Chris Drew: The First Amendment And The Right To Survive

[Occupy Rogers Park had no question about how it wanted to highlight the beginning of its "Chicago Spring" campaign: we decided to honor Chris Drew, Rogers Park resident and courageous artist, who has uncompromisingly fought for free speech rights for artists.  The unusual thing about Chris Drew is that he identified the right of the artist to survive (by his/her art) and the right of free speech, and thus began to challenge the restrictive peddler's licensing procedure that limits artists' abilities to pursue their craft and hence their speech.  He recorded his own arrest for violating this ordinance, and when the police discovered this they dropped that charge and instead charged him with felony eavesdropping.   The ACLU took up his case and in March, 2012 the trial judge threw the case out on constitutional grounds.  The Illinois eavesdropping law may be on its way out. 

What many may not know is that for the last year Chris has been fighting this case and fighting his own serious health issues at the same time. His indomitable will and his connection with and belief in those marginalized artists with whom he has worked for so many years sustained him.  But as his health is failing (for the past year he has been fighting lung cancer),  he was determined  to accept the award and to make his remarks, which appear below unedited.  In addition you will see the remarks I made to introduce Chris;  having worked with him since my arrival in Chicago has been a distinct honor;  and in making these remarks I wanted to add something that perhaps no one else was in a position to do.  When Chris and I had a few moments after we had dropped him off at home, we talked for a moment about how overwhelmed he was by the honors accorded him, and about the difference between the movements we had both seen as young people and the movement of today.  We talked about the slogan, often repeated on Occupy posters, "It Isn't One Thing,  It's Everything!"  Our experience is so tied up with this demand or that issue.  This piece of the pie or that piece.  But this is about the whole pie.  The whole thing.  And Chris responded: "What most people see is small and unconnectedness. But it is connected.  It’s about the whole thing, and art is the key.  It’s all connected it is the key to our freedom.  We use the art patch to illustrate how to fight for freedom, demonstrate that [artists] have tools to fight for that freedom.”    –  Lew Rosenbaum] (The April 7th program, including Chris Drew’s remarks can be seen here).

_________________________________________________________________________

The Art Patch Project: The First Amendment And The Right To Survive – Chris Drew

This expanded lecture needs to be repeated at graduate gatherings of the Arts Teaching Institutes in Chicago.

Community Arts Concept

Art for change vs. art for art’s sake:  Art is always both, because the act of art is self-expression, which is the act of expressing the self in flux – in change.

The economic system that developed around art – art for collectors, for curators and art as an investment separated itself from art for change when desirable.  “Change art” being feared by the moneyed classes had to be discouraged during its dangerous lifetime. This is done at the institutional level.

Community art keeps rearing its beautiful head, generation after generation, by different names, movements and artists. In the 60’s and 70’s tradition I am from, it was known as “Community Art,” and resulted in opening up institutions to minority artists as well as a call for the ambitious artist to establish small institutions in community locations, securing the self-esteem needs of community segments.

Our initial Art of the T-shirt and its presently evolved Art Patch Project is the fruition of this in our 25 year long arts activity.

Stolen Rights –the Right to Survive by Art

We are talking about the real First Amendment right to survive by selling our art in public spaces that is required for change art to exist and build a public audience. This is the right above all that should be defended by our lives. In Chicago and too many other locations it has been abandoned as useless, a move that has marginalized artists and dwarfed our art scenes in public.

I have written on the legal basis and significance of this on my blog (http://www.c-drew.com/blog/) and in e-mails available on

Chris Drew asks “WHO WILL WORK?”

line.  Here I hope to describe a vision shortly and hook a few dedicated individuals.  Every movement is only as great as the art that informs it.  We need a core of workers to re-awaken the Art Patch Project to change Chicago – to create survival opportunities as an arts change base for Chicago.  WHO WILL WORK?

Art Patch Project

Please use the Art Patch Project to make Chicago Change.  Bluntly put, I am dying and the Art Patch Project needs new energy.  I pray some of you are that new energy.

Why the Art Patch Project?

We must teach citizens of Chicago to stand up for their rights and demonstrate the central role art has in this process.  We must employ win-win strategies to do so.  Using art we have changed the eavesdropping law.  Let’s extend this to artists’ rights and set an example of using art to fight for First Amendment Rights.

The Art Patch Project is a win-win concept.  Artists submit designs and are encouraged to promote their art on line on the art patch.  The Art Patch Project promotes artists’ rights on line on the patch.  Volunteers print and give away the many flavored art patches over time educating the public to the variety of artists missing in public.  The movement regenerates an art movement to sustain its needs in public. Activities take place in low-tech one or two day a week activities sustainable by a core of dedicated artists at costs affordable to a volunteer movement that takes place in public.

In 2006 Chris Drew set up “shop” on Michigan Ave., ironically in front of the Chicago Tribune Freedom Museum

This concept is already underway, demonstrable today. You may have an art patch in your hand right now.  These patches are sewn on clothes, pinned up in a creative variety of ways. They have a life that goes on promoting your voice.  This is a solution.

Artists have been using the Art Patch Project to protect our stolen rights with growing awareness, establishing a foundation to build on.  The fact is we have less right to survive by our art in Chicago in public than most places of the world.

The fact is we have less right to survive by our art in Chicago in public than most places of the world. And we have a first amendment guarantee in this right.  And we are not fighting for it.  We have given it up. We have given up our most basic right.  It is your duty to change this.

__________________________________________________________________

Sue Ying, an advocate of the Harold Washington Cultural plan, founder of Artists Against Homelessness, a strong woman and revolutionary artist for fifty years, introduced me to Chris Drew shortly after I arrived in Chicago in 1987.  Chris had come to Chicago’s uptown as a homeless expatriate from Minnesota.  He’d set up a gallery on Clark Street and began a career devoted to advocating for and with artists, recognizing that suppression of the artists’ voices is key to suppressing any revolutionary discontent in society.  

