21c Museum Hotel Chicago

OFF-SPRING: New Generations, curated by 21c Chief Curator, Alice Gray Stites, featuring 100 artworks by 60 artists from all over the world, the exhibition explores the role of rituals in shaping identity, relationships, and institutions. Artists featured in the exhibition include Carrie Mae Weems, Deana Lawson, Ragnar Kjartansson, Lalla Essaydi, Gehard Demetz, Adriana Duque, Angela Ellsworth, Anthony Goicolea, and more. Rituals—religious and cultural, institutional, and domestic—provide the thematic infrastructure for OFF-SPRING: New Generations. These sculptures, paintings, photographs, and videos employ iconographic imagery from the sacred to the profane, to explore the development of both personal and group identity, childhood, family, history, and gender politics. At the wedding altar, in the family home, or in the classroom, within the fantasy of childhood play or the familiarity of grown-up habit, these new, old narratives generate a spectrum of meditations on the contemporary construction of self and society.