Positions: New Landscapes

Positions: New Landscapes is a group exhibition featuring works by six Chicago-based contemporary artists who explore the radical potential of landscape to address timely conversations about land stewardship, environmental justice, immigration, and racial violence in US history. Approaching landscape from a diverse range of perspectives, artists Lydia Cheshewalla, Kelly Kristin Jones, Norman Long, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal, Elsa Muñoz, and Leticia Pardo break boundaries of the traditional landscape genre to intervene in civic dialogues rooted in sites and their histories. Through photography, sculpture, sound, installation, and painting, the exhibition highlights unique approaches to engaging the landscape and how individual identities shape these practices and perspectives.

Positions: New Landscapes is curated by Mariela Acuña, Exhibitions and Residency Manager.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Lydia Cheshewalla is an Osage ephemeral artist from Oklahoma, living and working in motion throughout the Great Plains ecoregion. Her ephemeral installations are rooted in Indigenous land stewarding practices and emerge as an act of grounding in response to time, place, and relationship with the non-human world.

Raised on the West Side of Chicago, photographer Kelly Kristin Jones alters photographs of public and private space to point to histories of racial violence in the US and challenge racist historical narratives. She uses erasure as a tool and metaphor in her work to heal the landscape from these violent histories.

Norman Long is an artist, designer, and composer born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. His most recent body of work, Calumet in Dub, is the result of years of research on the ecological effect that industry has had on the Calumet Region in Chicago’s South Side. Calumet in Dubcombines field recordings, sonified research data, and photographs into an experimental sound installation.

Multidisciplinary artist zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o’neal encourages ways of being and feeling beyond the systems we inhabit. Her landscapesprompt the question: who gets to claim a sense of belonging in the American landscape? Drawing from Black feminist and queer theory, her photographs of landscapes are often constructed from various sources from her travels across the US and combined to create new places where more people can feel whole.

Elsa Muñoz is a Mexican-American artist born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. In her Controlled Burns series of painted landscapes, Muñoz brings attention to the Indigenous practice of using fire to maintain healthy ecosystems. She sees the process of making these paintings as a meditation and a way to process the psychological effect of losing connection with ancestral knowledge.

Leticia Pardo explores subjects like migration, place-making, citizenship across borders, identity and belonging, and how these manifest in the city. The exhibition includes her installation of embossed paper pieces that appear to be minimal representations of rock formations, but are in fact embossed fragments of the US-Mexico border that wears and breaks apart each time a person crosses.

ABOUT THE HYDE PARK ART CENTER

Hyde Park Art Center, at 5020 South Cornell Avenue on Chicago’s vibrant South Side, is a hub for contemporary arts in Chicago, serving as a gathering, production, and exhibition space for artists and the broader community to cultivate ideas, impact social change, and connect with new networks. Since its inception in 1939, Hyde Park Art Center has grown from a small collective of quirky artists to establishing a strong legacy of risk-taking and experimentation, emerging as a unique Chicago arts institution with social impact. Today, the Art Center offers a diverse suite of programs for artists and art lovers of all backgrounds, ages, and stages in their careers including: contemporary art exhibitions in six galleries; open-access community-based school with 1,500 annual enrollments; weekly arts education to 1,000 elementary school students in public schools; weekly and summer teen programs for 100 teen artists; professional-advancement programs for artists; a local and international artist residency; and public programs that connects residents with Chicago art and artists.The Art Center functions as an amplifier for creative voices of today and tomorrow, providing the space to cultivate new work and connections.

Photo credit: Elsa Muñoz, Controlled Burn, 2023.