DESIGN MUSEUM OF CHICAGO GALA WEAVES ART, DESIGN, AND COMMUNITY AT SECRIST | BEACH
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The Design Museum of Chicago hosted its annual gala, Interwoven City, on Thursday evening at Secrist | Beach Gallery, gathering a vibrant mix of designers, collectors, and creative leaders in celebration of Chicago’s design legacy. The backdrop for the evening was an immersive exhibition by textile and installation artist Jacqueline Surdell, whose powerful woven works provided a fitting visual metaphor for the night’s theme — creativity and community, interwoven.
Guests mingled among Surdell’s sculptural tapestries while enjoying food, drinks, and a spirited silent auction featuring design-driven items and experiences from some of Chicago’s most respected creators. Notable attendees included legendary gallerist Rhona Hoffman and industrial designer Norman Teague, whose work also appeared as The Drop 2025 — a limited-edition ceramic vessel created exclusively for the museum.
Throughout the evening, Tanner Woodford, Executive Director of the Design Museum of Chicago, reaffirmed the organization’s guiding principles: Museums should be free. Everyone deserves to be in a museum. And Chicago is a design museum. These ideas continue to shape DMoC’s mission to make design accessible to all while celebrating the city’s creative spirit.
The benefit supported the museum’s free admission, exhibitions, and educational programs, ensuring that DMoC remains a space where Chicago’s design community — from emerging artists to established innovators — can gather, learn, and inspire one another.
With its mix of artistry, philanthropy, and purpose, Interwoven City was more than a gala — it was a testament to the city’s living design culture and to the power of art as a connector across disciplines, neighborhoods, and generations.
MAYOR BRANDON JOHNSON TAPS LONGTIME CITY EMPLOYEE KENYA MERRITT AS INTERIM CULTURAL CZAR
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has appointed Kenya Merritt as the interim Commissioner for the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). Merritt, previously serving as Deputy Mayor of Business, Neighborhood, and Economic Development, will fill the role while the city conducts a search for a permanent replacement. WBEZ
Merritt brings more than two decades of experience in municipal government, having held leadership roles within DCASE, the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection, the Department of Family and Support Services, and the Office of Budget and Management. WBEZ
Her appointment has drawn attention from arts advocates and cultural leaders across Chicago, who view the selection of the next cultural commissioner as a pivotal moment for city arts funding, programming, and engagement strategy.
A PIGMENTED PROFILE
Roger Carter brings a powerful, playful, and deeply symbolic dimension to the exhibition through his mixed-media portraits constructed from toys, Legos, and found objects. His practice fuses the accessibility of childhood materials with urgent social commentary. Carter transforms familiar playthings — plastic soldiers, building blocks, action figures — into textured reliefs that interrogate themes of Black identity, resilience, power, and representation.
His work often reimagines iconic Black cultural figures — activists, artists, thinkers — rendering them with layered, sculptural surfaces that shift between nostalgia, disruption, and reverence. The colorful compositions seduce the viewer in, only to reveal complex tensions: who is seen, who is heard, what histories get built or erased. Carter’s aesthetic bridges pop culture and fine art, casting toys as agents in visual storytelling.
He recently was spotlighted in The New Yorker for a feature titled “Roger J. Carter’s Toy Soldiers and Black Revolutionaries”, profiling a short film about his process and the philosophical underpinnings of his work. The New Yorker The piece frames Carter’s portraits as battlegrounds of memory and identity, illuminating how small, everyday objects can speak to larger struggles for visibility and self-definition.
Carter’s work has been featured in national exhibitions and critical forums, earning recognition for its originality, technical mastery, and capacity to spark dialogue between object, image, and meaning. In the context of the fair, his portraits invite viewers to reconsider what is playful, what is serious — and how the personal is always political.
See him at the Pigmented Black Fine Art Faire opening October 30th. Get your tickets today.
‘TEMPLES’ SHOWS GORDON PARKS’ RELIGIOUS PHOTOS
PHOTO IN DRIVE. USE PIC AND FIRST paragraph of article.
By Kelvin Childs
The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center presents “Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life,” a curated selection of photos and other materials from the famed photographer, journalist, author, novelist, composer and film director.
“Temples of Hope” draws from the Gordon Parks Legacy Collection, which the MSRC acquired in 2022. The 244 photographs in the Legacy Collection cover Parks’ photography career from the 1940s to the 1990s, in which he documented Black American life with a keen eye and unmatched insight.
The curated “Temples of Hope” selection focuses on Parks’ observations of Black religious rituals, from the Black church to the Nation of Islam. It is on display in the Dorothy Porter Room of the Howard Museum in Founders Library until December 1.
Exhibition Details
“Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life”
Date: Through Monday, December 1
Location: Dorothy Porter Room, the Howard Museum, Founders Library
500 Howard Place NW, Washington, D.C. 20059
YOKO ONO MUSIC OF THE MIND
The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago will be the exclusive US venue for Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind opening October 2025. The MCA is the exclusive US venue for this comprehensive solo exhibition dedicated to artist, musician, and activist Yoko Ono. Traveling from Tate Modern in London, where it enjoyed record attendance, and in close collaboration with Ono’s studio, this groundbreaking retrospective covers seventy years of Ono’s trailblazing career, with over 200 works including participatory instruction pieces and scores, installations, a curated music room, films, music and photography, and archival materials. The exhibition reveals Ono’s innovative approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment.
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