2023 Expo Chicago Invites the World to Chicago and Chicago to the World
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With a programme ranging from Chance the Rapper in conversation with artist Hank Willis Thomas to one of the largest gatherings of curators in the United States, EXPO CHICAGO (13-16 April) promises to be the biggest week for the Chicago art scene in 2023.
Ross Caliendo, Amber Grove. Courtesy Ross + Kramer Gallery. Exhibition view: EXPO CHICAGO 2022. Courtesy Justin Barbin and EXPO CHICAGO.
EXPO CHICAGO returns to the city's Navy Pier this April, complementing its vast hall of gallery booths with an extensive series of events and installations within and beyond the fair's walls.
In addition to taking in the high-calibre presentations to be found in over 170 gallery booths, here are some must-see highlights for the wise fair-goer.
For those wanting to hear directly from artists and art world leaders:
/Dialogues
Not to be missed is the /Dialogues programme. Presented in collaboration with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), it will bring major curators, artists, and museum directors into conversation over the course of the fair. The programme features a particularly topical discussion with the Center for Native Futures on representing Indigenous voices in North America (12:00pm, 14 April) and a conversation between Chance the Rapper and artist Hank Willis Thomas (7:00pm, 13 April).
Chance and Thomas will speak on public art, community-building, and working with underrepresented artists on a stage surrounded by artworks that the award-winning Chicago rapper has curated. From Thursday to Saturday, Chance will also curate a series of live audio experiences in response to these works.
In their conversation, Chance and Thomas will discuss REACH, a sculpture by Thomas and Coby Kennedy that will be installed in late April at Chicago O'Hare International Airport in collaboration with City of Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), and will also be included as part of the fair's IN/SITU Outside programme.
Throughout his accomplished career, Thomas has interrogated American media systems and the commodification of Black identities in film, advertising, and sport. REACH, a massive sculpture measuring 49.5 feet in width, depicts a pair of arms reaching out to each other—almost touching, but not quite—representing a desire to connect that is palpable in many of his works.
For the art world, and those wanting to understand it:
Curatorial Forum
Amongst this year's attendees will be the participants of Curatorial Forum, which returns for its eighth year in partnership with Independent Curators International (ICI). The 2023 edition of the Forum focuses on the ways that notions of 'care' permeate the curator's role, including their responsibility to artists, accessibility, community, and labour conditions.
Victoria Noorthoorn will deliver the keynote speech to the Forum on 13 April. In the early 2000s, Noorthoorn returned from New York to an Argentina devastated by economic crisis, where she quickly learned to foreground listening in her work with Buenos Aires's highly creative artist-run scene. For the past 10 years, she has directed the city's Museo Moderno; she will share insights at EXPO CHICAGO on the transformation she has overseen at the museum.
The Forum will also include the inaugural class of ICI's Chicago Assembly, a programme made up of Chicago-based curators who will meet both before and after EXPO CHICAGO for an extended discussion on the year's theme and its impact on Chicago. Curatorial Exchange broadens the horizon to invite 25 international curators to the fair, cultivating a ground for future collaborations. The programme is organised in partnership with cultural and governmental organisations representing Denmark, Australia, Taiwan, and other locales.
'To bring both national and international curators to Chicago is to facilitate the process by which curators explore and connect to our broad cultural community. ... they begin to explore and find ways to build actual partnerships—which has a huge impact on our arts ecosystem.' EXPO CHICAGO president Tony Karman noted in a recent Ocula Conversation.
Directors Summit
Elsewhere on the fairgrounds, the Directors Summit programme will host emerging art museum leaders for a three-day discussion on institutional reinvention and the challenges of museum leadership today. The public will be invited to these conversations during two public roundtable discussions on structural change and how to build inclusive and sustainable art institutions on the /Dialogues stage on 14 and 15 April.
The contemporary call for accessibility in the arts—a historically inaccessible field—has recently been ringing in the ears of museum directors around the world. Art Bridges Foundation began to respond to this call before its current fever pitch, funding over 500 projects since its inception in 2017. At the Directors Summit, Paul R. Provost, founding CEO of the foundation, will share his insights into institutional accessibility on 15 April.
Works within the fair walls:
HOW ON EARTH
April is host to not only EXPO ART WEEK, but also Earth Month. At Booth 132, Art At A Time Like This and National Resources Defense Council recognise this intersection with HOW ON EARTH, a group exhibition of four Chicago artists who use their practices to wrestle with pressing environmental issues. Activations and additional programmes will take place outside Entrance 2 of the exposition.
Jennifer Wen Ma's contribution to the exhibition, titled Turn of the Tide, reaches beyond the booth to a large-scale, interactive tidal wave that the artist has constructed using Chinese paper-cutting techniques. Near the entrance, the installation will shift and decay over the course of the fair, reflecting the urgent danger of ocean pollution and climate crisis at large.
