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Anna Daucikova & Assaf Evron: FOR

Anna Daucikova & Assaf Evron: FOR

This exhibition coupled the work of Chicago-based Israeli photo-artist Assaf Evron with that of Slovak feminist video pioneer Anna Daucikova. The immediate occasion for this pairing is a shared interest in Russian-born and/or Soviet-trained artists of little renown but substantial visual impact: Ukrainian native Valery Lamakh (1925–1978), best remembered today for his decorative tilework on Kiev’s many Stalin-era residential buildings, and Israeli muralist Shlomo Eliraz (1912–1994), whose name today primarily survives in a handful of public artworks scattered around Herzliya and Tel Aviv. Lamakh is the subject of Daucikova’s elegiac video installation Along the Axis of Affinity (2015); Eliraz’s oeuvre is the centerpiece of Evron’s large-scale, site-specific photo work, itself part of a larger inquiry into the lost utopia of 1970s urbanism. In revisiting the legacies of these forgotten heroes of a certain avant-garde’s last stand, Daucikova’s video and Evron’s photo-mural revisit the trials and tribulations of the public art complex at a time of dwindling opportunities for artistic thinking on an architectural scale.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

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Anna Tsouhlarakis: She Made for Her

Anna Tsouhlarakis: She Made for Her

Anna Tsouhlarakis is at the forefront of contemporary Native American art. In She Made for Her, she created three large-scale sculptures made of materials purchased from IKEA’s “as-is” section. As viewers encountered the sculptures, their visual experience was mediated by a multi-channel sound installation featuring Native women describing those very objects. Some of the women approached the works as abstractions, some as utilitarian forms, and others as cultural symbols. The overlapping and divergent voices prompted viewers to rethink their cultural expectations when encountering the work of Native artists. This exhibition was presented as part of the Open Fields project at the Neubauer Collegium.

Curated by Jacob Proctor

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Apsáalooke Women and Warriors

Apsáalooke Women and Warriors

The Apsáalooke Women and Warriors project was a multi-site exhibition, jointly organized by the Neubauer Collegium and the Field Museum, that presented a rich narrative of the Apsáalooke cultural past, figured the present-day Apsáalooke identity, and offered a vision for the future. The centerpiece of the Collegium site was a tipi-like structure that transformed the gallery into an intimate space showcasing historical materials and works by contemporary Apsáalooke artists. All proceeds from the book published on the occasion of the show will benefit Little Big Horn College in Crow Agency, Montana.

Curated by Nina Sanders in collaboration with Dieter Roelstraete.

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Arnold J. Kemp: Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather

Small, colorful ceramic masks with two eyeholes are laid out like a grid.

Arnold J. Kemp: Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather

Masks have occupied Arnold J. Kemp’s imagination for close to three decades, and they are doubly present in the project developed for the Neubauer Collegium, the centerpiece of which is a sprawling installation consisting of hundreds of hand-sculpted ceramic objects, paired with two large-scale photographs of the artist’s hand eerily animating a flaccid Fred Flintstone mask.

Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968) is a Chicago-based American artist whose work ranges across an array of media including installation art and sculpture, painting and photography, and performance and poetry. Over the years, Kemp has sought to articulate his long-standing interest in challenging and interrogating the politics of “othering” so central to the imperial project of Western enlightenment. He has pursued this interest through a variety of forms and motifs, among which the mask stands out as the artist’s most persistent iconographic concern. Masks have occupied Kemp’s imagination for close to three decades, and they are doubly present in the project developed for the Neubauer Collegium, the centerpiece of which is a sprawling installation consisting of hundreds of hand-sculpted ceramic objects, paired with two large-scale photographs of the artist’s hand eerily animating a flaccid Fred Flintstone mask: “speech acts” that are exquisitely articulate in their wordlessness.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete

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Art and Public Life

Art and Public Life

What is a public? How do real and virtual spaces, architecture, and media help to create publics? Artists, critics, and scholars considered these questions with attention to new concepts of art as “social practice” and complex, modern notions of public space.

Art and Public Life is a combination seminar-colloquium, beginning in the fall term of 2014 and continuing throughout the 2014-15 academic year. The aim of the seminar is to work through some of the most advanced thinking on ideas about publics and their relation to questions of community, politics, society, culture, and the arts. From John Dewey through Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas, the notion of the public has remained central to a wide variety of debates in the humanities and social sciences. What is a public? How are publics constituted? What is the role of real and virtual space, architectural design and technical media, in the formation of publics? And, most centrally for our purposes, what role can and do the arts play in the emergence of various kinds of publics? One of our aims is to gauge the transformations in the arts and notions of the public sphere since the great outpouring of reflections on this topic that marked the “Culture Wars” of the 1980s, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989, and the emergence of new technical media along with new virtual and actual publics since the 1990s. Central to this investigation is the emergence of new concepts of art as “social practice” and new modes of thinking about the public sphere not merely as a kind of space, but as the site of practices and actions. Over the course of the year, Art and Public Life will also bring visiting artists, critics, and scholars to the University of Chicago campus to give a series of public lectures on the topic that will be considered for publication in a special issue of Critical Inquiry on Art & Public Life.

