An exhibition by Erik Wenzel. The show is a continuation Wenzel's reductive turn: creating a viewing situation from a selection of an increasingly sparse collection of things—in this case a new video work and some objects. A musical component will also be present during the opening in the form of a selection of songs played in alphabetical order by title.

Home Gallery is proud to host Brooklyn, New York's Art House Co-op and the Sketchbook Project, a library of sketchbooks collected from artists around the world. In addition, Home Gallery will be featuring drawings, sketchbooks, and artist's books from Anders Nilsen (Big Questions, Dogs and Water), Michael Brehm, Amanda Vähämäki & Michelangelo Setola (Souvlaki Circus), and Doug Shaeffer.

The Renaissance Society presents The Seductiveness of the Interval, a project presented at the Romanian Pavilion of the 2009 Venice Biennale. The work of three Romanian artists—Stefan Constantinescu, Andrea Faciu and Ciprian Muresan—is exhibited in a two-story architectural structure designed by studio BASAR specifically for that purpose. Together, the artists explore themes of exile, the human capacity for cruelty, and hope. Although the artists' works are distinct in terms of form and content, they are united by a structure conceived as a stage set where the viewer is invited to reflect on the individual works and ...

A participant in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Theaster Gates is a potter, musician, and performance artist who has earned national acclaim for his intelligent commentaries on race, the city and the museum.

The Opportunity Shop is a transitory, experimental project space for contemporary art in Hyde Park. The Op Shop is dedicated to creating alternative sites of exchange around art in vacant urban spaces. Come be a part of its second iteration at 1530 E. 53rd Street, Hyde Park, where local, national and international artists come together to creatively facilitate conversation and community interaction in a dynamic art environment. This large one story building, made available by The University of Chicago, offers a chance to create innovative encounters between artists and audiences, and new ways of connecting art to urban change.

Matthew Metzger’s subject is abstraction, but he excavates his motifs from the world of everyday things. His paintings of ping pong paddles, tattered paperbacks, scratched out lp sleeves, and other disregarded objects catalog the contents of basements, garages, closets, and attics. These outmoded objects, rendered with both deafening surface precision and also the vocabulary of abstraction, appear to pose a contemporary method of meaning making. Accessed through the tools of representation, the legibility of abstraction is scrambled and defamiliarized. As such, Metzger’s work emerges between present and past, theoretical and sensorial, real and falsified, the recognizable and the obscure.

For his exhibition at The Renaissance Society—the artist’s first solo museum show—Berlin-based artist Matt Saunders will present several interrelated new works in diverse media. In drawings, paintings, short films, and photographic works, Saunders recasts images, often taken from film or television, into new narratives about portraiture and spectatorship. At the same time, he pushes boundaries between media to tell a parallel story of how images are made, are repeated and are embodied in materials. Saunders’ subject matter is a diverse cast of characters, including an early Los Alamos scientist, a largely forgotten East German actress, a silent film star, and ...

Ps & Qs is an exhibition of work by seven American artists making formal, non-objective work in painting, sculpture and photography. Curated by Shannon Stratton and Jeff M. Ward, Ps & Qs showcases how this group of artists explore enduring concerns with formalism through the arrangement of material, color and shape. Artists Todd Chilton (Chicago), Pete Fagundo (Evanston), Carrie Gundersdorf (Chicago), Katy Heinlein (Houston), Jessica Labatte (Chicago), Andrea Myers (Chicago) and Tessa Windt (Phoenix) all work formally, producing work that is notable for its materiality. Conjuring a firm, optimistic agency in their application ...

Michael Rakowitz's work confronts our shared political consciousness through performance, sculpture, graphic design and derives it particular poignancy from an engagement with the world that is at once pragmatic and poetic.

As a young, but highly accomplished and recognized artist and writer, as well as an alumnae and active member of The University of Chicago community, Emma Bee Bernstein developed a successful body of photographic works up until her death in December 2008. This exhibition of 30 photographs is accompanied by a slide presentation curated by Antonia Pocock and a catalogue with critical statements by Kate Bussard, Assistant Curator of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago; Hamza Walker, the Director of Education at The Renaissance Society; and Professor Matthew Jesse Jackson, of the Department of Art History and ...

MFA students from the University of Chicago open up their studios to share their recent projects.

Work by Nathaniel Russell.

The exhibition From the Office of Scientists features a new body of work addressing the question “What does knowledge look like?” Artist Aspen Mays activates the office cubicle as a site for information production and general inquiry where “big ideas” are generated. For the first time in her career, Mays mixes photography with sculpture to construct an installation that challenges the value of photography in art while questioning the validity of the artifact. Aspen Mays employs an array of non-traditional techniques in her work as a means of exploring cosmological questions through everyday materials. For example, she once captured ...

