Justice Hotel at 6018North
What does it mean to “check into” justice?
Justice Hotel at 6018North is part of an ongoing, long-term project – Justice Hotel and Just Desserts – that has developed through a grant from the Joyce Foundation to iterate how artists can be agents of social change.
While we are closed due to Covid and then large exhibitions filling our space, we have been and are currently collaborating with a number of Southside partners to build spaces for community conversations and fund regenerative projects. Ultimately, we envision the Justice Hotel being run on the Southside.
During COVID-19 our collective of Justice Hotel curators – Wisdom Baty, Ciera McKissick, Caroline K. Ng, SY, and Ji Yang – developed a mission statement and set of values as they seek to expand their working collaboration:
Mission Statement
We cultivate and advance diverse voices, inclusive spaces, and multiple ideas of justice through alternative ways of engaging and participating in the arts. The Justice Hotel at 6018North project partners with artists, organizations, and communities from across Chicago using multidisciplinary and socially engaged methods to create conversations, collaborative curatorial projects, performances, dinners, and events centered around justice, equity and art.
Curators statement
We, the curators of the Justice Hotel at 6018North project, approach justice through real life issues by working with communities through creative and artistic actions in support of justice, including but not limited to racial, gender, economic, political, and environmental.
We come from varying backgrounds and embrace our differences, positionalities and similarities. We collaborate with Chicago artists, partners and communities to discuss, engage with, and act upon topics of justice that concern them.
Our Values
We believe in POWER SHARING through cooperation and transparency. We commit to COMMUNITY BUILDING through hospitality and fellowship that generates collaborative and inclusive spaces for Chicago artists and audiences. We champion EQUITY through resource sharing to bridge gaps and to empower our partners and communities to advance their platforms around justice. We embrace ACTIONS AND PROCESSES using creative and experimental methods that uplift and center ALAANA artists, curators and audiences. This is our approach to community and equity creation that advances the kind of collective future we want to see.
Justice Hotel previous iterations:
Specifically created to align with the themes of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Justice Hotel at 6018North invites overnight guests and event attendees into the very messy, difficult, layered questions surrounding collaboration, hospitality, and justice. Run and programmed as a cooperative enterprise, our collective of concierges, neighbors, and artists share in the revenue. Together we are developing the conditions of a cooperative working environment to generate and shape justice and monetary value. We are creating a new set of financial parameters that express ownership, management, and maintenance as an artistic and a cooperative endeavor. Visitors’ experiences help inform the long-term goal of developing a hotel with community individuals, groups, and curators on Chicago’s South side.
Developed with a collective of ALAANA concierge-curators, the hotel’s programming is a mix of conversational dinners, performances, and healing services. Employing a co-op model of ownership, we are experimenting with living and working together. As an experiment in economic transformation, Justice Hotel at 6018North asks if artists and curators can create a viable economic system that benefits all. The public was invited to initiate discussion of the intersection of economics and justice. These events were curated by our cooperative of concierges:
Wednesday Movie Nights – Screenings relate to justice. We welcome discussion about the film and the ideas it raises.
Thursday and Friday Conversational Dinners – Our facilitated conversational dinners invite guests to share thoughts and experiences to contribute to a wider understanding of justice.
Saturday Sound Celebrations – Saturday night dinner parties are sound performances. Local musicians, artists, and curators explore the sounds of justice and related sensory experiences.
Sanctuary Sundays – Sunday brunch is paired with energetic, healing workshops by local artists and wellness practitioners.
During Covid-19, Justice Hotel at 6018North programming paused. We have recently reopened booking for an individual or two people in a pod to stay. Help us put the ‘us’ in justice, one room at a time.
While Hotel programming paused, the work of the curatorial cooperative continued. During the pandemic lockdown, Wisdom Baty, Ciera McKissick, Caroline K. Ng, SY, and Ji Yang created Windows to the World an outdoor, street-facing exhibition to advance collective solutions to systemic problems. The curators are now working with TRAP HOUSE CHICAGO and other Southside organizations to develop programming in the Chatham, Greater Grand Crossing, and South Shore neighborhoods.
For the 2019 Architecture Biennial, Justice Hotel at 6018North featured a site specific installation by Lucas Murgida (pictured here), a reading room by Read/Write Library, and a pop-up shop by TRAP HOUSE CHICAGO. Many works from previous collaborations and installations at 6018North remained on view in the Justice Hotel bedrooms.
