Nick Cave’s work is oceanic in that it is both wide and deep. An artist whose work resides in the realms of wearable sculpture, dance and performance art—and who we recently interviewed—his projects vary in scope and scale and always push the boundaries of creativity. With his partner Bob Faust, he’s just opened a multidisciplinary creative space, Facility, in Chicago’s South Old Irving Park neighborhood, and they’ve also partnered with 21c Museum Hotels on the special project Contact Paper at EXPO Chicago.

Facility houses Cave Studio, Faust Associates and $oundsuit$hop, and is organized around the philosophy that art and design can be catalysts for cultivating peace, power and change. Cave says, “The space is really about possibility, imagining and dreaming up the future, and providing a platform for artists to do that. It’s everything to me. It’s an opportunity to see yourself in a different way through the arts.” Community-driven at its core, Facility will be a creative hub for other artists, artisans, designers and architects to export their works and ideas to the greater Chicago area and eventually the world, with plans for hosting pop-up projects, exhibitions, performances and retail experiences.

For EXPO Chicago, which takes place September 19 to 22 at the Navy Pier, Cave and Faust have collaborated with 21c Chief Curator and Museum Director Alice Gray Stites to create an interactive experience. Stites says, “When EXPO invited 21c to participate in the Special Exhibitions section of the fair, we immediately thought of working with Nick and Bob because of the alignment of our mission with that of Facility’s: to engage and nurture community through art. We also believed that Nick and Bob could create the kind of multisensory, immersive and participatory experience that we strive to offer. Contact Paper has exceeded our expectations; we’re thrilled and proud to share Nick and Bob’s joyous, generous work with the plethora of visitors to the booth.”

The space is decorated with reams of wallpaper printed with Cave and Faust’s rich polychromatic patterns. There’s also a Facility-designed kaleidoscopic floral yoga mat—the perfect accessory for a chic yogi—and a program of live events that includes tarot card readings, yoga sessions and discourses exploring wellness, healing and spirituality. The wallpaper and yoga mats are available for purchase, and all proceeds benefit the Facility Foundation which provides scholarships, opportunities and programming partnerships for emerging artists.

Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Foundation presents The Ship of Tolerance Now more than ever artists are making strong statements about the world’s socio-political state. The Ilya & Emilia Kabakov Foundation is no different in presenting The Ship of Tolerance, a global public art project rooted in tolerance, open-mindedness and belonging. For this, a large-scale installation of a ship is on display in Polk Bros Park at the entrance to the Navy Pier. The ship’s sail is embellished with the artwork of 139 children’s drawings and its construction supported by local carpenters and shipbuilders. The project also includes lots more collaboration with Chicago schools, like students building a scale-model ship, or creating musical performances based around ideas of inclusion.

Art on theMART presents Charles Atlas Chicago has long been admired for its commitment to public art. Art on theMART, initiated by former mayor Rahm Emanuel, is the city’s largest digital art project. Contemporary artworks are projected across Chicago landmark The Mart, which sits on the city’s incredibly beautiful Riverwalk. It provides residents and visitors with fantastic artwork for two hours a night, ten months out of the year. During Art Week, Art on theMART presents a new commission by Charles Atlas comprised of one-minute abstract pieces featuring myriad quixotic shapes and colors.

CASE Art Fund presents Borderlines Inside the fair, CASE Art Fund presents an interactive photo exhibit addressing children’s human rights. The exhibition invites the public to deconstruct a 6-foot wall made of flowers by donating $10 to remove a flower, which patrons get to keep. The goal is to give viewers an opportunity to show some compassion and attempt to tear down the wall every few hours. Proceeds will be donated to El Paso Matters, a digital news source that focuses on the El Paso border region, and there are photos of the Tornillo detention camp and video of a young family quietly walking in the desert towards border patrol on display in the booth.

Kasmin and The Peninsula Chicago Hotel presents REVERB The Peninsula Chicago hotel teamed up with New York gallery Kasmin to host REVERB, an exhibition of the work of James Nares, Iván Navarro and Naama Tsabar. Displayed in the hotel’s public spaces is an exploration of movement, sound and electricity. The neon works, Impenetrable Room by Navarro in particular, draw the viewer deeper in; through the use of mirrors and glass, he creates a rabbit-hole rippling effect that entrances the viewer.

Libraries are mostly known to house books, but beyond that they are home to endless stories. British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA)‘s latest exhibition, “American Library,” explores historical and personal immigration narratives of the United States. The immersive installation is on view at Louisville, Kentucky’s Speed Art Museum and is a collaboration with 21c Museum Hotels; it’s co-curated by Miranda Lash, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum, and 21c Museum Hotels Chief Curator and Museum Director, Alice Gray Stites.

Although Shonibare originally created this piece as a reaction to xenophobic rhetoric during England’s ‘Brexit’ deal, he was commissioned to do an American version inspired by the anti-immigrant sentiments that have become part of America’s current sociopolitical discourse. Curator Stites explains: “In the face of growing refugee crisis and resistance to immigration across the globe, we feel an urgency to share this work that celebrates the spectrum of voices that have created our nation’s culture and history. We hope this exhibition will provide opportunities to better understand the complexities of these political and cultural debates.”

Yinka Shonibare CBE (RA), The Age of Enlightenment – Gabrielle Émile Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, (2008
). Life-size fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton, mixed media. 
Collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, 21c Museum Hotels, and Collection of Jim Gray.

