Chicago Archives + Artists Festival: Embodying the Archive

This year’s festival embraces the theme of embodiment. Throughout this 3-day gathering, we’ll explore the ways archivists and artists preserve the legacies of our communities via talks, performances, music, and workshops.

As the Festival will be happening in person for the first time since 2018, we are celebrating the opportunity to gather together by emphasizing the role of embodiment in archives, asking: How can an archive be embodied in a space, a person, an object, a gathering, or a gesture? How does one begin to understand an archive in order to embody it out in the world? How does witnessing and engaging with archival materials make you feel (emotionally/bodily)? What can a gathering/group do that an archive can’t and vice versa?

The festival will feature workshops, performances, panel discussions, archive unfurlings, ask-an-archivist sessions, and opportunities for artists to be introduced to archives and special collections from across the city. This is also a chance for artists to understand how they can connect with archives that preserve and care for the legacies, stories, and histories of artists, particularly those from Indigenous, diasporic, queer, and disability communities, and the long list of voices that are shaping our city’s culture but are often neglected in mainstream and historically-rooted conversations around art.

The Chicago Archives + Artists Festival is generously supported by Teiger Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art. This festival is also part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.