Current Exhibitions

Current Exhibitions

TAC galleries are open Monday-Saturday, 10:00-4:00

Visit our calendar for more information

 


FOCUS & CLICK

March 1 – April 6

Artist Reception: March 1, 5:30-8:00 pm

What does a deep dive into Photography look like? Is it possible to contemplate contemporary photography without seeing where it started and how it has evolved? As the invention of the camera changed the history of painting, the advancement of technology continues to alter photography’s place in the art world.

However, throughout its evolution, there remains a consistency within it’s Merriam-Webster’s definition:

“The art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface (such as film or an optical sensor).” Moreover, whether taken with a camera or a cell  phone, photography is also defined as a source of information and communication, and a form of creative self-expression and documentation.

The featured artists/ guest jurors exemplify the depth and range of photography and how the medium can push boundaries of self expression and identity. TAC is thrilled to invite these amazing artists to help us look at photography with a new focus.

Guest Juror: Paula Chamlee- http://www.michaelandpaula.com/mp/html/photographs_paula.php

Paula Chamlee

Paula Chamlee is a photographer and painter living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Her photographs are collected in over forty museums including the Los Angeles County

Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, and the Library of Congress. Her photographs have been widely exhibited in museums and galleries and are in innumerable public and private collections in the United States and abroad. Seven monographs of her photographs have been published between 1994 and 2015, with a new one in the works.

Chamlee works with an 8×10-inch view camera and makes primarily large-format negatives. She also makes drawings, paintings, assemblages, and collages in her studio in Bucks County. She has been the recipient of several awards and grants, including the Leeway Foundation for “Excellence in Photography.” She teaches workshops at home and abroad, having taught photography in eleven countries around the world.

Chamlee is co-owner of Lodima Press along with her late husband, photographer Michael A. Smith, where they have published the photographs of many notable photographers.

Her books can be seen at www.Lodima.org and her photographs can be seen at www.michaelandpaula.com

Guest Juror: Rose Blouin– https://roseblouinphotography.com/

Rose Blouin

Rose Blouin has created documentary and fine art photography since 1980. Blouin’s work has been exhibited in a number of museums and galleries including Woman Made Gallery, Nicole Gallery, The South Side Community Art Center, Artemesia Gallery, The North Suburban Fine Arts Center, Evanston Arts Center, and the State of Illinois Art Gallery. Her work has received awards in juried exhibitions including Tall Grass Arts “From Earth” exhibition, Black Creativity (Museum of Science and Industry), University of Chicago Logan Center for the Arts “Chicago Jazz: A Photographer’s View,” DuSable Museum Annual Art Fair, and the Milwaukee Inner City Art Fair. Her photographs have been published on the covers of South Side Stories (City Stoop Press), Columbia Poetry Review (Columbia College Chicago), and Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors by Haki Madhubuti (Lotus Press). Photos of Gwendolyn Brooks are included in Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (Third World Press, 1991) and Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating The Writing Of Gwendolyn Brooks (Curbside Splendor, 2017.) Blouin has had solo shows at the South Side Community Art Center and at the Ferguson Gallery of Concordia University featuring photographs from South Africa. Most recently, Blouin mounted a solo exhibition of photographs from Havana at The New Studio in Evanston (2016). She is also a founding member of Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African American women artists.

Guest Juror: Susan Aurinko Susan Aurinko Photography

Susan Aurinko

Susan Aurinko, a photographer, writer, and curator, has shown her work in France, Italy, India, and Austria, as well as the US. Her exhibition about India, entitled Still Point India, opened at Kriti Gallery in Varanasi 2013 and is now available as a book. Aurinko’s work appears on numerous books in the US and UK, including The Stranger Among UsArielScar TissueSlut Lullabies, and Bound and Broken, and four of her photographs are included in the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection. In addition, her work is in the permanent collections of Loyola University Museum of Art, and The Union League Club of Chicago, and private collections in France, Italy, India, the UK, Monaco, and across the US. Aurinko’s Searching fo

r Jehanne – The Joan of Arc Project was a solo exhibition at LUMA (Loyola University Museum of Art) and at St Mary of the Lake University, with plans to travel to several venues in the US and abroad.  Searching for Jehanne – The Joan of Arc Project is also available as a book. Aurinko is represented by Hilton Contemporary in the US and Kriti Gallery in India and Hilton Contemporary in the US.

Aurinko studied photography, film, and design in various schools, including Layton School of Art and Design, The University of Wisconsin Madison, and Columbia College Chicago, where she has guest critiqued and taught in the photography department and the Portfolio Center.  Aurinko has led workshops for photographers and artists in the US, Canada, and India. She is on the Boards of Directors of FreshLens Chicago and The American Friends of the Vienna Museum, the Advisory Board for Filter, and the Advisory Committee of the International Photography Awards (Lucie Awards) and has been an IPA and Px3 Juror for many years.

CLICK ARTISTS: Dennis Barnett, David Belle aka Scan Ray, David Brodsky, Jonathan Michael Castillo, Allen Cohen, Jeff Cohen, Sara Peak Convery, Amy Duffy-Callan, Danica Fahmy, Nona C. Flores, Gary Friedlander, Jonathan Friedman, Francis Fullam, Deanna Gibson, George Gonzalez, Christopher Haydon, Fletcher Hayes, Clifford Holmes, Anne Houde, Gary Justis, Jenny Lam, Rob Lancaster, Kim Laurel, Lynda Lawson Karr, Maxim Marshall, Nate Mathews, Michael Mau, Erica McKeehen, Margot McMahon, Max Mitchell, Nancy Natow-Cassidy, Sandy Ostroff, Sambhram Patel, Hope Pennino, Amy Perlmutter, Matt Perrin, Emily Pruyn, Thomas Sandercock, Ernest J. Schweit, Rob Sills, Charese Smiley, Caleb Smith, Tony Smith, DayAndrea Thompson, Robert Tolchin, Jeffery Trilling, Peter Turner, David Vosburg, Dan Zamudio

SPECIAL EXHIBITION IN CORTESI GALLERY

Ted Degener: At Home with Artists

 

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.”