Chicago Home Theater Festival will explore the practice of social organizing by inviting artists, activists, and neighbors to create Neighborhood Field Guides in collaboration with the Chicago Park District, City Bureau, Sixty Inches From Center and others. We will gather neighborhood stories and create zines, audio collages, and dramaturgical tools which will be utilized by artists to create neighborhood-specific work and performed as part of our festival in May 2017. CHTF invites strangers into each other’s homes to share an intimate meal, experience transformative art, and build intentional community across lines of difference. We aim to provide a platform for artistic exchange within neighborhoods that have experienced systemic disinvestment; center narratives by and about artists of color, women and femmes, migrants and immigrants, LGBTQ folks, and artists with disabilities; and curate performances and conversations that directly disrupt injustice and catalyze collective action.

Chicago’s Englewood community is often cited in popular discourses around poverty, crime and civic dysfunction. The Chicago Park District’s TRACE (Teens Re-Imagining Art, Community & Environment) program uses art to empower teens as disrupters of this narrative by teaching curatorial and social justice practices to foster affirming and transformative creative expression. Join Lead Teaching Artist Alexandria Eregbu and Senior Program Specialist, Marcus Davis along with TRACE youth in a critical collaging session that interrogates notions of safety and survival through the lens of Englewood teens.

This program is in conjunction with PUBLIC SCHOOL and is led by Irina Zadov.