The Not-Collective
Taking Up Space
The women in the not-collective are busy making art, exhibiting together, but also working, teaching, and parenting. They compose something like a collective, as they have been conducting studio visits and visiting exhibitions, showing together and sharing opportunities for years.
2025
No Ordinary Light
No Ordinary Light invites us to see light as more than brightness or warmth. It is a guide, a sanctuary, and a witness to transformation—both tangible and metaphorical, holding space for clarity and mystery. In a time of tension and absolutes, this exhibition by female-identifying artists explores light as a teacher, a means of reflection and release.
Through paint, thread, clay, and image-making, these works become acts of pause, offering light as a steady thread through grief, transformation, and joy. It appears both fleeting and grounded, soft and fierce. For some, light is a sanctuary; for others, a beacon illuminating the path forward.
Borrowing from poetry, tradition, and personal history, No Ordinary Light reminds us that even in darkness, light endures—resilient and quietly transformative, a spark of renewal waiting in every beginning.
2024
You Are Invited
Welcome! You Are Invited is a group exhibition of Chicago area artists and caregivers. The third annual Taking Up Space exhibition explores themes of domesticity, family ties, shelter, play, ritual and wonder. Find connection in this place of warmth and softness. Express weakness, tenderness, joy, or pain and know that we’ve got you.
2023
This Is Your Allowance
The artists in this show explore the parallels between artists' work and mothers' work. In both roles, women absorb input and distill it for consumption. How do artists choose what to share with their audience? How do mothers choose what to share with their children? Do the two overlap?
Throughout this show, the artists examine their own bodies, experiences, and pieces of the mundane to create otherworldly landscapes and reimagined portraits that filter the muck raked in on a daily basis. This group of work also answers the question of how to create in small fits and starts. What does the allotted time allow? Is it enough to keep up? No matter, these artists are bringing you in, sharing soft forms and encompassing spaces with you. They are keeping you safe while allowing you to see through their lenses.
2022
Creating Space celebrates the work of Chicago Artist Mothers. The work in this exhibition is as varied and complex as the individuals who created it, but it is united by the undercurrent of family structures, transformation of materials, and growth. Our material choices range from personal ephemera accumulated in the background of our daily lives to traditional art materials. Circular forms appear in many of these works referencing the splitting cells, the cosmic, and cyclical time. Voids appear in surfaces as the physical manifestation of a change in a subject, perhaps a loss (void) or perhaps an opening (opportunity). Forms break out of the rectilinear plane illustrating growth out of containment.
The work in this exhibition shows abstracted interpretations of motherhood, the weight of carrying memory and navigating uncertain waters. Much of this work was created during the pandemic, when we felt closed off and closed in. Some of our work brought the outside world in, and some broadcast our inner worlds out. Through our work we created new figurative spaces to breathe and connect when our literal spaces disappeared.
Creating Space is part of Taking Up Space: A Grassroots Female Focused Community Global Art Exhibition, a collaboration between local Artist/Mother and Thrive communities.