Hyde Park Art Center - Exhibition Viewing - High Risk Individuals

Please note that this ticket time is reserved for visitors who have a higher risk of contracting Covid-19. Group sizes are smaller to facilitate social distancing and create a safer environment for vulnerable populations. If you do not need this accommodation, please click here to make a reservation to visit us at a different time.

Thank you for your interest in visiting exhibitions at the Hyde Park Art Center. Exhibition tickets are FREE, masks and social distancing are required. Based on recent recommendations from the CDC, the Hyde Park Art Center strongly suggests that visitors wear two types of masks during their visits.

Current Exhibitions: Maggie Crowley: Playmate, Cuts and Beats: Cecil McDonald Jr., and CONTINUOUS SPAN

About Maggie Crowley: Playmate

In her first solo exhibition in Chicago, artist Maggie Crowley presents a new series of large figurative paintings in acrylic on silk in which she examines her admiration and personal connection to the service industry. Uniforms and accessories, like safety vests, helmets, and coolers, identify public workers and render them visible, while conducting labor that is considered invisible. Crowley considers this contradiction as it relates to the value placed on essential work – a discrepancy recently heightened in the US by the pandemic.

The exhibition title, Playmate references the portable Igloo cooler beloved by laborers. The artist chose the object as a symbol of care, foresight, and independence of the skilled work force. Maggie Crowley is an alumni of the Art Center’s exhibition Ground Floor 2014 and co-founder of the alternative gallery, Produce Model.

Exhibition Dates: April 12, 2021 – June 6, 2021

This exhibition is partially supported by an artist grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

Image above: detail of Maggie Crowley, A Packed Lunch, A Tackle Box, 2021.

About Cuts and Beats: Cecil McDonald Jr.:

Chicago-based artist and educator, Cecil McDonald Jr. uses photography, video, and text to explore intersections of masculinity, ancestry, and the artistic and intellectual pursuits of Black Americans. Cuts and Beats refers to the title of McDonald’s most recent body of work in which the artist subverts historical images, like publicity stills from Black artists in the Vaudeville and Minstrel era, by transforming them using techniques of photo collage, video, and performance combined with his own photographs. McDonald thinks of the process of cutting, altering, reassembling, and bringing images into different contexts as a metaphor for performance, dance, music, and the complex histories of Black Americans. The new built images, McDonald says, “look back to often racist representations, and much like memory, recede to a current, self-possessed and subversive imagery, each influencing and dictating to the other, serving as a remix of past and present culture.”

The exhibition will feature new work that the artist began during his 2018 residency at Hyde Park Art Center.

Exhibition Dates: February 22, 2021 - June 12, 2021

This exhibition is made possible in part through generous support from a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and contributions from Kim & James Elbaor and Jill & Michael Lowe.

The exhibition is on view in Kanter McCormick Gallery.

Image above: Cecil McDonald Jr., We Want Eazy, 1997, Photomontage, 40 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

About: CONTINUOUS SPAN: Works from Fall 2020 Bridge Program

The Bridge Program fosters generative dialogue among a select group of artists in a seminar-style course designed to push art practices into new realms. This intensive, small-group setting is designed to help artists refine project ideas, better articulate the central concerns of their practices, deepen the conceptual grounding of their work, and situate their practice within a wider art world context. The cohort participates in critiques, writing sessions, essay discussions, online readings, and peer to peer visits, culminating with a showcase inside Hyde Park Art Center’s D’Angelo Art Library.

Exhibition Dates: March 25 - May 1, 2021

Featuring works by: Marc Benja, Miriam Bahena-Cardona Bisby, Teresita Carson, Nora Chin, Jelisa Davis, Anne Feiza, Celia Griener, Ryn Osborne, and Kathryn Trumbull Fimreite.

Program Led by Rodrigo Lara, Assisted by Ariel Guerra.