Living Systems is a series of apartment galleries spread across the neighborhood of Pilsen, Chicago, 60608, open for one weekend only on August 8th and 9th.

This system of exhibitions proposes a decentralized and democratic exhibition model, where art and community become the artwork itself. Comprising of curated exhibitions and performances staged in domestic spaces and public parks, the gallery system will challenge traditional ways of displaying art by placing it directly within lived spaces. Curators, chosen from an open call, will work to transform an apartment into a temporary exhibition space with each show reflecting a diversity of perspectives outside dominant institutional structures.
This system of exhibitions seeks to collaborate with the neighborhood of Pilsen, offering a platform for shared authorship, community grounding, and constellations of thought, space, and visibility.

Exhibitions and Performances:

Bed Bath and Beyond, curated by Gia Theodoropoulos, featuring Chloe Harthan, Ayla Hayes, Alyvia Luong, and Emma Xhaxho.

Bed Bath and Beyond acts as an assembly of works dealing with the exhibition and contemplation of art beyond the sacred white cube into the profane, a living space. Featuring work by Chloe Harthan, Ayla Hayes, Alyvia Luong, and Emma Xhaxho, Bed Bath and Beyond aims to argue the case behind the legitimacy of art once it exits traditional modes of exhibition, as it enters and integrates itself into the living space.

The exhibition takes its cue from recent discourse around the apartment gallery as a space that does not need to position itself as an opposing force to traditional modes of display. The domestic context that the exhibition situates itself upon is less a rejection of the “white cube” than a taxonomy, establishing its own conditions of ambiguity for encountering art. The domestic space reframes the terms of contemplation entirely, and does not register art as mere decoration.

Whispers of Tomorrow’s Blessings, curated by Taj Richardson, featuring Angel Mendoza and Isaiah Ward.

Whispers of Tomorrow’s Blessings places viewers in a moment of transition through an ever moving exhibition of memory and reverence. In this borrowed space, the Wind is the ambient presence of the past and present moving through the world and guiding experiences. An evolving neighborhood is in the Wind. A commute to and from work is in the Wind. A love that was lost is in the Wind. Viewers are asked to sit with how the Wind accompanied them today and to imagine what the wind will carry away with it.
Whispers of Tomorrow’s Blessings’s featured artists, Angel Mendoza and Isaiah Ward, have captured and documented the Wind through sculpture, assemblage, photography, projection installation, and poetry. Once the Wind passes through this space, the temporary weekend will be archived in print and shared with viewers.

Against The Run of Play, a performance by Nagual and Piuchen, featuring Javier Vinuela and Christian Varela Solis.

“Against the run of play” describes gaining success while the opposing side dominates. Against all odds the winning team manages counterattacks and scores. For an afternoon, public space becomes a space to move, meet, compete, and collaborate together.

Join us for rounds of soccer matches using ice buckets as effigies. ¡No sports experience needed!
¡Free & Open to the Public!

Under Quiet Light, Whispers Fade Together, curated by Angelina McComiskey, featuring Angie Darianna Bajaras, Daniel Villalobos, Carissa Hodges, Ashlee Bonilla, Emiko Tahara, and Kelly Erdenebaatar.

Some memories announce themselves. Others remain and settle quietly into the cracks of the places we inhabit.
Under Quiet Light, Whispers Fade Together, brings together six emerging artists whose practices explore memory through the language of domestic objects, inherited materials, and acts of making. Across printmaking, artist books, fiber, and sculpture, the works consider how identity and history are carried through the ordinary objects that are touched, repaired, saved, passed down, and lived with.

Presented with Living Systems, the exhibition unfolds from within an apartment, where the home transforms and becomes inseparable from the work. Rather than occupying a neutral show space, the artworks blend into a lived environment, inviting viewers to encounter them as though they have always belonged there. Together, they suggest that memory does not exist only in archives, but within the spaces we inhabit and the everyday objects that whisper and quietly hold our stories.

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Alyvia Luong, Angel Mendoza, Angelina McComiskey, Angie Darianna Bajaras, Ashlee Bonilla, Ayla Hayes, Bed Bath and Beyond, Carissa Hodges, Chicago, Chloe Harthan, Christian Varela Solis, Daniel Villalobos, Emiko Tahara, Emma Xhaxho, Gia Theodoropoulos, Isaiah Ward, Javier Viñuela, Kelly Erdenebaatar, Living System Gallery, Lower West Side, Nagual and Piuchen, nder Quiet Light Whispers Fade Together, Taj Richardson, Whispers of Tomorrow's Blessings