About
The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is a forum at the University of Chicago for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. The Center seeks to intervene in existing structures that keep scholarship and the arts separate from each other, and to help reimagine new relationships between them.
By providing a zone for serious play and genuine exploration, scholars and artists take risks not otherwise possible given their professional profiles. The experimental nature of the Gray Center’s work has yielded a wide variety of forms through which past, current, and prospective fellows share their work with diverse constituencies on campus, throughout Chicago and the US, and globally.
In September 2013, the Gray Center opened the Gray Center Lab, a 1,100-square-foot space in Midway Studios that can be configured to serve as a classroom, studio, collaborative workspace, or exhibition and performance space. Since its opening, The Lab has been home to a variety of projects and events related to our fellowships, programs, and partnerships with other organizations. We have hosted exhibitions, performances, panel discussions, poetry readings, classes, and artists-in-residence.
The Center is a result of the generosity of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Foundation. Richard Gray was a lifelong Chicagoan, internationally distinguished art dealer, noted private collector, and architectural landmark preservationist. University of Chicago alumna Mary Gray, AM ’78 (Art History), is a published author who has written two books on Chicago’s public sculpture and murals. We are proud to continue their tradition of pushing the boundaries of art and scholarship.
