<div class="editor_editorOuterFrame__BKE7d">
<div class="editor_editorContent__htY0F" data-slate-editor="true" data-slate-node="value">
Artists in Public Schools creates artist residencies in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), providing expansive art making experiences for students, educators, and professional Chicago-based artists. Working together with a collaborative, community-focused mindset, we celebrate and widely share the unique stories of CPS students and schools through art and creativity. When the arts and aesthetics are integrated into education, work, and life, we strengthen our capacity to learn. Creating something is at the core of learning.
</div>
</div>

We proudly appreciate support from our partners.

ropes gray, chicago artists, cps lives, chicago public schools

Hendricks Elementary Community Academy

Waters Elementary School

Nicholas Senn High School

<body>
My Artists in Public Schools 2022 – 2023 project focuses on LGBTQ+ youth at Senn High School. I will also be photographing a LGBTQ+ Senn faculty member, Meagan Zeman. They are the teacher who organizes Pride Club. Amid continued LGBTQ+ discrimination and fearmongering in American politics, this project is a way to convey and support the resilience and self-possession of today’s LGBTQ+ youth. 
During portrait sessions, I asked the students to handwrite answers to a few short questions: their first name, pronouns, where they feel their most authentic self, and their hopes for the future. I photographed in black and white on medium format film in a variety of locations that show Senn’s historic interior and exterior. I also captured empty landscape shots of the school’s vine covered walls and long interior corridors. 
</body>

James Hosking, CPS Lives, Chicago Public Schools, Chicago Art

I am a Chicago-based photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist. My work has screened internationally and appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, and many other publications.
I developed a multimedia project examining identity, aging, and labor among veteran drag performers in San Francisco&#8217;s Tenderloin neighborhood. It included a documentary that I directed, produced, and edited entitled <a href="http://jameshosking.com/beautiful-by-night" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Beautiful By Night</a>. I had a multi-year collaboration with the Tenderloin Museum in San Francisco that included screenings, public programming, and a solo photo exhibit of this work. The project was included in the 2020 group show Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. It was the focus of a <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/humanities/gallery/current-exhibitions/james-hosking.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">solo exhibition at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities gallery</a> during January and February of 2022.
I am currently a <a href="https://chicagoartistscoalition.org/residencies/hatch-projects/current-residents" target="_blank" rel="noopener">2022-2023 HATCH resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition</a>. HATCH is a juried program for emerging and mid-career artists that offers the opportunity to develop new work and produce collaborative exhibitions.
http://jameshosking.com/

James Hosking

Edgewater

James Hosking & Senn High School

As the coordinator for a CPS fine and performing arts magnet program, I find myself in my school building at hours when others are not. The quiet hallways, classrooms, closets, and corners reveal arrangements left behind by unsuspecting artists that take on new interest when they are removed from the context of the bustle of the day and the din of teenagers. Past and present are in constant collision creating over a century of layers of old and new.  My images explore the history and personality of the school, the building structure, and the people who exist inside of it through the odd, funny, and strangely beautiful arrangements of objects that I find. 
&nbsp;

Krista Wortendyke

Krista Wortendyke & Senn High School

The tremendous diversity of Senn is what many students cited to me as one of their proudest features of their school. Forming personal bonds and friendships with people coming from vastly different cultures and interests, (thanks to the addition of the IB program and Senn Arts), the Senn experience provides students a unique foundation for living, working, thriving, and leading in an ever diverse and changing world. 
Looking back on my involvement at Senn over the past year, I can’t help being struck by the notion that these students are our future, and that our future is in good hands.  
 
As it has for over a century, Senn stands at the forefront of progressive education. Ella Flagg Young would be proud. 
&nbsp;

Jim Iska has been photographing the urban scene for over thirty years. After graduating from the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1980, Iska’s work has revolved around on architecture from the classic to the vernacular, and its integral role in defining the city. He collaborated with author and historian Francis Morrone on a series of architectural guidebooks of New York City, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn in the 1990s.  Iska also produced contemporary photography for the first and second editions ofThe City in a Garden: A History of Chicago’s Parks by Julia S. Bachrach.  He is currently the author of the blog “In and About the City.”

