Our four-year-old essay Vogue Is Not For You—and a transcribed conversation between ourselves, Pony Zion, Pato Hebert, and Robert Sember in conjunction with it—have both been published on ArtsEverywhere. It was such an honor to get to sit down with other artists and educators we deeply admire, have real talk, and see our own values around teaching voguing both challenged and affirmed. Please take some time to read the interview!

This is our first week of site visits with Engage Chicago students in the Community Organizing concentration. We’ll visit with Chicago Freedom School this Wednesday, where we’ll be learning about adultism and transformative justice, and will be traveling to American Friends Service Committee and Asian Americans Advancing Justice later in the month. Stay tuned for more!

In terms of our own facilitation, we’ll be returning on July 11th to Brighton Park Neighborhood Council to teach an Intro to the School-to-Prison Pipeline workshop. We just led the same workshop in May at BPNC’s Annual Youth Summit for middle-school-age students from across the southwest side. This time around we’ll be working with youth from BPNC’s Youth Organizing Fellowship. We’re also leading a Pod Mapping workshop for the Towards an Accountable Chicago training series on July 16th, and will close out the month with a Queer & Trans Resistance to Policing workshop on July 24th for Pilsen Alliance’s Youth Summer Institute, an organization of families and neighbors fighting gentrification and displacement in the Pilsen community. We told y’all it was busy season!

Lastly, in an effort to include more left-leaning voices, the curatorial team of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial has commissioned Paris-based magazine The Funambulist to publish analysis of Chicago’s cultural and political landscape from the perspective of local activists and organizers. This joint publication will include a revamping of our piece on #NoCopAcademy recently issued in the Chicago Reader, incorporating more details about the campaign itself, and our path to becoming part of it. The publication, and more details related to it, will be released in September 2019, in conjunction with the Biennial.

BH