This month, we launch several new programs at Mana Chicago. First, we are introducing an Interactive Photo Studio inspired by Portraits of Craigslist Strangers by Jamie Diamond, currently on view at Mana Chicago. Artists at Mana Faheem Majeed and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford of the Floating Museum will invite the general public to engage in a temporal art installation. We also continue Five Works with paintings by Alex Bradley Cohen, whose works reflects human idiosyncrasies. Featured Artists at High Concept Labs, a.pe.ri.od.ic, will be holding a performance on post-Caegan works from their repertoire. Select open studios will include Artists at Mana, Arnold J. Kemp, Rajee Aryal, and Matt Morris. The café will be serving complimentary coffee, wine, and bagels supplied by local Pilsen sandwich shop Andorka’s, and donuts from Front Room Donuts.

Five Works: Alex Bradley Cohen
Five Works is a bi-monthly project series organized by La Keisha Leek, Exhibitions & Community Programs Manager, that features 5 new and/or recent works from emerging Chicago artists in the Mana Chicago office space. April’s segment of Five Works will showcase Alex Bradley Cohen, a painter who addresses the collective human experience in relation to ideas of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. Cohen is an alumnus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has exhibited at The Craft and Folk Art Museum, The Elmhurst Art Museum, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.

Jamie Diamond Interactive Photo Studio
Inspired by Jamie Diamond’s Portraits of Craigslists Strangers, Mana Chicago will host an interactive Photo Studio. With prompts given directly from the artist, get up-close and personal with a friend — or a stranger — and create photographs reminiscent of a formal portrait studio.

Floating Museum Installation
Floating Museum is a collaborative art project that creates temporary, site-responsive museum spaces to activate sites of cultural potential throughout Chicago’s neighborhoods. Our interactive spaces engage local artists, historians, and organizations in events that challenge traditional museum thinking and generate community engagement and conversation.

From March through April Floating Museum will curate a series of works and installations from previous and current iterations of the project.

High Concept Labs: a.pe.ri.od.ic
a.pe.ri.od.ic is a collective of composers, instrumentalists and vocalists with experience in a myriad of experimental music practices. The group has a history of interpreting distinctive pieces using a collaborative rehearsal process, deriving meaning and intention from oblique prose scores with great sensitivity. They will be performing a post-Caegan inspired performance, and will invite members of the audience to participate in their group scenes.

Featured Studios
Studio 604: Arnold J. Kemp
Studi 513: Rajee Aryal
Studio 423: Matt Morris

Exhibitions at Mana
Francesco Clemente and Chuck Connelly in the Pellizzi Family Collections
Through August 31, 2017
The exhibition features thirteen works drawn from the collections of members of the Pellizzi family, and was collected by Francesco Pellizzi, who is an Italian anthropologist and art critic, and co-Founder and Editor, since 1981, of the Harvard multi-disciplinary journal RES – Anthropology and Aesthetics (currently published by University of Chicago Press).

This is the second part to the series of exhibitions of Pellizzi’s collection. The first, which closed in January 2017, featured Julio Galán and Daniel Lezama, and the third will feature works by George Condo in September 2017.

Odes To Transience I Create: Encounters with Jamie Diamond & Matthew Weinstein
Through May 31, 2017
Curated by Mana’s Curatorial Director Ysabel Pinyol, the exhibition asks viewers to examine moments of brief, often impersonal interactions, specifically those involving relationships that perish synchronously with the moment. A collection of three video works placed throughout the building — in the lobby, on the 4th floor, and in the 5th floor café — the pieces are installed in transient areas: spaces primarily used for passing through en route to a destination.

See more about this event on our website: manacontemporarychicago.com/firstsaturdays

Image: Alex Bradley Cohen, on a good day

Official Website

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Tags: a.pe.ri.od.ic, Alex Bradley Cohen, Arnold J. Kemp, Chicago, Faheem Majeed, First Saturdays at Mana, High Concept Labs, Jamie Diamond, jeremiah hulsebos-spofford, Lower West Side, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Matt Morris, Rajee Aryal