Venues
6018 North’s dilapidated mansion is located in Edgewater, one of Chicago’s most diverse neighborhoods. Located in Edgewater’s Kenmore-Winthrop dense corridor of apartment buildings home to CHA, Section 8, trans-gender residents, and international refuges, as well as single family homes and condos, this neighborhood is diverse on multiple levels — economics, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and education. Yet diversity does not necessarily create a diverse community. Therefore 6018North asks how artistic encounters can connect neighbors and create a space to meet through art, food, architecture, and/or performance? 6018North is also itinerant. We create exhibitions and events in storefronts, on the beach, streets, gardens, and in classrooms. Wherever we are, we invite artists to transform spaces through art while drawing people together.
Drawn by its beauty and the fabulous free public events, hundreds of thousands of visitors come to the Chicago Cultural Center every year, making it one of the most visited attractions in Chicago. The stunning landmark building is home to two magnificent stained-glass domes, as well as free music, dance and theater events, films, lectures, art exhibitions and family events.
Comfort Station is a multidisciplinary art space whose mission is to present challenging and stimulating programming that is open and accessible to everyone. We are a community-centric organization offering a wide variety of programs: art exhibitions, concerts, film, workshops, lectures, participatory events, and more. As a historic building in the heart of Logan Square, we aim to create an active intersection of diverse Chicago communities and promote new connections between them. Comfort Station is all ages, wheel chair accessible, and gender inclusive.
Founded in 2010, DEFIBRILLATOR GALLERY (a.k.a. DFBRL8R or dfb) is a 501(c)3 arts organization dedicated to fostering local makers while invigorating Chicago by bringing to the city artists of exceptional calibre from around the world. Focusing on ephemeral and time-based artistic practices, DFBRL8R contextualizes performance within visual art, embracing those who look to the body in concert and conversation with time, space, object, architecture, and society. Providing opportunities for established and emerging artists alike, DFBRL8R is a platform for underrepresented voices and time-based work that does not sit comfortably within pre-established genres or disciplines. Dynamic programming, decidedly fearless and unique, aims to provoke thought and stimulate discourse. We foster and contribute to a global dialog surrounding conceptual, ephemeral, or enigmatic forms of expression.
Zhou B Art Center is a private non-government funded complex founded in 2004 by the Zhou Brothers in Chicago’s historic Bridgeport neighborhood, Zhou B has a mission to engage in cultural dialogue through contemporary art exhibitions and international programming.
Gallery 400, a not-for-profit arts space at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), supports contemporary art, architecture, and design through exhibitions, lectures, publications, and programs that prioritize interpretative reflection and critical inquiry.
Gallery 400’s mission is to be a contemporary art hub for social interaction, transformative experience, and multi-dimensional learning. Creating a place to connect, Gallery 400 actively positions its exhibitions and public programs as opportunities with which to build community and as avenues for learning in informal social settings.
Operating within the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago—the largest university in Chicago and one of the most diverse in the US—Gallery 400 endeavors to make the arts and its practitioners accessible to a broad spectrum of the public and to cultivate a variety of cultural and intellectual perspectives. Gallery 400 is recognized for its support of the creation of new work, the diversity of its programs and participants, and the development of experimental models for multi-disciplinary exhibition.
Founded in 1956, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. The Graham realizes this vision through making project-based grants to individuals and organizations and producing exhibitions, events, and publications.
High Concept Laboratories is an arts service organization dedicated to supporting working artists and engaging the Chicago community with arts and culture. Partnering with artists at every step of the creative process, HCL offers high-quality custom support services including administrative assistance, audience development, production support and space use. HCL also curates and hosts artist showcases, presents special community events, and facilitates educational arts partnerships. With a vibrant cycle of programs and process-support, High Concept Laboratories grows community alongside culture and fosters new audiences for the arts.
Founded in 1939, the Hyde Park Art Center is at once a contemporary art exhibition space, learning lab, community resource, and social hub for artists and art-curious alike. The Art Center presents innovative exhibitions of new work by primarily Chicago-based artists; education programs for children and adults, novice through professional; and, free public programming for a diverse and creative audience.
Links Hall encourages artistic innovation and public engagement by maintaining a facility and providing flexible programming for the research, development and presentation of new work in the performing arts. Since 1978, Links (a 501(c)3 organization) has incubated performing artists through its residency programs, artist-curated festivals, cabaret and performance series, co-presentations with self-producing artists, low-cost space rentals, direct grants to artists, workshop programs, apprentice producer program, fiscal sponsorship program, and as one of 72 presenting and visual arts partners in the National Performance Network. Links Hall has provided research, development and performance opportunities for nearly 10,000 artists and welcomes an average of 6,000 audience members per year. Our programming provides a fail-safe environment where both artists and audiences can take equal risk.
Located between Lake Michigan and the Magnificent Mile (Michigan Avenue), the MCA champions the provocative side of contemporary art and culture. Our innovative exhibitions, performances, and programs will inspire you.
OH!KLAHOMO is a new Experimental Performance, Sound, Art and Language space in the basement of Lori Talley’s and Mark Jeffery’s home on Iowa Street.
Red Rover Series
Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading} is curated by poets Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. Founded in 2005, the over one hundred events have featured a diversity of renowned creative minds. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. Fostering innovative forms and aesthetic solidarities, Red Rover Series has also devised large-scale collaborations of writers improvising together at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the MLA conference, AWP, the &NOW Festival, and the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) Department of Performance was founded in an experimental spirit and is unique in the United States as one of the only contemporary performance departments in an art school at the undergraduate and graduate level focused on performance practice and performance studies. The department continues to evolve in relation to new developments inside and outside the field and aims to be responsive to new ways of seeing and understanding the world in the 21st century, from both student and faculty perspectives.
The SAIC Fashion Resource Center: For over thirty years the Fashion Resource Center has evolved into a hybrid research hub and meeting space for faculty and students within SAIC’s Fashion Department as well as the school’s larger community. The FRC’s unique hands-on collection of late twentieth and twenty-first century designer garments and accessories represents innovations in construction, materials and embellishments, providing students and faculty alike with prime examples to learn from. This extensive collection is complimented by the FRC’s visual, print and fabric libraries that support and illuminate the physical garments and accessories.
The Sullivan Galleries represent 32,000 square feet of exhibition space–the only single contemporary gallery site of its size in the Chicago Loop. Located in the Sullivan Center at 33 South State Street, the historic site of Louis Sullivan’s masterpiece Carson Pirie Scott & Co. building, the galleries feature exhibitions, performances, lectures, and screenings by SAIC students, faculty, and guest artists. Recently relocated to 33 South State Street, the Betty Rymer Gallery features a range of exhibitions of work by SAIC students, faculty, and international artists. The Sullivan Galleries brings to Chicago audiences the work of acclaimed and emerging artists, while providing the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and the public opportunities for direct involvement and exchange with the discourses of art today. With shows and projects often led by faculty or student curators, it is a teaching gallery that engages the exhibition process as a pedagogical model and mode of research.