She told me he was someone I needed to know, to work with, and to learn from. What he was doing was important and powerful and it went to the heart of understanding what it meant to be a revolutionary and to have clarity about the content of our time. 

He was opening the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, which is still housed in the American Indian Center. Recognizing that Chris’s work was important to the youth in Uptown, especially the American Indian youth, the American Indian Center gave Chris a space, rent-free, to run the workshops that were open to anyone– ANYONE — who wanted to take them. Chris started a free screen print workshop, which pulled young taggers and graffiti writers in to learn how to put their drawings onto t-shirts.  He taught them the process and then engaged them to help teach others.  He never charged for what he taught and he always encouraged people of all ages to honor their creativity. Even if they could not sell to a gallery or get published, they could make art, they could make t-shirts for themselves; for their friends; to sell at pow-wows and to display and sell at the Art of the T-shirt exhibits that Chris arranged in libraries, at the Cultural Center one year, and at Daley Center another year.  But more than anything, Chris adhered what his mentor Carlos Cortez used to teach us: “Do not expect to become an artist to make a living; become an artist to make a life.”

For 20 years, Chris has run UMCAC on a shoestring — he always said he operated very low to the ground.  And while it is true that famous artists such as Carlos Cortez have worked closely with Chris, the thousands of other artists he has touched and helped to show that they have a voice are at least as important.  Chris’ gift to the community is translated into his vision that everyone is an artist, a vision that he shared with that other mentor, Sue Ying.  That there can be no revolution without a revolutionary culture.

As times changed, Chris added more weapons to his artistic arsenal: art shows, computer skills workshops, an artists’ co-op, a web campaign to revive the Harold Washington Cultural Plan that had been abandoned, the annual Art of the Tee Shirt Harvest Festival and the web based ART-ACT or Anti Racist T-Shirt-Artist Contest Tour.  From the ashes of the Washington Cultural Plan, Chris began the project that evolved as Free SAM or Free Speech Artists Movement.  

Chris passionately wanted artists to be able to display, and sell, their artwork in the parks and on the lakefront. That led to questioning the peddler’s license process. and that then led to his art patch project and to the Artists’ Free Speech Movement.  He was arrested in 2009, initially for selling his art patches for $1, but that charge was dropped and he was instead indicted for felony eavesdropping because he had audio recorded his arrest for selling the patches.  

This only scratches the surface, but I have to stop now.  I have to stop now by thanking Mayor Richard M. Daley.  I thought I would never thank Richard Daley, but I am doing it now.  Because King Richard and his minions thought they would pick a fight with a defenseless artist who would go quickly into oblivion.  Instead they picked on a tiger, who seized the opportunity and whose merit is that he wants us to continue to seize the opportunity, not to give up the fight for freedom until we are all free. 

Now, Occupy is not in the habit of petitioning the Mayor for actions.  In various parts of the city, organizations petition the mayor through their alderman for an street to be named in honor of one of the neighborhood’s distinguished citizens.  Instead of begging the Mayor of the 1%, we decided to confer that honor on one of Rogers Parks most distinguished citizens.  And so  Morse Ave. will be re-christened Honorary Chris Drew Way. And we are presenting this commemorative proclamation recognizing why the street will bear his name.  It’s especially appropriate for Occupy Rogers Park to be give this proclamation to Chris, because it is precisely the question of defending the “99%” to which Chris has devoted himself.  That is the content of our time: “Everything or nothing all of us or none. ” (Bertolt Brecht)

Chris Drew prints and gives away art patches at the Glenwood Ave. Arts Festival, August 2010

So now, I want to ask you, as Chris begins to talk, remember the felony charge that Chris has been fighting and take out your video cameras, your cell phones, any recording devices you have for video and audio, and record what you are about to hear, to post it far and wide on FB or any other medium you have at your disposal, to celebrate the fight for which Chris has dedicated the majority of his life, the battle which is for your freedom and the freedom of us all.  Pull those phones out and please help me welcome Diana Berek, a long time cohort of Chris Drew to present our Occupy Rogers Park award !!! — introductory remarks by Lew Rosenbaum]

In Chris Drew’s Case: Judge Declares State Eavesdropping Law Unconstitutional

[The Chicago Sun Times reported Friday, March 2, that Chris Drew has won this round in his free speech battle with the State.  Although Prosecutors immediately appealed the decision, Judge Sachs ruled in Chris' favor that the law making it a felony to audiotape the officers making an arrest is unconstitutional.  There will a be a formal celebration at B1E Gallery on April 7, part of the Chicago Spring activities of Occupy Chicago and the neighborhood Occupations.  Chris and his legal team will be there!]

Judge declares state eavesdropping law unconstitutional

BY LAUREN FITZPATRICK  AND DAVE MCKINNEY Staff Reporters March 2, 2012 12:31PM

Christopher Drew

Updated: March 3, 2012 2:10AM

A Cook County Judge declared the state’s eavesdropping law unconstitutional Friday, and a state lawmaker hopes the ruling provides momentum for her push to change the law.

Judge Stanley J. Sacks issued the ruling in the case of Christopher Drew, a Chicago artist who was charged with felony eavesdropping after he recorded his Dec. 2, 2009, arrest on State Street by Chicago Police.

“The Illinois Eavesdropping Statute potentially punishes as a felony a wide array of wholly innocent conduct,” he read. “A parent making an audio recording of their child’s soccer game, but in doing so happens to record nearby conversations, would be in violation of the eavesdropping statute.”

Prosecutors now may appeal the judge’s ruling directly to the state’s Supreme Court.

