Sideways
An anecdote of misapprehension
There are so many things I will post here. In the last 3 weeks I’ve defended and passed my PhD, installed and opened an exhibition, and nearly wound up the semester’s teaching. In coming weeks I’ll post the talk I gave for the defense so it lives somewhere besides my hard drives (and backups), and some reflections on the show.
But that’s a lot. For now, an anecdote about misapprehension.
I use that word a lot and most of the time I love what happens when it happens.
In 1996 I moved from San Francisco to Chicago to attend graduate school at the Art Institute. Someone had recommended I contact another SF-based artist who was going there to get her MFA in Fiber Arts. We met for coffee to see about finding an apartment in Chicago together.
Her work consisted of organic cotton squares she transformed into handmade tampons, used, unfurled, and flattened to produce a species of tie-dyed pattern. She then produced quilts made of dozens of these squares. She was about ten years older than I, and deeply passionate about her practice. It goes without saying that we didn’t make for great roommates.
I don’t remember who found the place in Pilsen, a neighborhood just south of the Chicago Loop, a few blocks from the then-extant, messy and magical Maxwell Street Market. A developer called Podmajersky had bought up a bunch of buildings there and sort of half-gutted them into more loft-like spaces. I was excited because I’d lived in the Czech Republic for a few years and the neighborhood had been named after the Bohemian city where I’d also spent some time.
The apartment we rented had been a funeral home. My roommate took the ground floor of the loft, having had more lucrative employment prior to our arrival. I took the basement. Rickety metal stairs led to my basement abode, featuring a concrete floor with a steel drain right in the middle. In the ceiling just over the drain, a human-length, aluminum fluorescent-laden light provided copious nightmares as I tossed and turned on my lumpy futon.
My roommate was the only one with a car; I had a bike and took it to school, fall, winter, spring. Sometimes she would drive me to the grocery store; otherwise the gas station was the only food option. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.
My first day in Chicago I had shoved my suitcases into the gloomy basement and fled by bike to get some air and look around my new hometown. I headed west, and what to my wondrous eyes should appear a few blocks in: huge red banners hanging across the street. One after the next, each filled with Cyrillic words exhorting the community to be good, think of others, buy local. Slogan after slogan. Welcome to the neighborhood.
I was in seventh heaven. No English anywhere. All the businesses’ signs were in Russian. The bakery, the laundromat, the restaurants, the supermarket. Having studied Russian as a kid, then in college, then three years immersed in other Slavic languages, I couldn’t believe my luck. I was too excited to even get off my bike and go into the shops. I sped back to the grim apartment to call my folks. I had no idea! Can you believe it? I’m going to get to practice, maybe it’s all different Eastern European stuff and I can speak Czech and keep working on it! It’s going to be so fun. What are the chances! I just got lucky.
The next few days were spent biking in the opposite direction, hitting warehouse-laden dead ends and eventually figuring out how to get under the highway to bike the least treacherous route to school. Grad school days are long; art school days even longer, especially when you’ve never been. I felt like a person who finally reached the water fountain after a marathon. So thirsty to know, to make, see, and do. I had wanted for so long to go to art school and was going to try and learn as much as I could in the two short years of the program.
About a week after moving to Chicago I biked back into Pilsen, planning a major exploration of my adopted Eastern European neighborhood. Remember, this was before Google, before smartphones, before searching a glowing rectangle for the best artisanal whatever and having the device tell you which way to turn to get it.
I was excited to shop for dark bread, kasha, stuffed cabbage, compote, oddly decorated chocolate bars, and to start getting to know a Slavic community in the spectacularly industrial Chicago I’d moved to.
A film set, I was later told. The blocks I’d biked down had been dolled up to look like a 1950s Eastern European immigrant neighborhood. I biked down the same street, baffled. My eyes must have been deceiving me. Instead, Chicago’s magnificent, brightly-colored Mexican bakeries, laundromats, restaurants, and supermarkets revealed themselves in their rightful places, freed from the monochromatic crimson bunting and hastily-glued on signage. All I could do was laugh. And buy tortillas. Which were delicious.
After a year of freakish funeral home living with lots of roommate tension, I managed to score another basement apartment across the street, this time with windows half above the ground and an exit to an interior courtyard garden—that I could afford on my own. Many more Chicago adventures transpired, but those stories will have to wait until another time.
It’s hard to express how much joy this misapprehension provided me then and continues to now. The cinematic illusion, trickery and humor provide a buoyancy to my memory of an intense and tumultuous time. It seems fitting as an important kick-off to a life devoted to the constant surprise of art, encounter, and being-in-the-world.
And no, I don’t think I ever learned what film they were shooting there.
Thanks for reading.
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In other news:
My solo exhibition “The Wonder” is up at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York. It’s a mini-retrospective, including works ranging from drawings from the early 2000s to the present. If you’re in New York between now and March 6 2026, I hope you’ll stop by.
Public programs during the run of the exhibition will include a launch of The Hoosac Institute Journal #16 (Feb 3), a screening of BUNKER (Feb 24), and a lunchtime screening and discussion of Happy are the Happy, a 1999 film shot in Prague and co-directed by me and Sarah Jane Lapp.
Congratulations also on your PhD! That is serious discipline!
Congratulations on the phd! And the show! You’re amazing Jenny!