JULY 8 - SEPT 11, 2022

All That Light: A Ten-Year Retrospective of the Artists-in-Residence (AIR) Program (2012 - 2022) seeks to survey the cumulative impact the program has had on the artists it has supported, the audiences it has convened, and the city it has engaged and depicted. Initially conceived a decade ago by artist Theaster Gates and jointly hosted by the University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life (APL) and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC), the AIR program has grown to become one of the art world’s most generative incubators of talent.

The exhibition’s title is taken from a conversation with Gates, Jacqueline Stewart and Adrienne Brown, acknowledging the program’s reputation for identifying Chicago’s most ascendant artists and makers. Spread across two exhibition spaces, Arts + Public Life and the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts, the exhibition features objects, sound, and video installation, and is organized to reflect on the multiple meanings of light: to stimulate sight; to make things visible; to illuminate or ignite; to emit radiant energy; and to be easily carried.

If Chicago, perennially a launching pad for some of our most respected artists and musicians, has in recent years become even more of a pacesetter for the rest of the nation when it comes to contemporary art, it is — in part — because the AIR residency and the artists who have participated in it have played a major role in maintaining and advancing that status. Today, Chicago is indisputably considered one of epicenters of cultural production by artists who are Black, Latino, Indigenous, and People of Color and by artists interested in the process of improvisation, co-creation, and defying genre.

Just ten years after the program’s creation, AIR alumni must be counted among the most compelling and successful Chicago-based and affiliated artists, continuing the rich and broad legacy of cultural production on Chicago’s South Side which the program was designed to honor, and cementing the city’s reputation as a touchstone for anyone interested in making and studying contemporary art.

Artist, arts administrator, curator, and librarian Tracie D. Hall founded the small, but influential Rootwork Gallery in Chicago in 2016 and four years later, became the tenth Executive Director of the American Library Association, the oldest and largest library association in the world.

Prior to that appointment Hall served as Director of the Joyce Foundation’s Culture Program where she originated the Arts Leader of Color Fellowship in association with Americans for the Arts; Retool 21, an early-career development program for aspiring arts preparators in partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Artist as Problem Solver summits which convened artists and organizers working on arts based community development initiatives in the Midwest; and the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project with the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Hall also served as Deputy Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) for the City of Chicago, where she oversaw the Arts and Creative Industries Division which included the visual and performing arts, arts-based small business, and the Chicago Film Office.

Hall has curated several breakout exhibitions including: ICONIC: Black Panther Chicago commemorating the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Black Panther Party in Illinois; Everyday Rituals: Bridging the Black Secular and the Divine; and Altar Call: The Architecture of Black Sacred Space. In 2019, she was listed among Chicago’s 50 Visual Vanguards by New City. Hall is currently at work developing a residency program for artists and writers in the South.

Twitter: @TracieDHall1