by Alonso Galue (he/him)

Push-On: The prophet of the extra-life is a multidisciplinary visual arts project that looks at the possibility of a new chance in life using gaming metaphors and post-colonial folkloric traditions.

Consisting of sculptures and monumental paintings of deities from syncretic traditions this immersive and engaging project centers a pin-ball machine as an altar of the XXIst century.

The prophet asks: what forms do our gods take in the twenty-first century? In an age of noise and distraction. How can art reach the depth of our shared humanity?

by Brandon Calhoun (he/him)

Through Their Eyes: In the Shoes of Black Women is a dance layered visual installment that uncovers the process of a Black woman-led dance company. Through a street anthropology approach, filmmaker Brandon Calhoun will immerse himself in the people and work of Praize Productions Inc., a 15-year-old dance organization in Chicago. The documentation will then be shared on YouTube and at two intimate events– one at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts and the other at the Newberry Library.

The installment will use the extended format of a series to present the complexities and the highs and lows of these women’s personal and professional experiences in the Black community and in the larger context of Chicago. Approaching this project as a street anthropologist Calhoun enters this culture and intimately share its truths and narratives, bringing audiences across time and space to reflect on underrepresented experiences and perspectives. This project will offer respect and appreciation to Black women and artists as well as open a world to people outside of this community.

by Dorrah Alharbi (she/her)

Home to the largest Palestinian population in the United States, Cook County, Illinois hosts a diverse Arab community that has played a vital role in Chicago’s broader cultural and social history. The network of neighborhoods commonly known as “Little Palestine” is a vibrant, yet under-documented area located in the city’s southwest suburbs.

Rooted in the Arab tradition of oral storytelling, Objects of Memory is an object-based oral history initiative dedicated to documenting and preserving the stories of this unique community by conducting interviews with first-generation residents, documenting their experiences in the diaspora, and recording the personal objects they have carried with them. Objects of Memory will create a visual archive, narrated through the participants' objects that tell the cultural history, memory, and identity of Little Palestine.

by Kenn Cook Jr. (he/him)

From The Westside, With Love – Outdoor Exhibition is a traveling public art project adapted from an upcoming photo zine of the same name. The exhibition brings large-scale photographs into the heart of Chicago’s West Side, transforming streets, parks, and community spaces into open-air galleries, making art free and accessible to all.

Rooted in the people and places of the Westside, the photographs reflect the beauty, resilience, and everyday lives of its residents. By moving beyond gallery walls, the project offers Westsiders the chance to see themselves and their neighborhoods represented in public art, while inviting broader audiences to experience the community through an authentic and loving lens.

At its core, From The Westside, With Love – Outdoor Exhibition is an act of recognition. It affirms a simple belief: everyone deserves to be seen, celebrated, and represented in the cultural landscape of their city.

by Laurel Hauge (she/they)

Help Me Help You gives time back to participants by offering assistance within a designated space. Visitors are invited to use the time they might have set aside to “see art” to take care of tasks related to the maintenance of their professional, civic, and personal standings. These are often the tasks which people avoid, delay, or dread: such as updating a resume, paying a parking ticket, signing divorce papers, or other neglected forms of life’s admin. The project repositions the artist as an assistant rather than an author, transforming the exhibition space into one of quiet utility, responsiveness, and service.

Set up as temporary office space, Help Me Help You centers on care, slowness, and utility. It asks what happens when an artwork offers something practical in return for the time visitors give. Help Me Help You is not a performance or social experiment—but a space where people can ask for help and receive it. Visitors decide what they need, and the artist makes themselves available to support them at their own pace. The project is shaped by those who participate.

