Book Launch: Art in Pursuit of Common Cause
The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry invites you to join us for the launch of Art in Pursuit of a Common Cause, a new publication from Delmonico Books that examines the development and reception of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 (TCC), a citywide project in Chicago that included the work of 29 artists installed at 19 venues throughout the city, and was curated by recent Gray Center Fellow Abigail Winograd. Winograd also co-edited and wrote for the book. The volume commemorates the widely discussed exhibition, which sought to underscore art’s power to catalyze change and to unleash the imagination on pressing social challenges, including environmental justice, public health crises, economic inequality and others.
Art in Pursuit of Common Cause seeks to document the ideas, roadblocks, rewards and questions that were raised during the planning, exhibitions and aftermath of the citywide exhibition. An attempt has been made to include content rarely seen in the traditional exhibition catalog, to analyze and amplify the voices of actual visitors and to place the project’s learnings in the context of the shifting ground of museum practice.
The exhibition centered on the work of the following artists, all recipients of the prestigious MacArthur Fellows award: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Ida Applebroog, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Mel Chin, Nicole Eisenman, Wendy Ewald, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, David Hammons, Gary Hill, Alfredo Jaar, Toba Khedoori, An-My Lê, Whitfield Lovell, Rick Lowe, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Trevor Paglen, Fazal Sheikh, Shahzia Sikander, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Willis, Fred Wilson, and Xu Bing.