ART HISTORY SERIES - Making Down Time

Art historian Leslie Wilson discusses the 2019 exhibition Down Time: On the Art of Retreat, organized by University of Chicago students in collaboration with Wilson for the Smart Museum of Art. The exhibition, which featured works by Chicago-based artists and others, explored how artists have represented Black subjects in places of respite, and how Black artists have aspired to, imagined, performed, and created spaces for sustaining themselves at a remove from everyday life and extreme events.

This talk examines how that deeply collaborative experience and its central themes have influenced Wilson’s current curatorial practice and her role as Associate Director, Academic Engagement and Research, Art Institute of Chicago.

Red Line Service is led by people with a lived experience of being unhoused. Red Line Service wields art world resources to build community, generating the sense of belonging and mutual care essential to securing and retaining housing. We collaborate with artists and cultural institutions to expand access to the art world, avowing that art can break the bonds of ingrained social roles and structures and forge new realities in which all can flourish.

Red Line Service: Art Histories is a series of lectures and conversations presented as part of Art Design Chicago Now, an initiative funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art that amplifies the voices of Chicago's diverse creatives, past and present, and explores the essential role they play in shaping the now.

RSVP through the checkout system is required.

A meal will be provided.