In December 2018 artist Trevor Paglen launched a small satellite into space with the aim of deploying a diamond-shaped balloon that would orbit the earth. The highly reflective inflatable sculpture would appear in the night sky to the human eye as a bright artificial star. The artwork was never deployed. What constituted the first artwork…

The economy of artist David Hammons’s conceptual practice conjures the act of recycling. Working with the scraps and spoilage of everyday life, Hammons makes art in which waste is taken up, reduced, reused, and used again until every ounce of meaning has been extracted. There is no excess in Hammons’s work. To the contrary, his…

Fred Wilson is a conceptual artist primarily working in installation and sculpture. Central to his practice are the neglected history of Africans and African Americans and the representation of race within the context of colonization, slavery, and abolition through the use of satire and irony. His exploration into museum collections and institutions’ language of display…

When Kerry James Marshall first read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the book’s opening pages stopped his artistic practice in its tracks. Writing to his audience, Ellison’s invisible man introduced himself as wholly present, alive and embodied, and yet also absent—because people “refused” to see him, because they either folded him into his surroundings or projected…

It’s not an overstatement to call Deborah Willis the godmother of Black photography. As a scholar, archivist, author, curator, and artist, she has discovered, researched, and shared the work of thousands of black photographers from throughout the United States from the 1840s to the present. Her work as a scholar has made visible the lives…

For Dawoud Bey, portraiture is a process through which the artist and the sitter meet in the middle. Each portrait begins with Bey gaining consent from someone to serve as his sitter. From there, Bey takes the time to become familiar with them by engaging in conversation, so that his camera can do more than…

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…

Whitfield Lovell’s work challenges us to remember a past obscured by history. The Black men and women in his drawings, rendered from antique photographs culled from family albums and flea market bins, are gone and largely forgotten. But Lovell conjures their memory into the present, reproducing their portraits on walls, reclaimed wood panels, or yellowed…