Destination/El Destino is the culmination project of a year-long residency of Edra Soto at the Art Center, and focuses on the decade-long evolution of the artist’s multimedia GRAFT series exploring the architecture of Soto’s native Puerto Rico and its ties to the African Diaspora/Afro-Caribbean tradition.      

Soto says, “When I think about a destination, I think about that special place that builds anticipation from within. The exhibition marks a full circle moment in my career, with the first iteration of GRAFT developed over a decade ago at the Art Center. My last year in residence offered me the space and privacy to reflect on GRAFT as a full body of work, providing an opportunity to bring early and recent developments of the project together as well as literary contributions that have inspired me over ten years of exploration. I hope to inspire visitors to dream of their own destinations that have to do with their lives, their memories, and their own concerns in this inclusive and generous gallery space.”

GRAFT addresses the unsung influence of Afro-diasporic cultures on Puerto Rico’s decorative architecture. The series references two common domestic architectural elements: quiebrasoles, made of concrete blocks, and rejas, ornamental grilles or screens typically cast in wrought iron. In Puerto Rico, quiebrasoles and rejas are arranged in decorative geometric patterns to create shade or act as a protective barrier between the street and the home. The GRAFT series combines elements of quiebrasoles and rejas with documentary photographs and drawings to counter colonial narratives that trace their designs to the Western-European tradition, expanding the voices and visions represented in the architecture of everyday Puerto Rican life. Drawing from the progressive scholarship of architectural historian Jorge Ortiz Colom, GRAFT reiterates how Puerto Rican architecture is indebted to the sub-Saharan African population brought to Puerto Rico as enslaved people to work on plantations. 

The exhibition is curated by Allison Peters Quinn, Director of Exhibition & Residency Programs at the Hyde Park Art Center.

RELATED PROGRAMS

In conjunction with the exhibition, a dynamic public program will feature free game nights, concerts of Afro-Caribbean Bomba y Plena music, and dance nights. The program will also include structured artist and guest speaker conversations about the cultural hybridity and post-colonial consideration present in Soto’s work. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Edra Soto is a Puerto-Rican born artist, curator, educator, and co-director of the outdoor project space, The Franklin. Soto has exhibited extensively at venues including El Museo del Barrio, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s satellite, The Momentary, AK; Albright-Knox Northland, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, IL; Smart Museum, IL and the Abrons Arts Center, NY. Recently, Soto completed a large-scale public art commission titled “Screenhouse”, currently on view at Millennium Park in Chicago. The artist has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Beta-Local, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, Project Row Houses and Art Omi, among others. Soto has been awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, the Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, the inaugural Foundwork Artist Prize and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, among others. Between 2019-2020, Soto exhibited and traveled to Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund. Soto holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico. The artist lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Engage Projects in Chicago.

ABOUT THE HYDE PARK ART CENTER

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering, production, and exhibition space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of risk-taking and experimentation, emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. Today, the Art Center offers a diverse suite of programs for artists and art lovers of all backgrounds, ages, and stages in their careers including: contemporary art exhibitions in six galleries; open-access community-based school with 1,500 annual enrollments; weekly arts education to 1,000 elementary school students in public schools; weekly and summer teen programs for 100 teen artists; professional-advancement programs for artists; a local and international artist residency; and public programs that connects residents with Chicago art and artists .The Art Center functions as an amplifier for creative voices of today and tomorrow, providing the space to cultivate new work and connections. For more information, please visit www.hydeparkart.org

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As colleagues at the Art Center for nine years, Chambers and Rodgers have a long-established working relationship that supports the organization’s vision to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. The co-leadership model ensures the continuity of Chambers and Rodgers’ demonstrated progress toward increasing access to art and arts education, advancing Chicago artists, and presenting innovative contemporary art that elevates the voices of marginalized communities.

During their time as Deputy Director and Director of Development at the Art center, respectively, Chambers and Rodgers spearheaded the launch of Open Arts, which provides tuition-free courses in the Art Center’s core curriculum education programs. Open Arts is the nation’s first contribute-what-you-can visual art school for all ages, and ensures more equitable access to artmaking, education, and community engagement for years to come.

Chambers said, “Hyde Park Art Center has been a personal and professional home to me since moving to Chicago in 2009. It is with immense gratitude that I assume the role of co-Executive Director at the Art Center, where our community inspires and energizes my work every day. I hope to spark these feelings in all who encounter us—whether in our building, or our partner schools, or at the neighborhood farmers market or fair. I feel especially honored to co-lead and discover our next chapter as a Chicago institution alongside Aaron, who shares the Art Center’s collaborative and community-centered vision.”

Rodgers said, “The most rewarding and impactful work of my career has been the last eight years at Hyde Park Art Center, and joining Jen as co-Executive Director is beyond thrilling. I look forward to deepening my connections to the students, artists, art lovers, neighbors, and my outstanding colleagues. I am grateful to begin this new chapter with my longtime and trusted colleague Jen as we build on the legacy of art access and art excellence in the vibrant neighborhood of Hyde Park and beyond.”

Art Center Board Chair Erika Dudley co-chaired the search process with Justine Jentes (former Board Chair) and shared the work that led to this decision: “Our Search Committee vetted dozens of candidates from across the country, with priority given to experience and commitment to equity. Jen and Aaron impressed us with their exceptional institutional knowledge of the Art Center, demonstrated leadership in the field, and personal and professional commitment to anti-racism and equity. Having seen them working well together with skills that complement each other, we saw an opportunity for a co-leadership model, and the Board unanimously voted to approve.”

About Jeannette Tremblay Chambers

Jeannette Tremblay Chambers has over 15 years of experience as an arts leader, administrator, and educator, with a focus on building equity and access in the arts sector. She has served the Chicago arts community through Hyde Park Art Center for 12 years, first as an intern and teaching artist and working her way through the organization, most recently acting as Interim Executive Director. Chambers was recognized as a “national changemaker under 40” in 2019 through the American Express “NGen” Fellowship program. She is a co-founder of the White Advocates for Racial Equity Network at the National Guild for Community Arts Education, providing racial literacy and tactical training to a national network of educators, administrators, funders, and executives. She recently served on the Board of Directors at Enrich Chicago, a nonprofit consortium of arts organizations that affects structural, antiracist change across Chicago’s diverse arts ecosystem, as well as the Equity and Museum Practice Advisory Committee at the Art Institute of Chicago. Chambers holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; an MS Ed in Urban Special Education from Long Island University in Brooklyn, NY; and a BA in Fine Arts from Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

About Aaron Rodgers

Joining Hyde Park Art Center in 2014, Aaron Rodgers has served as Director of Development since 2016. Among his accomplishments at Hyde Park Art Center, Rodgers led a capital campaign that concluded in 2022 after raising $17.2M, exceeding the $16M goal. Before the Art Center, Rodgers worked in Special Events at the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago. He has been involved in Chicago art and culture for 20 years and has programmed and presented more than 500 events. In 2008, Rodgers founded Homeroom, an organization dedicated to presenting and commissioning arts programming around Chicago with a focus on conversation and collaboration across genre and media, where he served as Executive Director through 2017. Rodgers joined the Board of Directors of Elastic Arts in 2017. He received a BA from New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2002 with concentrations in philosophy and aesthetics. 

