Since 2020, the artist Jeff Carter has developed an extensive body of work exploring the site, history, and significance of the Singer Pavilion – the last remaining building of the former Michael Reese Hospital complex in Bronzeville and a design collaboration by architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus School. This exhibition debuts the 11 resulting artworks including sculptures, digital images, sound works, and installations. Several artworks in the exhibition are made using materials extracted from the abandoned site: a waiting room chair, vinyl records, and plants that have reclaimed the building and surrounding landscape – all collected during the artist’s many visits. The excavated materials, transformed into sculptures, conjure both the events that happened in the building during its active years as a psychiatric institute (1948–2009) and the building’s life after the hospital’s closure. A series of zines by artists with connections to the hospital and its surrounding community are also featured.
Together, the works in the exhibition prompt critical reflection on the Modernist promise of social progress, and consider how architectural ideals are compromised by histories of institutional failure, abandonment, and inequality.
Jeff Carter (1967, California, USA, he/his) is a multimedia artist living and working in Chicago. Jeff earned his BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Jeff’s practice includes sculpture, kinetics, sound, installation, and digital media. In several recent projects Jeff has used IKEA products as raw material to reinterpret and recontextualize lost works of Modern sculpture and architecture.
Jeff has exhibited his work in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Renaissance Society, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Hyde Park Art Center. His work has been shown internationally at the Hayward Gallery, London; the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; the IKEA Museum, Sweden; and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland. His solo shows include the Chicago Cultural Center and the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; and Galeria Valle Orti, Valencia, Spain. His work was reviewed in Art in America and profiled in the 7th edition of Bauhaus Magazine. He is a Professor in The Art School at DePaul University.
June 6 – September 20, 2026
Kanter Family Foundation Gallery
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Ave