ARTIST STATEMENT
In summer 2020, in the early stages of transitioning, I began researching and responding to Chicago’s B.F. Ferguson Monument Fund and the public art it funded, independently organizing discussions with diverse Chicagoans about its history and commissions. My artistic responses reimagine the frozen figures in the Fund’s art as alive, cosmic, and ominous women. I began with acrylic paintings on wood of towering, faceless robed figures and expanded to easily- reproducible digital drawings of vivid women in colorful wardrobes. I have made small, shareable stickers of the digital drawings, allowing the colorful figures to travel to other cities and even countries. In 2023, informed by my own in-person archival research at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, I began on-site performances that activate the Ferguson Fund’s distributed archive, first posing in a sculpture’s original location blocks from where it is today. Through my body, I, as a tall, white transwoman, not only activate archival details in the present, but also publicly challenge the inherited gender expectations and imaginary public reflected in art commissioned by the wealthy, white cis men who administered the Ferguson Fund in the early twentieth century. Both my image-making and on-site activations highlight the interconnection between gender, race, and class, and their relationship to power over public space, public art, and public memory making.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Eve bridges is a white transwoman, self-taught artist and educator who has lived in Chicago since 2010. She has taught arts and humanities at multiple Chicago’s City Colleges, as well as writing and philosophy with adult learners in Illinois Humanities’ Odyssey Project. In summer 2020, eve began researching the BF Ferguson Monument Fund and the early public art it funded. In addition to writing about the Ferguson Fund and leading on-site discussions with diverse Chicagoans about its commissions, eve also creates interpretive art and activations that reimagine the Fund’s public art. eve’s research has been supported by three Illinois Humanities’ Activate History Grants from 2020 to 2023.
© Eve Bridges