Chicago Sukkah Design Festival seeks to unite North Lawndale communities: 'the heart of our efforts'

Sharhonda Clark lives in North Lawndale and has driven by James Stone Freedom Square in the neighborhood where the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival takes place, but came to see the exhibit up close for the first time Saturday.

"Each piece is different, but tells a story in some type of way," Clark said. "I think it's something that unifies our neighborhood. I never really had this growing up. ... It's a beautiful sight to see."

That's the goal of the Chicago Sukkah Design Festival — bringing different communities together through experimental art. The festival takes place every year to celebrate Sukkoth, one of the three major festivals in Judaism.

Sukkahs are temporary huts built for the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth. The holiday is "an agricultural festival of thanksgiving and a commemoration of the 40-year period during which children of Israel wandered in the desert after leaving slavery in Egypt, living in temporary shelters as they traveled," according to the American Jewish Committee.

The festival, now in its third year, highlights the importance of neighborliness Sukkoth represents, said Joseph Altshuler, artistic director and co-founder of the festival.

"That's sort of the heart of our efforts," said Altshuler, 37, who is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-founder of Could Be Design, a Chicago-based design practice. "Our fundamental mission is to build solidarity and relationships between many of Chicago's diverse communities."

This year's festival starts on Sunday and runs until Oct. 26 at the James Stone Freedom Square, 3615 W. Douglas Blvd. in North Lawndale. The festival pairs community organizations in North Lawndale with architectural designers to design and construct sukkahs.

Five sukkahs will be on display throughout the festival, and each one is paired with a sign providing context behind the importance of the sukkahs.

On Saturday morning, Palmyra Geraki and Jordan Campbell scrambled back and forth from a UHaul truck to a picnic table at the site as they worked to piece together the final exhibit of the festival.

Geraki is a founding principal at architecture practice Palmyra PLLC and Campbell is co-founder and executive director of Alt Space Chicago, an organization that focuses on healing Black trauma through art. Community and collaboration are some of the reasons they chose to participate in the exhibit.

"[It's] seeing problems, but coming up with solutions together and allowing ourselves to feel what we feel because it's part of the human experience," Campbell, 33, said. "That only happens with community and collaboration, which has been powerful in the process for us."

Campbell added: "We're kind of creating a bridge through art and design."

Their exhibit, titled "By the Book," uses vibrant colors and floating book pages to emphasize the understanding that "reading doesn’t have to come from a book all the time," Geraki, 39, said. "It's a lot of fun."

It is traditional for observers to eat and sometimes sleep in sukkah for seven days to commemorate Sukkoth, also known as the "time of happiness," which begins at sunset Oct. 16 and ends at nightfall Oct. 23.

After the festival, each sukkah is relocated and permanently added to the facilities of the community organizations that co-designed them as new program spaces, including a communal table, seed library, garden material recycling station, literacy landmark and hospital campus stoop.

Some of the organizations include the Chicago Street Vendors Association, Mount Sinai Hospital just south of the main campus and the community garden at Douglass branch of the Chicago Public Library.

The festival takes place in a lot that was once grassy and vacant across the street from Stone Temple Baptist Church.

"Each year, incrementally, we build and enhance this place," Altshuler said. "More recently, [this] was a seemingly vacant lot but now is a vibrant public space and one that is open to the full community."

Festival organizers have added a pathway and picnic tables in the previous two years.

"This festival is an opportunity to take a piece of my own culture, and sort of elevate it as a platform for broader community building in all the ways that I think are in keeping with the original spirit of the holiday, but in ways here that are no longer specifically religious or exclusively Jewish, but really a platform for broader neighborliness and inviting people in," Altshuler said.