Argyle Street: Archiving a Future
an work in progress from summer 2020
visuals and interviews by Caroline Olsen
Text by caroline olsen and Dr. Patricia Nguyen
The Argyle Street neighborhood of Uptown, Chicago is historically known as a port of entry for immigrants and refugees; most recently after the Vietnam/American War, it has become a Southeast Asian business district and home to Black/Latinx/Southeast Asian poor and working class people. This area has a rich history shaped by international war, the Indian Relocation Act of 1965, Great Migration of African Americans and poor white Appalachians from the south, Southeast Asian refugee resettlement, and urban renewal projects. The area now faces gentrification, heavy pollution from construction, increased policing, financial impacts of COVID-19, and increased racial tension in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests.
Axis Lab, a community arts organization, curates a series of site-specific artistic and food-based interventions to build across racial antagonisms to organize for ethical development. “Argyle Street: Archiving a Future,” tells a story of the people who live and work in the area, the changing architecture, environmental impacts of construction during COVID-19, and the impacts of recent Black Lives Matter protests on local businesses and encounters with police through photographs and audio. Axis Lab’s placed-based happenings create an undercommons in the public sphere, a space to reclaim belonging, personhood, and community. The photographs capture events where vacant train stations and closed Asian grocery stores are transformed into pop-up marketplaces and artistic platforms, where community members can gather to seek mutual aid through food and mask distributions, film screenings, storybooths, and sidewalk teach-ins as the street morphs into new ecologies of abolitionist imaginings.
FOOD Not cops
Community members visit Axis Lab’s “Food Not Cops” station to pick up free groceries and COVID care kits. Located on Argyle and Winthrop, strategically stationed close to a few different affordable housing buildings, a new luxury property looms in the background.
Stories from the street
“Police are doing their job, but they’re over-doing their job. They use the term ‘excessive force,’ they tried to take my arm and make it go over my head backwards. Now I can’t raise this arm normally. I can’t play catch with my grandson. I was in a public alley and they said I was criminally trespassing…
We have to hit the streets. As a nation though, not a group not as segregated people. Now we have all nationalities standing up for justice.” - Philip Moore, Uptown resident, standing by a new community mural that reads “Asians 4 Black Lives”
“To our surprise, it ends up being a very community focused area. It's really cool for us witness people coming here as organizers and artists together, and then also meeting each other.”
- Erin Hoang, co-owner of First Sip Cafe, on what type of space First Sip Cafe provides for the community
“I am friends with my neighbors, which is a really awesome thing. So that’s a really great way to feel connected. The cafe that’s hosting drinks here, First Sip, even though I don’t know everybody when I go in there, just being in there and seeing like minded people or people that I assume are like minded makes me feel connected.”
- Yvette, Uptown resident, on ways she feels connected to the Uptown community
“I appreciate what ya’ll are doing, especially the literature. It really, really helps. You know, I didn’t know about abolition. I didn’t know a lot of things about what’s going on and it helps you recognize what’s happening with our government and what’s happening with the community. I love that. I want to be aware, and be a part of the solution and not part of the problem.”
- Darrow, Uptown resident, on the zines and political education from the Food Not Cops summer event series
“I hope that you will help out our Native American pride and sponsor more than what you have done. Just because we are indigenous doesn’t mean that we are none.”
- Chris, Uptown resident, on what he wished people knew about the Native American community in Chicago -
