This summer, the Sullivan Galleries presents Summer Studio. Transforming the gallery into artists' working space, a place of public presentation into one of process, Summer Studio is a rare chance for artists to share in the company-and energy-of others, while sharing the resources of this institution. Artists-in-residence come from Chicago and beyond to use the galleries to explore diverse and ambitious projects that engage discussions and practices that are particular to the studio. Launching new collaborations for SAIC, Summer Studio is also organized with threewalls, a Chicago institution dedicated to increasing the city's cultural capital by cultivating contemporary art practice ...

Work by Rodney Graham, Josiah McElheny, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Rosemarie Trockel & Carsten Holler and Mark Wallinger.

Nationally renowned for their acclaimed collection of contemporary art, Donna and Howard Stone are equally respected for their longstanding commitment to the city of Chicago and its arts community. The Stones view their passion for art and collecting as an important and treasured aspect of their partnership, and surely many Chicago institutions—museums and universities especially—have benefited greatly from their dedicated patronage. The Art Institute is thrilled to present the first public exhibition of works from their collection, featuring a number of important gifts to the museum, on view this summer in the ...

Even before Bowie united them in song, sound and vision had been closely intertwined in the visual and audio art recordings of the early 1970s. This focused exhibition of a dozen works in various media explores the symbiotic relationship between art and music, presenting humorous yet rigorous investigations in which the two do not connect in any synesthetic sense but rather come together via acts of transposition—balls cast aloft are made to resemble notes in a musical score, honking drivers are photographed in mock (and silent) symphonic array, artists’ names are called ...

On the opening night of Sound & Vision, Summer Sounds, a series of Friday night performances, kicks off with the world premiere of a new composition/performance by composer/performer/digital artist Cory Arcangel. Born in Buffalo and trained at Oberlin’s renowned music conservatory, the 32-year-old Arcangel is known for a range of subversive uses of computer and video technology; one to two works by Arcangel will be in the Sound & Vision exhibition. For this performance in Fullerton Hall, Arcangel will début Music for Stereos, a composition/performance for low-end modern home stereo systems.

Yve-Alain Bois, Institute for Advanced Study, considers the impact of modernism on Ellsworth Kelly.

New work by Timothy Bergstrom and Daniel Sullivan.

Work by Thomas Schütte.

Learn about innovative local residencies for multi-discplinary practice, as well as residencies created by the artist. Joe Jeffers of Harold Arts, Shannon Stratton of threewalls, Abby Satinsky and Bryce Dwyer of InCUBATE and moderator Elizabeth Chodos of Oxbow, discuss the ethos and experience of their residency programs.  Photographer Judy Natal joins them to discuss her self-generated, self-directed residency at Biosphere II.

Luis Perez-Oramas, Museum of Modern Art, explores techniques and meanings in the art of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, noting existential and metaphysical dimensions, and connecting her to the harbingers of the end of art.

Experience Manifest. Columbia College Chicago's urban arts festival celebrates the next generation of artists and creative professionals. Manifest is an urban arts festival celebrating the work and creativity of Columbia students. Each year it attracts an audience of students, faculty, staff, parents, friends, alumni, patrons, donors, industry professionals, neighborhood residents, and the Chicago arts community. The festival is free and open to the public and features music, exhibitions, screenings, presentations, performances, and much more!

This monthly lecture series connects local, contemporary art with the vast collection of the Art Institute. Chicago-based artists discuss the work they’re creating today while connecting with the work of artists of the past.

While avant-garde architecture has frequently inspired today’s art photographers and video artists, Stanley Greenberg is the first to focus a documentary-style lens on the subject. Greenberg's luminous large-scale black-and-white photographs explore avant-garde structures in the process of being built. Using highly cropped views, Greenberg captures moments in the assembly of architecture that are rarely evident in the final building, revealing the complexity of contemporary construction and the residual visual unfolding of spaces resulting from these feats of structural gymnastics. Through framings reminiscent of Lewis W. Hine’s heroic construction images of the 1930s, Greenberg’s compelling photographs are a celebration of ...

London-based artist Roger Hiorns’s captivating sculptural objects, installations, and performances exploit unusual materials to disquieting ends. Among the artist’s principal preoccupations is the form of the engine—extracted from both automobiles and airplanes. In the most general terms, the engine is, for Hiorns, a metaphor for networks both inert and, potentially, threateningly alive. For his commissioned site-specific project on the Bluhm Family Terrace of the Modern Wing, Hiorns presents two Pratt and Whitney TF33 P9 engines, once mounted on Boeing EC135 Looking Glass long-range surveillance planes. For the artist, the project is a representation of a dominant 20th-century object within the ...

