“Most outstanding of all are an awesome array of solo exhibitions and projects at venues all across town…including Gómez-Peña’s thrilling takeover of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum” -Lori Waxman, The Chicago Tribune
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum is working with internationally renowned artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña as one of the partner institutions participating in Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, a multi-venue exhibition and program series featuring twenty-eight MacArthur Fellows happening throughout 2021 that is organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Gómez-Peña residency at JAHHM, in partnership with Public Media Institute, includes the exhibition Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive (September 9, 2021—August 19, 2022), the experimental radio broadcast Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border (1985–2021), a virtual workshops with Gómez-Peña’s performance troupe La Pocha Nostra, a film screening, a museum takeover, and the artist’s first in-person performance since the pandemic lockdown began in March 2020.
For Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive (September 9, 2021—May 29, 2022), pioneering conceptual-performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexican-American, b. Mexico City, 1955), takes up residence in Jane Addams Hull House Museum. The exhibition layers one house museum on top of two others, in San Francisco and Mexico City, highlighting the many affinities between the ideologies pursued by Gómez-Peña, Addams, and Hull-House.
Through sound and image, Gómez-Peña and his ever-evolving performance troupe, La Pocha Nostra, inhabit Jane Addams’s office, the original Hull-House library, Jane Addams’s bedroom, and other spaces throughout the Hull home. During its 75-year history, Hull-House Settlement was home to nearly one hundred Residents—advocates, doctors, scientists, writers, and artists—who lived on the upper floors of the settlement. The Residents and their immigrant and migrant neighbors worked toward, what Jane Addams called, “the common good.” In residency at Hull-House, Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra, present a borderless world where geographic, municipal, gender and other borders are dismantled to allow public institutions to reflect and serve all publics. Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive was devised with Gómez-Peña in dialogue with his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra (US/Mexico 2021).
WATCH: Gómez-Peña & La Pocha Nostra takeover Hull-House
On October 21, 2021, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe La Pocha Nostra invited guests to Hull-House for a fully immersive activation of the museum’s current exhibition “Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive.” Directed by Gómez-Peña, with special guest performer DRAGONFLY (Robin LaVerne Wilson), La Pocha Nostra and performance assistances inhabited, haunted, and activated Jane Addams’s office, bedroom, the Hull-House courtyard, and other spaces in the historic home. Click to watch the takeover and Gómez-Peña’s performance of the “Casa Museo Jam.“
Open Letter to the Museums of the Future
“I invite you dear foreigner in my performance country to dream with me and send me your own letters imagining a better art world or rather a myriad of art worlds, coexisting in synergy with nature, radical imagination, and community—you're surrounding multiple communities. Do you have ideas to propose for a museum of the future?”
—Guillermo Gómez-Peña, An Open Letter to the Museums of the Future
Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border
In a first-ever partnership, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, Public Media Institute (PMI) and the Smart Museum of Art will present a multi-year series of experimental audio performances from Gómez-Peña. Begun January 27, 2021 Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border (1985–2021) offers multi-lingual live radio and a selection of archival audio programs by the artist addressing “the multiple pandemics of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and neo-colonialism on steroids in the Trump Era.”
Public Programs
“In 2020, public demonstrations amplified demands for monuments, memorials, and museums to reflect the histories and the lived experiences of marginalized communities. The public outcry demonstrated the connection between cultural representation and democratic participation that were central to the social reform efforts of Jane Addams and Hull-House Settlement over one hundred years ago. ”
“With this unique partnership between the Museum and Public Media Institute, UIC is honored to be in dialogue with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, one of the living masters of political theater and theatrical criticism. We are thrilled that through this programming, his voice, excellence, and repertoire will be available to our students and the Chicago community.”
Partners
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico City, 1968) is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his three homes have been San Francisco, Mexico City, and the “road.” His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations. Gómez-Peña art work has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe. Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. For Gómez-Peña archive of performance visit guillermogomezpena.com.
Founded in 1993 in Los Angeles, La Pocha Nostra is Gómez-Peña’s ultimate and most long-standing project. La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization and 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations, gender complexities and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. For 25+ years, LPN has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender, and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists. Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive was co-developed with La Pocha Nostra members Emma Tramposch, Robert Gomez Hernandez, and Paloma Martinez-Cruz.
Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness, and a potential act of resistance. Presented on the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause deploys the Fellows Program as “intellectual commons” and features new and recontextualized work by twenty-nine visual artists who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981. Find additional information about the artists and exhibitions at TowardCommonCause.org.
The Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago explores the means, atmospheres, and attitudes that make art contemporary. From the conventional departmental presentation to the unconventional institutional event, the OPC aims to advance our collective understanding of theory and practice within the visual arts.
John M. Flaxman Library Special Collections at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago house an array of archives, rare films, artists’ publications, and other unique materials that SUPPORT AND PARTNERS 24 support SAIC’s curriculum and allow for in-depth research with original source materials. All Special Collections are non-circulating, as they require special stewardship, but are made as widely available as possible for teaching and learning.
The Creative Audio Archive (CAA) at Experimental Sound Studio is a Chicago-based center for the preservation and investigation of innovative and experimental sonic arts and music. With collections from Sun Ra/El Saturn, Links Hall, Malachi Ritscher, Studio Henry, and Experimental Sound Studio (its parent organization), among others. CAA was formed for the historical preservation of recordings, prints, and visual ephemera related to avant-garde and exploratory sound and music. Experimental Sound Studio is a Chicago-based nonprofit organization dedicated to artistic evolution and the creative exploration of sound. As an international hub for sonic experimentation, ESS nurtures artists, heralds new works, and builds a broad, supportive community of makers, enthusiasts, and creative partners through production, presentation, education, and preservation.
Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. VDB is dedicated to fostering awareness and scholarship of the history and contemporary practice of video and media art through its distribution, education, and preservation programs.
Public Media Institute is a non-profit 501(c)3, community-based art & culture organization with a mission to create, incubate and sustain innovative and equitable cultural programming through the production and presentation of socially engaged projects, music and art performances, books and magazines, community aid platforms, festivals, radio and video broadcasting, and visual art exhibitions. For more information and streaming radio visit the website publicmediainstitute.com.
University of Illinois at Chicago, College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts (CADA) educates and mentors the next generation of visual and performing artists, designers, architects, art historians and museum professionals. The college is composed of the School of Architecture, the School of Art & Art History, the School of Design, and the School of Theatre & Music, as well as the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (a National Historic Landmark and museum committed to social justice), Gallery 400 (a dynamic, cutting edge contemporary art gallery), and Innovation Center (an incubator for interdisciplinary innovation, collaboration, and education). The College is home to an energetic, award-winning, internationally recognized faculty of practicing architects, artists, designers, museum professionals, art historians, musicians, directors, and theatrical performers. Through their instruction and ongoing research, the faculty introduces students to disciplinary and professional themes of contemporary importance and fosters a vibrant atmosphere of intellectual and creative inquiry in a transformative learning environment. The goal: to help students become critical thinkers, innovative practitioners, involved community members and leading professionals. Learn more at cada.uic.edu.
Support
Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A Living Museum and Archive and Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border are presented by Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in partnership with Public Media Institute and the Smart Museum. The exhibition and audio series are an initiative of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40, organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. Toward Common Cause is supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
(Banner Image by Zen Cohen, courtesy of Guillermo Gómez-Peña)
