Ground Floor, an ongoing biennial exhibition since 2010, brings together work by Chicago’s most promising emerging talent whose work demands to be seen and supported. The exhibition offers a single destination to discover 20 artists who have recently graduated (in 2025 and 2026) from one of Chicago’s five outstanding MFA programs: Northwestern University, The University of Chicago, The University of Illinois at Chicago, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College. Ground Floor presents art made in the past couple of years in hopes of investigating and articulating conceptual and stylistic trends coming out of Chicago art schools right now.

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.