Big Words at Blanc Art Gallery

In 2017 I purchased my grandmother’s house, with the intent of preserving family history and connecting with home. It brought me some hard-earned lessons on being a first-time homeowner but it also brought me back to the neighborhood where I grew up. As I stripped paint and renovated parts of the house, I began to sit with memories of my family and some of our everyday experiences that have been so important to building my worldview and sense of identity.

BIG WORDS represents the resulting deep questioning of all aspects of my identity, and a desire to both acknowledge and share this experience, while also constructing the personal language and point of view that shapes how I move through the world.

How do we use language to inform our reality? To survive and create boundaries? How do we find the freedom to thoughtfully speak in our own language without the pressure to edit or code-switch to suit a different context? How do we carry home into the present?

Curator ······ Alison Cuddy
Curator ······ Anna Cerniglia
Medium ······· Varied
Opening ······ April 8, 2021

All That Light

All That Light: A Ten-Year Retrospective of the Artists-in-Residenc (AIR) Program at the University of Chicago from 2012 to 2022, seeks to survey the cumulative impact the program has had on the artists it has supported, the audiences it has convened, and the city it has engaged and depicted. Initially conceived a decade ago by artist Theaster Gates and jointly hosted by Arts + Public Life (APL) and the Center for the Study of Race. Politics and Culture (CSRPC). the AIR program has grown to become one of the art world's most generative incubators of talent.

The exhibition's title is taken from a conversation with Gates and some of the AIR's early administrators acknowledging the program's reputation for identifying Chicago's most ascendant artists and makers. Spread across two exhibition spaces, Arts + Public Life and the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts, the exhibition features objects, sound, and video installation, and is organized to reflect on the multiple meanings of light: to stimulate sight; to make things visible; to illuminate or ignite; to emit radiant energy; and to be easily carried.

Just ten years after the program's creation, AIR alumni must be
counted among the most compelling and successful Chicago-based and affiliated artists, continuing the rich and broad legacy of cultural production on Chicago's South Side which the program was designed to honor, and cementing the city's reputation as a touchstone for anyone interested in making and studying contemporary art.

Tracie D. Hall, Curator

A Legacy on Our Own Terms

(a legacy) on our own terms, is a group show, featuring both emerging and established artists in their practice, that explore legacy and worth through various lenses. What does worth mean when it is ascribed by someone else? What does it mean when it is defined by self? What is a legacy that is marred by a harrowed past? What does a future look like when the past no longer dictates the journey?

October 31st - December 6th, 2020
Curated by Ciera Mckissick

Artists: Alexandra Antoine, Brandon Breaux, Candace Hunter, Nikko Washington, Yaounde Olu

Photos: Courtesy of Heaven Gallery and Ciera Mckissick