Art Events

Attend the closing  reception for First Annual Chicago and Vicinity Riso Exhibition by Spudnik Press on Saturday, July 4th, from 2:00-5:00pm.

The Chicago and Vicinity Riso Biennial is a regional exhibition celebrating risograph printing as it is being made right now across the Midwest. The show brings together artists from Chicago and Illinois along with the surrounding states — Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana — working in a medium defined by experimentation, accessibility, and the particular beauty of ink on paper.

Risograph printing occupies a unique space — rooted in zine culture and independent publishing, but increasingly embraced by artists pushing at the edges of what the process can do. Its layered spot colors, soy-based inks, and analog unpredictability make it a medium that rewards curiosity and collaboration.

This biennial is both a survey and a celebration, and a cheeky nod to the Art Institute of Chicago's now defunct Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. This show is a chance to bring Midwest riso work into conversation with itself and honor a tradition of showing regional art, grounded in the independent, artist-driven print culture of the Midwest.

This exhibition is a part of a summer of midwest riso exhibitions organized by Spudnik Press.  A sister exhibition, 1st Annual Chicago and Vicinity Riso Exhibition,  is curated by Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller,  and Christopher Sperandio. will be taking place at Spudnik Press: 1821 W Hubbard St, #302, Chicago, IL 60622 from June 26-August 14, 2026 ( opening June 26, 6-8pm)

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Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the closing  reception for The Desert as Mirror by Sarah and Joseph Belknap on Saturday, July 4th, from 2:00-5:00pm.

How Close Can You Get to a Stranger is an ongoing, evolving photographic series featuring a selection of images from a larger body of more than 2,000 photographs taken by Piper between 2018 and 2024 across Paris, Étretat, Bordeaux, Arcachon, and Biarritz.

How Close Can You Get to a Stranger is a continuous exploration of Piper’s recurring subject of choice - the stranger. To him, this proximity to the subject is an extension of his fascination with scales of intimacy. Arranged along a progressing gradient of proximity, far away landscapes sequentially become detailed portraits. Piper invites the viewer to perceive themselves through the eyes of a stranger, as if meeting for the first time - suspending the moment of first recognition as a practice of releasing judgements and an affirmation of an eternal gaze.

“To my subjects, you were once a passerby in my life, yet now I look at you, so intently”

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Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the closing  reception for The Desert as Mirror by Sarah and Joseph Belknap on Saturday, July 4th, from 2:00-5:00pm.

We went to the desert for the eclipse. If we squinted, we could pretend we were on Mars.

We hadn’t been out of the city for a while and saw the biggest sky - it made us feel so incredibly tiny. We slept outside and ate outside and hiked outside. We tried to look at every rock we passed. Everything was red and brown and felt so warm.
We brought our medium format film camera and photographed the landscape, something we both remember doing but hadn’t done together. The last time one of us intentionally shot the landscape was more than twenty years ago.

When we developed the film back at home, we could squint and pretend we had been to Mars. 

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the closing reception for After the Flood by Alex Stark on Saturday, July 4th, from 2:00-5:00pm.

After the Flood is a collection of works made both before and after a flood in the artist’s studio. Stark began making a new body of collages in which he began covering parts of his previous salvaged paintings. Collaging on Stark's former damaged works becomes an act of revival, highlighting the resilience and ability of the body to adapt. The figures are ornamented and adorned in a way that is expressive of the relationship to these divine forms. The collaged imagery is photographic, combining and recontextualizing images of food, animals, architecture and nature into Stark’s own narrative, based around the body. These unconventional figures in crowded scenes form a sensory relationship with the viewer.

As a disabled queer artist, Stark’s work contemplates his own body and the manifestation and idea of belonging in a place. Physicality is central to his work through play with different materials that integrate drawing, painting and collage with an emphasis on visible mark-making.  A language and narrative is developed around figures’ natural and vulnerable state of nudity and their expressive poses that often relate to the spaces they occupy. 

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Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the opening  reception for Trespasses by Angelo Dolojan on Saturday, July 4th, from 2:00-5:00pm.

Trespasses is a series of graphite drawings concerned with proximity and how bodies, histories, and interior lives intersect. The works examine moments when boundaries blur and strangers cross into one another’s emotional terrain.

The title suggests both entry and overreach. To trespass is to cross a threshold without certainty of permission. It is also to risk closeness. The drawings dwell in this unstable space: between invitation and intrusion, tenderness and exposure, connection and aftermath.

Rendered from memory, the images resist documentation. They are partial reconstructions; scenes filtered through time, shaped as much by distance as by recall. Memory becomes the primary material: unstable, selective, and charged. What remains visible is not chronology but atmosphere and the feeling of having briefly occupied a shared interior and then stepped away.

Installed within Epiphany Center for the Arts, a space that once functioned as a church, the exhibition quietly acknowledges the building’s earlier life. Religious spaces have long been places where private histories are spoken aloud and where boundaries between interior and exterior life briefly soften. In this setting, the drawings consider what it means to enter another person’s emotional terrain, and what remains after those moments of closeness pass.

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the closing  reception for This is All I Have Left to Give by Alberto Aguilar on July 4th from 2:00-5:00pm.

