SOPHY Hotel Art Collection

Connected Through Art

In partnership with Trinal, Inc., SOPHY® donated art supplies to Hyde Park Academy High School, where students created 60 original works celebrating Hyde Park’s history and culture. Their artwork formed an outdoor mural displayed at the hotel site during construction.

SOPHY® also helped fund smart TVs so students could connect and collaborate with art students at other schools.

From the Source

At the turn of every corner is an eclectic collection of art that celebrates community and the artists and artisans that create it. Each piece is thoughtfully selected to inspire conversation, touch on the past, or incite something within you.

Meet the Artists

Paul Branton

Lewis Achenbach

Painting Jazz: Chicago Artist Sketches The Scene

Perhaps you've seen him at the Green Mill or Constellation, seated close to the action, focusing intently on the musicians, glancing down at his sketchpad then looking back up at the stage.

His arm moves constantly, reaching for certain colors, applying them to paper, creating forms and shapes and rhythms that reflect what he hears.

Most people in the audience may be relaxing, reveling in the music, sipping a drink, whispering to a friend, pondering. But Chicago artist Lewis Achenbach is busily at work, attempting the impossible: to capture a most elusive music — jazz — in visual form.

Achenbach has been haunting Chicago's jazz rooms and festivals for the past three or four years, he estimates, chronicling in thoroughly personal terms the city's ever-expanding jazz landscape. He moved here from San Francisco in 2011, was struck by what he encountered and decided that he had to respond.

"I realized the Chicago scene is every night," says Achenbach.

"The scene out here is so rich, and most of the guys are so humble about what they're doing. And they welcomed me.

"This scene needs to be documented," adds Achenbach. "I know there's photographs. And going off on a slight tangent, (consider) a Louis Armstrong record. You listen to it, you see photographs. I'd think: That's probably not what it was like to hear the music live. It's like watching a video of a video of a video.

"What must it have been like to hear Louis Armstrong live? It must have been new. It must have blown your mind. So I thought this is my job: Use my gifts to document what's happening. It's very rich now. I feel like I'm plucking fruits from a very fruitful tree."

Indeed Achenbach has been practically ubiquitous at Chicago's jazz shows, drawing Herb Alpert and Lani Hall at City Winery last Thursday; sketching Henry Threadgill at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival last month; documenting an eruption of sound during the 50th anniversary concert of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) at the University of Chicago's Mandel Hall last April.

I'll leave it to the art critics to weigh the merits of this work, but there's no question it gets at the vibrancy of the music in deeply idiosyncratic terms. Achenbach's images — crowded with color, punctuated with long lines and surging with energy — express not only the vitality of Chicago jazz in the 21st century but his own ardor for it.

Much of his work zeroes in on the jazz avant-garde, musicians experimenting boldly in work that avoids traditional concepts of melody, backbeat, harmony and structure. Adventurous audiences flock to this idiom in Chicago, a nexus for jazz experimentation since the dawn of the 20th century. In gravitating to music by Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Ken Vandermark and other iconoclasts, Achenbach is celebrating a core identity of Chicago jazz.

"I think it takes a certain kind of person to not only enjoy that kind of music, but put yourself in a room where this can be challenging," says Achenbach, citing a 2014 performance by the explosive Chicago Reed Quartet.

"These guys are all playing at the same time — some people run out of the room. I find when I'm drawing, it helps me listen. It occupies part of my brain so I can hear."

"I've also drawn Colin Hay," adds Achenbach, referencing a pop singer-songwriter best known as frontman of Men at Work. "I know what songs he's going to do.

"But with creative (improvised) music, it's wide open. It's me going along with their courage … kind of like my version of sky diving. I have no idea what's going to happen. It's kind of scary, because I do sometimes work my way into a corner. The challenge is: How do I get out of this?"

But jazz musicians, who similarly invent their art as they proceed, often find themselves in quite the same quandary, trying to extricate themselves from a puzzle of their own making. That, of course, is a large part of the risk and thrill of the art form, and the parallels between the musicians' struggles and Achenbach's may help explain why so many players have allowed him to sketch their shows (he always asks permission in advance, he says, and "if someone says that's not OK with that vibe, that's cool").

In perhaps the ultimate compliment, some musicians have incorporated his work into theirs. Most recently, flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid and drummer Mike Reed have used an Achenbach original as cover art for their forthcoming album, "Artifacts," a celebration of the AACM's golden anniversary.

Achenbach's circuitous journey to this point began when he was a teenager in the Philadelphia area and discovered jazz, quickly transitioning "from Iggy Pop to Pharoah Sanders," as he puts it. He studied film and animation at New York University and became enchanted with the work of New York artist Jeff Schlanger, who long has been at the forefront of painting live jazz performances.

