Video Game Exhibition About Historic Bronzeville This Fall
Image credit: Dateline Bronzeville © Screenshot Courtesy of Philip Mallory Jones, Donald Brooks Jones, Alchemy Media Publishing
Dateline: Bronzeville
Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative
1456 E 70th St, Chicago, IL
Hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12 - 7 pm
Organized by VGA Gallery in Partnership with Rebuild Foundation
Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Sept. 30th
Video Game Art (VGA) Gallery and the Rebuild Foundation are delighted to announce a fall 2016 exhibition (Sept. 30th - Dec. 18th, 2016) of artwork by Philip Mallory Jones, a multimedia artist from Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood, who is making a video game about Chicago's South Side, circa 1940, titled Dateline: Bronzeville. This exhibition will take place at the Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative (1456 E 70th St, Chicago, IL) and is timed to coincide with the Centennial of the Great Migration.
In the first half of the 20th century, Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood was known as the Black Metropolis and was populated by waves of African Americans from the South, who arrived during the Great Migration. It was a dynamic period for business, sports, culture and the arts. Jones is developing a first-person mystery game for consoles, mobile devices, and virtual reality, set during this period. Dateline: Bronzeville is planned for release in 2017. The exhibition will include prints of screenshots and standalone art from the game, video animation, corollary historical material, and a playable game vignette.
About the Game: Dateline Bronzeville is planned for release in 2017. It is a first- person mystery adventure where the player assumes the role of Runny Walker, a seasoned photojournalist and columnist for the Chicago Advocate. The game takes place over the course of three weeks and each week you publish a weekly column that chronicles and critiques the spectrum of social, political, cultural, sport, entertainment and community events in Bronzeville. But the player also digs dangerously deeper, solving crimes and exposing corruption in Bronzeville. The player intuitively explores the fascinating world of a now-vanished Bronzeville, and interacts with numerous distinctive characters, and experiences the milieu of Chicago’s South side during The Great Migration, The Great Depression, The Chicago Renaissance, and Jim Crow Segregation, while discovering clues in order to solve several crimes and mysteries.
About the Artist: Philip Mallory Jones has long played an important role in the media arts field; he was founder and Executive Director of Ithaca Video Projects, a pioneering media arts center, from 1971 to 1984, and Director of the Ithaca Video Festival from 1974 to 1984. Jones received a B.A. from Beloit College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Cornell University. Among his numerous awards are grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, New York State Council on the Arts, the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen, the Independent Television Service, and the National Black Programming Consortium. He has held faculty posts at Ithaca College, Howard University, the State University of New York at Fredonia, and was Batza Distinguished Scholar in Art and Art History at Colgate University. He has been Resident Artist at the Television Laboratory at WNET/Thirteen; American Center, Paris. France; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; the Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, and the Aesthetic Technologies Lab, The Ohio University, among other institutions. His videotapes and installations have been exhibited internationally, at festivals and institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Artists Space, New York; American Film Institute National Video Festival, Los Angeles; National Black Arts Festival, Atlanta; FestRio, Brazil; and the Afro‐American Museum, Los Angeles. Jones currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
This project is made possible by a generous grant from The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust.
Development of Dateline: Bronzeville has been made possible, in part, by significant support from The Black Metropolis National Heritage Area Commission.