Special Member Experiences

Art Encounter membership helps provide essential funding for our outreach and community programming, serving thousands of public school students, residents in senior living facilities, adults with disabilities, and community groups across the Chicago area each year. As thanks for this support, we offer a number of special, free experiences for our members, including our annual Members Appreciation Party, our annual Friends Appreciation Event, and our online Lunchtime Art Chats. Please see below for information about our upcoming special experiences for members.

To learn more about all membership benefits or become a member, please visit our membership page.

Upcoming Member Experiences

LUNCHTIME ART CHATS, 2023-2024

When: Fridays, 12:00 pm, Sept. 29, Dec. 1, 2023; Mar. 22, 2024
Where: Meet us on Zoom!
Price: FREE for all Art Encounter members

Meet us on Zoom for live conversations with gallerists, muralists, collectors, and auctioneers. These casual lunchtime chats are moderated by Art Encounter staff, and we welcome your comments and questions for our guests! 

Aron Packer, Director & Specialist, Fine & Outsider Art at Potter & Potter Auctions, March 22, 2024
Join us for our first Lunchtime Art Chat of 2024! Sarah Packer, Art Encounter's Public and Member Programs Manager, will lead a lively conversation with Aron Packer about his career in the arts. Aron–an expert in outsider, folk, fine, and contemporary art–will share his journey in the Chicago art world from his early interest in and collection of folk art (before “outsider” was even a term!) and his discovery of Chicago’s lakefront “Gallery Anonymous,” to his gallery ownerships and transition to Director and Specialist at Potter & Potter Auctions. 

Painter Nancy Rosen, December 1, 2023
Join us for our second Lunchtime Art Chat of the new membership year! Joanna Pinsky, Art Encounter's co-founder and Artistic Director, will lead a conversation with Chicago painter Nancy Rosen. If you've watched the delightful Netflix comedy Grace and Frankie, you are familiar with this artist's work. Frankie, played by Lily Tomlin, is a colorful artist creating beautiful large-scale expressionistic paintings, mostly figurative, all of which are Nancy Rosen's! We will find out about Nancy's artistic process, her experience of being part of this Hollywood series, and what she is working on these days in her Rogers Park studio.

Painter and Muralist Molly Z., September 29, 2023
Join us for our first Lunchtime Art Chat of the new membership year! Lea Pinsky, Executive Director and founder of our mural program, will lead a conversation with Chicago-based painter and muralist Molly Zakrajsek. Molly will tell us about her former work as an illustrator, her journey to becoming a muralist, and the ways that the Pattern and Decoration movement have inspired her studio practice as well as her public artwork in schools, businesses, and museums. She will also discuss the two beautiful murals she created with Art Encounter’s Evanston Mural Arts Program, and share why she loves working with communities to bring these large-scale works of art to life.

Former Member Experiences

FRIENDS APPRECIATION EVENT: BEHIND THE SCENES AT ARTIFACT SERVICES

When: Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023, 2:00–4:00 pm
Where: Artifact Services, 840 N Milwaukee Ave., Chicago
Price: FREE for all Friend, Patron, and Benefactor level Art Encounter members

Art Encounter members at the Friends level and above are invited to join us for a special reception and behind-the-scenes tour of the fascinating Artifact Services. While guests enjoy refreshments in the showroom, Artistic Director Joanna Pinsky will lead a conversation with Artifact’s Principal and Founder April Hann Lanford, who will share the company’s history and explain the many services they offer. April will also lead a guided tour of Artifact's impressive four floors of workshops, where conservators, artisans, and craftsmen restore and repair fine works of art, build intricate custom frames, repair and re-silver antique mirrors, and more. 

About Artifact Services:
Artifact Services specializes in conserving and restoring fine art paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and fine furniture. They also create and repair hand-carved frames, custom vitrines and pedestals, and antique mirrors. Principal and Founder of Artifact April Hann Lanford began her career in conservation at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999 and spent 12 years as Vice President at The Conservation Center before founding Artifact.

Artist and Gallerist Dan Addington, March 24, 2023
Art Encounter members are invited to meet artist and gallerist Dan Addington in conversation with Joanna Pinsky. Joanna will interview Dan, owner of the Addington Gallery in River North, to find out how he balances promoting the work of his gallery artists with his own creative practice. We’ll discuss how being surrounded by gallery exhibitions impacts his own work. Addington Gallery represents a range of artists, from representational to abstract, with many working in encaustics, a medium Dan uses in much of his own work. We’ll view examples of Dan’s work as well as the work of the artists he represents.

