Hyde Park Art Center
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The Hyde Park Art Center is located in the Hyde Park, Chicago neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, USA. It is the oldest alternative exhibition space in the city and boasts a long record of education outreach in the community. Its stated mission is to stimulate and sustain the visual arts in Chicago.
Established in 1939, the Center’s mission has been to stimulate and sustain the vitality of the visual arts in Chicago. To fulfill this mission, the Center actively pursues arts mentorship within the community it serves, fostering a collective spirit among artists, teachers and students, children and families, collectors, and the general public.
As one of the oldest alternative spaces in the city, HPAC has a long record of exhibiting a wide range of work by emerging artists through its Exhibitions Program. Panel discussions, gallery talks, poetry readings, music performances, open house events, and a series of short pieces by guest writers expand upon the approaches and ideas presented in each exhibition and engage a broad audience. In addition, the Art Center utilizes its exhibitions program, featuring contemporary art and artists, to engage school groups and teach them about art processes.
HPAC’s education programs demonstrate the long-standing organizational commitment to serving the immediate neighborhood and South Side communities. Since 1940, when the HPAC’s School and Studio Program was launched, thousands of children and adults have participated in ceramics, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, stained glass, and other visual art classes led by professional artists. The School and Studio programs now serve a diverse constituency from the Hyde Park-Kenwood community, the rest of Chicago, and its nearby suburbs; in 2003, enrollment was nearly 900, in 2006 that number had risen to nearly 1500.
The Hyde Park Art Center moved into its brand new facility on April 22nd, 2006. A ribbon cutting for the new space took place that day, attended by Mayor Richard Daley, and several local aldermen, followed by the grand opening gala that evening. The next weekend, the Art Center hosted an official public opening in the form of a 36 hour celebration called "Creative Move". Located just a few blocks away from its former space in the Del Prado Apartments, the new building at 5020 S. Cornell Avenue is a 32,000 sq ft space that more than triples the Art Center's capacities, with more exhibition galleries, more classroom spaces, and new features such as a fantastic 80' x 10' projection facade on the front of the building, digital classroom, cafe, and 4833 rph, a new resource space and gathering place for creative individuals.
HPAC celebrated its one year anniversary in its new space with Creative Move Too, a 24 hour event in the space which once again brought in performers and organizations from around the city of Chicago, including the Jesse White Tumblers, Chicago Djembe Drumming Group, Blue Lotus Tribe Belly Dancers, and the McCormick Storybus. It also featured performances in Speaker Project, Juan Angel Chavez's new exhibition in HPAC's large gallery.
Among its many exhibitions, the Hyde Park Art Center has shown members of the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists, including Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Karl Wirsum, and Roger Brown (artist), as well as a steady mix of emerging and established talent in the city of Chicago, such as Max King Cap, Inigo Manglano Ovalle, and Juan Angel Chavez. In late 2006, the Art Center exhibited a collection of ephemera from Sun Ra, the afrofuturist jazz musician who spent many of his formative years on Chicago's south side. The exhibition was met with great enthusiasm and praise, and featured a Sun Ra Symposium called Traveling the Spaceways.
The Hyde Park Art Center has also begun hosting monthly events geared towards many different audiences. A monthly artist talk series called TalkingPoint seeks to create a community of artists and features discussion rather than lecture or panel formats. Another series of events called Cocktails and Clay takes place on the second Friday of each month, spotlights hand building in HPAC's ceramics studios as well as drinks, and has proven to be very popular with a variety of audiences.
