CANDACE HUNTER ASKS, "WHOSE DREAMS ARE IMPORTANT?"
The Dan Ryan Expressway carries Chicagoans across the city every day. For artist Candace Hunter, it also marks a rupture. On September 24, Hunter opens Intentionality 1960, Whose Dreams?, an exhibition that asks viewers to look past the familiar story of urban development and confront the communities erased to make it possible.
The project begins with a number: 50,831. It represents the estimated number of African Americans displaced during the expressway's construction. Hunter explains that roughly 90,000 families and businesses were removed through eminent domain, with 60 percent identified as African American. To her, the figure is not a statistic but a point of departure for artistic investigation into lives that were built and then taken.
At the heart of the exhibition is a childhood memory. Riding beside her father as the youngest of four children, Hunter once saw blocks of doors standing side by side, painted in different colors, some marked with bills or writing. She imagined each led to an impossibly narrow house. Years later, she understood that the doors concealed debris from homes demolished for the expressway. That realization now anchors her practice: the doors become a way to remember vanished structures and the people who lived in them. "The real story is not easily accessible. And so, through my art, I'm trying to make parts of that story accessible."
Hunter's inquiry spans roughly 1958 to 1964, a period when construction coincided with the emerging Civil Rights Movement and the rise of powerful Black political and community organizations. She argues that the story is often told through images of housing projects and poverty, which can obscure the fuller lives that existed there. "The real story is not easily accessible," she says. "And so, through my art, I'm trying to make parts of that story accessible."
Alongside the visual work, Hunter's Memory Teas invite older adults who remember the displacement to share their recollections. Many who lived through it have passed, making first-person accounts urgent. A video component will feature people discussing their lives in Chicago during the period, pairing spoken testimony with the physical presence of the doors, oral history meeting installation and sculpture.
Intentionality 1960 is an evolving, multiyear project, building on earlier work including Dreams of the Diaspora and The Ways We Remember. Hunter envisions a culminating installation: a three-story, double-wide back porch built from doors. The exhibition, which remains on view through December 12, offers Chicagoans a chance to witness that work in progress and to ask whose dreams the city's landscape was built upon.
Event Details
Exhibition: Intentionality 1960, Whose Dreams?
Opening: Thursday, September 24; 6 - 8 pm
On view through: December 12
Venue: Art & Public Life, 301 E. Garfield
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