This expansive exhibit, which lives inside what was once the library room of the Speed Art Museum, is comprised of 6,000 volumes covered in Shonibare’s signature Dutch wax fabric. The rich fabrics envelope each book as a visual symbol of historical migration, trade, slavery and colonization; the cloths are most commonly associated with West Africa but were transported from Indonesia by Dutch colonizers. On the spine of each book, embossed in gold, are the names of figures that have for better or worse influenced the American public dialogue on immigration—immigrants, first-generation Americans, and people who have spoken out against immigration, equality, and diversity in the United States. Notables include: John Lennon, Cesar Chavez, Anaïs Nin, Joshua Kushner, Toni Morrison, Donald Trump, and Drake.

And while the word ‘immigrant’ usually connotes people migrating from other countries, Shonibare thoughtfully includes immigration within the United States. Featured with the aforementioned are the names of African-Americans who relocated or whose parents relocated out of the American South during the Great Migration. Figures pivotal in the forced migrations of Native peoples are also included.

The books are embellished in a gumbo of vibrant colors, in various lengths and widths, tightly packed into the shelves and reminiscent of a city skyline—the installation intentionally layered with diversity to reflect the breadth of immigrants and their experiences. Panoramically, each wall is covered entirely in books, giving the viewer a kaleidoscopic 360 view. But on the contrary, to discern whose name is on the binding, the viewer gets drawn in, easily seduced by the hues and patterns. Spectators may even feel an impulse to touch the work, but of course that is advised against. Four iPads filled with a Wikipedia-esque database make it easy for patrons to research any featured figures. Curator Lash says, “Empathy is often enhanced by education, and Shonibare’s masterful installation of books, and his online database of names, illuminates that this country was built by individuals coming from many different backgrounds and places.”

Shonibare’s other major works are included: The Three Graces, The Age of Enlightenment — Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, Food Faerie, and the Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, all of which explore themes of race, class, cultural identity, and the political and economic relationship between Africa and Europe, giving neophytes more context and seasoned spectators more to feast on. Using supplemental elements, curators Lash and Stites maximize on the opportunity to create community through the museum experience. Partnering with the Kentucky Refugee Ministries, refugees translated the overview text into the Spanish, Arabic, Somali, Nepalese and English, the five most populous languages in Louisville.

Throughout the show’s run, the museum will host several community-driven events, the most seminal being a Naturalization Ceremony, celebrating new citizenship for 100 immigrants in Louisville. Kentucky may seem like an unlikely place to explore immigration, but 21c Museum Hotels and the Speed Art Museum are using their instituitional power to shape the cultural landscape and perhaps heal an ugly past by creating a new, more inclusive narrative. With the United States recent immigration rhetoric reaching a climactic crescendo, Yinka Shinobare’s “American Library” provides a much-needed objective look at America’s ever-evolving immigration story.

Yinka Shonibare CBE: The American Library is on view at the Speed Art Museum through September 15, 2019.

Ebony G. Patterson’s new exhibition “…while the dew is still on the roses…” is wonderfully deceptive. Opening at Art Basel Miami and housed in the Pérez Art Museum in conjunction with Christian Louboutin, Patterson created a beautiful nocturnal garden embellished with polychromatic flowers that served as the backdrop for 13 large-scale works, six of which have never been seen before.

True to her aesthetic, the pieces are deeply ornate, through paintings, videos, drawings and tapestries that lure the viewer in. Patterson says, “there’s a sense of discovery every time I’m making something, even if it’s materials that I’ve worked with before. There’s more activity and action between the layers.” Just beneath the surface, complex ideas are woven into the work creating a socio-political “Where’s Waldo,” where the observer can find themes around race, loss, gender, and class that are alive in today’s larger cultural narrative.

Throughout Patterson’s body of work, she has used gardens as fertile ground to explore complex concepts. “For almost five years, I have been exploring the idea of gardens, both real and imagined, and their relationship to postcolonial spaces. “I am interested in how gardens—natural but cultivated settings—operate with social demarcations. I investigate their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land, and death,” she says.

For Patterson, the garden represents coming from the earth, living, and then once again returning to the earth. The title of her latest exhibition is from a funerary hymn, “In the Garden,” by C. Austin Miles. In it she says she found references to mourning, renewal, and a sense of urgency for the possibility of change. The garden has also been a catalyst for exploring contrasting ideas. In her most recent garden, she addresses visibility and invisibility, masculinity and femininity, life and death, and dress as a symbol of dignity.

In “…while the dew is still on the roses…” she juxtaposes ideas of beauty and burial. Amongst the flora, Patterson quite literally buries cultural artifacts, objects of adornment, symbols of folklore and even physical bodies. The Black body is a recurring figure throughout the artist’s work; for the exhibition she says, “we come to pause, to bear witness, and to acknowledge.”

One of the standout pieces in this latest exhibition is …three kings weep…, an eight-minute video featuring three young black men each on a screen de-robing out of elaborate clothes and jewelry; the video inconspicuously plays backward. Over the visual, a male voice recites Claude McKay’s 1919 poem, “If We Must Die.” Patterson makes a bold commentary on how dress affects and perhaps distorts the perception and visibility of black bodies making them susceptible to abuse and death.

Patterson is masterful in coating difficult and perhaps even disturbing realities in beauty. “…while the dew is still on the roses…” pushes against deeply rooted, antiquated narratives. Patterson is creating a new visual language that in turn can lead to a greater, more expansive narrative. Her show requires the spectator to engage in an immersive way. The work buries itself in the viewer and is a reminder of our collective humanity that so easily gets lost in the politics of daily life.