A photographer and screen printer from Rogers Park, Drew, 61, was selling art patches for $1 at 103 N. State St. when he was arrested for not having a peddler’s license.

Police found a tape recorder in his poncho that recorded the conversation between Drew and the arresting officer on the street.

He was charged with a Class 1 felony, which carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.

“It was impossible for me to imagine a law based on privacy would make it illegal for me to tape a public conversation by a public officer on the public way who was arresting me,” Drew said after the hearing in the Criminal Courts building in Chicago. “I should have the right to bring evidence into court of what that officer says to me in public.”

His attorney, Joshua Kutnick, had argued that the law was too broad.

“It criminalizes conduct that the statute was not designed to criminalize,” Kutnick said Friday. “It was designed to protect personal privacy and what Chris did out there on State Street that day was not a violation of the officer’s personal privacy.”

Illinois has one of the strictest laws in the country prohibiting audio recording without the consent of all parties involved in the conversation. Most states allow one-party consent, in which only one person who is part of the conversation has to agree to it being recorded.

A bill to change the law is pending in the Illinois House.

State Rep. Elaine Nekritz (D-Northbrook) is the lead sponsor of a measure that would legalize the recording of conversations with police officers performing their duties in public places “if the conversation is at a volume audible to the unassisted ear of the person who is making the recording.”

The bill passed out of committee in early February by a 9-2 vote and now is positioned for a floor vote by the full House.

Nekritz said Friday’s ruling “provides a great deal of momentum.”

The bill has 26 co-sponsors, including three Republicans, yet police groups still oppose the bill, and Nekritz is not clear whether she has the necessary 60 votes to pass the legislation in the House.

“We’ve been engaged in discussions with the police groups to try to see if there is some room for coming together,” she said. “I still think we are probably philosophically just going to be on opposite sides of the fence. But we’re trying.”

But not all police officials fully back the existing law. Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy has called the Illinois eavesdropping law a “foreign concept.” He has said recording police doing their jobs might prevent false accusations of misconduct later.

© 2011 Sun-Times Media, LLC.

Chicago Cultural Plan For the People? Or For the 1%. . . Commentary by Chris Drew

            The Chicago Cultural Plan

                                      commentary by  Chris Drew
Read the Chicago Tribune story here

Here is the on line hub for the Chicago Cultural Plan 2012

For Two decades the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center has been calling on Chicago to honor Mayor Harold Washington’s Chicago Cultural Plan by reviving its concept of cultural democracy. We are the only place to find the original Chicago Cultural Plan on-line. It has been published on our website since 1999 at http://www.art-teez.org/cul_plan.htm. Will the new plan live up to the legacy of the original. I tend to doubt it but remain hopeful. The original plan stressed the need to support community art activities and the Washington Administration followed through on that promise. Mayor Daley abandond independent community based artists to stress downtown interests and centralization of support for the arts. For more on the history of the Chicago Cultural Plan and my suggestion for the new plan that will tell us all we need to know to evaluate whether this new Chicago Cultural Plan will follow the Daley or the Washington model visit my blog at http://www.c-drew.com/blog.

 Artists Called to Display/Protest During Art Chicago

This is a call for all artists who want to Occupy Art Chicago and protest the lack of open-air opportunities to survive by our art in Chicago. Art Chicago is an annual event for artists to showcase their work at the Merchandise Mart. Booths start out at 3-5 thousand dollars for three days exposure. Most artists can’t afford to attend. At the same time the laws of Chicago prevent us from surviving by selling art on the street and creating art scenes where people are used to seeing us promote our art.

So we will ask artists to show their art outside the Merchandise Mart along Wells Street during Art Chicago. You may pass out your business cards and promote your websites to those attending Art Chicago without the expensive fees artists are paying inside. At the same time we will be promoting changes that lead to an artist friendlier City of Chicago where artists are encouraged to survive by creating open-air art scenes to sell their art to the public. Reply to this email if interested in joining us.

 Valentines Day Protest at my Court Hearing.

My next court date is our opportunity to begin to organize to make my trial for audio-recording my arrest for selling art for $1 into a national/international event that properly embarrasses the City of Chicago for violating its citizen’s rights. On February 14th we will have the oral arguments over our motion to dismiss my case based on First Amendment issues. This will be a very interesting discussion – well worth your attendance.

We need all supporters who want to help to meet us at 26th and California on February 14th at 10:30am in front of room 602. Those who will be there should reply to this e-mail so we can plan. This will be a very quiet show of force. We will save the theatrics for the trial.

Court Hearing for Chris Drew on Valentines Day: Come Out To Support Drew and Free Speech Rights

posted by cdrew on January 30, 2012 @ 5:25 pm

Valentines Day Protest at my Court Hearing.

At long last we are moving rapidly toward a trial. It will still not come until late spring or early summer but it will be upon us swiftly. This next court date is our opportunity to begin to organize to make this trial for audio-recording my arrest for selling art for $1 into a national/international event that properly embarrasses the City of Chicago for violating its citizen’s rights. On February 14^th we will have the oral arguments over our motion to dismiss my case based on First Amendment issues. This will be a very interesting discussion – well worth your attendance.

Art Patch art by Jenny Rotten from the Art Patch Project – http://www.art-teez.org/free-speech-movement/fs-art-patch-project-instructions.htm

We need all supporters who want to help to meet us at 26^th and California on February 14^th at 10:30am in front of room 602. Those who will be there should reply to this e-mail so we can plan. This will be a very quiet show of force. We will save the theatrics for the trial.

A little perspective is valuable. The State’s Attorney’s Office would like to frame this as simply a trial of a long haired troublemaker charged with violating the rights of a hard working policeman. It is not. It is about silencing the voice of an activist in Chicago with a long prison sentence.

