A self-designated “keeper of objects,” the artist Theaster Gates investigates the value of things and their potential to hold layered meanings. He has been dedicated to investing in the care of these objects as a way to nurture stories and voices – often Black stories and voices – largely overlooked by history or institutional structures.
Exhibition
Tongji Philip Qian’s “Alloyed Commitments” explores notions of access, legibility, skill, and structure within and between the pieces on view.
The exhibition includes work with conservation-grade and found papers, handwriting, leather, t-shirts, wall painting, and video, among numerous other media.
Exhibition
The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts is proud to present Keila Strong’s Closet Chronicles. The exhibition will be on view in Café Logan, 915 E 60th, from October 3 - November 30, 2025.
Closet Chronicles is a mixed media art exhibit that explores the depth, beauty, and cultural significance of Black fashion across generations. This collection of 10–12 original works includes a blend of mosaics and paintings, using both silhouette and figurative forms to explore how style tells our stories.
Ania Aizman is an assistant professor of Slavic Languages & Literatures whose work engages 20th and 21st century cultural studies of Russia and East and Central Europe, particularly the intersections of literary, visual, and performing arts with historical events and political ideas. She is currently working on a book called Anarchist Currents in Russian Culture, which tells the stories of artistic, literary, and political anarchists in the Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and the Russian Federation.
Adam Green is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and History at the University of Chicago. He has taught at UChicago since 2007, having previously held faculty appointments at Northwestern University and New York University. His areas of research expertise include post-emancipation African American history, cultural studies, urban studies and intersectional critical race studies.
Pranathi Diwakar is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher and instructor at the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersections of music, media, and performance, caste and social inequality, and urban life. Her ethnographic book project investigates two music scenes situated in the southern Indian city of Chennai to uncover the ways that caste, distinction, and placemaking reinscribe or challenge sociospatial and symbolic boundaries of caste.
Emily D. Crews is the Executive Director of the Marty Center. In collaboration with its staff and faculty co-directors, she sets the research and programming agenda of the Marty Center. She also acts as its public representative and leads its partnerships with collaborators across the University, the city of Chicago, and beyond. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School's PhD program in the History of Religions, and is a scholar of Christianities in Africa and the United States.
The story of the making of the Declaration of Independence often centers on its revolutionary authors, prominent politicians such as John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and (above all) Thomas Jefferson. But the Declaration we know today is equally a product of generations of readers, individuals and groups who discovered different meanings among its self-evident truths.
