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

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

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

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

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

Ben Tinsley: Thick as Thieves

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

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

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

Pope.L: No Thing Skin Sets

Marking his fifth presentation with the gallery and his second solo exhibition in Chicago, Jiménez (b. 1990 in Hawaii; lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico) turns to a personal narrative rooted in Puerto Rico, tracing the histories, memories, and inherited silences that have shaped his understanding of family and identity.Through painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture, the orange emerges as a recurring motif and metaphor. It evokes the sweetness and abundance of family histories, but also the omissions, secrets, and unresolved tensions that pass from one generation to the next. Like the fruit itself, lineage carries both nourishment and decay. Beneath its vibrant skin lies stories that shape a family's character and flavor, revealing how memory—and the spaces where memories falter—becomes embedded within the narratives we inherit. Clotilde Jiménez, China de Mayagüez, 2026. Detail. Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim.

Clotilde Jiménez: Eramos Silencios

Black Is Beautiful (II)&nbsp;revisits the theme of our&nbsp;2018 exhibition&nbsp;with a fresh group of&nbsp;artists and artworks. With this exhibition we argue that powerful images rendered in black ink on white paper remain fundamental to the visual language of printmaking.View on <a href="https://www.artsy.net/show/manneken-press-black-is-beautiful-ii" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Artsy</a> Image: Gelnn Goldberg:&nbsp;Empyrean (2)&nbsp;(detail), 2026. Etching and aquatint, edition of 20.

Black Is Beautiful (II)

In the Vault, CvsD presents&nbsp;The Lawnmower Video, starring Pope.L and the band Jon Waine.&nbsp; This short film features the only known footage of Jon Waine, recorded live in concert circa 1981. Jon Waine started in 1975 as a duo of Brian McCormack and Bill Pope (Pope.L), when they were students at Montclair State University in New Jersey, and expanded to a quartet and eventually quintet, featuring Franc Palaia on drums, Ellen La Forge on bass, and Steve Davison on rhythm guitar. In the video, Pope.L's bigger-than-life stage persona is clearly visible, offset by the everydayness of a segment dedicated to Pope.L mowing the lawn of the house he shared with McCormack in East Orange, New Jersey.

The Lawnmower Video

MUMS at Meijer Gardens&nbsp;showcases Michigan’s largest display of chrysanthemums, featuring thousands of garden and specialty mums in rich autumnal colors, along with fall-themed programming and Tuesday evening events.

MUMS at Meijer Gardens

Errantry&nbsp;is on view through October 31, 2026PATRON presents our second solo exhibition,&nbsp;Errantry, with Chicago-based artist Lindsay Adams. Adams’s new body of work extends an exploration into the query at the root of her practice;&nbsp;Where can I go to wander?&nbsp;As she moves across her canvases with an intuitive choreography, delicate gestures evidence errant modes of being, and moving through the world.&nbsp;Errantry&nbsp;marks her first exhibition since the unveiling of her mural commission at the Obama Presidential Center.The exhibition takes its title from Édouard Glissant's concept of errantry, articulated in his&nbsp;Poetics of Relation&nbsp;published in 1990, as a form of movement that resists the demand for a singular origin or stable identity. For Glissant, errantry is not aimlessness but a way of being, in relation to places, histories, people, and systems of knowledge that remain irreducible to one another. Adams's paintings similarly resist a fixed point of arrival. Forms appear to gather and float across their surfaces, creating environments that feel at once intimate and expansive.&nbsp;Glissant's writing enters the exhibition directly through&nbsp;Untitled (Poetics of Relation, Glissant) #1&nbsp;(2026) and&nbsp;Untitled (Poetics of Relation, Glissant) #2&nbsp;(2026), large-scale works on paper with fervent gestures in ink, graphite, and charcoal on Yupo paper. These works establish a dialogue between her conceptual references and painterly language, where marks can function as fragments of something beyond the image.&nbsp;&nbsp; The ascendent diptych,&nbsp;“Not being afraid of what I don’t know I unanxiously awaited the emergence”&nbsp;(2026), marks the threshold to Adams's exhibition. Swirls of green and pink juxtaposed against cutting blues and yellow dripping down the surface beckon the viewer into imagined realities. Adams's approach to the painted surface finds an important precedent in Helen Frankenthaler's radical rethinking of the relationship between color, gesture, and ground, which allowed paint to behave as both image and material. Likewise, Adams approaches the canvas as a permeable field through aqueous washes of pigment and thick applications oil stick, culminating in compositions that float through undetermined spaces.&nbsp;Continuing her engagement with concepts of opacity and refusal, Adams builds each painting on a foundational ground of black paint. With each layer she mitigates the light and spatial perception available to the viewer, negotiating what is knowable and what is withheld. In&nbsp;Rhizome&nbsp;(2026), the subtlest green hues seem to glow from within deep tones of inky blue, articulating a state of suspension.Throughout&nbsp;Errantry&nbsp;Adams&nbsp;constructs paintings that refuse to settle into a singular reading. Her works move through abstraction as one might move through an unfamiliar landscape without a map, but with an attentiveness to what emerges along the way. Her paintings evidence a commitment to openness and emphasize wayfinding over arrival.&nbsp; <a href="https://patrongallery.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fe9966abed200e47655a01bab&amp;id=2a182bb1fc&amp;e=9e3563b61b" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Explore Further</a>