About Hyde Park Art Center

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering, production, and exhibition space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of risk-taking and experimentation, emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. Today, the Art Center offers a diverse suite of programs for artists and art lovers of all backgrounds, ages, and stages in their careers including: contemporary art exhibitions in six galleries; open-access community-based school with 1,500 annual enrollments; weekly arts education to 1,000 elementary school students in public schools; weekly and summer teen programs for 100 teen artists; professional-advancement programs for artists; a local and international artist residency; and public programs that connects residents with Chicago art and artists .The Art Center functions as an amplifier for creative voices of today and tomorrow, providing the space to cultivate new work and connections. For more information, please visit www.hydeparkart.org.

# # #

Media Contacts:

Katy O’Malley/Louise Yingduo Liu

The Silverman Group, Inc. 

Katy@silvermangroupchicago.com

847-814-1940

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Back in 2019, the exhibtion’s artists, Elana Adler, Dana Carter, Tirtza Even, Julia Klein, Jaclyn Mednicov, William J. O’Brien, Ben Segal, and Maggie Taft participated in the Jewish Artists Fellowship at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. However, two months before the exhibition’s opening, Spertus announced that it refuses to exhibit a work by the fellow Tritza Even, since it featured a “one-sided” view of Gaza, a decision that led to the unanimous withdrawal of the participating artists and the subsequent resignation of Lichtzsier, who at the time was the Director of the Fellowship.

The current exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center presents for the first time the outcomes of a group of artists who chose to work together in the face of institutional denial and question the accessibility of museums and archives through their artwork. According to curator Ruslana Litchzier, “The exhibition sheds light on the precarious state of artistic and intellectual labor in cultural and pedagogic institutions.” 

In 2019 the exhibition was supposed to focus on the diverse material investigations of the fellows-artists into the Spertus’ collection alongside with selected items from the collection, this exhibition focuses on absences. It is structured around the absence of the first exhibition, the absence of the collection items, and the absence of an artist—Dana Carter—who passed away in the early days of the current exhibition design. 

For instance, during her fellowship, Elana Adler researched–while focusing on Architectural plans–the “handbreadth,” a traditional measuring unit used to build the Sukkah (a temporary shelter constructed for the holiday of Sukkot) and the space of the Eruv (an urban area enclosed by a wire boundary, permitting various activities on the Sabbath). After the exhibition’s cancellation, Adler utilized the Jewish material concepts to produce I see through your barriers (2021), a soft sculpture suspended off the ground. The work explores the complexities of community-making with means of exclusion.

On the other hand, Jaclyn Mednicov created a series of photographic transfers on acrylic polymer “skins.” Hung, the “skins” present morphed images that the artist took while researching at Spertus the unclaimed textiles that the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization had rescued after World War II. Featuring unclaimed textiles turned into skins, the work gives space to unspoken embodied histories that were nearly erased. In tandem is Memories of Objects (2022), a grid of nine wooden cyanotype collage panels, also by Mednicov. The collages are made of photographs the artist took during a workshop Mednicov led, where the fellows brought objects of personal significance. Uniting the dispersed objects into a cyanotype grid, Mednicov transfers the objects’ individual stories to the story of one group and in doing so she visually proposes a way in which a future counter-archive may take shape.

About the curator: Ruslana Lichtzier (she/her) is a doctoral student in Art History, a Mellon Fellow in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and in Critical Theory at Northwestern, as well as a curator, educator, and critic. Past selected fellowships include Core, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and Red Bull Arts, Detroit. Lichtzier directed Triumph School Manual Project, in Triumph, Illinois, the project space Triumph, Chicago (in collaboration with Ryan Coffey), and the Jewish Artist  Fellowship at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. Recent curatorial projects include  the group exhibitions An Echo, She Is (Chicago Manual Style, Chicago, IL), Four Flags Chicago (Chicago Manual  Style, Chicago, IL (in collaboration with Stephanie Cristello)), The Dangerous Professors (Flatland Gallery,  Houston, TX (with the support of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)). Lichtzier has contributed to  numerous exhibition catalogs and international art publications; her essays have appeared in English,  Hebrew, Spanish, and Korean. Lichtzier is a Lecturer in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About the artists:

Elana Adler (she, her) received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2008 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She currently lives in Portland, Meine. In the past, she was the co-director of a Chicago artist-run gallery, while also managing a studio collective. Adler exhibited at The Chicago Artists Coalition (Chicago, IL), Compound Yellow (Oak Park, IL), Borderline Art Collective (San Francisco, CA), Flatland Gallery (Houston, TX), Chase Public (Cincinnati, OH), Nave Annex Gallery (Summerville, MA), Calico Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Westbeth Gallery (NYC, NY), NorthernSouthern (Austin, TX), and Woods Gerry Gallery (Providence, RI), among other places.

Dana Carter (she, her; 1976-2019) was an artist who used fabric, light, and video in installations that dealt with the subjectivity of visual perception. She received an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Carter exhibited in MassArt (Boston MA), Elmhurst Art Museum ( Elmhurst, IL), American Institute of Architecture (New Orleans, LA) Iceberg Projects (Chicago, IL), Devening Projects (Chicago, IL) Center for Print Studies, Columbia University (NYC, NY), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Cleve Carney Art Center, College of Dupage (Dupage, IL), Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), The Bioscope (Johannesburg, South Africa), Fabrica de Arte, Havana Biennielle (Havana, Cuba), Canterbury Museum, and in South Island (New Zealand), among other places. In 2012, Shadow Velocities: on the work of Dana Carter was published by the College of DuPage with a grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

Tirtza Even (she, her) is a documentary-maker and a video artist. She has produced both linear and interactive video work that has been shown, among other places, at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC, NY), the Whitney Biennial (NYC, NY), the Johannesburg Biennial (Johannesburg, South Africa), as well as in many festivals including the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight, Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. Even has received numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Next Level and Visual Arts Awards, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Award, Media Arts Award, The Jerome Foundation; Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA. Even’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC, NY), the Jewish Museum (NYC, NY), and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem, Israel), among others. Even’s work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France, Video Data Bank (VDB), and Groupe Intervention Video (GIV), Canada. She is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.

