Kirsten Leenaars

  

During the summer of 2017, Chicago-based performance and video artist Kirsten Leenaars reprised her collaboration with a group of twenty-four middle school students from two Near West Side schools—Highland Community School and the International Newcomer Center in the Milwaukee Academy of Chinese Language—to create a video, (Re)Housing the American Dream: A Message from The Future.

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During the 2016 film shoot—which was structured as a three-week summer camp—personal histories and experiences from the participating students served as metaphors to explore the actual and imagined reality of the American Dream. In 2017 Leenaars and her collaborators revisited that model to imagine America fifty years from now. Where will they be? What will the world look like? How will people reflect on the present moment? The students resumed conversations about complex issues of the day, including the environment, economics, race, gender, equality, education, technology, and (im)migration to collectively envision their tomorrow.

 

Support for this exhibition and accompanying programs is generously provided by the Mary Martha Doerr Endowment Fund, the Richard P. Herzfeld Endowment Fund, the Joan Pick Endowment Fund, and the Milwaukee Arts Board and the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin, and a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin and the National Endowment for the Arts. Curator: Emilia Layden.

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http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/kirsten-leenaars2.php

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Project website: https://rehousingtheamericandream.wordpress.com/