Bridge welcomes new Visual Art section Editor Laura Kina (@laura.kina). Laura Kina is a queer, mixed-race Uchinanchu artist-scholar and breast cancer survivor whose artistic and scholarly projects address Asian American and Okinawan diasporic art. She is a Vincent de Paul Professor at The Art School at DePaul University. Kina was born in Riverside, CA (Cahuilla, Tongva, Luiseño, Serrano territory), grew up in Poulsbo, WA (Suquamish and Port Gamble S’Klallam territory), and is based in Chicago (traditional lands of the Three Fires Confederacy — Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Odawa nations as well as the Ho-Chunk, Myaamia, Menominee, Illinois Confederacy, and Peoria).

Bridge, Zephyr & SITE/less win City of Chicago Planning & Development Grant for $70,911 in Facility Improvements.

NEWS: Bridge Announces the Launch of Bridge Books

In planning by members of the core artistic collective and affirmed by the Bridge Board of Directors at their recent annual meeting, plans for the launch of Bridge Books were set in motion.

“It’s an exciting time to be working here at Bridge. In development since 2018, the announcement of Bridge Books comes with a slate of fascinating titles, projects and partnerships launching in 2023,” says Bridge Executive Director Michael Workman. “Along with these come the capacity for additional plans to expand the reach of our not for profit programming to new audiences, customize development of our own independent media distribution networks, and integrate it all with other media channels also currently in development, including our alternative streaming service, Bridge Video, our Audio and Sound Art archives and new series of special projects, some also years in development.”

NEWS: Bridge Announces “Mat Rappaport: Treatments, 2019/2023” at Material Gallery, April 29-May 7, 2023

“In 2019, my partner was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. As I accompanied her to consultations, tests, and treatments I found myself considering the spaces in which the clinical met the individual. The hallways, waiting areas, and examination rooms were a pastiche of industrial wall coatings, clinical equipment, and artworks. In particular I was struck by the artworks that had been selected for display, often copies of well-known master works and pastoral scenes, placed into nearly identical serial cubicles. These visual spaces were meant to distract and calm and yet, I could only reflect on the fact that that was their purpose. All this while contemplating the unimaginable.”

Please note: despite hundreds of staff hours applying for dozens of funding support opportunities since the program launch in 2018, no new support has been awarded the Assembly Zones program, either from local, state, federal or private sources. Without continued funding to prototype and develop the necessary technology for this effort, the program can no longer move forward.

We continue to believe deeply in the urgency and necessity of the Assembly Zones program, but as of Fall 2022, until sufficient new support is acquired to continue, development efforts on the initiative will be discontinued. Those wishing to reach out with new capital opportunities can email us at bridge.editors1@gmail.com.

The long-running Bridge Movement Matters series, which investigates work at the intersection of dance, art, performance, politics, policy and issues related to the body, is launching a new periodic performance series this October 18. Bridge has hosted a variety of Movement Matters programming now for seven years, including artist's roundtables, symposia and panels, but this will be our first outing as a performance series. Curated by Michael Workman and Juliann Wang, we hope you will come show your support for the series launch, which seeks to define new intersecting spaces between dance, movement and performance art.

With the release of Bridge V22N1, Bridge welcomes new Fiction section Editor Meghan Lamb. Lamb is the author of COWARD (2022), Failure to Thrive (2021) All of Your Most Private Places (2020) and Silk Flowers (2017). She served as the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, and teaches creative writing through the University of Chicago, Story Studio, and GrubStreet. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and Passages North, among other publications. She runs the shadow text reading series Significant Others, a project dedicated to elevating new books and the “behind-the scenes” texts that inspired them.

With the release of Bridge V22N1, Bridge welcomes new Couture section Editor Kristin Mariani. Her practice is an ongoing conversation between design and art; acknowledging the slippery distinctions between the two disciplines, her investigations unfold in this unstable territory. Through the craft of making clothes, Kristin deploys aesthetic strategies, skill-based knowledge, and text to probe the historical, material, and labor-oriented underpinnings encapsulated in any effort to clothe a person. For her project Yes/On featured in the Couture section, she addresses intimacy, care, language and boundaries, questioning how the production of gender is figured through fashion, place, and labor.

SAVE THE DATE! and PLEASE RSVP TO join us at the release of the Bridge Journal's new Volume 22, Number 1 on Tuesday, October 18 from 4-7pm at Guild Row Social Club, 3130 N. Rockwell.

Copies of the Bridge Journal V22N1 will be available for purchase and for subscription at the event.

Save the date for the first lecture in a series at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where Bridge Journal Editor-in-chief Michael Workman will trace the avant-garde lineages of the Bridge Journal going back more than a century, as well as, as the museum states: “the evolution of artists’ publications and manifestos. Using the Driehaus Museum exhibition, PAN: Prints of Avant-Garde Europe 1895-1900 and William H. Bradley and The Chap-Book from the Collection of Richard H. Driehaus, as a starting point, Workman will take us through decades of intriguing and sometimes revolutionary visual, literary and social history.”

Save the date for the first lecture in a series at The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, where Bridge Journal Editor-in-chief Michael Workman will trace the avant-garde lineages of the Bridge Journal going back more than a century, as well as, as the museum states: “the evolution of artists’ publications and manifestos. Using the Driehaus Museum exhibition, PAN: Prints of Avant-Garde Europe 1895-1900 and William H. Bradley and The Chap-Book from the Collection of Richard H. Driehaus, as a starting point, Workman will take us through decades of intriguing and sometimes revolutionary visual, literary and social history.”

SOURCE RECURSIONS will showcase an exhibition of works drawing from and integrating the visual elements of our essays in the Bridge Journal, Volume 21, N1. Focusing on and deliberating the history of these elements as they relate to specific architectural, dance and movement art histories discussed in the volume.

SOURCE RECURSIONS will showcase an exhibition of works drawing from and integrating the visual elements of our essays in the Bridge Journal, Volume 21, N1. Focusing on and deliberating the history of these elements as they relate to specific architectural, dance and movement art histories discussed in the volume.

Hello from Chicago’s independent, print-only journal of interdisciplinary art scholarship, where we just released the latest edition of the Bridge Journal, Version 21, Number 1 (click cover image above for our full masthead and table of contents). Designed by Bob Faust and Faust, Ltd., for this volume, focusing on the background and specifics of our Assembly Zones program, section editors Michelle Kranicke, David Sundry and Michael Workman worked with a wide range of artists and institutions including MoMA, Gladstone Gallery, The MIT Press, Rem Koolhaas’ Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and others to produce our most in-depth research yet.

Movement Matters Artists Roundtable: Selections from the Journal …….. This long-running Bridge program hosted by Michael Workman, the Movement Matters symposia series investigates work at the intersection of dance, performance, politics, policy and issues related to the body.

This iteration of the Movement Matters series focuses on the themes of the Bridge Journal Volume 21, number 1. Artists and writers who edit the various sections from the Bridge Journal and their contributions will discuss how their work for the current volume relate to its overarching themes, including the role of artists around the world in agitating for democracy and social justice, the Assembly Zones initiative, and more.

Launched on June 19, 2021, the Bridge core collective oversaw installation of the timeline development mural for the Assembly Zones program designed by Bob Faust and Faust, Ltd. that wrapped around the façade of the Evanston Art Center building. The mural showcased architectural drawings and materials from the core project team member David Sundry, as well as materials developed through the Your Turn campaign.