Tufting Gun Tapestries: Assemble in collaboration with Duval Timothy, Big Chief Demond Melancon and the Material Institute, New Orleans
September 13 - October 27, 2019
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E 60th St)
Tufting Gun Tapestries presents textile experiments produced by the architecture collective Assemble in collaboration with students from the Material Institute in New Orleans and other textile practitioners. Exploring alternative education and spatial practices, this project will transform the Logan Center Gallery into an active site of learning through an investigation of fabric arts, and will consider its spatial and social potential.
Presented by Logan Center Exhibitions

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze
September 14–December 1, 2019
The Renaissance Society (5811 S Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall, 4th Floor)
The Last Cruze, a new body of work by artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, centers on the workers at the recently “unallocated” General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. As the company’s negotiations with the international union build towards a deadline on September 14, Frazier has been in Lordstown, collaborating with the workers and families to record their stories during this period of profound uncertainty and change. Over sixty photographs and interviews, along with a video, are presented within a substantial installation that echoes the assembly line at the GM Lordstown Complex.
Presented by the Renaissance Society

Martha Rosler: Passionate Signals
Sept 17, 2019 – Jan 31, 2020
The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society (5701 S Woodlawn Ave)
Passionate Signals is the first exhibition by acclaimed New York-based artist Martha Rosler devoted to her interest in flowers, gardens and other “green” motifs. Pairing a selection of twenty-five years’ worth of flower and garden photographs with a pioneering early video piece and domestically scaled earthwork, the show highlights the social, political, and economic costs of producing beauty at its most innocuous.
Presented by the Neubauer Collegium

Samson Young: Silver Moon or Golden Star, Which Will You Buy of Me?
September 18–December 29, 2019
Smart Museum of Art (5550 S. Greenwood Avenue)
Loosely taking the idealism displayed at the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago as a point of departure, Samson Young premieres a trilogy of video installations that explore concepts of social progress and utopia. Through Young’s careful processing and manipulations, the multimedia exhibition considers how various sites—the home, the car and the shopping mall—are embedded with themes of progress and utopia through past and present social imaginaries.
Presented by the Smart Museum of Art

In Spirit + Structure
September 20-November 22, 2019
Arts Incubator Gallery (301 E. Garfield Blvd)
In Spirit + Structure is a solo exhibition presenting works by Nathan Miller. This exhibition marks a moment in Miller’s continual examination of the sacred–in object and in place. Miller’s ruminations in faith are expressed through photography, sculpture, sound, and installation. The Black church operating in and occupying multiple planes, becomes a subject, a landscape and a purpose in Miller’s work.   Nathan Miller was born in Evergreen Park, IL in 1990 and grew up in the West Pullman neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. Miller’s father, a Pentecostal preacher, artist, and educator, introduced him to music theory and photography. Through use of these mediums, Miller began to connect the temporal self to the eternal self. His work in photography, sound, sculpture, and public installation is an interdisciplinary translation of the spiritual within the context of the human experience.  
Miller has studied photography abroad at the University of Arts London (UK) and received a BFA degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013, and MFA from  Rhode Island School of Design.
Opening reception September 20, 6-8pm
Presented by Arts + Public Life

[Re]Construction House (Think-Do House II)
September 28, 2–6 pm
Perry Ave. Commons, 5749 S. Perry Avenue
Tours of the [Re]Construction House will be offered during Sweet Water Foundation's annual Harvest Celebration. A partnership of the Smart Museum of Art and Sweet Water Foundation, the [Re]Construction House project focuses on the year-long renovation and activation of an abandoned house.
Presented by the Smart Museum and Sweet Water Foundation

Disrupting Normative Practices in Fashion with Hoda Katebi
September 26, 6:30 pm | Free, Reservations recommended
Arts Incubator,  (301 E.  Garfield Blvd)
A workshop and discussion about disrupting normative practices in the fashion industry. Led by Hoda Katebi, she will discuss sustainable, ethical fashion industry practices, the aesthetics of policing. Participants will learn to make a wearable item. Hoda is the Chicago-based daughter of Iranian immigrants, and the voice behind JooJoo Azad, a political fashion platform and the founder of Blue Tin Production, an all-women immigrant and refugee-run clothing manufacturing co-operative in Chicago. 
Presented by Arts + Public Life

The Chicago Sound Show
September 27–December 29, 2019
Various locations across University of Chicago campus
The Chicago Sound Show features new works for historic and modern sites across the University of Chicago’s campus, including Cobb Gate (Henry Ives Cobb, 1897), Joseph Bond Chapel (Coolidge & Hodgdon, 1926), Joseph Regenstein Library (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, 1970), the Smart Museum of Art (Edward Larrabee Barnes, 1974), and Campus North Residential Commons (Studio Gang Architects, 2016). Through a variety of approaches, the works enrich our sensual knowledge of space.
Presented by the Smart Museum of Art

The Social Imaginary of an Assyrian Imperial City
October 19, 11:00 am–12:30 pm
Oriental Institute Museum (1155 E 58th St)
Assyrian kings of the 1st-mill. BCE created expansive urban landscapes that emanated the power and grandeur of the Neo-Assyrian Empire that dominated the ancient Middle East. Shared architectural forms and artistic elements of the palaces and temples embodied the cultural memory and politics of the period, offering insights into Assyrian official ideology. Join Kiersten Neumann, PhD, Curator, in an exploration of Assyrian architectural decoration—including a 40-ton winged bull—at the OI Museum.
Presented by the Oriental Institute Museum

