To Art and Profit (March 18-20)

To Art & Profit

What Is It Good For? Defining Art’s Purpose Now

Cuated by Abra Johnson & Meida McNeal

Spread over three weekends from March through May 2011, To Art & Profit is an interdisciplinary  performance series augmented with arts-focused dialogues and Carnival-inspired street theatre spectacle throughout the city of Chicago.

To Art & Profit envisions what collective social action looks like through a diverse and democratic approach to artistic programming, and tackles difficult questions bringing art-centered conversations and explorations to different kinds of local public spaces.

The festival pairs Chicago-based artists across discipline and genre, asking them to create performances around select themes and questions: How can we practice a more conscientious capitalism, one that allows art makers to make a living while still caring about the nourishing of the human spirit? How can we bring more creative voices to public spaces and stages widening the scope of representation and our willingness to embrace creative expressions we are not familiar with? How can we democratize art production?

Panels of artists, scholars and creative advocates will address art as knowledge in discussions held throughout the city at various community-centered spaces. Each performance weekend will be linked to a culminating street theatre event that adapts the performances to divergent public spaces in Chicago (Rogers Park, Logan Square, Washington Park). We hope to make productive social interventions using performance as the lightening rod to incite interest and discussion.  We forward the idea of art as a critical thinking and social justice tool. We also forward the idea of performance as a public forum.  Finding various ways to invite community participation, this series explores how art can be profitable, accountable and accessible.

Most significantly, To Art & Profit manifests what a socially aware art practice imagines itself to be at its core: an engine for critically engaged creative conversation destabilizing the norms of knowledge, taste and collaboration.