Opening Celebration
Join the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago for the opening event of the Chicago-wide exhibition Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40. Combining a gallery walkthrough with remarks and performances from local artists, museum representatives, and community partners, the opening promises to be a joyful celebration of four decades of meaningful artistic work, dialogue, and exchange, and our partners and community coming together ‘toward common cause.’
Welcome video
On the South Side
Visit Toward Common Cause venues across the South Side and the city of Chicago, many of which will also be open on Saturday:
Toward Common Cause
Hyde Park Art Center
Saturday, July 17, 10:30 am–2:30 pm • Make a reservation to visit »
Kara Walker: Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored
DuSable Museum of African American History
Saturday, July 17, 11 am–4 pm • Make a reservation to visit »
Black Wall Street Journey: 51st Street Pop-Up Gallery Opening
Urban Juncture
Saturday, July 17, 12–4 pm • Learn more about this free event »
Carrie Mae Weems: A Land of Broken Dreams
Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago
Saturday, July 17, 12–4 pm • RSVP for the opening reception »
Whitfield Lovell: The Spell Suite
South Side Community Art Center
Saturday, July 17, 12–4 pm • Make a reservation to visit »
Dawoud Bey: Portraits from Chicago (1993–2001)
Arts + Public Life
Saturday, July 17, 3:30–7 pm • Make a reservation to visit »
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All my work is a response to reality, to a human situation, a human context, a human tragedy.
Mark Bradford is known as an abstract painter, though paint only plays a minor role in his works, which are full of concrete meanings. Instead of painting, Bradford builds up layers of papers and other materials that he has collected from everyday life, creating thick surfaces that he then burrows into, scrubbing preselected sections out…
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I draw from the world around me, what I know. I pull my friends and family into my paintings . . . I paint the figure because I know the world through my body. And I understand my desires and my anxieties through my body and the desires and anxieties of our culture. I think the body can hold so much, it can be a site for just exploring the paint in or it can hold metaphorical and allegorical meanings. It’s just wide open.
The spare world of Toba Khedoori’s paintings is populated by familiar objects that structure the world that we inhabit. Doors, hallways, windows, rows of seats, a chain-link fence—her repertoire evinces a particular affinity for elements of built environment that mediate both access and exclusion. Treated with Khedoori’s singular combination of intricate detail and resolute abstraction,…
Designed as a home for the creative life of the University of Chicago campus and the city of Chicago, the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts is a partner, resource, and catalyst for developing deeper cultural networks and richer creative projects citywide and beyond. Plan your visit Visits to the Logan Center are…
I think what art can provide is an option that has not been considered before, and I think that's important because those options might be the liberating factor that is necessary to understand how to cope with what is going around us.
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The collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social document. Utilizing photography and video to navigate dynamics of the roles we play complicates the usual classifications of functional and dysfunctional families.
I first began to explore art in a social context after being challenged by a high school student who looked at my earlier political work and said it wasn’t what people needed. People needed solutions. And he said, if you are an artist and you are creative, why can’t you create a solution? That was the turning point that got me thinking about how to produce work that was not only symbolic and poetic but also had a practical application.
If art for me is a platform from which to speak, but not tell you something, that’s good. If that’s a way I give you a platform from which to think and debate, that’s even better. Ultimately, art for me does not reside in the object: it resides in what is said about the object. All of my work, even the most formal work, has an underlying politics to it, but I don’t want to reveal my position.
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Electronic music has a rich tradition of sampling. A well-crafted techno track might contain countless sources to build up texture: a reworked breakbeat, a transposed chord progression, and sped-up vocals taken from another recording. Dance music artfully partakes in appropriation. The trace of one song becomes the dominant theme of another, and so on. That…