Julia Klein (she, her) is an artist and publisher. She has exhibited her work nationally in venues including Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA);  Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI);  Shirley Fitterman Art Center (NYC, NY); and, International Museum of Surgical Science, , Weinberg/Newton Gallery, andThreewalls (Chicago, IL). Past residencies include the Terra Foundation Summer Residency in Giverny, Sitterwerk Kunstbibliothek, and Vermont Studio Center. Klein received an MFA in Sculpture from the Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and a BFA from the University of Michigan She is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid Chicago,  and since 2009 she has run Soberscove Press, through which she publishes  books about art and culture. 

Jaclyn Mednicov (she, her) is a Chicago-based artist, whose work combines painting, printmaking, sculpture and installation. She has her BFA from University of Kansas, MA from Eastern Illinois University, and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mednicov has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale Foundation, and The SEA Foundation in the Netherlands. Her work has been exhibited in recognized galleries including Mixed Greens Gallery (NYC, NY). The Franklin (Chicago, IL), Northern Illinois University Art Museum (Dekalb, IL), Paris London Hong Kong (Chicago, IL), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL), The SEA Foundation (Tilburg, Netherlands), and more. She has won awards such as a 3Arts Make a Wave Grant, a Netherland-America Cultural Grant, and an NEA grant. Her work has been published in New American Paintings and Sheridan Road Magazine. Mednicov is a Lecturer in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

William J. O’Brien (he, him) is an artist who works in multiple media: drawing, painting, ceramic, metal sculpture, installation, and assemblage. Inspired by Modernism, as well as the history of material usage of Outsider Art, O’Brien’s multidisciplinary practice is a search for identity and genuine expression through material and process. O’Brien has held solo exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI), Renaissance Society (Chicago, IL), KMAC Museum (Louisville, KI), MAD Museum (NYC, NY), Witte De With (Rotterdam, Netherlands), and The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (Overland Park, KS), among others. In 2014, O’Brien had his first major museum survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago curated by Naomi Beckwith. He has held residencies at the Vermont 

Studio Center and the U-Cross Foundation. O’Brien has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Artadia. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Miami Art Museum, Pérez Art Museum, Hammer Museum, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. O’Brien is also a professor and the Chair of Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ben Segal (he, him) is the author of Pool Party Trap Loop and 78 Stories, co-author of The Wes Letters, and co-editor of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. He holds degrees from Hampshire College, UC San Diego, and the University of Chicago, and has held a variety of teaching, writing, and legal positions. 

Maggie Taft, PhD (she, her) is an art historian and founding director of Writing Space, a community-based writing center for artists and designers. Her writing and reviews have appeared in many magazines and journals including Artforum, The Point, Texte Zur Kunste, Design and Culture, and The Journal of Design History. She is co-editor of Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now (University of Chicago Press, 2018), the first single-volume history of art in Chicago from the nineteenth century through the present day, and her book, The Chieftain and the Chair: The Rise of Danish Design in Postwar America will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2023. She is curator of the forthcoming permanent exhibition at the new Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York.

About Hyde Park Art Center

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections. For more information, please visit www.hydeparkart.org.

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with integration of longtime partner Green Lantern Press

CHICAGO (October 17, 2022) Hyde Park Art Center is thrilled to announce that Green Lantern Press (GLP)–an artist-run publishing house dedicated to the support, production, and dissemination of contemporary art, poetry, and philosophy–will become the Art Center’s in-house publisher. The merger integrates GLP into the Art Center’s existing Publications Program, which crystallizes the Art Center’s role as a critical presenting institution for emerging and mid-career artists in Chicago through exhibition catalogs and documentation, while building on GLP’S legacy of fostering dynamic dialogues between artists and writers. 

Moving forward, all of the Art Center’s exhibition catalogs and publications will be published by GLP and disseminated through GLP’s national distribution network. Additional projects supporting emerging art writers and experimental projects will be curated by the Art Center and produced by GLP for local and national distribution. Past GLP publications will continue to be circulated by Hyde Park Art Center. GLP’s and a selection of the Art Center’s publications will be available for browsing and purchase on www.hydeparkart.org/publications.

Caroline Picard, Founder of Green Lantern Press, shares why the Art Center is the perfect new home for the publisher: “For more than 80 years, Hyde Park Art Center has set a benchmark for unwavering commitment to art making and community in Chicago. Its institutional ethos had a profound impact on my own approach to artist-run publishing, exhibition making, and administration at the Green Lantern Press. Among other sympathies, I share the Art Center’s belief that publishing books about artists captures, archives, and disseminates an artist’s work beyond the bounds of a physical exhibition, providing a public record of the city’s critical talent.”

Allison Peters Quinn, Art Center Director of Exhibition & Residency Programs, talks about the history of collaboration between the two and what the integration means for future work: “It’s such an honor to continue GLP’s legacy and marry the Art Center’s Publications Program to this well respected moniker going forward. For over a decade, GLP has been a trusted partner and collaborator in producing books featuring the work of Chicago’s contemporary artists and writers, several of which were made in conjunction with Art Center exhibitions including the books Artists Run Chicago Digest, Epic Something, and Institutional Garbage. Known in the field as a platform for creative art writing and poetry, GLP brings renewed energy to our publications program by inspiring us to reconsider our role in supporting experimental art writing in the Midwest and ensuring future relationships between artists and writers to come.”

Hyde Park Art Center publications compliment its exhibitions program, often while producing the first-ever monograph catalog of a Chicago artist’s work. Since 1945, Hyde Park Art Center has generated over 70 publications that range from black-and-white booklets to substantial perfect-bound books. The Art Center is dedicated to providing quality documentation, commissioning writing on Chicago artists, and representing a diverse range of experimental, contemporary art made in Chicago, through its publications. 

RELATED PROGRAM

To celebrate the merge, a book release will take place on Tuesday, November 22, 6-8 p.m. at Hyde Park Art Center, for The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful, GLP’s most recent publication and first book released by award winning flutist and composer, Nicole Mitchell Gantt. Mitchell will be in conversation with critically acclaimed author, filmmaker, dancer and independent scholar, Ytasha L. Womack, followed by a book signing. The book will be available for sale on-site through the independent bookstore Seminary Co-op, and distributed by University of Minnesota Press.

The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella. The book blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that are integral to the collective survival of our planet.

