Red Line Service
Red Line Service creates cultural experiences for and with Chicagoans concerned about and/or currently in transition*. We insist and demonstrate that communal artistic and intellectual enrichment awakens imaginative possibilities in all people, encouraging them to envision, aspire to, and build alternative realities. In partnership with organizations providing direct services and those advocating for policy development we strive to open and expand critical dialogues about poverty, social responsibility, and culture. At the same time, we strive to stimulate growth and change for all program participants, those in transition as well as their housed counterparts, and to transform the cultural institutions that house our programs. In solidarity, we are working to reshape our society into a more connected – more loving – community of care.
Red Line Service reframes art as a broad social justice endeavor by establishing a practice that values civic engagement over artifact and deliberately eschews commodification. We stand in favor of a creative culture that bumps up against and becomes the lived experience of everyday life. The work of art lies not in the programming itself but rather in the enactment of belonging and the insistence on modeling a radical human unity.
*We use the word transition to affirm that homelessness is a temporary set of circumstances and not a state of being.