Past events
DATE
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
TIME
5:30 PM Reception
6:00 PM Reading
WHERE
Residents’ Dining Hall
800 South Halsted Street
Co-sponsored with The Poetry Foundation
READING
Join us on March 16 for a special reading by activist and award-winning writer and poet, Luis Rodriguez.
Luis will recite works from his extraordinary collection, as well as a new poem commissioned by the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum for the Alternative Labeling Project, a new series that transgresses and challenges the way we think about objects and artifacts and the extraordinary stories they tell.
ABOUT LUIS RODRIGUEZ
Luis J. Rodriguez is one of the leading Chicano writers in the country, with 14 published books in poetry, memoir, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. His poetry has won the Poetry Center Book Award, the PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award, and the Paterson Poetry Book Prize, among other accolades. Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A., his 1993 memoir of gang life, has sold more than 300,000 copies; it received the Carl Sandburg Literary Award and a Chicago Sun-Times Book Award, and was designated aNew York Times Notable Book. His latest poetry collection, My Nature Is Hunger: New & Selected Poems, appeared in 2005 from Curbstone Press/Rattle Editions. Rodriguez helped found Chicago’s Guild Complex, Tia Chucha Press, and Rock A Mole Productions, which organizes arts festivals in Los Angeles. He is renowned for his work in gang intervention.
ALTERNATIVE LABELING PROJECT
Can a common museum label—so often the omniscient voice that provides factual evidence that identifies artifacts and objects in a museum's collection—sensually engage us, inspire revolution and reform, or provide pleasure and comfort?
Can a museum label be a poem, an essay, or piece of music?
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum asks these questions in its new series of Alternative Labels that presents diverse voices and encourages visitors to view history from a fresh perspective.
We invited Luis Rodriguez, one of the country's leading Chicano writers, the International Contemporary Ensemble, a vibrant, cutting-edge new music ensemble, and Terri Kapsalis, a writer and performer, to choose artifacts from our collection and compose labels that challenge and provoke. For the final part in the series, visitors will be invited to exercise their voices and participate by creating their own alternative label for an object in our collection.
These labels, non-traditional in format and presentation, will be placed throughout the museum over the next few months to provide alternative encounters that will introduce visitors in fresh ways to the extraordinary history of the Hull-House Settlement.
Co-sponsored with The Poetry Foundation