Chicago Artist Spotlight Festival
Friday & Saturday, April 26 - 27, 2024
7:30 - 9:30 pm
The Dance Center Columbia College Chicago (1306 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60605)
Buy tickets here
Award-winning Chicago artists showcase the vibrancy of Chicago’s dance ecosystem over a two-week festival that pushes concert dance in new ways. Dancemaker and poet J’Sun Howard (BFA Dance ‘19), kinetic philosopher Ayako Kato (USA Artist Fellow), pop-fringe creator Erin Kilmurray (BA Dance ‘08) with Kara Brody (Lucky Plush), and artist/activist SJ Swilley (Red Clay Dance Company) engage audiences on a journey through Grant Park and the Dance Center itself.
April 26-27 J’Sun Howard’s take carefully (or the world shatters when you don’t find your loved ones, Erin Kilmurray with Kara Brody’s KNOCKOUT, and SJ Swilley’s Who is SJ? activate the Dance Center’s three floors and theater along with sonic activations by beloved Dance Center accompanists, musicians Andrew Elbert and Joyce Lindsey!
*I'm dancing for J'Sun's piece along with Timothy "Solomon" Bowser, Damon Green, and Charles Pierson.
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Men I Have Ever Met
March 8 - April 14, 2024
Opening reception: Friday, March 8, 7:00 - 9:00pm
Co-Prosperity (3219 S Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60608)
Co-Prosperity is thrilled to present Men I Have Ever Met, a group exhibition anchored on 100+ written encounters revisiting Sungjae Lee's queer journey navigating interpersonal relationships. Lee invited 5 queer Asian artists, Club Chow, Eugene I-Peng Tang, Jay Carlon, Jinu Hong, and Vincent Chong who are based in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York to present creative responses to Lee’s stories. Please join the opening reception on March 8th from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. Live drawing session by Vincent Chong from 6:00 to 8:00 PM and music by Club Chow from 8:00 to 8:45 PM.
LUMPEN RADIO SPECIAL SERIES: MEN I HAVE EVER MET with host Sungjae Lee & Club Chow
Airs Firdays, March 15 - April 12, 11PM - Midnight
The radio show Men I Have Ever Met is a program in relation to the group exhibition with the same title at Co-Prosperity, presenting 6 queer Asian artists: Sungjae Lee, Club Chow, Eugene I-Peng Tang, Jay Carlon, Jinu Hong, and Vincent Chong. Responding to Lee’s redacted text installation, DJ Club Chow creates music employing words or sentences from the text as musical elements. Tune in to listen to the full context of the text in an ASMR style and queer Asian themed music! Every Friday, from March 15 to April 12, 11pm – 12am. An hour-long episode is composed of 4 or 5 stories and music in between.
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Dialogues
November 11, 2023 - January 27, 2024
Opening reception: Saturday, November 11, 5:00 - 7:30pm, performance starts around 6:00pm
Patron Gallery (1612 W Chicago Ave, Chicago, IL 60622)
Dialogues is a series of projects that highlight the work of Chicago’s contemporary artists from the perspective of their colleagues and peers, celebrating and interrogating the ways in which generations of artists learn from and look to each other. Dialogues began as an invitation to five local artists, each of whom invited an artist, or artists with whom to exhibit. Over the winter of 2023-2024, PATRON’s five discrete spaces become containers in which intimate visual and practice-driven conversations are hosted, suggesting ways by which material, image, and research can be rethought, shared, and expanded. Organically resulting from years of mutual respect, or suggestive of forays into new contexts, the dialogues generated offer a current perspective on the diverse landscape of contemporary practice within Chicago today. The exhibition unfolds as a series on one-to-one visual exchanges, visual metaphors for the foundational connections of the creators and makers that together shape the city, and region, today.
Dialogues features work by:
Samuel Levi Jones (with Amanda Williams), Alex Chitty (with Richard Rezac, Diane Simpson, and Gordon Hall), Alice Tippit (with Barbara Rossi), Caroline Kent (with Nate Young), and Soo Shin (with AiRos 頌恩 medill and Sungjae Lee).
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Life Work
Saturday, November 4, 2023
7:00 - 9:00 pm CST
Chicago Athletic Association Drawing Room (12 S Michigan Ave, Chicago, IL 60603)
Tiny Table Gallery is excited to unveil its fourth exhibition with an opening hosted at the Chicago Athletic Association on Saturday, November 4, 2023 from 7 to 9 pm. Life Work examines the ongoing maintenance required to sustain complex relationships, in all their varied forms. Feminist artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in the manifesto, “Maintenance Art,” articulates her idea of the Life Instinct: “unification, the eternal return, the perpetuation of MAINTENANCE of the species, survival systems and operations, equilibrium.” Building upon this concept and her manifesto more broadly, Life Work exhibits artists whose practices engage or embrace the sustained labor and trust necessary for meaningful collaboration, care, and the often messy ways we live in relation to one another. This exhibition expands the gallery’s display format, utilizing not just one, but two, miniature tables, to allow paired artworks to enter into dialogue with one another.