SAIC's Graduate Exhibition features work by the next generation of artists and designers. More than 120 students completing master's degrees exhibit their work in art and technology studies; ceramics; fiber and material studies; painting and drawing; performance; photography; printmedia; sculpture; sound; and visual communication design.

Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University, shows and analyzes several works by the young video artist Anri Sala.

Printervention: Printing for the Public, an exhibition and public art project inspired by cultural programs created through FDR’s New Deal and The Works Progress Administration. Printervention underscores the necessity for public support of artists and raises awareness of the social and political issues of our day. In addition to an exhibition of over 70 posters and prints, Printervention, will feature a mobile silkscreen printing cart for distributing works in the parks and streets of Chicago. Printervention is a part of Version Festival 2010, an annual arts festival in Chicago that brings together hundreds of artist, musicians and educators from ...

Both in form and in function, Ryan Trecartin’s video practice advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative, and identity, while also propelling these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life. This evening, as part of a special two-part presentation organized by the Visiting Artists ...

Ryan Trecartin's video practice both in form and in function advances understandings of post-millennial technology, narrative and identity, and also propels these matters as expressive mediums. His work depicts worlds where consumer culture and interactive systems are amplified to absurd or nihilistic proportions and characters circuitously strive to find agency and meaning in their lives. The combination of assaultive, nearly impenetrable avant-garde logics and equally outlandish, virtuoso uses of color, form, drama, and montage produces a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life.

International is a video and sculpture installation that aligns two historical figures in conversation for the first time, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) and American builder and philanthropist George R. Brown of Brown & Root (1898–1983). Sampling oral history recordings captured between 1968 and 1978 of Brown and Hayek (they never met), the animation folds together a conversation that identifies their perspectives on how the ideal economic and social order for a nation should evolve. From a contemporary perspective, the conversation also reveals how it is possible for the mind to simultaneously hold incompatible ideas and how individuals like Hayek and ...

The films of British artist Emily Wardill are brilliant cinematic labyrinths. Visually striking and playfully rigorous, they draw upon an array of sources– underground theater, psychoanalytic case studies, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Rancière, and even the game logic of Nintendo Wii–to pose fundamental questions about vision, representation, and media and their role in how we come to know ourselves. Wardill has been the recipient of much recent critical acclaim: Tate Modern film curator Stuart Comer rated her film The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008) as one of his top ten picks of 2008 and The Guardian newspaper deemed ...

Artist talk by Erik Wenzel.

Matt Keegan works mainly with photography, collage, printmaking, and sculpture. Recently, he has been thinking about the myriad possibilities of archives, social history projects, cities, and ways to map and record time.

This monthly lecture series connects local, contemporary art with the vast collection of the Art Institute. Chicago-based artists discuss the work they’re creating today while connecting with the work of artists of the past.

Working within the tradition of conceptual art, Ryan Gander’s multifaceted practice interweaves factual and fictional narrative elements and a wide range of references that encompass early Modernism, architecture, popular culture, art history, design, and children’s literature. Gander’s varied output has included an installation of crystal balls laser etched with the image of a falling sheet of paper, a children’s book that tells the story of a boy who witnesses British modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger build the Trellick Tower, and a fabricated pop band comprised of only a name and promotional materials. Balancing self-reflexivity and humor his installations at times appear ...

The documentaries of Pavel Medvedev are haunting portraits of some of post-Soviet Russia’s most isolated people and places. This rare screening presents four different facets of Medvedev’s remarkable oeuvre. Vacation in November (2002) follows Russian miners in the tundra. On a forced furlough from their regular jobs, they embark on an annual massive reindeer slaughter to supplement their income. On the Third Planet from the Sun (2006) studies life in the country’s resource-rich Arkhangelsk region, where inhabitants forage for scrap metal left behind from H-bomb testing. Wedding of Silence (2003) depicts a deaf community in St. Petersburg, juxtaposing an expressive ...

Richter archivist Dietmar Elger presents his new book Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting. Benefiting from private interviews, Elger is able to elucidate Richter's aesthetics of detachment and ambiguity, providing a rich, personal, and vivid portrait of this important artist.

In 2006, experimental filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine, where she still lives today. The result of her adventures is the quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian Time Machine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life– traditions that are eroding with the encroaching pressures of modernity–Uman creates a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve. In this evening’s program, Uman will present Unnamed Film, her keen documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ ...