Chicago Open Studios, 2025

Join us Saturday, April 26th from 2-10pm.

2233 S Throop Street Chicago, IL 60608

Mana Contemporary Chicago and Monira Foundation are pleased to announce our Spring Open Studios.

We invite you to tour the current exhibitions, meet our studio artists, and attend our presentations! This event is free and open to the public.

EXHIBITIONS – on view throughout the duration of the event!

Purvis Young

Young was self-taught, producing a remarkable number of works over his lifetime that convey rich scenes—at once pictorial and spiritual—of his life spent in the inner-city Miami neighborhood of Overtown. Informed by an early practice of drawing from life, Young began making paintings in the 1960s. Blending techniques of painting, drawing, and collage, Young collected discarded materials found on the streets and in abandoned buildings across his locale to incorporate as the surfaces for his work. Elements of action, figuration, and storytelling are laid over a series of structural devices, activating the ways in which the found materials onto which Young painted would serve to frame the images placed upon them. While some of these panels are smoother or more straightforward in proportion, others approach a mode of assemblage that reflect the variable and multi-layered narratives found across the artist’s work. The materiality of Young’s paintings reflects the artist’s own relationship to architecture, place, and time in Overtown. This sense of site-specificity is translated when encountering the works in person, whereby the panels offer a certain reconstruction of the environments from which they once came.

Young’s use of repurposed materials also speaks to the artist’s long-running ecological concerns, which are often expressed in the imagery of his works. At the beginning of his life, Young was witness to a time of political and social upheaval, including the civil rights movement as well the Vietnam war and the spirit of mass protest against it. Coming into adulthood, he was of aware of the large outdoor murals created by artists in Detroit and Chicago. Young began attaching his own panels to the front of abandoned buildings, doubling as a kind of material return for the work itself. Around 1972, Young began his large-scale outdoor project known at Goodbread Alley, which he filled with innumerable paintings over time on a rotational basis. Coupled with Young’s choice of this particular mode of presentation for his works, he considered the paintings to be fine art, and would most often sign his name on the front of the image.

Fledgling 

A Mana Highlight Wall by Mickey Alice Kwapis

Fledgling is a culmination of all of the blueprints I have made during my time at Mana so far, an ever-expanding collection representing the passage of my time as an artist and three generations of falcon families. I love watching the babies as they grow up, start losing their fluffy white down, and learn to fly before they finally leave for good, often feeling like one of those awkward teenage birds who hasn’t developed confidence but knowing I just need to spread my wings and see what happens when I put my most vulnerable art out into the world.

Night Car Play 

A Mana Highlight Wall by Marzena Abrahamik, Jonathan Michael Castillo and Tom Van Enyde