Our Big Shared Walls Fall Push: 9 Art Exhibitions at CPS Schools in 4 Days!

In the last year, we’ve made intentional strides to get as strategic as possible with our Shared Walls™ Rotating Art Program. Leasing art exhibitions to businesses at a fee and using that revenue to put FREE art exhibitions in local schools, parks, libraries, and youth centers, has proven to be a model that works, and we’ve been so excited by the progress.

Our model keeps our team focused on the people we serve, as opposed to writing grants & fundraising.

We’re proud of that viability, and have worked to optimize our annual calendar, batching activities into groups, and making sure we’re as efficient as possible with our outreach and programming.

That’s why we moved to a calendar that has super intense bursts of activity, followed by periods of strategic breaks where we can plan. We gave it a go last week by installing art exhibitions in 9 Chicago Public Schools in 4 days, and threw an event at our gallery with All Star Press, just for good measure.

After months of outreach, curation, logistics, and correspondences, we scheduled installations with geographically efficient routes, meaning we could implement between 2 and 4 installations every day.

In that time we installed art in 9 Chicago communities including Ashburn, Belmont-Cragin, West Garfield Park, Dunning, Avondale, West Lawn, Lincoln Square, and more, showing the broad reach of our program while meeting our mission of making art accessible to everyone.

As always, it was our sincere pleasure to collaborate with principals and art teachers citywide who are dedicated to their communities, as well as the notion that all of us deserve equal access to a quality education.

We’re proud to support Goode STEM Academy, Hurley Elementary, Eberhart Elementary, Northwest Middle School, Beard Elementary, Frazier International Magnet School, Tilton School, Lorca Elementary, and McPherson Elementary as part of this latest round of installations, and look forward to pushing toward our goal of putting art in all 50 wards within the city. After this latest batch, we’re happy to report that we have now installed art in 43 of 50 wards. We’re so close!

By adding our Engagement Plan and Art Guide, we’ve built an additional resource to support our partners through increased engagement with their exhibitions and the artists featured.

As always, you can get involved by:

• leasing art for your business
• contacting us on behalf of your community space
• donating, or
• volunteering

Be sure to sign up for our newsletter to discover new artists and stay updated on our mission, and check out the photos below of all 9 exhibitions!