Chicago’s Public Art with the Floating Museum

May 14, 2022 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm Stagg Court

The Chicago Athletic Association hotel is a host venue for two Chicago Humanities Festival programs this season.

If you’ve seen musical performances on the green line, a giant inflatable sculpture of Chicago founder Jean Baptiste Point du Sable and his wife Kitihawa, an outdoor art gallery in Garfield Park—you’ve been looking at the work of Floating Museum. This art collective creates site-responsive public installations with the idea that all of Chicago is a museum canvas. For the first time ever the four co-directors—poet avery r. young, designer Andrew Schachman, and artists Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford—sit down for a conversation about their work in relation to the history and present of public art, practices, and institutions.

This program opens with a special performance orchestrated by avery r. young.

Grab a ticket here.

Please visit the CHF FAQ for more information about ticketing, books, accessibility options, and other event logistics.

The Chicago Humanities Festival connects people to the ideas that shape and define us, and promotes the lifelong exploration of what it means to be human.

Best known as a poet, songwriter, and performer, multi-disciplinary artist avery r. young is also an award-winning teaching artist who mentors youths in the crafts of creative writing and theater. He has been an Arts and Public Life Artist-In-Residence at the University of Chicago and has written curriculum for Columbia College Chicago, Young Leeds Authors, True Star Magazine, and Chicago Public Schools Art Integration Department. young’s poems and essays on HIV awareness, misogyny, race records, and art integration have been published in The BreakBeat Poets, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, AIMPrint, and other anthologies.

Andrew Schachman designs environments, infrastructures, and installations. He is the executive co-director of two organizations that are experimental spaces for delivering arts and culture within existing metropolitan networks: Floating Museum and Fieldwork Collaborative Projects. Trained as an architect, he designed and managed projects for the offices of Zaha Hadid, Perkins and Will, Carol Ross Barney, and Doug Garofalo. His projects have received numerous awards including the Distinguished Building Award from the American Institute of Architects and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design. Principal of Studio Andrew Schachman, he recently completed the design for the Palais de Tokyo’s exhibition, “Singing Stones,” in the roundhouse of the DuSable Museum of African American History. Andrew is a Lecturer in Urban Design at the University of Chicago.

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford is a visual artist and Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Indiana University Northwest. He is also a co-director and founder of the collective Floating Museum. His work has been shown at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The UCSD Art Gallery, The Glass Curtain Gallery, and The Hyde Park Art Center, among other spaces. He has held fellowships at the Sculpture Space, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, the Brown Foundation Program at the Dora Maar House, and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. His work has been supported by grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Propeller Fund, the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Sicily.

Faheem Majeed is an artist, educator, curator, and community facilitator. He blends his unique experience as a non-profit administrator, curator, and artist to create works that focus on institutional critique and exhibitions that leverage collaboration to engage his immediate, and the broader community, in meaningful dialogue. Majeed received his BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).