Scott Vehill in We All Are Streeter, Hyde Park Art Center, April 2007

We All Are Streeter is a scripted symposium (ubeknownst to the audience) about identity, locality, and the notion of second city complex, a subject very much implicit in the cultural dynamics in Chicago. The “panel” was composed of a critic and an artist from Peoria (a city in Illinois that regards itself as a “second city” to Chicago).  The debate between the panelists was intertwined with a lecture about the real life of Captain George Wellington Streeter, an eccentric sailor whose boat crashed onto the shores of downtown Chicago and thus tried to claim the area as his own. He was eventually evicted, but the area where he once claimed as his own  is now known as Streeterville.

read the full text:

Script of We All Are Streeter (2006)

Captain Streeter

Babel, Performance at Gallery 2, Chicago, October 1993

(from Theatrum Anatomicum and Other performance Lectures, 2009)

I presented my first performance lecture, unaware that such a format existed, as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on October 8, 1993. The piece, entitled Babel, was my attempt to make sense of my cultural displacement from Mexico City, which I had left four years before. The work was constructed around a 1943 photograph that was the only historical connection between Chicago and me: the visit of the president of Rotary International (based in Chicago) to Mexico City, commemorated at a breakfast hosted by my grandfather (who was president of the Mexico City chapter of the club at the time). In Babel I made a case for the reconstruction of the photographic scene to mark the fiftieth anniversary of this otherwise banal incident. My father, who is pictured in the original photograph, became the living link to the new one, fifty years later. Those who participated in the 1993 reconstruction were told to keep in touch, because the photograph will be reconstructed again fifty years from that day, in 2043.

Rotary Club Breakfast, Xochimilco, Mexico, circa 1943