Pedal Powered Picnic PROGRAM

A Note from the Artistic Director

We are very grateful that you can spend your valuable time with us today at our Pedal Powered Picnic. Thank you!

Our hope for today’s picnic is to create an experience that is interactive and joyful. We hope to offer the opportunity to meet new people and have unexpected conversations. This largely reflects our mission to gather people who would not normally mix for experiences that are unusual, exceptional, and meaningful.

Cabinet of Curiosity is eight years young. We are proud of the ways that we have been resourceful and imaginative in our time. What you’re seeing today is the product of many conversations with collaborators and community members interested in sustainability, environmental awareness, engineering, and art making. Through partnerships with the Chicago Humanities Festival, Working Bikes, the Chicago Park District, and our community consultants, we have created an uncanny landscape that demands audience participation to activate the experience. This is an expression of a mission that we think is unique and particularly powerful.

We hope you play today. We hope you ride a bicycle and enjoy that it powers a bubble machine. We hope that you can connect with others in this community.

About Our Work

Cabinet of Curiosity’s purpose is to create unique interactive and experiential events and ceremonies that promote curiosity, community and culture. Our practice is to hire multicultural professionals in theater, visual arts, dance, sculpture and music for this work, while simultaneously training community members, high school students, and college-age apprentices to become the future creators of new meaningful rituals. Our processes of community engagement, community authorship, and public expression deliver images of hope, surprising devices, original music, moments of wonder and audience interaction in often unexpected spaces.

It is not common practice for artists to be paid for all devising time, rehearsal hours, and performance hours. However, Cabinet maintains the integrity that everyone is paid an hourly fee for all work. We contract over 800 artists each year, which makes our small enterprise difficult to sustain, but invaluable.

We are very proud of the large and extended team of artist who have been paid to create the work you’re seeing today:

About the Playground

The Pedal Powered Playground, devised by Frank Maugeri and a dozen students from Cabinet’s paid training program The School of Celebration, includes multiple bug- and beast-inspired sculptures containing fans blowing pinwheels, record players playing vinyl albums, and machines emitting showers of bubbles, all which are powered by audience members on transformed exercise bicycles. The Playground includes a mechanical engineering workshop and mechanism building station where participants will be invited to add their creation to one of the large sculptures; collectively creating a totem of communal expression. Additionally, each participant may take home a free coloring comic book that examines the necessity of global sustainability, healthy exercise, conscious eating, alternative forms of power, and the enormous value and respect of bugs and creatures from the natural and imagined world. Expect an uncanny garden of oddities and surprises.

“Our hope is that Cabinet continues to lead a resourceful, collectively created model of whimsical events inspired by our STEAMM2. STEAMM2 includes science, technology, engineering and math plus our unique addition of mythology into outdoor celebratory collaborative events. Our first human powered experiment provided us the knowledge to continue developing interactive immersive outdoor events with our many cultural, community partners and neighborhood authors,” said Cabinet Founder and Artistic Director Frank Maugeri and Executive Director Alexandra Plattos Sulack in a joint statement.

Upcoming Events

Pedal Powered Playground
Sundays On State

Pedal Powered Playground
Boler Park

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