A building-wide event featuring exhibition celebrations, open studios, performances, a holiday art sale, and hands-on making!

1-4 pm / Exhibition Receptions

Join us as we celebrate the opening of two exhibitions, Mutuality: The Center Program Exhibition and Vesna Jovanovic: Carnival. We also celebrate the closing of Mark Me, Too: Five Artists.

1-3 pm / Art-making Workshop

Inspired by Vesna Jovanovic: Carnival, Sofia Fernandez Diaz leads a workshop that encourages visitors to respond to poured paint through drawing.

1-4 pm / Holiday Art Sale and Fundraiser

Join us for our annual Holiday Art Sale, featuring high quality work from our Oakman-Clinton School & Studio artists! Pottery, prints, paintings, photographs and more will be available for purchase. A portion of the proceeds go to supporting our school and studio programs. Get your holiday shopping done early with a thoughtful, unique gift of artwork from Hyde Park Art Center!

1:30 and 3 pm / Performance of Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 — Myths for the Moon by Irene Hsiao

Named for the Taiwanese love song “The moon represents my heart,” Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 is a performance installation and community art project created by Irene Hsiao as part of her year-long residency at the Hyde Park Art Center that bridges places and people, times and cultures. Mond(e) means moon(s) (German); world (French); also humans, singular and plural, Asian, American, international. In Mond(e), site-specific performances between Hsiao and new collaborators each month will occur within an installation built in the artist’s studio and evolve in reference to the periodic phases of the moon: its darkness, its reflection, its influence on tides, our poems, our myths, stories, and legends, our songs old and new.

2 pm / Performance by Hannah Marcus, Maya Nguyen, and Kat Bawden

Forms of Flesh is a performance work by Hannah Marcus, Maya Nguyen, and Kat Bawden merging their practices in movement, sound, and video. The piece considers flesh as a site of memory, contemplating how the body reacts to its shifting surroundings. It explores identities of flesh—as comfort, as armor, as emotional repository—to effort towards understanding the body’s capacity for transformation. Forms of Flesh first materialized out of Chicago Grand Gallery’s exhibition of the same name curated by Alicja Seledec in August of 2025.

2-4 pm / Guida Family Creative Wing Open Studios

Visit the studios of Guida Family Creative Wing Artists, Sabba S. Elahi, Irene Hsiao, Leticia Pardo, Norman W. Long, Anwulika Anigbo, Katherine Lampert, Jess Atieno, Laveen Gammie, Tongji Philip Qian.

About the exhibitions:

Vesna Jovanovic: Carnival

Gallery 5 October 11, 2025 – February 15, 2026

Recent ink on paper (polypropylene) work by Chicago-based artist Vesna Jovanovic features invented spaces that collapse body and setting in dramatic and humorous measure. Jovanovic considers how we navigate social space and relationships in a post-pandemic culture. Her research led her to read about Rabelais, a French medieval writer, who included bodily topics such as food, sex, defecation, and slapstick violence in comical ways in his novels. Some literary theorists claim that his grotesque humor deliberately maintains a tradition from medieval marketplace carnivals where an emphasis on the body—in contrast to the mind or soul—restored a sense of kinship among the masses. These festivals diffused tensions between people from different social positions and created camaraderie, if only for a day. Jovanovic’s seductively dark and funny imagery of candy and other items lodged in fleshy cavities reminds us not to take life too seriously.

Mutuality: The Center Program Biennial Exhibition

Gallery 1, Gallery 2 & Cleve Carney Gallery December 13, 2025 – March 8, 2026

The Center Program offers artists who are ready to raise their practice to the next level the opportunity to develop new work, receive feedback from art professionals, and work towards an exhibition at the Art Center over the course of a year. For this edition of the program, the cohort focuses on Mutuality as the guiding principle for discussion and discourse toward new works. Defining mutuality as “demonstrating mutual care and interest as artists and people.” This core value of mutuality challenges Center Program artists, as people living in the United States, to think about how intentions, works, and practices impact our world. This eleventh iteration of the program will be guest curated by Teresa Silva, an independent curator based in Chicago and feature the work of twenty artists: Bethany Cordero, Amethyst Davis, Caitlyn Doran, Josué Esaú, Richard Gessert, Jalen Hamilton, Juan Molina Hernández, Amay Kataria, Millicent Kennedy, Deborah Kraft, Dawn Liddicoatt, Charlotte Mays, Kelly McKaig, Gabriel Moreno, Vida Sačić, Carlos Salazar-Lermont, Eugene I-Peng Tang, Carina Vargas-Nuñez, Frank Vega, and Katie Vota.

Mark Me, Too: Five Artists

Kanter Family Foundation Gallery August 9 – December 14, 2025

One of the most common enactments of an artist’s practice is mark-making. An artist’s mark can be reflective of art historical genres, time periods, and suggestive of their gestural idiosyncrasies. Inspired by Toni Morrison’s canonical text Beloved, Hyde Park Art Center presents Mark Me, Too: Five Artists, exploring the ways contemporary artists turn this tradition on its head. Curated by Dr. Rikki Byrd, the artists on view extend brushstrokes, threads, and unlikely materials––from birthing blankets to egg shells––to reflect on how they carry marks of migration, movement, hybridity, legacy, and identity through their practice. The final works by Lisa DeAbreu, Lex Marie, Natasha Moustache, Lola Ayisha Ogbara, and Ciarra K. Walters leave seams visible, overturn popular emblems, or obscure materials only to make them palpable under the surface, bringing forth the complexity of recollecting the past, what Morrison called “rememory.”

Mark Me, Too and Dr. Rikki Byrd’s residency are made possible due to the generosity of the Guida Family Fund for Creativity.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Alicja Seledec, Amay Kataria, Amethyst Davis, Anwulika Anigbo, Bethany Cordero, Caitlyn Doran, Carina Vargas-Nunez, Carlos Salazar Lermont, Center Day, Chicago, Ciarra K. Walters, Dawn Liddicoatt, Deborah Kraft, Eugene I-Peng Tang, Frank Vega, Gabriel Moreno, Hannah Marcus, Hyde Park, Hyde Park Art Center, Irene Hsiao, Jalen Hamilton, Jess Atieno, Josué Esaú, Juan Molina Hernandez, Kat Bawden, Katherine Lampert, Katie Vota, Kelly McKaig, Lauren Ike, Leticia Pardo, Lex Marie, Lisa DeAbreu, Lola Ayisha Ogbara, Maya Nguyen, millicent kennedy, Natasha Moustache, Norman W. Long, Sabba S. Elahi, Sofía Fernández Díaz, Teresa Silva, Vida Sacic