Students participate in Jeremiah Husebos-Spofford's project. (Photo courtesy Jeremiah Husebos-Spofford)

When Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford wanted to use the “forever open, clear, and free” lakefront to stage his project, “Give Me a Place to Stand and I Will Move the World,” he discovered the last part of that famous vision for Chicago beaches didn’t quite apply in economic terms.

“They made me get an insurance quote for a million dollars worth of liability,” said the 28-year-old Hulsebos-Spofford of the park district’s less-than-enthusiastic response to his work, in which he and a crew were to tug wood-sculpted rafts onto Windy City waters to be sailed ashore, all part of an artistic demonstration on America’s immigration experience.

That million-dollar figure wasn’t for the whole beach, actually, just the sand. The lake altogether was out of the question.

“They said ‘no’ pretty definitively,” he said. And so the trek was to Miller Beach in Indiana for the June launch of “Give Me a Place,” created during his spring artist-in-residency stint at the Hyde Park Alliance for Arts & Culture (HyPa).

Utilizing assistance from students at the Chicago High School for the Arts, where he’s an instructor, Hulsebos-Spofford spent two-and-a-half months building the wooden rafts at HyPa’s space at 52^nd Street and Harper Avenue.

“I live in Hyde Park, and I know that lots of construction projects are happening all the time,” he said. “I pretty specifically targeted some Dumpsters, and got yelled at.”

With some interceding from HyPa, Hulsebos-Spofford was able to secure donated materials from the university to build “Give Me a Place,” a reflection of the Vermont native’s longtime interest in maritime-themed art.

It’s a field that has fascinated him since his first foray into art while at Bard College in New York and which he developed further during his graduate studies at UIC, where he started making floating sculptures he describes as works “looking at maritime histories and myths of water.”

It was while spending last summer in Sicily on a Fulbright grant that the idea for “Give Me a Place” first took shape.

“I was teaching art classes to primarily North African immigrant kids,” he said, adding that he also managed a project reenacting the Greek fable of Ulysses’ battling the Cyclops. “I had the kids do drawings of what Ulysses’ ship would look like and what he escaped the Cyclops on. And so when I built my sculpture, I was looking at lot of the drawings the kids were doing.”

His Fulbright work, along with the discrimination he witnessed towards non-Sicilian residents, got Hulsebos-Spofford to thinking about the negative connotations many here can’t easily shake regarding immigration, particularly Latin American immigration.

“I just didn’t like my image banks seeing the Cuban rafts,” he says pertaining to the oft-unflattering televised images, from the 1980s onward, of Cubans and others from Caribbean islands arriving onto American shores. “I feel like it’s this really charged image that a lot of Americans carry.”

With his multiethnic student crew consisting of many first-generation Americans, Hulsebos-Spofford went about making “Give Me A Place” at the HyPa space, which was open to the public during construction.

And after a pre-launch reception for the project on June 4, Hulsebos-Spofford and company ventured to Miller Beach in Indiana for the big event, where the students played the role of immigrants.

“They have a canal to launch boats, so we paddled out through that canal,” he said about the launch, which got the attention of curious sunbathers nearby. “There were a lot of phone cameras out, and a lot of baffled beach-goers.”

Check out Hulsebos-Spofford’s blog to view pictures of the event, which he hopes to replicate in other cities and turn into an educational film addressing immigration issues.  And with “Give Me A Place,” he’s poised to join the likes of Theaster Gates and Dan Peterman as prominent artists putting Hyde Park art on the map.

“Just in terms of a little gem in the city,” he said, “it’s going places.”