Arts + Public Life:
Relationships, Engagement &
Cultural Stewardship on Chicago’s South Side

An APL course at UChicago, Spring 2025

During the 2025 Spring Quarter, this new course introduced UChicago students to APL’s embedded practice of supporting the arts and cultural history of the South Side of Chicago and invited them to consider how they might become responsible and responsive stewards of this work themselves.

Arts + Public Life:
Relationships, Engagement &
Cultural Stewardship on Chicago’s South Side

Chicago Studies course 20500
Cross lists ARTH 20500, ARTV 20707,
RDIN 20501
Nootan Bharani, instructor
Ren Willis, course assistant

Each week, students engaged with a different aspect of APL’s robust portfolio, all of which center relationships, community engagement, and cultural stewardship. Readings and guests offered background, inspiration, and practical insight into APL’s cultural production processes and location in Washington Park, while workshops with APL team members helped students refine their ideas throughout the quarter.

Students developed proposals for cultural productions rooted in a specific place, with a clear intentional relationship between the production and its location.

Click on each project to the right to explore students’ StoryMaps!

Abridged Course Reading List

Blouin, Rose, To Washington Park with Love: Photographs from the Summer of 1987, 2024

Chicago Critic’s Table Portable Gray 2024 7:2

Contreras, Ayana. Energy Never Dies: Afro-optimism and Creativity in Chicago, 2021

Crawford, Romi, and Organization of Black American Culture. Visual arts Workshop. Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect, 2021

CYT Toolkit Series: Preparing Teaching Artists and Educators

Fierceness Served! The Enikalley Coffeehouse, Shellée Haynesworth, producer, documentary film

Smith, Stephanie, and David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art. Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, 2013

Winograd, Abigail, et al. Art in Pursuit of Common Cause, 2024

You Remember Frank London Brown? A conversation between Sabrina Craig and Adrienne Brown Portable Gray 2024 7:1

Zorach, Rebecca. Temporary Monuments: Art, Land, and America's Racial Enterprise, 2024