Lecture Exhibition

A Celebration of A Tale of Today | Five Years of Contemporary Art at the Driehaus Museum

Saturday, April 13, 2024

This panel celebrates five years of the Driehaus Museum’s contemporary exhibition series, A Tale of Today, with a discussion among artists and fellows about their unique approaches to site-specific installations in the 1883 Nickerson Mansion. Curator Stephanie Cristello will moderate the discussion.

Presented in conjunction with EXPO CHICAGO, this panel marks the closing weekend of Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin.

ABOUT A TALE OF TODAY

A Tale of Today is the Driehaus Museum’s contemporary art exhibition series. It takes its name from The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, the 1873 book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that gave the era its name. The series was conceived as an opportunity for audiences to explore the legacy of the Gilded Age from different
perspectives and to understand that history’s place in our experiences today. Exhibitions and programs have included Yinka Shonibare CBE (2019), Nate Young and Mika Horibuchi (2020), Emerging Artists Fellows (2019), Emerging Artists Fellows (2020), Theodora Allen: Saturnine (2021), and Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin (2024).

About the Speakers:

Mika Horibuchi (American, b. 1991) is a San Francisco–born, Chicago-based artist. Horibuchi draws from art history and psychology to walk the line between truth and deception, embracing an idea that images can simultaneously separate us from a direct experience of reality and bring us closer to another world. Using trompe-l’oeil painting technique and an adept understanding of visual and popular culture, Horibuchi digs into the layered systems of representations and reproductions. In 2014, Horibuchi co-founded 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago. Recent exhibitions of her work have taken place at PATRON Gallery, Chicago; Salón ACME, Mexico City; 52 Walker, New York; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; and Anat Ebgi Gallery, Los Angeles. Horibuchi is represented by PATRON Gallery, Chicago.

Horibuchi participated in A Tale of Today: Nate Young and Mika Horibuchi (September 26, 2020–May 2, 2021).

Maryam Taghavi is a Chicago-based artist and educator born in Tehran, Iran. Her art engages with a range of disciplines such as painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, publication, and installation. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as LAXART, Queens Museum, Exterressa Museum, Chicago Cultural Center, and the Driehaus Museum, among others. In 2023 her sculpture work was commissioned by the City of Chicago to be permanently installed at O’Hare International Airport’s Terminal 5.

Taghavi is currently exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago in the 21st edition of Chicago Works, a solo exhibition series at the MCA that features artists who are shaping the contemporary art scene both in the city and beyond.

Taghavi participated in the 2020 cohort of A Tale of Today: Emerging Artist Fellows.

Sif Itona Westerberg (Born 1985, Lives and works in Copenhagen) is a visual artist, working and living in Copenhagen. She works primarily within the field of sculpture, from where she examines new ecologies, relations, and aesthetics within the Anthropocene era. Through reworking classical imagery and morphing it with a multitude of different styles and perspectives Sif Itona Westerberg casts a light on the shadowy, subcultural, and suppressed sides of humanity and our society, which in our modern rational world has been pushed aside or ignored.

Westerberg’s exhibition A Tale of Today Sif Itona Westerberg: Twin Flame, Double Ruin is on view through April 14, 2024.

Nate Young (b.1981, Phoenixville, PA) lives and works in Chicago, IL. He works across media in a manner that challenges traditional modes of artistic production, creating work that engages with issues of race and racialization. Young explores the systems and objects that impact one’s beliefs to address theological themes through text, diagrams, or architectural elements. Through a universal lexicon of primordial signs and symbols–arrows, circles, grids, and negative spaces–that strongly suggest meaning without in fact conveying it, Young presents profound void that invites the viewer’s activation. Previous solo and group exhibitions include MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023); Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM (2022); Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN (2022); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2022); Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2021); Front Triennial at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH (2018); and The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY (2012). In 2021, Young received the Joyce Foundation Artadia Award, Chicago, IL.

Young participated in A Tale of Today: Nate Young and Mika Horibuchi (September 26, 2020–May 2, 2021).

About the Moderator:

Stephanie Cristello (b. 1991, Toronto) is a contemporary art critic, curator, and author based in Chicago, IL. Her work focuses on artists who critically engage with the image and its role in visual culture. She has worked internationally across a variety of platforms, including exhibitions, panels and symposia, editorial and publishing, and writing on practices of art and architecture.

Photograph: Clockwise, Mike Horibuchi, Sif Westerberg, Maryam Taghavi, and Nate Young.