Jason Brown Invites Map Making to the 21st Century!

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Today we talk with Community Artist and Organizer Jason Brown about his Artist in Residency, Mapping (in) Progress at 1100 Florence in Evanston.

June 26 - July 6, Jason is hoping to share collective discoveries through his Collective Cartography process with the broader public, and open up the conversation of what mapping can mean for us and our neighbors.

Photo from Art Encounter's YOUTime walking tour of Florence Avenue.

EVENTS

KIDS + MAPS
SATURDAY, JUNE 30, 10 AM -12 PM
This family-friendly event will be for parents and kids of elementary age (1st-5th grade) to explore mapping home with a kids-eye view.
We'll have a time of learning, mapping, playing, and sharing.
Click here: FREE W RSVP on Facebook
Learn more at geocommunetrics.com/1100florence/

COMMUNITY POTLUCK
SATURDAY, JUNE 30, 5:30-8:30 PM
Community is central to the Collective Cartography process.
Let's come together for an evening of conversation, observation and research! Jason Brown will be sharing from his experience leading Collective Cartography mapping sessions around Evanston. Participants will be led through observation and collective, qualitative research around a collection of large-scale, hand-drawn maps of our city and some of our neighborhoods.
Bring a dish to share, bring a friend and meet a new neighbor.
Click here to RSVP on Facebook
Learn more at geocommunetrics.com/1100florence/

More about Jason:

In October 2016 I developed a 3 hour workshop called Collective Cartography for the arts festival Big Draw Evanston. It was an intentional time where Evanston artists, leaders, and activists showed up and we worked on mapping out our collective version of Evanston. Over the course of the workshop, we created a large-scale hand-drawn map of Evanston, and what we know about its geography, economy, resources, barriers, and what we could dream up as possible solutions. Images on the map were real and fantastic - inviting deeper sociological imagination for how we see the city we live and work in.

With that first workshop of around a dozen women being so successful, I've spent the last year and a half refining the workshop. With support from the Evanston Arts Council, I have continued this mapping with small groups from the public, local training programs, and community organizations, effectively asking the question: What does equity look like spatially?

Over this time, I've collected around a dozen maps from various group workshops. Participants have been executives, bureaucrats, baristas, artists, social workers - your everyday Evanston residents and workers. Instead of leaving mapping our city - remembering its past, examining its present, planning its future - in the hands of the traditional "powers," Collective Cartography has put this honor and responsibility into the hands of the People. Any people that show up. Yet, while this process has been about equity, I have to confess it's not been the most equitable in approach, and truly not that diverse in the cast of cartographers.

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrating and elevating creatives, featuring 20-minute, unedited conversations that mimic the live-radio vibe, purposefully low tech. Contact host Lisa Degliantoni at thelisadshow[at]gmail.com

The Lisa D Show with Jason Brown

Our guest Jason Brown (aka The Zip Code Kid) talks about the upcoming WinterHeARTh event Rocks & Rolls on Feb. 18 at Ridgeville Parks District, Collective Cartography and how our places make us and we make our places and embellishment and happenstance.

Jason has worked as a community arts advocate and organizer in the Evanston community since 2013. Jason initiated the annual Winter HeARTh public community art series in 2013, while co-chairing the Public Art Committee. He has also helped produce community and public art works and programming through Art Encounter, The Big Draw Evanston, Downtown Evanston, Evanston Made, the Evanston Community Foundation and the City of Evanston. Jason promises you that he leaves Evanston, occasionally.   

As an independent artist, Jason, also under the alias “The Zip Code Kid,” runs the brand Geocommunetrics, a multidisciplinary design practice that seeks to explore the ideas of space, place, home and belonging using abstract, minimal design. Check out the work of TZCK at geocommunetrics.com or on Instagram @thezipcodekid.

Rocks & Rolls

Saturday, February 18 at 1 PM - 5 PM

Ridgeville Parks District, 908 Seward Street

Warm the winter blues by sharing bread and soup with neighbors, and brighten your Saturday by painting with friends!

Rocks & Rolls will bring us around Evanston-made bread and tasty soup from Lucky Platter and Cross Rhodes, while we hang out and paint hopeful flowers on rocks and "plant" them outside. A craft and a snack for artists and non-artists alike, this Winter HeARTH event hopes to warm you up and keep life colorful.

All ages and families welcome. Share bread and soup with us, and bring your own bread and soup recipes to share! (Don't worry, this snack's on us, so leave the real stuff at home.) Bring a few rocks from home to paint, or paint some ours. Paint and brushes supplied.

Painted rocks can be brought home, or added to the installation in the Ridgeville Garden, right off Ridge Avenue.

Not familiar with Evanston's Winter HeARTh series? Check out our past events online here: http://www.cityofevanston.org/arts-culture/public-art/winter-hearth-series/

Geocommunetrics

Geocommunetrics pieces are experimental explorations, visualizing places as data and design, to provided backdrops for life and lenses for learning.

With Geocommunetrics pieces, The Zip Code Kid (TZCK) imagines how we see "home" and "Self" as a work of place and time, art and science, and, well, a bit of magical thinking.

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The Lisa D Show is a podcast celebrates creatives. Listen to 20 minute, unedited conversations with host Lisa D. and the creatives who make our world a more connected, interesting and beautiful place to live. Podcasts will be posted at https://thelisadshow.blogspot.com

This podcast is recorded at 1100 Florence, an art event space in West Evanston, IL, owned and operated by Lisa Degliantoni and Dave Ford. It is a former Polish Grocery store, probably not the BEST place to record a podcast (boomy to say the least) but we're new and it will get better. Reach out to thelisadshow[at]gmail.com