Revolutionary Frequencies: exhibition, roundtable, performance, dance party (2025)

A celebration of music, dance, art, friendship, queer life, love, thought, and resistance!

This project at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry for Revolutionary Frequencies,  brought together artists and scholars to celebrate revolutionary frequencies and their embodied and gestural histories. Built on oft quoted adage: “If I can’t dance it’s not my revolution” we invite you to join us to dialogue, listen, and move together to build on the histories of dance and resistance from ACT UP to Chicago’s House scene and Tbilisi’s underground queer resistance.

The evening began with “Chronicles of Resistance,” an exhibition by photographer and DJ Dato Koridze documenting the role that the underground queer dance scene has played in the recent demonstrations in Tbilisi, Georgia.  After the exhibition reception, we convened a roundtable discussion about dance and resistance with Theaster Gates, Thomas DeFrantz, Kris Trujilo, Jonathan Flatley, DJ Duane Powell, Dato Koridze, and Uta Bekaia, moderated by Leah Feldman. This was  followed bya performance by drag artist Miss Angelíca Grace, Empress Darling Shear and Uta Bekaia featuring costumes by Bekaia.  Which immediately led kicked off a dance party with DJ sets by Citizens Union (Dato Koridze) and DJ Duane Powell.

Awi’nakola Chicago (2023)

Awi’nakola means “we are one with the land and the sea.” It was also chosen as the name for a foundation started by a group of Indigenous knowledge keepers, scientists, and artists working together to find effective responses to the climate crisis and educate others through the process.

Art forms a central part of Awi’nakola through the work of artists Rande Cook (Ma’amtagila), Lindsay Katsitsakatste Delaronde (Kanienke’haka), Kelly Richardson, and Paul Walde—all based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia—and Chicago-based curator Stephanie Smith. Awi’nakola Chicago 2023 was a week-long visit of conversations during which the artists connected with Chicago-area colleagues and members of the public, shared ideas, and planted seeds toward future collaborations.

You can read a special feature on Awi’nakola is Portable Gray HERE.

For more about Awi’nakola, visit https://www.awinakola.com

On Drawing Drawing On (2022)

This program brought together almost 40 artists and scholars from various genres and disciplines to explore how drawing is at once a catalyst for shaping reality, a middle place between being and becoming, and a fully realized work of art in its own right.

Download the exhibition guide and essay.

Watch two video tours of the exhibition led by curators Zachary Cahill and Mike Schuh.

Busan Biennale (2021)

In partnership with the Busan Biennale, the University of Chicago’s Center for East Asian Studies Committee on Korean Studies, and Empty Bottle Presents, the Gray Center was pleased to support a year-long series of projects with artists, musicians, and writers.

The Busan Biennale 2020 was originally conceived and presented in South Korea by artistic director Jacob Fabricius. Together with curator Stephanie Cristello, they reimagined Words at an Exhibition《열 장의 이야기와 다섯 편의 시》an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems for a Chicago audience as The Chicago Chapter.

Read a feature about the project in The Korea Times HERE.

Another Idea: an actual conceptual art exhibition (2020)

In 2020, during the outbreak of the Covid 19 Pandemic, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry launched a conceptual art show that was open from June 1st and ran through July 31st. Drawing on the histories and methods of conceptual art, artist created work that  reimagined what an exhibition could be during a moment when the customs of normal exhibition making were thrown into deep disarray and inaccessible. Another Idea saw artists create instructional pieces, time-based performances over Craig’s List, gatherings on the Moon and abandon lots, concerts and stand up performance, downloadable prints, Internet-based art projects from the 90s and more.  Exhibiting  artists included: Zarouhie Abdalian, Carris Adams, Victor Burgin, Julia Eckhardt,Chelsea A. Flowers, Theaster Gates, Liam Gillick, Renée Green, Susan Hiller, Kyle Bellucci Johanson, Gloria Maximo, Devin T. Mays, Antoni Miralda, Pope.L, Cauleen Smith, Mami Takahashi, Philip von Zweck, and Gillian Wearing.     

The exhibition catalog can be found HERE.

A review by Kerry Cardoza in NewCity HERE.

