TAC galleries are open Monday-Saturday, 10:00-4:00
Visit our calendar for more information
Central Suburban League Student Exhibition
April 12 – April 22
Artist Reception: April 18, 5:00 – 8:00 pm
SPECIAL EXHIBITION IN CORTESI GALLERY
Ted Degener: At Home with Artists
March 1 – April 13
Artist Reception: March 1, 5:30-8:00 pm
This extraordinary exhibit showcases portraits of art environment makers within and among their grand works of art. For more than five decades, Ted Degener has traveled across the United States in search of encounters with the makers of art environments—artists who transformed personal spaces like homes, gardens and studios into continually evolving, site-specific and life-encompassing works of art.
His fascination with art environments started in 1970 when he learned about Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, making the site the destination of his first cross-country road trip in pursuit of art. Since then, Degener has photographed more than 400 artists in and with their work, in addition to roadside attractions, eccentric festivals and other American cultural activities. He continues to travel to and photograph art environments, contributing photos of his adventures to Raw Vision magazine.
Degener’s photographs go beyond documentation of art environments, though some serve as remnants of sites long disassembled, to capture the artist inhabiting their work. Often, art environments are the result of a lifetime of love and labor, and Degener’s portraits capture the makers’ dynamism, their sense of joy and pride in sharing their creations with others.
“Degener captures the personalities of both the makers and the sites in his work,” said Debra Kerr, president and CEO of Intuit. “There’s a liveliness that runs throughout the exhibition, reflected in Degener’s portraits and videos.”
The exhibition, which will be displayed at The Art Center Highland Park is on loan from Intuit from: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, one of only a handful of museums that exclusively presents the work of artists who typically work outside the mainstream and may have faced societal, economic or geographic barriers to a traditional path of art making. “We have had many conversations about collaborating with Intuit – one of my favorite museums – and something always got in the way (COVID, for instance). As they are working on their remodeling we are more than glad to finally be working with them.” Adds James M. Lynch, Executive Director of The Art Center. “This will be a wonderful treat to our community and we hope to have more shared exhibits in the future.”