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Arts + Public Life

Arts + Public Life (APL) Exhibitions are rooted in collaboration and critical inquiry. Presented at the Arts Incubator in Chicago's Washington Park neighborhood since 2013, our exhibition program brings artists into sustained engagement 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, place, cultural histories, and social life, often foregrounding narratives and perspectives that have been historically underrepresented within cultural institutions. Through new commissions, artist talks, performances, public programs, and interpretive resources, we create multiple points of entry for audiences while extending conversations beyond the gallery.

Grounded in the histories and communities of Chicago's South Side, our exhibitions remain in conversation with broader artistic, historical, and international contexts. As part of the University of Chicago, we draw on collaborations with faculty, students, scholars, and community partners, creating opportunities for contemporary art to intersect with research, teaching, and public life.

About Arts + Public Life
Candace Hunter: Intentionality, 1960

September 24 – December 12, 2026

Intentionality, 1960 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. Now embedded within Chicago’s geography, the expressway obscures both the choices that produced it and the lives reorganized around its construction. A continuation of Hunter’s ongoing project, 50,831 +/– Dreams, the exhibition extends her inquiry into displacement beyond the removal of people from a physical location. The Dan Ryan disrupted the ordinary intimacies through which a geography becomes home: routes traveled, neighbors known, businesses frequented, porches gathered on. The expressway stands as both infrastructure and evidence of that reordering. Through collage, installation, archival materials, sound, and oral history, Hunter works between what is recorded and what is remembered. Her ongoing Memory Teas are integral to this process, placing lived experience alongside the official record without asking one to resolve the other. If geography is also a way of knowing and ordering the world, memory offers another spatial record—one produced through lived experience rather than the authority of the map. In Hunter’s work, memory becomes its own geographic knowledge, locating lives and relationships that the contemporary landscape can no longer make visible. Intentionality, 1960 remains with what happens when the physical markers of a place disappear but the place itself does not. Forgetting does not erase these histories any more than remembering can fully recover them. Hunter attends to this irresolution and to what persists: what is carried forward, what is obscured, and what takes root in its place.

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