Future Sounds: Listening Garden 2025

Future Sounds: Listening Garden 2025
Thanks to the generosity and mutual support of our Compound Yellow community of artists and musicians we are able to offer this beautiful array of artworks and music for you to bid on and hopefully win! Your purchase will help us pay all musicians in our Side Yard Sounds 2025 series and cover costs for our exhibitions and community events. 

A little history of the Side Yard Sounds series: 
SYS began in 2020 in response to fear and isolation at the onset of the pandemic, as well as the desire to support our musician friends who were suddenly out of work. Each year since 2020 we have hosted between 28 and 35 live musical performances and have managed to pay all musicians a fair wage for their performances. Last year alone we had over 1000 people attend these events from all over Oak Park and the Chicagoland area but funding has been our biggest challenge to date and we want to continue this beautiful program! Your purchase of art is greatly appreciated and will be used to sponsor the Side Yard Sounds public music programming 2025. We thank you in advance for your support! 

Our future vision/dream for Compound Yellow's side yard is to create an immersive sonic playground for deep listening, resting, restoring, learning, and gathering. The Listening Garden emerges at a critical time when community connection, public healing, and inclusive engagement are more essential than ever. In the wake of ongoing social, political and environmental challenges, there is a demonstrated need for safe, welcoming public spaces that foster reflection, dialogue, and unity.

The auction goes live Friday 6/20 on the precipice of the summer solstice and runs until midnight July 19th, check out the items, bid and win! The auction goes a long way to support programming and our Compound Yellow artist community, a win-win for all. 

Compound Yellow is an independent, multi-functional artist-run space and artist's residency.

Mission Statement
Compound Yellow is a non-profit 501(c)(3) experimental art space in Chicago’s western suburbs supporting independent cultural production, participatory projects, and interdisciplinary explorations that connect Oak Park and surrounding communities to the arts. Composed of a committed group of artists, curators, educators, creative thinkers, and engaged citizens, Compound Yellow hosts exhibitions, interventions, performances, workshops, lectures, gatherings, and open sessions for collective imagining. We celebrate a culture of sharing, connecting, and collective action, accessible to all in suburban Oak Park.

Compound Yellow is a model for experimental cultural production in Cook County.  We envision a future where artist-run spaces operate in a mycelial fashion–like mushrooms–a self-sufficient and highly adaptable life system that brings visible and invisible vitality and interconnectedness to all that it touches and supports.

Compound Yellow is run by a generous, collaborative group of local volunteers.

Our Mission
To promote the arts, provide educational programs and present opportunities for people to share and experiment with creative practices that nurture collective knowledge and cultivate critical discourse.

Side Yard Sounds is a series at Compound Yellow that features a bevy of creative musical artists who traverse diverse forms: from the intriguing waters of experimentalism and the avant-garde to forward-reaching jazz and other modes that are expanding our vision of music both in and outside of Chicago. These performances take place in the side yard of our compound from April-October each year.