IN/SITU
Y el mar tomó la palabra (And the sea spoke), this year's IN/SITU programme curated by Claudia Segura, Curator of Exhibitions and Collection at MACBA, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, will present a range of works by international artists that examine the power of fables to imagine the past and potential futures. Held in these times, troubled as they are by climate crisis and manmade disasters, it is sure to provoke a compelling discourse.
Ebony G. Patterson's wall installation ...pink...red...striped...carnations... (2021–22) promises to be a crowd favourite. The immersive, colourful, and complex gardens that define the Chicago artist's practice are well known for their use of beauty as a portal to difficult conversations around race, class, gender, and the violences enacted therein.
For those looking to venture beyond Festival Hall:
IN/SITU Outside
IN/SITU Outside extends the art and creative conversations of EXPO CHICAGO beyond the walls and across the city, with works installed across a range of public Chicago spaces, from bus shelters organised by Public Art Fund (Aïda Muluneh, This is where I am) to parks (Yoko Ono, Sky Landing, Jackson Park), in addition to O'Hare.
The Lake Michigan waterfront that lines Chicago's eastern perimeter will play host to a number of IN/SITU Outside installations, including the augmented reality-based artwork Stone Speaks, which will float above the lake's waters on the Chicago Horizons Trail with the assistance of the 4th Wall App.
Extending the climate crisis discussions stimulated at the fair by HOW ON EARTH, Stone Speaks is based on conversations between the artist Nancy Baker Cahill and Sophia the Robot about climate change and the infinite possibilities that might be available if human and robot work to survive and thrive together.
Film screenings
Meanwhile downtown, the Gene Siskel Film Center has partnered with EXPO CHICAGO to show a selection of films that profile contemporary artists and their practices. Among the highlights is All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (4:30pm, 15 April), winner of the Best Film Golden Lion Award at the 2022 Venice Film Festival, that tells the moving story of Nan Goldin and her work to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in the opioid crisis.
The Gene Siskel Film Center will also offer two sneak peek screenings of You Can Go Now (5:30pm, 12 April; 7:00pm, 15 April), a documentary about Aboriginal artist Richard Bell, who is featured in this year's IN/SITU programme and will also speak on protest art as part of /Dialogues. Bell, who describes himself as an 'activist masquerading as an artist', will be at the Center on 15 April for a post-screening Q&A.
BARELY FAIR
The artist-run heart of Chicago continues to beat in harmony with EXPO CHICAGO across the city at BARELY FAIR, an international art fair led by artist-run project space Julius Caesar. Opening with vernissage on 14 April, the fair will invite 36 galleries and project spaces to present exhibitions in 1:12 scale models of the standard art fair booth.
Other exhibitions
As across the rest of the year, contemporary art presentations abound throughout the third coast hub, including Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at the Art Institute of Chicago (8 April–3 July 2023). Swaby's intricately embroidered portraits in celebration of blackness and womanhood are not to be missed.
South Side will play host to the beginning of EXPO ART WEEK on Tuesday 11 April, with openings and viewings at many of the neighbourhood's most iconic galleries and institutions.
Of particular note is Michael Rakowitz's The invisible enemy should not exist (2007–ongoing) on view at The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), consisting of his reconstructions of items looted from Iraq's National Museum after the 2003 US invasion. Made of Middle Eastern food packaging and Arabic newspapers found in the United States, the work materialises war's cultural losses and the ways in which culture is shaped and reshaped in diaspora.
Take a short stroll from ISAC across the University of Chicago campus green to the curatorial walkthrough of Aria Dean's Abattoir, U.S.A.! at The Renaissance Society. The exhibition's eponymous central film uses 3D modelling to survey an empty slaughterhouse's interior. Through this work and its surrounding installation, Dean contemplates the slaughterhouse as allegory and locus of the deconstruction and reconstruction of civil society.
Further west, Arts + Public Life will be hosting the opening reception of zakkiyyah najeebah dumas-o'neal's solo exhibition The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, for which she will debut new photo and video works. A Chicago-based artist and past Arts + Public Life residency artist, dumas-o'neal is also the co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective of lens-based artists in the African diaspora.
Speaking with Ocula on EXPO CHICAGO and its cultural initiatives, ICI executive director Renaud Proch remarked, 'Everything we've built has been part of this effort to magnify what is already here, and to bring curators from around the country and around the world to witness it and bring it back to their communities.'
EXPO CHICAGO 2023 passionately delivers on this effort, highlighting and expanding upon the diverse, booming Chicago arts scene.—[O]
