Director of Programs and Fellowship
Founding Editor-in-Chief, Portable Gray
Over the last several years, Zachary Cahill 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. Zachary 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 Zachary to its Art 50 listing of Chicago's Visual Vanguard. Zachary 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.
Gray Center Curator Zachary Cahill was featured as one of "Chicago's Visual Vanguard" in Newcity's annual Art 50 issue. "Zachary Cahill’s politically and historically charged practice transcends boundaries between roles as artist, critic, curator, writer and educator."
The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is thrilled to announce the appointment of Zachary Cahill as our new Curator.
Read more »Join scholar Bill Brown (University of Chicago, Department of English) , architect Ted Brown, artist and Gray Center curator Zachary Cahill, and cross-disciplinary writer Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago, Department of English), and artist Jessica Stockholder (University of Chicago, Department of Visual Arts) for an evening of food and conversation about the role of assemblage in each of their given practices.
The Gray Center is excited to inaugurate our Sidebar series with a discussion between art historian Gwen Allen and Gray Center curator Zachary Cahill. Sidebar is a new series of conversations and events hosted by the Gray Center. This edition will focus on the ways in which artists use the magazine as "an alternative medium and experimental space."
The Gray Center is kicking off the fall with a new edition of SIDEBAR. Join us for an evening of food, drinks, and conversation with artist Tony Cokes. The discussion will focus on current interests within Coke's practice, which locates itself at the intersection of conceptual art, theory, politics, and pop-music. The conversation will be moderated by Gray Center curator Zachary Cahill.
We, the Wrens, invite you to our exhibition. This exhibition is the result of a DIY media campaign comprised of posters, whispers, video interviews and a library containing over 1,200 books on the subject of immigration.
As part of the closing of the Smart Museum exhibition Revolution Every Day, Russian poet Kirill Medvedev will perform selections of his work, followed by a discussion with exhibiting artist Cauleen Smith and exhibition curators Robert Bird, Zachary Cahill, and Christina Kiaer.
The Gray Center is pleased to announce the launch of Portable Gray, a new journal dedicated to the weirdness found at the heart of the arts and scholarship(s). Free food. Free drinks. Meet contributors. Complimentary copies of the inaugural issue.
Please join us for a special Sidebar conversation with artists Devin T. Mays and Caroline Kent in conversation with UChicago Professor Theaster Gates and the Gray Center's Zachary Cahill.
Never Not in Crisis: Forms of Calamity in Catastrophic Times Symposium
How do we come together in the wake of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic? What forms of literature, music, theory, & visual art will facilitate the forms of community we need?
This symposium explores how to engage with the forms of suffering the COVID-19 pandemic has made visible on a global scale, alongside its multiplying aftershocks and afterlives—from economic instability to the War in Ukraine.
