Troy Briggs, Jon Brumit, Joe Jeffers, Jeff Kolar, Meredith Kooi, Michael Milano, David More and Shannon Stratton (Chicago, IL)

The Urban Gray Ballroom is a street-side staircase theater equipped with a sound system and custom console that includes inputs for the museum’s organ, a Werkstatt-01 synthesizer donated by Moog, as well as a handmade radio transmitter and doorbell created by Jeff Kolar. The ballroom was initiated to provide an alternative art space, created by and for artists as a forum to establish community and allow for flexible use and experimentation. It serves projects that might not be as accepted by large audiences, that don’t fit as well within models for art production and reception more readily available outside of it. As an “alternative” the ballroom was constructed to physically and metaphorically clear new space for artists within the institution of Elsewhere, which is itself an alternative art space. It’s presence at Elsewhere registers the need that artists have to choose from many kinds of alternatives to traditional museums and galleries in order to thrive.

The new theater was prepared by patching and giving the walls of the staircase a fresh coat of paint to draw attention to Martyna Szczesna’s double vaulted ceiling. The stairs were cleaned, sanded and refinished to provide proscenium seating. The console was installed into the stair-landing for a traverse stage with seating potential on both sides of the building’s threshold. Performances are live broadcast from the ballroom throughout the museum and its neighborhood on 88.1 FM.

Contact documentarian@goelsewhere.org to book a show or find out more about the UGB.

This project was created as part of the Museum as Instrument curatorial initiative and funded in part by the North Carolina Arts Council.

Featured

Jul 1, 2015

Meredith Kooi

Jul 1, 2015

Meredith Kooi (b. 1985, Chicago) is a visual and performance artist, editor, arts writer, and curator based in Atlanta, GA. She is a Hambidge Fellow and a recipient of Atlanta's Office of Cultural Affairs 2014 - 2015 Emerging Artist Award. Her recent performance and installation work has been presented by venues across Atlanta including Eyedrum, The Goat Farm Arts Center, MINT Gallery, and The High Museum of Art.Since 2011 she has been the editor for the Chicago-based experimental radio broadcast platform Radius, which received a Propeller Fund award for its 2014 series GRIDS. With Radius, she has curated playlists featured on WFMU's Free Music Archive (NYC) and Kunstradio (Vienna), commissioned artists' works for two series: GRIDS and RANGE, been a visiting artist at ACRE Residency, and participated in participated in the Museum as Instrument residency at Elsewhere.

Jul 1, 2015

Jun 26, 2015

Jon Brumit

Jun 26, 2015

Jon Brumit works creatively with interactive social design, structured improvisation and multi-layered interventions. By design, his objects and public performance situations often produce unpredictable results – occasionally humorous, often sonorous, and always highly interpretable. Brumit has presented solo and collaborative works widely in the US and abroad at venues including the 2008 Whitney Biennial (as Neighborhood Public Radio), MOCAD (Detroit), SF MOMA, the DeYoung Museum (SF), Chelsea Art Museum (NYC), YBCA (SF), Novi Sad Contemporary Museum (Serbia), Cranbrook Museum of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI), the Krannert Museum (Urbana Champlain), Kavi Gupta Gallery (Chicago), and the Borderline Academy / Fadaiat (Tarifa, Spain).

Jun 26, 2015

Jun 17, 2015

Joe Jeffers

Jun 17, 2015

Joe Jeffers is a co-curator of Museum as Instrument: A Sound Art Residency at Elsewhere. Joe is a musician, producer and Director of 8550 Ohio (Chicago and Chesterhill, OH).

Jun 17, 2015

Troy Briggs

Jun 17, 2015

Troy Briggs works with technology and sound and everyday objects to create subtle interventions in public and private space. These moments, ranging from audio jacks that connect the listener to far-away white noise and single, bare light bulbs that tap out morse code messages sent from across the world, speak to delicacy of human connection though the simplest of means.Briggs has exhibited widely in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, including Shane Campbell, Chicago; Rontoms, Portland, OR; A+D Gallery, Chicago; and 6018 North, Chicago, IL. He teaches in Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and sculpture, sound and new media at Cathege College.

Jun 17, 2015

Michael Milano

Jun 17, 2015

Michael Milano develops drawing and sound work through adapting systems of constraint as they are presented by the grid. Specifically drawing on the weaving draft as device to compose audio work, Milano explores the limits of the binary to produce conceptual “weavings.” Milano received a MFA from the Fiber and Material Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Humanities from Shimer College. He has shown at Roots & Culture, threewalls, Peregrine Program, Adds Donna, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. He recently co-curated the exhibition duckrabbit with Jeff M. Ward at Adds Donna.

Jun 17, 2015

David Moré

Jun 17, 2015

David Moré is a sound artist, experimental musician and sculptor. His current projects include listening to weak electromagnetic waves from (maybe) Jupiter using a home built radio telescope. In the past he has collaborated with an elephant-nose fish named Alex Halsted on the creation on biomusic.

Jun 17, 2015

Sep 25, 2013

Shannon Stratton

Sep 25, 2013

Shannon Stratton is a founder and Executive Director of threewalls, a Chicago based not-for-profit for the presentation of contemporary art and ideas. Established in 2003, threewalls has grown from a start-up exhibition space to a vital visual arts organization supporting contemporary art through solo exhibitions, residencies, grants, publications, conferences and commissioning programs. With Green Lantern Press she founded and published (via threewalls) PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independant and artist-run projects, now in its third volume, and The Artists Run Chicago Digest, a companion, appraisal and extension to the exhibition of the same name at The Hyde Park Center. Along with Roots & Culture, Document and The Public Media Institute, she co-founded (as threewalls) the MDW Fair in Chicago, a gathering of artists and independent visual arts platforms. She is a co-founder of FIELD: Artist Projects and Spaces, a national alliance of and advocacy group for small-scale visual arts platforms and their producers.

Sep 25, 2013

The Urban Gray Ballroom | Museum as Instrument Residents

Doorbells | Jeff Kolar

Urban Exchange Residency I | Chicago: Museum as Instrument