Olivia Gude: And there went two years of my life. Right? But really all the projects weren't significant enough to put up. But what I've done now is found this website. The website is to show the work of the Contemporary Community Curriculum Initiative, and a related initiative that I do with pre-service teachers, called Spiral Workshop.

M2: What is that?

Olivia Gude: It just opened a couple of weeks ago…a week ago. It's called spiral.aa.uic.edu.

V3: I sent several of my students to the Spiral Workshop.

Olivia Gude: Well good. Well yes, that's right. You're one of our partners that we've been recruiting from for years and years. By the way, if you teach, the Spiral Workshop is a Saturday program for young artists, middle school and high school age. So you have to be 13. We take kids 13-20, basically. It's only in the Fall, and it's 13 weeks of programming. It's a really excellent project because it's unlike Gallery 37 and a lot of things nowadays which are job-based. We're a culturally-based program. We look at the idea of art and culture. Our kids do writing and looking at art every Saturday as well as making things, and then we have a big show. But anyway, that's just kind of a connection where I've done a lot of work. My curriculum initiative was really wanting to look at that overlap of art in the schools and art in the community that I think is just such a profound thing to be thinking about. I know that you're thinking about it too, or you wouldn't be doing this project. So in terms of talking here today, I could start talking about the history of Chicago murals and that would just be like a long question. One thing I'm going to suggest you do is to feel free to Xerox. But it's an essay which is about a 10-15 page essay which Jeff and I wrote. It's a really nice description of the community public art movement. Actually, I hadn't really thought about it, but when I think about it offhand, I find the reading level is actually only about 9th grade, I would think-if you checked it. So that could be a piece that I think you might even possibly use.

M: I would love to use that.

Olivia Gude: The other thing is I thought of a few things today. This is a chapter on cultural activism. It's myself, Marcus [inaudible], that you have, and [inaudible] who was one of the people who worked on that one mural at 51st Street, is it…? You know what happened? I used to know the location of every mural. When I finished that book, it was like my mind said, "I don't need to know these addresses any more because I can just look them up in my book." It was like I had a download. But anyway, [inaudible] right here. I brought a couple of copies. This is just a quick one. This is a piece where a lot of it is about the, "Where Do We Come From? Where Are We Going?" mural. About that idea. I brought one for everybody.

M: Oh, great.

Olivia Gude: But this might be useful to some people. This basically talks about several different murals. A lot of it talks about the way someone who like I am-basically one of the younger ones. There's an older general of muralists. I'm like in the earliest generation or something of Chicago muralists. It's funny, but people oftentimes think now that my husband John Towns, who's the Director of Chicago Public Art and I founded the group. Because we've been basically the people who've been very active and keeping it going since 1988. But actually the group goes back to 1970. So there are all these different generations of muralists. There's sort of a middle generation, then. Marcus is a little bit younger than I am. They're sort of talking about what it's like to carry on a tradition that was founded by our elders in the movement. So if that's something that's something that's of interest to you, you might want to really take a look at that one.

M2: Basically, do you know all these others that were represented?

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