Arts + Public Life invites you to the exhibition opening of Intentionality, 1960: Whose Dreams by Candace Hunter.
Intentionality, 1960: Whose Dreams? examines the instability of geography—how places are made, inherited, and ultimately understood as fixed. The landscape can make what was intentional appear inevitable. In her latest exhibition, Chicago artist Candace Hunter returns to the construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway and the Black communities displaced in its path. A continuation of her ongoing project, 50,831 +/– Dreams, the exhibition considers displacement beyond the loss of physical place and the routes, relationships, memories, and ordinary intimacies disrupted alongside it.
Working across photographic collage, installation, architectural fragments, archival materials, sound, sculptural interventions, and oral history, Hunter moves between what is recorded and what is remembered. Her Memory Teas operate as a form of practice-based research, gathering first-person accounts from Black Chicagoans who remember the Dan Ryan’s construction and the neighborhoods transformed by it. These accounts sit alongside the historical record, complicating what can be known about a place through maps, archives, and the landscape as it exists now.
Intentionality, 1960 stays with what persists after a place has been remade: what is carried forward, what is obscured, and what takes shape in its wake.
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 notoriety has come from her Brown Limbed Girls series, which are painted and collaged 20 x 20 inch works, more than 130 and counting, that were born during the covid 19 pandemic and their sole purpose was to depict brown girls in various states of joy. To date, those images have been featured on Chicago billboards. three book covers, two major shows in New Orleans and Oakland and became the inaugural show for the Narrow Bridge Arts Club in Woodlawn.