Monthly Recap :: August 2025

Author

Justin McElderry
September 07, 2025

Peace Everyone,

I hope this finds you well. As usual, I’m sharing a few reflections on where my mind’s been, what I’ve been making, and what questions have guided my work in the past month.


1. What I’ve Been Thinking About

August was a month of writing, dreaming, and tension—between what I’ve already achieved and what might still be possible. I found myself journaling more than usual, not to capture thoughts but to keep from forgetting how they sound.

Simultaneously, I’ve been thinking a lot about philanthropy as an operating system, and about asset-based community development not as jargon, but as a worldview: one that assumes we start from fullness rather than lack.

At the same time, I’ve felt moments of distance—between myself and the version of me that arrived in Chicago wide-eyed and hopeful nearly 2 years ago. These days, I’m learning to love the new type of scaffolding that’s emerging. The slow construction of a life. Of a practice. Of an approach that honors remembrance, belonging, care, and inheritance as real materials.


2. Updates from My Art Practice

In August, I let go of the pressure to build a “series” of work and started thinking more about how individual pieces can live on their own terms. Some of my most generative ideas lately aren’t part of any cohesive narrative—and I’m finally okay with that. Making work that doesn’t have to resolve itself. Letting one drawing stand next to another without explaining why. Asking myself: What if the artist’s role is not to complete a thought, but to stay inside it?

There’s a certain economy of materials I keep returning to—drawings on scrap paper, sculpture with just what I have. It reminds me of where I’m from. I’m starting to think that my medium is availability, and that my only real job is to give each object, image, or phrase the attention it’s owed. Nothing more. Nothing less.


3. Ongoing Work in My Professional Practice

I’ve been feeling the weight of future decisions—like where I’ll be several years from now. And that uncertainty has made it harder some days to focus on the work in front of me. Still, I return to this core belief: that design is a tool for social progress, not just polish. That architecture can be a civic offering, not just a building. And, in that sense, my practice is still architecture. Still construction. Just perhaps on a longer timeline. And that strategy is not separate from art—it’s part of how the work survives. My questions this month weren’t project-based. They were existential:

  • How does this work currently become legible to others later on?

  • What am I building that might outlive my current job title?


4. Best Things I Saw in July

These are a few of the talks, books, and works that opened something in me this month:

🎥 Theaster Gates x David Adjaye at Serpentine Gallery — Watch here
🎥 Joan Didion On Taking Notes — Watch here
🎥 Farming on The Far Southside of Chicago — Watch here
🎥 Beyond Brownfields — Watch here

5) Priorities In My Holistic Practice Right Now

  • Strategic advising for mission-first organizations exploring urban development, sustainable business, and uncertain futures

  • Projects that treat art as civic or ecological infrastructure

  • Collaborations at the intersection of land, design, and long-term investment

  • Precision Fabrication for sculpture 🙂 

Thanks, as always, for following along. If your own work is circling similar questions—or if you’re wrestling with slowness, systems, or scale—I’d love to be in conversation.

Blessings,

JCM