Hyde Park Art Center, the renowned non-profit hub for contemporary art located on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is proud to announce the full exhibition schedule for the 2024 calendar year. This year’s exhibition program highlights the impact of local artists on broader Chicago art and design history with solo exhibitions by storied artists Robert Earl Paige (b. 1936) and Alice Shaddle (1928-2017), in addition to its continued cultivation of emerging artists via its residency, education, and teen programs. Under the leadership of Co-executive Directors Jeanette Tremblay Chambers and Aaron Rodgers, the Hyde Park Art Center continues to engage and increase visibility for artists at every step in their career, from programs that serve the local community to nationally recognized exhibitions and projects.
Celebrating 20 years with the institution in 2024, Director of Exhibition & Residency Programs Allison Peters Quinn has been a leader in establishing the Art Center as one of Chicago’s most prolific incubators for artistic talent and new curatorial voices. Of her two decades at the Art Center, Quinn says, “Our exhibition history is an anthology of meaningful art practices born in Chicago. This legacy has provided a structure for me to approach exhibition-making with playfulness and experimentation, like my predecessors, and to consider the Art Center’s next chapter.”
Identifying and presenting the most promising emerging and mid-career artists through the lens of the social, political, ecological, and educational concerns of our time, Quinn has helped to provide a critical platform for artists who are now well-recognized, such as Theaster Gates, Edra Soto, Candida Alvarez, Faheem Majeed, Karen Reimer, Dawoud Bey, Jim Duigan, Lan Tuazon, and Juan Angel Chavez, to launch into the next chapters of their careers. These artists have gone on to lead the art discourse in Chicago by sharing knowledge and critique with one another, as well as teaching and mentoring the next generation of artists.
Quinn adds, “It is the network of artist-to-artist support that makes Chicago a rare and magical city for makers. Art Center board and staff prioritize the need for resources for artists in the form of studio space, financial support, and steadfast advocacy to continue to challenge artists. We developed a commissioning program that pays Chicago artists to realize ambitious new artworks and installations, and designed a Residency program that speaks to the Art Center’s strengths in caring for artists. By building their networks, encouraging new ideas in their work, and providing more opportunities for further growth, the Art Center demystifies the creative process from studio wall to gallery wall.”
2024 exhibitions
In chronological order
Aimée Beaubien: Through the Hothouse
March 2 – June 2, 2024
Aimée Beaubien showcases her innovative techniques in Through the Hothouse. The installation transforms a 92-foot-long hallway into a green corridor by integrating elements such as plant matter, weaving, photographs, and 3D drawings. This immersive garden of strange and enticing forms symbolizes the intricate interplay between ecological, social, and cultural concerns. Beaubien’s work challenges common assumptions about landscape and raises important questions about preservation, conservation, and care for green space within the built environment.
Alice Shaddle: Fuller Circles
March 23 – June 16, 2024
Fuller Circles presents the intricate world of Alice Shaddle (1928 – 2017), an artist whose practice centered on paper-based creations in Chicago for more than 60 years. Curated by Nicholas Lowe and Lisa Stone, the exhibition explores Shaddle’s original manipulations of paper, including daring papier maché bas relief sculpture; shadow boxes with haunting visages; enigmatically constructed and layered collaged objects; Shaddle’s elaborate, immersive installations with large-scale colored pencil drawings; and her meticulously constructed, cut paper mosaic collage compositions. The exhibition explores Shaddle’s life and work in the context of Chicago’s kaleidoscopic art world from the 1960s into the 2000s, highlighting her association with Artemisia Gallery for many years, her fifty year career of teaching art to youth at Hyde Park Art Center, and her life in the George Blossom House, a residential property in Hyde Park designed by Frank Lloyd Wright where Shaddle lived with her family for over fifty years. Archival materials will reveal Shaddle’s intensive modes of working and inventive use of materials. The exhibition and corresponding public program are part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
Alice Shaddle, Pool, 1984
The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige
April 6 - October 27, 2024
Longstanding artist, educator and designer Robert Earl Paige believes beauty should be accessible to everyone. The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige is a career-spanning survey of textiles, drawings, tiles, prints, and more that explores over half a century of Paige’s prolific creative practice. The solo show curated by Allison Peters Quinn is the largest presentation of the Chicago native’s work to date, featuring Paige’s popular fabric work while debuting recent clay, wall/floor paintings, and collage work made during his Radicle Residency at Hyde Park Art Center in 2022-23. The exhibition and corresponding public program are part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.
Robert Earl Paige, Universal Colours of Paige, 1990
The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige: Parapluie
April 27 - October 27, 2024
The parapluie, or umbrella in French, is how the artist, designer, and educator Robert Earl Paige describes circles of artists that mutually support each other through sharing their talents. In tandem with his solo exhibition, Parapluie showcases work by Paige’s multigenerational network of artists who regularly exchange ideas, skills, solutions, and materials.
EXPO CHICAGO: Special Exhibitions
April 11 – 14, 2024
Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand
Hyde Park Art Center partners with Terra Foundation for American Art to host a booth at the international Art Fair that highlights the important work of Artist-Run Platforms in the Chicago area.
Teen Show
June 15 - September 22, 2024
New paintings, drawings, photography, prints, and multimedia works demonstrate the intense study by young adult artists participating in Hyde Park Art Center’s Teen programs. Under the guidance of professional artists, nearly twenty teens develop their creative voices over the course of 15 weeks, and translate complex thoughts, feelings, and emotions into individual works of art.
