For Artists Run Chicago 2.0, ADDS DONNA asked a selection of artists we’ve worked with over the past ten years to share influential objects from their homes and studios in an effort to examine artists’ impulse to collect. Be they objects of beauty, objects of curiosity, sincere or ironic, hand-made or mass-produced, we’re interested in how the physical items artists are drawn to may influence their visual language.

Picking up from a 2016 ADDS DONNA exhibition titled Housewarming which was about artists collecting work by other artists and the underrecognized web of influence and support the collections revealed, this second experiment also emphasizes artists’ influences, but instead of asking “who” artists are looking at, we’re asking “what?” The project channels the practice bolstered by figures like Kathleen Blackshear, Whitney Halsted, Ray Yoshida, and Roger Brown, who encouraged generations of Chicago artists to look outside of Western art history for inspiration and to create rich, personal collections as source material.

For some, the blurred boundaries between art and life are mirrored by their relationship to home and studio. Many of the artists we asked to participate in this project work from their homes- a reality made especially significant during the Covid-19 pandemic. ADDS DONNA itself began in a live/work studio in Garfield Park, whose members frequently engaged in a near compulsive assemblage-style collaboration with one another’s work and everyday objects in their studio. It wasn’t uncommon to walk into the studio and find someone else’s painting leaning on top of your sculpture, or an upside-down postcard tacked to someone else’s drawing. These unannounced but good-natured mash-ups became part of the language and ritual of the studio and consequently the gallery. The practice underscored the expectation of sudden change, shifting context, and the possibility that others will see something different in what you’re up to. ADDS DONNA continues to embrace these ideas in our programming and we are grateful to all the artists we’ve collaborated with over the years.

October 8, 2020 “Show & Tell” with Participating Artists (6 pm) – Zoom link – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82777701582