Editorial Projects
Chicago Archives + Artists Project: Case Studies in Collaboration
Edited by Kate Hadley Toftness, Tempestt Hazel, and Christina Nafziger
A project of Sixty Inches From Center, the Chicago Archives + Artists Project highlights Chicago archives and special collections that give space to voices on the margins. Published in collaboration with From The Birds Trapped in Airports, the book features over three dozen Chicago artists, archivists, librarians, writers, curators, community organizers, and editors.
Within the pages of the book, you’ll find new archive-inspired explorations, a directory of Chicago-based archives and collections, and reflections on 5+ years of the Chicago Archives + Artists Project. The book also features two new artist + archive pairings with letterpress printer Ben Blount who spent time in the archives of Shorefront Legacy Center, and artist/poet Natasha Mijares who explored the Latinx art collection at DePaul Art Museum.
Book Design & Production:
For the Birds Trapped in Airports
www.forthebirdstrappedinairports.com
@forthebirdstrappedinairports
Night Games: On Horror
Edited by Christina Nafziger and Annette LePique
Photography:
Ryan Edmund Thiel
www.ryanedmundstudio.com
@talldarkandryan
As part of their 6-part mini-anthology series Something to look forward to, Sixty Inches From Center published Night Games: On Horror. This zine pulls together previously published writing on Sixty and asks its readers to consider the texts through the lens of horror. Night Games is an offering in three tales, doorways to enter writings on art through three themes: Haunted House, Possession, and Monsters. Together, these three sections tell a story; a history, they form a codex through which to understand our fears, our desires, what remains unspoken.
Zine Design, Production, & Photography:
For the Birds Trapped in Airports
www.forthebirdstrappedinairports.com
@forthebirdstrappedinairports
Curatorial Projects
A Thread Through a Past Life
August 12 - October 14, 2023
What memories are held within material? Silk from your mother’s favorite dress, a sleeve from a childhood sweater, thread left over from your aunt’s homemade quilt. Whether handmade or store bought, clothing is embedded with our history. In the work of Udita Upadhyaya and Nina Littrell, this history is dissected, examined, rearranged, and sewn together. By using fabric materials that literally and conceptually reference their past, each artist confronts their own histories and memories, stitching them together to create something new–something that is both part of them and outside of them; a quilted mosaic of their identities.
Haunted Nostalgia: the mall will be closing in 10 minutes…
April 14 - Jun 11, 2023
Haunted Nostalgia: the mall will be closing in 10 minutes… is a solo show by Katie Neece that explores the hazy vision of our failed capitalist aspirations. Her paintings build on our nostalgia for the future we thought was coming but has instead decayed within and alongside the American mall. Inspired by 80s and 90s graphic design and visual culture, there is familiarity that hides within Neece’s works. But something doesn’t feel right—the vision is skewed. Through looming digital-esque forms and deep drop shadows, the artist offers a nod to the failure of the capitalistic ventures in which we often found such aesthetics. As the artist explains, her works “illustrate that the past continually reminds us of the future’s failure in the form of haunting.”