In reality it is a trial about the First Amendment. I was arrested violating the peddlers license to test its constitutionality and to demonstrate our First Amendment right to sell art in public. This is a misdemeanor. The police knew I and my team of artists were on a mission to do this because we told them so. My arresting officer was the head of the Homeland Security detail responsible for the entire area around Macys in the Loop on State Street. You can be sure he was hand picked to do the job.

Why? Because three weeks earlier we had tried have me arrested and the police balked. That previous time I was ticketed and told I would be arrested then if I continued. We continued. A patty wagon shadowed me for an hour and a half awaiting instructions that day. Police in plain clothes and in uniforms observed our actions while communicating with each other and headquarters by radio during that entire time but never acted. Finally, we headed off for a late lunch to talk about our next attempt. You can not tell me the police did not know who we were and what we were up to. The day I was arrested it took about an hour before the arresting officer showed up. That is just enough time for us to be observed and for the police to put their pre-made plan into operation sending their senior officer to arrest me to make sure everything went smoothly.

Once I was cuffed in the jail waiting room and they discovered I had audio-recorded my arrest a three hour gap appeared before they decided just how to handle me. I was arrested at 1:30. The arresting officer heard my tape about an hour later after he was informed I had taped my arrest. Hours later at 4:00 a detective told me they had not decided yet what to charge me with. “If you are charged with a felony you will go to Cook County Jail in the morning and if the charge is a misdemeanor you will be set free tonight,” he told me.

This decision came down from the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office not from the arresting officer. The decision was to use a portion of the eavesdropping law enacted by the State Legislature to punish gang members caught spying on the justice system at 26^th and California with modified cell phones and pagers recording the internal conversations of judges, assistant state’s attorneys and policemen. Normally, if a person records the conversation they are having in Illinois without informing the another person to the conversation the penalty would be a class 4 felony, if it ever reached the stage of contention. A class 4 felony was not enough punishment for those who would exercise their First Amendment rights to challenge the status-quot in Chicago.

Even applying the class 4 felony to the act of recording a policeman in public who is arresting or interrogating you a is highly suspect act by a State’s Attorney in America today any where but Illinois and two other states. Thus, applying the obviously inappropriate charge of class 1 felony is an outrageous act of malicious prosecution. This charge was aimed at taking my First Amendment right to be a social critic away by intimidating and threatening me with up to 15 years in a state prison. It had nothing to do with me violating the arresting officers rights and the arresting officer didn’t even make the decision to prosecute, the State’s Attorney’s Office did. The only proof I need to offer to verify this is the logic of the story I have just told. Tell me without grinning that it is not true.

Artropolis – artist protest.

This is a call for all artists who want to Occupy Artropolis and protest the lack of open-air opportunities to survive by our art in Chicago. Artropolis is an annual event for artists to showcase their work at the Merchandise Mart. Booths cost three thousand dollars and above for three days exposure. Most artists can’t afford to attend. At the same time the laws of Chicago prevent us from surviving by selling art on the street and creating art scenes where people are used to seeing us promote our art.

So we will ask artists to show their art outside the Merchandise Mart along Wells Street during Artropolis. You may pass out your business cards and promote your websites to those attending Artropolis without the expensive fees artists are paying inside. At the same time we will be promoting changes that lead to an artist friendlier City of Chicago where artists are encouraged to survive by creating open-air art scenes to sell their art to the public. Reply to this email if interested in joining us.

Growth of Bill HR 3944 (to make it legal to audio record police) in the State Legislature

Bill HR 3944 is assigned to Judiciary 1 – Civil Law Committee for a hearing on Tuesday. To see committee members to be contacted regarding your views visit

http://www.ilga.gov/house/committees/members.asp?committeeID=895

E-mail or call the legislators on the committee at the link above to express your views before Tuesday.

Hearing Jan 31 2012 3:30PM Stratton Building Room D-1 Springfield, IL

The ACLU has provided a contact your legislators link below to make your view easy to express to your own legislators.

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=4001

Our Fight For Your Freedoms 2012 — Update From Chris Drew

“C Drew” <umcac@art-teez.org>
Our Fight for Your Freedoms in 2012

Thank you for following our achievments throughout the year. I am Chris Drew, the volunteer Executive Director of the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center for the past 24 years. I work for you without pay. Our ground breaking lawsuit against the Chicago peddlers license is soon to be filed. The stakes are high. Your help is needed to make Chicago more friendly to artists.

Cindy is not her name but her story is common in Chicago. She is an artist facing poverty, out of a job, prolific, but unable to sell her art in public. Even with a peddlers license her opportunities are limited because there are no art scenes where she is able to sell her art. When she ventures out, she finds herself confused by the public with the homeless who they are used to seeing on the streets of Chicago. The homeless have won their First Amendment rights to meet the public in Chicago while artists have not. In the few marginalized areas of Chicago where the peddlers license allows her to sell, she is not joined by other artists in a vibrant street arts scene. The public sees her as a lone figure against a bleak cityscape and pass on by. She is unable to survive, as she should, by her art in Chicago because street art culture has been killed by unfriendly laws and prohibitive park policies.

Remember Lee Godie – the lady who became famous selling her art in front of the Art Institute? Chicago outlawed her activity the year she died, 1994, by requiring a peddlers license that defined the sidewalk before the Art Institute and most of the best locations in Chicago as prohibited areas. There have been few, if any, artists legally surviving by selling their art in public in Chicago since that time. Chicago’s cultural character is largely hidden. We envision a future art Mecca of street art scenes showcasing Chicago artists in public with myriad opportunities for artists to survive by their creative activities. Chicago’s streets should bloom with art and culture every spring.