Nicole Mitchell Gantt  is an award-winning creative flutist, conceptualist, and composer. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), founder of the Black Earth Ensemble, and Professor of Music at University of Virginia, Charlottesville. The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful  is her first book.

Ytasha L. Womack is a critically acclaimed author, filmmaker, dancer, independent scholar, and champion of humanity and the imagination. Her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture (2013) bridges science fiction, futurisms, and culture and was a 2014 Locus Awards Non Fiction Finalist. Womack tours the world championing Afrofuturism and the role of the imagination. Her works in Afrofuturism have been translated into Portuguese and Spanish for markets in Brazil and Latin America. Womack’s other books include Rayla 2213 (2016) Post Black: How a New Generation is Refining African American Identity (2010), which was a Booklist Top 10 Black History Reader, and Beats, Rhymes and Life: What We Love & Hate About Hip Hop (2007). More information available here: https://www.ytashawomack.com

About Green Lantern Press

Founded by Caroline Picard in 2005, Green Lantern Press is an artist-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing house dedicated to the support, production, and dissemination of contemporary art, poetry, and philosophy. GLP was committed to funding artists in the commission and development of new work that raised ethical questions about how to ensure a more equitable and sustainable creative life. Since inception, GLP organized over 250 events and exhibitions and published  more than 40 paperback editions in a range of genres from contemporary art, critical theory, fiction, and poetry, featuring the work and collaboration of Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, Candida Alvarez, Joel Craig, Romi Crawford, Luis Felipe Fabre, Lily Robert-Foley, Coco Fusco, Becca Mir Grady, Matthew Goulish, Amira Hanafi, Roberto Harrison, Young Joon Kwak, Devin King, Ellen Rothenberg, Nick Sarno, Lara Schoorl, Sonnenzimmer, Hui-Min Tsen, Moshe Marvit, and Fo Wilson, among others. 

About Hyde Park Art Center

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections. 

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GROUND FLOOR highlights emerging Chicago artists

December 10, 2022 – March 5, 2023

CHICAGO (September 26, 2022)— Hyde Park Art Center, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, announces Ground Floor, the seventh iteration of the Art Center’s biennial program since 2010 showcasing select work by recent graduates from each of Chicago’s five MFA (Master of Fine Art) programs, on view from December 10, 2022 – March 5, 2023. 

The exhibition offers a single destination to view some of Chicago’s most promising emerging talent who graduated in 2021-22 from one of Chicago’s five top-tier MFA programs: Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The University of Chicago, and The University of Illinois at Chicago. Artists represented in Ground Floor include: Sungho Bae (SAIC), Juan Baños (UIC), Scott Campbell (U of C), Ále Campos (SAIC), Sofia Fernandez Diaz (SAIC), Ali Georgescu (CCC), Sara Grose (U of C), Payton Harris Woodard (SAIC), Patrick Hubbell (SAIC), Nicholas Jackson (UIC), Ajmal “MAS MAN” Millar (SAIC), Travis Morehead (NU), Natasha Moustache (CCC), Elissa Osterland (U of C), Jess Atieno (SAIC), Shabtai Pinchevsky (NU), Emilie Plunkett (CCC), Corey Smith (SAIC), Frank Vega (SAIC), and Jessica Walker (NU).

Ground Floor presents the thesis work of the twenty graduates made in the past few years to investigate and articulate conceptual and stylistic trends coming out of Chicago art schools right now. Ground Floor—so named because it provides a crucial platform for emerging artists and traverses the entire lower level of the Art Center—gives exhibiting artists a major public venue in which to display their works at a critical juncture in their careers, helping to build, support and ensure a strong and vibrant community of artists in Chicago.

The artists in the exhibition were selected by the Art Center’s Exhibitions Committee from a competitive pool of applicants who were nominated by respected Chicago-based artists, curators, and administrators. The 2022 jury committee includes nationally and internationally renowned artists and educators Dawoud Bey (committee chair), Anne Wilson, Steve Reinke, Ross Jordan, and Daisy Shultz. The exhibition is curated by Exhibitions and Residency Manager, Mariela Acuña and Director of Exhibitions and Residency, Allison Peters Quinn.

The exhibition is accompanied by public programs and a catalog to be released in the Spring. The catalog will include a commissioned text by curator and writer Denny Mwaura, Assistant Director at Gallery 400, UIC. For more information, visit www.hydeparkart.org.

Admission, hours, and COVID-19-related safety protocols 

Exhibition admission is free and allows walk-ins. Masks are encouraged but not required to enter the building. Hyde Park Art Center views its community’s health and safety as the number one priority and is utilizing the guidance from the City and State to inform its safety protocols. For latest exhibition hours and COVID policy, visit https://www.hydeparkart.org/plan-your-visit/.

About the Hyde Park Art Center

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections. 

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Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Hues of Black & Blue

August 6 – November 19, 2022

Featuring sculptural works from Art Center’s Ceramics Apprenticeship that

reimagine Black feminine identity

CHICAGO (July 18, 2022)—Hyde Park Art Center, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, announces solo exhibition Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Hues of Black & Blue, featuring new work by the artist made during her year-long Ceramics Apprenticeship at the Art Center in 2021, on view August 6 – November 19, 2022.

Playing on the conceptual and literal contexts of the colors black and blue, Ogbara’s sculptural assemblages combine ceramic vessels, along with imagery, sound and domestic objects like stools and tables. Using familiar and unfamiliar spatial aesthetics while pointing out the complexities of emotion, Ogbara defies the flattening of Black feminine identity and reinforces its intersectional dynamism by challenging gazes that reinforce systems of oppression.

“My practice explores the multifaceted implications and ramifications of being in regard to the Black experience. I work with clay as a material in order to emphasize a necessary fragility which symbolizes an essential contradiction implicit in empowerment,” says the artist.

Born and raised in Chicago, Ogbara’s practice range from sculpture, sound, design, photography to installation art. Ogbara holds a Bachelor of Arts in Arts Entertainment & Media Management from Columbia College Chicago in 2013 and a MFA in Visual Arts from Washington University Sam Fox School of Art & Design. In 2017, Ogbara co-founded Artists in the Room, a collective of artists and scholars who host artists, emerging and established, in hopes of serving as a catalyst for artist development and networking. Ogbara has also received residencies, awards and speaking engagements including: the Multicultural Fellowship sponsored by the NCECA 52nd Annual Conference, the Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture Residency at the University of Chicago, and If It Wasn’t for the Woman: Reimagining Portraiture and Power lecture at the St. Louis Art Museum, among others.

