Join us for a special program in A Movement in Every Direction as we present newly commissioned writings connecting the contributors of Gravy, a magazine published by the Southern Foodways Alliance, with artworks in our galleries. Curated by Gravy guest editor Audrey Petty, this program emphasizes storytelling, personal histories, and individual interpretations of artworks on view. Gravy contributors joining us include Saleem Hue Penny, Lolly Bowean, and Emily Hooper Lansana.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Free with exhibition admission.
Southern Foodways Alliance’s Gravy Magazine:
Gravy is our journal and podcast duo of original narratives that are fresh, unexpected, and thought-provoking. Each year, Gravy supports the work of over 100 writers, illustrators, and photographers. The The Southern Foodways Alliance documents, studies, and explores the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Learn more at www.southernfoodways.org.
Audrey Petty:
Audrey Petty writes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Her stories have been published in such journals as African American Review, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, and The Massachusetts Review. Her poetry has been featured in Crab Orchard Review and Cimarron Review, and her essays have appeared in Saveur, ColorLines, Poetry, The Southern Review, Oxford American, Cornbread Nation 4, Gravy, and the Best Food Writing anthology. She is the editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness/Haymarket Press) and co-editor of The Long Term (Haymarket Press). Petty has been awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Colony, the Richard Soref Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she’s been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Invisible Institute, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Hewlett Foundation. She has taught extensively in the fields of African American literature and creative writing. Formerly on faculty in the Creative Writing Programs at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Knox College, Petty has also been an instructor for Project FYSH (Foster Youth Seen and Heard), Education Justice Project, and the Continuing Studies Program at University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has served as the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor of Fiction at Northwestern University and the Tin House Writer-in-Residence at Portland State University. She currently directs the Sojourner Scholars Program at Illinois Humanities and is a member of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. Photo credit: Keyana Marshal
Emily Hooper Lansana:
Emily Hooper Lansana is a community builder, storyteller, arts administrator, and educator. For more than thirty years, she has performed as a storyteller, sharing her work with audiences throughout Chicago and across the country. She has been featured at the National Storytelling Festival, the National Association of Black Storytellers Festival, and at a variety of museums, colleges and performance venues. She often performs with Performance Duo: In the Spirit. Her work seeks to give voice to those whose stories are often untold, especially those of the African diaspora. Currently she serves as Senior Director of Community Arts for the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. She teaches storytelling in a variety of venues from universities to community centers. She is honored to be a 2021 3Arts Award recipient. Photo credit: Maurice Rabb
Saleem Hue Penny:
Saleem Hue Penny (him/friend) is a Black poet expanding the pastoral tradition of the Southern Black Belt using a “rural hip-hop blues” aesthetic. Drum loops, field sounds, gouache, and birch bark commonly punctuate his poetry; these hybrid audio/mixed media pieces are released under the moniker h.u.e (hope – uplifts – everything). The 2021 Poetry Coalition Fellow at Zoeglossia, an Assistant Poetry Editor at Bellevue Literary Review, and a proud Cave Canem Fellow, his writing and hybrid art pieces explore how young people of color traverse wild spaces and define freedom on their own terms. Saleem is committed to disability justice, not only as a macro social worker, mutual aid advocate, and volunteer Hospital Magician, but as a person with less-visible disabilities and health conditions such as Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, single-sided deafness, and Bipolar II. Care Work comes in many forms and is essential to our collective liberation. He is compiling his first full-length poetry collection, battling against bull thistle in the community garden, and pursuing archival research for a long-form lyric essay set in Reconstruction-era “Affrilachia.” Photo credit: Davon Clark (c) 2021
Lolly Bowean:
Lolly Bowean is a writer, an award-winning journalist and community storyteller. Lolly worked as a general assignment reporter at the Chicago Tribune for more than 15 years and had a particular focus on urban affairs, youth culture, housing, minority communities and government relations. She wrote primarily about Chicago’s unique African-American community and the development of the Obama Presidential Center. During her tenure at the Chicago Tribune, she covered the death of Nelson Mandela; how violence was lived and experienced in troubled neighborhoods; and the 2008 election and inauguration of President Barack Obama. Most recently, she wrote about the election of Chicago’s first African-American woman Mayor, Lori Lightfoot. In addition, she covered Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the last gathering of the original Tuskegee Airmen. Before joining the Chicago Tribune, Bowean covered suburban crime, government and environmental issues for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. She has been published in Chicago Magazine, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Lenny Letter and Longreads. She has served as a contributing instructor for the Poynter Institute and lectured at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and is the former program officer for the Chicago Headline Club. She was a 2017 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and is a Studs Terkel Award winner. In 2019, she became the first African-American awarded the Gene Burd Urban Journalism Award. In 2020, she was awarded the Anne Keegan Award for excellence in writing about the common man. And earlier this year, she was given the “Ida Guides Me” journalism award by the Chicago advocacy group “Girls Like Me.” She is a Pulitzer prize nominated writer who splits her time between the South Side of Chicago and Brooklyn, New York.