Volunteers Help Create Peace Parks in North Lawndale
Peace Park Project
Chicago Urban Art Retreat Center is adding beauty, public art, green places, and African American heritage displays in North Lawndale in an attempt to do a lot. We want people to pay more attention to the need for beauty, the need for peace, the need for art in public places, and the need for green places. We want to engage the neighborhood, Chicago in general, and other people far away to enjoy the peace parks and the protect leading up to making them a reality! We want to educate people about African American heroes. We want to help people see how recycling can be used in many ways, including building art. We want to turn people outside down while they enjoy seeing things in a new way and support people, peace, and art! This is a great way for everyday people of all ages to be involved in creating parks and art to go into those parks.
Volunteers will be volunteering Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 2 to 4 pm. to help create a Peace Park on the West Side of Chicago. This project will start in June and we will be working during the months of June, July, and August to create this park. We will meet at 1957 S. Spaulding Ave at the corner of 21st.
This is a project led by Chicago Urban Art Retreat Center. Our first Peace Park opened June 5th, 2016 and is located at 2101 S. Spaulding Ave, Chicago, IL 60623 just 2 blocks west of the Kedzie stop on the pink line and across the street from the Center. The new park will be created out of a vacant lot a few blocks from the Center on Trumbull.
We can wear masks and keep at least 6 feet apart. There is lots of room to keep our distance.
The Peace Park is completed from a series of single art projects put together. It honors African American heroes – people that have made important contributions. It can be someone you have heard of or someone you didn’t know.
In addition to maintaining the first Peace Park, we are going to be mowing the second lot, building six sculptures using recycled materials and cement, and creating six vegetable gardens for families in the neighborhood. Each family will be able to keep up their garden, planting veggies for themselves, and thus live in a sustainable way.
This lot is bigger than the first lot and it already has trees. We are going to keep these trees and create a landscape around them. We are going to be meeting at Chicago Urban Art Retreat Center at 2 p.m. and will wrap up by 4 p.m. The Center is located at 1957 S. Spaulding Ave, Chicago, IL at the corner of 21st and Spaulding, west of the Kedzie Pink Line stop. Feel free to invite others and reach out to contact@urbanartretreat.com with any questions.
Background
The North Lawndale Peace Parks initiative is an offshoot of Ten Thousand Ripples, a “collaborative public art, civic engagement, and peace project” developed by the artist Indira Johnson. Centered on the creative integration of 100 Buddha sculptures in 10 Chicago neighborhoods, Ten Thousand Ripples aims to open a space for community activism and structural change. The Buddha heads, situated between Earth and sky, symbolize peace and spiritual growth. Their strategic placement in various locations provides a springboard for continuous, collective transformation. Examples include education, the economy, family dynamics, community beautification, and greater engagement with the arts. by actively discussing and planning around these issues, participants find themselves in a position to challenge the status quo. It should be noted that this is an intergenerational project — individuals of all ages contribute in different capacities.
These projected parks constructed on vacant lots throughout North Lawndale will focus on decreasing crime and violence and promoting the development of clean, safe peaceful spaces. The idea is to “reclaim” what is unused or distorted and facilitate a sense of communal pride and ownership. Recent studies by the University of Pennsylvania and University of Vermont have found that well-maintained vacant lots with grass, trees, and fences are correlated with reduced crime rates.
We will landscape the empty lots to make them welcoming green spaces for people to relax, converse, and enjoy nature. Children will feel safe to play there, and old people will sit and read their papers. We will make sure the signage identifies it as a People’s Peace Park and urges folks to respect the space and keep it clean. In addition, we plan to involve youth who live near the parks to maintain them year-round. We will train youth on how to identify and remove graffiti. Our group will take permanent responsibility for the upkeep of the park. We wish the Peace Parks have forever homes in these lots.
According to the Ten Thousand Ripples website, Johnson chose 10 neighborhoods in Chicago to gift with large statues of the Buddha’s head, symbolizing peace. North Lawndale is one of the communities the artist chose, along with Evanston, Rogers Park, Uptown, Albany Park, Little Village, South Chicago, Pilsen, Auburn Gresham, and Back of the Yards. To go along with the gift of the statues, Johnson challenges the communities to invest in peace and art in their neighborhoods. Each community approached the challenge in a different way. North Lawndale chose to revitalize 10 vacant lots scattered around the community.
In North Lawndale, it seems like every block has at least one vacant lot. They are the places where litter and junk gather, and occasionally you might find a pile of cinder blocks or a footpath where people cut through on their way to somewhere else. You might find a group of people gathered for any number of reasons — from things of little significance to activities of ill repute. The lots are hollow spaces in this community — spaces that need to be filled with something better than what ends up in them. This is the goal of the Peace Parks of North Lawndale — to transform these vacant spaces into vibrant peace parks to serve the community.
Each of these lots-turned-parks will be landscaped and transformed into welcoming, peaceful spaces. They will be home to abstract sculptures created by people of Chicago — not artists from outside the city. The sculptures will represent African American heroes.
Three prototype sculptures for the project honoring Barrack Obama, Toni Morrison, and Maya Angelou call the garden at the Chicago Urban Art Retreat Center home. We experimented with materials to see what we could come up with using cement and recycled materials. The emphasis on collaborative community effort is meant to help preserve the parks – the more pride North Lawndale finds in its new green spaces, the more likely they are to continue existing as a source of pride for the community.
With support from local organizations and community members, the Peace Parks are not inaccessible for North Lawndale. If you or your organization is interested in volunteering or donating to the Peace Parks Project, you can contact us at contact@urbanartretreat.com. Let us keep looking forward to new growth in North Lawndale as new ground is broken for Peace Parks over the years, and in the minds of community members.
Dianna Long, Steven Lin, Sara Wines, Vernon James, Cesar Quiroz
Chicago Urban Art Retreat Center (lead organization)
1957 S. Spaulding Ave. (773) 542-9126 contact@urbanartretreat.com
www.facebook.com/urbanartretreat
Carson Poole, Chicago Botanic Garden Green Youth Farm
Namita Shah, Chicago teacher
Annamaria Leon, Permaculture Design and Consulting
Christine Street, Chicago artist
Tracie Worthy, Lawndale Christian Development Center
James V. Allen, Chicago artist
Charles Leeks Neighborhood Housing Services
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