All That Light: A Ten-Year Retrospective of the Artists-in-Residence (AIR) Program at the University of Chicago from 2012 to 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 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 and some of the AIR’s early administrators 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.

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.

• Tracie D. Hall, Curator