously defined communities and the politics of individual and group identity.

Shalom will lead two such walks for the public in Pilsen on Friday, September 16th (one in English from 7-8:15PM and one in Spanish from 4-5:15PM), and will also be working with members of our Elective Studies artist community to develop four new walks by Chicago-based artists. Those walks will take place in Pilsen on Saturday, Sept 17th. Exact location is TBD; registrants will receive the address upon confirmation.

• Audience capacity for each walk is limited to 12 participants, so we encourage advance registration! We will begin a waiting list once each walk has been filled.
• The 4pm walk will be conducted primarily in Spanish and the 7pm walk will be conducted primarily in English.
• This program is appropriate for people 13 and up.
• Registration is required: All scheduled walks have reached capacity.

MORE ON THE ARTIST:

Todd Shalom works with text, sound and image to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. He is the founder and director of non-profit participatory walks organization, Elastic City. In this role, Todd leads his own walks, collaborates with artists to lead joint walks, and works with artists in a variety of disciplines to adapt their expertise to the participatory walk format. He often collaborates with performance artist/director Niegel Smith. Together, they conceive and stage interactive performances in public and private environments. Todd is also a ringleader of Willing Participant. Willing Participant whips up urgent poetic responses to current events.

Todd is a member of the core faculty in Pratt Institute’s MFA in Writing. His work has been presented by organizations such as Abrons Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, The Invisible Dog, ISSUE Project Room, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, P.S. 122 and Printed Matter. Todd is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California College of the Arts and also holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Boston University.

If you require ASL interpretation or other assistance to fully participate in this program, please contact info@ilhumanities.org at least 72 hours prior to the program so that we can make accommodations. For more information, please call (312) 422-5580.