Why not eat some vegetable soup and support local art? Sunday Soup is a quarterly community meal, which is an event that supports artist initiatives and community projects in Chicago through a grant raised by the meal. For each dinner, head chef Eric May and his friends prepare a soup and other dishes using local ingredients. The meal is served family style and costs $15 per person.
The money from ticket sales (minus the cost of food) becomes a grant for a creative project. At the dinner, diners vote on proposals for creative projects that are displayed or presented at the meal. The project that gets the most votes gets the money from the Sunday Soup event. At the dinner past grantees will give updates, and there are sometimes readings or music performed.
Past presentations have included a art historical lecture on the aesthetic practice of walking by critic Lori Waxman, a meal by San Francisco underground restaurant chef Leif Hedendal, and Portlander Marc Moscato’s documentary on Chicago’s Dill Pickle Club. The event creates a participatory and transparent method of funding arts and culture. It also is a way to support dialogue about community, art, and funding. Who doesn’t have great conversation while eating a tasty shared meal?
Sunday Soup last occurred on Sunday May 6, 2012, and The Prison-Neighborhood Arts Project (P-NAP) received the most votes at the dinner. Prison-Neighborhood Arts Project is a new initiative that offers visual arts classes to men at Stateville prison and produces exhibitions of the resulting works in neighborhood galleries and community centers on a bi-annual basis. The Sunday Soup grant will support P-NAP to buy books for a new fall course in creative writing and literature. At the end of the fall semester, an exhibition of artworks and readings of student writing will be held in Chicago.
The project is a way to directly support projects made by individuals, which can be difficult to fund. Currently public money in general for the arts is minimal, and projects done by individuals are often funding by crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Artists and cultural producers have to often spend a lot of time putting a project into a definable category, and spending significant time in creating online campaigns.
The Sunday Soup grant is a simple and direct process, making Sunday Soup a direct and broad way for artists to potentially find support for projects. Some past projects that have been funded include Gabriel Saloman’s Spartacus School of Passing Time, AREA Chicago, Geraldine Juarez’s Tanda Foundation, Joseph Del Pesco’s Black Market Type project, and many others.
The project was initiated by InCUBATE in 2007 and restarted this past year after a two year break. Sunday Soup has helped support an international network of micro-granting community meals. Over 61 “sister projects” are currently in operation. You can read about the project, funded projects, and contact them if you want to participate or do your own soup events. The website has links to other artist-run funding projects, so you can connect with others in cities across the U.S.
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http://www.sundaysoup.org
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