Dorian Sylvain “Nature: Art’s Muse,” CHA x HPAC mural project unveiling on 7-31-25/Photo: Hyde Park Art Center
Part of the Art in Chicago feature, a guide to Chicago art institutions, galleries and movements for collectors, curators and the curious.
There are two Chicagos. There is Chicago on postcards, the skyline gleaming across the Lake, the marquee lights of the Loop, the iconic museums with encyclopedic collections. Then there is the other Chicago, where real artists and creatives live and work. Tucked in artists’ lofts and former industrial neighborhoods across the city, this Chicago is no less brilliant. It might even be more compelling, more true. Each version of the city has its strength, and each contributes its vitality to our cultural tapestry. But when trying to define Chicago’s cultural identity, the story stretches far beyond the glittering view.
It exists outside the Loop, in the grassroots spaces scattered across the city’s residential blocks and commercial corridors. There, in nonprofit art centers, independent theaters and micro-galleries, Chicago’s true cultural identity takes bloom. Less exclusionary than art schools and far less flashy than major museums, these spaces are fertile ground for creativity and exploration. They are where emerging artists develop their creative language and where experimentation becomes the avant-garde.
Hyde Park Art Center on an opening night/Photo: Hyde Park Art Center
A walk through Hyde Park makes this clear. You might pass the Hyde Park Art Center with its doors flung open, music spilling onto the street, an open invitation to all passersby. That sense of vibrancy, that instant and unpretentious welcome, is the center’s hallmark. Nestled between apartment buildings on a quiet street, HPAC is one of Chicago’s earliest and most influential alternative art spaces. For eighty-six years, it has served as a community hub, offering classes, exhibitions, panels and events to Hyde Park residents and the greater city.
Don Baum and Ruth Horwich at Horwich’s 70th birthday celebration, Bergman residence/Photo: Hyde Park Art Center
In its early years, under its first curator Don Baum, the Hyde Park Art Center became known for showcasing the unconventional, the strange and the boldly experimental. While major museums focused on traditional narratives, Baum curated exhibitions featuring the Monster Roster, whose grotesque, post-war imagery challenged the boundaries of representation. Alongside Chicago art collector Ruth Horwich, he would later introduce the world to the Hairy Who, recent School of the Art Institute graduates whose exaggerated, graphic style evolved into what we now call the Chicago Imagists. The decision to give these artists space, to show work that was weird, irreverent and unclassifiable, ignited Chicago’s alternative art scene.
Mitzi Sabato “Trying to Move You” in “Altered States” 1990/Photo: Hyde Park Art Center
A dive into HPAC’s archives reveals decades of exhibitions of the off-kilter and experimental. The 1970s, eighties and nineties continued this legacy with shows like “The Refrigerator Door Show” (1988), which featured nineteen artist interpretations of a refrigerator door, and “Altered States” (1990), showcasing artworks created from found materials.
HPAC has not only promoted unconventional art, but it has also displayed work from underrepresented communities and global voices. In 1975, the Center hosted an exhibition by the Lithuanian-American Women Artists Association, reflecting the city’s rich heritage as the largest community outside Lithuania. In 1991, “Haitian Art: Selections From a Chicago Collection” showcased work by self-taught Haitian painters and included programming about Haitian culture.
Hyde Park Art Center, ground floor gallery, 2024
Chicago-based Jamaican artist Yasmin Spiro completed a residency at the Center in 2024, extending this global dialogue. Spiro describes HPAC as “a multilayered ecosystem where adult learners, practicing artists, neighborhood families, teens, seniors, art audiences and resident artists all use the same building and participate in the culture together.” The staff’s generosity, she says, shapes everything: “They are a thoughtful, collaborative and committed group, and their dedication filters into everything.”
Hyde Park Art Center, ground floor, 2024
Even in winter, HPAC radiates warmth. Visitors are greeted by “Nature: Art’s Muse,” a dazzling mural by South Side artist Dorian Sylvain and a team of young-adult collaborators. Bursting with yellows, greens and vibrant geometric patterns, the mural is an invitation into summer, a small, joyful escape from the city’s gray months.
Musicians, writers, teachers and artists all have something positive to say or a memory to share about the center. HPAC has earned its universal goodwill through consistency, care and community investment. HPAC supports artists at every stage. It introduces children to artmaking, nurtures teenage artists, provides opportunities and partnerships for working artists, and offers classes and community for older adults. Journalist Jasmine Barnes recalls her first class in 2022, a collage class taken to get out of the house in winter: “It was so fun to have free instruction and a physical space to come and be creative.”
Barnes also describes HPAC as one of the “third spaces we’re sorely missing”— multigenerational, multicultural, queer-inclusive and “gentle and affirming and actually accessible.” It is a place where people can come as they are and be met with openness, curiosity and community.
Hyde Park Art Center Ceramics Studio/Photo: Hyde Park Art Center
What began as a five-person volunteer effort has grown into Chicago’s most beloved art center. At its eighty-fourth annual gala, HPAC announced an extraordinary shift: all studio arts courses, more than 200 across ceramics, printmaking, photography and more, will fall under a “contribute what you can” tuition model. It was a bold step toward cultural equity, aligning resources with values.
My first visit to HPAC was in 2021. The exhibition on view, “Dream,” was the culminating show for the Center Program, a professional development opportunity where twenty artists spend eight months pushing the boundaries of their practice. The resulting exhibition was big, eclectic and gloriously detailed. I was mesmerized by the large-scale works, especially Mayumi Lake’s multi-textured chandelier-like installation and D. Lammie-Hanson’s black-on-black figurative paintings, which made my heart swell. I wanted to study everything, up close, far away, from every angle. It was a reminder of what group exhibitions can be: expansive, surprising, and full of possibility.
The center’s impact reverberates throughout the city. Its residencies are internationally respected. Its exhibitions are ambitious. It nurtures emerging artists, supports mid-career experimentation and honors overlooked legends. I met the future director of Expo Chicago on the Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery. I took my niece to see “The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige.” In one way or another, everyone in Chicago’s art world has a connection to HPAC. Chicago’s art identity is a conversation, self-reflective and always evolving. It negotiates its past and imagines its future simultaneously. Ideas shift, stretch and reconfigure themselves. Chicago artists are always pushing. And Hyde Park Art Center is one of the places where the conversation continues, for everyone.
Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 South Cornell.