Chicago Art Museum Hotel

Colleen Plumb makes photographs, videos, and installations that look at the complex and contradictory relationships people have with the natural world. Her work explores ways that both animal captivity and land-use reveal persistent colonial thinking, that a striving for human domination over nature is normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Her work sheds light on extractive practices in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice. One of her recent projects, Invisible Visible, reflects upon the industrial food system through the bones and bodies of chickens. Her 2021 installation, Surveilling Snow Lily, was highlighted as a must-see in ARTFORUM gallery guide. Plumb’s work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited. Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011), critically documents ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb’s recent photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius Books, 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants. It was listed as a LensCulture favorite book of 2020, by Eastman Museum curator Lisa Hostetler. Plumb’s work has appeared in LitHub, Psychology Today, Virginia Quarterly Review, Village Voice, New York Times LENS, Time Lightbox, Oxford American, PDN, Artillery Magazine, and Orion Magazine. Plumb lives in Chicago and has taught photography and video at Columbia College Chicago since 1999. 

His collaborative and non-secular approach to his work results in functionally expressive visual experiences that inspire change and instigate tangible actions. He has been recognized as a design leader nationally and internationally. As well as an artist in his own right, Faust is also the studio/special projects director for artist Nick Cave, where he both collaborates on exhibition design as well as produces Cave’s performance works.

Hailed as a “polymath wave-maker” and “a pioneer of art that is interactive, collaborative, and as much fun for viewers as it is for artists,” Jenny Lam is a self-taught artist, independent curator, and writer. Born in Chicago to Hong Kong immigrants, she graduated from Columbia University in New York City, and she is the founder of Artists on the Lam, which was voted “Best Arts Blog” in the Chicago Reader’s Best of Chicago issue. With a mission to make art accessible and a vision to bring people together, she has independently curated interactive shows like the groundbreaking exhibition I CAN DO THAT, which was voted “Best Exhibit” in NewCity’s Best of Chicago issue. Her art has been exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center and Chicago Public Library, she is the 1^st Prize Winner of the National Park Service’s Centennial Project, and she is a two-time awardee of Chicago DCASE’s Individual Artists Program Grant.

Jenny has curated exhibitions at venues like the renowned Zhou B Art Center and guest judged shows at galleries like Line Dot and Water Street Studios. She has written for Time Out and Sixty Inches from Center and been published in the graphic novel anthology New Frontiers. She has spoken at a Leonardo LASER Talk about resilience, at Facebook Chicago about media representation, at Startup Art Fair about “What Matters,” and on a panel about “Writing in the Margins”; performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art and 20×2 Chicago; and conducted Visiting Artist Workshops at the Chicago Children’s Museum.

Learn More about Dreams of a City at 21c Museum Hotel Chicago here.