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A person standing on the front porch of a house, with his hand on his chest, next to a ladder.

Folded Map, "unBLOCKED" project, Delon Adams in front of his home on construction day.

Stories & News / Foundation News

Art Design Chicago Grants Awarded Fall 2023

November 27, 2023

Supported Projects

The Terra Foundation for American Art awarded 32 grants in October 2023 through its Art Design Chicago initiative. Totaling nearly $3.2 million, these grants support projects that highlight Chicago’s unique artistic heritage and creative communities. Art Design Chicago officially launched November 2, 2023, and continues into 2025. The awarded grants include support for Art Design Chicago exhibitions, public programs, and research and learning resources.

Representing a citywide collaboration and showcasing the work of hundreds of artists, Art Design Chicago is a series of events and exhibitions that involves more than 50 Chicago-area arts organizations and spans 30 Chicago neighborhoods and several suburban communities. Supported projects for this grant cycle include Folded Map’s public program “unBlOCKED,” National Public Housing Museum’s exhibition Still Here: Linking Stories of Displacement, and South Asia Institute’s exhibition Seen and Unseen: South Asian American Art in Chicago. 

Folded Map’s “unBlOCKED” project has grown out of social-justice artist Tonika Johnson’s Inequity for Sale (IFS) initiative. IFS seeks to educate the public about Chicago’s racist housing policies, including predatory land-sale contracts and redlining, and “unBlOCKED” builds upon this work by using art and material resources to transform one block in Chicago’s Englewood community impacted by these discriminatory policies. Residents will envision artistic interventions and enhancements for their block with the help of collaborators from the Englewood Arts Collective and Chicago Bungalow Association, and the project will be documented through photographs, videos, and oral histories that will be incorporated into exhibitions, digital assets, and virtual programs made accessible to a wide audience.  

“Public art traditionally takes form as murals, gardens, sculptures, and outdoor installations. Although these are impactful, my unBLOCKED Englewood project deviates from that,” said Johnson. “In partnership with the Chicago Bungalow Association, unBLOCKED is repairing homes and artistically beautifying one block in the historically redlined and disinvested Englewood neighborhood with residents whose families were victims of racist housing practices in the 1950s and 1960s. Receiving the Art Design Chicago grant from the Terra Foundation is not just an honor, but it is a profound testament to the role arts funding organizations can play in addressing the legacy of historic racism, even before comprehensive national redress is established.”

National Public Housing Museum’s Still Here: Linking Stories of Displacement is the inaugural exhibition at the museum’s new home, using art, archives, and public dialogue to explore and connect histories of displacement on the land where the museum is located. The project explores the displacement histories of Chicago’s Indigenous and Black communities and considers how their experiences are connected. Still Here includes work by Chris Pappan, Amanda Williams, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, and contextualizes their practice within the historical debate over land rights and access to public space. These artists bring the history of settler colonialism into the present, making connections between the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples and the ongoing disinvestment that affects many communities of color in Chicago.

Compilation of important figures in National Public Housing Museum's Folded Map project with Chris Papan, Tonika Johnson, Chief Simon Pokagon, Simon Pokegan, Ida B. Wells,and Why the Colored American is Not in the Columbian Exposition pamphlet.

Upper Left: Chris Pappan, Spirit of Kitihawa, 2020, pencil, graphite, ledger paper, inkjet, (Private Collection)., Upper Right: Tonika Lewis Johnson, 6823 South Aberdeen, 2022, Photograph and Original Landmarker, Middle Left: Illustration of Chief Simon Pokagon from Indian sketches: Père Marquette and the last of the Pottawatomie chiefs by Cornelia Steketee, Library of Congress Control Number 12022569, Middle Right: Simon Pokegan, The Red Man's Greeting, Digital Reproduction of 28 pg book on bark, 1893, (Newberry Library), Lower Left: Portrait of Ida B. Wells, Chicago History Museum, Lower Right: Ida B. Wells Barnett, Ferdinand Barnett, I. Garland Penn, Fredrick Douglass, Why the Colored American is Not in the Columbian Exposition, Digital Reproduction of a paper pamphlet, 1893, Chicago History Museum.

 Executive Director and Chief Curator of the National Public Housing Museum, Dr. Lisa Yun Lee, notes, “Still Here: Linking Histories of Displacement, co-curated with Dr. Lucy Mensa, uses art, archives, and public dialogue to explore and create solidarity between the histories of displacement of Indigenous people and African American families on the land where the National Public Housing Museum is located. The project will include a mural outside the museum by artist Andrea Carlson that links Indigenous history with the history of redlining and African American displacement in public housing, as well as a participatory exhibition in the museum’s gallery, programming, and the development of a resource guide. A centerpiece of the exhibit is an engagement wall, created by the Indigenous exhibition design team 7GAE, that will share research, invite feedback and questions from visitors, and serve as a process for developing our land acknowledgment statement. Drawing upon participatory museum strategies, the wall’s design will engage audiences with interactive formats that accommodate multiple learning styles and different languages. We will share a new land acknowledgment statement resulting from this process at the closing of the exhibition.” 

“The exhibition Seen and Unseen: South Asian American Art in Chicago addresses a significant gap in the history of art in Chicago. Despite more than 25 years of exhibitions featuring South Asian American artists’ contributions to the rich cultural network of diasporic art across the United States and internationally, these histories are under-documented and practically unknown. South Asia Institute believes it has a responsibility to preserve, safeguard, and share the rich histories of South Asian American artists in Chicago.”

Shireen Ahmad, Founder and Director of South Asia Institute

South Asia Institute’s Seen and Unseen: South Asian American Art in Chicago is a multifaceted project that documents the history of South Asian art and artists in Chicago and shares this history through an archival exhibition and an installation of contemporary art. The project narrative begins with colonial-era perspectives, including those reflected in documentation and photographs from the Indian Pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and continues through the past 25 years, documenting South Asian American artists’ participation in exhibitions and programs throughout the city. South Asia Institute convened meetings and workshops with local South Asian American artists, curators, scholars, and an archivist with the goals of assembling past exhibition-related materials and recorded oral histories and addressing gaps in the art-historical record. The exhibition brings together artworks in several formats and media and highlights the diverse range of contemporary artistic practices.

Cloud-like creature shaped in the form of a person, on a blue and black canvas.

Lala Rukh, Untitled, circa 1976, Collection of Seemin Khan, Northfield, USA, Photo credit: A. Moratinos.

Two guns shaped like a triangle, with a glove in the center.

Indira Freitas Johnson, The In Between (2021), Photo credit: Yancey Hughes.

“The exhibition Seen and Unseen: South Asian American Art in Chicago addresses a significant gap in the history of art in Chicago,” said Shireen Ahmad, Founder and Director of South Asia Institute. “Despite more than 25 years of exhibitions featuring South Asian American artists’ contributions to the rich cultural network of diasporic art across the United States and internationally, these histories are under-documented and practically unknown. South Asia Institute believes it has a responsibility to preserve, safeguard, and share the rich histories of South Asian American artists in Chicago. This groundbreaking survey exhibition involves local artists, curators, gallerists, and scholars in an effort to collectively archive and showcase the rich history of South Asian American artists who lived, worked, and/or studied in Chicago, and who continue to contribute to the city’s vibrant contemporary arts scene. Recentering these long-neglected art histories and connecting them to the present in this unprecedented exhibition will assure South Asia Institute’s role as one of the nation’s leading South Asian American art institutions, and we hope that it will lay the groundwork for similar projects across the country.”

For all foundation grants awarded, and for more information about these grants, please see the grants database. For information about the additional grants awarded in October 2023, please see the grants awarded story.

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