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

Celebrate art and community at Hyde Park Art Center—enjoy a conversation between Jackman Goldwasser resident Pooja Pittie and artist Soumya Netrabile, followed by a community dinner, free and open to all. Pittie is the inaugural resident of the Beyond Bodies of Work: A 3Arts + Hyde Park Art Center Residency.

Beyond Bodies of Work: A 3Arts + Hyde Park Art Center Residency

The Fine Art Auction is now online and will have a live auction on 23 October 2026 at 11 AM CT. The auction features various artworks including 'Girasoles y frutas' by Luis Nishizawa, 'Lonesome Road' by Stephen Etnier, 'Panama' by Helen Rousseau, 'Jacques (from the Mime series)' by Richard MacDonald, 'Untitled Studies (seven works)' by René Gruau, and 'Archaeology-Anthropology' by Mordi Gassner. For more information or to view lots, visit the provided links. To learn more about a work in your collection, contact the specialists for a free evaluation at 312 563 0020 or consign@toomeyco.com. The auction is organized by a network of independent auction houses. For any questions, contact info@toomeyco.com or call 312 563 0020, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm CDT.

Fine Art Auction

Enjoy spectacular Modern &amp; Contemporary highlights from Heritage Auctions Spring Signature® Auction up close, including diverse and engaging paintings, prints, and sculptures from Picasso and Miro to Sol LeWitt and Banksy. Kindy RSVP <a href="https://forms.monday.com/forms/1b070176726e255bb772051ae8b2294c?r=use1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Here</a> <a href="https://fineart.ha.com/c/search/results.zx?dept=1544&amp;mode=live&amp;auction_name=8277&amp;type=https://www.ha.com/8277" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">HA.com/8277</a> Inquiries | <a href="mailto:HeidiC@HA.com?subject=CGN%20listing" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">HeidiC@HA.com</a> Image: Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) Squiggly Brushstrokes, 1997 Gouache on paper 60 x 60 inches

Modern & Contemporary Art Auction Preview Reception

<a href="https://www.heritageasianart.org/event-details-registration/tea-and-treasures-a-night-of-chinese-art-and-tea-culture" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DETAILS and Tickets</a> Join us for an immersive evening exploring the evolving traditions of Chinese tea culture among works of Chinese art and cultural objects. Bringing together art appreciation, history, tea ceremony, tasting, and live music, this program considers tea as both an everyday drink and an enduring expression of Chinese culture. Guests will view a special exhibition of Yixing purple-clay teapots from the Heritage Museum of Asian Art’s collection and the Grace Chun Collection at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago. Celebrated for their distinctive material, craftsmanship, and close relationship to tea preparation, Yixing teapots reveal the artistry and cultural values embedded in the tea experience. Under guidance, guests will also have an opportunity to handle a few Yixing teapots. The evening will include a lecture and conversation connecting tea to the museum’s collection and to the history of Chinese society. Learn about tea’s changing role through the centuries, its place in Chinese cultural life, and the ways Chinese herbal teas have been introduced and shared within American communities. A live tea-art demonstration and tasting led by Puremind Tea Culture Center will invite participants to experience the aromas, flavors, and attentive rituals of tea preparation firsthand. Accompanied by live Chinese music, the program offers a welcoming space to savor tea, encounter art, and reflect on how cultural traditions continue to travel, adapt, and connect communities today.

Tea and Treasures: A Night of Chinese Art and Tea Culture

Volume Gallery is pleased to present Arrangements, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Arina Erdélyi, opening September 17th, from 5-8PM in gallery two. In a series of ceramic lighting and wall works, Erdélyi explores tensions of scale and perspective through the pairing of miniature and full-scale forms. Table lamps frame miniature domestic scenes illuminated beneath silk shades, while full-scale plates hang above, extending these scenes into the surrounding space.

Arrangements

At Ease In Nature: Nature Holds Our Stories is an event taking place from October 7 to October 24 at the Carnegie Library in Waukegan. The event is associated with Brushwood Gallery, located at 21850 N. Riverwoods Rd., Riverwoods (60015). For more information, visit www.brushwoodcenter.org.

