Founded in 1995 by Jim Duignan, Stockyard Institute is a Chicago-based artistic and pedagogical collective whose practices center on a variety of issues concerning youth, Chicago, visual art, community, and social knowledge.
Much of Stockyard Institute’s practices employ the city itself often modeled as a test kitchen for generating understandings that can inform and shape new personal meaning. It is a network of teachers, activists, artists, writers, producers, and friends. As a lose assemblage of practitioners, it designs temporary art projects and sustainable art education programs that considers people in their many capacities as community producers. It welcomes those willing to expand and contract with it in a reasonable extension of growth and focus, while respectfully navigating the city’s more quieter sectors.
Stockyard Institute was originally situated in the Southwest Side community, Back of the Yards. From there it floated from community to community taking shape in whatever iteration was possible. Today it has a more fixed location around DePaul University. Jim Duignan’s professorship at the university has allowed the organization to galvanize future efforts. In that capacity, Stockyard Institute serves as a platform for undergraduate and graduate students to investigate and engage their pedagogical interests via Stockyard Institute resources.
Stockyard Institute believes in economies of exchange, participation, and empowerment, therefore its materials are often free and open. Free resources, free speech, free broadcasts, free publishing, free teaching, free information, free art, free learning, free thinking, and free styling are major components.