Jan Tichy, Kioto Aoki
& Benito Juarez Community Academy
Jan Tichy, Kioto Aoki & Benito Juarez Community Academy

Project Overview

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  • Artist — Jan Tichy, Kioto Aoki

  • School — Benito Juarez Community Academy

  • Neighborhood — Pilsen

  • Medium — Photography

  • Classroom Education Level — High School

Places Under the Sun, 2018 Cyanotype on cotton, unique quilt, 66*36 inch

Following on the history of Chicago documentary projects that CPS Lives continues, students from the nearby Benito Juarez Community Academy were asked to make a snapshot of their place in the city, capturing with their smart phones cameras the world around their neighborhood, mostly Pilsen. Stacy Ciccone, IB digital art teacher at Benito Juarez Community Academy and Jan Tichy and Kioto Aoki have worked during the spring with two classes to include photography in the existing art program, introducing analog photographical processes into their digital photography. For the occasion of Bauhaus Centennial Kioto and Jan explored with CPS students the work of Nathan Lerner, the New Bauhaus Chicago artist and designer. The artists introduced the students to the work coming from the Chicago New Bauhaus, visiting AIC and seeing the origional work. Following the visit to AIC Photograpny colelction, the students build their own Lerner’s Light Boxes to experiment with light and space. Photographing with their own smart phone cameras and developing the images as cyanotypes, the students learned about digital and analog photography. The cyanotypes prints on cotton cloth allowed for the individual works to come together as one large quilt that decorates the halls of the school along the quilt from last year. In class the students processed the digital images they captured around their neighborhood into black and white negatives and printed on transparencies that later transferred as sun prints on cyanotype cloth. The quilt that they put together from these prints is a collaborative effort that reflects on some of the perspectives they see their neighborhoods through.

Meet the Artist

Jan Tichy

Portrait by Devina Yoestong

Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist and educator. Working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography, his conceptual work is socially and politically engaged. Born in Prague in 1974, Tichy studied art in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Associate Professor at the Department of Photography and the Department of Art & Technology Studies. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Chicago Cultural Center among others.  His works are included in public collections of MoMA in New York and Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. In 2011, he created Project Cabrini Green, a community based art project that illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago during its month-long demolition. In 2014 Tichy started to work on a long-term, NEA supported, community project in Gary, IN – the Heat Light Water cultural platform. Beyond Streaming: a sound mural for Flint at the Broad Museum in Michigan in 2017 brought teens from Flint and Lansing to share their experience of the ongoing water crisis. In 2018 Tichy has been one of the inaugural artists for Art on theMart.

Visit their Website

Jan Tichy is a contemporary artist and educator. Working at the intersection of video, sculpture, architecture, and photography, his conceptual work is socially and politically engaged. Born in Prague in 1974, Tichy studied art in Israel before earning his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is now Associate Professor at the Department of Photography and the Department of Art & Technology Studies. Tichy has had solo exhibitions at the MCA Chicago; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; CCA Tel Aviv; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Chicago Cultural Center among others.  His works are included in public collections of MoMA in New York and Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. In 2011, he created Project Cabrini Green, a community based art project that illuminated with spoken word the last high rise building of the Cabrini Green housing projects in Chicago during its month-long demolition. In 2014 Tichy started to work on a long-term, NEA supported, community project in Gary, IN – the Heat Light Water cultural platform. Beyond Streaming: a sound mural for Flint at the Broad Museum in Michigan in 2017 brought teens from Flint and Lansing to share their experience of the ongoing water crisis. In 2018 Tichy has been one of the inaugural artists for Art on theMart.

Visit their Website

Portrait by Devina Yoestong

Meet the Artist

Kioto Aoki

Portrait by Devina Yoestong

Kioto Aoki is a visual artist whose practice includes photography, film, books and installations to engage the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process. Using the nuances of time, space, form, light and motion, her work explores different modes of perception as it relates to the space between the still and the moving image. Her work also explores the photographic and cinematic interpretations of the body in space and includes a series of dance-movement films. She has exhibited and screened in Chicago, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Japan. Her work is held in Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library. Kioto received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a past artist in resident for HATCH Projects at the Chicago Artists Coalition.

 

Visit their Website

Kioto Aoki is a visual artist whose practice includes photography, film, books and installations to engage the material specificity of the analogue image and image-making process. Using the nuances of time, space, form, light and motion, her work explores different modes of perception as it relates to the space between the still and the moving image. Her work also explores the photographic and cinematic interpretations of the body in space and includes a series of dance-movement films. She has exhibited and screened in Chicago, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Japan. Her work is held in Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Library. Kioto received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a past artist in resident for HATCH Projects at the Chicago Artists Coalition.

 

Visit their Website

Portrait by Devina Yoestong

Previous Residency

Jay Wolke & Dolittle Elementary School

Next Residency

Bob Thall & Roger C. Sullivan High School

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