Exhibitions

Arts + Public Life

Arts + Public Life’s exhibitions are rooted in collaboration and critical inquiry. Presented at the Arts Incubator in Washington Park, our exhibition program brings artists into sustained conversation with place, history, and community. We approach exhibitions not simply as presentations of finished work, but as evolving sites of research—shaped through long-term relationships, dialogue, and attentiveness to context.

Our program centers emerging and mid-career artists whose practices engage memory, material processes, and social life, often foregrounding narratives and perspectives that have been historically underrepresented within cultural institutions. Through new commissions, public programs, and interpretive tools, our exhibitions are grounded in local knowledge while remaining in conversation with broader artistic and cultural histories. Each exhibition is conceived as an invitation to look closely, linger, and think together about how art can help us understand the present and imagine what comes next.

EXHIBITION OPENING + ARTIST TALK

Saturday, March 7th | 6:00pm-8:00pm

Opening Reception + Artist Talk with Jason, SSHMP director and founder Jacqueline Stewart, and Spinning Home Movies series producer Avery LaFlamme.

Ramon Williams was an IBEW electrician, entrepreneur, and amateur filmmaker who documented public life in and around his neighborhood of Bronzeville. His collection, donated to the South Side Home Movie Project in 2020, includes over 300 film reels captured between the 1940s and the 1960s. From parades, performances, sporting events and fashion shows, Williams’ films are rare glimpses into the vibrant civic life of the historic Black neighborhood.

Unlike many of the collections archived at the South Side Home Movie Project, Williams’ films primarily document public events occurring beyond the domestic confines of a family home. And yet, the collection of films retain the intimacy typically reserved for home movie recordings. To foreground this intimacy, Campbell collects still frames from Williams’ films that capture moments of direct eye contact between Williams’ camera and his subjects. Excised from their moving image context and assembled into photo albums, these stills become an archive of presence where Williams, his subjects and visitors to the gallery share a collective interior in the midst of Black public life.

The gaze collapses the divide between public documentation and private memory. Historically, Black presence in public space has been surveilled, regulated, or rendered hyper visible. When subjects look directly into Ramon Williams' camera, the look is not passive, it reclaims the frame. The gaze signals: this is ours; we recognize who is filming; we belong here. By extracting only these moments, civic documentation is transformed into something that behaves like a family archive, where being seen is not extractive but relational. Spinning Home Movies Episode 20: Quiet Still with Jason Campbell invites us to view projected images from within The Linen Closet, to explore the photo albums of stills, and to consider the “stilling” power of the gaze.

Spinning Home Movies Episode 20: Quiet Still with Jason Campbell is presented with generous support from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation.

EXHIBITION EVENT

Spinning Home Moves #20 Quiet Still Closing Night with Jenn Freeman

As part of South Side Home Movie Project’s 20th Anniversary, celebrate Spinning Home Movies Episode #20: Quiet Still with an intimate performance by movement artist Jenn Freeman. By weaving together research from the SSHMP Ramon Williams Collection and the physical structure of Jason Campbell’s The Linen Closet, Freeman uses movement to explore the ritual of 'homemaking' within a cedar-framed monument to improvisation and care.

2026

Spinning Home Movies #20 Quiet Still with Jason Campbell

Opening: March 7th | On View March 9th-March 14

Gallery hours :

Monday, March 9 - Saturday, March 14 | 1:00 - 5:00pm

As part of its 20th Anniversary celebration, the South Side Home Movie Project presents Spinning Home Movies Episode 20: Quiet Still with Jason Campbell, a week-long exhibition that showcases the materiality, architecture and temporality of home through archival films and architectural design. In the first ever Spinning Home Movies exhibition, Jason Campbell presents an original work that combines elements of his own artistic practice with SSHMP’s Ramon Williams Collection.

Artist and architect Jason Campbell transports The Linen Closet, originally exhibited as part of the Chicago Architectural Biennial, to the Arts Incubator gallery. An open cedar frame carries donated quilts and comforters, creating a monument to the ritual, improvisational practice of homemaking. In its new location, images sampled from the Ramon Williams Collection at the South Side Home Movie Project are projected onto The Linen Closet, expanding its material archive of home to include home movie recordings.

