Art Design Chicago Now is a series of pubic conversations, hands-on workshops, behind-the-scenes collections tours, and digital storytelling that amplifies the voices of Chicago’s diverse community of makers―past and present. Featuring archivists, historians, artists, designers, and curators, 2020’s Art Design Chicago Now programs explore the range of artists’ contemporaneous responses to pivotal moments in history, from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, Art Design Chicago Now helps deepen our understanding of the essential role the city’s creatives play and have played in shaping the now, in Chicago and beyond. The series anticipates Art Design Chicago 2024, which will feature a wide array of exhibitions and events that elevate the multiplicity of voices so central to the city’s dynamic artistic identity and cultural history.