At Ease In Nature: Nature Holds Our Stories

Volume Gallery announces&nbsp;Flowers and Leaves, Christy Matson’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery, opening September 17th, from 5-8PM. This new work draws on a recently discovered box of nineteenth-century family textiles, including lace, tatted fragments, and woven cloth passed through generations, to consider inherited histories of labor, resistance, and ornament. “Flowers and Leaves&nbsp;begins with a Jacquard-woven tea cloth found in a box of family heirlooms, accompanied by a handwritten note from my grandmother tracing its passage through generations. The cloth dates to the 1830s or 40s and belonged to Sarah Doty Arnold, my fifth great-grandmother, a Quaker woman living in Macedon, New York, within a community shaped by abolitionist networks and early feminist organizing, where radical thought moved through households in letters, meetings, and domestic exchange.” - Christy Matson Many of Matson’s ancestors were Quakers active in abolitionist, pacifist and early feminist movements. Macedon, New York, was a vital hub of the Underground Railroad, and these inherited objects would have circulated within households during moments of profound social and political change. Alongside that history, the handmade lace and cloth also carry a parallel meaning: the long tradition of women’s textile work as a site of knowledge, cultural production, and embodied practice, often left out of written record, but preserved in the objects that remain as evidence of their presence. This tension is a throughline in Matson’s practice, a sustained attention to the time, intelligence, and material thinking embedded in domestic textiles, forms of labor that have long gone unrecognized. This box of tatted doilies, scraps of lace with delicate floral motifs, and cloth bearing geometric patterns was passed down through generations. Unlike bulkier heirlooms that would have been left behind during displacement, these pieces endured. Cloth could be folded into trunks, sewn into coat linings and passed between hands across migration, upheaval, and inheritance. Drawing from details found in the remnants, Matson creates geometric but irregular oil pastel drawings that serve as a ground for collage. From the textile fragments, she isolates motifs of flowers and leaves, photographing and extracting these details before integrating them into the drawn compositions. These layered works function as studies for the woven images that follow. Using a Jacquard loom, she translates the collages into meticulously constructed woven paintings, drafting each image thread by thread through a series of weave structures. The resulting works are both intimate and monumental. Colorful blocks of pattern evoke both quilt-making and Modernist painting. Vertical stripes intersect lace-like interventions that depict scraps and studies, including overshot florals, suns, and sunflowers, drawn from larger, now-lost textiles. The exhibition’s title comes from the writings of Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), mathematician and the world’s first computer programmer. In the same decade that the Jacquard-woven tea cloth that inspired this body of work was made, Ada Lovelace described the loom as a system that “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.” She used weaving to describe a new kind of machine logic, one that operates on symbols according to rules rather than only calculating quantities. This idea sits within a longer history of textile practices as systems for encoding and transmitting pattern, structure, and notation, most often through women’s labor. The binary logic of weaving (warp and weft, thread above and below) runs through all of Matson’s work, a reminder that these ancient systems of making were always a form of code and a form of communication. Textiles encode structures that outlive their origin; patterns carried across time.Flowers and Leaves&nbsp;will be on view through October 24, 2026. Christy Matson&nbsp;lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include Philip Martin Gallery, Rebecca Camacho Presents, The Milwaukee Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, which featured a special commission for the US Art in Embassies Program, and the Long Beach Museum of Art. Her work has been in dozens of group exhibitions, including the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum, the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, the Asheville Art Museum, and the Knoxville Museum of Art. Matson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. ​

Flowers and Leaves

Art Encounter is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of our mural program with special programs throughout the year! This October, join Executive Director and mural program co-founder Lea Pinsky for a guided behind-the-scenes walking tour of the large-scale artworks that have transformed Downtown Evanston over the past decade. See some brand new projects, hear stories about the artists and the origins of the artworks, and learn what's coming next for our mural program. Visit artencounter.org/downtown-evanston-mural-tour-2026 to register.

