HOUSE & HOME: A People’s Salon

Tiff Beatty is an arts and culture organizer, and performance poet based in Chicago, Illinois. She is currently associate director at the National Public Housing Museum, co-founder of House of the Lorde studio, and co-host of The Reading Room, a Black feminist study group. 

Tiff was born and raised in Tacoma, WA, and received her B.A. in Psychology from Whitworth University. She received the 2022 Roberta “Bobbie” Raymond Leadership & Innovation Award from The Oak Park Regional Housing Center. 

​Tiff organizes and moderates dozens of cultural events and workshops each year and her work has been featured in various publications and media outlets, including Crain's Chicago Business, History News Network, Block Club Chicago, The New York Times, Ebony, Chicago Tribune, WVON, and more.

Patric McCoy, art collector, photographer, and retired environmental chemist, has been acquiring artwork — mostly by Chicagoans, many of whom are Black artists — for more than five decades. 

Patric's also co-founder of Diasporal Rhythms, a 20-year-old nonprofit dedicated to collecting, promoting, and preserving art from the African Diaspora.

Learn more about Patric McCoy and his collection in this 2024 feature in Block Club Chicago by Jake Wittich.

Photo by Jerry Nunn

Laurie Jo Reynolds is a policy advocate and community organizer who has spent two decades opposing the demonization, warehousing, and social exclusion of people in the criminal legal system — especially focusing on solitary confinement and public conviction registries, extreme punishments that emerged in the punitive turn of the 1990s.

She coordinates the Chicago 400 Alliance, a grassroots coalition led by formerly incarcerated people who challenge conviction registries and housing banishment laws.

Robyn Mineko Williams is a director and artist from Chicago, IL. She is drawn to embodiments of memory, time, lineage, and the relationships with the traces left in a person of the people they’ve encountered. Robyn is the founder and director of Robyn Mineko Williams and Artists (RMW&A), which houses and shares a body of interdisciplinary performances created in collaboration with an evolving roster of dynamic artists and designers. 

RMW&A creates by intertwining performance, design, people, and place to prioritize public, malleable forms of presentation.