Tender House Project: 2021 BridgeHouse Activations

Tender House Project returns as a partner program of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and the inaugural Backward River Festival with activations in two of Chicago’s historic bridgehouses. Tender House Project will activate the DuSable bridge for the second iteration of Bridge Lift, featuring a musical performance in concert with the live sounds of the moving 101 yr old bascule bridge during the city’s scheduled bridge lifts. This rare performance will be viewable among the moving gears of the McCormick Bridgehouse &Chicago River Museum and the Riverwalk.

Lumpen Radio and Communities Amplified will premiere a series of live radio transmissions at the South Ashland Bridgehouse featuring stories from community organizations across the 25th Ward. With the support of Public Media Institute, the broadcasts will be amplified during the Backward River Festival where people can tune-in and listen to the live broadcast of speeches, poetry & storytelling, music, and discussions from community leaders, youth, and stakeholders. In the evenings, the bridgehouse will symbolize a beacon of resident voices and the strong presence of the Chicago River through a curated selection of film projections created by Chicago Artists.

These programs are made possible through the amazing collaboration of Tender House Project, Public Media Institute, the School of Art and Art History (UIC), Deep Time Chicago, and UIC Freshwater Lab.

FOLLOW US: @tenderhouseproject @lumpenradio @deeptimechicago

2021 CALENDAR OF EVENTS

OCTOBER 16, 2021 9:30 - 10: 30 AM

BRIDGE LIFT: DAMON LOCKS AT DUSABLE BRIDGE

On the morning of October 16th, artist Damon Locks will perform a duet with the live sounds of the moving bascule bridge during Chicago's Fall bridge lift. The rare performance can be experienced in the belly of the DuSable Bridge, where Locks will perform with and among the moving gears of the historic 101 yr old bascule bridge. The sound will be amplified outside of the bridgehouse engaging a wider audience of pedestrians and awaiting sailboats.

This event is free and open to the public. Space inside the bridgehouse will be limited to first come first serve.

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, and vocalist/musician. He is a Museum of Contemporary Art/SPACE (School Partnership for Art and Civic Engagement) embedded artist at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy. He teaches art with Prisons and Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville Correctional Center. He is a recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts as well as a 3Arts Awardee. He is a Soros Justice Media Fellow. Damon leads the group Black Monument Ensemble and is a founding member of the group The Eternals. He is also the primary vocalist in Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra.

Instagram: @blackmonumentensemble

OCTOBER 16, 2021 2:00 - 3:00 PM

DOUGLAS EWART

PERFORMANCE ON BUBBLY CREEK AND AT THE GATES OF THE SOUTH ASHLAND BRIDGE

Composer, Artist, and Educator, Douglas Ewart will kick off our series of programming at the South Ashland bridgehouse with a musical performance on the waters of Bubbly Creek and the South Branch of the Chicago River.  Ewart will stage his performance on one of Chicago’s oldest active boats, the (1936) Robert Allen II which will amplify his sounds across the waters and engage the public on the shores of Park 571 and Canal Origins Park.  

This event is free and open to the public. 

Douglas Ewart Perhaps best known as a composer, improviser, sculptor, painter and maker of masks and instruments, Douglas R. Ewart is also an educator, lecturer, arts organization consultant and all around visionary. In projects done in diverse media throughout an award-winning and widely-acclaimed 50-year multidimensional work as an artist, Mr. Ewart has woven his remarkably broad gifts into a single sensibility that encourages and celebrates--as an antidote to the divisions and compartmentalization afflicting modern life-the wholeness of individuals in culturally active communities.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1946, Douglas R. Ewart immigrated to Chicago, Illinois in the United States in 1963. His travels throughout the world and interactions with diverse people since then has, again and again confirmed his view that the world is an interdependent entity. An example of his efforts both to study and to contribute to this interdependence is his use of his prestigious 1987 U.S.-Japan Creative Arts Fellowship to study both modern Japanese culture and the traditional Buddhist shakuhachi flute, and also to give public performances while in Japan. In America, his determination to spread his perspective is part of the inspiration behind his often multi-disciplinary works and their encouragement of artist-audience interactions.  It is also the basis of the teaching philosophy with which he guides his classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught since 1990, and the basis of the perspective he has brought to his service on advisory boards for institutions such as The National Endowment for the Arts, Meet the Composer (New York City) and Arts Midwest. Mr. Ewart uses his past experience as chairman of the internationally renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) to celebrate and build upon the history and achievements of the organization, and is from this perspective a natural extension of the activities he has been engaged in for the past four decades.