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Artful Living Program

Artful Living Program

This project aimed to augment patient care and rethink the definition of “treatment” by hosting and measuring the impact of events that allowed medical patients to experience art in various forms.

Health is not solely defined by the physical conditions that are treated in the doctor’s office or a hospital room. Accordingly, holistic, comprehensive health care must address a myriad of biopsychosocial factors that affect people’s lives and their psychological and social well-being. The University of Chicago’s Comprehensive Care Program (CCP) is designed to provide comprehensive, multifaceted care to complex patients at high risk of hospitalization by allowing them to receive care from a closely-knit team of providers led by a physician who cares for them both in clinic and the hospital. While the CCP’s success is largely the result of strong patient-clinician relationships, and the knowledge, trust, and communication that is promoted by those relationships, patients still have humanistic needs that the current CCP cannot adequately address.

As a result, the CCP aimed to create the Artful Living Program (ALP) in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. ALP will augment the care that CCP patients receive and broaden health care “treatment” to include other factors that contribute to overall health and well-being. Leveraging the robust arts and humanities organizations and events already in existence at the University of Chicago and in the surrounding community, and creating their own participatory arts/humanities based programming, ALP hosted events throughout the year for CCP patients to experience art in its various forms - music, theater, cinema, narrative, visual arts, and the physical arts. With a more inclusive definition of health and health care provision, the research team anticipated that through participation in ALP programming, CCP patients will reap the benefits of the arts and humanities and become more engaged, better connected, and healthier while ultimately experiencing greater fulfillment in their lives.

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Arts Labs

A man in a soundproof room, seen from below.

Arts Labs

Six independent but linked initiatives will shape and support a culture of experimentation and critical analysis around arts research on campus.

Six independent but linked initiatives will shape and support a culture of experimentation and critical analysis around arts research on campus. Our projects include conceptual and practical workshops in opera; the creation of a Movement Theory Lab; a dance-theater adaptation of a classic dramatic text; workshopping a new musical with Court Theater; diversity initiatives in contemporary literary publishing; and renewed operations of the Black Cinema House, bringing UChicago faculty and visiting artists into conversation at the intersection of scholarly inquiry and artistic making. The labs will create space for the development of creative projects while fostering dialogue among scholars and artists (and artist-scholars) about the opportunities and challenges of artistic research.​

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Black Wall Street Journey

Black Wall Street Journey

This project drew on methods from the visual arts, social science survey research, and community engagement practice to study the economic and social health of several neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side.

The Black Wall Street Journey (BWSJ) project brought together the visual arts, social science survey research, and community engagement to study the economic and social health of several neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. The research team's work centered on producing the content of Houston-based artist Rick Lowe’s “Stock Tickers,” sculptural interventions distributed in select Chicago neighborhoods in the summer of 2021 as part of Toward Common Cause, a multi-site exhibition organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and presented on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows Program. The BWSJ research team sought to better understand residents’ perspectives of their neighborhoods and to project this information through the sculptures Lowe created during his residency as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow. The challenge was three-fold: 1) to design and conduct a sociological study that conceptualizes, gathers, and analyzes data on the focal neighborhoods’ economic and social health; 2) to determine, with residents, what kind of information might be of use to residents of disenfranchised neighborhoods; and 3) to make those data legible in artistic form. The creation of the data, and the tracking of reactions to and engagement with the sculptures, provided social science insights into how community is perceived, described, and documented. The sculptures are a new source of information that constitutes value and facilitates decision-making by residents of low-income, historically divested communities.

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Carmenza Banguera: The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible

Three heads made of mud rest in the grass, giving the impression of three buried bodies.

Carmenza Banguera: The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible

This exhibition offered a provocative meditation on the meanings of the “resistant” Black body.

In her three-part exhibition project The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible, Afro-Colombian artist Carmenza Banguera explored tropes of Blackness and belonging, conjoining perspectives across two multicultural democracies, Colombia and the United States. Banguera’s works were partly based on observations drawn from an exploratory trip to Chicago in the spring of 2019 and reviewed through the lens of the Afro-Colombian experience in her hometown of Cali. Informed by the “racial reckoning” taking place in the United States following the murder of George Floyd, the exhibition offered a compelling meditation on the transnational meanings of the “resistant” Black body as invulnerable and thus capable of arduous and unsafe work. Banguera offered a striking critique of this gendered and racialized notion of bodily resistance, baring the contradictions of such embodied citizenship as they subtend Black Americans’ daily dealings with pervasive state violence and constrained labor markets. Conceived in close collaboration with the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research project at the Neubauer Collegium, this exhibition compelled us to imagine new ways of being and seeing.

Curated by the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context research team in collaboration with Dieter Roelstraete

Installation photography and video by Robert Heishman. Event photography by Max Herman. All rights reserved.

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