Past Events

Voices: Kamau Patton
Tuesday, November 10, 2020, at 6 pm.
Patton will talk about his current project Tel. The lecture will focus on transmissions, remote performance works and text to sound compositions done while in quarantine. Tel is a platform for performance, study, and contemplation that will question how the nature of memory has changed in relation to the encroachment of cyberspace, telematics, and transmission technologies.

Voices: Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Thursday, November 5, 2020, at 6 pm.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed will discuss the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished in her interdisciplinary practice. What does it mean to be a learner who creates work that is perpetually being iterated upon?

Voices: Mendi and Keith Obadike
Tuesday, October 27, 2020, at 6 pm.
Mendi + Keith Obadike make music, art, and literature. They have exhibited and performed at The New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Museum of Modern Art. Their early collaborations were works made for the internet and recorded music. Their current projects include a series of large-scale, public sound art works. Their honors include a Rockefeller New Media Arts Fellowship, Pick Laudati Award for Digital Art, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award.

Voices Lecture via Zoom: Tonika Johnson
Tuesday, October 20, 2020, at 4 pm.
Tonika Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist from Chicago’s South Side Englewood neighborhood. In 2010, she co-found Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.) and is the lead co-founder of Englewood Arts Collective established in 2017.

Voices Lecture via Zoom: Jessica Labatte
Tuesday, October 13, 2020, at 6 pm.
In Almanac for Shade Gardeners, Jessica Labatte will share photographs that champion beauty in the everyday through floral still lifes and colorful photographic abstractions.

Pandemic Lessons: Challenges, Innovations and Re-Imaginings
The current COVID 19 pandemic has necessitated a drastic reframing of how art education is approached and accessed. Following the end of the first semester/ term of online learning, Gallery 400, in partnership with the BFA in Art Education program at UIC’s School of Art & Art History, hosted a series of presenter-led conversations to explore how art education has adapted to a virtual learning environment: the challenges, innovations, and ways forward. Learn more about the 3 convenings hosted.

Voices Lecture via Zoom: Ramell Ross
Monday, April 20, 2020 at 6 pm
Join Us via Zoom: https://uic.zoom.us/j/135946245
Visual artist, filmmaker, and writer RaMell Ross will discuss his work in photography and how it informed his Oscar-nominated film, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rural Hale County, Alabama, over the course of five years.

Voices Lecture via Zoom: Damon Locks
Tuesday, March 31, 2020 at 6 pm
Join Us via Zoom: https://uic.zoom.us/j/135946245
Damon Locks discusses his work with Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project, the S.P.A.C.E. program (via Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago) a high school on the south side, and his work with the Black Monument Ensemble and making sounds in real time!
Manifest Justice, 2015, digital print by Damon Locks

Closing Event: Much Handled
Saturday, March 7, 2020
2:00 pm
Gallery 400 (400 S Peoria St)
Join artist Derrick Woods-Morrow, photographer and collector Patric McCoy, and others for a personal tour through Chicago and its cruising history. The tour is Gallery 400 Turn the Light exhibition artist Derrick Wood-Morrow’s live interpretation of his exhibited film Much Handled Things Are Always Soft.

Hatorade Retrograde: The Musical! Audition Call
Saturday, March 7, 2020
11:30 am
Gallery 400//UIC Great Space (400 S Peoria St)
Set in a San Francisco of 2069, the musical looks to San Francisco’s countercultures of the late 60’s, science fiction, and camp to imagine a future landscape impacted by climate change. Hatorade Retrograde envisions a speculative , high-tech, utopian (femi-)future as an empowering answer to contemporary anxieties about the economic and environmental impacts of water and air pollution and rising sea levels.

Founders: A Conversation with Faheem Majeed
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
12:00 pm
At the UIC Latino Cultural Center, Lecture Center B2, UIC Quad
Join co-director of The Floating Museum, Faheem Majeed, as he talks with Etzer Cantave and Starla Thompson about the Floating Museum project Founders and Cantave and Thompson’s participation in the project. A 25-foot-high inflatable sculpture, Founders was created by the Floating Museum to honor the founders of Chicago, Jean Baptiste DuSable and Kitahawa. The sculpture is sited on the UIC campus the day of the conversation from 9:00am to 3:00pm.

