Draft:Jim Duignan

Jim Duignan (born August 16, 1958) is an American social practice artist and professor in the College of Education at DePaul University. In 1995, Duignan founded Stockyard Institute, an ongoing artist collective that has initiated artistic and pedagogical programs across Chicago. A Chicago native, Duignan has shown work at and collaborated with institutions such as Hyde Park Art Center, the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago , and DePaul Art Museum. Though relational aesthetics and participatory art have been criticized for their "ethical one-upmanship––the degree to which artists supply a good or bad model of collaboration," Duignan's practice is distinct in its ability to work within the parameters of and transform traditional art and educational institutions without simply critiquing them or unwittingly reproducing the structures of neoliberalism that subtend them. Influenced by Fluxus artists, Joseph Beuys, and Group Material as well as theorists and practitioners of radical pedagogy such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire, Duignan's work with Stockyard Institute promotes a non-hierarchical vision of arts education that engages local communities on their own terms well beyond the confines of the art market.

Early life and education
Jim Duignan was born in Chicago to James and Bruna Duignan (née Obuchowski). His father, who worked for many years as a Chicago Police officer, was of Irish descent and whose family had lived for many generations in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. The maternal side of the family was of Russian descent. As a young child, Duignan spent much time with his great-grandmother, Manya Krevoy, who was a Russian immigrant and communist. Duignan was influenced early on by his experiences of Chicago, outings with Krevoy, and his time as a Boy Scout for which he earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 1976. He attended Taft High School from 1972–1976 as well as attended summer at programs at the Art Institute of Chicago thanks to the encouragement of his high school art teacher, Sam Wenet. In 1978, Duignan enrolled in the Art Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago where he studied with Robert Nickle before his death in 1980. During the 1980s, Duignan attended UIC sporadically, eventually graduating with his BFA in 1991 where he took advanced painting with Julia Fish. After receiving his BFA, Duignan immediately enrolled in the MFA program at UIC from which he graduated in 1993. His MFA cohort included John Arndt, Carla Arocha, Yvette Brackman, Arturo Herrera, and Michael Piazza. It was Piazza who would turn out to have the biggest influence on Duignan's artistic practice leading the two to collaborate on many projects.

Back of the Yards (1995–2000)
After graduating from UIC in 1993, Duignan began teaching at DePaul University, having been hired by Dr. Rafaela Weffer in December 1992. Duignan originally taught writing and photography courses, but later became a permanent fixture in the College of Education. In 1995, Duignan was approached by Brother Ed Siderewicz and Gordon Hannon, founders of the San Miguel School, who asked him to head the arts program at their experimental middle school. Duignan, who at the time had little experience as an educator, began working with students from the Back of the Yards neighborhood after school in an abandoned building next to the school. Duignan describes the project as "a small community institute [designed] to unpack some of the questions I had about social injustice and over violence on youth, opening up arts experiences to meditate on those issues." In collaboration with the students as well as other artists whom Duignan had visiting the space, the students decided to research and construct what they called the Gang-Proof Suit. Motivated by one student's fear of being accidentally shot in the back, Duignan facilitated the project by sharing with the students his knowledge of artistic techniques as well as provided the students with books, materials, and access to the resources needed to follow the project to its logical conclusion. Duignan reflected on the project saying, "The gang-proof suit started as a series of drawings and designs. Eventually it was time to bring friends in to help with building and fabrication. We identified the comfortable and protective qualities of the suit. We started to build a body forms using chicken wire, papier mâché, and found forms. We built full-body casts, appendages, and helmets, and we pieced together a composite that stood just under five feet tall." Alongside this project, the students also created underground radio broadcasts where they shared their own perspectives and stories. The broadcasts were entitled LOCO COOL and were disseminated via the free radio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Curator Nato Thompson would later compare the Gang-Proof Suit project to the work of artist Nick Cave and his sound suits.

Austin (2000–2005)
In the early 2000s after being evicted from the Back of the Yards building at 4749 S. Damen Ave., Duignan and his collaborator, Michael Piazza, began working in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. The two took up residency in the Austin Town Hall Cultural Center where they became artists-in-residence. In line with the collaborative and artistic model developed in the Back of the Yards period, Duignan and Piazza began speaking with local community members to better understand their perspectives, hopes, and concerns. During this period Duignan met Davion Mathews, then age ten, whose curiosity was piqued by Duignan's artistic practice. The two developed a quick rapport and soon began working on artistic projects in response to the inquiry of a local resident who said, "What are you doing here? People only come to this neighborhood to come home." Confused by this comment, Duignan and Mathews decided to open up an impromptu tourist bureau that they named Austin Tourist Bureau that would offer free tours to local community members that would allow participants to see their neighborhood in a new light. Duignan purchased a turquoise 1964 Chevrolet Corvair Greenbriar for $800 in 2002 and, with Mathews, the two would give weekend tours to anybody interested. Though the number of participants was small, Matthews immediately saw the project as a success. The following year, in 2003, Duignan and Mathews collaborated with the artist group Haha—who had been part of the groundbreaking social practice project Culture in Action organized by Mary Jane Jacob—on a project called Taxi. Haha invited artists from across Chicago to design messages that would fit on the advertising space found atop taxi cabs. Using GPS technology, the message would change as the cab entered different neighborhoods. Mathews, who had been developing his graphic design skills, contributed the text for the Austin neighborhood which read "DON'T MESS WITH MY FRO."

