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

A beautifully crafted object can enhance any home or workspace. From a mug for your morning coffee, a plate for your toast, a bowl for your favorite soup, a rocking chair to relax in, a colorful pottery jar for storage, a contemporary hand-blown glass vase, and a woven textile are not just art pieces, but also practical items that can be used in our daily lives. Art can be all around us in the form of these functional pieces that make our spaces fun.The exhibition will showcase artwork from over 30 artists, many from Illinois.Fine Line will host an in-person reception on Thursday, March 26, from 6:00 to 8:00 PM to officially open the show, with several of the participating artists in attendance. As with all Fine Line gallery receptions, this event is free and open to everyone. Light refreshments will be served during the evening.

Home Improvements: The Functional Art Show

Photographer of the Year 

Anne Loucks Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of&nbsp;Reflections,&nbsp;a new exhibition in our Glencoe gallery featuring west coast artists Victoria Adams, John McCormick and Leslie Wu.The show includes 35 landscape paintings capturing dramatic skies, glistening water, and meditative vistas.&nbsp;Please join us for the Opening Reception with artist Leslie Wu, Friday, March 13th from 5 - 7 pm at 309 Park Avenue in Glencoe.&nbsp;

Victoria Adams, John McCormick & Leslie Wu: Reflections  

The storied city of Djenné, a center of Islamic learning, study, and scholarship since the twelfth century, is the hometown of Bamako-based photographer&nbsp;Hamdia Traoré&nbsp;(b. 1992, Mali).&nbsp;The thirty portraits in Traore’s series&nbsp;Des marabouts de Djenné (Marabouts of Jenne)&nbsp;reflect his intimate connections to the city’s people and deep history. Learned and devout, marabouts teach in Djenné’s over 50 Qur’anic schools, offer spiritual guidance, and treat ailments through their knowledge of the Qur’an.Made during a time of political and social upheaval in Mali, these portraits reflect enduring cultural resilience. Each image depicts a marabout seated with the tools of his practice—books, Qur’an boards, amulets, and prayer beads—framed by the architecture and atmosphere of Djenné. The consistent format underscores their collective identity, while individual poses and captions highlight personal roles and neighborhoods.Traoré’s work will be shown alongside mid-20th-century black-and-white portraits of marabouts by Malian photographers&nbsp;Mamadou Cissé, Abdourahmane Sakaly, and&nbsp;Tijani Sitou. Drawn from the Archive of Malian Photography, these earlier images share visual parallels and deepen the historical context.&nbsp;Together, these images illuminate evolving perspectives on spiritual authority, identity, and visual representation in Mali.This exhibition is developed in collaboration with the artist and professor Candace Keller, co-founder of the&nbsp;<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://amp.matrix.msu.edu/" target="_blank">Archive of Malian Photography</a>.

Hamdia Traoré’s “Des marabouts de Djenné” and Muslim Portraiture in Mali

On August 5, 2015, the rupture of the abandoned Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado, released more than three million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River, turning its waters a shocking shade of yellow. In the following year, artist and anthropologist&nbsp;Teresa Montoya&nbsp;(Diné, born 1984) embarked on a road trip from Silverton to Shiprock, New Mexico, retracing the path of the contaminated water and documenting its ongoing cultural, spiritual, and material effects on the Navajo Nation and other Indigenous communities downstream.Marking the ten-year anniversary of the disaster, The Block Museum of Art partners with Montoya to revisit this journey.&nbsp;Tó Łitso (Yellow Water)&nbsp;explores the enduring consequences of the Gold King Mine spill through photography, sound recordings, water samples, and cartographic data.&nbsp;Combining documentary photographs with scientific data and poetic reflection,&nbsp;Tó Łitso&nbsp;invites viewers to consider water not only as a life-sustaining resource but also as a conduit for histories, stories, and harm. In doing so, the exhibition challenges extractive frameworks of land use, centering Indigenous knowledge and resilience. Through Montoya’s interdisciplinary practice,&nbsp;Tó Łitso (Yellow Water)&nbsp;offers a powerful meditation on environmental and cultural justice in the Southwest and beyond."The 2015 spill had discharged more than three million gallons of acidic mine waste fluid into Cement Creek before joining the Animas River and eventually into the San Juan River, which flows directly across the Navajo Nation. Through my photographic journey, I make explicit the enduring presence of toxicity across multiple landscapes and territories. Sometimes it appears beautiful, other times haunting.&nbsp;The images highlight the relationships that various communities sustain through water/tó&nbsp;despite the occurrence of repeated and enduring contamination from upstream locales.&nbsp;The Gold King Mine Spill shows us this, even in that, which cannot be readily seen." – Teresa MontoyaPronounce:&nbsp;<a href="https://navajowotd.com/word/to/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tó</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://navajowotd.com/word/litso/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Łitso</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill&nbsp;was curated by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Marisa Cruz Branco (Isleta Pueblo/Portuguese), Terra Foundation Fellow, in collaboration with the artist. It was supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. Ahéhee' (thank you) to Janene Yazzie, John Hosteen, Wade Campbell, and Andrew Curley for Diné language and curatorial guidance. Image: Teresa Montoya (Diné, born 1984), Tó Łitso #22 (Yellow Water #22), from the series Tó Łitso (Yellow Water), 2016, Inkjet print. Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment Fund purchase. Image courtesy of the artist