Life Work features the work of Jess Bass, Gabriel Chalfin-Piney, Izzy Cho, Julia González, Emma Kang James, Mike Landini, Sungjae Lee, Emilia Lichtenwagner, Ruby Que, Matt Ryerse, Rob Sohmer, and Eva Sturm-Gross.
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Sharp Tank: 3 nights of casual works-in-progress + conversation
Thursdays 8/31, 9/14, and 9/21
Doors at 6:45, show at 7pm
bim bom studios (5226 W Belmont, Chicago)
Sharp Tank features a lineup of Chicago artists across disciplines with your host Nora Sharp. Vibe is low stakes / high investment / minimum viable WIP / let's take it in and then let's talk about it / we need spaces to workshop our work earlier and oftener and without huge barriers to entry (aka nothing at all like Shark Tank). Different lineup every night with special visitations from guest movers and shakers. Nora Sharp will be performing an excerpt of my solo-in-progress each night alongside fellow artists:
Episode 1, 8/31: Bindu Poroori + Lichen Bouboushian + Aviva Jaye + Nora Sharp + Charlotte Long
Episode 2, 9/14: Christina Chammas/Ali Claiborne-Naranjo + Candy + Nora Sharp
Episode 3, 9/21: Helene Achanzar, Sungjae Lee, Camila Rivero Pooley + Nora Sharp
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Dig and Rise
July 20 - September 22, 2023
Kala Art Institute (2990 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702)
Opening hours: Tuesday - Friday, 12-5pm
Opening reception: Thursday, July 20, 6-8pm
Kala Gallery is excited to present the exhibition Dig and Rise featuring new works by 2022-2023 Kala Fellowship and Media Residency artists: Lani Asunción, Meghana Bisineer, Paola de la Calle, Rayelle Janell Gardner, Sungjae Lee, Jessica Doe (née Mehta, Tyner), Nasim Moghadam, Khadijah Morley, Rosa Park, Sass Popoli (2021-2022 Fellow), and Trina Michelle Robinson.
Dig and Rise celebrates diverse voices and research, with a focus on resilience and hope that each artist in the exhibition carries and amplifies through their projects. Together their projects enforce one another to raise powerful questions and empower us through imagination, hope, resilience, and empathy. Click here for more information!
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Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief
Sunday, July 2, 2023, 4:30 - 7:30PM CST
Hight Concept Labs (4th floor, 2233 South Throop St, Chicago, IL 60608)
Free RSVP here
Explore collective healing to shift into ease, groundedness, and joy. Curiosities of Wellness in Bodies of Grief brings together offerings of performances, live music, art therapy, movement therapy, plant medicine, taxidermy, and shared dialogue. Come as you are. Join us for a portion or all. You are welcome to come and go: Please feel free to rest in the 5th floor lounge or take a break by exploring the art exhibition on the 8th floor.
Artists include: Dorothy Carlos, Anjal Chande, Ain Eccles, Catherine Hepler, Mickey Alice Kwapis, Peregrine, SUNGJAE LEE, Cristal Sabbagh, Darling Squire, Irene Hsiao, and Sharon Udoh
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Aging
March 16 - April 20, 2023
Airlock (E-mail / DM me on IG to get the address)
Opening reception: March 16, 6-8 PM.
Participating Artists: Sungho Bae, Hwi Hahm, Jihyoung Han, Gyae Kim, Majeo Kim, Thomas Kong, Sungjae Lee, and Jio Yoo
062 in collaboration with Airlock is thrilled to present Aging at Airlock. Aging is a group show presenting works from eight Korean artists based in Seoul, New York and Chicago. Koreans count the year spent in the womb as part of their age and everyone in Korea is born one year old. Regardless of the day of their birth date, everyone ages one year on January 1. June 28th, 2023 will mark the ending of the traditional Korean Age counting system to follow the system used elsewhere in the world. Age plays a key role in the Korean Confucian tradition and culture, and eight artists were invited to reinterpret the definition of aging and the change in the system. Using a washer and dryer unit as a platform, eight artists were commissioned to create magnets for this exhibition.
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High Maintenance
March 10 - April 20, 2023
Chicago Artists Coalition
Opening hours: Wed - Fri 11am - 5pm, Sat 12-4pm
Opening Reception: Friday, March 10, 5-8pm
High Maintenance wants to invite you to think about the hidden labor and tension around the ordeal of maintaining, an act of repetition and reverse-entropy that has been capitalized and also racialized in contemporary American society. Chloe Munkenbeck borrows from architectural elements that allude to the curtain walls of a glass building to highlight the level of maintenance--as well as the technological innovations put into it to realize self-maintenance--of modern high-rises. On the other hand, SUNGJAE LEE explores organization within messiness, intimacy within the abject, focusing on labor and work that are completed by the hands. Collecting and using hair from clients who attended his private haircut sessions, the artist will present a video installation that reflects on service industries, such as drycleaning and massage businesses, that are run by Asian Americans.
