Tactical Urbanism, in the Horizontal Landscape, "Soundscape Tapestry."
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2022 AIR Reggie Nicholson
Title of Project:
Tactical Urbanism in the Horizontal Landscape,
"Soundscape Tapestry."
DCASE NAP: Describe this project in as much detail as possible, including locations - tentative or confirmed. Be sure to include the "nuts and bolts" of the program: Introductions will be brief: participants should say their name, title, and organization if applicable.
WHO: I'm Alpha Bruton, lead artist, and the Phantom Gallery Chicago is my curatorial practice. I'm collaborating with composer and musician Reggie Nicholson. This project is designed as an intensive experience.
We are creating a work with an interdisciplinary approach and will present the final product during community programming. This project occurs in and around the Bronzeville community, collecting sounds from the horizontal landscape to produce the Soundscape Tapestry.
The Phantom Gallery Chicago is in my studio at the Bronzeville Artist Lofts. This project will be presented in the 10,000 sq foot commercial space converted into a popup gallery featuring the National Black Baseball League, Mario Uomo Studio, and the Empty Lot at 47th and Vincennes.
National Black Baseball League, Mario Uomo Studio
THE NICHOLSON CONCEPTS
Reggie: Music collection of sounds, locations? My name is Reggie Nicholson
My title- Is composer, Musician, Percussionist, and Soundscape Artist; as a Soundscape artist, I capture the sounds of a specific environment or landscape by recording them and combining them with improvised or composed music.
As the resident musician, this project is an opportunity to collaborate with a visual artist (Alpha Bruton) to create musical ideas that will express the characteristics of the paintings/experimentalist abstract. I will utilize the community space at the Cornerstone Apartments to compose, edit, and combine my recorded soundscapes and music for the installation.
WHAT:
This collaborative project will utilize sound and visual art in a public installation. Soundscape Tapestry will echo the African American music experience unique to the sounds of Bronzeville. In addition, we are introducing a new sector of experimental film projections in the public space. This ambitious and new project features my artwork created during the residency project.
Reggie Nicholson at "Spirt Lake" 43rd Street Beach
When: The project began in January of 2022 with conversation and planning and putting together a work plan, figuring out ways to communicate and translate language and meaning between musical composing and visual arts composition. We spent weeks in the summer creating a visual journal and recording in the YouTube Studio Live. Reggie recorded sounds of the horizontal landscape, and I responded to create graphical images for these recordings.
The project is now in postproduction, and the final experimental films and artwork will be completed in December 2022. This project will be presented in a series of time-based projections along 47th Street/
Vincennes, Michigan, and 47th TBD in 2023, and during the Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tours.
Vincennes, Michigan, and 47th TBD in 2023, and during the Bronzeville Art District Trolley Tours.
HOW:
Producing the experimental film and working out the logistics has been challenging during this residence, along with a critical examination of D.I.Y. film production. For example, coordinating the soundscape with images is so different from life and in-person experimenting during performances I've done in the past with musicians. Also, the cost of production is no longer a D.I.Y. and keeps increasing as we bring on tech support, rentals of equipment, sound equipment, and film editing online services. And professional development for me to learn a new way of editing beyond the YouTube Studio has been challenging to get the product we are both satisfied with.
DCASE NAP: Could you outline the purpose and goals of the project and how you will measure success?
What is the purpose of this project, and why are we presenting it in the public sphere?
Tactical urbanism is often citizen-led, commonly called guerrilla urbanism, pop-up urbanism, or D.I.Y. urbanism as a low-cost, temporary change to the built environment intended to improve local neighborhoods and city gathering places. Initially, we used an extension cord, plugged into a laptop, and projected using an SUV dashboard, which is as low cost as it gets.
We are using Tactical Urbanism contributing to the Horizontal Landscape to expose pedestrians to the experience of what is viewed inside the gallery and museum, creating a dynamic platform for large-scale installations, moving image works, and sound performances.
This collaborative effort has put two artists, a composer/percussionist, and a visual/installation artist, in a space to create a new body of work that will draw on the inspiration gained from the environment of the Bronzeville and the North Washington Park neighborhood.
Both of us have been working in this way for the past thirty years. Reggie Nicholson produced his concepts in music, and I in experimentalism featuring guest artists.
DCASE NAP: Let’s consider two significant divisions of success:
Popular success and critical success models:
While I desire my creative work to touch many lives, I am looking for something other than a massive popular success. The art forms I practice and the kind of work I make will not speak to people in that way, of FAME, and I would not want the burden of massive fame at this point in my career.
So my focus is on Critical success.
Critical success is when you are acknowledged and respected by your peers and the cultural establishment. As a result, I may win awards and be highly praised in the press and admired by other artists.
Critical success is essential because, like many artists, I hunger for validation. I long to make truly great art, one measure of success.
How will I measure success in terms of Community in two ways:
Program level and Community-level. The program-level impact is the impact that individual services have on the people directly participating. We will evaluate the effect of the work we bring to the collaboration and the processes we share to successfully make the final product happen. And how other artists that work with us during our process experience the final production.
This may happen at the Community Builders Artist Lofts and the Bronzeville Artist Lofts locations. In addition, other artists are submitting content for the Popup Film Screenings. So it is ever-changing and has different ranges each time.
In terms of community-level impact, how the community responds, and the many different partners working in collaboration have on what our neighbors experience.
