West Town, Wicker Park, Ukrainian Village, Kinzie Corridor, Humboldt Park

West Town

Wisconsin

IL • MI • IN

West Loop, Fulton Market, East Garfield Park

West Loop and West Side

Evanston, The North Shore, Northern, Western and Southern Suburbs

Suburbs

Old Town, Lincoln Park, Lakeview, Roscoe Village, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Logan Square, Lincoln Square, Ravenswood, Uptown, Edgewater, Andersonville, Rogers Park

North Side

Michigan Avenue, Streeterville, The Gold Coast, The Loop, and South Loop

Michigan Avenue

Pilsen, Bridgeport, Chinatown, plus Hyde Park, Jackson Park/Dorchester, and Bronzeville

South Side

Superior and Franklin streets, West Chicago Ave, and down to Merchandise Mart and the River

River North

For this live performance within the exhibition, Ximena Garrido-Lecca has invited Lia Kohl, a sound artist and musician in Chicago, to occupy this corner of space-time. A nimble performer and composer with a wide-ranging experimental practice, Kohl explores experiences of simultaneity here, as it connects to sound and music, while incorporating recordings of gravitational waves and other sources. Visit&nbsp;<a style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="http://renaissancesociety.org/" target="_blank">renaissancesociety.org</a>&nbsp;for more information.

Performance: Lia Kohl

Care is both love and labor—nurturing, repairing, and sustaining ourselves, others, and our communities. This exhibition builds on feminist histories of care work, recognizing its often invisible, gendered, racialized, and classed dimensions. ﻿Juror:&nbsp;<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://womanmade.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=77610ec6940e4a7c0d652a863&amp;id=803ad95985&amp;e=a3993dd90f" target="_blank">Kristen Carter</a>

Acts of Care: Nurturing the Present, Shaping the Future

New paintings, drawings, photography, prints, and multimedia works demonstrate the intense study by young adult artists participating in Hyde Park Art Center’s Teen programs. Under the guidance of professional artists, nearly twenty teens develop their creative voices over the course of 15 weeks, and translate complex thoughts, feelings, and emotions into individual works of art.

Teen Show

A performance developed in collaboration with Jamaican choreographer Neila Ebanks that explores themes in the exhibition through movement and dance. Ebanks is the co-founder of dance collective Enkompane and Director of Dance Studies at Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston.