How badly do we need change? When I tried to challenge the constitutionality of this peddlers license law by selling art for $1 in public the State attempted to put me in prison for up to 15 years using the unconstitutional Illinois eavesdropping law. I didn’t back down. In Illinois we don’t have the right to gather the evidence of what police say to us in public to defend ourselves in court. My actions are resulting in a move to change this law in Springfield this year that will bring Illinois in line with the rest of America allowing you to audio-record your police in public in Illinois. We are creating change with pure guts. We are winning real freedoms for you. Now we are also going forward with our lawsuit to increase artists’ rights to sell art in public, as we originally intended.

Our peddlers license lawsuit, that we will present to the court soon, will spearhead a smart direction in the national legal debate over how to determine what art deserves First Amendment protection. In our study of the case law on artists’ rights to sell art in public, we have discovered major flaws in the judicial attempts to define what art is protected by the First Amendment. There is division between differing Federal Circuit

screen print workshop

Court decisions on how to define the art which is protected by the First Amendment when it comes to the sale of art in public. We have gathered scholastic arguments for a new way for the courts to determine what art is protected.

Throughout all this turmoil of legal battles over your rights we have continued to conduct our free Screen Print Workshop for Artists. This workshop teaches artists the basics of screen printing using the least expensive and least technical methods providing them with another tool to better survive by their art. Our Art Patch Project to educate Chicago on artists rights is an on-going growing exhibit of art printed on cotton patches. We print the designs submitted to us by artists supporting our fight for their right to sell art in public and give them away to the public. Exhibits of this growing body of artwork are being prepared to travel around Chicago and other cities to increase the awareness of our movement. These two effective community art programs are a solid basis for the creative change we are engaged in. They deserve your support all by themselves.

Stay tuned for more details in our fight to support greater freedoms for everyone and artists in the new year. Support our pioneering efforts at changing Chicago and America to make them more friendly to artists in the future. Donate to the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center. We are a most effective, all volunteer arts non-profit making change by supporting and promoting the art and artists of our communities. Make a tax deductible donation now. Change Chicago and Illinois. The freedoms we fight for belong to you.

Sincerely,
Chris Drew

<http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.networkforgood.org%2Fdonation%2FMakeDonation.aspx%3FORGID2%3D363554496>

This message was sent to rosetree@mindspring.com from:

Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center | 1630 W. Wilson Avenue | Chicago, IL 60640

Email Marketing by <http://www.icontact.com/a.pl/144186>

<http://app.icontact.com/icp/mmail-mprofile.pl?r=35180696&l=71242&s=UZ00&m=576696&c=296369>                     Manage Your Subscription                                                                               |                                  <http://app.icontact.com/icp/core/message/forward?m=576696&s=35180696&c=UZ00&cid=296369>                     Forward To a Friend                                                                                       View this message in the iContact Community:                                                   <http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fcommunity.icontact.com%2Fp%2Fcommunity1112%2Fnewsletters%2Fblog%2Fposts%2Four-fight-for-your-freedoms-in-2012>                                           View message                                                                    <http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fcommunity.icontact.com%2Fp%2Fcommunity1112%2Fnewsletters%2Fblog%2Fposts%2Four-fight-for-your-freedoms-in-2012%23commentform>                                           Comment on this message                                                                            <http://community.icontact.com/p/community1112/newsletters/blog/rss.xml?r=35180696&l=71242&s=UZ00&m=576696&c=296369>                                                   Receive as RSS                                                                                                            Share this message with others:                                                   <”http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fdel.icio.us%2Fpost%3Fv%3D4%26noui%26jump%3Dclose%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommunity.icontact.com%252Fp%252Fcommunity1112%252Fnewsletters%252Fblog>                                           del.icio.us                                                                    <”http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com%2Fsubmit%3Fphase%3D2%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommunity.icontact.com%252Fp%252Fcommunity1112%252Fnewsletters%252Fblog%252Fposts%252Four->                                           Digg                                                                    <”http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=http%3A%2F%2Freddit.com%2Fsubmit%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommunity.icontact.com%252Fp%252Fcommunity1112%252Fnewsletters%252Fblog%252Fposts%252Four-fight-for->                                           reddit                                                                    <”http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fsharer.php%3Fu%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommunity.icontact.com%252Fp%252Fcommunity1112%252Fnewsletters%252Fblog%252Fposts%252Four-fi>                                           Facebook                                                                    <”http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=35180696&msgid=576696&act=UZ00&c=296369&destination=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stumbleupon.com%2Fsubmit%3Furl%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fcommunity.icontact.com%252Fp%252Fcommunity1112%252Fnewsletters%252Fblog%252Fposts%252Four-f>                                           StumbleUpon

Danny Alexander Occupies 2011 And Music

This is Danny Alexander’s sum up of the year, his Occupation as a music writer and political thinker.

Take Em As They Come

Thursday, December 29, 2011

2011 in Review: My Occupy 25

I hate making year end lists. I’m a slow listener, for starters. And other than superficial run-ins with the radio, I tend to listen to one thing at a time. Once I get into some music enough to write about it, I don’t look up much until the writing’s done.

I reviewed about 22 albums in 2011.  Since my I-Tunes lists about 22 new album releases a month, I’ve deeply listened to (and this is being wildly generous to myself) at most 1/12th of the music high profile enough for a (let’s call it) national conversation about the state of our music.  Since about half of what I’ve listened to is regional and not likely to be listed in I-Tunes new releases, it’s safe to guess I’m listening to less than 1/24 of what we might talk about in a year-end review.  So, while I’m sometimes asked to do those things, I’ve never seen it as a gauge of what mattered most that year.  It’s what mattered most to me, which is, at best, an argument for the importance of some things others might have overlooked or undervalued.

