Exhibition catalog for Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40

The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry invites you to join us for the launch of Art in Pursuit of Common Cause, a new publication from Delmonico Books and the Gray Center that examines the development and reception of Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 (TCC), a citywide project in Chicago that included the work of 29 artists installed at 19 venues throughout the city. The launch will feature a conversation with exhibition curator and recent Gray Center Fellow Abigail Winograd. Winograd is also a co-editor and an author for the book. The volume commemorates the widely discussed 2021 exhibition, which sought to underscore art’s power to catalyze change and unleash the imagination on pressing social challenges, including environmental justice, public health crises, economic inequality, and others.

The book launch is free and open to the public.

Art in Pursuit of Common Cause seeks to document the ideas, roadblocks, rewards, and questions that were raised during the planning, exhibitions, and aftermath of the citywide exhibition. An attempt has been made to include content rarely seen in the traditional exhibition catalog, to analyze and amplify the voices of actual visitors, and to place the project’s learnings in the context of the shifting ground of museum practice.

The exhibition centered on the work of the following artists, all recipients of the prestigious MacArthur Fellows award: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Ida Applebroog, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Mel Chin, Nicole Eisenman, Wendy Ewald, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, David Hammons, Gary Hill, Alfredo Jaar, Toba Khedoori, An-My Lê, Whitfield Lovell, Rick Lowe, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Trevor Paglen, Fazal Sheikh, Shahzia Sikander, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Willis, Fred Wilson, and Xu Bing.

Abigail Winograd is an independent curator and writer. She was previously curator-at-large and MacArthur Fellows Program Fortieth Anniversary Exhibition Curator at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for the Arts and Inquiry, a role she originated at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago. She is currently co-director and chief curator of Pueblo Unido Gallery, a community-generated art space situated within Centro Romero, a social service organization serving and advocating for the immigrant community on Chicago’s North Side. Winograd’s scholarly work focuses on postwar abstraction in South America and institutional approaches to expanding canonical histories. She has held positions at the Frans Hals Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Blanton Museum of Art, and Art Institute of Chicago and has curated exhibitions around the world. She has contributed to books and museum catalogues, published academic articles, and written for publications such as Bomb, Mousse Magazine, Frieze, and Artforum. She received a doctorate in art history from the University of Texas at Austin and has additional degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2024, she was a curator and commissioner of Jeffrey Gibson: the space In which to place me for the United States Pavillion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

About the Gray Center
The Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry is a forum at the University of Chicago for experimental collaborations between artists and scholars. Gray Center activities take place all over campus (encompassing various divisions, departments, and programs), across the community, throughout the city, and beyond. Through its various programs—including the Mellon Residential Fellowships for Arts Practice and Scholarship, exploratory research initiatives, the monthly Sidebar conversation series, Gray Sound, Portable Gray the center’s journal published twice yearly by the University of Chicago Press, international conferences, and institutional collaborations—the Gray Center seeks to foster a culture of innovation and experimentation at the intersection of arts practice and scholarship.

For press inquiries: Rebecca Daniel Mottley, rebecca [​at​] mottleypr.com.