About the Green Lantern Gallery
Mission
The Green Lantern Gallery & Press is a 501(c)3 non-profit gallery and paperback press dedicated to the study, presentation, and archive of contemporary art practice. The Green Lantern Gallery develops thematic exhibitions, artist projects, and public programs around the idea of artists’ research, highlighting creative inquiry, experimental processes, and explorations into social and political engagement. Committed to forming independent and sustainable models for the distribution and presentation of noncommercial contemporary art, the nonprofit Gallery and Press is partnered with the for-profit Paper Cave Bookstore and Corpse Performance Space under the umbrella of Lantern Projects in order to explore different possibilities to support artists and our local creative community.
Thoughts on the next year…
The Green Lantern Gallery’s thematic exhibitions and artist projects are thought experiments, models for critical and social engagement, poetic ruminations, and interrogations of the creative process from all angles. We hope to be a center for artists’ research, meaning simply that we highlight the process through which artists’ arrive at their creative ideas, rather than the product of their inquiry. We also support a transdisciplinary and transgressive wandering across contemporary art and its history as well as politics, social history, economics, science, and other bodies of knowledge, to get there. At the same time, we believe in critically investigating what is being produced by artists’ research and asking what marks the difference between art as one’s life “work” and living life creatively everyday. In other words, what do artists know?
These questions will take the form of traditional exhibitions, workshops, meals, site-specific installations and discussion groups. We are interested in learning in public and with various publics and making rarefied knowledge accessible. This will happen in tandem with the artists we work with, the audience that attends our shows, the neighborhood we are in, and the people that circulate around various Lantern Projects activities. We expect to make mistakes, experience spectacular failures, forge new partnerships, and meet fellow travelers.
When thinking about starting the Green Lantern anew, it feels important to acknowledge and celebrate both its past activities and the vibrant Chicago independent, artist-run space community that didn’t forget us while we reconfigured. In the original mission, the Green Lantern states, “The ultimate success of Green Lantern is determined by the willingness of its community.” For the pilot year as the staff of the new Lantern Projects, while we stretch our arms and legs and figure out how to work together, we decided on the idea of “ecology” as something to keep in mind as we organized our various activities. Ecology basically can be characterized as complexity in motion. This brings up discussions internal to the Gallery itself as to the qualities of a “healthy” art institution and its life cycles of growth and decomposition. But it is also an external concern as to the ecology of artists’ spaces in Chicago and the role of Green Lantern in helping our local, independent, and idiosyncratic culture thrive.
John Dewey wrote in Art and Experience, “It is quite possible to enjoy flowers in their colored form and delicate fragrance without knowing anything about plants theoretically. But if one sets out to understand the flowering of plants, he is committed to finding out something about the interactions of soil, air, water, and sunlight that condition the growth of plants.” It is with this in mind, our commitment to finding out what makes a critical creative community able to sustain itself, both theoretically and pragmatically, that we set out on our first year of the Green Lantern Gallery, again.
Who we are
Caroline Picard, Executive Director
Abigail Satinsky, Gallery Director
Devin King, Corpse Performance Space
Zach Dodson, Paper Cave Bookstore
contact us at greenlanterngallery(a)gmail.com
Floor plan
Gallery floor plan, courtesy of Charlie Vinz
Internships
We are currently looking for Gallery interns. Download for more information: