"The State of Play in Chicago's Communities" is published and ready for your reading pleasure!

Through my work at Chicago Children's Museum I spent roughly five days a week last April and May (2009) documenting and helping to facilitate workshops for parents and professional development trainings for educators about the connections between play and learning. Our 'Communities at Play' team (or CAP, as we called it) set up short-term residencies in Chicago Park District buildings located in four Chicago neighborhoods -- Englewood, Humboldt Park, Pilsen, and Rogers Park -- and listened to what people had to say about play, its value, and the barriers they face in supporting children's play in their communities.

Then I spent from June to October (2009) analyzing all the data we had collected, merging it with data from online surveys the Museum had conducted between October 2008 and April 2009, and drafting the first version of what would become the "The State of Play in Chicago's Communities" report. After MONTHS of revisions and delays within the Museum, the final report is now available to the public. Yippee!

In some ways the final report is markedly different from what I originally wrote and I mourn portions that were taken out and language that was removed by editors who had the final say, but much of the report's core remains the same. If you would like to read the report, you can find it here (pdf). Also, all of the photographs of adults in the report were taken by me (as are the photos in this post).

It's nice to see that all the efforts put forth by the CAP team and participants is finally available to the world. Go read the report!

Making space for the truth of family diversity.

I just read a lovely story penned by Jennifer Finney Boylan in The New York Times titled 'Maddy' Just Might Work After All. An excerpt:

[M]y two children and my wife and I were sitting around the kitchen table, eating dinner. I was mid-transition. My older son, Zach, gave me a look.
“What,” I said. He was 7.
“We can’t keep calling you ‘Daddy,’ ” he said. “If you’re going to be a girl. It’s too weird.” ...
“Well,” I said to my sons. “My new name is Jenny. You could call me Jenny.”
Zach laughed derisively. “Jenny? That’s the name you’d give a lady mule.”
I tried not to be hurt. “O.K., fine. What do you want to call me?”...
“I know,” he said. “Let’s call you Maddy. That’s like, half Mommy, and half Daddy. And anyhow, I know a girl at school named Maddy. She’s pretty nice.”
His younger brother, Sean, who was 5, said, “Or Dommy.’
We all laughed. Even Sean. Dommy! What a dumb name for a transsexual parent!
After the hilarity died down, I nodded. “Maddy might work,” I said.

I spend a lot of time with kids, and one thing I am frequently reminded of is the beautiful diversity of who makes up our families and the strength that we draw from those foundations.

A year or more ago I saw a wonderful traveling exhibit called Love Makes a Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People and their Families. (On a side note, the exhibit was sponsored by a church - the Berry United Methodist Church in Chicago, a reconciling congregation and proud member and supporter of the Reconciling Ministries Network. Not all churches are exclusionary of our LGBTQ brothers and sisters.) The exhibit was put out by the great folks at Family Diversity Projects who currently have six traveling shows, including their newest project Pioneering Voices: Portraits of Transgender People. Family Diversity Projects works to use the images and stories of real families to create exhibitions that show and advocate for the true diversity of families, along lines of race, sexuality, gender identity, disability, mental illness, family composition, and so forth.

At the end of the day, it is truly heartening for me to see more and more voices speaking out in love of the community we can build in our differences.

You're beautiful just the way you are!

Hey folks. A quick hit to remind you/me/us/we that seeing is NOT always believing, especially if it's media trying to sell anything (music, tv, beauty, lifestyle, products, whatever).

I, for one, often forget how much I'm lied to by every advertisement, commercial, billboard, etc. that I see. It's like I become inoculated to the falsity of media surrounding me. Especially when it comes to beauty. We (men and women) are supposed to be flat here, curvy there, blemish free everywhere, toned, no wrinkles, no flab, god forbid we be freckled, blah, blah, blah. It's enough to make me barf.

But I get really scared when I begin to forget that it's messages outside of myself being delivered to me that are telling me these things (even when I remind myself all the time). Instead I begin to feel as if the messages come from within me. My own voice starts to say "You're chunky. Look at that patchy skin! Ooh, look at those wrinkles!" Yadda-yadda, on and on. It's bad for me. It's bad for all of us.

BUT, every once and a while I get a nice kick in the ass to remind me that, uh, nope, I'm just fine the way I am and the world of media is what's way, way, way sick. Case in point: I ran across this website today that reps a company that provides professional photo retouching services. The real mind blower is their portfolio. If you want to be reminded of all the lies we tell each other about what 'beauty' is (aka - attack of the Photoshopper), but also what 'reality' looks like, this is the place to go (but remember that this particular version of 'reality' is supported by entire crews of hair, make-up, costuming, set, and lighting teams in addition to lifestyles likely filled with expensive skin and body 'care' routines). Anyway, go to this website, click Portfolio, select any image, and as you roll your mouse back and forth over the image, you'll see the original and retouched photos. Holy crap. I think it's fair to say that we have some fucked up ideas about beauty. Do you agree?

As a preview, check out this two samples from the site:




























Because apparently even beautiful people need to be 'fixed' and/or 'perfected.' Sad.

To see other examples of media (primarily print, but also some video) that works to make us forget what real beauty looks like, Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville has a series called Impossibly Beautiful.

In the meantime, I feel like I need to continually chant to myself, "I'm beautiful just the way I am. You're beautiful just the way you are. We're beautiful just as we are." Whew... Breath. Repeat.

UPDATE:
I just watched a recent (March 10, 2009) Op-Ed piece in The New York Times video library entitled Sex, Lies and Photoshop. It was put together by the wonderful Jesse Epstein, a Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker. (I was first introduced to Epstein when her piece 34x25x36 was featured in The YouTube Screening Room, and then I saw her work again as a featured film in this year's LunaFest film festival -- which is still touring, if you wanna go.) Anyway, Epstein's Op-Ed argues in support of possible legislation in France that would make it illegal to promote (through any media, including advertising) negative body image and eating disorders. One central measure would force magazines to disclose the extent to which their images have been retouched or altered. Can you imagine?! Wow-wee! We should keep our eyes on France and see what happens! - 4/6/09

Spring...

Greetings, friends!
Friday marked the calendar end of winter and beginning of a new season. Spring has technically (though perhaps not materially) sprung, and I, for one, welcome the change. Winter offers a stark beauty worthy of awed appreciation and perhaps reverence, but I was built with a temperamental body that struggles in the cold, sometimes making a love of the brisk air and heavy snow difficult. As such, spring is a welcome addition to my days.

I made it through another quarter of graduate school -- a space of mixed blessings. I'm on "Spring Break" which, for me, is a pseudonym for "Catching Up." It'll be a week of cleaning, laundry, bill paying, taxes, answering 3 months worth of email, that sorta stuff. I don't really mind. I feel free, which can be a fleeting feeling. I was reflecting on just that this past Saturday. I was on the sun porch reading, which I often do on Saturday mornings, but this time it was a book of MY choosing that can be begun and completed on MY schedule. And that freedom of choice makes all the difference. That sense of control, even if small, over my own life. In the larger picture, that's a silly sequence of logic. I chose to be a grad student; I chose my classes; I chose to approach my work with a commitment to doing the best I can. So, this 'absence of freedom' is self-subscribed. Even so, the immediate ability to structure my own time, and take pleasure in the small things that I so often choose to overlook because 'I have no time!' is a joy.

This past Saturday was in the mid-50s, a pleasant break from the chill we've been moving through the past five or six months. I decided to take a walk -- a pleasure I can rarely indulge when school's in session. I made my way the 3.5 miles to the Lincoln Park Conservatory, a favorite spot for forgetting the winter cold, swung through the Regenstein African Journey portion of the Lincoln Park Zoo (always free to the public!), made my way to the Lakeshore, and walked the 3 or so miles north along the lake before cutting back west towards home. It was a lovely afternoon and I was free to enjoy the weather and the city and my own space to reflect, to contemplate, and to be inspired but the vastness of beauty that exists in the everyday, but is too easily overlooked as I(we) rush from thing to thing.

For me, when I feel lost and out of control of my own day-to-day living, I'm drawn back to the natural world -- flora, fauna, landscapes -- places that bring me back to myself. I've lived in big cities for the past seven years, and perhaps the most difficult thing about it -- despite all the advantages I gain -- is the distance from nature. So I have to find places that let me reconnect. In Boston, I'd make my way out to the Arnold Arboretum - 265 acres of land where I would often lose myself in the pine forests, stop to sketch or read or take a nap in the sun, far from the sights and sounds of the city. Chicago's different. Similar spaces are far enough away that they're difficult to reach on public transportation. So, here I just look for green, and often find myself on the Lakefront Trail, an 18 mile trail that stretch along Lake Michigan from Hollywood Ave. on the northside to 71st St. on the southside. While I'm in easy sight of the city I can at least hear the birds, smell the lake, and see green. A girl's gotta take what she can get.

In my reflections over the weekend, I started organizing some of my digital photography, pulling out images of flora, enraptured by the rich variation in color, shape, texture, size. Everything of beauty being offered by nature itself. I started working on a number of large collages (roughly two feet square) that perhaps in time I'll see about framing, but I thought I might share one here. It is very much a work in progress, but you get the idea. Most of the images are from the Lincoln Park Conservatory or my mother's garden in northeast Ohio, but I'm working on another one that includes images from the Garfield Park Conservatory, rural Nebraska, Maine, Manhattan, Kyoto, Mexico City, my own neighborhood, and my own backyard. It's good to remember that there is natural beauty everywhere, when I remember to look.