The most notable project of the Austin period was Urbs in Horto (2003). Taking its name from Chicago's motto "city in a garden" adopted in 1837, Urbs in Horto took Columbus Park as a site for community-based arts programming, radio broadcasts, and other collective investigations. As architectural historian Jennifer Gray writes, "The activation of Columbus Park was motivated by the fact that people living in the immediately surrounding communities rarely visited it. These neighborhoods struggled with poverty, crime, drugs, and lack of opportunities, and the park, despite its proximity, felt alienating to many of the local, mostly Black residents, who felt unable to freely enjoy the parks open spaces." The year-long programs and happenings culminated symbolically on Columbus Day of 2003 with a day of community collaborations, radio broadcasts, workstations, screenings, installations, and performances. As Piazza wrote in an accompanying text, "It is with our collective dreams that we gather on the grounds of Columbus Park today....Urbs in Horto supports initiatives that call for new uses of public space which emphasizes making culture together—with all of us whose concerns are at stake rather than responding to or fitting into any initial design."

Museum and gallery projects (2007–present)
In the years that followed, Stockyard Institute undertook three major projects in more traditional institutional spaces: Pedagogical Factory: Exploring Strategies for an Educated Cities (2007), Nomadic Studio (2010), and PUBLIC SCHOOL (2017). Each exhibition transformed existing museum and gallery spaces into collaborative sites for the community, radical pedagogy, and direct democracy. Pedagogical Factory curator Allison Peters Quinn writes," After work hours and on weekends, the hypothetical factory came alive with material exchanges, yoga, recipe swaps, horticulture instruction, listening sessions, legal workshops, and various other programs attended by teachers, artists, families, and neighbors wanting to learn from one another. Pedagogical Factory not only offered participants foundational tools to question and modify how they seek out information, but also itself served as a catalysts for creative learning and citizenship." Contemporaneously with the exhibition, Duignan along with artist Daniel Tucker launched an arts journal titled AREA Chicago (Art, Research, Education, Activism) whose fifth issue, How We Learn, coincided with the Pedagogical Factory Exhibition. Nomadic Studio transformed the museum at DePaul University into an interactive open studio that emphasized art-making practices as process-based, open-ended collaborations rather than a site for the display of self-contained, already completed works of art. Artist and theorist Greg Sholette, in an essay written on the occasion of the Nomadic Studio show, referred to Stockyard Institute as "Mockinstitutional Aesthetics," which "offers one model for how improvisation and informality can be sustained in a learning situation over time." For the tenth anniversary of Pedagogical Factory Duignan returned to Hyde Park Art Center, this time with collaborator Rachel L. S. Harper, for the project PUBLIC SCHOOL (2017). As a response to the ongoing school closures and budget cuts that deeply affected Chicago Public Schools, Duignan and Harper "sourced their ideas from spaces of wonder and exploration traversed before the streetlights went on: playgrounds, libraries, forts, stages, garages, and gymnasiums prompt activity and self-education early in life and prioritize learning from a physical understanding of environment." Teaching artists and students from across the city used the space to collectively rethink the meaning of public education. This same concern with public education is treated in the ongoing project Reimagining Abandoned Schools (2013–present) in which Stockyard Institute works with students across Chicago to collect proposals on how to repurpose abandoned school buildings.

In 2021, DePaul Art Museum organized the first retrospective of Duignan and Stockyard Institute curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm.

Other projects
Though Stockyard Institute is a deeply collaborative practice, Duignan has nonetheless produced a variety of other projects that investigate similar concerns and themes. In 2012, Duignan participated in the exhibition Opening the Black Box: The Charge is Torture organized by Chicago Torture Justice Memorials (CTJM) at the Sullivan Galleries at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. CTJM asked artists to submit speculative proposals to imagine reparations for Chicago Police and Jon Burge torture survivors. Duignan submitted one of his many planter box works titled Salve, which was planted with aloe vera. Rachel L. S. Harper described the exhibition as creating a space for "Viewers [to] engage in participatory understanding of the multifaceted image of each proposal, and become present with the unsettled knowledge in transition. We begin to imagine that justice may become transformative in movement through the transition between the world we have found and the one we will create."