Lindsay Adams | Errantry

Please join for an opening reception for&nbsp;<a href="https://www.oliviazubko.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);" target="_blank">Olivia Zubko’s</a>&nbsp;first show at Western Exhibitions, on Thursday, September 17, 5 to 8pm. Western Exhibitions is pleased to announce our first solo show,&nbsp;Nymphaeum,&nbsp;with&nbsp;Olivia Zubko, a Chicago-based artist new to our roster. Zubko’s recent work employs cast replicas of fixtures and found materials from private, semi-private, and domestic environments to create ceramic sculptures evoking viewers’ personal memories and associations with intimate spaces. Her works investigate the nuanced relationship between these objects and the human form, as well as the broader dynamic between the individual and the domestic sphere of private space, personal intimacy, having a body, and the burdens and privileges of maintaining it. The show opens with a free public reception on THURSDAY, September 17, 5 to 8pm (during Chicago Exhibition Week) and runs through October 31. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm. For Zubko, no object is too modest to use for appropriating into a material dialogue about metamorphosis.&nbsp;Cast porcelain dumbbells tessellate as repetitive units of laborious bodily upkeep. Single-use sheet masks swirl around a basin as reflections of a desire for a more perfect image. An orthopedic pillow assumes the role of a fleshy, corporeal fragment, both playful and possibly a touch foreboding. Her sculptural works recast these modest, mortal artifacts as mythological bathing nymphs, drawing reference from the long and expansive history of depicting “bathers” in both art and mythology. Celebrated, objectified and/or fetishized, bathers have been a trope throughout art history since antiquity, whether in a tub, basin, or outdoor body of water. Zubko’s work conflates historical depictions with modern sentiments towards private space and personal intimacy and focuses on the negative compositional space surrounding the bather while still invoking the sense of a body or its absence. A nymphaeum is an ancient Greek and Roman sanctuary built as tribute to water nymphs that functioned as a public fountain, water reservoir, and gathering place.&nbsp;Nymphs, while associated with healing, prophecy, love, and the natural world, are also often characterized as unconventional outcasts who reject conformity to societal standards. In Zubko’s exhibition the Nymphaeum is translated into an intimate space like a bathroom or locker room, spaces often imbued with visceral associations. They may evoke vivid recollections, such as childhood experiences of bubble baths, illnesses, and quiet reflections as well as discordances with body image, identity, and development. Associations deeply rooted in personal experience render the bathroom a significant site for daily rituals, personal intimacy, and “self-care,” occupying a paradoxical space that can be both familiar and distant, public and private, safe and unsafe, sterile and emotional. <a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4KRv7qzeuqPSkqj6BPi7qO2UG3nFoI5DPweExNglbXIlAkMBe3D7guCit-k28M2-0mock9r3zYEmXVjObxCj92tpKhX-OGZ1hfxlk4C0yzl2FGgwlXWr2aVzUT8lEWWxTxwQR6vYNa0Q9waQ25ZClV8=&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Olivia Zubko</a>&nbsp;(born in 1995, Chicago, IL) has had solo and 2-person shows at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, California and in Chicagoland at The Arts Club of Chicago, DeGroot Fine Art, Cleaner Gallery + Projects, and McHenry County College. Her work has been included in group shows at Patient Info and The Plan, both in Chicago, and at Rockford University, Illinois. Zubko recently curated Deep Cuts! at The Plan, a group show of over 75 Chicago artists with works that were made when the artists were 12 years old or younger. She is a current fellow at The Arts Club of Chicago. Zubko received her BFA in 2020 from Northern Illinois University, and lives and works in Chicago. Image: Cairn III , 2025, Stained porcelain. 16h x 6 1/2w x 6 1/2d in