Happy spring!


















(ps - Please don't use this image without permission. That's stealing and makes me sad.)

Are Oompah Loompas an incarnation of Mexican gods?

Apparently I am veering away (at least momentarily) from the generally "focused" approach I try to bring to the blog. Today I have been pondering the undeniable likeness between Deep Roy (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - the remake - fame) and an artifact I saw at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia while in Mexico City. (I honestly cannot remember which time period or region of Mexico from which the figure came. I'll pay better attention next time. Promise.) Now, Roy was born in and has spent much of his life living in Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, and his parents are Indian. Thus it's all the more striking, and satisfying, to me that his stone likeness would come from a third continent. Maybe he's related to the gods of Mexican mythology. Who knows. But it's worth pondering, don't you think?

Hey Kelly, where've you been?!

I have been gone for a while (almost two months, it seems). Can you find it in the goodness of your hearts to forgive me? (Or at least start reading again?) I've been flirting with the idea of getting back online for a while, but the world has been a bit of a whirlwind and I needed a bit more time to resettle myself.

The primary reason I've been absent is that I have been out of the country for a while and without consistant, reliable access to the internet. I spent several weeks in June and July living and learning in Mexico. I was involved in a short term study abroad program (through a partnership between DePaul and the CIEL program at the Universidad de La Salle in Mexico City) and also did some travelling around on me own. And yes, a "young thing" like me travelled Mexico alone. Horrors did not befall me. In fact, I met some wonderful new friends and worked diligently to explore and situate the many warnings heaved upon me prior to my departure for Mexico, realizing quite promptly that while attention, tact, and sensitivity were required in my everyday interactions abroad, those "precautions" are strikingly similar to those that are a regular part of my everyday, "safe" life State-side. I guess that's the gift of experiencing things yourself; you are reminded (as is the repeating lesson of life) that what you're told is not always the truth as lived through your own experiences. Thankfully, my time travelling alone gave me space to explore both the physical richness of Mexico as well as my own thoughts about it. While companionship and group-shared experiences hold powerful offerings for growth, sometimes independence yields equally powerful opportunities to process your own thoughts and feelings in a time and space more suitable to your own growth. (Ya feel me?) Anyway, I'm back. And to answer your questions (because people seem to only ask two -- you should work on changing that): "Yes, it was a good trip, and yes, you can see pictures."

One of the reasons I've been hesitant to get back online is that I have this deep desire to "do justice" to my time and experience in Mexico. It's hard to convey to folks the richness of one's own experience in just a few words or images. But I've been working pretty hard trying to. I did this big final project about my travels for class, I've been organizing and sorting photographs (both mine and others) for public displays and thank you packages being sent back to the Mexico, I've been designing program brochures advertising the study abroad opportunity for future students, and so forth, and in some ways I've been finding all of the value judgements I've been making in the process difficult on my mind. Every photograph is being assigned a meaning. Who is being represented (and forgotten)? What stories are being told (or not told)? What images will evoke the desired responses from viewers? What images are close enough to American stereotypes yet different enough to take viewers from what they know to one step closer to a "bigger truth"? And myriads of other questions. I find myself spinning in this representational, storytelling world that is full of hope for growth and change beyond those who travelled themselves, but also threatens to further ingrain stereotypes, injustices, incorrect perceptions, and all sorts of unhelpful things. As I continue to search my own photographs (there are nearly 1200, y'all; I'm a photo-freak; we knew this, right?), I'm continually asking myself what it is that my photographs are saying. Is it possible for this American born and raised girl to catch the soul of Mexican culture in a photograph? Or will the images always be filtered through the lens of my own cultured experience and minds' eye? I photograph things that strike me -- a human being with a very set history that frames how I view the world. That vision changes as I learn and do new things, but will always be through the lens of "me." So what does that mean for my photographs -- my visual markers of cultural meaning, both mine and that which is foreign to me? Who knows.

So, here are some photos. BUT, for once I haven't sorted them to suit a specific, manipulative or thematic purpose (other then narrowing 1200+ images to roughly 50). They are photographs from my time in Mexico that I find beautiful. And not always "beautiful" because they are of beautiful things, though they may be, but because they have meaning to me for whatever reason. Take a look. Make a comment. It's "Mexico through the lens of Kelly, as she tries to leave behind the 'meaning' and find value in mere 'being' instead." (That title is much too long...)

I'm looking forward to being back to chat about other stuff soon. Hope you're all well. 'Til next time...