DCASE NAP: Could you describe the community you will serve with this program, the neighborhood/community areas, and how you intend to engage them in the process and result?
Despite experiencing decades of disinvestment, Bronzeville is primed for new and exciting opportunities for reinvestment. With leadership and strategic action from committed residents, community organizations, business owners, and elected officials, Bronzeville is on a very steep cliff of dynamic transformation. Recent community engagement has reiterated the communities desire for walkability, enhanced streetscape, community safety, and community celebrations.
Resident artist & film coordinator Latasha Bennett- Presenting Raymond A. Thomas
47th and Vincennes Ave
The site where we will be making these projections is situated at the corner of 47th and Vincennes Ave. This important retail node, the intersections, houses cultural institutions like the Harold Washington Cultural Center at King Drive and our successful mixed-use development like the Bronzeville Artist Lofts.
DCASE NAP: Intend to engage:
This site presents a unique opportunity to bring a placemaking project to the 47th Street corridor into a vibrant commercial district on the INVEST South/West Corridor before the new development and investments occur.
Tactical Urbanism is another term used in Placemaking, allowing communities to see how their insight and knowledge fit into the broader process of making change. It will enable them to become proactive versus reactive and positive versus negative. Tactical urbanism allows regular people to create extraordinary, significant, and minor community improvements.
Placemaking is creating public 'places of the soul' that uplift and help us connect.
DCASE NAP: Please describe strategies to make real connections between the audience /participants and the themes in your program.
Our strategies are first to engage artists in the Bronzeville Creative community to come out and engage the audience/community by presenting in the horizontal Landscape. Post-COVID-19, it has been challenging to have the audience visit Open Studios. Outdoor engagement, such as our Tactical Urbanism in the Horizontal Landscape, will make genuine connections with the audience, giving the pedestrian bits of cinema you find at ART BASEL in Miami and Cities across America to engage audiences in temporary pop-up installations. This is not meant to be a sit-down movie but a moving experience that the audience captures and continues their forward motion to their east or west journey on 47th Street.
CDOT reports that Bronzeville residents have the following modes of transportation, by car 5,199, 1,973 use the CTA bus, and 714 by walking; we expect to capture a percentage of this population during these activations.
DCASE NAP: Do you or your organization tailor programming to engage and respond to needs within specifically identified communities?
Yes, Bronzeville is a BAIPOC community with a population of 25.4 thousand (Whites 1,858, Asians, 689, and Hispanics 617). Census.
DCASE NAP: Do you engage communities in the development and implementation of projects?
Cornerstone Artists Housing has a community space for musicians and a sound isolation room for small groups or individuals to practice music and various art forms. But they are in a zone just for residential. More minor engagements of development can happen here. Inviting artists for small screenings is using the space to work out experimental theories.
Some of us have been talking for years about how we could cross-pollinate. Of course, the Bronzeville Artist Lofts need those amenities. Still, we are on a commercial corridor in the heart of the Art District, and it is primed for the development and implementation of projects because of the art walks and tours that take place during the year.
DCASE NAP: How do you intend to ensure Equity, Inclusion, Diversity, and Accessibility for your participants and audience during the program and/or events?
The arts hold a unique power to challenge dominant ways of thinking and being and to offer a greater understanding of the world. During these events, they are accessible and inclusive to all that walk by, stand at the bus stop, stop at the stop light and glance, or to the neighbors in the skyrises across the way, enjoy and sometimes glimpse at our outdoor installations and community engagement activities.
DCASE NAP: Specifically, will you be able to address the needs of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and neuro-divergent populations? (Not everyone can guarantee complete access for all folks with special needs. We understand that.)
I have considered the importance of DISABILITY AND PERSPECTIVES in my curatorial practice. I just completed a yearlong fellowship at the Evanston Art Center as a Curatorial Fellow. At the core were disability and perspectives. For this project, I plan on using close captions to describe what viewers watch and hear on the film once loaded upon the YouTube studio. In addition, an ADA interpreter is written into the budget to be a consultant, so we can present this project to our audiences with special needs.
DCASE NAP: Please describe the long-term impact your programming will have on the community and you (or your organization), including whether this will continue after this grant period and/or how you intend to engage new audiences/participants.
I want this project to continue after this residency and total immersion have ended. This project has been a tactical urbanism/ placemaking project that the Phantom Gallery Chicago presented in 2014 as a featured program during Chicago Artists Month here in Bronzeville. Experimental filmmakers have submitted proposals, all using D.I.Y. urbanism tactics.
This has been a plug-and-play project where emerging filmmakers have used tactical urbanism to stage projections in projects they are working on and using experimental film series to engage our neighbors and pedestrians. Sometimes we get comments from across the street, where folks holler out, "Those artists are subject to be doing anything" Translation, who would have thought about that happening in Bronzeville on a side wall?
A new audience can be cultivated using the abandoned shipping container left by developers, where Soundscape Tapestry can be a timed-based activation from November to December. The Experimental Satellite Film Festival can continue in the Commercial Space in the building without development after nine years. We have been using it as a popup.
NOTES AND SUGGESTIONS:
Recent Grants:
Profiles:
Reggie Nicholson Support Documentation:
Provided to YouTube by CDBaby
Keep It on the Low · Reggie Nicholson.