Jim Iska

Jim Iska & Nicholas Senn High School

Michelle Keim is a fine art photographer living and working in Chicago. She received her MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 and has taught at Columbia College and Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. Her industrial landscape photography, “Iron Beauties”, was represented by Catherine Edelman gallery for roughly 10 years and published as a monograph in 2006 by Nazraeli Press. Her landscape work is in the permanent collections of Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Federal Reserve Bank and many other corporate and private collections. She is currently engaged in a long term landscape photography project in which she is taking a close look at the brick-making industry in her rural Ohio hometown situated in the largest Amish community in the country. Representing a mid-life career change of sorts, in recent years Keim has become entrenched in the world of athletes, combat sports in particular. She got her start photographing team mates in Mixed Martial Arts, then transitioned to covering live events and is now the official photographer and social media director for the historic Chicago Golden Gloves. She has worked closely with UFC number 9 ranked strawweight fighter, Felice Herrig, for over 3 years covering training camps and personal aspects of her life as a successful professional athlete. Getting a late start in life as an athlete herself, Keim is currently undefeated in Muay Thai kickboxing holding a record of 1-0. She has 3 children, all of whom have attended CPS schools.

Michelle Keim

Near-North Side

Michelle Keim & Nicholas Senn Highschool

A More Perfect Union
I am proposing a series of interventions, actions and explorations throughout the Senn campus, I have identified (see attached for locations, materials and methodologies) spaces on campus where these happenings may take place. After a fruitful period of incubation regarding how to proceed, I have decided that it would be best to proceed as an artist working on the campus as an autonomous entity. This would allow the students to observe me and my practice without guidance or scaffolding from faculty, staff and administration. I believe it best that students encounter me and my ideas in an unexpected, arbitrary manner, a thoughtful, gentle interloper. I will be referencing Let America Be America Again, by the American poet and novelist Langston Hughes, this will be my anchor text. I suspect that these series of actions will take me right up to the holiday break. After the break I will circle back to the classroom with the Hughes poem as our guide and anchor engaging the students in a similar fashion; guiding the students to create and execute works based on works that I have demonstrated on campus as well new ideas and methods that may come from teachers and students input and insight. I believe this approach allows the student an opportunity to reflect and more importantly utilize some, if not all, knowledge and skills gained thus far, at the service of making as a civic leader and creative endeavor. Peripherally (but just as importantly) I have reached out (and secured a commitment) to the music department to have an original score created on the same themes hereto outlined. I expected to do the same with dance for a choreographed piece based on notions and concepts of our collected Americaness . I look forward to your feedback, comments and suggestions as we move forward&#8230;I am excited to be in this position and fortunate to be at Senn to put these ideas into motion.

Cecil McDonald Jr, Senn High School, High Schools, Southside High Schools, 2019,

Cecil McDonald Jr. uses photography, video, and text to explore the intersections of masculinity, familial relations, and the artistic and intellectual pursuits of black culture. McDonald studied fashion, house music and dance club culture before receiving a MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he currently serves as an adjunct professor and a teaching artist at the Center for Community Arts Partnership at Columbia College Chicago. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with works in the permanent collection of The Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago Bank of America LaSalle Collection, and the Harris Bank Collection. He was awarded the: Joyce Foundation Midwest Voices &amp; Visions Award, the Artadia Award, The Swiss Benevolent Society, Lucerne, Switzerland, Residency and the 3Arts Teaching Artist Award. McDonald participated in Light Work’s Artist-in-Residence program in July 2013. Most recently McDonald completed the DCASE residency where he began work on his most recent body of work Cuts and Beats, a project that montages performance photography from the floors of dance festivals and nightclubs with turn-of-the-century imagery from stage and theater advertisements, sheet music covers and celebrity portraiture.

Nicholas Senn High School

Stories from Nicholas Senn High School

James Hosking
& Senn High School
James Hosking & Senn High School

Krista Wortendyke
& Senn High School
Krista Wortendyke & Senn High School

Jim Iska
& Nicholas Senn High School
Jim Iska & Nicholas Senn High School

Michelle Keim
& Nicholas Senn Highschool
Michelle Keim & Nicholas Senn Highschool

Cecil McDonald Jr.
& Senn High School
Cecil McDonald Jr. & Senn High School

Nicholas Senn High School

Stories from Nicholas Senn High School

James Hosking & Senn High SchoolJames Hosking & Senn High School

Krista Wortendyke & Senn High SchoolKrista Wortendyke & Senn High School

Jim Iska & Nicholas Senn High SchoolJim Iska & Nicholas Senn High School

Michelle Keim & Nicholas Senn HighschoolMichelle Keim & Nicholas Senn Highschool

Cecil McDonald Jr. & Senn High SchoolCecil McDonald Jr. & Senn High School

James Hosking
& Senn High School
James Hosking & Senn High School

Krista Wortendyke
& Senn High School
Krista Wortendyke & Senn High School

Jim Iska
& Nicholas Senn High School
Jim Iska & Nicholas Senn High School

Michelle Keim
& Nicholas Senn Highschool
Michelle Keim & Nicholas Senn Highschool

Cecil McDonald Jr.
& Senn High School
Cecil McDonald Jr. & Senn High School