There’s something almost defiantly personal about the title. I just really want to tell you this one thing. It sounds less like an exhibition title and more like something you’d say at the end of a long conversation, when all the preamble has finally run out. That feeling is exactly the point.
Chicago-based artist Alberto Aguilar’s exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center spans two distinct periods of his career, from 1997 to 2002 and from 2020 to 2026, exploring themes of communication, response, transmission, and translation. It runs through August 23, 2026, on the 4th Floor North Exhibit Hall — and admission, like everything at the Cultural Center, is free. Full details are on the City of Chicago’s official exhibition page.
An Artist Who Chose People Over the Studio
Aguilar began his career as a painter. The decision to move toward new media came to him one night while cleaning his brushes at 2 a.m. after hours of solitary work. He realized he didn’t want to spend so much of his life alone in the studio. That moment of clarity shaped everything that followed. His practice since has been rooted in exchange: with collaborators, with strangers, with the audience standing in front of the work.
Today his art is as likely to be a sculpture made from everyday objects or a performance involving a soccer ball as it is a painting. What ties it together isn’t medium. It’s the insistence that meaning only happens between people.
A Show Built on Collaboration and Translation
At the center of the gallery, visitors find some of Aguilar’s early paintings alongside recent response work. He invited eleven artists to select one of his paintings and remake it, keeping the parameters open for creative interpretation. The result is a range of approaches to the same source material, each one a re-interpretation of a younger Aguilar’s expression, shaped entirely by the sensibility of the person doing the translating.
Collaborators include Saoirse Ahumada Furin, Jess Bass, Cecilia Beaven, Julieta Beltrán Lazo, Alex Bradley Cohen, Maria Burundarena, Jooeun Kim, Joshua Mitchell, Jonas Müller-Anheim, Ricardo Vilas Freire, and Zespo. It’s a genuinely diverse group, and the variety of responses to Aguilar’s original works makes that diversity visible in a way that feels earned rather than curated for optics.
Michael Ferro, Chicago artist and curator, has long been drawn to work that treats collaboration as a creative method rather than an afterthought. This exhibition is a clear example of what that looks like in practice.
Why This Exhibition Matters Right Now
The Cultural Center itself describes the show not as the culmination of Aguilar’s ideas, but as the means to develop new ones together. That’s a rare admission for an institution to make. Most exhibitions present finished things. This one presents process, exchange, and the productive messiness of working with other people.
For Michael Ferro, that kind of openness is what separates a meaningful exhibition from a merely competent one. Chicago has no shortage of polished shows. What it has in Alberto Aguilar is an artist genuinely asking what communication costs, what gets lost in translation, and whether the attempt to connect is itself the work.
The Chicago Cultural Center is located at 78 E. Washington St. and is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., free of charge.
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