As humans we have access to an endless amount of ideas

Sometimes we do not believe that they are good enough

So they sit dormant or fade away in our subconscious

Making ideas into reality is a skill that one can develop

It’s not necessary for the idea to even be a good one

Sometimes it is just a step to generate other ideas 

I find value in applying a self-imposed framework

Some see this as an infringement on freedom

I view it as a force to generate more ideas

Without limits we are moving in the dark

Initially I wasn't interested in this space 

Visiting it I began to see its potential 

Arranging things found here on site

Aside regulated party streamers 

I brought this idea into being

This is all I have left to give

But more will come from it

What does it mean to you

Does it conjure any ideas

If it does do not let it go

Record, collect, make it

It will take you places

You cannot fully see

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

 

Attend the opening reception for The Jade by Laleh Motlagh on Sunday, July 19th, from 2:00-5:00 pm.

The Jade presents recent paintings by Laleh Motlagh, centering on a jade plant brought by her father from her hometown of Tabriz, Iran, in 2012. Over fourteen years of relocation across various Chicago homes and studios, Motlagh has nurtured this plant, developing an intimate, symbiotic bond with it. Since 2022, the jade has transitioned from a personal companion into one of the primary subjects of her visual practice.

Indigenous to South Africa but ubiquitous worldwide, the plant serves as a living metaphor for political displacement and global migration. Motlagh focuses intently on the plant's pot as a site of dual identity: it is both a protective shelter and a rigid constraint. Confined within this human-made structure, the jade adaptation mirrors the endurance of Iranian women navigating systemic restriction and control. Through daily and repetitive observation, The Jade maps the deep intimacy between human and botanical life, offering a quiet meditation on uprooting, survival, and the persistent will to grow within boundaries.

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the opening  reception for Dog Kicking in its Sleep by Ethan Shay-Cowell on Sunday, July 19th from 2:00-5:00pm.

Dog Kicking in its Sleep is the first solo exhibition from Chicago based artist Ethan Shay-Cowell. His work combines observation with surrealist invention and symbolism to create dark, dream-like spaces that bridge the physical world with the ever-present allegory unfolding beneath it.

These works created between 2022 and 2026 were inspired by the artist's time spent living and studying in Chicago, as well as the increasing volatility of the global political theatre. The paintings are a response to uncertainty and conflict, both within and outside of the self, searching our stories and symbols for meaning that withstand this volatility. His practice personifies time and space as a parent and teacher in a way that blurs the line between art making and theistic reflection, seeking an intimacy that is only possible through confrontation.

The exhibition aims to create a moment in which the artist's works can together express a portrait of human nature in its juxtaposing elements as to be faithful to its complexity.

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

 

Attend the opening  reception for Temple Toys by Max Li on Sunday, July 19th from 2:00-5:00pm.

Temple Toy brings together tintypes, calligraphy, photographs, writings, and sculptural objects developed through Max Li’s ongoing relationship with Chicago, sacred space, memory, and everyday life. Moving between improvisation and ritual, the exhibition treats objects as emotional devices, small monuments, jokes, relics, and temporary sites of attention. Ancient forms, toy-like materials, devotional gestures, and contemporary fragments coexist within a playful and open-ended landscape where sacredness appears not as certainty, but as a shifting human condition.

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

 

Attend the closing reception for The Jade by Laleh Motlagh on Sunday, September 20th, from 3:00-6:00 pm.

The Jade presents recent paintings by Laleh Motlagh, centering on a jade plant brought by her father from her hometown of Tabriz, Iran, in 2012. Over fourteen years of relocation across various Chicago homes and studios, Motlagh has nurtured this plant, developing an intimate, symbiotic bond with it. Since 2022, the jade has transitioned from a personal companion into one of the primary subjects of her visual practice.

Indigenous to South Africa but ubiquitous worldwide, the plant serves as a living metaphor for political displacement and global migration. Motlagh focuses intently on the plant's pot as a site of dual identity: it is both a protective shelter and a rigid constraint. Confined within this human-made structure, the jade adaptation mirrors the endurance of Iranian women navigating systemic restriction and control. Through daily and repetitive observation, The Jade maps the deep intimacy between human and botanical life, offering a quiet meditation on uprooting, survival, and the persistent will to grow within boundaries.

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the closing  reception for Dog Kicking in its Sleep by Ethan Shay Cowell on Sunday, September 20th from 3:00-6:00pm.

Dog Kicking in its Sleep is the first solo exhibition from Chicago based artist Ethan Shay-Cowell. His work combines observation with surrealist invention and symbolism to create dark, dream-like spaces that bridge the physical world with the ever-present allegory unfolding beneath it.

These works created between 2022 and 2026 were inspired by the artist's time spent living and studying in Chicago, as well as the increasing volatility of the global political theatre. The paintings are a response to uncertainty and conflict, both within and outside of the self, searching our stories and symbols for meaning that withstand this volatility. His practice personifies time and space as a parent and teacher in a way that blurs the line between art making and theistic reflection, seeking an intimacy that is only possible through confrontation.

The exhibition aims to create a moment in which the artist's works can together express a portrait of human nature in its juxtaposing elements as to be faithful to its complexity.

RSVP for this event.

Golden Hour at Epiphany:
Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.