Olivia Zubko: Nymphaeum

It is human nature to respond to Rhythm.&nbsp;The visual artists in our fall “Got Rhythm” exhibition respond to music in the language of lines, shapes and colors. When music pulses through their veins, they channel their emotional responses through mark-making: gestural lines and strokes vibrate like sound waves. They respond in their own unique way to rhythm and music: to the beat of their own drum. Artforms include paintings, photographs, and mixed-media approaches.Artists: David Alton, Ashley Alvarado, Nancy Behles, Alan Brunettin, Sheila Cahnman, Susan Chelminski, Rich Conti, Anna Marie Crovetti, Catherine Daniels, Melissa D’Souza, Shelley Gilchrist, Steven Guenther, Ivan Gutierrez, Peter Jablokow, Bonnie Katz, Jacqueline Kott-Wolle, Ari Koultourides, Diana Leviton Gondek, Victoria Loeb, Deborah Newmark, Sam Onche, Jim Parks, Patrick Perry, Patti Ray, Renee Robbins, Virginia Roeder, Margarete de Soleil, Josefien Stopplenburg, Frank Styburski, Joseph Taylor, Sally Wille and Colette Wright Adams.&nbsp;Image: Renee Robbins

Got Rhythm? Music-themed Visual Art

PATRON is proud to announce&nbsp;Tannic Waters, our second solo exhibition with Claire Sherman.&nbsp;Over the past two decades, Sherman’s conceptual approach to landscape painting has drawn upon researching, extensive hiking and photographing, and the development of a painterly language that shifts in and out of representation. Her emotive, intimate renderings of the natural world, of places filtered through her own psyche, shift from traditions of land ‘captured’ to an examination of nature as artifice that informs societal and personal narratives.&nbsp;In 2023, Sherman began what would be a multi-year project revisiting the writings of American writer William Faulkner, whose rich literary descriptions of both real and fictional locations constructed a vibrantly nuanced depiction of the American South in the mid-20th century. Alluding to the mired political landscape of the 2020s, as well as the artist’s own navigation of personal grief, Sherman’s work abstracts the trees, underbrush, and foliage observed in her voyage through waters of uncertainty, resisting a clear path forward.&nbsp;Borrowing its name from the leaves, peat, and minerals that give the region’s languid rivers and swamps a rusty, tea-hue, the exhibition premieres a group of new paintings created following Sherman’s visit to Faulkner’s estate, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi and her subsequent visits throughout the swamplands of the South: along the coasts of Northern Florida, the Great Dismal&nbsp;Swamp in North Carolina, and Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia. Applying Faulkner’s construction of a place, through its shared history and present, Sherman’s paintings translate moments of landscape into spaces that slip, shift, or disintegrate. In works such as&nbsp;Vines&nbsp;(2026), the accumulation of branches and foliage appears as almost a natural barricade, alluding to Rebecca Solnit’s perception of&nbsp;landscape as the “battlefield of our time—not a scenery but as the space and systems we inhabit, a system our own lives depend on.”&nbsp;Sherman’s&nbsp;Tree and Moss&nbsp;(2026) and&nbsp;Tree and Vines&nbsp;(2026) act as abstracted memories of her experience within the otherworldly swamps, psychological environments that are at once eerily haunting and spiritually reverent. Vines playfully ensnare tree trucks ascending from brackish waters and Spanish mosses, elegantly draped across tree branches, become veils that fragment their environs. Slipping between representation and ambiguity, Sherman’s paintings become archaeologies themselves, constructed locations that bear the strata of our own complex personal, environmental, and political histories.<a href="https://patrongallery.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fe9966abed200e47655a01bab&amp;id=4d089e118c&amp;e=9e3563b61b" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(105, 105, 105);" target="_blank">﻿</a><a href="https://patrongallery.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=fe9966abed200e47655a01bab&amp;id=4d089e118c&amp;e=9e3563b61b" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Explore Further</a>