Past Exhibitions

2025

Nathaniel Mary Quinn and Gregory Huebner: The Hand That Guides

October 30 – December 13, 2025

Gallery hours: Thursday-Saturday, 1PM-5PM

Read the Press Release

This exhibition marks the first joint presentation of Nathaniel Mary Quinn and his former mentor, Gregory Huebner—two artists whose practices are bound by the transformative power of guidance, reflection, and human connection. Renowned for his emotionally charged, collage-like portraits, Quinn presents a new series of paintings on linen created specifically for this occasion. These works meditate on the “guiding hands” that have shaped his life and artistic path—mentors, loved ones, and inner voices—while opening a broader conversation about the universal role of mentorship in shaping creative journeys.

Alongside Quinn’s new work, the exhibition features Huebner’s Ritual series (2015–ongoing), a body of abstract paintings that channel his lifelong exploration of the unseen. Layering color, energy, and gesture, Huebner seeks balance amid chaos, grounding his work in decades of philosophical inquiry and spiritual study.
Together, their works resonate across generations, offering two distinct yet interconnected visions of art as a practice of searching—whether for selfhood, for spirit, or for the possibility of transformation..

Exhibition Event:

The Hand That Guides: Conversation with Artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Thursday, October 30th | 5pm-6pm

Green Line Performing Arts Center | 329 E. Garfield Blvd

Join artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn and moderator Anastasia Karpova Tinari for a conversation exploring The Hand That Guides.

This dialogue occurs just before the exhibition’s opening celebration. Guests are invited to continue the evening by walking to the Arts Incubator to experience the exhibition firsthand.

The talk is free and open to the public; seating is limited.

If you would like to attend the Artist talk, you can email artsandpubliclife@uchicago.edu to reserve your spot.

About the Artists

portrait of Nathaniel Mary Quinn

Nathaniel Mary Quinn creates hybrid, fractured portraits and figures on paper and linen canvas using black charcoal, gouache, soft pastel, oil pastel, paint stick, and oil paint. His process draws from personal memory, experience, and family history growing up in Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes. His work balances the beautiful and grotesque, capturing the complexity of human emotion as both individual and universal

Quinn has exhibited internationally with Gagosian, Almine Rech, Half Gallery, Luce Gallery, M+B Gallery, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, and others. Reviews of his work have appeared in The New York Times, The Independent, Cultured, The Brooklyn Rail, AFROPUNK, The Chicago Reader, NewCity, HuffPost, and The New Yorker. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Sheldon Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is represented by Almine Rech and Gagosian Gallery.

Almine Rech Gallery and Gagosian Gallery represent Nathaniel Mary Quinn worldwide.

portrait of Gregory Huebner

Gregory Huebner is Professor Emeritus of Art at Wabash College, where he taught from 1974 to 2011 and chaired the department for 23 years. His abstract paintings—seen in over 34 solo exhibitions—explore themes of ritual, balance, and spirituality. His work is represented in 33 public and more than 90 private collections, including the Indiana State Museum, Raclin Murphy Museum of Art at the University of Notre Dame, and Deloitte & Touche.

He currently lives in Indianapolis, where he serves as Artist-in-Residence at Nomad Corporation.

the undercommons, the first solo exhibition by painter Brandon Carlton. Through his distinctive approach to stylized figuration, Carlton explores the complexities of contemporary Black life, using portraiture and spatial composition to evoke intimacy, distance, and presence.

Taking inspiration from The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, the exhibition engages with their concept of the undercommons—a space of "fugitive sociality," where collective life unfolds beyond dominant structures. Carlton’s figures inhabit ambiguous realms—neither entirely confined by structure nor completely unbound by freedom. In these carefully orchestrated spaces, they embody a continual negotiation of identity, asserting agency and evoking the enduring presence of historical memory.

Carlton’s approach draws from the layered surfaces of Alex Katz and David Hockney, as well as Jordan Casteel’s nuanced portrayals of community and everyday encounters. Through gesture, color, and composition, his work reimagines presence, offering new ways of seeing and understanding Black life beyond fixed narratives.