Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago presents Intentionality, 1960: Whose Dreams? a new exhibition by Chicago artist Candace Hunter centered on the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway and the Black communities displaced in its path. Now embedded within Chicago’s physical and social fabric, the Dan Ryan Expressway obscures both the choices that produced it and the lives reorganized around it. The construction disrupted the ordinary intimacies through which a place becomes home: routes traveled, neighbors known, businesses frequented, porches gathered on.
Through photographic collage, architectural fragments, archival materials, sound, sculptural interventions, and oral histories, Hunter moves between what is documented and what is remembered. The work resists the idea that displacement can be understood solely through statistics.
The series builds on the Memory Teas Candace hosted during her APL residency, which gathered first-person accounts from Black Chicagoans who remember the Dan Ryan’s construction and the neighborhoods transformed by it. Rather than asking these memories to complete the historical record, Hunter allows them to stay partial, layered, and unresolved.
While centered on Chicago's South Side, the history at the heart of Intentionality, 1960 reaches beyond the city. Across the United States, highway construction, redevelopment, and urban renewal reshaped Black communities, often presenting profound social and spatial disruption as necessary progress. Intentionality, 1960 invites audiences to see those histories not as isolated events but as part of a larger American story.
Intentionality, 1960 will be accompanied by Threshold: Conversations on the Stoop, a series of public dialogues on the front porch within the exhibition between Candace and scholars to dive into topics related to the exhibition. The Threshold conversations are presented with support from the Office of the Provost Diversity and Inclusion team, in partnership with the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.
Intentionality, 1960: Whose Dreams? will be on view from September 24-December 12 in the Arts + Public Life Gallery Space located in the Arts Incubator at 301 E. Garfield Blvd.
Gallery Hours: Thursday-Saturday | 1:00 - 5:00pm
About Candace Hunter
Candace Hunter (chlee), a Chicago-based artist, creates collage, paintings, installations, and performance art. Plainly, she tells stories. Using appropriated materials from magazines, maps, cloth, and various reused materials, she offers new landscapes back to the viewer with a glimpse of history and admiration of the beautiful.
A highly respected artist in the Midwest, chlee’s most recent honors include the Elevate Climate Changemakers Award (2022), 3Arts Next Level Award (2021) and the Tim and Helen Meier Foundation Award (2020).
Hunter’s most recent recognition has come from her Brown Limbed Girls series, comprising more than 130 painted and collaged 20 x 20-inch works created since the COVID-19 pandemic. Their sole purpose was to depict brown girls in various states of joy. The images have been featured on Chicago billboards, three book covers, and in major exhibitions in New Orleans and Oakland, and became the inaugural exhibition for the Narrow Bridge Arts Club in Woodlawn.