Chicago’s Exquisite Corpus

In 1993, Imagine Chicago organized a series of public forums for six downtown churches on the city as context for God’s imagination. Having recognized that our city suffered from a ‘divided imagination’, we were interested in stimulating more people to think about Chicago as a whole.

Over eight evenings, we discussed different dimensions of the city’s life. Nathan Mason, an artist, suggested we commission eight local artists (including a 15-year-old newly arrived Polish immigrant and an 82-year-old African American grandmother) to conceptualize and create Chicago’s "body". At the start of each session, the artists inspired us to re-member the city as a whole living body by symbolizing and reconnecting the different parts. Chicago’s beauty, diversity and vitality included images and representations of Chicago’s arts and architecture, sports and work, neighborhoods and natural settings, and its many people, young and old, famous and infamous, of all ages, shapes and colors.

The inclusion of the arts community as a key resource in this early Imagine Chicago initiative permanently shaped our thinking about the importance of the arts in inspiring imagination for public good. Imagine Chicago has subsequently integrated the arts in multiple ways, in all of its programs — using dance, music, visual arts, community performance, masks, quilt-making, paper mache and other media — to inspire and express vital understandings and connections. In the Urban Imagination Network, Imagine Chicago’s most extensive and long-term initiative, multiple arts media were integrated across the whole curriculum of schools involved in the program. Citizenship depends on being able to understand, imagine and create. Those processes can be effectively cultivated with great delight by encouraging artistic expression of what we understand, including what we see and hope for our city.