Collective Workshop with ACCD
Thursday, February 27, 2020
6:00 pm
Gallery 400 (400 S Peoria St)
Asociación Communitaria de Conocimiento Descentralizada (ACCD) (Community Association of Decentralized Knowledge) aims to revive public memories of human rights struggles and radical cultures in Latinx neighborhoods in Chicago. This workshop will be one in a series of pop-ups focused on women, LGBTI people, and system-targeted youth—groups that are almost always excluded from the very civil rights struggles that they led.

Voices: Teresa Montoya
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
6:00 pm
Gallery 400 (400 S Peoria St.)
How do we understand what is toxic? Why do we prioritize the visual in such apprehensions? In August of 2015, a U.S. EPA subcontractor inadvertently breached a dam wall below the historic and now defunct Gold King Mine near Silverton, CO. The consequent release of three million gallons of acid mine water eventually reached the San Juan River that ows through the Navajo Nation. Montoya presents a series of photographs taken one year after the Gold King mine spill to document the enduring violence of toxic exposure and its visual representations. In doing so, she interrogates the racialized ways environmental contamination disproportionally impacts Indigenous communities and our territories.

Won't you be my neighbor? with Nia Easley
Wednesday, February 19, 2020
6-9pm
Gallery 400 (400 S Peoria St)
The workshop contemplates ideas of sustaining neighborhood archives when faced with constant change. Over the last year, artist Nia Easley has developed a project that investigates the history of Avondale and asks questions about how a neighborhood is built, by whom, and what happens when community members change.

Workshop: Papier-mâché Lanterns at Tolman Library
Tolman Library, 2708 S. Pulaski Rd., December 7, 11am-12:30pm
This hands-on workshop invites participants to experience the papier-mâché artistry prominent in Tultepec, Mexico, where traditional methods of papier-mâché fabrication are used to create sculptural foundations.

Chicago Art Book Fair 2019
Nov 15-17 (Fri: 5-9pm, Sat: 11am-7pm, Sun: 12-6pm), Chicago Athletic Association
Come say hi at the Gallery 400 table! We will be there with some amazing book offerings.

Cocktails and Paper Crafts (SAAH Open House)
Thursday, November 14, 5-6 pm, Gallery 400
As part of the School of Art and Art History Open House, Gallery 400 hosts a cocktail mixer and a paper flower making workshop inside the exhibition The Last Judgment, the Gallery’s current exhibition that features papel maché sculptures.

Voices: Tione Nekkia McClodden
I Prayed To The Wrong God For You
Date: Tuesday, November 5, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Tiona Nekkia McClodden will unpack the notion of ‘chronos vs kairos’ in relation to her work over the past year with a close reading of her latest work I prayed to the wrong god for you, 2019 filmed across the United States, Cuba, and Nigeria. The multi-channel work combines video and sculptural elements in a highly personal ritual dedicated to Shango, a deity or Orisha within the Afro-Cuban religion Santería/Lucumí whose origins can be traced to the Yoruba people of Nigeria.

Voices: Lee Plested
Some Ideas on Display
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Presenting a mixture of curated and artist projects, Lee Plested investigates various exhibition apparatus and interpretive strategies that enable the viewer as an active subject, discussing methods he’s utilized to create these display-based propositions within exhibitions to formalize interdependent encounters with essentially autonomous objects, their histories, and social resonance. Tea will be served.

Voices: William Estrada
Collaborative Resistance
Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
William Estrada discusses how teaching has influenced his arts practice and describes current projects that focus on inquiry and mobilization. This Voices lecture includes images and personal excerpts of community workshops that honor black and brown people in their communities by amplifying the creativity already present.

Subverting Technologies of Repression
Conversation with Emmanuel Ortega and Adela Goldbard
Date: Friday, October 18, 2019
Time: 4:30pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Subverting Technologies of Repression is a conversation between Emmanuel Ortega and Adela Goldbard, sharing research on topics of Mexican resistances against historical repression. Ortega and Goldbard will give individual presentations on their research followed by a collaborative discussion.

