TEAM - VOLUNTEER - INTERSECTIONS - MOVIES - IMAGES - HISTORY - PRESS - PRESS RELEASE

Contact us:info@careerdayteam.org // JUNE. 2006, New York City, Broadway Ave. // Calling all artists, sweepers, fashion designers//

Career Day is a group that is interested in the socially based practices of art in public spaces. Creating a contemporary connection via creating conversation with action, intervention with others in the built environment. The group composed of four artist residents in Chicago from Europe, Canada, West Coast and East Coast now reside in Chicago.

This was a socially based action of creating connection in the urban gird of Chicago. The Cartesian X - Y coordinates of the ideal city grid meet at Milwaukee Avenue - a street which meets, divides and creates so many neighborhoods, a street that makes borders and creates crossroads between so many groups of people. Our approach and sculptural action was an endurance tag team relay from block to block in a timed choreography, exchanging brooms and uniforms, a Laurel and Hardy approach to the comedy and tragedy of social public space.

Water samples of the Chicago River from its source at Devon Avenue ~ as authentic "souvenirs" were handed out to volunteers and people we met along the way, the water samples are a kitsch notion of respect to the river defines the city and its history.

Over 62 volunteers, arranged, met and coordinated over a two month schedule of planning. Some volunteers we knew, others responded through the space of the web, or posters on the street. Sweeping with a gentle, a kind, a caressing motion to care for the streets of Chicago.

Creating a dialogue with performance as an endurance. Milwuakee Avenue from Devon Avenue to Kinzie Avenue - a 12 mile stretch. (We did not "sweep" in the traditional sense of cleaning, we swept to create a statement about respect) Milwaukee Avenue is an old Indian Trail, and now a main automobile thoroughfare through the city, reminiscent in some places of suburbia and the historic traditions of Chicago's built environment.

Volunteers had their own stories along the path of the sweeping, about neighborhoods, gentrification, idealism and patriotic notions of local politics were shared with one another.
Neighbor met neighbor. The neighborhoods along Milwaukee Avenue, define the history and politics of the city, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Latino, Yuppie and Gentrified, to the abandoned and forgotten. Milwaukee Avenue was appreciated in this Career Day action of the artist in the city.

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