Zachary Cahill named new Curator at Gray Center

Nov 29, 2016

We are delighted to announce the appointment of Zachary Cahill as Curator for the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Working closely with Gray Center Director Jacqueline Stewart, our advisory council and other faculty, arts leaders across campus, and Mike Schuh, the Gray Center Program Coordinator, Zach will play a crucial role in continuing the important work of the Gray Center; cultivating compelling Mellon Collaborative Fellowships in Arts Practice and Scholarship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; and developing a range of innovative partnerships between practicing artists, scholars, and the University community. Zach will also facilitate the deep engagement of each fellow in the intellectual life of the University; ensure that the Gray Center Lab continues to be a space for creative experimentation and discovery; and develop the many collaborations in which the Gray Center participates on campus and beyond. 

Over the last several years, Zach has been actively engaged in developing dynamic arts programming at the University of Chicago, particularly in his role as Open Practice Committee Coordinator in the Department of Visual Arts from 2007-2016, where he also served as a Lecturer. Zach is an accomplished interdisciplinary artist. Since 2009, he has been working on the long-term project the USSA, an exhibition-based fictional narrative relating to concepts of nation building. He has had solo exhibitions at sites including the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art; and Threewalls, Chicago. His work has recently been included in Broken Flag at Iceberg Projects, Chicago (2016); Goethe Institut's Kultursymposium, Weimar, Germany (2016); The Works: Artists in and from Chicago at CAB Brussels, Belgium (2015); Magic Mountain at the MCA Santa Barbara (2015); the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014), among other exhibitions in the US and Europe. In 2012, Zach was a participant in The Retreat - dOCUMENTA (13) at the Banff Centre in Canada. His writings have appeared in international contemporary art journals such as: Afterall (where he also served as a co-editor), Artforum, Artforum.com, The Exhibitionist, Frieze, and Mousse. In 2015, Newcity magazine named Zach to its Art 50 listing of Chicago's Visual Vanguard. Zach earned his BFA in Sculpture from Cornell University in 1995 and his MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago in 2007.