No Land Beyond: a vocal-organ recital
October 22, 2019 at 4 PM
Rockefeller Memorial Chapel (5850 S. Woodlawn)
In a special Chicago Architecture Biennial-themed entry in Rockefeller Chapel's weekly Tea & Pipes series, University Organist Thomas Weisflog collaborates with vocalists of The Oriana Singers and The Rookery in resonant music from Philip Glass's score for the movie Koyaanisqatsi, van Dijk's Horizons, Vienna Teng's Hymn of Axciom, Tormis's Curse Upon Iron, Ted Hearne's Because, and more. 
Presented by Rockefeller Memorial Chapel

Liam Young, Speculative Architect: Talk and Film Screening 
October 24, 7pm
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Room 201 (915 E 60th St)
In Young's talk and film screening, he presents works that move among the realms of architecture, film, and fiction. By merging documentary footage taken on expeditions around the world with fragments of speculative narratives, Young produces a vision of what he describes as an "exaggerated present" through storytelling, to explores the complexity of cities and the influence of new technologies and networks on space, culture, and community.
Presented by Arts, Science + Culture Initiative, Film Studies Center, Department of Cinema and Media Studies

Down Time: On the Art of Retreat
October 25–December 29, 2019
Smart Museum of Art (5550 S. Greenwood Avenue)
Where can we turn when we need space and time away? What do those spaces look like, and how do we create them? Who has access? And can we ever really get away, even for a little while? The artworks in Down Time present a range of public, private, and imagined settings—from lush gardens in France, to shadowy hallways, to kaleidoscopic landscapes—that point to realms of retreat. With particular attention to how artists have represented Black subjects in places of respite, and how Black artists have aspired to, imagined, performed, and created spaces for sustaining themselves at a remove from everyday life and extreme events, this exhibition asks: what drives the creation of these “other” spaces, how have artists envisioned them, and how does “getting away” shape an ultimate return?
A collaboratively produced exhibition organized through the Smart Museum of Art’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry, Down Time was conceptualized and curated by a cohort of University of Chicago graduate and undergraduate students.

Remembering Rhumboogie with Lee Bey
October 27, 1-4 PM
Free, Reservations Required
Tour: First stop is 301 E Garfield Blvd - Arts Incubator. Final stop is 329 E Garfield Blvd. Green Line Performing Arts Center
Lively watering holes and great music venues formerly dotted the landscape of many South Side neighborhoods. On this stroll through Washington Park and Bronzeville, guests will trace the rich cultural legacy of jazz, blues, and swing by visiting the long-gone sites where crowds gathered to mix, mingle, and be entertained. Tour led by Lee Bey, Senior Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute and author of Southern Exposure: The Overlooked Architecture of Chicago’s South Side.
Presented by Arts + Public Life

Spacial Justice: A Conversation with Liz Ogbu and Maria Gaspar
November 2, 4pm
Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts (915 E 60th St)
Court Theatre and the Chicago Humanities Festival present Architect and urban designer Liz Ogbu and artist Maria Gaspar in conversation about how they use art and design to address systemic problems plaguing disinvested communities. Both have practices making visible frequently ignored spaces, such as disinvested neighborhoods and county jails. Ogbu and Gaspar also facilitate residents' gaining a voice and serving as the architects of their own futures. Discussion moderated by Susana Vasquez, Associate Vice President in the Office of Civic Engagement.
$15 CHF members, $20 general admission
Presented by Court Theatre, the Office of Civic Engagement and the Chicago Humanities Festival

Frank Lloyd Wright's Vision for Greater Baghdad
November 16, 2pm
Oriental Institute Museum (1155 E 58th)
This lecture will look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealized plans for Baghdad. Drawn up in 1957, when Wright was approaching the end of his life, these plans consisted of a detailed vision for a civic opera building, shops, a museum, a university, and even a monument to the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid. The lecture will also place Wright’s work within the context of Middle Eastern inspired architecture, including that of the Oriental Institute.
Presented by the Oriental Institute Museum

Notes on Territory with Anna Martine Whitehead Martine
Fri, Nov 22, 7pm, Sat, Nov 23, 7pm and Sun, Nov 24, 3pm
Green Line Performing Arts Center (329 E. Garfield Blvd.)
Tickets: $15-25 (sliding scale)
Choreographer and dancer Anna Martine Whitehead presents Notes on Territory, which brings together an array of research modalities to address the dialectical concerns: What is the prison; and What is the nature of freedom? Territory considers crosses and arches, walls and holes, as means of exploring the rich tradition of oppressed peoples' liberation practices. At its core, the work offers movement as research, in kinship with transdisciplinary artist-philosophers such as Torkwase Dyson, Dawn Lundy Martin, and Renée Green; transdisciplinary scholars such as Simone Browne, Michelle M. Wright, and Katherine McKittrick; and freedom dreamer Harriet Jacobs.
Tickets: $15-25 (sliding scale)