Featured images

Jared Brown performing at ECLIPSING: The Politics of night, the politics of light, Links Hall 2018. Photo: Ally Almore.

Damon Green performs at Danspace Project in Working on Better Versions of Prayers: Volume 1, by Chicago dancemaker J'Sun Howard. Photo: Ian Douglas.

Interdisciplinary artist Jared Brown joins dancemaker and poet J’Sun Howard for an evening of experiments with sound and performance in the MCA Commons. The evening is presented in partnership with ECLIPSING, a multi-media festival organized by local curator Amina Ross. Through performance, video and workshops, ECLIPSING celebrates darkness and mines queer imagination to explore blackness beyond the binary.

In Progress is a series designed to give patrons a look into the process of artists, thinkers, and curators organized by Curator of Public Programs January Parkos Arnall and Assistant Curator of Public Programs Christy LeMaster.

About the Artists

Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. Brown's work constructs a mythology around their origins and archives their existence as a black celestial being. In recent work, Brown has presented audio and text-based work on the radio (Central Air Radio, 88.5 FM), in live DJ sets, and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah's description: a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of black American subculture, history, and technology. Brown repurposes these fragments in audio, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space. Brown is interested in exposing the contradictions and complexity within black American subculture. They consider these gaps and slippages as a type of code that holds the key to a personal and collective future. Brown holds a BFA in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art and moved back to Chicago in 2016 in order to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.

J’Sun Howard is from Chattanooga, Tennessee, and is a Chicago-based dancemaker and poet. Howard has received the inaugural Co-MISSIONS Fellowship at Links Hall, a Sybil Shearer Fellowship through Ragdale Foundation, a nomination to participate in an emerging artist laboratory at MANCC, and a 3Arts Make A Wave Award. A 2014 Chicago Dancemaker's Forum Lab Artist awardee, his choreography has appeared at venues such as Danspace Project, Links Hall, Northwestern University, Sonotheque, Lincoln Square Theatre, Insight Arts/Center for New Possibilities, Epiphany Church, Rumble Arts Center, Patrick's Cabaret, California College of the Arts, and Defibrillator Performance Art Gallery. Howard has performed for choreographers Malcolm Jason Low, Asimina Chremos, Sara Wookey, Paige Cunningham, and Selene Carter, but most extensively with collaborators Darrell Jones and Damon Green in their research of (e)feminized ritual performance, which received a 2013 Juried Bessie Award for Hoo-Ha (for your eyes only). Howard's literary work is forthcoming in GIANTHOLOGY and can be seen in Propter Nos, Calamus Journal, Bird’s Thumb, Inkwell, and Storyglossia.