But, then, I do have a desire to sum up the year, in some way that makes sense in terms of how I work.  I started writing about music as an act of rebellion- . . . Read More Here

Bruce Springsteen Introduces “Somewhere in America”

The Boss agreed to write the introduction to ‘Someplace Like America.’ (photo: Public domain)

(reposted from Reader Supported News)

‘Someplace Like America’

By Bruce Springsteen, The Washington Post

20 December 11

View Photo Gallery – A new book gave Bruce Springsteen the chance to write his thoughts about three decades of tough times in our nation. The following are excepts of his foreword to “Someplace Like America,” by Washington Post photographer Michael Williamson and writer Dale Maharidge, both Pulitzer Prize winners.

Someplace Like America: Tales From the New Great Depression,” the latest collaboration from Columbia journalism professor Dale Maharidge and Post photographer Michael S. Williamson, tells the story of American industry and its workers – a story the two began to document more than 30 years ago and published in the mid-’80s in “Journey to Nowhere.” That work inspired Bruce Springsteen to compose the lyrics to “Youngstown” and “The New Timer.”

The Boss agreed to write the introduction to “Someplace Like America.” His words are adapted for publication here, along with some of Williamson’s pictures.

had completed most of the “Tom Joad” record when one night, some 15 years ago, unable to sleep, I pulled a book down off my living room shelf. I read it in one sitting, and I lay awake that night disturbed by its power and frightened by its implications. In the next week, I wrote “Youngstown” and “The New Timer.”

That book – “Journey to Nowhere,” by Dale Maharidge and Michael S. Williamson – put real lives, names and faces on statistics we’d all been hearing about throughout the ’80s. People who all their lives had played by the rules, done the right thing and had come up empty, men and women whose work and sacrifice had built this country, who’d given their sons to its wars and then whose lives were marginalized or discarded. I lay awake that night thinking: What if the craft I’d learned was suddenly deemed obsolete, no longer needed? What would I do to take care of my family? What wouldn’t I do?

Without getting on a soapbox, these are the questions Maharidge and Williamson posed with their words and pictures. Men and women struggling to take care of their own in the most impossible conditions and still moving on, surviving.

As we tuck our children into bed at night, this is an America many of us fail to see, but it is a part of the country we live in, an increasing part. I believe a place and a people are judged not just by their accomplishments, but also by their compassion and sense of justice. In the future, that’s the frontier where we will all be tested.

How well we do will be the America we leave behind for our children and grandchildren.

Now, their new book, “Someplace Like America,” takes the measure of the tidal wave 30 years and more in coming, a wave that “Journey” first saw rolling, dark and angry, on the horizon line. It is the story of the deconstruction of the American dream, piece by piece, literally steel beam by steel beam, broken up and shipped out south, east and points unknown, told in the voices of those who’ve lived it. Here is the cost, in blood, treasure and spirit, that the post-industrialization of the United States has levied on its most loyal and forgotten citizens, the men and women who built the buildings we live in, laid the highways we drive on, made things and asked for nothing in return but a good day’s work and a decent living.

It tells of the political failure of our representatives to stem this tide (when not outright abetting it), of their failure to steer our economy in a direction that might serve the majority of hard-working American citizens and of their allowing of an entire social system to be hijacked into the service of the elite. The stories allow you to feel the pounding destruction of purpose, identity and meaning in American life, sucked out by a plutocracy determined to eke out its last drops of tribute, no matter what the human cost. And yet it is not a story of defeat. It also details the family ties, inner strength, faith and too-tough-to-die resilience that carry our people forward when all is aligned against them.

When you read about workers today, they are discussed mainly in terms of statistics (the unemployed), trade (the need to eliminate and offshore their jobs in the name of increased profit) and unions (usually depicted as a purely negative drag on the economy). In reality, the lives of American workers, as well as those of the unemployed and the homeless, make up a critically important cornerstone of our country’s story, past and present, and in that story, there is great honor.

Maharidge and Williamson have made the telling of that story their life’s work. They present these men, women and children in their full humanity. They give voice to their humor, frustration, rage, perseverance and love. They invite us into these stories to understand and allow us to experience the hard times and the commonality of experience that can still be found just beneath the surface of the modern news environment. In giving us back that feeling of universal connectedness, they create room for some optimism that we may still find our way back to higher ground as a country and as a people. As the folks whose voices sing off the book’s pages will tell you, it’s the only way forward.

Art and Occupy in Los Angeles

Occupy L.A. and the Art World

A wave of art projects go hand in hand with the protest

Published in the Los Angeles Weekly, Thursday, Nov 24 2011

On Nov. 11, artists Elana Mann and Juliana Snapper brought two big, flesh-colored papier-mâché ears and a handful of poster-board signs with ears drawn on them down to the tarp-covered library at Occupy L.A. There they met up with a small group of artists, writers and curious occupiers, who joined them on a “listening walk,” navigating the encampment while holding the handmade ears in the air to show bystanders that listening was going on.

PHOTO BY LUCAS KAZANSKY

During Artist Sinnombre’s performance

The Ballad of the Disenfranchised at Occupy LACMA

last weekend, visitors could choose a word from

the bowl to fill in the blank on the sign.

Given the dense visual activity around City Hall right now, focusing on just sound is not easy, and occupiers who noticed them seemed to appreciate the effort. One called it the Van Gogh parade. Others said, “Can you hear me?”

“It’s good that you’re listening,” said a man who walked with them briefly. “Did you go down to the south side, where there were all those cops today? You really should go listen down there.”

Mann, a performance and video artist, has attended the movement’s general-assembly gatherings and seen people get riled up and ideas left behind. “We had noticed both how difficult it was to listen at Occupy L.A.,” she says, “and also the amazing speaking and listening techniques that are happening in the Occupy movement.”