Programming throughout the Biennial included contributions by:
AMFM, Black & Pink, Chicago Mobile Makers, Cookin' & Eatin’, Kitchen and Table, North Branch Projects, Read/Write Library, Janelle A.M., B'Rael Ali, Wisdom Baty, Tiff Beatty, Alice Berry, Laura Biagi, Melissa Blount, veronica bohanan, Rocio Boliver, Sylvia Bowersox, Carla Bruni, Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Deborah Castillo, Ada Cheng, McKenzie Chinn, Courtney Cobbs, Michael Courier, Jabowen Dixon, Astronauta Emiliana, Timothy Engelbrecht, Gonzalo Escobar Mora, Amaris Evans, Melon Fernsebner, Adrián García Orozco, Ana García JaCome, Nicole Goss, Maushaun Hendricks, Sahand Heshmati Afshar, Emily Hooper-Lansana, Regin Igloria, Silvia Inés Gonzalez, Nadia Granados, Regina José Galindo, Lariel Joy, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Yair Kaldor, Britteney Kapri, KyungMook Kim, Khadijah Kysia, William LaBeija, Kim Laude, Joseph Lefthand, Jose Luis Benavides, Dana Major, Carlos Martiel, Aiko Masubuchi, Ciera McKissic, Solomon Salim Moore, Velvet Rose Moore-Owen, Yvette Mushimiyimana, Justin Nalley, Juan Neira, Caroline Ng, Erika Ordosgoitti, Lauren Pacheco, Sharon Powell, Amapola Prada, Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Najee-Zaid Searcy, Teshika Silver, Drea Smith, Elizabeth Son, Fabrizzio Emilio Subia, Ginny & Sarah Sykes, Aisha F. Truss-Miller, Asha Iman Veal, Sandra Vivas, Killian Walsh, Sandria Washington, Rhonda Wheatley, SY, Ji Yang, Jacobo Zambrano, Sojourner Zenobia, Ariel Zetina, and many others.
This long-term project with artist and architect Amanda Williams and Justice of the Pies chef Maya Camille Broussard has taken many forms. For EXPO Chicago 2018 Amanda and Maya, along with 3Arts and artists Carris Adams, Mashaun Ali Hendricks, Nikki Patin, Amina Ross, and Rhonda Wheatley to create Sanctuary, a prototype of a healing hotel. The project has also included Co-Meanings – meetings where teens discussed justice, and what is and isn’t valued, while driving around Chicago in limos. In 2018, 6018North Summer Youth Employees helped design Sanctuary, in 2019 Summer Youth created a podcast to discuss restorative justice, and interviewed Heather Miller, Director of American Indian Center, who created a Land Acknowledgment for the Justice Hotel at 6018North.
Justice Hotel and Just Desserts draw upon the threat of eminent domain in the Englewood neighborhood and the Supreme Court’s Kelo vs. City of New London decision to allow city governments to take private land if it believes doing so will generate greater tax revenues or other economic benefits when the land is developed by a new owner. The idea for the hotel and café was sparked by a libertarian’s comical response to the Supreme Court case. Justice Hotel is then a reinterpretation in its manifestation and building of a space to redesign justice in the aftermath of Chicago’s landscape being “designed” via erasure, systemic neglect, racism, redlining, and an imbalance of resources. The building and running of the hotel as an art project is foundational. Instead of gentrifying, we aim to reposition the community as power agents in a process that often ignores and moves community out. Since we know what artist and curator run spaces can look like, we now want to develop the blueprints to construct a hotel as a social justice endeavor that through its spatial, material, and localized conditions empowers its workers and its community.
During Sanctuary at Expo 2018 to get into the Justice Hotel, visitors had to meet with concierges who talked to them about justice and that justice takes work and maybe giving up what you hold dear. They were then asked to answer the question: What would you be willing to give up for justice?
Justice Hotel asks: “What are you willing to give up for justice?”
Here are some of our favorite answers.
Justice has a voice, and it is many.
Land Acknowledgment
Chicago is the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations. Many other Tribes like the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac and Fox also called this area home. Located at the intersection of several great waterways, the land naturally became a site of travel and healing for many Tribes. American Indians continue to call this area home and now Chicago is home to the sixth largest Urban American Indian community that still practices their heritage, traditions and care for the land and waterways. Today, Chicago continues to be a place that calls many people from diverse backgrounds to live and gather here. Despite the many changes the city has experienced, both our American Indian and Justice Hotel community see the importance of the land and this place that has always been a city home to many diverse backgrounds and perspectives.
Justice Hotel charrette map with Amanda Williams and Summer Youth Employees, 2018
Press
IDHS “Artist and business owner trains Edgewater nonprofit and community members on peace circles,” June 3, 2021
Art Monthly “Letter from Chicago,” March 2020 by Agnieszka Gratza
Choose Chicago “Chicago Architecture Biennial: 8 things to see and do,” October 3, 2019 by Kelsey O'Connor
The Art Newspaper “Chicago Architecture Biennial reckons with displacement, privation, and segregation,” September 18, 2019 by Lauren Deland
NEO2 “Bienal Arquitectura Chicago 2019 “…and other such stories”,” September 18, 2019
Newcity “Justice Hotel at the Chicago Architecture Biennial,” September 17 2019 by Kerry Cardoza
Newcity “EXPO 2018: Critic’s Picks,” October 2, 2018 by Kerry Cardoza
Newcity “‘For the many, not for the few’, Market Reflections on EXPO 2018’s Commercial Offerings,” October 1, 2018 by Stephen F. Eisenman
Funding
Justice Hotel and Justice Hotel at 6018North has received vital ideation support from The Joyce Foundation, event sponsorship from The Chicago Community Trust, and professional development assistance from The Driehaus Foundation.
6018North is an Illinois not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the promotion of culture and the arts in Chicago. 6018North projects are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Illinois Arts Council Youth Employment Grant, CityArts Grants from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, an Artistic Vitality Grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the Field Foundation of Illinois, MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at the Driehaus Foundation, and individual donations.