Good morning, Chicago.
What was once an empty lot at the southwest corner of Douglas Boulevard and Central Park Avenue has been reinvented as a space reminiscent of a real-world “Sesame Street.”
With an emphasis on education and activities for children and adults alike, Lawndale’s Pop-Up Spot, at 3601 W. Douglas Blvd. in the Love Blooms Here Plaza, is a community-led museum housed in a shipping container. It has been featuring art and narratives by and for West Side residents since 2019 under the guidance of co-founders Chelsea Ridley and Jonathan Kelley.
The Pop-Up Spot is the brainchild of Ridley and Kelley, who wanted to take museum curation out of the institutional landscape and bring it to the everyday person.
“We work under the model of museums as soup kitchens,” Ridley said. “Museums should be more than just places to display things; museums should provide services to the people. If you think about museums and the landscape of Chicago, museums are downtown, all in one location, or on the South Side, where you have the DuSable Museum. The West Side is left out. So this is a great nexus, a center for stories of the West Side. There’s a rich history here. (The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) lived here when he lived in Chicago. This is a place to find, collect and tell stories.”
Read the full story from the Tribune’s Darcel Rockett.
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