Hyde Park Art Center
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.
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.
Related
Engage in the themes of Toward Common Cause through a weeklong exchange between teachers, educators at multiple Chicago museums, and artists at the center of the exhibition. This Summer Teacher Institute offers participants—classroom teachers at any grade and any subject matter, teaching artists, and cultural educators from arts or community-based organizations—to engage deeply with the…
Fazal Sheikh seeks to restore face, voice, and agency to the world’s displaced peoples. His work is often beautiful—visually stunning—but beneath the aesthetic qualities of Sheikh’s work lies this deeper purpose of aiding refugees around the world in their ongoing struggle to secure basic tenets of human livelihood. Sheikh’s entire approach—his choice of subjects, his…
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.
Center Sundays is a family-friendly filled day of art-making activities, workshops, and artist talks presented by the Hyde Park Art Center. In May, Center Sundays offers virtual programs and socially distanced outdoor activities, including a Fundred drawing workshop led by Smart Museum Educators. The Fundred Project engages youth in civic action around lead contamination and…
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.
Using creativity to fight lead poisoning as part of Toward Common Cause.
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…