South Side Home Movie Project celebrates 20 years
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Image of the Bud Billiken Parade from the Ramon Williams Collection. Photo: Courtesy of the South Side Home Movie Project, Arts + Public Life
After two decades and thousands of hours of memories, the South Side Home Movie Project is sharing stories from South Side families in a new exhibition.
The big picture: "The Act of Recording is an Act of Love: The South Side Home Movie Project" is a curated exploration of the home movies collected by SSHMP since 2005.
Flashback: Jacqueline Stewart founded the SSHMP at the University of Chicago after seeing the recordings of a man in a Japanese internment camp.
- "He had a camera in secret and he was shooting the staff of the cafeteria and kids sledding and people posing after church services. And it blew my mind. He was showing us everyday life persisted even in the most difficult of circumstances; people lived their daily lives as best they could," Stewart told Newcity recently.
How it works: Stewart, a film scholar who grew up on Chicago's South Side, knew after seeing that home movie that there must be hours of analog memories that would be worth bringing into current media forms.
- Stewart and students posted flyers around UChicago's campus asking for neighbors' submissions.
By the numbers: SSHMP has collected more than 1,000 reels of 16mm, 8mm, and Super-8mm footage from over 40 families shot between the 1930s to the 1980s and digitized many of them.
- The project has also collected oral histories from its donors.
If you go: The new exhibition is at the Logan Center for the Arts in Hyde Park from Friday through Aug. 24.
- Plus, there's a handful of special events, including Sunday's "Mothering on Screen" film series, a screening of six films that show the experiences of Black mothers across decades.