Admission, hours, and COVID-19-related safety protocols 

Exhibition admission is free and allows walk-ins. Masks are encouraged but not required to enter the building. Hyde Park Art Center views its community’s health and safety as the number one priority and is utilizing the guidance from the City and State to inform its safety protocols. For latest exhibition hours and COVID policy, visit https://www.hydeparkart.org/plan-your-visit/.

About the Hyde Park Art Center

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections.

The post Hyde Park Art Center presents solo exhibition Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Hues of Black & Blue appeared first on Hyde Park Art Center.

Register to attend: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/loving-and-coupling-a-conversation-with-artist-couples-tickets-380584738197

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According to Miller & Shellabarger, “Speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities, we attempt to document the rhythms of relationships. The title of the exhibition comes from Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of the Americans. Stein’s discussion of the way in which life, history, and time is formed and understood is emblematic of our own relationship: Life is made of small, repeated gestures, and each repetition accumulating over time equals history. Our work tries to document the intimacy of these small and repetitive moments in a variety of ways.”

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Artist Bios: 

Dutes Miller and  Stan Shellabarger.

Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary work – performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes – that documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. Their performances, always enacted together in public, push simple materials and actions to almost Sisyphean extremes. Their gestures shift between moments of togetherness and separation, private and public, protection and pain, and visibility and invisibility. Their work is both autobiographical and metaphorical, speaking to common human interaction and queer relationships. Silhouettes of each other, their iconic beards, and their bodies appear regularly in their work. In their signature ongoing performance, Untitled (Pink Tube), a non-theatrical, durational piece, they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink acrylic yarn, a metaphorically-loaded object that both unites and separates them. In Untitled (Grave), Miller & Shellabarger dig two holes close together, deep and large enough for each man to lie in. They then dug a small tunnel between the holes that enabled them to hold hands while lying in the graves.

Miller & Shellabarger have had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, INOVA in Milwaukee, the University Galleries at Illinois State University and Gallery Diet in Miami and they have performed and/or been exhibited in group shows across the North America. Miller & Shellabarger are a 2008 recipient of an Artadia Chicago award and a 2007 recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award. Their work in is the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Newark Public Library, Indiana University Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada. Their work has been written about in Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, Chicago Tribune, and the Chicago Sun Times. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger also maintain separate artistic practices. They are represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicagoland live and work in Chicago.

Arthur Wright and Candace Hunter

Arthur Wright was born in Chicago and raised in Wilmington, Delaware were he was an Art Major at Wilmington High School. Excelling in the arts during his early years, he secured a full scholarship to the Columbus College of Arts and Design where he majored in Advertising and Graphic Design. After college he relocated to New York where he found a position with the Caroline Jones Advertising Agency and served as Art Director. While at the agency he personally won three prestigious Clio awards. After returning to Chicago in 1993, he has shown works at the National Black Fine Art Show in New York, and in Chicago at the Cook County Assessor’s Office, Nelah Art Expressions Gallery, Gallery Guichard, Nicole Gallery and the Little Black Pearl Gallery.

Arthur has also shown as part of Chicago’s Artist Month in a solo show in 2012, “Oh, The Places We’ll Go!” at a pop-up gallery in Bronzeville, as well as solo and group showings at Faie African Art in Bronzeville Gallery. An April 16th solo show at the Fulton Street Collective featured Arthur’s series: “One In a Million”, an ongoing series of one million pen and ink drawings, studies, paintings and collages of varies subject matter. Arthur was part of the first Fellowship Program at the Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago. He collaborated with two other artist Kenrick McFarlane and David Anthony Geary; to create three paintings based on the “1975 Paintings by Artist Noah Davis. Arthur’s current series of works “Music On My Mind”, consist of India Ink, pen, paintings and collages that present the story, emotions and movements of Music.

Candace Hunter (chlee), a Chicago based artist, creates collage, paintings, installations and performance art. Plainly, she tells stories. Through the use of appropriated materials from magazines, vintage maps, cloth, various re-used materials, she offers this new landscape of materials back to the viewer with a glimpse of history and admiration of the beautiful. During the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, she began to do two things, offer free art classes on Instagram and to create what she now calls her “Brown Limbed Girls” – a growing series of whimsical brown girls enjoying their lives. She is extremely happy to share the girls with a new audiences in New Orleans and Northern California.

A highly respected artist in the Midwest, chlee has most recently received 3Arts Next Level/Spare Room Award, the Tim and Helen Meier Family Foundation Award, the 2016 3 Arts Award and honored by the Diasporal Rhythms Collective. In 2020, she served as a juror for the Kentucky Foundation for Women and was asked to speak at the Midwest Women in Ecology Conference.

Andrew Bearnot and J. Kent

Andrew Bearnot (b. 1986, New York) is an artist, educator, and self described materialist. Bearnot received an MFA from the University of Chicago and dual undergraduate degrees from Brown University (BS) and the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA). Bearnot was a Fulbright fellow in Sweden and has been an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design (New York, NY), Hyde Park Arts Center (Chicago, IL), Marble House Project (Dorset, VT), and Creative Glass Center of America (Millville, NJ). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include: Engage Projects (Chicago, IL), MSU Broad Museum (East Lansing, MI), Currents 826 (Santa Fe, NM), The Arts Club of Chicago, The University Club of Chicago, Roots and Culture (Chicago, IL), and The Leather Archives and Museum (Chicago, IL).

Working within the intersection of writing, performance, and sculpture, J. Kent’s practice explores bounty amidst professed scarcity.

Collaborations

2017/2018 – Collaborated on a series of public programs titled Bread and Roses in tandem with Out of Sight festival and Open Engagement.
2019 – Mounted a two-person show titled ᗡOUBLEHEADED at Roots and Culture, which included several collaborative pieces.
2020 – Collaborated on artworks for the show Armatures + Supports at Stanley Brown Jewelist.

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OF JACKMAN GOLDWASSER RESIDENCY PROGRAM, 

ENABLING LOCAL, NATIONAL, & INTERNATIONAL ARTISTS 

TO CONTINUE ART PRACTICES WITH SOCIAL JUSTICE FOCUS

Current cohort of yearlong ‘Radicle Residents’ includes trio of Chicago ALAANA artists: Cecilia Beaven, William Estrada, and Farah Salem

Artists invited to apply for 2022 year-long and seasonal residencies, 

now open through August 23

CHICAGO (July 20, 2021) Hyde Park Art Center, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, proudly marks the tenth anniversary of its Jackman Goldwasser Residency program, offering four comprehensive residencies of varying lengths for local, national and international artists and curators. For over a decade, the residency program—with a particularly focus on ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native American) artists—has been providing valuable studio spaces, art classes, and supportive resources, while connecting the resident artists to the city’s artists, institutions, and cultural communities. 