With Schlanger's blessing, Achenbach says, he took up the cause in Chicago and eventually began creating what he calls Jazz Occurrences: live jazz performances in which he invites the audience to watch him paint and to enjoy a concurrent exhibition of various artists' work (the next Jazz Occurrence will be Saturday night at Constellation). In this, too, Achenbach is building on the work of his elders: Chicago drummer-bandleader Kahil El'Zabar long ago was staging multimedia music-and-art happenings here and around the world.

Though Achenbach supports his family by working as a "laborer, house painter, tradesman," he says, he sees his jazz work inevitably taking over.

"I paint in the day, I go out late at night," says Achenbach, who believes the free-flowing nature of jazz has become a guiding principle in his life.

"I find that listening to improvisational music, especially live, really makes you more adaptable to your life situation."

We all have to improvise in life, in other words — jazz shows us how.

"Portraits in Jazz": Howard Reich's e-book collects his exclusive interviews with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald and others, plus profiles of past masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Get "Portraits in Jazz" at www.chicagotribune.com/ebooks.

Frank Bell

Dan Christmas

Jason Dunda

About the Art

Unequal and unbalanced power captures my attention. I am working through source imagery from opposite ends of the authoritative spectrum – the hoodie, Josephine Baker, military uniforms, corporate mascots, and the pulpit. I blend and conjure a nonexistent middle ground as a sort of whimsical indictment. This parody of authority often results in portraitive abstractions. An implied head functions as an identity that can't quite be. When installed, I intend for my work to transform the exhibition space into a place of ironic celebration through caricature, as well as a space for liberal rage and aggressive progressiveness. Mitch McConnell, Judith and Holofernes, Joe Arpiao, Mike Daisey, and Miss Teen USA 2016 have been recent subjects for this form of sarcastic canonization.

I depict my imagery with an improvisational, gestural approach and a limited but sophisticated colour palette. I intend to temper the weight of my subject matter with lyrical, clumsily seductive line, form, and colour. I distill futility and failure into formal playfulness. I do not aspire to epiphany; I choose instead to highlight, satirize, and impugn.

About the Artist

Jason Dunda is a Chicago-based Canadian painter. He is currently working on a project entitled "Various Incidents" in which he translates imagery of authority and control into portraitive abstractions. Recent projects include "The ceiling caves in on Jason Dunda's head," a solo exhibition at Slow in Chicago; "Burn it Down" at Heaven Gallery in Chicago; "Everything Paper" at the University of Nebraska at Omaha; "Eating Cultures" at SOMArts in San Francisco; and "Isolated Fictions," a travelling group exhibition. International exhibits include the Heine-Onstad Art Centre in Oslo, and the Kuwait Art Foundation in Kuwait City. His work is represented in the collections of Todd Oldham, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre and the Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto. Recent residencies include the Corporation of Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the SÍM Residency in Reykjavik, Iceland, and a four-month research and production residency in Paris sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts.

Krista Franklin

About the Art

My work emerges at the intersection of poetics, popular culture, and the dynamic histories of the African Diaspora. The Fantastic, the surreal, mythmaking, black portraiture, and the collective conscious are conceptual preoccupations of my work. The forms take shape in collage, hand papermaking, installation, poetry, letterpress, altered bookmaking and performance. I appropriate image and text as a political gesture that chisels away at the narratives historically inscribed on women and people of color, and forges imaginative spaces for radical possibilities and visions.

Black ritual, the metaphysical and the black nostalgic are core concerns in my art practice. I orchestrate the collision of past, present and future, and mine historical and fictional memory for artistic content. Artist books inspired by the novels of science fiction author Octavia E. Butler, altered books in aquariums, and handmade paper formed with mixed media are a few examples of my artistic output. I drag racialized and gendered past(s) into my work in order to reframe and realign the dynamic psychological and physical experiences of the African Diaspora in the 21st Century.

The collective and collaborative are also central to my work. I cultivate artistic community with fellow artists, writers and scholars. This materializes in a diversity of projects from sonic/music collaborations to book and exhibition making, and salons that are committed to the development of ideas and concepts. It is a vital practice for me, and a continuous undercurrent that fosters the advancement of creative liberation, reflection, scholarship and artistic communion.

About the Artist

Krista Franklin is the recipient of the Propeller Fund and the Albert P. Weisman Award, and has held residencies at A Studio in the Woods, Cave Canem, and the University of Chicago's Arts + Public Life Initiative. Her poems and visual art have been published in Black Camera, Copper Nickel, Callaloo, Vinyl, BOMB Magazine and Encyclopedia, Vol. F-K. Willow Books published Study of Love & Black Body, her chapbook of poems, in 2012. Franklin's work has exhibited nationally, and was featured on 20th Century Fox's Empire (Season Two). She is the co-curator of the Chicago citywide poetry and art initiative, EKPHEST: A Festival of Art + Word, and 2nd Sun Salon, a community meeting space for writers, visual and performance artists, musicians and scholars. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts – Book & Paper from Columbia College Chicago.