Downtown Evanston Mural Tour

Discover the Art of Linocut! Join us at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art for our next Linocut Workshop, where you’ll discover the creative possibilities of printmaking. From carving your design to lifting the paper and revealing your finished print, every step brings its own sense of discovery. No experience necessary just curiosity and a willingness to create. Whether you're trying something new or rediscovering your artistic side, you'll leave with your own original artwork and the satisfaction of having made it yourself. More information will follow. Come curious. Leave an artist!

Linocut Workshop

The Art Center's massive annual showcase of recycled and rediscovered artwork.We are proud to announce that the&nbsp;2026 Recycled Art Sale&nbsp;will be bigger, and filled with more treasures, than ever before.&nbsp; Over the last year, donors have dropped off a record number of donations. The art at&nbsp;Recycled&nbsp;is carefully curated and priced to be affordable. Make sure you get your ticket for opening night below, or join us during the week of the sale for free.&nbsp; First Look Entry:Friday, Oct 16 | 5 pm Opening Night Event:Friday, Oct 16 | 6 pm Opening WeekendSaturday, Oct 17 | 10 am – 4 pmSunday, Oct 18 | 12 pm – 4 pm Free Entry:Monday, Oct 19 – Saturday, Oct 24<a href="https://rkcgwygbb.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=001shdM4pYLrrQHSx7IJCzsIYZedukQGSp5GKA088AOyu5MHbVyfqYWX5O2pBY0TZXhTMGplt9A5bovGShmr_MhLVKKiTGVvbWQEn9O3jgH5reMsJt4HuigkhsUM_jvoeYfRCUJ_oEEDHrY4OVUG8QEshjmmsnfPL7N0zFUj336NNcBtkfEN6NQgeSOrUreiMQ6PkMRMGvNljo6lt3GYv9GftlIZpiKBo6TTpLSzH1Fs7srj3kjhe8SLMwxIT7I0_e-3njmeL0i6IB44ngqbvKFUg4-nrSJ5NAVCOCqENYkGPcHFHhJle143w==&amp;c=SQKm9DDLdpMQLf-CGyUwqJpILvUjkmq4gB6Co3Gfv3QwsRN6YmalGw==&amp;ch=belmXMhoSl8-jaeyjf0Ex2ByYEuxGjfP2Y85OeEJ5FhF2kFtpno0aw==" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Get your tickets here</a>

