Cyraina Johnson-Roullier & John Preus
Project Overview
Getting in the Way: Making Sense of COVID-19, Racial Injustice and Humanity in Chicago and New York City: The late Congressman John Lewis cautioned us to understand that “in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine.” But at this point in our American history, what has been called a reckoning on race has sparked a global conversation on inequality, highlighting its significance in health disparities, educational and economic oppression, the school to prison pipeline and police brutality. Central to this reckoning is the question of humanity. With the frustration brought on by the isolation of quarantine and the threat of infection on one hand, and the videotaped reality of racial injustice in the form of police brutality on the other, making sense of our troubled world is a difficult task, but not impossible to achieve. By using the Four C’s of 21st Century Skills Learning (critical thinking, creativity,
collaboration and communication) as a backdrop, participating youth will gain crucial aptitudes for future academic and professional endeavors. Fostering dialogue between youth from two of the different cities hardest hit by these issues will provide much-needed perspective on the difficulties we share as well as their possible solutions. And by taking the time to learn and think more deeply about what makes us human in and through such dialogue, students will participate in creating the strong foundation necessary to create the compassionate world we seek for the future, learning to build together across the divides of disease and health, wealth and poverty, equality and inequality, justice and injustice,
violence and non-violence.
Meet the Artist
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier teaches Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame. A former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is the author of Reading on the Edge:Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce and Baldwin (SUNY 2000), and has published critical essays on modernism, literary and feminist theory, American and African American literature and literature of the Americas, as well as several op eds on systemic racism and COVID-19. Her essay, “The City Shining on a Hill, or by a Lake: (Re)Thinking Modern Americanness, (Re)Writing the American Lynch Narrative and Ida B. Wells” appeared in the January 2018 issue of Modernism/modernity. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript that interrogates Americanness through the lenses of race, gender, law and utopia, and a memoir entitled Hands: A Touch of Cancer.
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Cyraina Johnson-Roullier teaches Modern Literature and Literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame. A former Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, she is the author of Reading on the Edge:Exiles, Modernities, and Cultural Transformation in Proust, Joyce and Baldwin (SUNY 2000), and has published critical essays on modernism, literary and feminist theory, American and African American literature and literature of the Americas, as well as several op eds on systemic racism and COVID-19. Her essay, “The City Shining on a Hill, or by a Lake: (Re)Thinking Modern Americanness, (Re)Writing the American Lynch Narrative and Ida B. Wells” appeared in the January 2018 issue of Modernism/modernity. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript that interrogates Americanness through the lenses of race, gender, law and utopia, and a memoir entitled Hands: A Touch of Cancer.
Visit their Website
Meet the Artist
John Preus
Portrait by Suzette Bross
John Preus (rhymes with choice – b. 1971) spent his early years running barefoot under a cathedral of trees in Makumira, Tanzania, then grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and northern Wisconsin. Preus, currently works as an artist, builder, fabricator, amateur writer, musician, and collaborator.
After receiving his bachelors in art, Preus studied hand-tool furniture-making with master, John Nesset. He fabricated for Nesset, and later for many other artists and designers including, Dan Peterman, Theaster Gates, Omer Arbel, and Norman Teague. Preus co-founded SHoP, a community art space in Hyde Park Chicago with Laura Shaeffer (2011), and Material Exchange with Sara Black (2005). and collaborated with Theaster Gates on the Dorchester Projects, and was project lead for 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, at Documenta 13, the culmination of a 6 year collaboration with Gates.
Preus was recently a Kaplan resident at Northwestern University, a 2016 nominee for the US Artist Fellowship, and was included in New City’s Chicago Art 50 in 2016. He was the 2013-2014 Jackman-Goldwasser resident at the Hyde Park Art Center, a 2015 Propeller Fund recipient, a 2014 Efroymson Fellow in sculpture and installation, 2014’s first place winner of the Maker grant and a 2013 finalist. He was a finalist for the 2015 Artadia Award and the 2014 Creative Capital grant, and a 2014 DCASE artist grant recipient.
Selected solo exhibitions include, The Beast: Herd Mentality at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, John Preus: New Work at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, The Relative Appetite of Hungry Ghosts at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, John Preus On Drawing at the Heilbronn Kunstverein in Germany, The Beast at The Hyde Park Art Center, Slow Sound at the Experimental Sound Studio. Group shows include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Threewalls Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR, The Iceberg Gallery in Portland, OR. Miami/Basel, the New York Armory Show, ADAA, EXPO Chicago, The Elmhurst Biennial, The Huguenot House in Kassel, Germany, The Devos Art Museum in Michigan.
John Preus (rhymes with choice – b. 1971) spent his early years running barefoot under a cathedral of trees in Makumira, Tanzania, then grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and northern Wisconsin. Preus, currently works as an artist, builder, fabricator, amateur writer, musician, and collaborator.
After receiving his bachelors in art, Preus studied hand-tool furniture-making with master, John Nesset. He fabricated for Nesset, and later for many other artists and designers including, Dan Peterman, Theaster Gates, Omer Arbel, and Norman Teague. Preus co-founded SHoP, a community art space in Hyde Park Chicago with Laura Shaeffer (2011), and Material Exchange with Sara Black (2005). and collaborated with Theaster Gates on the Dorchester Projects, and was project lead for 12 Ballads for Huguenot House, at Documenta 13, the culmination of a 6 year collaboration with Gates.
Preus was recently a Kaplan resident at Northwestern University, a 2016 nominee for the US Artist Fellowship, and was included in New City’s Chicago Art 50 in 2016. He was the 2013-2014 Jackman-Goldwasser resident at the Hyde Park Art Center, a 2015 Propeller Fund recipient, a 2014 Efroymson Fellow in sculpture and installation, 2014’s first place winner of the Maker grant and a 2013 finalist. He was a finalist for the 2015 Artadia Award and the 2014 Creative Capital grant, and a 2014 DCASE artist grant recipient.
Selected solo exhibitions include, The Beast: Herd Mentality at Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, John Preus: New Work at Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, The Relative Appetite of Hungry Ghosts at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, John Preus On Drawing at the Heilbronn Kunstverein in Germany, The Beast at The Hyde Park Art Center, Slow Sound at the Experimental Sound Studio. Group shows include The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Threewalls Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, OR, The Iceberg Gallery in Portland, OR. Miami/Basel, the New York Armory Show, ADAA, EXPO Chicago, The Elmhurst Biennial, The Huguenot House in Kassel, Germany, The Devos Art Museum in Michigan.
Portrait by Suzette Bross