Cornerstone Performance in collaboration with Neila Ebanks

<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" target="_blank">Hyde Park Art Center</a>, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, announces&nbsp;Yasmin Spiro: Cornerstone,&nbsp;the first major solo exhibition of the Chicago-based Jamaican artist, and related free public programming. Inspired by Spiro’s background, the exhibition presents the artist’s ongoing exploration of the intersections between land, body, memory, and architecture, inviting the audience to contemplate the physical and psychological effects of histories of migration and colonialism. Layered with aspects of Jamaica’s ecology, architectural structures, land ownership, and socio-political history,&nbsp;Cornerstone&nbsp;emphasizes the hybridity of the island's culture and people, via immersive new works including sculptures, sound and scent work, and weavings.&nbsp;Yasmin Spiro: Cornerstone&nbsp;is curated by Allison Peters Quinn and runs&nbsp;from April 19 to November 2, 2025; admission is free. The title work&nbsp;Cornerstone&nbsp;is a new, towering fort-like structure made with cast forms and textile walls designed for visitors to enter. In construction, the cornerstone refers to the first-laid stone of a building, to which all other stones are positioned in relation. Set up at the center of the gallery, the installation—created during Spiro’s 2024 Jackman Goldwasser Residency at the Art Center—connects to three surrounding bodies of work in the gallery, serving as a metaphor for home and the feeling of being grounded in an identity that is shaped by a homeland. Combining burlap, wood, rope, mixed-media cast, and ceramic forms, video, and rural sound, Spiro composes a sensorial environment that elicits comfort and belonging. The three related bodies of work combine old and new elements from Spiro’s practice within texture, muted organic tones, and sensory-rich materials. The north end of the gallery will feature a 17 ft. long burlap weaving embedded with handmade ceramic bells, found driftwood, and rope that projects a complex lattice of shadows on the wall, offering a new perception of space. On the west wall, six mounted panels align rope compositions next to flesh-toned ceramic tiles made during Spiro’s Arts/Industry residency at Kohler Co. Finally, ropes descend from the ceiling on the south end of the gallery and extend outward, forming a suspended alternative architecture. Through these works, Spiro contemplates the fluidity of land and water, and how people’s relationship to land is shaped by migration, colonial histories, and national identity. To the artist, buildings are not simply physical structures, but spaces that anchor human experiences, culture, and history. “Materiality is central to the meaning of the work,” explains Spiro. “The cast forms in&nbsp;Cornerstone&nbsp;create an organic, almost fossilized presence that simultaneously emerges from and erodes back into the earth, reflecting how landscapes shift and histories accumulate over time. Pigmented in shades of pink, their fleshy, shell-like tones correspond to the cast porcelain on the walls, referencing the natural landscapes of Jamaica and the layered histories embedded in them. These forms speak to the way places shape us and how we carry them within us.” This exhibition is part of an ongoing annual series of large-scale artworks commissioned by Hyde Park Art Center, which in the past included new works by Edra Soto, Faheem Majeed, and Lan Tuazon among others. The exhibition will be documented and enhanced through a publication with essays by critic and writer Seph Rodney and curator Allison Peters Quinn. A series of public programs will offer opportunities for audiences to further engage with the exhibition.&nbsp;Yasmin Spiro: Cornerstone&nbsp;is generously supported by the Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation Research and Production Fund. Related free public programs include: Artist-led Exhibition TourTuesday, April 22, 5:30 p.m.<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" target="_blank">Yasmin Spiro leads an exhibition tour as part of EXPO Chicago’s South Side Night.</a> Yasmin Spiro in conversation with Seph RodneyThursday, May 15, 6 p.m.<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" target="_blank">Writer and critic Seph Rodney joins Yasmin Spiro in conversation to discuss her exhibition</a>&nbsp;in relation to colonial and post-colonial Caribbean culture, land, body, and identity. Panel discussion: Geographies of Belonging: Land, Identity, and Collective MemorySaturday, June 21, 1-2:30 p.m.<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" target="_blank">Artists, architects, archaeologists, and historians discuss how human bodies relate to land and space, exploring themes of displacement, rootedness, and identity.&nbsp;</a> Cornerstone Performance in collaboration with Neila EbanksThursday, October 9, 6 p.m.<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" target="_blank">A performance developed in collaboration with Jamaican choreographer Neila Ebanks that explores themes in the exhibition through movement and dance. Ebanks is the co-founder of dance collective Enkompane and Director of Dance Studies at Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston.</a> ABOUT THE ARTIST<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" target="_blank">Born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica by a family from multiple geographies, the interdisciplinary artist&nbsp;</a><a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.yasminspiro.com/" target="_blank">Yasmin Spiro&nbsp;</a>approaches cultural identity with a unique perspective. Through her sculptures and installations, she addresses issues of socio-economic imbalance within the framework of urban development and architecture – often through the lens of Caribbean culture. Spiro works in a variety of media from wood, ceramic, natural and synthetic fibers and textiles to performance and video, exploring materiality while investigating the relationship between the body, nature, and the built environment. She attended Pratt Institute and held residences at the Dora Maar Foundation, The Kohler Arts and Industry residency, Vermont Studio Center, and the Chicago Artist Coalition. She currently resides in Chicago. ABOUT THE HYDE PARK ART CENTER<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" target="_blank">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 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; an open-access community-based school with 2,000 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 connect residents with Chicago art and artists. The Art Center’s Oakman Clinton School + Studio is the nation’s first fully contribute-what-you-can visual art school for all ages. 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, visit&nbsp;www.hydeparkart.org</a>.

Yasmin Spiro: Cornerstone

One of the most common enactments of an artist’s practice is mark making. An artist’s mark can be reflective of art historical genres and suggestive of their gestural idiosyncrasies that respond to lived experiences, emotions, or their surroundings. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s canonical text Beloved, this exhibition engages approaches to art making through the gesture and concept of the mark taken up by Black contemporary artists, who turn the art historical form of mark making on its head. In the works on view, artists contend with the marks of displacement, colonialism, migration, birth, and beauty, as they repurpose, refabricate, and reorient materials to reflect on how they might carry them through their practice. The final works leave seams visible, place dissonant objects into conversation, provide documentation of the production of the work alongside the final iteration, or obscure materials only to make them palpable under the surface.

Mark Me, Too

Yupo work by Chicago-based artist&nbsp;<a style="color: rgb(17, 85, 204); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://vesnajovanovic.com/" target="_blank">Vesna Jovanovic</a>&nbsp;features invented spaces that collapse body and setting in dramatic and humorous measure. Jovanovic considers how we navigate social space and relationships in a post-pandemic culture. Her research led her to read Rabelais, a French medieval writer, who included bodily topics such as food, sex, defecation, and slapstick violence in comical ways in his novels. Some literary theorists claim that his grotesque humor deliberately maintains a tradition from medieval marketplace carnivals where an emphasis on the body—in contrast to the mind or soul—restored a sense of kinship among the masses. These festivals diffused tensions between people from different social positions and created camaraderie, if only for a day. Jovanovic’s seductively dark and funny imagery of candy and other items wedged in fleshy cavities reminds us not to take life too seriously.

Vesna Jovanovic: Carnival

The Center Program offers artists who are ready to raise their practice to the next level the opportunity to develop new work, receive feedback from art professionals, and work towards an exhibition at the Art Center over the course of eight months. This eleventh iteration of the program will feature the work of 20 artists guest curated by Teresa Silva, an independent curator and writer based in Chicago.

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