Recycled 2026

﻿Brendan Fernandes&nbsp;is an internationally recognized,&nbsp;multidisciplinary artist&nbsp;who&nbsp;examines issues of cultural displacement, migration, labor, and queer subjectivity through installation, video, sculpture, and dance. He is invested in confronting the complexities of transitional and transnational identities, with a particular interest in incorporating elements of cultural performance into contemporary art, arising from his unique cultural background as a Queer, Kenyan Indian Canadian.&nbsp;Fernandes’&nbsp;projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency,&nbsp;his&nbsp;projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest...&nbsp;always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.&nbsp; Fernandes (b.1979, Nairobi, Kenya) attended York University for his Bachelors (hons.) and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2010).&nbsp;He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.&nbsp;Selected solo presentations include&nbsp;the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO (2024);&nbsp;Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, NY (2023);&nbsp;The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA (2023);&nbsp;Lurie Garden at&nbsp;Millennium&nbsp;Park, Chicago, IL (2022); The Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC (2022); The Art Gallery in Ontario, Toronto, ON (2021); Chrysler Art Museum, Norfolk, VA (2020);&nbsp;moniquemeloche&nbsp;(2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2019); The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2019); The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2018).&nbsp;His projects have been featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,&nbsp;ON;&nbsp;Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON;&nbsp;Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA;&nbsp;and The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI, among many others.&nbsp;Recent projects include performances and solo presentations at the&nbsp;Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; Prospect.6, New Orleans, LA;&nbsp;Remai Modern, Saskatoon, CA;&nbsp;Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway; a collaboration with Danish National Radio, Copenhagen, Denmark, a group show at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa,&nbsp;and a two person show at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA. In 2024, Fernandes debuted&nbsp;Build of the House&nbsp;for ART on THE MART, which traveled to Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moments.&nbsp;&nbsp; Public collections include&nbsp;the&nbsp;National Museum of&nbsp;African&nbsp;Art, Smithsonian, DC;&nbsp;Museum of Contemporary&nbsp;Art, Chicago, IL;&nbsp;Remai&nbsp;Modern, Saskatoon, CA;&nbsp;The&nbsp;Museu&nbsp;de&nbsp;Arte de São&nbsp;Paulo, BR;&nbsp;Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO;&nbsp;DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL;&nbsp;Block Museum of&nbsp;Art&nbsp;at Northwestern University, IL;&nbsp;The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, CA;&nbsp;Musée&nbsp;des&nbsp;Beaux-Arts de Montréal, QC;&nbsp;Crysler&nbsp;Museum of&nbsp;Art, Norfolk, VA;&nbsp;The Joyner/Giuffrida&nbsp;Collection of&nbsp;Abstract&nbsp;Art, San Francisco, CA;&nbsp;Museum of Contemporary&nbsp;Art, University of Massachusetts,&nbsp;Amherst, MA;&nbsp;and the Wedge Collection, Toronto, ON.&nbsp;Fernandes is a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship. In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art&nbsp;Award, and&nbsp;is the recipient of a prestigious Canada Council New Chapters grant (2017), the&nbsp;Artadia&nbsp;Award (2019), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020).&nbsp; Fernandes currently lives&nbsp;and works&nbsp;in Chicago, IL.&nbsp;Installation View, Photo by Bob.

Brendan Fernandes: The Noise Will Sound

The Evanston Art Center (EAC) is excited to welcome the public to our upcoming exhibition, <a href="https://www.evanstonartcenter.org/exhibitions/amy-hanks-over-sea-under-stone" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Amy Hanks | Over Sea Under Stone</a>. The exhibition will be on display from September 19 - October 25, 2026 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 27, 1-3pm that will be free and open to the public. "My art practice is informed by nonlinear, spirit-filled narratives. I’m inspired by icons, tarot cards, lotería, memoirs, kachina dancers, children’s stories, illuminated manuscripts, and more.I layer, scrape, draw, paint, sew, reveal, and obscure as an analogy to life's transformative journeys over unfamiliar and unexpected landscapes. Through this process, I grapple with earthy and mystic subjects such as time travel, uncertainty, humor, grief and delight.” – Amy Hanks Amy Hanks graduated with a BFA from the University of Texas and an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Rackham Fellow. She has been awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the State of Illinois and is a 2024 Fulbright Fellow Alumni.&nbsp;

Amy Hanks | Over Sea Under Stone

The Evanston Art Center (EAC) is excited to welcome the public to our upcoming exhibition, <a href="https://www.evanstonartcenter.org/exhibitions/sarah-sipling" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sarah Sipling | Solo Exhibition</a>. The exhibition will be on display from September 19 - October 25, 2026 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 27, 1-3pm that will be free and open to the public. “I focus on the many possibilities of printmaking, combining traditional and digital techniques. Each printmaking method has a unique visual language and communicative power and I often combine techniques and reimagine the possibilities of each method. My work questions political issues focusing on ideas of protest, power, and perception.” – Sarah Sipling Sarah Sipling is a mixed media artist and printmaker. Sipling received her MFA in Printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and BFA in Printmaking from Purchase College, State University of New York. She lives and works in New York and Kansas City.

