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Experience a panel discussion with the artists in The Art Center Highland Park’s current exhibition, Facades.

The Art Center Highland Park, in partnership with Oliva Gallery, proudly announces an artist talk for Facades, a new exhibition on display at The Art Center Highland Park. This show foregrounds three influential voices in contemporary Midwestern art: Nikki Renee Anderson, Aaron Becker, and the late Molly Schiff.

Nikki Renee Anderson, known for her ceramic sculptures and immersive installations, brings a tactile intimacy to the exhibition. Her works challenge static notions of femininity and identity, drawing on personal history to create forms that are at once soft and assertive, playful and deeply psychological. Anderson’s practice reflects a career of national and international acclaim, with exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, and the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, Italy. A professor and leader in ceramic education, Anderson’s work reclaims the domestic and decorative as spaces of feminist resistance and self-exploration.

Aaron Becker engages viewers with a sculptural language that distorts familiarity. Trained in ceramics, Becker constructs imagined environments through abstract form and geometric composition, asking us to examine the energies that shape our perception of place. His work, which often pairs the functional with the conceptual, explores the thresholds between domesticity and disorientation. His installations provoke questions about presence, interiority, and what it means to occupy space.

Curator Kimberly Oliva will be discussing the work of the late Molly Schiff (1927–2018), a visionary Chicago modernist, who rounds out the exhibition with vividly colored paintings that channel emotional immediacy through abstraction. A lifelong creative force who began painting after a career in the garment industry, Schiff earned multiple degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and exhibited widely across Illinois. Her works exemplify a blend of expressive form, bold palette, and open invitation to interpretive intimacy. She remains a cherished figure in Chicago’s art history and her legacy continues to influence new generations.