Expanding Visions: Fall 2025

When: Wednesdays, 11:30 am–1:00 pm and 1:30–3:00 pm, October 8, 2025–December 3, 2026
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: $360 for full series of eight sessions

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Freedom of Form, Richard Hunt at LUMA, Museum Exhibition | October 15, 2025
Delve into sculptures and prints by Chicago’s most internationally-renowned sculptor at the Loyola University Museum of Art on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. The exhibition traces the late artist’s career from his early days as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to his last work. As a Black man, Hunt was affected by the Civil Rights Movement and was committed to freedom of expression. For the first time, two works bookending the artist’s career are exhibited together: Hero’s Head (1956) created when he was 19 after attending the funeral of Emmett Till; and completed designs for Hero Ascending (2023), a soaring monument for Till’s childhood home which will become the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley House Museum. As we peruse the exhibition’s 45 sculptures and exquisite prints, we’ll discuss the development of Hunt’s abstract visual language.

Sarah Krepp, Artist | October 22, 2025
Examine an array of non-conventional art materials in Krepp’s Evanston studio, including blown-out retread tires, metal, handwritten NPR text, stitching, tar, lace, and paint. Discover how the artist organizes these materials into artworks that skirt painting and sculpture, producing a strong emotional impact. Through our associations with diverse materials, we’ll explore the content of the work and learn about the artistic process and development of ideas from this former professor and chair of the art department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Miao Wang and Matthew Metzger, Artists | October 29, 2025
Investigate the work of an artist couple whose work is both physical and conceptual in their Bridgeport home and studio. Born and raised in China, Wang uses materials that hold connections to historical and contemporary Chinese painting filtered through Western monochromatic color field painting. Working with water-colors on often giant-size synthetic paper, she layers coats of colors to produce meditative and sensual pieces. Matthew Metzger shifts between monochrome, hard-edged abstraction and photo realism, sometimes incorporating sound to produce works that raise questions about what we see, what we think we know, and what we can’t see and may not even recognize. The artist has exhibited at Chicago’s prestigious Renaissance Society, the MCA Chicago, and abroad.

Jacqueline Kott-Wolle, Artist | November 5, 2025
Meet an artist in her beautiful Highland Park Georgian home and studio where she paints personal narratives about her life growing up in Toronto, capturing precious moments with her family and friends. In her current series, Growing Up Jewish- Art and Storytelling, she explores her North American experiences and how her Jewish identity evolved over five family generations from 1925 to the present. Using vivid colors, the artist transforms images found in family photographs to accentuate emotions and ambiguous feelings while honoring the subjects and the resilience newcomers face leaving behind a painful past. We’ll discover the stories behind these images.

D.E. Simmons, Collector | November 12, 2025
Explore a collection of art by African American artists in the 1890 South Side home of the Executive Director of Diasporal Rhythms, a 23-year-old Chicago-based organization dedicated to collecting, promoting, and preserving contemporary art by artists of the African Diaspora. Mr. Simmons has filled the walls throughout his house, from the entry way to the upstairs bedrooms, with colorful, expressionistic, figurative, and abstract work. He has a specific method for placing new pieces: the work starts out in his office, where  he “communes” with it before finding its proper location. Among the many works we’ll see are a new a mixed media painting by Raymond A. Thomas and works by Dalton Brown, Pearlie Taylor, Paul Branton, Joyce Owens, and Felicia Grant Preston.

Joan Holleb and Julia Katz, Artists | November 19, 2025
Visit two artists with studios in a complex of one-story buildings in Highland Park. Joan Holleb begins her paintings by drawing and splashing a patina solution on the surface of copper and letting it run in various directions to oxidize. This mixture of spontaneity and control leads to complex landscape compositions in oil paints, resulting in a lively play between metal and paint, representation and abstraction. Also playing between realism and abstraction, Julia Katz combines figures, dogs, or birds with abstract geometric patterns and imaginative oval shapes to portray her suburban surroundings. Her oils on panel and acrylics on paper suggest the passage of time.

Ken Skolnik, Collector | December 3, 2026
Don’t miss this opportunity to find out what an art gallerist chooses for his personal surroundings. Ken, owner of Madron Gallery, which specializes in American Impressionism and American Modernism, has paintings by museum-collected American modernists along with a collection of designer pottery by British 20th century artist Clarice Cliff; British Moorcroft pottery from the Arts & Crafts period; and the significant American early 20th century Newcomb Pottery, all suitable for his mid-century bi-level home in Glencoe. We’ll see several works by Belarus-born Chicago painter William S. Schwartz, New York artist Charles Shaw, figurative artist John D. Graham, and a painting of New York in the 1930’s by Julian Joseph.