In response to COVID-19 and the crises it brought forth and amplified, the selection of the 2021 roster of residents and supportive public programming have been adapted to increase support for Chicago artists (vs. those requiring travel), fortifying the program’s effort to help artists sustain art practices especially in the face of the pandemic. The 2021 cohort features ten artists of various disciplines, from painting to printmaking and textiles, in four programs of varying length and focus. In general, residencies range from six to eight weeks for national and international residents, while Chicago artists may participate in a yearlong intensive in the signature Radicle Studio Residency. The artist application for the 2022 class is now open for the year-long Radicle Studio Residency and seasonal Flex Residency, through Monday, August 23, 10 p.m. CST, available at www.hydeparkart.org. 

“Over an incredibly challenging year for arts organizations, and most of all artists, Hyde Park Art Center took this opportunity to reset intentions and recommit our programs to supporting art in Chicago, ensuring that artists across the city can continue to make their work and thrive. This year, we were able to refocus attention locally, expanding support for Chicago artists,” says Megha Ralapati, Art Center Residency Manager. 

The ten artists in the 2021 cohort of the Jackman Goldwasser Residency program are:

Radicle Studio Residency, Year-Long Residency for Chicago Artists

Radicle Studio Residents are rooted for a year at the Art Center through high-quality, free studio space where artists make work, research new projects, have access to the Art Center’s broad international network of artists and resources, and connect with a dynamic public.

Cecilia Beaven is a visual artist and art instructor from Mexico City whose multimedia practice serves as a vehicle for retelling stories from Mexican mythology combined with fictional personal narratives.

Farah Salem is an artist and art therapist working across media to investigate the gendered nature of trauma as it is embedded within her experiences as an Arab woman. 

William Estrada is an artist and art educator whose community-centered practice seeks to transform, question, and make connections via discussion, creation, and amplification of stories from across Chicago’s rich neighborhoods.

Flex Residency, Seasonal Residencies for Chicago Artists

Flex Residents participate in focused seasonal residencies where they are given free studio space to make work and develop new projects. They receive access to the Art Center’s broad network of artists and resources and connect with the Art Center’s staff and dynamic community. The 2021 Flex Residents include Aaron Hughes, Alexandra Antoine, and Moises Salazar.

BAC x Art Center Residency, Seasonal Residencies for Chicago Artists

A new partnership with the Black Arts Consortium at Northwestern University offering focused seasonal residencies and access to both the Art Center’s and the Black Arts Consortium’s broad network of artists and resources. The 2021 BAC X Art Center Residents include Devin T. Mays, Dorothy Burge, and Jory Drew.

International ArtsLink Fellowship, Ongoing Residency for International Artists

Ongoing partnership with CEC ArtsLink’s acclaimed international fellowship program, currently supporting  Bermet Borubaeva, artist, curator and educator, who continues her research-focused residency virtually, exploring the intersection of food justice, and innovative trash and recycling practices between her home town Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and in Chicago.

In addition, in June 2021, Hyde Park Art Center commenced a new partnership with Les Ateliers Medicis, an art space supporting emerging artists in Clichy-Montfermeil, France, through ongoing collaboration with the French Cultural Council, which builds upon the residency’s international collaborative work both with France and beyond. This partnership provides one of the few valuable residency opportunities in the City that enable international traveling for Chicago artists. The collaborative residency, Clichycago, is a new initiative that aims to weave a strong link between urban peripheries from the South Side of Chicago and the Parisian suburb of Clichy-Montfermeil. Chicago artist Faheem Majeed (whose exhibition Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden: Shrouds by Faheem Majeed is now on view at the Art Center) participated in an in-person residency in France through this collaboration. 

About Hyde Park Art Center

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections. 

For more information about Hyde Park Art Center, please visit  https://www.hydeparkart.org/

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Photo credits (l-r, t-b):

William Estrada, Cecilia Beaven, Farah Salem, Moises Salazar, Alexandra Antoine, Aaron Hughes, Jory Drew, Devin T. Mays, Dorothy Burge, and Bermet Borubaeva.

Courtesy of Hyde Park Art Center.

Artist Bios:

Cecilia Beaven (she/her) is a visual artist and art instructor from Mexico City. Cecilia holds an MFA from SAIC and a BFA from ENPEG La Esmeralda (Mexico City). Cecilia’s multidisciplinary artwork has been shown in solo shows in Mexico City, Houston, and Chicago, as well as in group exhibitions in Mexico, the US, Colombia, Sweden, Italy, and Japan including in the Hyde Park Art Center’s Ground Floor Biennial. Through her multimedia work Cecilia develops a speculative mythology with unique visual narratives. She affirms her creative agency by modifying existing tales and mythology and seamlessly adding fiction and personal anecdotes bringing a unique perspective on Mexican identity that goes beyond folklore and mainstream ideas of Mexico.

William Estrada (he/him) grew up in California, Mexico, and Chicago. His teaching and art making practice focus on addressing inequity, migration, historical passivity and cultural recognition in historically marginalized communities. He documents and engages experiences in public spaces to transform, question, and make connections to established and organic systems through discussion, creation, and amplification of stories through creativity already present. He has worked as an educator and artist with Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Hyde Park Art Center, SkyArt, Marwen Foundation, Urban Gateways, DePaul University’s College Connect Program, Graffiti Institute, Vermont College of Art and Design, Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, and the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Farah Salem (she/her)  is an artist and art therapist from Kuwait, whose photo, performance, and installation practice questions the potential erasure of socio-cultural conditioning, focusing on the gendered nature of trauma as it is embedded within her experiences as an Arab woman. Her studio and art therapy practices are bridged by social activism. In both, she focuses on community building through artmaking, investigating the use of materials for social-emotional wellbeing, accessibility of mental health services, and raising awareness about domestic and gender-based violence. She holds a BA in Visual Communications from Gulf University for Science and Technology and an MA in Art Therapy from SAIC. Farah’s work has been exhibited at United Photo Industries (New York), Mana Contemporary (Chicago), Site Galleries (Chicago), La Galerie (Dubai), and Contemporary Art Platform (Kuwait).

Moises Salazar (they/them) is a non-binary queer artist from Chicago. Being first generation Mexican American has cemented a conflict within Moises Salazar’s political identity, which is the conceptual focus of their practice. Whether addressing queer or immigrant bodies, their practice is tailored to showcasing the trauma, history, and barriers these people face. Reflecting on the lack of space and agency they possess, Salazar presents queer and immigrant bodies in environments where they can thrive and be safe. The spaces the figures inhabit are colorful, gentle, soft, and safe. The use of glitter, paper mache, and yarn are important in their work because of their cultural and personal value.

