Live.
Work.
Thrive.
CAC is a non-profit organization that supports contemporary Chicago artists and curators by offering residency programs, exhibitions, professional development and resources that enable them to live, work and thrive in the city.
ViewCAC's timeline to see how the organization has grown and how it has supported artists and curators for nearly half a century.
Check out the current CAC exhibitions and other events. All exhibitions are open to the public.
Learn more about CAC's residency for artists and curators.
Find opportunities for artists through Chicago Artists Resources (CAR). Post jobs, open calls or list spaces to reach our growing community.
Ále Campos
Ále Campos (b. Los Angeles, California) is a multidisciplinary artist and performer whose elastic studio practice is anchored by drag and their persona, Celeste. Their performances, often mediated by technologies (cameras, green screens, live-streams, projections), test the directions of the gaze and the scales of hyper-visibility, stretching the boundaries of the stage. Their live work naturally unfolds into sculpture, video and print-media at the hand of exploring ephemera and the after-life of performance. Drag is at once their material but also their scaffolding for performance making, guiding their efforts in returning to formative experiences re-constructing familial archives and cultu...
Andi Crist
Andi Crist was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and earned her BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2011. She is the co-founder and executive director of Autotelic Studios, a nonprofit arts organization that serves the creative community on the northwest side of Chicago by creating affordable studios in alternative spaces. Crist’s practice focuses on sculpture–both social and object-based–which touch on subjects of appropriation, practicality, place-making, and the assessment of value. She has recently exhibited work at Mana Contemporary, the Washington Park Arts Incubator and Chicago Artists Coalition. About Autotelic Studios Autotelic is committed to providing affordable workspace and facilit...
Farah Salem
Farah Salem (b.1991, Kuwait) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist and somatic art therapist; these two practices exist independently, yet are intertwined as her professional training informs her artistic inquiry of how trauma manifests in the body. Her visual arts practice rooted in photography expands through video, performance and installation finding subtle affinities between geologic time, somatic movement, gendered trauma, and Arabian Peninsula ceremonial healing rituals. Through relational merging and mapping of human and geologic bodies, she envisions their liberation by examining themes of agency, making the invisible visible, and the potential erosion of socio-cultural condit...