Eleven faculty members from the U of I School of Art & Design will be featured in the upcoming exhibition, Another Place: Storymaking the Entangled Prairie. Featured artists: Ryan Griffis, Emmy Lingscheit, Melissa Pokorny, Sharath Ramakrishnan, Stacey Robinson, Joel Ross, Stephen Signa-Avilés, Blair Ebony Smith, Nekita Thomas, Deke Weaver, and Brooke C. White.
Opening night is January 29, 5–7 p.m., with live music and a dessert bar. Meet the artists. Free and open to everyone. The exhibition will run through July 2, 2026.
The exhibition considers how people make and define place through stories, and how stories carry out a kind of labor, maintaining narratives about the places we live—and about us. Each artist will be premiering new work created for this project.
The geographic focus of Another Place is the Prairie, Chicagoland, and Central Illinois, but its chronological focus is more expansive, with works addressing past stories, historical events, and imagined futures.
A multi-authored companion text will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2027. The essays will bring writing on place-based storytelling into conversation with works from the exhibition, additional artist’s projects, and alternative forms of scholarly writing, to think about what “place” is, or can be, beyond the local, and with the goal of building solidarity between communities.
The spring 2026 event calendar will feature artist talks in conjunction with the exhibition and a performance by Professor Deke Weaver.
Curated by Terri Weissman, Associate Professor of Art History, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Director of the School of Art & Design.