Katherine Chronis slipped out of her dress one recent afternoon on the corner of Crosby and Division and then strolled eastward, wearing nothing but jelly sandals and a necklace. Within moments, a girl roaming about in front of one of Cabrini-Green’s remaining high-rises began spreading the news: “That lady’s naked! That lady’s naked!” Peals of laughter erupted from some of the people within earshot. Others poked their heads out apartment windows. Cars honked. Chronis held her head high, passing a startled middle-aged man who asked if she’d been dared and another who smiled and said, “All right! I’m feeling better now, I guess.”
Chronis doesn’t have a stock answer for people who ask why she’s naked. “I should just start saying, ‘I’m from a branch of the government that nobody knows about: I’m a pepper-upper.’” She prefers not to explain what she’s doing while it’s happening–you get it or you don’t–but she appreciates honest inquiries and will usually reward curious onlookers with earnest if simple responses. At various times she has represented her nudity as “an art project,” or “a declaration of individuality,” or a way of exploring “how people react to the body.” She told a newspaper reporter from Texas she wanted to “change people’s reality for a moment.”
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Chronis has some experience at changing her own reality. Born in Chicago to Greek immigrants, she grew up in government-subsidized housing in Uptown. She orchestrated her expulsion from Saint Scholastica by unleashing profanities at a nun, and then attended two other high schools before dropping out at 16, convinced the education being offered was “a sham.” She left home that same year and married in her early 20s–she says she can’t remember exactly when–and together she and her husband nursed their budding interests in heroin into full-blown addictions. Then in the early 90s she moved out, cleaned up, and relocated to New York. She returned temporarily to Chicago in 1999, to be with her mother while she was dying of a brain tumor, and then moved back again last February, having determined that New York was too “image conscious” and that she needed to live at a slower pace.
At first, appearing naked onstage felt wonderfully liberating. But after a while, she says, “I started to wonder: Why did I not get naked out in public? Why am I segregating my expression?” She concluded that to experience “true liberation”–and not just the “illusion of liberation”–she would have to expose herself on the streets and subways too. The Get Naked Project was born.
In her apartment she’s hung two enlarged photos from the Get Naked Project. One shows her standing at a bank of pay phones making a call. People occupy the phones on either side of her, seemingly unaware of her presence. In the other she is nude in a crowded subway car. Most of the other passengers read newspapers or stare blankly in front of themselves.
Chronis says she’ll continue getting naked in public for as long as there’s a payoff. “I’d like to be really old and naked on the street, but something else will probably be engaging me then.”