Claire Sherman | Tannic Waters

In October, Vivid Art Gallery will be featuring the work of represented artist Susan Jacoby.&nbsp;On Friday, October 2nd, we will be having an exhibit opening for featured artist Susan Jacoby's show "In the Stillness." The opening will run from 4-7 PM and will display Susan's trademark landscapes.&nbsp;Surrounded by a wealth of ever-changing inspiration from the shores of Lake Michigan, Jacoby is drawn to expansive vistas, shifting skyscapes, and ephemeral atmospheric conditions. Rather than a realistic depiction of a place, her paintings evoke the remembrance of a moment, combining observation with imagination.&nbsp;Image: Susan Jacoby, "Calm Passage"

Susan Jacoby

September 17 to October 31, 2026﻿ <a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4GJ82Rtjbik2x0ekA_aXO3Trzwn9QJN7tkoyGxTd57M2FpHOJ1fp56TxHUlyYWPgDFeT0D83HbexWdImgVgJQuU6KpaPFJnWQmtYhxeoSB7HxIRVytTqe2RS7pj63MNFT3_UgsWHauqlFf01ipLUiJ9GeduYAFWqnQ==&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Affairs to Remember</a>Lilli CarréJournie CirdainNanako KonoPaul NuddGeoffrey Todd SmithCathrine Whited﻿﻿Olivia Zubko Opening receptionTHURSDAY, September 17, 5-8pm Request&nbsp;<a href="mailto:scott@westernexhibitions.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">preview</a> See images&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4GJ82Rtjbik2x0ekA_aXO3Trzwn9QJN7tkoyGxTd57M2FpHOJ1fp56TxHUlyYWPgDFeT0D83HbexWdImgVgJQuU6KpaPFJnWQmtYhxeoSB7HxIRVytTqe2RS7pj63MNFT3_UgsWHauqlz7w_jrvGzQeYaNY66Y_lSw==&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">here&nbsp;</a> <img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1786834152/wawlmoeq6lipdq49kvde.gif" height="1" width="5">Affairs to Remember&nbsp;features recent work by gallery artists: framed hand-drawn animation cels by&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4Ecp4-zmYSfF-VQZBZmUVKlWQVRH6_AhG1I1-V1YYcAM5KETdNf_Kwk6NVsABMUN9VHZmDgowuquPGKVbAjbZ7lrwIG2AJtKHdAeO30nwOTnTGzXszwIVa62uoAagSoKV3nDFIdhypE6&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Lilli Carré</a>, large graphite drawings by&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4KRv7qzeuqPSJbyZEHDQYy0yJnyVTNPuIH6vwdLCZBn7ttl0m_R2h3NMQBcapdTv5USUVaUXsBASWYJzfCxJcrJKzCuKZg7F2_aiA2FuWRVkzWSmD6iiScwy1c6xiMbEU3pPzLB2ajec&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Journie Cirdain</a>, miniature paintings on plastic by&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4KRv7qzeuqPSgoLDHOXbQYNb95U69fNW9R5eWgoGhlJ1yh3FVfYA1Ko0LRE4zcJcUtpB98WU2e8NC-k0Z9nh68bWdPpZV0m7a6wRqPi0sQJ-CtvQFvPEZ5kUaTv9GXJihKE7Qbrh6x4K&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Nanako Kono</a>,&nbsp;ceramic sculptures by&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4Ecp4-zmYSfF3_bHlHaeUlqbOEqfBL3MLki3bO4UuI_Zf8Z7Td_7FH2UNmw_oIsH_Hw5y2ksCp08dt7sfPsSHw_jvldoY1KtyQGdfYyKthDen4Zakp3J7yuL744xeP-Ml9D8RyX5sjBV&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Paul Nudd</a>,&nbsp;miniature paintings on paper by&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4Ecp4-zmYSfF4sQPwAA4ff4O_gipePbp9YPysskUcAFznRXYoQkd1bW67HT23sVWyZgESr8-CquYVpD0mcS0o3TZH8ZMWHJKBN_NgjH9W_Pn55D-mNMsFJt8YR-PWEQ-FFgMG_dvrESQ6d0HSaWABJo=&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Geoffrey Todd Smith</a>,&nbsp;drawings&nbsp;of household objects&nbsp;by&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4OWYFLRuN-JzEVYoEAxENJmIQa7Rww9lyjjIXZNO_znaEKvc0YKlGw4WJ62w8U1_sKam5KtdEP3uPcm0pe8DpaGPwV-UjRtFypm-pZ51vsRqwJ6PUKQScrixMnjbnpgcYkXfIdlYvCoSOhNqRb0_oWU=&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Cathrine Whited</a>. and&nbsp;wall-mounted ceramic sculptures by&nbsp;<a href="https://jxxaepcab.cc.rs6.net/tn.jsp?f=0014NSeTmioPTcKPE2SKLImwATT-eVaYrMgJ8G7XcrClSSAmKSkgfNF4KRv7qzeuqPSkqj6BPi7qO2UG3nFoI5DPweExNglbXIlAkMBe3D7guCit-k28M2-0mock9r3zYEmXVjObxCj92tpKhX-OGZ1hfxlk4C0yzl2FGgwlXWr2aVzUT8lEWWxT2i4y0oXRbOh_bt2uGcX6hQ=&amp;c=XRFpR96WqnQq3v6Y8cwmEhx71pCGSccyMqCGuCpUT0Hb4dOerHDFAA==&amp;ch=ErPS6lgdweoFt1YhhY-wmgHtOv0NxXIwTxWXmDGORX7Unf5p7Y1aFA==" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 64, 247);" target="_blank">Olivia Zubko</a>.

