Curated by Nate Olison and Elgin Bokari Smith of
Stomping Grounds Literary Arts Initiative
Stomping Grounds Literary Arts Initiative (SGLAI) helps empower people through the art of storytelling, with a focus on incarcerated youth. Through SGLAI programming, children get a chance to produce their own songs, publish their own comics, and realize just how powerful their voices and stories can be. These achievements can have a profound impact on students’ lives, from inspiring their choice of career to positively influencing their court cases and bids for freedom.
Locked Achievements showcases the work done in SGLAI teacher Nate Olison’s classes. While Nate’s own work focuses on helping children tell their stories through comics, his students are free to explore their ideas with a variety of media, from poetry to music production. They even came up with the title of this exhibition, highlighting how even though they’re locked up, they can still achieve meaningful things.
The Beautiful Cat is proud and excited to present Locked Achievements for our inaugural exhibition. As a gallery in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood, situated between several immigrant communities, we focus on under-represented, excluded, and under-resourced communities, creatives, and art forms. Locked Achievements exemplifies these values and our hopes for the future, a future free from incarceration, where being creative and making art is seen as a right, not a privilege only accessible to people of certain income brackets.
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See the Exhibition
Locked Achievements is on display at The Beautiful Cat from Saturday, February 22 – Sunday, March 30. As a window gallery, the works are viewable 24/7 at the northeast corner of Granville and Winthrop. It is located just a half block east of the Granville Red Line stop and a block west of the 147 express bus at 1070 W Granville, Chicago, IL 60660.
Meet the Artists
Interview with Nate Olison
Nate Olison
Comic Artist, Teaching Artist, Curator
Nate Olison is a comic artist who specializes in helping people express themselves through art. As an SGLAI teaching artist, he mentors incarcerated youth, including the students featured in this exhibition. Check out the interview below to learn more about how Nate and SGLAI use empathetic teaching practices to help students realize that they can shine by sharing their voices with the world.
This piece, Harriet Tubman in Space!, is an afrofuturist meditation on some of the questions that dominate Nate’s life. What does a utopia consist of exactly, and what would we have to heal in order to create one? How much of the past can you take with you to the future? What is left when you forget who you are?
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Exhibition Catalog
Bring the artists’ work home with an exhibition catalog showcasing works from the show as well as a behind-the-scenes look at SGLAI classes.
