Expanding Visions Spring 2025

When: Wednesdays, 11:30 am–1:00 pm and 1:30–3:00 pm, April 2–May 28, 2025
All registrants will be assigned a time slot to limit group sizes.
Where: Private collections, artist studios, and exhibition spaces throughout Chicago and the suburbs
Price: $325 for full series of 8 sessions; $50 per session*

You MUST be a current member of Art Encounter to register.

We are currently accepting full-series registrants only. Please contact Sarah Packer at sarah@artencounter.org to register.

*To be added to the waitlist for individual sessions, please email sarah@artencounter.org.

Robyn Tavel, Collector | April 2, 2025
You won’t want to miss seeing this collection in a beautiful Northshore home, where the architecture and interior design showcase artworks ranging from large-scale to intimate. We’ll see works by renowned artists alongside emerging artists in styles ranging from abstract to pop, including word-painter Mel Bochner; British contemporary pop art star Julian Opie; young L.A. artist America Martin; world-famous Alex Katz; portraitist Shizu Saldamando; graphic, colorful Spanish painter Juan de la Rica; and Meredith Pardue, who creates large fluid abstractions.

Block Museum of Art | April 9, 2025
Delve into works by Indigenous American artists in two fascinating exhibitions at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art. We’ll begin with Jordan Ann Craig’s elegantly-crafted abstract paintings in her solo exhibition It takes a long time to stay here. Then we’ll investigate Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland, which features mixed media installations and large-scale works by four artists who reference aspects of their native heritage from the Chicago region in their work. Some employ indigenous artistic techniques, while others incorporate cultural images or address history and social justice.

Olivia Petrides, Artist | April 16, 2025
Meet a painter, illustrator, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago Adjunct Professor who has held art residencies in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Vermont, Virginia, Illinois, and Yellowstone National Park, and has also taught in Ireland and Southern France. In her Roscoe Village studio, see how she brings her love of nature and its potential demise into her expressive mixed media paintings, which often combine newspaper fragments, scripted text, ink, and gouache on large-scale papers. We’ll also discuss her Openlands project at Fort Sheridan, which uses nature’s colors in hard-edged, painted columns.

Nate Young, Artist | April 30, 2025
Investigate meticulously hand-crafted mixed media work by this 2021 winner of the Joyce Foundation Artadia Award in his Humboldt Park studio. Nate excavates family history to piece together stories of the Black Migration as well as issues of race and racialization through drawing, sculpture, video, and immersive installations. We’ll discover why images of bones have been important in his art. In works that address theological beliefs, the artist removes specific content, creating universal themes through abstract primordial symbols and unusual artistic approaches that strongly suggest meaning without illustrating it.

Isabel Chan & Sam Shee, Artist & Collectors | May 7, 2025
See how East meets West when we visit an artist and his architect wife in the beautiful Highland Park home she designed. The light-filled house holds 100 paintings, mostly large-scale, including abstractions, nature paintings, and figures. Outside, we’ll enjoy Shee’s large, playful sculptures as we walk through the couple’s lovely gardens. Originally from Taiwan, Shee immigrated to the US to pursue graduate medical studies in pathology and nuclear medicine; his passion for creating art developed in his 50’s. Wishing to expand the audience for art, he used his entrepreneurial skills to bring his work to Paris and Taipei as well as Chicago, and subsequently, he has shown work throughout the world.

Arnie & Carol Kanter, Collectors | May 14, 2025
Meet an extraordinary couple of creators and world travelers in their beautiful Gold Coast condominium filled with art. Carol Kanter, a psychotherapist, poet, and writer, and her husband Arnie, a photographer, former attorney and consultant, have produced four stunning art and poetry books, but that’s not all. They also initiated Innovation 80, a charitable fund that supports small arts organizations working in underserved Chicago communities to connect youth and the elderly by creating art together. Learn more about Innovation 80 and their approach to collecting as we dive into large-scale abstract work by David Hare; a landscape by Sally Michel Avery; mixed media sculpture, colorful paintings, and prints by Tamayo and Chillida; and a range of photography.

Salvador Dominguez & Aristotle Norris, Artists | May 21, 2025
Today is a double header as we meet Salvador in his studio and Aristotle at his exhibition in ArtTruss Gallery, both in the same Old Irving Park Chicago building. Born in Mexico and raised in L.A., Salvador pays homage to his background through his iconography and techniques that include embroidery, weaving and cast iron. In his words, “I grew up in a Mexican American working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, and the concept of art isn’t familiar to them, especially my parents. I wanted to have a conversation with people who don’t come from art.” Aristotle is a sculptor who creates pieces out of everyday objects that appear to be precariously balanced.

Becky & David Rubin, Collectors | May 28, 2025
Explore Becky’s creative approach to arranging art and objects in this couple’s three-story Queen Anne house. Located in the Hyde Park historic district, they completely gutted and rehabbed their home, where their collection centers around the theme of nature. We’ll see an enormous photograph by Zsuzsanna Luciano; a liquid mosaic by Inna & Alex Deriy; paintings by Winnie Godfrey and Maya Eventov; a collage created from vintage books, maps, and tickets by Yvonne Miller and Stefan Hochhuber; and a collection of apple objects and quilts by Abby Block, Becky’s mother. We’ll also see a display of photographs showing a family tree going back generations with Becky’s family on one wall and David’s on the other.