Выставка «Ground Floor» в Чикаго представляет работы 21 выпускника художественных вузов

For the ninth time since 2010, the Hyde Park Art Center is giving Chicago’s newest art school graduates a stage of their own. “Ground Floor” 2026, on view through Nov. 1 at 5020 S. Cornell Ave., brings together 21 artists who graduated in the past two years from one of Chicago’s five MFA programs: Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and Columbia College. The biennial, which opened Aug. 9, fills the Art Center’s lower level with painting, sculpture, video and kinetic installation. Mariela Acuña, the Art Center’s director of exhibitions and residency programs and a co-curator of the show, said the exhibition starts with a nomination process. Faculty and curators from each school recommend recent graduates, who then apply to a jury that includes faculty from each program and at laeast one member of the Art Center’s curatorial team. Acuña said the show offers a window into how each school shapes its students differently. Some schools often produce graduates keen on photography or performance art. This year, sculpture and interactive work stood out. “We have a surprising amount of work that is interactive,” Acuña said. Acuña also pointed to a thread running through several pieces: an interest in history and how artists integrate it into their materials. In one work by SAIC graduate Aidan Anne Frierson, traditional African American food staples like collard greens, yams and black-eyed peas are either turned into paper or worked onto it; a piece by Northwestern graduate Renee Royale features a chattel house built to be taken apart and moved. One work that immediately draws visitors’ attention is Mauricio López F.’s “También tienes que venir mañana / You also need to come tomorrow,” a set of motorized street cones, an idea that grew out of the daily clamor of construction near his old Albany Park apartment. López, who studied sound at SAIC after training as a composer in Chile, said he became fixated on the orange cones that mark off Chicago work zones and the Spanish being spoken by the crews behind them. “This piece was for me about zones, about working zones and about safe zones,” he told the Herald. López spent months translating that idea into an object, working with professors who study sound and robotics to give the cones unpredictable motorized movement meant to unsettle a passerby’s sense of a stable path. “I became obsessed with the composition of cones and how important they are as an optic to tell you that the rules you’re experiencing in your daily life are completely different if you are inside them,” he said. López said the piece is also about the labor that goes unnoticed once it becomes part of the city’s background noise. “The amount of work zones that are there, at some point you get just numb, and you don’t start paying attention to them,” he said. Because the cones run on batteries, López said the Art Center has to service them daily to keep them running. “I do feel that my work demands a different type of attention from the institutions that choose to put it on view,” he said. Showing alongside artists from four other schools, many of whom he had never met, López added, “makes you realize the scope of what everyone else is doing.” A similar recalibration happened for Kiana Shahnia, whose three-panel painting “Headcount” is installed not as a single triptych but split across separate walls in Gallery 1, so the panels align into one image only in the mind’s eye. Shahnia, who has a background in art history, said the work grew out of a longstanding preoccupation with the relationship between art and its viewer, one she often explores through the language of theaters, funhouses and fairgrounds. “I've always been interested in the idea of the actor and the watcher,” she said. “Headcount” depicts empty chairs arranged in a perfect circle as if for a meeting or a performance that has not yet started or has already ended. Shahnia said removing any human figures from the scene was deliberate, a way of treating the painting less as something to be viewed and more as an object that occupies the gallery alongside the viewer. “My paintings act more like objects than a window or an image to be looked at,” she said. That interest in the hierarchy between artwork and audience, she said, is part of a broader curiosity about how people are positioned in the spaces they move through. “Everything in the world is setting us in a specific body, in a specific place to do a specific thing, and I’m interested in dismantling that, not literally, but offering a space where there is no hierarchy to begin with,” she said. Shahnia, who has three pieces in the exhibition, said showing her work has given her a rare chance to see her work outside the U. of C. environment where her classmates had watched it develop for two years. “This does feel like a really great opportunity to be right out of grad school in a show with everyone else that's in the same position, experiencing the same thing,” she said. According to Acuña, that kind of connection between artists who had never met is part of what keeps the biennial going after 16 years. She pointed to past participants, including Jonathan Michael Castillo, who showed in “Ground Floor” in 2021 and has since taught teen photography classes at the Art Center and received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship this year, as evidence the show can mark a real turning point in the careers of emerging artists. “Ground Floor,” the Hyde Park Art Center’s biennial exhibition of emerging artists, is on view through November 1 at 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Admission is free.