New Edition
July 13 – October 6, 2024
This exhibition presents new works from participants in New Edition, a program for artists to learn and make work in a medium with which they have had little to no previous experience, and receive critique on the work. Curated by Program Facilitator Jeff Robinson, the exhibition will feature the work of ten artists, each of whom will present one piece in the medium for which they are known alongside a new artwork made during the ten week program.
Brian Parris & Friends: Layerscapes
August 17- November 17, 2024
Artist Brian Parris, Ceramics Department Head at the Art Center, introduces his work alongside collaborations with his students in his first Chicago exhibition, Layerscapes. The artist considers clay a tool for creating functional objects that beautify everyday chores. Using unique spray-painting techniques to layer glazes onto porcelain plates and cups, Parris' distinct surface treatment is an abstraction of the world around him inspired by his birthplace of New York City and his upbringing in the Pacific Northwest. Each year, emergent artists apply for a year-long ceramics apprenticeship working alongside artists in the Art Center’s ceramic studio. The new work created during that time will be featured in this exhibition.
Cecilia Beaven
October 5, 2024 – February 16, 2025
Chicago-based Mexican artist Cecilia Beaven creates mystical environments and narratives through her large graphic wall paintings.This exhibition will feature a new temporary mural by Beaven featuring the women-centered worlds she has been illustrating over the past five years. Her paintings and sculptures first appeared at the Art Center in Ground Floor (2020) and continued to develop on site during a Radicle Residency (2021).
Positions: New Landscapes
October 26 - February 23, 2025
Positions: New Landscapes is a group exhibition featuring works by artists who explore the potentials of landscape in contemporary art to contribute to timely conversations about relationships between sites of history, place and belonging, and labor and land. Working in a diverse range of media, the artists in the exhibition, curated by Mariela Acuña, reinvent the traditional genre of landscape to explore its possibility to intervene in civic dialogs rooted in places and their histories.
Ground Floor
December 7, 2024 – March 9, 2025
The biennial exhibition Ground Floor brings together work by some of Chicago’s most promising emerging talent. This eighth iteration of the show offers a single destination to discover twenty artists who have recently graduated in 2023 and 2024 from Chicago’s five outstanding MFA programs: Columbia College Chicago, Northwestern University, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago.
CLOSING SOON
Marian Carow: Salvages
October 28, 2023 – February 18, 2024
What are the true surfaces of an object? Chicago-based artist Marian Carow considers this philosophical perspective and other formal concerns in Salvages. The exhibition presents new sculptural work rendered in cardboard and collages, through which Carow explores minimal forms referencing architecture as well as the constant flux and impermanence of our built urban environment. Carow is an alumna of Hyde Park Art Center’s Center Program (2016) and has been making drawings and sculptures for several decades.
Candace Hunter: The Alien-Nations and Sovereign States of Octavia E Butler
November 11, 2023 - March 3, 2024
Inspired by the Octavia Butler archive at The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, Hunter has been building an expansive body of multimedia work to process the celebrated Black fiction author’s uncanny narratives since 2016. The Alien-Nations and Sovereign States of Octavia E. Butler encompasses installation, video, sound, assemblage, and painting that continue the artist’s speculation on the future of human resilience in the wake of racial reckoning, climate change, and food scarcity. The exhibition addresses the concepts of nationhood, posing questions about who is other, and in what situations do we see people as other to ourselves? How do we become universal? The exhibition features new work from Hunter’s time in the Art Center’s Jackman Goldwasser studios in 2022-23.
Beneath the Visible
December 9, 2023 – February 25, 2024
The Center Program offers artists who are ready to raise their practice to the next level the opportunity to develop new work, receive feedback from art professionals, and work towards an exhibition at the Art Center over the course of eight months. This tenth iteration of the program, guest curated by artist and educator Silvia Inés Gonzalez, Beneath the Visible features the work of 20 artists translating impermanence, cyclical events, and transformation. The artists enact poetic research to process what lies beneath what is immediately seen with methods involving cultural, personal, and societal excavation. Beneath the Visible transforms perceived fragments into blueprints for a more detectable dimension. Artists include Alexandra Antoine, Lucia Calderon Arrieta, Holly Cahill, Kittisak (Wa) Chontong, Karen Dana Cohen, Jane Georges, Rhonda Gray, Lauren Grudzien, Marylu E. Herrera, Laurie LeBreton, Carisa Mitchell, Joseph Josue Mora, Amanda Mulcahy, Ameera Pernebsati, Fabrizzio Subia, Kushala Vora, David Vosburg, Nayeon Yang, and Dennissa Young.
ABOUT THE HYDE PARK ART CENTER
Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering, production, and exhibition space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of artists to establishing a strong legacy of risk-taking and experimentation, emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. Today, the Art Center offers a diverse suite of programs for artists and art lovers of all backgrounds, ages, and stages in their careers including: contemporary art exhibitions in six galleries; open-access community-based school with 1,500 annual enrollments; weekly arts education to 1,000 elementary school students in public schools; weekly and summer teen programs for 100 teen artists; professional-advancement programs for artists; a local and international artist residency; and public programs that connects residents with Chicago art and artists .The Art Center functions as an amplifier for creative voices of today and tomorrow, providing the space to cultivate new work and connections. For more information, visit www.hydeparkart.org.