2023
The Landscape
Overview
The landscape design for James Stone Freedom Square is led by Joseph Altshuler and Nekita Thomas working with Stone Temple Baptist Church. The landscape strategies test ideas from Altshuler and Thomas’s design research project Supergraphic Landscapes, incubated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Supergraphic Landscapes explores urban design and creative placemaking strategies that amplify identity, access, and belonging in public spaces. As the context and outdoor venue for the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival, James Stone Freedom Square treats the sukkah pavilions not as sculptural objects, but as an interconnected constellation of platforms that welcome programmatic activation by neighbors and community groups. While the sukkahs will be moved from this site after the Festival, the supergraphic landscape strategies and permanent site improvements that make up James Stone Freedom Square will be ongoing, as Stone Temple Baptist Church continues to enact their future vision of using this site as part of an extended neighborhood campus that hosts a variety of community programs and accessible events, including a farmers market, movies in the park, and a kite-flying festival.
Spearheaded by a team of designers and architects, the Supergraphic Landscapes seeks to create a vibrant and dynamic urban landscape that transcends the traditional boundaries of architecture and graphic design, embracing the power of visual storytelling to shape the city's identity. By superimposing graphic patterns and visual narratives into various everyday contexts, Supergraphic Landscapes cultivates companionable relationships between the city and its inhabitants, generating new typologies of inclusive public spaces. Challenging the notion that public art exists to “decorate” or simply “beautify” the city, Supergraphic Landscapes argues that particular strategies of contemporary public art empower architects and designers to re-choreograph the city’s deep-seated organizational and operational structures.
The Supergraphic Landscapes design research project is funded by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign’s Call to Action to Address Racism & Social Injustice Research Program, organized by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. This first chapter of Supergraphic Landscapes investigates matters of race, using a critical race design approach.
Contributors:
One aspect of the project invites guest artists to reinterpret and prototype ideas that enact Supergraphic Landscapes through their own creative practice. 2023 guest artists include:
Out of Bounds
Outpost Office
Out of Bounds uses sports fields' distinct and recognizable supergraphics to contemplate novel uses of civic space in Chicago. Whether striped on a parking lot or chalked across a field, the graphics of sports fields set the rules and terms for engaging space. Likewise, our neighborhoods are filled with their own boundaries, both seen and unseen, that dictate everyday experiences. Informed by neighbors who participated in a community workshop, Out of Bounds is a temporary turf painting that “plays” with these civic boundaries to envision more inclusive and joyful fields of play. The temporary familiar sports field tropes encourage new uses of our bodies and cities. Out of Bounds continues an ongoing series of Outpost Office projects that explore the dynamics between community identity, sports, and graphics.
Nu Flags
Norman Teague Design Studio
Norman Teague Design Studios envisions a graphic landscape as an activation of airspace as much as ground-space. Nu Flags consists of quilted, patterned fabric draped over the entrances and primary faces of the Storytelling Sukkah. These “flags” represent the legacy of non-verbal communication through symbols, color, and pattern. The quilted element of the fabric references the African-American history of quilting as a means of coded communication, especially during the era of enslavement. By adding a new layer of content, graphics, and artistry, the art activation continues the sukkah’s ambition to broadcast layered narratives and overlapping stories of multiple communities.