In Ghost Town, the most recent body of paintings by Andreas Fischer, found tintype portrait photographs of ordinary people from the Gold Rush era serve loosely as an inspirational source for Fischer’s paintings titled Sunday Best. Through enlivening these dated portraits with an updated palette and active washes of color, Fischer attempts to re-imagine the representation of history as only painting can by depicting intangible mental characteristics excluded from an object-based historical archive. Ghost Town is a solo exhibition of work by Andreas Fischer held in two concurrent locations: the Sunday Best series contains portraits and will be on view at ...

Video installation by Michelle Menzies with audio by Max Alexander.

William Cordova is a Peruvian-American artist working in various media to address the layered history of the urban landscape, mixing references to politics, history, race, and pop culture.

Join renowned artist Jason Salavon as he discusses his recent exhibitions Spigot, on view at the Hyde Park Art Center September 23 - February 6, 2010 on the Art Center’s Digital Catwalk Facade. Salavon’s exhibition experiments with the artistic possibilities of information technology and unconventional source materials. In this large-scale projection on the Hyde Park Art Center’s façade, pulsating fields of color serve as the background for rapidly emerging pieces of text; these images alternate with multicolored, interlocking squares that recede and project in a dynamic rhythm.

The Renaissance Society will mount a solo exhibition of photographs by Chicago-based artist Anna Shteynshleyger (b. 1977). Trained at Yale, Shteynshleyger belongs to a generation of photographers whose work is notable for its formal beauty and technical execution. The exhibition will feature approximately 20 works that poignantly document Shteynshleyger's life over the past several years. During that period, Shteynshleyger has had to renegotiate her relationship to Orthodox Judaism, which she had practiced since the age of 16, after moving to the United States from Moscow where she was born. Too personal to qualify as documentary of the Orthodox Jewish ...

The revolutionary art by Emory Douglas. Presented in conjunction with the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago.

The Opportunity Shop is a transitory, experimental space for new art in Hyde Park. The Op Shop is dedicated to creating alternative sites of exchange around art in vacant urban spaces. Come be a part of its first incarnation on East 55th Street, where local artists have produced an evolving, total installation of video, photography, drawing, and sculpture. This large storefront, made available by Mac Properties for a token fee, offers a chance to create innovative encounters between artists and audiences, and new ways of connecting art to urban change.

(Re)Collect, is an exhibition highlighting a selection of the Art Center’s faculty whose work complicates notions of memory through embracing its slippery nature. Curated by Interim Exhibitions Manager, Francesca Wilmott, the exhibition underscores the correspondence between the physical act of gathering artistic source material and the conceptual act of recollecting the past. Together, the artworks demonstrate the repetitive, compulsive, and often deceptive, nature of retrospection. Delving beyond the purely sentimental, (Re)Collect intertwines personal and material memory to question the reliability of recollections. Despite the range of art forms featured in the exhibition—including painting, photography, video work, performances, and site-specific installations—each artist ...

threewalls and The Green Lantern Press are pleased to announce our latest publishing collaboration, The Artist’s Run Chicago Digest, a complimentary publication to the exhibition Artist’s Run Chicago (curated by Britton Bertran and Allison Peters Quinn) at the Hyde Park Art Center, May 10th-July 5th, 2009. The ARC Digest is meant to archive in print the activities of Chicago’s artist-run spaces between 1999-2009. It acts both as a companion to the exhibition and an extension of that project with interviews by Dan Gunn, essays by Abigail Satinsky, The Pond, Scott Speh and John Neff, Mary ...

Photographer Lynne Cohen's work challenges medium specificity by its use of found spaces that blur the line between photography, installation art, and sculpture, drawing attention to the aesthetics of institutional spaces.

In celebration of the Center’s 70th Anniversary, Just Good Art will feature pieces by over 80 artists who have exhibited at the Center throughout its 70 year history, including work by Judith Brotman, Gillion Carrara, Rodney Carswell, Juan Angel Chávez, C.C. Ann Chen, Stan Chisholm, Alan Cohen, Jordan Davies, Brian Dettmer, Wendy Ennes, Howard Fonda, Doug Garofalo, Judith Geichman, Aron Gent, Matthew Girson, Ron Gordon, Diana Guerrero-Macia, Monica Herrera, Joseph Jachna, Carol Jackson, Chuck Jones, Gary Justis, Kelly Kaczynski, Sarah Kaiser, Yvette Kaiser Smith, ...

One of Canada's most prominent and most influential artists, Joyce Wieland (1931-1998) has been long overdue for a re-evaluation of her visual art and her stunning film work in the United States. This retrospective of her film work includes a selection of her short films (Oct. 16) that includes the gorgeous Water Sark (1965), the poignant Handtinting (1968) and the playful Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968), as well as a rare screening of her feature-length La Raison Avant La Passion (1969).