Listening with Peter Ablinger:
Music’s Over (2020)

Experimental composer Peter Ablinger’s 9-day residency at the Gray Center threaded a series of talks, composition seminars, and experimental discussions in between multiple performance events featuring world premieres and internationally renowned ensembles.

The Gray Center kicked off the inaugural week of our experimental sound and music program, Gray Sound, with Peter Ablinger’s first visit to Chicago. For decades, Ablinger’s work has been forcing open fault lines in the topography of the audible. His vast output of scores, electronic pieces, installations, and conceptual works consistently finds ways—funny, pointed, disturbing—to put the ear’s organization of reality in doubt. Is that a voice, and what is a voice? When is something newly or no longer music? Noise? Information? In Ablinger’s cunning scramble of sonic categories, listening loses its lay of the land. Concepts come unmoored from sounds, and the land changes shape.

In partnership with Goethe-Institut Chicago, Gray Sound hosted a nine-day residency from Sunday, January 19 — Monday, January 27, 2020. The residency will threaded a series of talks, composition seminars, and experimental discussions in between multiple performance events featuring world premieres and internationally renowned ensembles, rendering Ablinger’s work alone and alongside other artists who enjoy his influence. Running throughout the week at the Gray Center Lab was the world premiere of MUSIC’S OVER, one of the most ambitious of Ablinger’s Quadraturen (“Squarings”) series: a computer-controlled piano performing a clangorous, spectrally derived “phonorealist” transcription of a raucous live Doors performance from 1970. All were invited to come by the Lab, press the red button on the piano, and prepare to lose and refind their way.

Performances by Fonema Consort, Wet Ink Ensemble, and a•pe•ri•od•ic, featuring two world premieres by Ablinger as well as works by Chiyoko Szlavnics, Fernanda Aoki Navarro, Sam Pluta, and others.

You can watch a video and learn more about Listening with Peter Ablinger: Music’s Over HERE.

Read an interview with Peter Ablinger by Gray Center Director, Seth Brodsky, and artist, Philip von Zweck in Portable Gray HERE.

Loose Machinery: A Symposium On The Chicago Race Riots of 1919 (2019)

An interdisciplinary symposium that explored the history and legacy of the 1919 race riots. On the centennial year of the 1919 race riots this symposium examined the brutal chapter of Chicago’s history and the Red Summer . 

Wednesday, October 23
9:30 AM – Breakfast and welcome
10:00 AM – CRR19: 1919 Chicago Race Riot Commemorative Project – Franklin N. Cosey-Gay, Co-director, CRR19; – Director, Chicago Center for Youth Violence Prevention
11:00 AM – Global 1919 – Noah Hansen, PhD Student, Department of English Language & Literature
1:00 PM – Real Estate and the Riot – Adrienne Brown, Associate Professor, Department of English Language & Literature
2:00 PM – Mapping the Riot – John Clegg, Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
3:30 PM – The 1919 Race Riot and its Legacy: Normalizing Segregation – Adam Green, Associate Professor of American History and the College
4:30 PM – Poetry and Memory – Eve L. Ewing, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration
7:30 PM – Film Screening: Within Our Gates, directed by Oscar Micheaux (1920) – featuring a new live score by DJ Rae Chardonnay. Post-Screening Discussion: DJ Rae Chardonnay, Jacqueline Stewart, Professor, Cinema and Media Studies; Allyson Nadia Field, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies

Disciplines of Experiment: a sympoisum/practicum (2018)

The Disciplines of Experiment symposium/practicum brought together humanistic scholars from a variety of disciplines, as well as poets, writers, artists, game designers, performers, musicians, and scientists to explore the concept of “experiment” as a framework, objective, method, and provocation.

External participants include Natalia Cecire from the University of Sussex, D‘Lane Compton from the University of New Orleans, and Carla Nappi from the University of Pittsburgh. Heidi Coleman, Rachel Galvin, Edgar Garcia, Travis Jackson, Heinrich Jaeger, Patrick Jagoda, Adrian Johns, Our Literal Speed, Sam Pluta, Dieter Roelstraete, C. Riley Snorton, Ashlyn Sparrow, Jennifer Wild, and John Wilkinson will be joining us from the University of Chicago.

Sponsored by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, The Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Arts, Science, and Culture Initiative at The University of Chicago.

For more about the Disciplines of Experiment: Symposium/ Practicum watch video HERE.