Snow City Arts presents “A Room Without Walls,” a year of shows with arts organizations across the city to showcase two decades of student work.
Snow City Arts has launched its 20th Anniversary Celebration, “A Room Without Walls,” starting with a packed house at Open Books at 651 W. Lake St., Chicago. The exhibition was the first of six over the course of 2018, designated by the City of Chicago as “The Year of Creative Youth.” Each event is being held in conjunction with an esteemed cultural partner of Snow City Arts, which provides one-on-one arts instruction to children in area hospitals, and each event is dedicated to a genre that SCA offers to the students with whom it works.
The Open Books creative writing exhibition highlighted the work of students who have participated in Snow City Arts poetry and writing workshops over the last 20 years. Local poets such as Roger Bonair-Agard, Emily Jungmin Yoon, and CM Burroughs read works written by SCA students, and the event include display and audio recordings of work, along with published chapbooks and framed pieces. All of the events in the series are and free and open to the public.
The visual arts exhibition of A Room Without Walls opened at The Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago on April 6, and was on on display through April 27. This exhibit featured the work of more than 100 students from the past 20 years. The teaching artistry exhibition is scheduled for the Weinberg Newton Gallery, June 5 – 23, with an opening on Friday, June 8 at 6 p.m. The theater presentation will be at the Steppenwolf Theatre Education Department, July 25 and 26. The film exhibition will be at the Gene Siskel Film Center, October 13. The final event of the series will be a music exhibition held on December 16 at Schuba’s.
“Our teaching artists have worked with tens of thousands of students over the last two decades. It’s really gratifying to share a snapshot of this work with our partners at some of Chicago’s premier arts organizations. A movie shot in a hospital bed, being shown at the Gene Siskel Center—that’s an exciting moment for a student,” said SCA Executive Director Carrie Spitler.
Each of the exhibitions is curated by a member of the SCA teaching artist faculty, all of whom are working artists themselves in the medium they teach. Current and former students are invited to the events as participants and as audience members, a reunion in some cases of relationships between students and teachers from years ago.
“As longtime fans of Snow City Arts and the incredible service they offer children and families of the Chicagoland area, it is an honor to be able to showcase the work of their young theater artists at Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Thanks to the dedication of the Snow City teaching artists, whose creative spirits never let the walls of a hospital get in the way of creating theatre magic, there are world-class productions the public has yet to see. This July, come to Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater and be among the lucky to get to do so,” said Megan Shuchman, Director of Education at Steppenwolf.
All events are free and open to the public. To find out more or make a reservation to the events, go to the Snow City Arts website at: www.snowcityarts.org/anniversary.
About Snow City Arts: Chicago-based Snow City Arts brings one-on-one, professional arts education every day to the rooms of pediatric patients at its hospital partners: Rush University Children’s Hospital, the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital University of Illinois, and its latest site, Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, which began working with SCA in 2017. Snow City Arts has been profiled as a best practice by the National Endowment for the Arts, honored as one of the 15 best youth programs in the United States by the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities with the prestigious Coming Up Taller Award, and has been the recipient of the Make It Better Philanthropy-Arts Award. For more information, visit snowcityarts.org