Sarah Sipling | Solo Exhibition

Gallery VICTOR is honored to present&nbsp;Honoring Resilience, a special exhibition commemorating the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, centered on Bruno Surdo’s monumental painting&nbsp;Tragedy, Memory and Honor.Tragedy, Memory and Honor&nbsp;is one of Surdo’s most powerful and historically significant works. The five panel artwork measures 9 x 35 feet. Created in response to the events and aftermath of 9/11, the painting stands as a profound meditation on loss, courage, mourning, and the endurance of the human spirit. Through its sweeping scale and emotional force, the work invites viewers into a space of remembrance and reflection while honoring the lives forever changed by that day.Bruno Surdo is a celebrated Chicago artist known for his large-scale narrative figurative paintings and his sustained commitment to the human condition as a subject of contemporary art. Represented by&nbsp;Gallery VICTOR, Surdo has exhibited widely over several decades, and&nbsp;Tragedy, Memory and Honor&nbsp;has previously been shown in Chicago, including at the&nbsp;Daley Center&nbsp;in 2002 and 2003, as well as in galleries across the country. In recognition of the painting, Surdo received a letter of appreciation from former Mayor&nbsp;Richard M. Daley.This exhibition will extend beyond the painting itself. In addition to&nbsp;Tragedy, Memory and Honor, the presentation will include artifacts from Ground Zero collected by the artist while assisting in cleanup efforts two weeks after 9/11, along with a video documenting the creation of the painting, preparatory drawings and sketches, photography, testimonials, and historical materials. Together, these elements will provide visitors with a deeper understanding of the work’s creation, its historical context, and its lasting emotional impact.Presenting this exhibition in Chicago carries special meaning. As Surdo’s hometown, the city provides a powerful context for revisiting a work that has moved audiences nationwide. Gallery VICTOR’s historic setting offers an ideal venue for an exhibition of this scale and significance, giving viewers the opportunity to engage with a work that is not only a monumental achievement in contemporary figurative painting, but also a testament to collective memory, resilience, and compassion.More than two decades after 9/11,&nbsp;Tragedy, Memory and Honor&nbsp;remains a deeply relevant and moving work, reminding us of art’s capacity to preserve history, bear witness to suffering, and honor the strength of those who endure.The exhibition will premiere during the&nbsp;10th Annual River North Design District Fall Gallery Walk&nbsp;on&nbsp;Friday, September 11, 2026, from 5 to 8 PM. This special evening will offer the public its first opportunity to experience Surdo’s monumental work at Gallery VICTOR on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Honoring Resilience

<a href="https://www.heritageasianart.org/event-details-registration/intro-to-wycinanki-the-polish-folk-art-of-papercutting" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Details</a> Join folk artist Sam Wróbel and experience wycinanki, the Polish folk art of papercutting. You will learn about the history and regional styles of this colorful art form, and create one Kurpie-style cutting and one Łowićz-style cutting in this 2-hour workshop. With just paper and scissors, you'll be amazed at the vibrant beauty you can create. No experience is necessary—just bring your creativity! This workshop is part of the Cutting East to West exhibition. Presented in collaboration with members of the Guild of American Papercutters (GAP), Cutting East to West invites visitors to discover the precision, imagination, and cultural stories held within a single sheet of paper.

Intro to Wycinanki - The Polish Folk Art of Papercutting

THE DIASPORAL RHYTHMS COLLECTORS ART AUCTION 3PM-6PMSunday, October 25 Logan Center for the Arts915 E. 60TH STREET A NATURAL THOUGHT IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY A GENEROUS SPONSORSHIP FROM THE CHICAGO COMMUNITY TRUST RSVP: <a href="https://diasporalrhythms.org" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DIASPORALRHYTHMS. ORG</a>

A Natural Thought – The Diasporal Rhythms Collectors Art Auction

October 28, 2026Start time: 10:00 AM CDT Freeman’s presents Essential Jewelry, a live online auction taking place October 28 at 10 a.m. Central. Visit the auction page for catalogue and bidding information. <a href="https://freemansauction.com/auction/6552-essential-jewelry" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DETAILS</a> Sale number: 6552

Essential Jewelry

Friday evening, September 11, 5 to 8 PM. Misha Goro - Images of the City. River North Fall Gallery Walk, 5-8pm. On view through October 28, 2026.

