Project Description

Echoes of the Heart sought to examine and improve neighborhood race relations in a Chicago neighborhood. The project consisted of a series of ten banners made in 1993 with a group of residents from Chicago's southwest side, an area surrounding Marquette Park, nationally infamous as the place where residents threw rocks at Martin Luther King. Adults, teens, and children worked with artist/facilitator Olivia Gude to generate the themes, images, and text that together presented a dynamic portrait of the complex social relations of the area. The project arose from the community, with the Southwest Catholic Cluster Project, an antiracism group, providing leadership

Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities

A multiracial discussion group agreed to come together to try to speak frankly about race and the neighborhood. Participants shared stories of anger, grief, fear, and embarrassment, and analyzed structures of language and politics, as they sought to find a practical basis for fulfilling spiritual commitments to break down barriers of racial difference. Because of its extensive community-based mural work, the Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) was invited to participate in a gathering on community, culture, spirituality, and race. Through networks formed at that gathering, Gude, a CPAG artist, proposed a project that would represent this kind of dialogue to others in the community. CPAG aims to help communities "represent themselves to themselves." Apparent within the dialogues was how subjectivity changes over time. People present themselves not as standard historical types, but as human beings whose thoughts and reactions shift according to accumulated experience. The Catholic Cluster provided a structure through which the banners could be shown at various community sites and thus become incorporated into an ongoing dialogue. 

Information Sources
Gude, Olivia. "Beyond Monological Monuments." Public Art Review, spring/summer 1995.