This survey of Vietnamese American artist Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn brings together films, installations, and sculptures made in the last two decades. The exhibition explores transnational entanglements in the wake of colonialism.
Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy explores representations of ecstasy in the work of Black queer artists from the Harlem Renaissance through today.
Opening at London’s Mimosa House and later at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, transfeminisms explores a multiplicity of urgent, pressing, and ongoing issues faced by women, queer, and trans people across the globe.
Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger gives an in-depth overview of Nengudi’s and Hassinger’s practices, creating a project that establishes an intimate dialogue between them while highlighting the uniqueness of their shared paths.
Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology Along the Hudson River brings together historical and contemporary art, visual and material culture, and environmental science to engage in a critical dialogue about the art of the Hudson River. Foregrounding alternative narratives, the works featured include objects of Lenape life, ceramic jars made by African Americans for the oyster industry from the eighteenth through the twentieth century, and contemporary Asian American artists’ responses to the river’s environmental damage, among other works.
Art on Sedgwick’s public programming series “Intersections” explores migration, place, erasure, and other themes that are resonant in Chicago’s Near North Side Cabrini Green neighborhood. Using William Walker’s historic mural All of Mankind: The Unity of the Human Race as a starting point and source of inspiration, the project brings diverse intergenerational audiences together for art-making workshops, discussions, neighborhood history tours, and other art activations meant to foster belonging and create connections across Near North Side communities.
Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) on Chicago’s South Side is introducing the series “Let’s Talk About Art,” a five-week program offering the 65+ community an opportunity to safely learn together, celebrate, and discuss projects and exhibitions that are part of Art Design Chicago. Students meet with the artists and designers behind these projects, participate in workshops, and create art inspired by what they have learned. HPAC aims to foster an environment that encourages older adults to connect with other lifelong learners, all while socializing and gaining exposure to the city’s vibrant art scene.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is launching a seven-day workshop for college and university faculty and instructors, “Chicago Designs: New Approaches to Teaching Social History and Design,” which introduces participants to design-related archives and collections across Chicago. The project brings a critical eye to established design histories and reveals hidden narratives of labor and disability as well as other histories. Participants develop and share teaching resources (syllabi, teaching plans, assignment templates, bibliographies, etc.) based on collection materials, which are gathered on a public website in partnership with area archives and other collecting organizations.
The Making of the National Public Housing Museum is a multiauthor publication that documents the process of developing a museum centered on the voices and experiences of some of our nation’s most marginalized communities. Featuring essays and interviews, the book details how public housing residents inform the contents of the museum and the ways their stories are shared. Additionally, the book provides a visual narrative for exhibition strategies that embrace art and design and their role in shaping perceptions, knowledge, and emotion around such issues as race, class, gender, and other themes central to our common future, and that serve as a call to our nation.
Sixty Inches From Center, in partnership with the Chicago Park District’s Arts & Culture Unit (ACU), produces a multi–author publication, Finding Ceremony, with art publisher For The Birds Trapped In Airports and editor Kamilah Rashied. The book chronicles ACU’s inaugural Anchor Curatorial Residency, awarded to Tiffany M. Johnson. Johnson’s residency and exhibition project at the Park District’s Austin Town Hall Cultural Center examined the tensions between safety, care, and the visibility of Black and Brown lives in the municipal space. The book offers a model of community-centered curation, showing how municipalities can leverage their structural, human, and natural resources to empower cultural workers and artists as interlocutors in collaboration with communities.
To support the reinterpretation of Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With. The painting has become one of the most recognized and potent images of the modern civil rights movement, and the Norman Rockwell Museum seeks to develop a new interpretive framework that tells a more complete story of the painting. The project contextualizes the work more deeply within the desegregation of schools in New Orleans and the specific people involved, as well as within the work Rockwell did before and after this painting. The project also addresses the ways that Rockwell’s art can be presented today in an inclusive and meaningful way for diverse audiences.
The Chicago Public Art Group (CPAG) seeks support to preserve one of the earliest CPAG murals still extant and one of the few monumental murals created for a labor union, the Union Electrical Workers Mural (1973–74), also known as “Solidarity,” by CPAG cofounder John Pitman Weber and the late Jose Guerrero. Addressing such themes as resilience and the dignity of labor, and representing the story of the UE, industrial unionism, and related social movements, “Solidarity” reflects Chicago’s centrality to the revival of the mural movement of the 1960s and ’70s and is significant to the city’s art history and US labor history. The sale of the United Electrical Workers (UE) Hall at 37 S. Ashland Avenue necessitates moving the mural to preserve and conserve it—work to be carried out by Parma Conservation, after which it will be rehoused at the Chicago’s Teachers Union at 1901 West Carroll Street.
