Kerri Sancomb remembers when she discovered her friend’s secret. She and Millicent Souris were part of a group of young artists and musicians living–not entirely legally–and working in a four-story industrial warehouse in the West Loop. In the summer of 1998 the group decided it was time for a party. The Butcher Shop, a gallery housed on the third floor, would sponsor the event, which would double as a showcase for the gallery’s artists. Souris said she could read some of her poems.
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“A lot of people I know, if I said I wrote poetry, it’d just make them laugh,” Souris says. “It’s hard to believe that what you can do is any good, or special, but you’ve still got to do it. It’s hard to say, ‘Listen to me, I’m important.’”
Souris grew up just north of Baltimore and studied English at Oberlin College; upon graduation in 1995 she joined friends in Chicago and eventually began working as a buyer and sales manager at the music distributor and label Carrot Top. She’d known Sancomb for about a year when they moved into the West Lake Street building, where they joined other residents in a more or less communal life, constructing art studios and rehearsal spaces for themselves. Souris just needed a place to live. Sancomb, who had studied printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute and printmaking and book arts at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, arrived in Chicago in 1996 after a year in Minneapolis. She needed space for her printmaking and other projects; she and her husband, Jeff Mueller (guitarist for June of ’44, Rodan, and, currently, the Shipping News), now own and operate Dexterity Press in a space on the fourth floor. (The building is no longer used as a residence.)
“Yeah, it’s not fragile or something you have to be scared of . . .”
“You can’t make this sappy,” Sancomb says, “but it’s genuine.”