When the Occupy Wall Street effort began its spread two months ago, many in the arts community felt an affinity toward the protestors, not only agreeing with their stance on inequality and anger toward finance companies but seeing a parallel in the arts world, where museums and other institutions are struggling to keep afloat and often playing it safe to stay in donors’ good graces. Occupy L.A. has been an opportune setting for art projects that channel these anxieties.

This spring, Mann and concert soprano Snapper (along with two others) co-founded the group ARLA (a shifting acronym that has stood for Audile Receptives Los Angeles and A Ripe Little Archive). Many of their strategies come from Pauline Oliveros, an accordionist-turned-composer who began experimenting with electronic music in the 1950s, before it really even existed. She pioneered what she calls Deep Listening, or “listening to everything all the time and reminding yourself when you’re not listening.”

Like a lot of the artist activity at Occupy L.A., the ARLA performance would have happened occupancy or no occupancy, and in fact already had, at the Getty two weeks before. Participants there consisted of families and children, and the museum’s pristine granite surfaces provided an atmosphere emphatically different from the tent-covered one downtown.

But the fluid nature of the camp, with leaders and inhabitants changing regularly, and the baffling inclusiveness of the movement’s “occupy everything” agenda, made it an ideal setting for Deep Listening. Feeling heard put people at ease. The occupiers invited Mann and Snapper to come back weekly, and they obliged.

“They said that there were few, if any, opportunities to get together as people, rather than around a particular issue,” Mann says.

Since the recession hit, a number of artists’ projects have taken measured approaches to questioning the practices of museums, trustees and other elite players in the arts economy. In the same way that most members of Occupy L.A. would encourage the involvement of politicians, artists seem less interested in attacking institutions than reforming them.

When the collective Machine Project “occupied” LACMA for two days in 2008, building birdhouses on the balconies and playing live music in the elevators, they just wanted to open the museum up to a little more diversity. But when the current Occupy movement spread to museums in New York last month, with demonstrations outside MoMA and the New Museum, organizer Noah Fischer was confrontational, declaring, “No longer will we, the artists of the 99 percent, allow ourselves to be tricked into accepting a corrupt hierarchical system.”

Occupy LACMA, organized through Facebook by an anonymous artists’ group and held Nov. 20, was more tempered. It targeted LACMA as a symbolic center of the creative community and claimed no “singular objective” other than “to hear and listen.” Occupiers wore red, the color of the supports of the nearby Broad Contemporary wing, and held political discussions at a table in the museum’s courtyard.

One of the artists who participated in Machine’s earlier LACMA project was Liz Glynn, whose current series of performances at MOCA, called “Loving You Is Like Fucking the Dead,” explores her own conflicted relationship to the museum, an institution that’s both an amazing resource and a “crystal palace,” austere and averse to change. The first week of November, Glynn’s MOCA Goes Dark happened a few blocks above the Occupy headquarters at the museum on Grand Avenue. Blindfolded visitors, led through the permanent collection by the sound of jangling keys, had to trust security guards and visitor service volunteers. This performance and the final one, a dinner party scheduled for Dec. 1, rearrange the hierarchy of the museum idealistically, making visitors and the employees on the pay ladder’s lower rungs more central to its functioning.

Glynn is on the committee of the Public School, an artist-founded, consensus-run, curriculum-free school based out of a Chung King Road storefront. Anyone can propose a class and anyone can volunteer to teach. Justin Biren, also an artist and committee member, advocated for moving classes down to Occupy L.A. the week the encampment started. “The main purpose was just seizing the moment and showing solidarity,” he says. “The whole [Occupy] thing folded perfectly into the underpinning of the Public School.” Classes, including one on civil disobedience and another on architecture theory, met in the Occupy L.A. library until, days before NYPD raided Zuccotti Park, the committee decided to move back to Chinatown (a public university sanctioned by the movement had begun to hold classes at the library, too).

Few of the artist activities at Occupy L.A. have been “official.” Most have slipped in informally, like many of the occupiers themselves, though there’s an exception: Artists March to Occupy L.A., held Nov. 14 and organized by Susie Tanner, a teaching artist and performer who has worked in theater in the city since 1979. It took her a month to get on the official calendar, as her contacts kept leaving or moving on to different committees. Then, when she finally did secure the date and show up to march with about 60 people, no one at the encampment really seemed to care. “They seemed to be in their own world,” Tanner says. “In a way it was disappointing, but also kind of fascinating, like coming into a village that’s in progress, where no one minds you’re there but everyone has their own priorities.”

Tanner also organized a program of music and spoken word in the main square west of City Hall, an event mainly featuring artists who had participated in protests during the Vietnam War. Doors drummer John Densmore was there, as was poet Luis J. Rodriguez and writer-musician Ruben Guevara. Afterwards, on the walk to dinner in Little Tokyo, Densmore compared the Occupy movement to war protests in the 1970s, an era in which sculptor Mark di Suvero spearheaded the Artists’ Tower of Protest and a foreign policy demonstration was held at LACMA. “This goes beyond what we were doing then,” he said. “It’s about change to the core.”

“Everything is in crisis; that’s why it’s called an apocalypse,” Rodriguez says. “Everyone thinks apocalypse is an ending, but really it’s an unveiling.”

He, ARLA, Liz Glynn and members of the Public School are all interested in opening things up, pulling back covers to show the inner workings of the systems and institutions that govern us. That works for art, and, weirdly, for now at least, it seems to be working for protestors.

