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Terri Kapsalis, Damon Locks, and Ken Vandermark
National Public Housing Museum, 919 S. Ada Street, Chicago, IL 60607
A small leather satchel with four vials of pills and powder accompanied Jane Addams on her expeditions around the world. This travel kit is on display in the settlement house leader and social reformer’s bedroom at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago, along with her Nobel Peace Prize and the thick FBI file that once tracked “the most dangerous woman in America.”
Medicine Kit is a recorded sound piece based on an enthralling label for this object written by Kapsalis, featuring Damon Locks on sampler/electronics and Ken Vandermark on reeds. Part forensic mystery, part experimental documentary, Medicine Kit is a sonic meditation on rest and restlessness, antagonism and peace, domesticity and social justice, medicine and poison.
For this special launch and listening party, all three artists will be present for a discussion about the collaborative and improvisation-based process of making the piece and the relevance of Addams’ work and ideas today.
Terri Kapsalis is the author of “Jane Addams’ Travel Medicine Kit,” “The Hysterical Alphabet” and “Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum.” A co-founder of Theater Oobleck and a collective member at Chicago Women’s Health Center, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. He leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals.Damon is a 2025 recipient of the Creative Capital Award. In 2019, he became a 3Arts Awardee, and In 2017 he became a Soros Justice Media Fellow. Damon teaches Improvisation in the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (Photo by zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o’neal)
Ken Vandermark is an avant-garde composer, improviser, saxophonist/clarinetist, curator, and writer. In 1999 was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship in music. His current group activity includes the bands Edition Redux, Lean Left, The DKV Trio, DEK, his large ensemble Entr’acte, the ongoing Momentum projects; duos with Terrie Ex, Christof Kurzmann, Damon Locks, Paal Nilssen-Love, Mars Williams, and Nate Wooley. Ken co-founded Catalytic Sound in 2012, an organization dedicated to the economic sustainability of creative improvising musicians and has been its director since then. In 2014 he began Audiographic Records, an independent music label. Since June of 2015 Ken has been co-curator of Option, a music and interview series held at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago.