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Open Door: Dreaming Ages
Friday, October 13, 2022, 7:00 - 8:00PM CST
Poetry Foundation (61 West Superior St, Chicago, IL 60654)
Video recording here
Join us for Dreaming Ages, an in-person installment of the Open Door series with Zachary Cahilll, Ama Codjoe, Calvin Forbes, Maud Lavin, Sungjae Lee, and Jenny Lin. The Open Door series highlights creative relationships in Chicago, including mentorship and collaboration.
Dreaming Ages explores nonlinear as well as chronological time in aging. and plays against silences and secrets around aging. Dreaming Ages delves into aging’s whimsy, memories, racial markings, and rediscoveries; it butts heads with the rules and comparisons of each age, and dives into erotics of aging, the delicious, explosive, sensual discoveries at different ages.
The featured writers in the group range in age from their 30s to 70s, and offer varied perspectives on aging’s pleasures and fears, expressing a range of quixotic emotions and striving corporealities. Each pushes against cultural silence about aging, and imagines its ever-changing bodily and dream states. Unicorns, sex, rage, unknowns, images, disabilities, lake swimming, and edibles will appear.
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Men I Have Ever Met in Chicago
October 7 - 28, 2022, Saturdays and Sundays only
Companion Co-op
Book a gallery appointment here
Join us for the opening of Men I Have Ever Met in Chicago by Sungjae Lee on Friday, Oct, 7th from 7-9PM 💡💛 Men I Have Ever Met in Chicago is a series of 90+ episodes of an ongoing narrative illustration and personal archive that critically explores acts of reminiscing, intercultural navigation, racial difference and the social function of the erotic. Since relocating from Seoul to Chicago in 2017, Sungjae Lee has been building an archive of their interpersonal relationships with others.
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Survey 4: Pinned by a shaft of light through the window
September 30 - November 11, 2022
Chicago Artist Coalition (2130 W Fulton St, Unit B, Chicago, IL 60612)
Click here to read the exhibition statement
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To see the event page, click here
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MdW Assembly
September 9 - 11, 2022
MANA Contemporary Chicago (2233 S Throop St, Chicago, IL 60608)
RSVP Here
MdW Assembly will bring together artist-led projects from across the region for a four-day alternative (to an) art fair September 8th-11th, 2022 in Chicago. Application, participation, and attendance are free for all. The assembly will take place at MANA Contemporary, in addition to Co-Prosperity and other Chicago venues. With the goal of bringing together multiple hyperlocal scenes from across the Midwest, gathering at MdW Assembly will facilitate opportunities to work together to build pathways for lasting coalitions of purposeful, artist-led action.
*I will present a remnant of my ongoing project Temporal Chest Hair at Ohklahomo booth.
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How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself
June 24, 2022, 7:00 PM CST
Inga Bookshop (1740 W 18th St, Chicago, IL 60608)
RSVP Here
Presented by Inga, How Shall Thou Resolve Thyself will premiere in Chicago with cast of seven Chicago-based artists, performers, and educators: Bryan Saner, Katharine Schutta, Amira Hegazy, Thomas Huston, Luke Joyner, Sungjae Lee, and Anders Zanichkowsky. This occasion marks the first time that the work will be presented by performers who were not part of the work's genesis, offering a unique exploration of empathy and shared experience.
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HATCH 2022-23 Residents
CAC is pleased to announce HATCH 2022-23 Residents. HATCH is a juried program for emerging and mid-career Chicago visual artists and curators. It offers the opportunity to produce collaborative exhibitions and strives to support an ecology of curatorial and artistic practice.
Curators: Vasia Rigou, Nicky Ni, John H. Guevara
Artists: Becca Thomas, Breanna Robinson, Chloe Munkenbeck, Eseosa Edebiri, James Hosking, Jessica Ferrer, Josué Esaú, Luis Rodríguez Rosario, María Antonia Villaseñor-Marchal, Mariel Harari, SUNGJAE LEE, Yoonshin Park
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RELAY FREEDOM
November 10, 2021 - January 21, 2022, Every Friday 12:00 PM CST
Click here to view works
RELAY FREEDOM -- is a series of video works by nine artists, curated by Mark Jeffrey. Starting November 12, a new artist will present their work on this website and the social media channels of the Goethe-Institut Chicago. Your reaction to these posts will serve as one model of how freedom spreads: is it via social media of an organization, via word of mouth, through the artist communities? Does it make a difference who knows about it, talks about it, shares it?
*My video FLAGS will be showcased on January 7, 2022. Stay tuned!
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Past, Present, Future VII
November 23, 2021, 7:00 PM EST
RSVP Here
Join us in welcoming the 2021-22 Franklin Furnace Fund Recipients! Franklin Furnace will be hosting a virtual event through The Loft introducing this year’s awardees. The artists will each give a presentation describing their newly funded projects, explaining the influences, thought-processes, and practices culminating in their eventual performances. It’s a rare chance to listen and engage with performance works in various stages of becoming. We hope to see you at our exciting event!
We will be joined by Martha Wilson and Jennifer Miller as hosts for the evening. This year’s esteemed selection panel was made up by; IV Castellanos, Kara Lynch, Carlos Martiel, Marlène Ramírez-Cancio and Joyce Yu-Jean Lee.
