What’s Happening: To celebrate the MacArthur Fellows Program’s 40th anniversary, more than two dozen shows and installations by the likes of Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby are popping up around Chicago throughout the summer and fall.

The Download: The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation launched the MacArthur Fellows Program to offer great minds across disciplines the resources to exercise their own creative instincts for society’s benefit. Commonly known as the “Genius Grant,” the annual accolade awards between 20 and 30 individuals $625,000 paid over five years as an investment in their future work—often with no strings attached. Since the program first launched, in 1981, more than 900 people including Ada Louise Huxtable, David Foster Wallace, and Liza Lou have been named MacArthur Fellows.

To celebrate the program’s 40th anniversary, the foundation is opening more than two dozen shows and specially commissioned installations by previous Genius Grant recipients around Chicago. Called “Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40,” the citywide show amounts to a biennial-style outing that puts the ingenuity of 29 visual artists and grant winners on full display. It riffs on our current socio-political moment, exploring how resources such as air, land, water, and even culture can be held in common without being freely available—and how they’re often exclusionary.

“Toward Common Cause” is headlined by two main group exhibitions, held at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Stony Island Arts Bank, both of which open this week and will feature work by artists including Nicole Eisenman, Trevor Paglen, and Carrie Mae Weems. The painter Kerry James Marshall plans to unveil a site-specific work at the community center BBF Family Services later this summer; Kara Walker, meanwhile, will bring her black cutout figures to the DuSable Museum of African American History, where they’ll cover its rotunda’s circular walls. More works will open through the summer and into the fall.

In Their Own Words: Abigail Winograd, the curator hired by the MacArthur Foundation, notes the show has been nearly four years in the making. “We want to meet people where they are,” she tells the New York Times. “Part of the problem with the biennial model is that it happens and it disappears. That was not the goal here. The idea was to have this art as a community resource. In a way, it’s crowdsourced curation.”

“In the midst of civil unrest, a global pandemic, natural disasters, and conflagrations, this group of exceptionally creative individuals offers a moment for celebration,” says Cecilia Conrad, managing director of MacArthur Fellows. “They’re asking critical questions, developing innovative technologies, enriching our understanding of the human condition, and producing works of art that provoke and inspire us.”

Surface Says: In an era marked by division, sickness, and environmental calamity, “Toward a Common Cause” shows that art can be a valuable community resource—and address the most urgent questions of our time.

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When Hurricane Sandy wreaked unimaginable devastation on New York in late 2012, Rachel and Nick Cope had a front-row seat from their apartment in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Confined to their home for a week as they waited for the floodwaters to recede, the couple began brainstorming ways to stay creative. After countless hours spent experimenting with colors and patterns, the duo launched Calico Wallpaper from their living room, gaining an avid following within Brooklyn’s creative sphere as a go-to purveyor of refined wall coverings that elevate the medium into fine art with striking visuals.

One of Calico Wallpaper’s latest feats, called Dawn, builds off of the studio’s early successes. Aurora, perhaps known as the studio’s signature collection, reflects on the endless variation in each day’s cycle of dawn and dusk through seamless gradients that glow like the distant horizon. During the pandemic, the duo invited a group of leading international designers—Sabine Marcelis, Dimore Studio, Ini Archibong, and Neri & Hu—to try their hand at making custom Aurora gradients. The four new colorways immerse interiors in washes of atmospheric colors while offering studies of light, place, and mood.

Cristina Celestino looked to Palazzo Avino’s surroundings in the hilltop town of Ravello when reimagining seven rooms at the venerated Pink Palace hotel. Here, we ask the Italian architect about the project.

What was the vision for the makeover?

The concept is inspired by the wonders of Ravello’s Italian gardens and the odyssey of forgotten tales of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Details of Moorish architecture, mother-of-pearl materials, and references to flora create a harmonious mix.

What colors and materials are central to the visual identity?

We worked on three color palettes, within a single mood: aquamarine, sand, coral. The materials are the most varied, from the white terracotta floors with pink and mocha accents and the rainbow onyx in the bathrooms to the colored wood roots of the furniture’s craquelure ceramic tops.

Favorite detail?

It is difficult to choose! The headboards in the embossed fabric that draws sinuous curves are very beautiful.

When: July 17–Nov. 21

Where: Fondazione Berengo Art Space, Venice, Italy

What: In an homage to the ancient glassblowing techniques passed between Murano craftspeople, “Glass to Glass” reveals the vibrancy of the glass industry under the backdrop of historic Venetian venues. Through the medium of glass, this group exhibition celebrates the artists and designers who work with Murano glass today while reinforcing Venice as a leader in the glass manufacturing arena. “We wanted to give the sector of glass a new impulse,” WonderGlass co-founder Maurizio Mussati says, “and to showcase the endless possibilities that this medium has to offer.”

Pyer Moss, the fashion label founded by Kerby Jean-Raymond, was already becoming a cultural powerhouse when France’s Paris Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture invited him to show a collection during Paris Couture Week. The New York designer and Surface cover star, who became the second Black American designer to show a collection in the event’s 48-year history after the late Patrick Kelly, creates garments that are often referred to as monumental; his shows, revolutionary.

His latest runway outing, called “WAT U IZ,” certainly didn’t disappoint. The live-streamed event may have been postponed by two days due to torrential downpours, but that didn’t prevent a lively crowd of eager spectators from turning up. Held at Villa Lewaro, the Palladian estate in Irvington, New York, built by Madam C.J. Walker, a child of slaves who became the first self-made millionaire in the United States, the show paid tribute to the ingenuity of Black inventors often overlooked or erased by history.

Reimagining the stars and stripes using black leather and metal rivets, Bond Hardware’s Hitch Flag is emboldened and unbound, a cathartic meditation on the collective grief, struggle, and eventual liberation of the pandemic year.⁣ ⁣

“For us, objects speak louder than words. The Hitch Flag is an emblem of the time and place it was made—New York City in 2020—as creators; as humans, grieving collectively while searching for a way to articulate the weight of shared struggle,” says Dana Hurwitz. “To be hitched or bound is an idea we continue to reference, here as a critique of American ‘freedom.’ What began as a cathartic exercise has become a part of our work to provoke and embody change.”

MB&F is a laboratory based around a simple idea: assemble collectives of independent watchmaking professionals to develop radical horological masterpieces. By nurturing teams of talented individuals and crediting each person’s role, MB&F uses its synergy to reinterpret traditional watchmaking into three-dimensional kinetic sculptures.

Surface Says: Max Büsser doesn’t make watches. He crafts horological machines—with his friends. In an industry with a reputation for being stilted and pretentious, Büsser’s creative masterpieces surprise and delight watch collectors by appealing to their childhood memories and dreams.

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