Voices: Ephraim Asili
Measuring Time
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Artist Filmmaker Ephraim Asili explores the question of how we “measure time” as it relates to his recent creative output in film, music, and photography. The lecture will include excerpts from films, a photo slideshow, and live sonic explorations.

Workshop: Papier-mâché Lanterns and Piñatas
Sept 21, 2-4pm
This hands-on workshop invites participants to experience the papier-mâché artistry prominent in Tultepec, Mexico, where traditional methods of papier-mâché fabrication are used to create the sculptural foundations for elaborate pyrotechnic displays.

Screening: Brimstone & Glory
September 19, 6pm
Join us for a screening of Brimstone & Glory, a documentary directed by Viktor Jakovleski that chronicles the days and months leading up to the National Pyrotechnic Festival in the Mexican town of Tultepec, where three-quarters of the residents work in pyrotechnics.

Reception: The Last Judgment / El Juicio Final
September 6th 2019, 6pm
Join us for the opening reception of The Last Judgement by Adela Goldbard.
Centered on the community interests of residents in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, Adela Goldbard’s The Last Judgment features large-scale sculptures built as pyrotechnic scenography for a public pyrotechnic event to be presented in Little Village on October 12, 2019.

Open House | Casa Abierta
Date: Saturday, July 27 | Sábado 27 de Julio
Time: 3-6pm
Location: 2215 S St. Louis Ave, Chicago, IL 60623
Come view the progress of Adela Goldbard’s community-based art project! The Last Judgment highlights the stories and concerns of Little Village residents and will incorporate them into a pyrotechnic play for which master artisans—who have traveled from Tultepec, Mexico—are building large-scale scenography and decor. Join us at the Little Village work site to meet the artisans, learn about their work, collaborate with them on papier maché fabrication, and learn about the public pyrotechnic performance in Little Village on October 12, 2019.

Feeling ShapeyTwo-Person Artist Talk
Date: Thursday, July 18, 2019
Time: 6pm – 8pm
Location: Gallery 400
Artists Alberto Aguilar and Alex Bradley Cohen look back on their ten years of collaboration, discussing past work that spans video, sound, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. They speak about overcoming doubt and utilizing play to produce a vast and prolific body of work. It is free and open to all.

At Bounded SpaceGuided Walk with Hui-min Tsen
Date: Saturday, June 8, 2019
Time: 2pm
Location: Gallery 400
Led by artist Hui-min Tsen, At Bounded Space is a guided walk through the transitional areas surrounding Gallery 400. The walk offers participants a universal method for encountering the many visible and invisible boundary lines surrounding us in our everyday lived experiences. The duration of the walk is approximately 45 minutes. It is free and open to all.

Homemade Stories and Handmade Books Workshop
Date: Saturday, May 25, 2019
Time: 2pm
Location: Gallery 400
Madeleine Aguilar introduces the practice of autobiographical comics in this interactive bookmaking workshop. Participants are lead through exercises to document and translate their own personal narratives into pictures and words.

Carpet Diem Variety Show on an Area Rug
Date: Thursday, May 16
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400
Jesse Malmed hosts this one-night-only artistic showcase. Making creative use of the limitations intrinsic to an area rug, performances respond to the concept of allotted space and the idea of a carpet. Each artist has a short burst to present, perform, or transform their interpretation of the evening’s themes.

Creating Legacy
Date: Wednesday, May 15
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Join us for Creating Legacy: Furthering the Art of Dance Through the Art of Disability, an artist talk featuring 2019 UIC 3Arts fellow Ginger Lane. Real-Time Captioning (CART), ASL, and Audio Description are provided for this event. It is free and open to all.

A PD Invitation Art(s) Education Workshop
Date: Saturday, May 11, 2019
Time: 2pm
Location: Gallery 400
This is a personal invitation to have a professional development share-out at the exhibition of Alberto Aguilar. An artist-teacher gathering about your expertise prepared by Jorge Lucero and Chicago Arts Partnership in Education.

