The Art Center Highland Park, in partnership with Oliva Gallery, proudly announces Facades, a powerful new exhibition opening August 8, 2025, that foregrounds three influential voices in contemporary Midwestern art: Nikki Renee Anderson, Aaron Becker, and the late Molly Schiff. Through sculpture, color, and dynamic form, Facades confronts themes of identity, visibility, and public space, inviting audiences to consider how we construct, obscure, and reveal ourselves in a constantly shifting social landscape.
These three Chicago-based artists—each rooted in a distinct material language—deliver an experience that is visually compelling and emotionally resonant, shaped by Midwest sensibilities and a commitment to community dialogue.
Nikki Renee Anderson, known for her ceramic sculptures and immersive installations, brings a tactile intimacy to the exhibition. Her works challenge static notions of femininity and identity, drawing on personal history to create forms that are at once soft and assertive, playful and deeply psychological. Anderson’s practice reflects a career of national and international acclaim, with exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, and the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, Italy. A professor and leader in ceramic education, Anderson’s work reclaims the domestic and decorative as spaces of feminist resistance and self-exploration.
Aaron Becker engages viewers with a sculptural language that distorts familiarity. Trained in ceramics, Becker constructs imagined environments through abstract form and geometric composition, asking us to examine the energies that shape our perception of place. His work, which often pairs the functional with the conceptual, explores the thresholds between domesticity and disorientation. His installations provoke questions about presence, interiority, and what it means to occupy space.
Molly Schiff (1927–2018), a visionary Chicago modernist, rounds out the exhibition with vividly colored paintings that channel emotional immediacy through abstraction. A lifelong creative force who began painting after a career in the garment industry, Schiff earned multiple degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and exhibited widely across Illinois. Her works exemplify a blend of expressive form, bold palette, and open invitation to interpretive intimacy. She remains a cherished figure in Chicago’s art history and her legacy continues to influence new generations.
Together, Anderson, Becker, and Schiff present a multi-generational conversation on form, identity, and the surface tensions that define civic life. Facades is more than an exhibition, it is a reflection on visibility, vulnerability, and the connective power of art in public discourse.
Opening Reception: August 8, 2025 | 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Exhibition Dates: August 8 – September 2025
Location: The Art Center Highland Park 1957 Sheridan Rd, Highland Park, IL 60035
