Ed Marszewski could very well be the king of Chicago's underground art scene. He's the founder of The Co-Prosperity Sphere, one of the largest alternative art spaces in Chicago, located in the south side neighborhood of Bridgeport. In addition to hosting regular exhibitions and occasional concerts, each year he puts on two weeklong festivals, Select Media in the fall and Version in the spring, showcasing experimental work from around the world (the theme of last year's Select Media festival was "Infoporn," and Version's theme was "Dark Matter.") Marzewski also runs Lumpen, a free local art publication, and his most recent project, the Chicago-centric but nationally distributed, Proximity magazine, connects this scene to the larger art community. Marzewski recently sat down with PAPERMAG to shed some light into the booming alternative art scene in Chicago.
How long has the space been around and who all is involved?
Well this space, the Co-Prosperity Sphere, has been around for over two years now. It was an abandoned building and had been for maybe 10 years. This whole space was full of junk. I started fixing it up, the apartments, the plumbing and the electrical. I scraped the ceilings for three weeks straight with a wire brush and some friends. Back then it was people who used to be at the Buddy space we ran in Wicker Park. Reedo, this guy Matt, and I moved down here, and we just worked on it. I also hired a bunch of people to do plumbing, electrical and some construction stuff.
You guys have been doing Select Media and Version Festival for seven years now, and it used to be at the Buddy Gallery?
Well Version Festival started at the Museum of Contemporary Art and a bunch of other venues including Buddy and Heaven. We always use multiple venues for those programs, but in recent years we've been using The Co-Prosperity Sphere space as our headquarters for most of the main exhibitions. It's just more convenient. And we don't have to rent other spaces. This place has been operating as a regular facility since April 2007.
And now you guys opened a new space in the area?
Yeah, it's a tiny storefront called Eastern Expansion on 31st Street, a public display area in a different part of the neighborhood. The great thing about this space is the display window. The neighborhood kids and the people in the community can look at art from the street in a neighborhood that never had any kind of visual art. So we use storefronts whenever we can get them to do installations. In 2004 we met these guys who own some huge factories down on 35th Street. So we took up like 100,000 square feet in these two different factories and started doing our festivals there. One festival had the theme "Bridgeport, Community of the Future." We actually rented out a bunch of storefronts on this block, opened a Quimby's Bookstore, a Myopic Bookstore and a video store. We called it "The Experimental Cultural Zone" as a way to see what impact the freaky, independent artist culture would have on the neighborhood.
And those were all meant to be temporary?
It was a one-month-long project. We had no idea we would actually be here at that time because we were still doing our thing in Wicker Park. So it's really ironic that we ended up being back in the Experimental Cultural Zone three or four years later.
(Above: Clockwise from top left) The installation of Version>07 at Co-Prosperity Sphere; Paper Rad Window Installation; Michael T Rea Opening; Ray Noland Installation
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