Affairs to Remember

Elise Seigenthaler Gallery is pleased to present&nbsp;No Such Thing, an exhibition of eight medium-format photographs by Chicago-based artist Nolis Anderson. Anderson’s first show with the gallery,&nbsp;No Such Thing brings together a series of works that consider the idea of perfection through the lens of portraiture and material process.&nbsp;Shot over the course of three years, this series of work represents Anderson’s desire to shift away from the clean, intentional, and manicured visual language that had come to define his photography. Each image grew from a conversation with the subject about the role of perfection in their creative practice, which expanded into questions of self-image, lived experience, and personal understanding of what constitutes perfection, how it shapes our relationship to the act of existing. Excerpts from the conversations accompany the photographs in a zine, bringing the multiplicity of Anderson’s subjects’ perspectives into relation with his images.The material qualities of each photograph are central to the exhibition. Rather than meticulously controlling every element of the photographic and development process, Anderson has allowed the unpredictability and imperfections inherent to working with film fold in to the rich beauty of his imagery. Erratic scratch marks, dust, and squiggles dance across the surface of certain photographs while in others ghostly, shimmering rays of white light envelop the subjects. Faint, spectral shapes irregularly dot the images, imbuing them with a textural depth that complicates any expectation that a photograph should feel impeccably neat and fully resolved. Rather than treating these effects as flaws, Anderson embraces each unexpected mark or blemish and incorporates it into the finished image, reflecting his interest in the space between intention and accident. Image: NOLIS ANDERSON, SA, 2026, Archival pigment print, 34 x 26 in, 86.36 x 66.04 cm

Nolis Anderson: No Such Thing

Virtual Artist’s Talk:&nbsp;Thursday Oct. 15th, 7 PMRegister&nbsp;<a href="https://us.list-manage.com/NqM_u15avjU?e=49b9939ea4&amp;c2id=50b0bcd76dd70262de19b41666dd6e34" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 255);" target="_blank">here</a>Perspective Gallery is proud to present a new show by fine art photographer, Alexa Frangos. Titled (Re)arranging, the work finds inspiration in her daughter’s hands, using photo-collage to imagine them reassembling what is broken. Playful and performative, the work both looks back to Surrealist photography of the 1920s and 1930s and forward to the potential of today’s younger generations to create a more beautiful world.&nbsp;(Re)arranging opens on Thursday, October 1, with a public reception on Saturday, October 3 from 5 p.m.- 7:00 p.m. Alexa will give an artist’s talk on Thursday October 15th and the show will close on Sunday, November 1st.

