The Riverside Arts Center’s (RAC) Freeark Gallery is pleased to present Richard Deutsch and Susan Kraut in The Conversation. Both artists are approaching their 50th year of exhibiting in Chicago. This is the fourth exhibition in RAC’s series called The Conversation, featuring two artists who together have some form of creative discourse.

Richard and Susan’s friendship spans four decades and is built upon painting, teaching, and the Art Institute of Chicago. There, they rendezvous for lunches and museum visits, which have extended to shared studio visits, shared artistic values, and deep respect and support for each other. Both make paintings that are modest, representational, and out of step with our impatient, attention-seeking world.

Slowness is key. Both paint with nuanced revery. Richard’s paintings, made with matte paints, have the surface of unglazed porcelain. They depict small moments of urban entropy—encroaching vines, peeling paint—transformed into utterly still memorials to the city’s patina. Susan’s domestic interiors are almost still, like the space between breaths. A curtain just moved in the breeze, an object was just put down, the light just dimmed, someone just left. They are softly, tenderly painted in oil. Both Richard’s and Susan’s paintings gently, insistently, require us to concentrate. We focus on their descriptions of light, space, and surface to experience the sensation of holding time.

–Anne Harris, curator

Richard Deutsch’s paintings have been exhibited nationally, including exhibitions at the Illinois State Museum; the Grand Rapids Art Museum; Indiana University; the Kalamazoo Art Institute; the Noyes Cultural Center; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Publications include The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Herald, The Pioneer Press, The Dallas Morning News, and The Searle Collection of American Art. His work is included in the collections of the First National Bank of Chicago, the Hyatt Corporation, the Fairmont Corporation, and the Searle Collection of American Art. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught painting and drawing since 1989.

rdeutsch@saic.edu

Susan Kraut’s paintings have been exhibited internationally, including Ivory Gate Gallery (Shanghai), Addington Gallery (Chicago), Unity Gallery (Buffalo), Della Studios (Los Angeles), Jerwood Gallery: Lady Margaret Hall (Oxford, England), Rendez-vous Gallery (Aberdeen, Scotland), Villa Serbelloni (Bellagio, Italy), and the Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, IL). Publications and catalogs include American Art Review, Art Institute of Chicago Collection, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, and Chicago Review (University of Chicago Press). Her work is in collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Illinois State Museum, the Kemper Insurance Company, and Marshall Field & Company. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has taught there since 1981.

skraut@saic.edu

Anne Harris has exhibited her paintings internationally, including de Boer (Antwerp), Ivory Gate (Shanghai), Serious Topics (LA), Alexandre (NYC), Goldfinch (Chicago), the National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian), the Portland Museum of Art, and the California Center for Contemporary Art. Her work is in such public collections as the Fogg Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the New York Public Library, and the DeCordova Museum. Harris’s communal drawing project The Mind’s I has traveled/exhibited internationally, including The Mind’s I: Palazzo Mora; Personal Structures: Confluences, collateral to the 2026 Venice Biennale. Grants and awards received include a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Individual Artists Fellowship, and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Lyme Academy College of Art.

Richard Deutsch and Susan Kraut: The Conversation

Opening Reception: Sunday, October 25, 2026, 3:00 – 6:00 pm.
Join us afterwards for a Private Cocktail Hour at the Quincy Street Distillery
Artists Talk: Saturday, November 7, 2:00 pm.
Exhibition Dates: Thursday, October 22–Saturday, November 28, 2026
Gallery Hours: Wednesday 4:00 – 8:00 | Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, 1:00 – 5:00 pm

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Tags: Anne Harris, Richard Deutsch, Riverside Arts Center's Freeark Gallery, Susan Kraut, The Conversation