Lunchtime Art Chat: Gallerist Victor Armendariz, December 2, 2022
This December, we will chat with the inspired gallerist Victor Armendariz for our second Lunchtime Art Chat of the year. Victor opened his gallery in 2017 after serving 20 years as Assistant Director to Ann Nathan at her eponymous gallery. While building his new business and surviving the pandemic, he has produced beautiful and thought-provoking exhibitions by extraordinary figurative artists, sculptors, and more. We will chat with Victor about what drew him to become a gallerist, what he looks for in artists, and how he feels the Chicago gallery scene has changed over the past few years.

Lunchtime Art Chat: Muralist Brett Whitacre, September 30, 2022
Our first session will feature artist Brett Whitacre, a Rockford-based painter, drummer, and talented muralist who recently completed a tropical-themed project with our Evanston Mural Arts Program. Brett has a storied background and an unusual challenge: being a color blind artist! He recently received his first pair of color-correcting glasses, and is seeing the true colors in his art for the first time.

MEMBERS’ APPRECIATION Party: Alma art and interiors

When: Sunday, Apr. 2, 2023, 2:00–4:00 pm
Where: Alma Art and Interiors, 3636 S. Iron Street, Chicago
Price: FREE for all Art Encounter members

Art Encounter members are invited to join us for an exciting afternoon at Alma Art and Interiors, a spectacular loft space with over 9,000 square feet of vintage home furnishings and contemporary art. View paintings and sculptures, ranging in size from huge to intimate, created with a vast array of materials by over sixty artists. Enjoy refreshments as we meet with Kimberly Oliva of Oliva Gallery and Gosia Korsakowski of Architectural Anarchy, who joined forces to create this unique gallery featuring vignettes of art and furniture in a welcoming setting. The duo also creates small, one-person shows in this amazing West Bridgeport space.

Art Encounter members at the Friends level and above are invited to join us at the MCA Chicago for a conversation with Lynne Warren, Guest Curator of Intricate: Calder and the Poetry of Science, an elegant display of kinetic sculptures by Alexander Calder. Together, we will enjoy a private viewing of the show with Ms. Warren and find out what inspired her to emphasize the artist’s use of four different concepts in physics to create his graceful and imaginative works of art. Following the viewing, we will gather for a reception at the museum's Crown Family Room to learn more about Ms. Warren’s professional history with Calder and the intricacies of organizing this display to best feature each artwork. Light refreshments will be served.

About Lynne Warren
Lynne Warren was named Art Encounter's Kaleidoscope Honoree in Spring of 2022. She recently retired after leading a 40-year-long career as Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Ms. Warren became an expert on the city’s art history from 1945 to the present through her curation of monographic exhibits highlighting artists with a significant relationship to Chicago. Her 25 solo exhibitions at the MCA include Kenneth Josephson (1982), Donald Sultan (1987), Robert Heinecken: Photographist (1999), H. C. Westermann (2001), Dan Peterman: Plastic Economies (2004), Chris Ware (2005), and Jim Nutt: Coming Into Character (2011). She was the project director of the exhibition Art in Chicago, 1945–1995 (1996), which produced the first in-depth publication on postwar Chicago art. In addition to writing over 40 exhibition catalogs and contributing to a number of other publications, she is also the editor of the three-volume reference book The Encyclopedia of 20th Century Photography (2005). Educated at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago, Warren has taught courses at universities throughout Chicago and has lectured throughout the United States.

FRIENDS appreciation EVENT: William S. Schwartz at MADRON GALLERY

When: Sunday, Nov. 14, 2021, 3:00–4:30 pm
Where: Madron Gallery, 1000 W North Avenue, Chicago
Price: FREE for all Friend, Patron, and Benefactor level Art Encounter members

Join Art Encounter for a special reception and viewing of William S. Schwartz: Color and Coloratura at Madron Gallery. Schwartz, a Russian Jewish immigrant trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, was a fixture of Chicago’s twentieth century modern art scene. His prolific career spanned over five decades, from the period just after WWI to the early 1970s, and his work, which often defies categorization, includes elements of Fauvism, Futurism, and Surrealism.

Established in 2003, Madron Gallery showcases paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs and prints by notable American artists from the first half of the twentieth century. The spacious gallery displays works from its large inventory along with changing exhibitions of modern and contemporary work in different rooms. Madron Gallery features an in-house press publishing high quality art books that focus on the lives and works of influential, lesser-known modern artists, particularly those with a connection to Chicago. This exhibit celebrates their publication of William S. Schwartz: Color and Coloratura by Alex Cornnachia.

Art Encounter’s Artistic Director Joanna Pinsky and representatives from Madron Gallery will lead an interactive discussion about the work. Refreshments will be served.