Nov 9th 2025

Jill Wells: Virtual Artist Talk

@ Fourth Presbyterian Church

Online

Opening Sunday, November 9th, from 12:30PM - 1PM

On view through Thursday, November 20th

Join us for a Virtual Artist Talk with Jill Wells in the Borwell Dining Room on the first floor of the Gratz Center, Fourth Presbyterian Church, 126 E Chestnut St, Chicago, IL.

Link will be posted in the Facebook event on the day of the event.
Exhibition dates: Oct 11 – Nov 20, 2025
The gallery is open 7 days a week 8:30am-6pm

THIS ARCHIVE IS US is a bold meditation on history, presence, and belonging, built from archival text in Braille drawn from the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Black Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement by Glenda Armand. These words, in Braille, emerge as both mark and material — a form that resists invisibility and asserts access as part of the work’s very skin. This exhibition positions the archive not as something distant or static, but as immediate, embodied, and personal.

The works glow with ombre washes of pinks and purples layered across Braille paper, stretched over pale nude pine and bur-free wood. In works where light emerges from within, LED illumination pierces the surface, casting a luminous hum that underscores the material’s tactile weight. This exhibition gestures toward the intersectional realities inscribed in the archive — reminding us that within these histories, we too are present, overlapping in identities that resist erasure. By collapsing text into color, touch, and light, this exhibition turns civil rights documents into multisensory encounters — works that preserve while also declaring. The title echoes the cadence of protest chants — “This is our movement!” … “This is what access looks like!” … “This is the people’s power!” — folding archive into immediacy, and history into presence. THIS ARCHIVE IS US reminds us that the voices embedded in law and memory are not distant records.

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