Line Age Gap Father/Daughter Artist Talk In Turn
Date: Wednesday, May 1, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400
Throughout this father-daughter artist talk, Alberto Aguilar tells origin stories about certain works in his survey exhibition while Madeleine Aguilar tells stories through original music written as records of certain life experiences. Their storytelling happens in turn over an hour timespan and sometimes correlates. This event is free and open to all.

Opening Reception: Alberto Aguilar moves on human scale
Date: Friday, April 26, 2019
Time: 6-9pm
Location: Gallery 400
Join us in celebrating the opening of Alberto Aguilar moves on human scale at Gallery 400. Alberto Aguilar’s first large scale survey explores how the Chicago-born and based artist’s various life roles and surroundings have shaped a searching, inquisitive practice that is grounded in, and produces, a radical everyday.

Voices: Maria Gaspar Speech Acts
Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Maria Gaspar discusses her recent project, Radioactive: Stories from Beyond the Wall, which culminated in a public site intervention at the Cook County Jail this past fall. At the intervention, Gaspar illuminated the north end wall of the jail with projected animations developed through workshops she held inside the jail with men who were incarcerated, collectively named the Radioactive Ensemble.

Artist Talks and ReceptionA Nameless Familiar
Date: Friday, April 12, 2019
Time: 5-8pm
Location: Gallery 400
Join us in celebrating the closing of the second of two MFA Thesis Exhibitions, A Nameless Familiar. The artists present their work from 5-8pm with a reception to follow.

Voices: Aruna D'Souza Is Empathy Enough?
Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
By looking at the example of the 2017 Whitney Biennial protests and their aftermath, Aruna D’Souza discusses both the value and the limits of fellow feeling when it comes to working towards social justice. Artists, curators, museum educators, and others speak lately of art’s special role in helping to develop the kind of understanding that’s necessary to cross divides of class, race, affiliation, and so on. But what if empathy isn’t enough? What if—even worse—it’s counterproductive?

Artist Talks and Opening Reception: Now & There
Date: March 22, 2019
Time: Artist Talks: 5-6pm
Opening: 6-8pm
Location: Gallery 400
Join us in celebrating the opening of the first of two MFA Thesis Exhibitions, Now & There. The artists present their work from 5-8pm with a reception to follow.

Voices: Hương Ngô
Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2019
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
In this artist talk, Hương Ngô presents recent work that reflects her research-based practice that connects personal and political histories using a conceptual, interdisciplinary, and collaborative approach. Ngô interrogates the ways that power is bound up with language and creates work reframing the hybrid, the imperfect, and the non-fluent as sites of survival and knowledge.

Forms and Features: Poetry and the Collective Experience
Date: Thursday, March 7
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Gallery 400
This poetry discussion and creative writing workshop led by Maggie Queeney begins as a conversation with our current exhibition, All have the same breath. After engaging with the exhibition, participants read and discuss poems that explore the artworks’ prevalent themes.

How are we looking today?, Bochay Drum
Date: Saturday, March 2
Time: 3:30-5:30 pm
Location: Gallery 400
*The performer will individually greet each audience member upon arrival. Please plan to arrive within the 20-minute window from 3:30 – 3:50pm.
How are we looking today? Is an experimental performative workshop in conversation with All have the same breath and presented in conjunction with All have the same breath: Symposium for Political Ecology as Practice.

All have the same breath: Political Ecology Symposium
This symposium presents the final results of the fieldwork carried out by the project participants of the project Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene, presented in conjunction with All have the same breath. This project investigated the reciprocal relationship between the emergent theories of the Anthropocene, climate change, and the global environmental crisis, and how local ecological problems are experienced in various regions of the world. Presented in conjunction with Bochay Drum’s performative workshop.

This is Not a Drill, Jefferson Pinder
Date: Tuesday, February 26
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
As a participating venue in the 2019 IN>TIME Festival, Gallery 400 hosts an in-progress presentation by the artist Jefferson Pinder on his project This is Not a Drill. Pinder trains a team of performers to venture into the deep south during Summer of 2019. Taking inspiration from Goat Island’s How dear to me the hour when daylight dies, he aggressively prepares black bodies for stylized militancy in the face of history and white nationalism.