Teresa Montoya’s Tó Łitso (Yellow Water): Ten Years after the Gold King Mine Spill

2025 Master of Fine Arts degree candidates — present their thesis projects and conclude their residencies in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University.This exhibition and the associated events are co-organized by the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice and the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. Support provided by the Norton S. Walbridge Fund; the Myers Foundations; the Jerrold Loebl Fund for the Arts; and the Alsdorf Gallery Endowment.

Art, Theory, and Practice

The Shape of Color, A Formalist Painting Exhibition

In his first exhibition at EAM, visual artist Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford presents a series of outdoor sculptures in Wilder Park (on view starting April 18) as well as an immersive installation within the iconic McCormick House. Bridging handcrafted techniques and digital fabrication, featured works serve as a low-carbon alternative to traditional monumental sculpture as a way of reflecting on labor, materiality, the internet age, and architectural legacies. Curated by&nbsp;Allison Peters Quinn, EAM Executive Director and Chief Curator,&nbsp;Near Immortality&nbsp;features&nbsp;new sculptures inside the McCormick House&nbsp;created from 3D scans of important design items in EAM’s collection, including Mies’ Barcelona Chair and a leg splint designed by Charles &amp; Ray Eames.&nbsp;Hulsebos-Spofford is a sculptor and assistant professor of sculpture at Indiana University Northwest. He is also a co-director and founder of the collective Floating Museum, and co-curator of the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Through his large plaster and silicon sculptures, he reinterprets modern monuments and classical sculptures as glitched assemblages. Although many of his works evoke ancient art history, Hulsebos-Spofford’s pieces are rooted in modernist aesthetics and its relevance in the everyday experience.&nbsp;

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford: Near Immortality

Raised in Wheaton, Illinois, and based in New York, Jeanette Andrews&nbsp;bridges the worlds of illusion, installation, and conceptual art, creating interactive vignettes and surreal, multisensory experiences that investigate perception, cognition, and the seemingly impossible. Andrews applies sensory illusion techniques and her interest in the bounds of perception to create artworks that explore magic, multiple realities, and the human psyche, often inviting audiences in as co-creators in her illusory performances.Her first solo museum exhibition,&nbsp;On Wonder, Mind, &amp; Magic&nbsp;will present interactive and site-specific works including installation, sculpture, video, sound, and performance, alongside&nbsp;new work developed while Artist in Residence at MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology&nbsp;in 2024-25. Curated by&nbsp;Liz Chilsen, Manager of Exhibitions &amp; Collections, the exhibition represents a return home for Andrews, who cites EAM as an early influence in her pursuit of a career honing her technical skills and applying magic and sensory illusion techniques to create artworks.&nbsp;Andrews has presented numerous commissioned works with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, as well as for the Quebec City Biennial and Boca Raton Museum of Art, presented talks for Cooper Hewitt, Chicago Ideas Week, The British Society of Aesthetics, and universities, including Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Harvard. She has held residencies with the Institute for Art and Olfaction and the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and is a former National Arts Club Artist Fellow and Affiliate of metaLAB at Harvard. She was a 2024-2025 Visiting Artist for the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT and the current visiting artist for the Arts Institute at Brown University.

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