(Re)arranging

&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Hyde Park Art Center</a>, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, announces&nbsp;Ground Floor, the ninth iteration of the Art Center’s biennial program showcasing select work by recent graduates from each of Chicago’s five MFA (Master of Fine Art) programs, on view from&nbsp;August 9 – November 1, 2026.&nbsp;The exhibition opens on the Art Center’s quarterly open house day,&nbsp;Center Day, with free public programs including artmaking from&nbsp;1-4 p.m.The exhibition offers a single destination to view some of Chicago’s most promising emerging talent who graduated in 2025-26 from one of Chicago’s five MFA programs: Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The University of Chicago, and The University of Illinois at Chicago. Artists represented in&nbsp;Ground Floor&nbsp;include&nbsp;<a href="http://lamiaabukhadra.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Lamia Abukhadra</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://gabriellebanks.co.uk/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gabby Banks</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://claireburkedain.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Claire Burke Dain</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://ricardodelima.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ricardo De Lima</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://emmadifani.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Emma Difani</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://naakitafk.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">naakita f.k.</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://aidanannefrierson.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Aidan Anne Frierson</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.laveengammie.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Laveen Gammie</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://laurelhauge.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Laurel Hauge</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://lianghestudio.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Liang He</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://xingyuhuang.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Xingyu Huang</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://susanjablonski.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Susan Jablonski</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://yingfeiliang.wixsite.com/fayeliang" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Faye Yingfei Liang</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://mauriciolopezf.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mauricio López F.</a>, Isaiah McDaniel,&nbsp;<a href="http://tepalandjian.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Te Palandjian</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.breannarobinson.studio/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Breanna Nannette Robinson</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://reneeroyale.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Renee Royale</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://kianashahnia.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Kiana Shahnia</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://nanakokono-rolly.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Nanako Wagley</a>, and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.judsonwomack.com/#1" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Judson Womack</a>.Ground Floor&nbsp;presents the work of select graduates made in the past two years to articulate conceptual and stylistic trends coming out of Chicago art schools right now. Their modes of making range the full spectrum in media, from painting and printmaking to film and sculpture.&nbsp;The artists share their excitement about the opportunity and why it is meaningful at this moment in their practices: "Over the years, I’ve known many artists whose careers and practices have been deeply impacted by this exhibition, and I’ve always seen it as an incredible resource and opportunity for artists navigating life after graduate school. I’ve been connected to the Art Center in many ways—as a South Sider, a visitor, an artist, and coordinator of the Center Program—long before this exhibition. To now have the honor of exhibiting my own work alongside so many other artists feels like a homecoming moment," says&nbsp;Aidan Anne Frierson.&nbsp;And&nbsp;Emma Difani&nbsp;shared: “While graduate school was a period of tremendous growth, it was also a bit of a bubble. This is an exciting opportunity to build relationships outside of the academic setting in a place for art-as-lived that celebrates artists of all ages and stages.”&nbsp;Xingyu Huang&nbsp;said, “For me, this opportunity to show my work on the building facade is an invitation to reimagine the boundaries we build between ourselves and the living world. My work challenges the idea that urban environments and ecological processes are separate by bringing attention to aquatic systems within exhibit spaces. It’s incredibly exciting to create a space at HPAC where audiences can physically confront these invisible, shared dependencies and realize we are entirely continuous with our environment.”The exhibition opening day overlaps with the summer installment of the Art Center’s quarterly series&nbsp;Center Day, an all-ages program offering free public access to art viewing and artmaking, from&nbsp;1-4 p.m.&nbsp;The August 9 programming includes exhibition receptions for three exhibitions (Jeff Carter: The Singer Pavilion Project&nbsp;and&nbsp;OFF THE WALL!, in addition to&nbsp;Ground Floor) from 1-4 p.m., a mural workshop from 1-4 p.m., Chicago Housing Authority mural unveiling from 1-1:30 p.m., a teen artist panel from 1:30-2 p.m., a basket weaving workshop led by Art Center resident artist ebere agwuncha from 1-3 p.m., and open studios from 1-4 p.m. with resident artists (ebere agwuncha, Carlos Flores, Cydney M. Lewis, Pooja Pittie, Fidencio Fifield-Perez, Anwulika Anigbo, D. Lammie-Hanson, Jess Atieno, Laveen Gammie, and Tongji Philip Qian). About Ground Floor 2026Ground Floor—so named because it provides a crucial platform for rising artists and traverses the entire lower level of the Art Center—gives exhibiting artists a major public venue in which to display their works at a critical juncture in their careers, helping to build, support, and ensure a strong and vibrant community of artists in Chicago.The 21 artists in the exhibition were selected by the Art Center’s&nbsp;Ground FloorSelection Committee from a competitive pool of applicants who were nominated by respected Chicago-based artists, curators, and administrators. The 2026 jury committee includes nationally and internationally renowned artists, curators,&nbsp;and educators Cecilia Beaven, Amber Ginsburg, Sherwin Ovid, Lorelei Stewart, and Jade Yumang. The exhibition is curated by Director of Exhibitions and Residency, Mariela Acuña, and Exhibitions and Residency Manager, Tran Tran. The exhibition is enriched with further insight into these artists’ practices by didactic text by writer and curator Nicky Ni. A few notable Ground Floor alumni include Jonathan Castillo, Hai-Wen Lin, Tony Lewis, Maria Gaspar, Norman Teague, and Melissa Leandro.This exhibition is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and The Joyce Foundation. ABOUT THE HYDE PARK ART CENTERHyde 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; 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 connects 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, please visit&nbsp;<a href="https://www.hydeparkart.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">www.hydeparkart.org</a>.