Art, Labor, Politics

I was in my early twenties when I recognized the need to become politically active.  I had entered medical school in the fall, 1964.  When Johnson was elected president that year, it was a response to Barry Goldwater’s jingoistic arguments to expand the war ongoing in Southeast Asia and a defense of his “Great Society” legislation.  Even as the war expanded, a certain ticket for young physicians overseas,  I came face to face with the fact that health care was available to the wealthy and not to the poor.  Training at Los Angeles County Hospital forced me to confront the lessons we were learning:  that our alcoholic, downtrodden, acutely and chronically  ill patients were worthless human beings.  Other students, like me disturbed by the discrepancy in health services to residents of Beverly Hills and Watts, had started a school newspaper.  They’d titled it Borborygmi — presumably the protesting bowel sounds emerging from the shit of our human detritus.  It was here that I first learned about layout and combining art with text.  Here I copied the pictures from the Dover edition of the drawings and etchings and block prints of Kathe Kollwitz.  Some 45 years ago I stumbled on the connection between art, labor and politics that I have been grappling with ever since.

Yes, I had listened to The Weavers, Pete Seeger, and others.  But now I learned to manipulate visual images to enhance the printed word.  And so perhaps this was the first time I considered art as more than spectacle, instead something with which to engage, in which to participate.

Tonight I spent 30 minutes waiting in the Democratic Party HQ in Rogers Park, where I live, waiting to confront the alderman.  The liberal Joe Moore had voted, along with every other alderman, to support the budget of incoming mayor Rahm Emmanuel.  Every alderman, including the liberal Joe Moore, had voted to cut services to the mentally ill and considerably more. As we confronted him, took over his meeting, warned him that we were watching, pictures flashed deep in my brain, remembrances of times when I first found Kollwitz.   When I first saw those wide eyed children with their empty plates gazing upward for food;  the woman being torn asunder and the women grouped together for their collective protection and strength. Tonight one of my cohorts asked how it was possible for artists to respond so quickly to the changing conditions that they find with new and more inventive cartoons at every instance of oppression.

I give thanks to Kollwitz to this very day for making me aware of the importance of combining art and politics, how the artist draws inspiration from the battles of daily life to survive.  And how the artist helps to transform the consciousness, the understanding of the tasks we all have to transform the society in which children have to beg for their next meals.

A number of you-tube videos are available of her work:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzabzZft6WQ

with a Mikis Theodorakis score:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJiLp3AUqCY&feature=related

another very dark score:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB1wbzC13-E&feature=related

Lew Rosenbaum — Monday, 21 November, 2011

Update: Chris Drew Tells How His Free Speech Court Case Gave Him A Bigger Megaphone

[This is the latest post from Chris Drew, screen print artist who was arrested for selling his art patches . . . and then charged with a class 1 felony for having the audacity to make an audio recording of the police arresting him. ]

At our Screen Print Workshop for Artists a discussion erupted, as frequently happens, and a person said “…they charged you with a class 1 felony for audio-recording your own arrest and they took you out of action for two years from fighting for artists’ rights while you’ve been fighting their felony charges…”
“No they didn’t!” I maintained. “They gave me a megaphone to trumpet artists’ rights and that is what I have been doing ever since. They tried to distract us but it blew up in their face.

   PROOF: THE T-SHIRT ART HARVEST FESTIVAL

The T-shirt Art Harvest Fest is this coming weekend (Friday Sept. 30 – Sunday Oct. 2nd, 2011) and it is bigger than ever even as I am fighting health issues and we are fighting their intended legal distractions. The Ravenswood Art Walk (RAW) is at the same time and it is well promoted. Come meet the Native Artists exhibiting with the RAW on Saturday and Sunday. We have a map with our Fest on it for the Chicago Critical Mass on Friday and the weather looks to be great all weekend.

The Art Patch Project is the more proof that our voice for artists’ rights is steadily increasing even as they try to silence our movement with a felony charge and two years of legal interference. The Art Patch Project is now over 180 designs strong and growing. We are preparing exhibits in other cities. It still has just the tiny tip of its iceberg showing with its big history still to come when artists begin to flock to its call. See the latest designs and pick up new art-patches before they are all given away. Hint – you best come on Friday to get a good crack at the latest art patches. They are fast becoming collectors items.

YES – Free Music and art will rule at the American Indian Center Friday, September 30th through Sunday October 2nd at 1630 W. Wilson Avenue in Chicago. The Art Patch Project will distribute free art patches all weekend. SPEAKOUT on Saturday from 2-5 on the Illinois eavesdropping law. The public and people affected will be invited to speakout on the Illinois eavesdropping law with their statements to be video recorded and uploaded to Youtube to raise awareness of this important issue.

Volunteers are especially needed on Friday from 6-11pm when we expect the Chicago Critical Mass to arrive. We need help to watch bikes locked up outside the building. Help us make the Chicago Critical Mass welcome by volunteering to watch their bikes for us. Call 773-561-7676 if you can help for a few hours to make this event rock easy.

 MORE PROOF OUR MEGA PHONE IS WORKING

Several weeks ago Circuit Court Judge David Frankland said that Michael Allison had a First Amendment right to record the police officers and court employees and dismissed all the charges against him. Judge Frankland ruled the Illinois eavesdropping law is unconstitutional. Just before that the ACLU appeared in front of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals arguing for their federal lawsuit against Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and Anita Alvarez, to prevent her from enforcing the Illinois eavesdropping law against individuals who audio-record police in public.

Today this issue is a hot national issue while 22 months ago when I was first charged with eavesdropping on the police no one had heard about this law. We changed that! Distraction? I doubt it. By December we will be suing the City of Chicago over the constitutionality of the peddlers license just as was our initial intention. When our artists’ rights lawsuit is lodged it will gather the attention it deserves because of everything we have been through.

LATEST Nancy Bechtol Court Video – Judge later said I can’t argue the “exemption i”  defense to the jury.