Misha Goro - Images of the City

October 29, 2026Start time: 10:00 AM CDT Freeman’s presents Watches, a live auction in Chicago on October 29 at 10 a.m. Central. Visit the auction page for catalogue and bidding information. <a href="https://freemansauction.com/auction/6574-watches" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">DETAILS</a> Sale number: 6574

Watches

Join Aviva Lehmann, Deputy Chair of Fine Art at Heritage Auctions, for a guided tour of highlights from the remarkable American Art Signature Auction to take place on November 13. From Ernie Barnes to Norman Rockwell, enjoy these impressive, large-scale American classics and masterworks and the stories behind them before the gavel strikes. Kindly RSVP Here [insert link: https://forms.monday.com/forms/6bb069dd7c31f5d0566301f636a238ec?r=use1] HA.com/8258a

American Art Auction Preview 

Ben Tinsley “Thick as Thieves” is an event scheduled to take place from September 10 to October 30.

Ben Tinsley: Thick as Thieves

This work gathers at the midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice, where the year tips into its dark half. It is a threshold season, and the body knows it before the mind does. The pull toward slowness and the disappearing of the light. The instruction to fold inward as the ground begins its own long rest. To pause here is not idleness. It is a refusal. The world we inhabit demands constant motion and vigilance, and to stop is to say no to that. In this season, the choice to slow becomes an act of care. It is also defiance. As the warmth thins and light withdraws, the self turns to interior work. This is the kind of knowledge only the dark makes possible. The western hemisphere, and the body alongside it, prepares for rest, the implied question is what should be carried forward and what should be laid down? The withdrawal of light is not where the membrane between worlds grows thin. The shadows draw near, and we make room for them. We honor the ones who created our bodies with their own erotic power. We honor the dead and respect their navigation of the same rhythm of humanity we are now pursuing. We keep vigil to remember the accumulated knowing our own bodies fight to retain. Photography mimics this register of motion and rest, of the porous body and the thinning veil. It respects the cyclical. The natural rhythm of withdrawal and return. It harkens, as Lorde wrote, to the body's deepest rhythms. To slow, to descend, to honor the dead, to let the body rest. They are one act to tend the fire of our fearless selves. This call is for photography that engages with liminality and seasonal transition; images exploring rest, descent, ancestry, grief/vigil, or the body's relationship to seasonal rhythm. Landscape, portraiture, and still life photographs are all welcome as long as the work speaks to this in-between, threshold energy. Exhibiting Artists: Vanessa Lafolla, Sarah Gillingham Schorr, Eden Berke, Sarah Joy, DanaidX Duo, Kevin Lyle, Erin Graver, Frank Morgan, Kathryn Rodrigues, Alan Leder, Maria Macko, Brent Showalter, Erica McKeehen, Darlene Poloniak, Andrea Vaca, Bethany Barto. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/solo-group-shows-opening-reception-tickets-2002347008805" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Details on Eventbrite</a>

Deepest Rhythms

The palindrome works as a whole only from a separate vantage point, the same forwards and backwards, but we are always in the center of it, processing the strangeness of a life that has arrived. Is the still center created by infinite movement what being present actually feels like? The word reads the same forwards and backwards, mirroring itself perfectly. Rotator performs rotation just by being read — form and meaning reflect each other. Arguably the most philosophically complete palindrome: ROTATOR enacts its meaning. Being inside a future once imagined is stranger than the wanting of it. Seeing from within a once-future now is unmooring — calmer in some places, wilder in others. Can we see the texture of the actual? Not the dream of a life, but the life of a dream? A new place becomes familiar as time is lost inside of it. This is the unexpected weight of a world created with intention. Rotator is the lightness of beauty that arrives without being conceived of. The synchronicity of a plan not fully fleshed out that becomes a reality which cannot be removed from the picture. The act of rotation only functions as it moves. For an object like a gyroscope, a bicycle wheel, a spinning top, rotation is their function. Stillness changes their purpose. As a metaphor, this inverts the usual assumption that a successful life means rest. Rotation is to be present inside a life you only once imagined. Human presence isn’t stillness or clarity, it is both the balance within rotation and the disorientation of attempting to take stock of it. Always in equilibrium inside something, never outside it looking in. <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/solo-group-shows-opening-reception-tickets-2002347008805" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Details on Eventbrite</a>

