Summertime Chi
sample
〰️
phil cohran
“on the beach”
voice credits
〰️
yaw agye
stacy patrice
otez gary
essence mcdowell
j. tracy
kiara sample
sukari stone
brian vaxter
kee humphrey
felicia vaxter
zana sanders
melanie bentley-tracy
sample 〰️ phil cohran “on the beach” voice credits 〰️ yaw agye stacy patrice otez gary essence mcdowell j. tracy kiara sample sukari stone brian vaxter kee humphrey felicia vaxter zana sanders melanie bentley-tracy
this sound installation features Black chicagolanders from across the chicago metropolitan area—known colloquially as chicagoland—discussing summertime chi mixed over “on the beach” by the legendary kelan phil cohran—a jazz musician, one of the founders of the association for the advancement of creative musicians, and a Black chicagoan—who performed several concerts at 63rd street beach also known as bongo beach on the southeast side of chicago. we encourage you to absorb the ways Black chicagolanders describe what summertime chi means to them, the memories it conjures, and where the pursuit of summertime chi takes them across Black chicagoland.
Words & photography: dr. april l. graham-jackson & Roderick E. Jackson
Sound installation: Produced by Roderick E. Jackson
Published: July 2025
Black folks fully activate during summertime chi after the hawk or “mr. wind” transcends over the city through the harsh and brutal winters that we endure for half the year.
some say that chicago has two seasons - winter and construction. while there is some truth to that, Black chicagoans also look forward to summertime chi as not only the end to the hawk’s dominance over our lives, but when we fully activate and transform chicago into our summer wonderland.
chicagoland belongs to us during summertime chi and we absorb, consume, and delight ourselves in our city-region while it lasts.
we conjure Black chicagoness, consisting of southern, caribbean, african, and various iterations of Blackness, as a root, route, and placemaking strategy to take up space and make our presence known, felt, and heard.
we fish at historically Black bongo beach, cultivate stillness at church, locate calm by the lake, bbq in our backyards, sweat and dance with our whole chest at festivals, pursue radiant joy on the corner, and socialize on da block.
Black chicagoland, conceived by award-winning artists, scholars, and married couple Roderick E. Jackson and april l. graham-jackson, brings together richly textured photography, the music and sounds of Black Chicagoland, and inner musings from Black Chicagolanders to thicken how we understand Black Chicagoness within and beyond the city’s iconic South Side. The Jacksons have reimagined Black Chicago as “Black chicagoland” to draw attention to the the forgotten suburbs and villages hugging Chicago’s periphery, to the places that are often hidden beneath the surface, and to the spaces on the fringes where Black Chicagoness is and has always been present in all of its truths, contradictions, and expressions. Black chicagoland engages Black life across this geography through its mythologized but often erased racial histories, deep cultural innovations, Black placemaking, and the shifting spatial boundaries that insist that there is more to be learned of what Richard Wright called “the known city.” Rod’s camerawork and april’s sound and geographic research emerges from the contested terrain of the Chicago city map, between the municipality’s ordered and numbered “community areas,” and the more fluid neighborhood names and suburbs and villages on the city’s periphery where Black Chicagolanders locate themselves. Through years of listening, visualizing, mapping, and dreaming Black chicagoland, the Jacksons offer new “landguage” and an evocative portrait of a distinct place and its people by peeling back the layers of a deeply historied Black geography that is familiar and still yet to be discovered. The Jacksons have produced public exhibits at UC Berkeley’s Worth Ryder Art Gallery with Dr. Leigh Raiford and the Dayton Metro Library in Ohio with the Black Midwest Initiative and the Lungs Project.
dr. april l. graham-jackson is a postdoctoral scholar in the department of sociology and mansueto institute for urban innovation as well as a postdoctoral research affiliate with chicago studies, the committee on environment, geography, and urbanization (cegu), and the urban theory lab at the university of chicago. dr. graham-jackson is also a fellow with the american council of learned societies (acls) and long term fellow with the newberry library in chicago. a proud third-generation Black chicagolander, april’s research and public humanities work centers how Black people shape the chicago metropolitan area known colloquially as chicagoland and how they are shaped by it. she is currently developing her dissertation into a monograph that examines Black suburban placemaking and the spatial imaginaries of Black people who built suburban settlements across chicago southland—a suburban sub-region of chicago - in the post-reconstruction era (1877-1915). her second book explores the geographic practices of the Black house music and cultural community of chicago and how they created house music, house culture, and what she termed “house geographies” that affirm Black life. april is the geographer and geosonicologist behind Black chicagoland, which situates Black chicagoness as a root, route, and placemaking practice that maps Black life across chicagoland through photography, sound, music, and community cartography. april holds a phd in geography from the university of california, berkeley. she graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa from mount holyoke college as the first person with a bachelor’s degree in Black geographies.
Roderick E. Jackson is a second generation Black Chicagolander and PhD student in the African American Studies Department at UC Berkeley. His doctoral research explores race, class, and gender through an interrogation of the value of Black, male labor within a post-industrial context in peri-urban cities. Focusing on Gary—the former steel capital of the United States in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008—his work investigates how Black working-class men build community within hyper-masculine spaces of socioeconomic marginalization. Roderick is the principal photographer for Black Chicagoland utilizing visual ethnography through a multi-modal approach to thicken our understanding of Black life across the Chicago Metropolitan Area. He has worked as an event photographer for SFMOMA, Mount Holyoke College, and UC Berkeley. Roderick is also a musician, producer, and composer who is part of the Grammy certified production duo Tensei with Chris Kramer. Tensei has worked with J Ivy, Bilal, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Brandee Younger, and Makaya McCraven and has been featured on television shows South Side on HBO Max and The Blacklist on NBC. Click here to check out Tensei’s music on Spotify. Roderick also produced the Chicago hip hop classic, “Dennehy” by Serengeti and works as a solo producer, writer, and composer with Sony | KPM Music. Roderick graduated cum laude from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology.
