Three solo exhibitions open Friday, November 6, at ARC Gallery in West Town, bringing together portraits of admired women, paintings built around found materials and an exploration of family members who never met. The opening reception runs from 5 to 8 p.m. at 1463 W. Chicago Ave.
The shows remain on view through December 4. Visitors can see Abigail Engstrand’s My Sheros, Alejandro Mazon’s Forgotten Stories in the New Barroque and Laura Farahzad Mayer’s Good Grief in the same visit.
Portraits, found objects and family memory
In her statement for My Sheros, Engstrand describes making portraits of women she admires, from relatives and friends to public figures. Her materials include paint, wool and sometimes silk, with sewing, drawing and needle felting among her methods.
The portraits grow out of looking, reading and sketching. Engstrand places those individual likenesses within a larger family of women whose work and lives she wants to remember.
Mazon’s exhibition statement connects his painting to early 19th-century Indian painted photographs and Latin American Baroque traditions. He describes incorporating vintage photographs and found objects into images where saturated color and theatrical light carry questions of memory and cultural belonging.
The found materials matter to that account: they bring traces of earlier lives into the painted surface. His statement presents the work as an encounter between visual traditions, with those physical fragments anchoring its historical references.
Good Grief follows Mayer’s relationship with her father alongside her relationship with her children. The exhibition description identifies two generations that never had the chance to meet, approaching that separation through grief, joy and storytelling.
Mayer is an Iranian American interdisciplinary artist based in Milwaukee. On her own website, she identifies printmaking, artist books and small sculptures as recurring forms in a practice shaped by memory and family collaboration.
When to visit
Friday’s reception continues until 8 p.m., later than the gallery’s usual closing time. Outside the reception, ARC lists regular hours of 2 to 6 p.m. Thursday and Friday and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
The gallery’s contact page lists info@arcgallery.org and 312-877-5760 for visit questions. For anyone who cannot make opening night, the December 4 closing date leaves time to return to the three exhibitions during regular hours.
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