Civic Love Luncheon

Getting to the heart of housing justice

Celebrate the role of art and culture in promoting housing justice at the National Public Housing Museum’s inaugural Civic Love Luncheon. 

Join our engaged community as we honor Elizabeth Alexander—poet, author, and president of the Mellon Foundation. This joyful and thought-provoking gathering also features a conversation between artist Amanda Williams and Charlottesville public housing resident leader Joy Johnson as well as readings from poets Eve L. Ewing and Elise Paschen. 

We hope you will join us for an unforgettable luncheon supporting the National Public Housing Museum as a cultural and civic incubator in Chicago.

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Host Committee

• Ben Applegate
• Deborah Bennett
• Penny Brown
• Liz Butler
• Jean Butzen
• Sunny and Paul Fischer
• Graham Grady
• Michael J. Gurgone
• April Jackson
• Michael Kaplan
• Amy Khare
• Marisa Novara
• Liz and Don Thompson 
• Francine Washington
• Brad White

Amanda Williams is a distinguished visual artist and trained architect whose work explores the intersection of race, color, and the built environment. Growing up in Chicago’s South Side, she earned her Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Williams is best known for her “Color(ed) Theory” project, where she painted abandoned houses in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood with culturally resonant colors to highlight the impact of disinvestment in African American communities.

Williams’s work has been exhibited in prestigious institutions with several permanent collections, including the MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian. She has received numerous accolades, including being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022. Her commissioned piece, Resilient Hues, created with Olalekan Jeyifous for the National Public Housing Museum, draws inspiration from paint chips and wallpaper scraps salvaged from the Museum’s building from its days as part of the Jane Addams Homes. The large-scale, glass and steel artwork frames the Museum’s entrance.

Joy Johnson, a native of Kingston, Jamaica, has been a longtime community activist and organizer. As a public housing resident and former Outreach Coordinator for the Westhaven Nursing Clinic, she has worked tirelessly to improve access to healthcare, economic opportunities, and fair housing policies. She has volunteered countless hours as an advocate for Charlottesville’s low-income residents, speaking out on their behalf to demand safe and clean affordable housing, adequate representation on city boards and commissions, living wage employment, and voter education.

In 1998, Johnson helped found the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), a nationally recognized citywide resident association, which is responsible for Charlottesville’s outstanding level of resident representation on its Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. Johnson currently serves as Chair for the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), Vice-President of the Board of Legal Aid Justice Center, and Chair for Charlottesville Housing Advisory Committee and UVA housing Committee. She is the recipient of the 2020 Cushing Niles Dolbeare lifetime service award and the 2023 Reflector Award.

Dr. Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author, most recently, of Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism, as well as the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, and a novel for young readers, Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks. She has written several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series and Black Panther, and is currently writing Exceptional X-Men. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.

Elise Paschen, an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, is the author of six poetry collections, most recently, Blood Wolf Moon, as well as Tallchief, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. Paschen received the Rupert Costo Chair in American Indian Affairs Medal in 2019. Her poems have been published in Poetry Magazine and The New Yorker, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry and A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. Her poem “Wi’-gi-e” was credited as inspiration for the title of the non-fiction book Killers of the Flower Moon (2017).

Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is a co-founder of Poetry in Motion, a nationwide program that places poetry posters in subway cars and buses. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Sponsors

Propel Sponsors

Promote Sponsors

Lisa Lee and Adam Bush

Preserve Sponsors

Patron Sponsors

Antunovich Associates

Deborah Bennett

Chicago Association of Realtors®

CIBC

Sunny Fischer

Graham Grady

Amy and Rahul Khare

Marisa Novara

Related Midwest

Taft Law

To learn more about sponsoring the Civic Love Luncheon, please contact Colleen McGaughey, director of development, at [email protected].