Hyde Park Art Center is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering and production space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks.

Plan your visit

The Hyde Park Art Center is open for walk-in visits, no pre-registration required. Open Monday 10 am–4:30 pm; Tuesday–Thursday 10 am–7 pm; Friday 10 am–4:30 pm; and Saturday 10 am–3 pm. Learn more and plan your visit. 

Toward Common Cause
Mel Chin, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Fazal Sheikh
July 17–October 24, 2021

As part of Toward Common Cause, the Hyde Park Art Center presents artworks by Mel Chin, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Fazal Sheikh that foreground the environmental racism and infrastructural inequalities (including exposure to industrial pollution and limited access to healthcare, food, and clean drinking water), which are shared by disinvested and disenfranchised communities across the globe.

The latest iteration of a thirteen-year project that raises awareness of lead contamination and its impact upon children, Mel Chin’s Chicago Fundred Initiative: A Bill for IL invites individuals to create their own “Fundred,” a form of creative currency that affirms the right of each maker to equal protection against a pervasive and insidious environmental hazard present in water, soil, and paint.

LaToya Ruby Frazier completed Flint is Family over the course of five months in Flint, Michigan. Combining Frazier’s photographs with voice over by lifelong Flint resident Shea Cobb, the film displayed here documents Cobb’s lived experience of the now infamous Flint water crisis.

The combination of landscape photography and ground-truthing is central to Fazal Sheikh’s Desert Bloom series, part of the artist’s Erasure Trilogy. It is also central to Sheikh’s Conflict Shoreline, a project created in conjunction with Eyal Weizman, that examines the connection between desertification, colonialism, and the displacement of Bedouin communities from ancestral lands in Israel’s Negev desert.

Plan your visit the Hyde Park Art Center

Resources

Download and read the brochure—in Arabic and Hebrew—related Fazal Sheikh’s work on display at the Hyde Park Art Center.

• Desert Bloom brochure, Arabic (PDF)
• Desert Bloom brochure, Hebrew (PDF)

About

The Hyde Park Art Center’s mission is to stimulate and sustain the visual arts in Chicago. It offers a comprehensive set of programs that serve the creative and resource needs of artists and communities. Through exhibitions, artist talks, studio art classes, international and local residency programs, free public events, satellite class sites, and professional development opportunities the Hyde Park Art Center works to provide the space for artists at every age and stage to cultivate their practice, build connections, and impact our world.