By late afternoon on sunny days, Natasha Moustache’s studio at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) fills with warm light that illuminates a portrait of Moustache’s mother hung up on the wall. The photographer is still decorating their space as they settle into their year-long residency at the center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., but it’s already inviting, with a golden accent wall, photographs neatly spread out across a long table, and rolls of wallpaper waiting to be installed.
Moustache is one of four artists who moved into HPAC studio spaces in January as part of the center’s Radicle Studio Residency, a free program for Chicago artists. The residency, which runs until December, gives artists access to an individual studio space, the center’s network of artists and resources, and connections to the Chicago art world.
As a sort of mission statement for the residency, HPAC’s website writes: “The radicle is the first part of a seedling to burst forth from a seed, rooting itself deeply into the earth.”
As they settle into their studio, Moustache plans to hang rolls of wallpaper they made next. The wallpaper is a kaleidoscopic arrangement of one of Moustache’s photos of a ginger root. To Moustache, ginger is much more than a cooking ingredient — it’s a metaphor for the resiliency of the African diaspora.
“It is the absolute perfect symbol for the diaspora,” said Moustache. “If you cut a ginger piece off and … put it in this dark place where you think it shouldn’t grow and shouldn’t survive, and it shouldn’t thrive, by all accounts you think it will just shrivel up and die. It doesn’t. It actually grows and reboots and reconnects and it builds new nodes.”
Moustache’s work investigates this ability of the African diaspora to thrive across the globe, even in harsh conditions. One of their recent projects, “Under the Same Sun,” followed the lives of three mothers: Moustache’s mother Anne, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Seychelles, and two Chicagoans named Apple and Yuvette.
“I was thinking about the relationships between the Black American community and the African immigrant community, and how there can sometimes be a distance between those communities. I was thinking about the ways we share cultures and history,” Moustache said about their conversations with Apple and Yuvette, who are Black Americans from Chicago and the South, respectively.
By photographing all three women, Moustache hoped to “build a family archive” of the diaspora.
A relatively recent newcomer to the South Side, Moustache moved to Bronzeville in 2019, the year they began a masters in photography at Columbia College Chicago.
Though Moustache’s creative practice typically just involves walking through neighborhoods and forming relationships with its residents whom they photograph, they’re also interested in making use of their new studio space at the HPAC to run posed photography sessions.
Having a physical space carved out for the practice of art-making is also essential for Moustache’s fellow resident Keith Wilson, a poet and game designer.
He works at Resilient Games Studio, which is owned by the University of Chicago, where he builds educational video games. Alongside his game design, Wilson is a poet. His first book, “Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love,” was published in 2019.
Though to some they may seem vastly different, Wilson described how his game design and poetry inform each other and blend together.
“Games are both serious and unserious,” he said. “People think about games and they’re like, ‘you just play them for fun!’ (But) if you watch anyone who cares about games, and even people who don’t care that much about games, they’re serious business.”
Recently, Wilson created a chess puzzle that includes elements of poetry to make an argument about police brutality.
“On the chess board, I have text, so as you’re trying to solve the puzzle, and you’re moving the pieces, you can read part of a poem,” Wilson said.
In this puzzle, knights mounted on horseback represent police, and move around the board, revealing Wilson’s poem beneath them.
As Wilson experiments more with visual poetry and games, he’s increasingly interested in collaborations with some of the visual artists at the HPAC and using his studio space there to make bigger pieces of art and poetry that can’t fit in a traditional book.
“Making visual art takes a lot of space,” Wilson said. “I have never had enough space that I can make something large.” He said he wants to use the wall of his studio for something, perhaps projecting, but he hasn’t settled on an idea yet.
As he experiments with hybrid forms in his studio, Wilson also plans to work on revising his second book, “Games for Children,” a draft of which is already done. “Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love” focused broadly on legacies of violence like slavery and policing, descriptions of visual art, and discussions of love in all of its forms.
“When you’re in love with someone, often the things that you value the most about them you don’t really realize, maybe only until they’re gone, are very ordinary things, like just sitting around doing nothing, or being on long drives, or eating dinner together,” said Wilson.
Wilson, like Moustache, has spent years living on the South Side. Wilson moved to Hyde Park in 2011 and has lived in the neighborhood ever since.
“I just really love Hyde Park because it’s essentially a part of the University of Chicago … It’s also part of the South Side, so it’s more diverse in many ways,” said Wilson. “(It’s) walking distance to the lake. I just really love, love the neighborhood.”
Whether it means going out into the streets and photographing locals or holding poetry workshops, Moustache and Wilson say they plan to fully embed themselves into the Hyde Park community during their residency.
A community dinner and discussion with HPAC’s Radicle Studio Residents will take place at the center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave., on March 14 from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
