"The IMC has helped support young brilliant minds in our community. The IMC helps to support emerging artists of color. One example is Mother Nature, two young women of color, Truth and Shasta, who are now performing in Chicago, Atlanta and New York and are blowing up! A really unique hip-hop act, even unique for Chicago. So Mother Nature in some part got started at the IMC - they held a hip hop workshop.
The mural right here by Langston Allston is a mural that was done as a part of the Miseducation of Hip Hop Workshop that we had here. This is the Good Vibes Only mural by Langston and they got together a group of twenty youth and put together the mural. Langston sketched the outline of it and the local youth came in and painted it. It was the perfect kind of youth engagement, drawing upon local artists that came together for the project. And it was really out of Mother Nature’s vision that we applied for and won the National Endowment for the Arts grant to continue that project. So when it came time to choose artists for the four workshops, Mother Nature was one of those four. And they brought all their friends.
We’re trying to continue those creative collaborations and ultimately provide resources for the youth. We have a stage, a sound system, a space where they can put on events and now we’re trying to create a community music studio down in the basement where youth can come in and record. A free music studio where you can set up a time and we can get folks in here and playing together. We are pulling together volunteers for the technology, the media, and the hardware to make it happen. We have a lot of resources in the community, we’re just trying to materialize it into something that local youth can use, who don’t have access to media technology, they don’t go to the university, they graduate from the local high schools, they work jobs in the community. They sweep our floors during the week but on the weekends they like to get down and have hip hop shows. So that’s the kind of space we create."