Aaron Hughes (he/him) is an artist, curator, organizer, teacher, anti-war activist, and Iraq War veteran. He works collaboratively in diverse spaces and media to create meaning out of personal and collective trauma, deconstruct and transform systems of oppression, and seek liberation. Working through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and printmaking, Hughes develops projects that deconstruct militarism and related institutions of dehumanization. Hughes works with a range of art and activist projects including Justseeds Artists Cooperative, Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project, About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and emerging Veteran Art Movement.

Alexandra Antoine (she/her) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist whose work examines traditional artistic practices throughout the African Diaspora with a focus on healing traditions, identity and culture through the use of collage, portraiture, and most recently, farming. She uses the portrait as a tool to re/present individuals of the African diaspora while exploring her relationship to them within the larger narrative of her Haitian identity. She holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts and Arts Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at Rootwork Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Roman Susan Gallery, Chicago Art Department and Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, IL. Her work is also part of the Arts in Embassies program in the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Jory Drew (they/them) is an artist and educator, whose work reckons with the social constructions of race, gender, and love which influence the economic, legal, and political conditions that manifest and determine the lives of Black people. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Drew has exhibited locally and nationally and has participated in the Open Kitchen Residency (Milwaukee, WI), ACRE (Steuben, WI/Chicago), and Hot Box Residency (Austin, TX). As an educator, Drew is the co-lead artist for the North Lawndale Teen Art Council in Homan Square for SAIC and the Teen Creative Agency at the MCA Chicago. They Co-founded F4F, a domestic venue in Little Village (Chicago) and Co-organize Beauty Breaks, an intergenerational beauty and wellness workshop series for Black people along the spectrum of femininity.

Dorothy Burge (she/her) is a multimedia artist and community activist inspired by history and current issues of social justice. Dorothy is a native of Chicago, and a descendent from a long line of quilters from Mississippi who created beautiful quilts from recycled clothing. Her realization that the history and culture of her people were being passed through generations of quilters inspired her to use the medium as a tool to teach history, raise cultural awareness, and inspire action. Dorothy received her Masters of Arts in Urban Planning and Policy and her Bachelors of Arts in Art Design, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of Blacks Against Police Torture and Chicago Torture Justice Memorials; cultural collectives seeking justice for police torture survivors.

Devin Mays (he/him, they/them) is a multimedia artist whose practice, which includes sculpture, performance and drawing, is described as an auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary exploration of material, prospective and presence. A Graduate of University of Chicago’s MFA program, May’s work has exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Lowe Art Museum, University of Florida; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago; Nahmad Projects, London; NADA Miami, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; and Regards Chicago.

Bermet Borubaeva (she/her) is an urban environmentalist and labor rights activist and uses trash as a medium in her work. Bermet is interested in the intersection of art, climate science and environmental inequality. Her practice is dedicated to the global problem of food waste and growing ecological disruptions caused by excessive urbanization. She is a 2020-2021 CEC ArtsLink Fellow, and during her residency with Hyde Park Art Center, Bermet has been studying ecological politics, environmental inequality and climate disruption caused by food overproduction and excessive urbanization in home of Bishkek, Kyrgzystan and in conversation with Chicago.

Faheem Majeed (he/him) is a builder—literally and metaphorically. A resident of Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, Majeed often looks to the material makeup of his neighborhood and surrounding areas as an entry point into larger questions around civic-mindedness, community activism, and institutional critique. As part of his studio practice, the artist transforms materials such as particle board, scrap metal and wood, and discarded signs and billboard remnants, breathing new life into these often overlooked and devalued materials. His broader engagement with the arts also involves arts administration, curation, and community facilitation, all which feed into his larger practice. From 2005-2011, Majeed served as Executive Director and Curator for the SSCAC. In this role he was responsible for managing operations, staff, programs, fundraising, curation, and archives for the SSCAC. During his time with the SSCAC, Majeed curated exhibitions of numerous artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Dr. David Driskell, Charles White, Jonathan Green, and Theaster Gates. Majeed received his BFA from Howard University and his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC).

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Installation features one-bedroom house of the future built to scale with recovered materials within Art Center gallery; concludes artist’s trilogy reimagining existing orders of the built world

CHICAGO (July 8, 2021)—Hyde Park Art Center, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, announces a major new sculpture exhibition by Chicago artist Lan Tuazon, Future Fossils: SUM, on view September 7 – November 13, and curated by Allison Peters Quinn, Art Center Director of Exhibition & Residency Programs. The exhibition offers visitors an encounter with a future house that doesn’t yet exist—one constructed solely with recovered materials. It visualizes the sum of a lifespan’s worth of human material traces in the world, nestled together as a one-bedroom house built to scale and exhibited inside the two-story gallery at the Art Center.

As envisioned by the artist, Future Fossils: SUM is a test site for what a house would look like in a “circular economy,” which builds a sustainable society producing minimal waste vs the current extractive take-make-waste industrial model known as a “linear economy.” Asking the question “how much of the 109 tons of waste produced per person in a lifetime can be reabsorbed into one’s present needs?” Tuazon repurposes and transforms found everyday objects—mass produced containers, common packaged goods, tchotchkes, household items—to give mass to the unseen byproduct of consumption and propose an extended life span of objects. The artist dissects, layers, and presses such objects to present a stratification-like form, mimicking fossils as a visualization of geological time while creating new items from materials with past uses. Visitors are invited to contribute by dropping off plastic goods to be shredded on site, which will then be turned into raw materials for sheet press companies.

Future Fossils: SUM marks the final installation in Tuazon’s decade-long trilogy, Shift in the Order of Things, in which the artist challenges how an individual is subjected towards an ideological version of the world. Tuazon’s trilogy consists of three themes—economy, culture, and power—with works about the urban plan, cultural history, and human-made geology. Revealing and reinserting what is erased from the existing Western order of the built world, Tuazon’s sculptures function as a tool to propose alternate realities. The first installment, titled Architectures of Defense, was exhibited at Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany in 2010, interpreting common barrier structures in urban landscape as instruments of racial and class division. The second chapter, a solo exhibition, On the Wrong Side of History at the Brooklyn Museum in 2011, highlighted the separation of world cultures relegated to the past as preserved through museums and academic institutions. These two projects on architecture and artifacts led the artist to the subject of planetary conditions as human activities now have the greatest impact on geological and ecological systems, as presented in this latest installation. Through Future Fossil: SUM, Tuazon aims to decentralize human and existing categories of human knowledge. She states, “The trilogy itself is an onion with strata-like layers that telescope from the scale of a human body at the core to the planetary conditions that contain it and conversely, from the planet to the body, resembling a circular economy.”

