MORE PARADES!
2026

"More Parades" for the exhibit "No More Parades: Interrupted Joy," January 16 to February 14, 2026 @ Elephant Room Gallery (704 S Wabash Avenue in Chicago).

This situation has gone off the rails, pun intended. (Because ... model train miniatures.)

Here is the journey of making my (tiny) submission to the Elephant Room's show, "No More Parades," January 16-30, 2026!

My submission is entitled: "More Parades!"

My friend told me about the Elephant Room's participation in Arts in the Dark, and I entered the following submission:

"I will make a sculpture of people carrying signs from various Chicago parades with portable battery-operated lighting."

Since that bit of things got cancelled / transformed into a gallery-only piece, I ditched the original Barbie doll plan and went with 1:87 scale figures (HO scale, like the massive model at the Museum of Science and Industry) because, and I cannot stress this enough, I have literally no chill.

My updated submission: "a collection of miniatures parading around Chicago!"

Because I am an unrecovering researcher at heart, I immediately went to check if this was an original idea and la, of course it is not.

Anyhow, I got to work looking up parades and going on the ole ebay / etsy / train world (truly, a rabbit hole / train tunnel? of discovery) to figure out how to get a billion tiny figurines.

If you are also new to this hobby, you might be interested to know that by "saving money" buying unpainted figures, you are "losing time" because they will arrive in a box... almost completely unassembled... (This would be great in theory if I were going to paint them, but since I am not, it means that in practice I am gluing arms and heads and guns on tiny figurines with what is probably way too much glue and not enough patience.)

Anyhow, now I am printing out tiny protest signs from various Chicago-based archives and getting glue everywhere.

A (ROUGH) TIMELINE OF CHICAGO PARADES (or things I am calling parades)

After a bunch of research (looking through the Tribune, Sun Times, Wikipedia, Newberry Library, and Chicago History Museum Archives), some of the Chicago parades I am including in this piece are (images link to source):

in my 2003 yearbook, as my senior quote, i wrote "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade i though they said throw a ticker tape parade." so there you go, the chicago tradition persists.

see also chicago (and variations)