Join us for our spring Center Day and celebrate the launch of our new Open Arts program — our new contribute-what-you-can education model! We will also be hosting the opening of our new exhibitions, Loving Repeating, Wheel of Life, and Sequences, Iterations, and Permutations. Join us for a packed day of activities including, open school studios with class demonstrations from teaching artists, art making activities inspired by our exhibitions, printed art swag takeaways, studio visits with our Creative Wing Resident Artists, Earth Day activities from the Gardeneers, a food truck, and more!

School & Studio Demonstrations
Join us in our Oakman Clinton School & Studios to learn more about class offerings for Open Arts, meet some of our teaching artists, and participate in demonstrations! 

Gardeneers Seeding Activity

Celebrate Earth Day weekend with the Gardeneers at our Center Day! Nothing says spring like seeds, and we, like the Gardeneers are always planting seeds in our community — just different kinds! Check out their wearable seed jewelry, learn more about gardening, and even take home your own grow bag and kit! 

Gardeneers works with Chicago’s South- and Westside schools and communities to contribute positively to the larger food system. We do this by supporting youth in our school garden and farm programs to build their own knowledge, skills, and habits to become leaders who care for themselves, their environment, and their communities. Gardeneers ensures the success of every school farm and garden program we support. We measure success in: the number of young Black and Brown people trying new fruits and vegetables in our gardens; in hours spent learning the ways of agriculture; in pounds of produce harvested and distributed to community members; in social and emotional skills learned; and finally in the number of young leaders supported to go on to change the world!

DIY Animation for Zoetropes with Daisy! 

Join teaching artist, Daisy Schultz, for a workshop inspired by our Wheel of Life exhibition curated by Scott Wolniak. The workshop centers on the zoetrope, a 19th-century optical device consisting of a cylinder with a series of pictures on the inner surface that, when viewed through slits with the cylinder rotating, give an impression of continuous motion. In this hands-on workshop, Shultz will teach participants how to create their own manual animation to be used in zoetropes from the exhibition. She will also explore other methods of hands on manual animation techniques. 

Daisy Schultz has a background in chemistry and worked in a biochemical lab for three years before starting her MFA. She works mainly in photographic and time-based media. Daisy Schultz earned her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2020 and exhibited her work in the 2020 Ground Floor Biennial at the Hyde Park Art Center. She is a 2021 Luminarts Cultural Foundation Fellow, a Visual Arts Fellow at the Arts Club of Chicago, and a teaching fellow at the University of Chicago. She lives and works in Chicago.

Art making Activity: Repeating Paper Cranes

To celebrate the opening of their Loving Repeating exhibition, artists Stan Shellabarger and Dutes Miller, will be leading guests through a paper crane making station to activate and add to their “Burnt” installation. 

Married artist collaborators Miller & Shellabarger explore physicality, duality, time and romantic ideal in their multidisciplinary work – performance, photography, artists books, sculpture and cut paper silhouettes – that documents the rhythms of human relationships, speaking both to common experiences of intimacy as well as the specifics of queer identities. Their performances, always enacted together in public, push simple materials and actions to almost Sisyphean extremes. Their gestures shift between moments of togetherness and separation, private and public, protection and pain, and visibility and invisibility. Their work is both autobiographical and metaphorical, speaking to common human interaction and queer relationships. Silhouettes of each other, their iconic beards, and their bodies appear regularly in their work. In their signature ongoing performance, Untitled (Pink Tube), a non-theatrical, durational piece, they simultaneously crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink acrylic yarn, a metaphorically-loaded object that both unites and separates them. In Untitled (Grave), Miller & Shellabarger dig two holes close together, deep and large enough for each man to lie in. They then dug a small tunnel between the holes that enabled them to hold hands while lying in the graves.

Creative Wing Resident Artist Open Studios

Come and meet our new yearlong Radicle resident artists, flex residents, and our Exhibition Development resident artist in our Jackman Goldwasser Creative Wing! New Radicle residents include Regina Agu, Joseph Lefthand, and Robert Earl Paige. Flex residents include, Ariella Granados, and Jennefer Hoffmann, and our Exhibition Development resident Artist, Edra Soto.

WeJam DJ Academy Youth DJs

Enjoy music from WeJam DJ Academy featuring youth DJs during Center Days! Check out DJ sets from DJ Air One (11 years old), and DJ Joshua (14 years old)! WeJAM DJ Academy, Inc. is an instructional institution that focuses on instructing students in the art of DJing as a hobby or as a profitable business.

Enjoy eats from the Fat Shallot Food Truck in our parking lot!

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Parking will be limited as some activations will be taking place partially in our parking lot. There will be additional parking available at Kenwood Academy located at: Kenwood Parking Lot on the corner of Hyde Park Blvd and Lake Park Blvd.