Voices from the Farm: Digging Deep in the Vermilion Watershed
Date: Saturday, February 23, 2019
Time: 2-4pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
In an industrialized agricultural landscape dominated by big business, the ideals of organic, sustainable farming are harder to achieve than most urban environmentalists realize. Charlie Corwin humanizes this struggle with a reading of stories from the perspective of farmers in the Vermilion River watershed of Illinois. Artist Stella Brown leads a gallery discussion of her work Vermilion River Watershed Geologic Column followed by an all-ages workshop.

COPIES AND TRANSFERS: Printmaking with Tamara Becerra Valdez
Date: Saturday, February 16
Time: 1-3pm
Location: Gallery 400
In this workshop, Valdez discusses the tools, techniques, and translation of ideas in relief and found object printmaking. Each participant creates an edition of “like” prints that will be equally redistributed among each other to create a Trade Portfolio. Valdez is an artist participating in the exhibition All things share the same breath

Fluid Entanglements Curated by Robyn Mericle
Date: Tuesday, February 5
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
In conjunction with the current Gallery 400 exhibition, All have the same breath, Fluid Entanglements is a film screening curated by Robyn Mericle. The films in this lineup explore water and the natural landscape as lived, material realities inextricably intertwined with—not separate from, or merely subject to—human history, politics, and culture.

Opening Reception: All have the same breath
Date: Friday, January 18
Time: 5-8pm
Location: Gallery 400
Join us in celebrating the opening of All have the same breath at Gallery 400. This interdisciplinary exhibition will be on view at Gallery 400 from January 18-March 9, 2018.

Interactive Story/Text-Based Game Making Workshop
Date: Saturday, December 8
Time: 1-3pm
Location: Gallery 400
In this workshop led by VGA teaching artist Eden Ünlüata-Foley, participants will learn how to use Twine, a simple tool for making text-based games. No programming experience is required.

Screening: Selections from Josh Tsui’s Insert Coin
Date: Wednesday, December 5
Time: 1-3pm
Location: Gallery 400
Get a sneak peek of the forthcoming feature Insert Coin: Inside Midway’s ‘90s Revolution, a documentary diving deep into the history of Midway Games. Josh Tsui will be in attendance to present and discuss the work.

Chicago New Media Remix Night
Date: Wednesday, November 28
Time: 6pm
Location: Gallery 400
For one night only, Chicago-based game makers and new media artists Cat Bluemke, Ali Krouse, and Whitney Pow present video games that creatively rework, remix, and respond to specific pieces exhibited in Chicago New Media 1973-1992.

Pixel Art Sprite Making Workshop
Date: Saturday, November 17
Time: 1-3pm
Location: Gallery 400
Led by VGA teaching artist Eden Ünlüata-Foley, this workshop gives participants the opportunity to create their own pixel art game sprites. No programming experience is required.

CAVE2 Demonstration with Dan Sandin
Date: Wednesday, November 7
Time: 6-7:30pm
Location: University of Illinois at Chicago’s Engineering Research Facility (ERF), 842 W. Taylor Street, Room 2036
Join UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab (UIC’s EVL) co-director Dan Sandin for a special demonstration of Particle Dreams in Spherical Harmonics in the CAVE2: the next-generation virtual reality and visualization hybrid environment for immersive simulation and information analysis.

Chicago New Media Symposium
Date: Thursday, November 1
Time: 2-4pm
Location: Gallery 400 Lecture Room
Join us for conversations on the history and influence of Chicago new media. Hosted by VGA Gallery and Gallery 400 to mark the opening of Chicago New Media 1973-1992, the symposium presents dialogues between participants in Chicago’s new media history and prominent media art history scholars.

Opening Reception: Chicago New Media 1973-1992
Date: Thursday, November 1
Time: 5-8pm
Location: Gallery 400
Join us to celebrate the opening of Chicago New Media 1973-1992 at Gallery 400. Chicago New Media 1973–1992 chronicles Chicago’s contributions to new media art by artists who worked at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (UIC’s EVL), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and Midway Games and Bally.