“For this exhibition, the Art Center will become a laboratory for radical processes in new material led by artist Lan Tuazon,” according to Allison Peters Quinn. “When Lan was participating in the Jackman Goldwasser Residency here in 2017, she proposed the idea of building a house filled with bisected and recycled containers ranging from hot sauce bottles to shipping containers. I had no idea how impactful her work would be on piloting new materials from recovered plastics. This immersive installation will truly put into perspective the geologic weight of our consumer habits, while literally building inhabitable structures from waste.”

This exhibition is generously supported by the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation and the Henry Moore Foundation.

Tuazon shares the inspiration and goal for creating her trilogy: “It inspires me to think that reality is an unfinished project. When I look at the built world, I know it exists at the erasure of other possibilities. You can make up the difference if you’re a builder, but the goal is not to rebuild everything, but to create the double that reminds you that possibilities are in the making. My sculptures are meant to be evidence of the very things we deny, and artworks that give visibility to the nature of our condition.”

Lan Tuazon (b.1976, Philippines) lives and works in Chicago where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the School of Art Institute in Chicago. Tuazon has exhibited internationally at the Neue Galerie in the Imperial Palace (Austria), Bucharest Biennale 4 (Romania), the WKV Kunstverein (Germany), and the Lowry Museum (U.K.). Solo exhibitions have been held at Brooklyn Museum and Storefront of Art and Architecture (New York), Youngworld, Inc (Detroit), and Julius Caesar (Chicago). She was awarded artist-in-residence fellowships by the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), Headlands Art Center (U.S.), and Civitella Ranieri (Italy). Tuazon’s work has been featured in group exhibitions in New York at 8th Floor Rubin Foundation, Artist Space, Canada Gallery, Sculpture Center, Apex Art, Exit Art; in Los Angeles at Redcat Gallery; in addition to here at Hyde Park Art Center. Lan Tuazon received her B.A. from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1999, her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2002, and graduated from Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 2003.

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CENTER SUNDAYS PUBLIC PROGRAM MAY 2, 2021, 1-4 P.M.

WITH IN-PERSON AND VIRTUAL PROGRAMMING

Latest installment in monthly series, now with both in-person and virtual components, features three hours of artmaking, film screening, artist talk, exhibition walkthrough, and portrait painting

CHICAGO (April 22, 2021)— Hyde Park Art Center, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, will host its latest Center Sunday, an all-ages program filled with art-making activities, workshops, and artist talks, held on the first Sunday of each month, May 2, from 1-4 p.m. This month’s program will feature both in-person and virtual components: outdoor artmaking with the Smart Museum, outdoor film screening by the South Side Home Movie Project, virtual exhibition walkthrough and artist talk with Maggie Crowley, and virtual portrait painting with Irina Zadov. The event is free and open to the public, with pre-registration required at hydeparkart.org.

Monthly Center Sundays are curated by Ciera McKissick, Hyde Park Art Center Public Programs Coordinator, as a means of introducing the community to the myriad ongoing offerings at the Hyde Park Art Center for all ages, interests and skill levels; the May Center Sunday programming includes:

Artmaking: “Fundred” Project Drawing Workshop with Smart Museum Educators

1 – 3 p.m.

Outdoor in-person in the Hyde Park Art Center parking lot

Educators from the Smart Museum of Art will teach how to create one’s own “fundred” for the Fundred Project. The Fundreds Project engages youth in civic action around lead contamination and is a creative currency to demonstrate how much the lives of children and a future free of lead poisoning are valued. A “fundred” is an original, hand-drawn interpretations of $100 bills, and is a play on words which combines the words “Fun,” “Fund,” and “Hundred.” Making a Fundred is a chance to express oneself, while together the Fundreds demonstrate the value collectively placed on healthier communities, lead-safe homes, and the imagination of all children. Located nearby in Hyde Park, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago is a site for rigorous inquiry and exchange that encourages the examination of complex issues through the lens of art objects and artistic practice. Through strong community and scholarly partnerships, the Museum, first opened in 1974, incorporates diverse ideas, identities, and experiences into its exhibitions and collections, academic inquiry, and public programming. 

Spinning Home Movies Screening

1 – 3 p.m.

Outdoor in-person in the Hyde Park Art Center parking lot

Hyde Park Art Center hosts an outdoor screening of Episode 14, the latest episode, of the South Side Home Movie Project’s Spinning Home Movies. The South Side Home Movie Project collects, preserves, digitizes, researchs and screens home movies made by residents of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods. Spinning Home Movies invites local artists and DJs to curate a collection from the archive, set to music for a special episode. Curator Ciera McKissick and DJ Skoli are featured in this episode to take viewers on a road trip across the country as a way to highlight the complexities of black transit and travel. 

“What Time Is It?” Portrait Session with Irina Zadov

2 – 3 p.m.

Virtual via Zoom link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89878680561

Chicago-based artist and organizer Irina Zadov leads a virtual portrait painting session where she paints and interviews a teen member from the Art Center’s ArtShop education program. Zadov’s current exhibition What Time Is It? debuts a rotating series of large-scale digital portraits of some of Chicago’s most influential cultural community members, projected on the facade of the Art Center. These 50 hand-painted portraits highlight contemporary artists, authors, activists and thinkers who are working to radically transform our city. 

Exhibition Walkthrough and Artist Talk with Maggie Crowley

3 – 4 p.m.

Virtual via Zoom link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89878680561

Artist Maggie Crowley leads a walkthrough of her first solo exhibition in Chicago, Playmate, currently on view at the Art Center, featuring a new series of large figurative paintings in acrylic on silk in which she examines her admiration and personal connection to the service industry. Crowley examines the invisible labor and value placed on essential work – a discrepancy recently heightened in the US by the pandemic. The walkthrough will be followed by a facilitated Q&A with Exhibitions and Residency Coordinator, Mariela Acuna.

About Center Sundays

Every first Sunday of the month and pre-COVID 19, Hyde Park Art Center was activated throughout the center for the public, neighbors, and families, with intergenerational art making activities, artist workshops, artist talks, open studios, curatorial tours of its exhibitions, community collaborations, music and small bites. Since the pandemic lockdown, Center Sundays have switched online—and now in a hybrid mode—continuing with interaction, engagement, and exchange with the public on the same day of each month. Center Sundays are free and open for all.

About the Hyde Park Art Center

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of innovative development and emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. The Art Center functions as an amplifier for today and tomorrow’s creative voices, providing the space to cultivate and create new work and connections.

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