The Driehaus Museum is characterized by a rich history and an impressive wealth of architectural styles. The site of the Museum, the Gilded Age-era Samuel Nickerson Mansion, offers a rare opportunity to map important and often overlooked histories and genealogies. While the unique design and architecture of the Mansion have been documented and studied, A Tale of Today: Materialities proposes to investigate more deeply the materials that comprise the very fabric of the building.

The materialities of objects and architectural features can link past to present histories in original and compelling ways. They connect different cultures and define cultural boundaries. Never inert, materials are inherently political. They are active participants in the ongoing negotiations that build our present and define our futures. There is a new prominence of materiality in art and it is a clear manifestation of our growing awareness that humans no longer are the undisputed centers of everything and that our world is the result of collaborative processes with other living and non-living, human and more-than-human agents.

Materialities invites artists to select a specific material from the Driehaus Museum to engage in a new materialist dialogue with it. In conversation with guest curator Dr. Giovanni Aloi, the artists will research the histories of their chosen material to produce an engaged, critically aware, integrated response designed to uncover hidden cultural, historical, and ecological networks that bind the very fabric of the house to distant shores, peoples, skill sets, traditions, ideologies, and economic forces.

Major support for Materialities is generously provided by the Driehaus Trust Company, LLC., and Gary Metzner and Scott Johnson, with additional support from Russell Reynolds and Friends of Materialities.

Materialities is part of Art Design Chicago, a citywide collaboration initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art that highlights the city’s artistic heritage and creative communities.

About the Artists

Rebecca Beachy is a Chicago-based artist, writer, and educator whose practice explores the complex relationships we have with the natural world. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jonas N.T. Becker is an interdisciplinary, research-based artist. Recent exhibitions include a survey at Wexner Center for the Arts and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Nazarian/Curcio. He works in Waiteville, WV, and Chicago, IL, where he is an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute.

Olivia Block is a Chicago-based, experimental music composer, performer, and contemporary media artist. Her research-driven installations include field recordings, found sounds, found images, electronic sounds, video, and objects. She is known for presenting sound work through installations of multiple speakers. Block regularly performs at festivals and tours throughout America, Europe, and Japan.

Barbara Cooper works in sculpture, drawing, and public art, as well as designing gardens and structures for dance and theater. She has had numerous exhibitions, residencies and fellowships, both in the US and internationally, and has used them as opportunities to research and engage with new environments and geographies. A graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Cleveland Institute of Art, Cooper’s work is in the collections of many esteemed museums.

Richard Hunt is one of the most recognized American sculptors of the past century. His distinguished art career spanned seven decades. During his lifetime, Hunt held over 160 solo exhibitions and is represented in more than 100 public museums across the globe. Hunt passed away in 2023.

Industry of the Ordinary is a two-person conceptual art collaborative, made up of Chicago-based artists and educators Adam Brooks and Mathew Wilson. Their work is often performative or sculptural, incorporating audience participation and interaction with the artists. For over 20 years, they have used performance, installation, objects, and interventions to explore and celebrate “ordinariness” and to challenge and elevate the everyday experience into an endeavor worthy of study and veneration.

Beth Lipman is a glass artist who is renowned for her sculptural compositions which recreate the bounty and visual sumptuousness of Renaissance and Baroque still-life paintings, particularly 17th-century Dutch scenes. Lipman earned a BFA from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 1994.

Luftwerk is comprised of artists Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero. Since founding Luftwerk in 2007, their practice has developed a significant body of work that explores the interplay of light, color, and space through the exploration of data, nature, history, and architecture. Their work is multi-faceted, taking the form of installations, site-specific interventions, and artwork, engaging with landscapes and architecture as well as galleries, museums, and art centers.

Dakota Mace is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on translating the language of Diné history and beliefs. Mace received her MA and MFA degrees in Photography and Textile Design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BFA in Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts. As a Diné (Navajo) artist, her work draws from the history of her Diné heritage, exploring the themes of family lineage, community, and identity.

Bobbi Meier is a Chicago-based multimedia artist. Known primarily for her provocative, fiber-based abstract sculptures, she challenges boundaries between public and private, exploring themes of proper manners and repressed sexuality in her work. She earned both her MAAE and MFA degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was awarded a Kohler Arts/Industry residency in 2019.

Laleh Motlagh, born and raised in Iran, is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. In her practice, she delves into profound explorations of love and intimacy, resilience and care, religion and spirituality, while remaining deeply connected to her localities and surroundings. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Motlagh received her MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago.

Ebony G. Patterson is a multimedia artist creating intricate, densely layered, and visually dazzling works that center the culture and aesthetics of postcolonial spaces. Patterson’s practice includes painting, photography, video, performance, sculpture, textiles, and installation. Across media, her works address themes of postcolonial space, visibility and invisibility, regeneration and mourning.

Jefferson Pinder focuses primarily on found objects and video, He investigates identity by creating dynamic circumstances through his innovative use of materials. His work has been featured in numerous group and solo shows including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Showroom Mama in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the 11th Shanghai Biennale.

Edra Soto is a Puerto Rican born interdisciplinary artist and co-director of the outdoor project space The Franklin. Her recent projects, which are motivated by civic and social actions, prompt viewers to reconsider cross-cultural dynamics, the legacy of colonialism, and personal responsibility.
About the Curator

Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, and educator specializing in the histories of art and the representation of nature in art. Aloi gained his PhD in natural history and contemporary art from Goldsmiths University of London and has worked as an educator at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries. His essays on art and nature and other subjects have appeared in The Guardian, Apollo, Esse, Flash Art, Whitehotmagazine, and many academic journals.

He has published with Columbia University Press, Phaidon, MIT, and Prestel and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota series ‘Art after Nature’. Since 2006, Aloi has been the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Aloi is the author of several books including Art & Animals (2011) and Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019) and Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019). Since 2021, Aloi is US Correspondent for the international publication Esse Magazine – Art + Opinion. He has contributed to BBC radio programs and curated exhibitions in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe.

Aloi currently teaches modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and London.
About A Tale Of Today

In 2019, the Driehaus Museum launched a pilot project under the title A Tale of Today. The project is comprised of two new initiatives. The first is a series of exhibitions that present work by leading contemporary artists to expand the immersive experience in art, architecture, design, and history of the Nickerson Mansion, the Museum’s home. The second offers allied programs tied to these contemporary exhibitions including a six-month Fellowship opportunity that creates an artistic community of established and emerging artists as well as museum and art professionals.

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Tags: A Tale of Today: Materialities, Adam Brooks, Barbara Cooper, Beth Lipman, Bobbi Meier, Chicago, Dakota Mace, Dr. Giovanni Aloi, Ebony G. Patterson, Edra Soto, Industry of the Ordinary, Jefferson Pinder, Jonas N.T. Becker, Laleh Motlagh, Loop, Luftwerk, Mathew Wilson, Olivia Block, Petra Bachmaier, Rebecca Beachy, Richard Hunt, Sean Gallero, The Richard H. Driehaus Museum