The goal of the Artist Exhibition for 106 years has been to celebrate and showcase the artistic efforts of the institution’s artists members across a range of media, styles, forms, and genres. There are 80 artworks on view and all of them were made between years 2020 and 2022.
It’s hard to mention them all thusI’m just highlighting couple of them here: – Allison Swoboda, Mandala Selvim Azurea, 2021. Mixed media on paper. Allison Svoboda is known for her Zen-inspired work. She transforms paper, ink, and the act of collage into various mandalas or different studies of organic forms and space. – Sandro Miller: Nzinga, Dakar, Senegal, 2020. Photography. The photography belongs to an ongoing portrait project in which Miller celebrates the diversity and artistry of black women’s hair, and he honors their power and beauty while celebrating blackness.
The Hyde Park Art Center is another highly respected and one of the oldest art organization in the city of Chicago. https://www.hydeparkart.org A curated by Asha Iman Veal group exhibition titled Dream features various media artworks and practices brought together in this biennial show. The curator asked all invited international artists to focus on their dreams for the reach of their own practice, and the way their work can continue to exist in the subconscious and impact others. Some artists in the exhibition are current or recent resident at the HPAC. Tanya Gill, for example, is a multimedia artist and educator whose work explores mental constructs, adaptation, and restoration. Mending is one of approaches that she often uses in her delicate embroidery on fabric to express her artistic inquiries (an image of crashing cars painted on paper is attached here). Demanding attention are three multi-media installations by JeeYeun Lee, Sarabeth Dunton, and Dorothy Burger. JeeYeun Lee’s Whose Lakefront, foregrounds the occupation of Native land by marking with a red sand the boundary of unceded territory in the heart of Chicago’s downtown using a line of red sand. Sarabeth Dunton’s installation The Dirty Books features an ongoing series of hand-bound and embossed books installed in pools of loose graphite powder. Dorothy Burger creates artworks from screen prints on commercial cotton fabrics that are machine quilted to visual tableaus.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Andrea Bowers is a multidisciplinary visual artist working in a variety of mediums such as colored pencil, installation art, and video, who explores pressing national and international issues. Her work combines an artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched social and political inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a fairer and more just world. This first museum retrospective exhibition is surveying over two decades of the artist’s practice highlighting topics like environmental justice, indigenous rights activism, among some other ones.
Written by Kasia Kay Curatorial Practice & Artist Kasia Kay Art Projects
