January 29, 2024
Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago
Committee of Six: Screening and Discussion
The Open Practice Committee invites you to join us for a live screening of the 2022 film Committee of Six directed by artist and filmmaker Fred Schmidt-Arenales. A post-screening discussion will take place between Schmidt-Arenales and the University of Chicago's Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History, Darby English.
Committee of Six is an enactment of archival meeting minutes held at the University of Chicago. The meetings took place in 1955 between community leaders and University officials for the purpose of creating an “Urban Renewal Program" for the neighborhood of Hyde Park, situated in the south side of Chicago. The film documents the process of a group of performers, academics, residents, and activists interpreting the archival documents, inviting comparison between the language of the past and the contemporary reality of gentrification and racist real estate practices in Chicago.
[Screening time: 38:50 minutes]
Fred Schmidt-Arenales is an artist and filmmaker. His projects attempt to bring awareness to unconscious processes on the individual and group level. He has presented films, installations, and performances internationally at venues including SculptureCenter and Abrons Arts Center, (New York), Links Hall (Chicago), The Darling Foundry (Montreal), LightBox and The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), Artspace (New Haven), The Museum of Fine Arts and FotoFest (Houston), Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien (Graz), and Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna). His recent film Committee of Six is an official selection of the 2022-23 Architecture and Design Film Festival and was awarded a jury prize for best film at the 2023 Onion City Experimental Film Festival
Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History. English’s teaching and advising address subjects in cultural studies as well as modern and contemporary American and European art produced since the First World War. He is associate faculty in both the University’s Department of Visual Arts and its Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. From 2014 to 2020, English was Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts and co-sponsored by the Chicago Center on Democracy and Cinema Media Studies