South Side Home Movie Project in collaboration with Arts + Public Life, collaborated on Everyday Resistance: The Art of Living in Black Chicago, was an exhibition of private film footage gathered from residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. The exhibition featured home movies captured by amateur South Side filmmakers animating domestic space and offering a visual record and aesthetic of blackness from the 1940s through the 1970s. The rich visual inheritance of the included films, tells us much about black control over the black image and gives viewers the opportunity to witness moments of leisure and performativity lived within the constraints and confines of racism and anti-blackness.

Curated by: Arts + Public Life Curatorial Team

Image credit: Daris Jasper

The Southside Home Movie Project collects, preserves, digitizes, researches and screens home movies made by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. Founded in 2005 by professor and current APL Faculty Director, Dr. Jacqueline Stewart. SSHMP seeks to increase understanding of the many histories and cultures comprising Chicago’s South Side, and of amateur filmmaking practices, by asking owners of home movies to share their footage and describe it from their personal perspectives. The archive includes small-gauge films (8mm, Super8mm, 16mm) covering a period from the 1920s to the 1980s.

SSHMP reaches out to local residents to educate them about the value of their family films provide digital copies of film prints contributed to the archive, and to conduct oral histories with participants in the project to accompany their home movies. They inspect and store original films in a state-of-the art, humidity- and climate-controlled film vault located in the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts and run by the University’s Film Studies Center.

SSHMP brings materials that are typically kept in private collections into public light and discussion. During the exhibition, South Side families were invited to bring in their own 8mm, Super-8 and 16mm reel-to-reel films for inspection and assessment for free digitization and possible projection.

EXHIBITION RELATED PROGRAM

Archiving Your Family History: Preservation Workshop

June 28, 2018

The South Side Home Movie Project’s archivist Candace Ming and a team of film preservationists, Brian Belak, Collections Manager and Client Services Director, Chicago Film Archives, Dan Erdman, Archivist, Media Burn Independent Video Archive, and Raquel Flores-Clemons, Archivist and Director of Archives, Records Management, and Special Collections, Chicago State University, lead a workshop on how to care for, preserve, and catalog Community members archival materials whether they be film, video, documents or photographs. The team inspected, assessed and made recommendations on maintaining these historic records in the best condition. Families who chose to contribute 8mm, Super-8 and 16mm films to the SSHMP archive received free digital copies. 

EXHIBITION RELATED PROGRAM

Social Dance + Music: Black Celebrations Everyday Resistance Closing Reception

July 6,  2018

With our community we explored  Black celebrations with a screening of films from various SSHMP collections that spotlight social dances including the Twist, Watusi, and Bopping, as well as the 1979 Gloria Gaynor concert at Chicago Fest. Discussion was led by Ayana Contreras and Arif Smith about Black dance and the relationship between song and dance within a range of vernacular expressions.