Ground Floor

Jackson Junge Gallery is pleased to present their fourth solo exhibition of the year, LINGERING STARDUST, featuring the artwork of Chicago oil painter, Laura Haberer. This expressive collection sheds light on interiors across Chicago and in doing so constructs a portrait of our shared lives. By omitting human subjects, the viewer is made to consider the influence of humanity on the mutual spaces we occupy. The essence of the architecture we exist within is imbued with the stories of each passing face, their light a refraction which reverberates through the ages, all the way back to the stars from which we all came. Haberer’s calling to begin a career as a painter was born of her desire to find connection and belonging within a contemporary world that felt disoriented in the wake of the pandemic. While quarantine caused a shift in all our interpersonal relationships, Haberer was uniquely impacted as a professional psychotherapist. Having to alter her practice to limit face-to-face interaction, she felt that those relationships which were so crucial to her personal and professional worlds were farther away than ever before. This feeling of distance caused her to consider ways that she could bring herself closer to the world around her. In doing so, only six years ago, she began to paint. Since that time, Haberer has taken to a range of subject matter, from landscapes to portraiture, but finds that interiors have a unique ability to tell stories. After gaining the confidence to take her practice out into urban environments beyond her own home, she felt called to paint places and objects which hold a depth of communal history. “I find home with people, that first was represented for me in my own living room,” she says of her previous work depicting interiors. “I think as I started to look around more, I realized that home exists wherever we are.” LINGERING STARDUST is a continuation of Haberer’s unending goal to express our connected lives, zooming outward beyond the individual’s environment to include transient areas. Cafes, cultural centers, antique stores, and open houses are communal spaces which feel the activity of so many unique lives every day. The significance of these spaces as a connective force cannot be overlooked in an urban environment whose infrastructure is increasingly tailored to individualism. In divorcing these spaces from any of the people that would typically inhabit them, a mutual past emerges which ties together all their occupants across time. There is a feeling of quiet wisdom that resonates throughout architecture that has been a historical meeting place for generations. In Haberer’s depiction of the Chicago Cultural Center, ELYSIAN LIGHT, this sentiment is expressed with great intricacy. The specificity of such ornate decorative architecture as the Preston Bradley Hall Tiffany Dome is not lost on her brush. She lovingly captures the mosaics which have adorned the walls since the Cultural Center’s opening to the public in 1897, originally as the first Chicago Public Library, with great detail. These subtleties cause her audience to consider the lives of those who spent their time building that architecture, and how many have experienced that handiwork during its 129-year lifespan. In the same stroke, the gentleness and warmth she introduces to the space allows the viewer to see a site softened by time, basking in the wonder of all who have travelled through. The reverence that Haberer’s audience feels while viewing these works is inherent in the subject matter she chooses to paint. She finds that soft light in combination with antique objects reveals an emotional quality that draws her toward painting these spaces. “It [light] encircles everything inside the room. And all those things inside the room are symbols of lives lived. All the nooks and crannies are as complicated as the humans they represent.” This sentiment is evident in the piece WALLS TELL STORIES, a depiction of her childhood friend’s home as it is being shown for sale. While the light dancing on its