Gómez-Peña returns to Chicago for his first LIVE and in-person performance since lockdown began. This new solo performance monologue features new writing responding to the multiple pandemias including rantings and confessions. This one-night event is presented in dialog with his ongoing experimental radio program presented by Public Media Institute Gómez-Peña’s Mex Files: Audio Art & Strange Poetry from the US/Mexico Border (1985–2021)” and the exhibition at Hull-House Gómez-Peña’s Casa Museo: A living Archive and Museum. (September 9, 2021—May 29, 2022).
Featuring a cameo by conceptual artist, performer and storyteller Robin LaVerne Wilson aka DRAGONFLY.
Mex Files LIVE: The Pandemia Chronicles is presented by Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in partnership with the School of Theater and Music in the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Co-sponsors include, The Rafael Cintrón Ortiz Latino Cultural Center, UIC and the School of Arts and Art History, UIC. The Performance is an Initiative of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40.
Guest must present proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test within 72 hours of the start of the event to be admitted into the theater. Mask must be worn through the duration of the performance.
Guillermo Gómez-Peña (Mexico City, 1968) is a performance artist, writer, activist, radical pedagogue and artistic director of the performance troupe La Pocha Nostra. Born in Mexico City, he moved to the US in 1978, and since 1995, his three homes have been San Francisco, Mexico City, and the “road.” His performance work and 21 books have contributed to the debates on cultural, generational, and gender diversity, border culture and North-South relations. Gómez-Peña art work has been presented at over one thousand venues across the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Russia, South Africa and Australia. A MacArthur Fellow, USA Artists Fellow, and a Bessie, Guggenheim, and American Book Award winner, he is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines in the US, Mexico, and Europe. Gómez-Peña is currently a Patron for the London-based Live Art Development Agency, and a Senior Fellow in the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics. For Gómez-Peña archive of performance visit guillermogomezpena.com.
DRAGONFLY is Robin LaVerne Wilson [she/they] was born in Detroit, Michigan; raised in SanAntonio, Texas; and has been a resident of the NYC Metro since 2003. She descends fromenslaved Africans who rooted themselves in Alabama and Georgia after the end of the firstAmerican Civil War. She is the Gen X daughter of a career US Army combat medic (Korea and Viet Nam), and a military wife/homemaker/non-domestic cleaner. The unresolved intergenerational traumas of race, class, gender, and sexuality inform her work as a conceptual, multidisciplinary artist.Her red afro and tambourine-wielding activism alter-ego, Miss Justice Jester, was born during the first Black Lives Matter uprising. From streets to stages, Miss Justice Jester is a hybrid of the irreverent court jester and the West African griot. She has facilitated vigils and workshops, supported direct actions across social, racial, economic, and environmental justice issues, and performed internationally at Cabaret Voltaire and Theatre Neumarkt.
Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 explores the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness, and a potential act of resistance. Presented on the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause deploys the Fellows Program as “intellectual commons” and features new and recontextualized work by twenty-nine visual artists who have been named Fellows since the award program’s founding in 1981. Find additional information about the artists and exhibitions at TowardCommonCause.org.