OCTOBER 16, 2021 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

OCTOBER 17, 2021 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM

communities amplified

Lumpen Radio and Communities Amplified will premiere a series of live radio transmissions at the South Ashland Bridgehouse featuring stories from community organizations across the 25th Ward. With the support of Public Media Institute, the broadcasts will be amplified during the Backward River Festival where people can tune-in and listen to the live broadcast of speeches, poetry & storytelling, music, and discussions from community leaders, youth, and stakeholders.

Swing by to say, Hello! And tune in to WLPN 105.5 to hear the amazing conversations and programming.

*Communities Amplified trains new radio producers from communities in Chicago and expands multilingual programming on Lumpen Radio. This project aims to reach a multicultural, immigrant audience to further develop a community that incorporates multiple immigrant experiences. Public Media Institute’s low power FM radio station, (WLPN 105.5), combined as it is with online streaming and archiving, is a platform for a vital and diffused dialogue, where people share ideas, sounds, and events within their communities, and are also able to broadcast culture to a much wider public in the city and the globe.

STEPHANIE MANRIQUEZ:

COMMUNITIES AMPLIFIED HOST

Stephanie Manriquez is an award-winning writer, radio producer, journalist, and teaching artist with a passion for highlighting social justice issues affecting Latino communities. She is Executive Director at Contratiempo magazine and a Social Justice News Nexus Fellow at Northwestern University leads the National Museum of Mexican Art’s youth journalism program, and was recognized in 2020 by the Field and MacArthur Foundations as one of 11 "Leaders for a New Chicago." She regularly produces and creates content for Lumpen Radio, which includes leading the Communities Amplified multilingual radio initiative. The Spanish language Communities Amplified programming is an initiative of Public Media Institute and Contratiempo nfp that opens doors and builds a growing network of Latino radio producers, hosts, and talent across Chicago; producing and airing new Spanish content every week.

OCTOBER 16, 2021 6:00 - 8:00 PM

DEEP TIME CHICAGO

Projected onto the observatory windows of the South Ashland Bridgehouse, Deep Time Chicago will feature 6 films by Chicago Artists. This series of films examine crucial questions of global ecological change.

• BORN SECRET (19:44 MINS) : Jeremy Bolen, Brian Holmes, and Brian Kirkbride

• TIME TO CHANGE / JUST TRANSITION (5:04 MINS): Brian Holmes

• RE-PERCUSSIONS (0:29 MINS): Marlena Novak, Jay Alan Yim, Mak Hepler-Gonzalez

• LOTIC WATERS (10:28 (MINS): Beate Geissler, Mat Rappaport, Oliver Sann

• RIVER, COME BACK (6:11 MINS): Nina Barnett

• CARP SONG (1:30 MINS): Sarah Lewison and Andrew Yang

• COMFORT IN HYDROLOGY (13:00 MINS): Steve Rowell

  Join the artists for a brief presentation and discussion at 7 PM.

DEEP TIME CHICAGO is an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of the Anthropocene Curriculum program at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany, in 2016. Our goal is to explore one core idea: humanity as a geological agency, capable of wreaking violent disruptions on the earth system and inscribing present modes of industrialized existence into deep time. By knitting together group readings, guided walks, lectures, panels, screenings, performances, publications and exhibitions, we are developing a public research trajectory, offering a variety of formats where Chicago area inhabitants can grapple with the crucial questions of global ecological change, experienced right here at home.

OCTOBER 17, 2021 7:00 - 8:00 PM

THE REVERSAL

The Reversal animates thousands of glass-plate negatives with a haunting, time-traveling sound collage to evoke the reverse-engineering of the Chicago River and the invisible histories of our capital-driven landscapes.

Join the artists for a presentation and discussion at 7 PM.

Jennifer Boles is a nonfiction filmmaker, historian, and editor based out of Chicago. She received her PhD in History at Indiana University in 2015 and her MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern University in 2019. Her work explores the intersections of history, capitalism, and the environment through expanded approaches to archives and documentary filmmaking. Her films have screened at festivals such as Alchemy Film & Arts, Antimatter Media Art, DOXA, Chicago International, New Orleans Film Festival, Mimesis Documentary, FLEX fest, Chicago Underground, and others. She coordinates a fellowship program at the University of Illinois-Chicago and teaches film at UIC and Northwestern University.  Instagram: @jen_boles7

Nevo Shinaar is a creative producer based in Chicago. His award-winning films played at film festivals including Sundance, SXSW, AFI Docs and Palm Springs, showcased on POV/PBS, the NY Times and The Atlantic Selects, and supported by Tribeca Film Institute and Kartemquin Films. Nevo serves as Head of Development for Mitten Media for both scripted and documentary. He is a founding member of the award-winning SITE collective, and of Wolf + Me Films. In 2020, he was included in Newcity Film 50. Nevo holds an MFA from Northwestern University in Documentary Media and a BFA from the Tisch School of Film and Television at Tel-Aviv University. 

VIEW OUR PAST EVENTS