centerpiece, a piano, feels representative of that family’s connection from father to young son through music, it also feels as if it is waiting for the arrival of a new tenant to build a different kind of sanctuary in the space, as many families had before them. This exercise in observing the intimate details that make a place feel like home is contrasted by its sister piece, TO LEAVE A PLACE, which also uses an apartment on the market as reference. With its heavily staged furniture and distant composition, the audience is made to feel as though the signifiers of home are packed up in boxes, while the surrounding walls remain steeped in the warm afterglow of loving memories. In Haberer’s eyes, the spaces and the objects in them are separable from each other, but inseparable from the influence that humans have on them. Since becoming a new mother, she empathizes with how generations of familial interaction are internalized by everyday domestic objects, even as they are separated from homes. The way that light refracts off rust, cracks, and weathered enamel is illustrated with just as much glory as intentional decoration. “I couldn’t help but think of all the children bathed in those bathtubs and all of the mothers bathing those children in those bathtubs...” she says of painting NOSTLAGIA, whose subject is defunct bathroom fixtures found at Salvage One, an architectural salvage shop in West Town. “That experience of bathing your child is no different than it was 500 years ago, than it was 50,000 years ago.” Laura Haberer offers a similar treatment to the atmosphere of each piece in the LINGERING STARDUST collection. Through visually softening each space she depicts, dappling light across each interior, she diffuses those edges that form physical boundaries and highlights the intricacies of each space simultaneously. In doing so, she can show us a microcosm of the ever-evolving character of our world. “My understanding of human nature is that it is incredibly complex. Not black and white. The only universality to it is that everyone is complicated. What I’m trying to evoke is that nothing is concrete.” The softness expressed across Haberer’s body of work is a facet of that same philosophy, that despite the unique qualities of every individual, the separation between each of us is lesser than we often perceive. “Those lines are blurred if we let them be.” LINGERING STARDUST will be on view at Jackson Junge Gallery from September 21st –November 1st 2026. The gallery will be holding the exhibition’s opening reception on Friday, September 25th, from 6 pm - 9 pm, free and open to the public. It is curated by Owner Chris Jackson, Gallery Director Kaitlyn Miller and Gallery Assistant Allison Freeman.

LINGERING STARDUST

The Evanston Art Center (EAC) is excited to welcome the public to our upcoming exhibition, <a href="https://www.evanstonartcenter.org/exhibitions/whispers-dark-curated-azul-alberto-nogueron" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Whispers in the Dark | Curated by Azul Alberto Nogueron</a>. The exhibition will be on display from September 26 - November 1, 2026 with an opening reception on Sunday, September 27, 1-3pm that will be free and open to the public. <a href="https://www.evanstonartcenter.org/exhibitions/whispers-dark-curated-azul-alberto-nogueron" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Whispers in the Dark</a> is the final exhibition curated by Azul Alberto Nogueron as part of their time as the EAC's COMPASS Resident. Secrecy, hidden agendas, and mental health are the key components of the exhibition, with a celebration of the macabre. The COMPASS Curator Residency provides an emerging curator with an opportunity to curate three shows in the Evanston Art Center’s Lobby Gallery space. The EAC’s Lobby Gallery is a space dedicated to exhibiting emerging and underrepresented artists/curators and responds to current social events. This dynamic and inclusive space draws in new curators, artists, and audiences.&nbsp;

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