Chicago becomes a museum to the devastating intersection of racism and climate change

Across Chicago, where the foundation has its main office, there are artworks displayed from 29 of its grantees. But it’s more than a simple retrospective. Instead, the citywide exhibition takes artwork beyond the walls of the major museums to confront issues facing many low-income and minority communities in Chicago and other postindustrial cities. In installations scattered across bus shelters, disenfranchised neighborhoods, and community-based organizations, the exhibition brings a spotlight to the ways many lower-income residents in cities are often disproportionately burdened with pollution, environmental degradation, and public health disparities.

To create a citywide experience that explored these and other themes, the MacArthur Foundation teamed up with curator Abigail Winograd of theSmart Museum of Art at the University of Chicagoand brought in dozens of partner institutions and community organizations to put the artworks in places where museums and contemporary art are less accessible.

“I was interested in this idea of ‘just, verdant, and peaceful,'” Winograd says of the foundation’s mission for the world.

She focused in on the idea of the commons—the shared spaces, resources, and even cultural standards that can either hold up a society or crumble beneath one.Toward Common Causeexamines issues of environmental justice. The artworks, Winograd says, are “trying to reveal the relationship between urban and rural geographies, and the exposure to postindustrial pollution and the results of extractive mining, drawing connections between public health crises and environmental racism.”

Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazierreveal the lives affected by water pipe contamination in Flint, Michigan. Works byFazal Sheikhshow the disturbed—and disturbingly beautiful—landscapes in Israel that have displaced Bedouin populations in the name of mining and public infrastructure projects. Anexploration of Tulsa’s Black Wall Streetby Rick Lowe includes a series of posters installed on bus shelters throughout the city that delve into the racism that led tothe neighborhood’s violent decline.

At theSweet Water Foundation, a nonprofit in Chicago’s South Side, artistIñigo Manglano-Ovallehas a series of works featuring water infrastructure as a way to interrogate issues of water access and scarcity, building on previous installations in California and New Mexico. At Sweet Water, a hydrant will become a permanent point of access for clean water, freely available for use in the community gardens on-site. “In Chicago, which is located on the Great Lakes, which contain 20% of the world’s fresh water, thinking about the precariousness of fresh water is a really pressing question,” Winograd says.

Also on that site is a piece by Mel Chin, who has been doing a series of works focused on lead contamination in cities like New Orleans. His project at the Sweet Water Foundation is a functioning bank vault door on the side of a building, meant to connect with hispublic education campaignseeking lead-safe homes and communities. “It symbolizes the value present in the community, but also safe space free of lead,” Winograd says.

The pollution and environmental issues many of these artworks address are common not just in Chicago’s lower-income neighborhoods but also in cities around the world. Winograd says the issues raised by the works in the exhibition are meant to give voice to the communities affected by these ongoing challenges, and to push for change.

“All of these kinds of activities that happen in the global south and in communities of color in the United States are able to go on because we as a society have not collectively taken a stand against the exploitation of disenfranchised communities,” she says.

Toward Common Cause aims to broaden that conversation. The exhibition is currently on display, and many of the artworks will remain accessible throughout the rest of the year.

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