by Leticia Pardo (she/her)

greetings from Chicagoacán (stories from within) gathers oral histories and casts of domestic spaces belonging to members of Chicago’s Mexican diaspora, forming a visual and auditory archive where narratives and fragments reflect on spaces—real and imagined, present and longed for—that anchor a sense of home. The project explores how migration reshapes the built environment, and how longing, adaptation, and memory endure. Voices recorded in oral histories inform a series of casts taken from domestic surfaces, materializing these stories in both sound and architectural form. Rooted in Pardo’s ongoing project greetings from Chicagoacán, this work traces how home is carried, reconfigured, and continually rebuilt.

by Marimacha Monarca Press

Like our collective’s symbol, the queer monarch butterfly, we aim to highlight migration and metamorphosis while questioning “American” identity and borders. As migrant beings we are forced to reckon with issues of land and belonging, this print exchange aims to manifest the bridge we long for as transplantas hoping to celebrate multiple roots.
TRANSplantas - carrying belonging is a print exchange portfolio between queer artists in community around Chicago and la Ciudad de Mexico. The exchange is organized by Tortillería Gráfica (CDMX) and Marimacha Monarca Press (Chicago). This portfolio seeks to illustrate queer ecological visions, visions that disrupt binary frameworks and recognize fluidity and otherness. Sharing print invocations for past, present and future environmental justice, cross pollination/hybridity, and human, flora and fauna transmigration. Honoring our queer ecosystems that are both as flamboyant as poison dart frogs and as underground as mycelial networks.

We are collaborating with printmaking artists in Ciudad de México, with Tortillería Gráfica to compile the prints and activate the prints in public. In hopes of drawing connections from Chicago to CDMX, we connected with 10 Chicago based artists and Tortilleria Gráfica connected with 7 artists from Bogotá, San José, Barcelona & CDMX to create a bridge recalling our familial migration patterns.

We hope to continue creating our rasquache-made portfolios and disseminating to the artists, display our transnational print exchange, and host a popup protest printmaking workshop in late summer, just as the monarch butterflies begin to leave to their ancestral trees in the forests of Michoacán.

by The Adoptea

As an all-adoptee artist collective by adoptees for adoptees, The Adoptea challenges the sugar-coated narrative of adoption and centers the adoptee diaspora through art, critical dialogue, and community-building. In this next phase, The Adoptea will expand its work by focusing on outreach, launching a website, and developing public programming to amplify adoptee voices.

This year, we aim to deepen our visibility, create accessible resources online, and host public events including panels, workshops, and exhibitions that promote understanding of adoption’s complex realities while fostering solidarity, care, and meaningful relationships within the adoptee community and beyond. So, bring a mop because The Adoptea is spilling the tea on what adoption truly means.

by John H. Guevara (he/him) and Xavier Robles Armas (he/him)

Glimmers: Latinx Illuminations highlights the current waves of Latine visual and performative practices of today. Focusing on artists whose works are shimmering in critical brilliance, this event is both an ephemeral visual showcase, performance, and a panel discussion on Latine and LatAm artistic practices. It aims to account Chicago as a site for converging local and national voices that are working with the politicized and speculative Latine body and image. It is an embracive dialogue and imaginative program that pulls forward Latine artistic visions from disparate and complex localities. Taking a pulse on Chicago, it hopes to not only showcase Latine and LatAm performance and contemporary art now, but strengthen the national network that connects projects–across shared dialogues and labor. Glimmers: Latinx Illuminations seeks to ignite cultural change, spark conversations, and forge powerful collaborations, ultimately igniting Chicago’s flame to shape the Latinx art discourse.

by CollⒶpse Consulting

Everyone's (A) Critic is a new project by CollⒶpse Consulting a group of emerging artists appropriating the power of the critic to legitimize the kinds of visual art we find vital. Inspired by ‘00s artist-run initiatives at galleries such as Julius Caesar and Reena Spaulings, CollⒶpse Consulting believes that art criticism should more closely resemble an immersive art experience or subcultural party than a magazine article behind a paywall. This project is just the beginning.

Stay tuned for CollⒶpse Consulting's first official project, Everyone's (A) Critic, followed by our sophomore effort, The Chicago Manual of Anti–Style.