Stacey Lee Gee: ROTATOR: OSCILLATIONS

Corbett vs. Dempsey is honored to present&nbsp;No Thing Skin Sets, an exhibition of recent works by the artist Pope.L. This is the gallery’s first exhibition with Pope.L and the first major gallery show of his work in Chicago. One of the key figures in contemporary conceptual art, Pope.L was based in Chicago from 2010, when he started teaching at the University of Chicago, until his death in December of 2023, at the age of 68. Pope.L first came to international attention with a number of performance- and endurance-based pieces in the early 1990s, though he’d already been working for more than a decade by then. His graduate studies at Rutgers University included a performance art class with Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, whose influence was profound and lifelong. Reflecting that lineage, right out of the gate, in performances such as&nbsp;Tompkins Square Crawl&nbsp;and later&nbsp;The Great White Way&nbsp;and&nbsp;Eating the Wall Street Journal, Pope.L established himself as an artist unbounded by the usual artistic silos, freely mixing performance with sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, and video. And he was unafraid to present work that challenged assumptions about race and class, pressing buttons with satire, sarcasm, irony, absurdity, and a healthy dose of countervailing earnestness. Among the indelible, confounding works Pope.L presented in Chicago were the 2013 Renaissance Society exhibition&nbsp;Forlesen&nbsp;and the 2018 Art Institute of Chicago performance&nbsp;The Escape. Subtly, but through sheer force of intellectual rigor and nonconformist experimentation, Pope.L infused the city with his unorthodox way of thinking. It’s possible to consider the environment we now live in as post-Pope.L Chicago. Conversations around a potential show at CvsD with Pope.L evolved organically after the gallery’s move to its present location in 2019. We were able to continue discussions about the exhibition after his death, courtesy of the Pope.L estate and the artist’s longtime assistant Dave Lloyd, whose guidance in choosing and installing&nbsp;No Thing Skin Sets&nbsp;has been invaluable. The exhibition covers several areas of Pope.L’s recent work and includes one older work titled&nbsp;Trap&nbsp;(1992). The North Gallery is consumed by a major installation piece,&nbsp;I Machine&nbsp;(2014–2022), which integrates multiple overhead projectors, tubing, water, a painted canvas onto which constantly shifting images of plastic letters and degrading coins are projected through the water, and many, many Post-It notes, some featuring little drawings.&nbsp;I Machine&nbsp;has only been exhibited once. Prior to completion it was featured in a 2020 profile in&nbsp;The New York Times&nbsp;titled “A Work In Progress that Explores Our Collective Ignorance.” In the South Gallery, CvsD presents a number of distinct groups of Skin Set works that belong together. These include a group of four “sluice” paintings made of birchwood and filled with acidic green acrylic paint, and a group of four “window” pieces, which involve rectangular holes cut out of the top of the gallery’s west wall, recalling the out-of-reach apertures in a prison cell.&nbsp;Well (Redistribution Version)&nbsp;(2019), is a floor-piece consisting of nine decorative drinking glasses filled past the brim with water each morning, a futile directive recalling Fluxus artist George Brecht’s&nbsp;Drip Music&nbsp;(1959–1962). A small painting made with a light absorbing black material features in&nbsp;King Actar’s Wife&nbsp;(2018), but it is lit unusually by a penlight mounted on a bulky stand positioned directly in front of it. These mysterious, provocative works, as well as others, give the exhibition a multi-ring quality, with Pope.L as its inscrutable ringmaster.&nbsp; Pope.L’s works on paper, of which the gallery also presents two earlier Skin Set examples, are currently the subject of&nbsp;Certainly an Act, a 50-year retrospective, at New York’s Drawing Center.&nbsp; Image: Pope.L, Well (Redistribution Version),&nbsp;2019, 9 drinking glasses, water, dimensions variable, installation

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