A new arts journal has started in Chicago and its called 127 Prince,  named after the location of artist Gordon Matta-Clark's 1971 restaurant FOOD. According to their site 127 Prince will "present and examine ideas on the art of social practice, and the social practice of art." The collective of editors includes Randall Szott, Jen Delos Reyes, Tracy Candido, Nancy Zastudil and Ted Purves. Their recent coverage of the relational art/activist love fest, Open Engagement conference is worth grazing. And an interview with Nato Thompson by Chelsea Haines is worth a read. We look forward to more!

Stina is an artist and graphic designer whose artwork has been shown around town, and whose graphic design talents feature a mean Lisa Frank impression.  Can’t I be the next Lisa Frank?  When she’s not concocting awesomeness in the art world, she’s busy making me caprese sandwiches… and finding these goodies on the internet.

Chicago-based artist John Parot is a contender on Bravo Tv's "Work of Art: The Next Great Artist." We hope the show rocks. Time Out recently interviewed at critic Jerry Saltz who was a judge for the show. The first episode will air June 9, 2010. Have a peak here:

We recently received the latest issue of Afterall and will be placing it in our Public Media Research Library. One essay that popped out was Claire Barliant's essay "Adaptive Reuse: New Strategies in Response to the Housing Crisis." She surveys works by Center For Urban Pedagogy's  Damon Rich, as well as artists Mary Ellen Carroll and Julia Christensen.  The text is a nice survey of recent art, advocacy and architectural practices. (image: Damon Rich, Cities Destroyed for Cash, 2009, 1431 plastic markers on a panorama of New York City, c.30 x 30m. Photograph: Damon Rich )

The Co-Prosperity School is an Artist-Run School for and about the advancement and understanding of contemporary Chicago Art. Through guest speakers and class member presentations we will shine a light on the contemporary art scene of Chicago. One of our goals is to break down the panel discussion dialogue of Chicago’s art and bring it to a more informal group discussion format in which shapers of Chicago’s Art World themselves tell of the contemporary scene.   Members can discuss their own work, or the work of others. Summer School begins June 28 and ends August 2, 2010. We meet on Mondays at the Co-Prosperity School from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. Class sizes are limited. Registration ends June 21, 2010 Upcoming Guests include Daniel Tucker, Tom Burtonwood, Paul Klein, Duncan MacKenzie, and Cody Hudson. Tuition is $150 for 6 classes. Email coprosperityschool@gmail.com if you are interested in joining us or have any questions. The School is co-produced by Aaron Delehanty and The Public Media Institute

Call for Texts Proximity Magazine  008 Education as Art issue Call for proposals due: June 15, 2010 For our next issue we have asked Albert Stabler, Jim Duignan and Keith Brown to guest edit our alt.pedagogy issue. The issue will be released in the Fall of 2010. The discourses around fine art and education are both “problem children” of the Enlightenment.  Both were ideally envisioned as unbounded arenas of free inquiry and experimentation, and both are caught up today in moribund, directionless institutions (often the exact same institutions), quickly sinking into popular disrepute and fiscal insolvency.  The search for a new direction, both in art and in education, has moved largely outside of institutions, and the common ground is in projects we are referring to as “education as art.”  The upcoming issue of Proximity will take on this theme through a number of profiles, interviews, essays, and narratives. To give you an idea of what we’re interested in, here is a list of projects we are actively soliciting pitches to cover in some way.  Whether it addresses an item on this list or not, we are open to your ideas. Michael Piazza Denmark Pedagogical University Chicago Freedom School Public School, LA Chicago prison schools, curricular explorations Street schools in India Exploding School, Nils Norman Night School, New Museum, NYC Musik til skoler (Aarhus, Denmark) John Dewey Paulo Friere Local syllabi from all sorts of teachers Teachers for Social Justice Beehive Collective Center for Urban Pedagogy Beneath the University Bruce High-Quality Foundation And there are plenty of other ideas to be had; here’s a nice list (and some excellent questions) compiled by Dara Greenwald: http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2010/02/school_as_art_1.html //// Please send your 250 word proposal with sample texts to: Ed@proximitymagazine.com, bertstabler@ameritech.net and jduignan@depaul.edu Writers Guidelines can be found at: http://proximitymagazine.com/information/