A real-world ‘Sesame Street’: Lawndale Pop-Up Spot puts art, storytelling in the hands of the public

What was once an empty lot at the southwest corner of Douglas Boulevard and Central Park Avenue has been reinvented as a space reminiscent of a real-world “Sesame Street.”

With an emphasis on education and activities for children and adults alike, Lawndale’s Pop-Up Spot, at 3601 W. Douglas Blvd. in the Love Blooms Here Plaza, is a community-led museum housed in a shipping container. It has been featuring art and narratives by and for West Side residents since 2019 under the guidance of co-founders Chelsea Ridley and Jonathan Kelley.

At the Pop-Up Spot, whirligigs stand proud next to a sensory sand table for tikes. Pavers make the area accessible among the landscaping that surrounds the 20-foot shipping container. And past and present exhibits look at physical and emotional safety, Earth’s healing foliage, and ancestral histories of Black and brown women. Let’s not forget the colorful mosaics that rest next to a pergola built by Boy Scouts or the grill that sits at the ready for public gatherings.

On a rainy day in early June, pages of Natasha Tarpley’s book “I Love My Hair” were displayed on wooden stakes in the soil adjacent to the shipping container for youths to read as they walked by. Inside the container, kids can pick up a book to enjoy on the beanbag or take it home to read.

The Pop-Up Spot is the brainchild of Ridley and Kelley, who wanted to take museum curation out of the institutional landscape and bring it to the everyday person.

“We work under the model of museums as soup kitchens,” Ridley said. “Museums should be more than just places to display things; museums should provide services to the people. If you think about museums and the landscape of Chicago, museums are downtown, all in one location, or on the South Side, where you have the DuSable Museum. The West Side is left out. So this is a great nexus, a center for stories of the West Side. There’s a rich history here. (The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) lived here when he lived in Chicago. This is a place to find, collect and tell stories.”

The idea for the Pop-Up Spot was born in 2016, when Ridley and Kelley were getting their master’s degrees at the University of Illinois at Chicago in museum studies. The concept is an ongoing conversation between the pair and the communities they serve: North Lawndale and Little Village.

Ridley said the idea came to fruition when North Lawndale was coming up with its Quality of Life Plan in 2018. While convening with community members at planning meetings to dispel myths about what a museum is and isn’t and what it could be, Ridley and Kelley started getting buy-in for the facility, building partnerships along the way and letting the vision be molded by the community.

Kelley said he and Ridley are always searching for ways to better engage with the environment around them. That means being responsive to what people want to see — their interests and curiosities. Last summer that meant condensing what Kelly and Ridley learned in their museum studies curricula and making it accessible to an intergenerational cohort of a dozen adults who were paid to brainstorm an exhibition topic, go on field trips to other museums, and research, develop and install their own exhibit in the fall.

Typically closed during winter, the Lawndale Pop-Up Spot hosts six to eight exhibits a year, predominantly featuring works by and with West Side artists, curators and community organizations. Installations are open four to five days a week, depending on staffing, and outdoor activities are held as well, according to Kelley.

The June exhibit is “Readers Are Leaders,” an early literacy installation sponsored by the One Lawndale Children’s Discovery Center. Ridley is also the director of community engagement at Open Books, a nonprofit that provides literacy experiences for readers through programs and the sale of new and used donated books.

“Reimagining 16th Street” opens Saturday with murals and sculptures. People will be invited to tell stories about the buildings that used to sit on the now-vacant lots as a way to start imagining what could exist in the commercial corridor.

“This commercial corridor … unfortunately, over the last several decades, it’s become disinvested,” Kelley said. “Only now are you starting to see things perk up again. Seeing 16th Street become more active, beautiful, safe and in service through beautification, through people living there, shopping there, dining, just being a more happening corridor … that’s something we’re really excited about.”

In July, “Cornelia’s Lounge: An Immersive Juke Joint Experience” will allow visitors to explore the historical and cultural perspectives of juke joints by inviting artists, poets and musicians to give performances. In the fall, an exhibit about the tree canopy on the West Side will take center stage in collaboration with the Chicago Architecture Center.

With a goal of being accessible and intentional, the Pop-Up Spot offers free events like Sundays on the Boulevard and Fridays on the Plaza, where grilling, arts and crafts activities, and music are shared with the community. The museum space has also shown movies against the side of the shipping container and also hosted cookouts, catered events, produce giveaways and book giveaways.

The Lawndale Pop-Up Spot also co-sponsors the Let’s Move Saturday morning walks starting in Douglass Park, the Litter-Free Lawndale initiative and the annual Chicago Sukkah Design Festival honoring the Jewish heritage of the neighborhood.

The museum’s mission is to collaborate with churches, schools and organizations to bring resources like mental health and physical health services to the area, all of which help the Pop-Up Spot be as rooted in the community as possible.

“It’s a simple concept,” Ridley said of the museum. “Our mission is to listen to people and let that be our guidance, which gives us a level of planning year by year, but who knows what will happen next month or next year that we want to respond to. We want to be responsive so we have to stay nimble and on our toes.”

The next goal for the museum? Coming up with more creative things that excite the imagination, but also doing what needs to be done, which translates into building up community metrics like sustainability, wealth, safety and health to maintain an environment that every kid deserves to grow up in regardless of the job their parents have or their location, Kelley said.

“This needs and deserves to be a brilliant community at every level,” he said. “It is already, in so many ways; it has so much richness in terms of the history and culture and the people in the spaces. In those places where metrics lag behind, how can a museum/cultural institution help engage with those and hopefully overcome.”