ABOUT

Living Systems is a series of apartment galleries spread across the neighborhood of Pilsen, Chicago, open for one weekend only on August 8th and 9th. This system of exhibitions proposes a decentralized and democratic exhibition model, where art and community become the artwork itself.

Comprising of curated exhibitions and performances staged in domestic spaces and public parks, the gallery system will challenge traditional ways of displaying art by placing it directly within lived spaces. Curators, chosen from an open call, will work to transform an apartment into a temporary exhibition space with each show reflecting a diversity of perspectives outside dominant institutional structures.

This system of exhibitions seeks to collaborate with the neighborhood of Pilsen, offering a platform for shared authorship, community grounding, and constellations of thought, space, and visibility.

Meet the Team

Director of Exhibitions

Jasmine Johnson is a interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Chicago (BFA 2026). Johnson's curatorial practice is inspired by place-keeping and making theory, institutional critique, and the nuance of human experiences. Johnson moved to Pilsen in the summer of 2024 and fell in love with its vibrant artist community. She is interested in programming and working intimately with communities. Johnson also helped to create the Mountain House Youth Action Committees first Youth Summer program. Johnson is also one half of the curatorial duo MagandMan and has previously worked for SITE Galleries as the Special Programs Director.

Assistant Director of Exhibitions

Reeves Beckley is a visual artist and photographer based in Chicago, IL. He consistently works through different mediums and materials to work through questions and observations of hierarchical systems that live within our post-internet world.

Curators

Angelina McComiskey (b. Seattle, WA) is an interdisciplinary artist and emerging curator based in Chicago, Illinois. Working across print, drawing, and fiber, her practice explores memory, archival material, cultural inheritance, and the construction of identity through domestic objects. Rooted in her Filipino heritage, her work considers how material can preserve obscure and transform memory across generations.

Alongside her artistic practice, McComiskey's emerging curatorial work centers on artists whose practices engage archives, memory, and material culture as sites of personal and collective history among their respective experiences. She is interested in exhibitions that celebrate and bring artists into conversation around individual narratives that reveal broader histories.

Taj Richardson (b.1999; The Bronx, NY) is an artist, designer, and curator based in Chicago with an interest in rendering and analyzing imaginative spaces through multiple mediums. Influenced by their relationship with escapism and memories, Taj combines analog/traditional methods with digital programs to create intimate moments between people and spaces. Taj is also one of the co-founders and editors of Write That Down!, a seasonal mag based collection of artifacts, art, and stories that captures the current moment in Chicago from a radical, queer, and experimental perspective.

They earned a BFA and a B.Arch from Rhode Island School of Design where they studied architecture and printmaking in 2022, was an Urban Ecology Fellow at Sweet Water Foundation in 2022, is a curatorial resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition, and a board member of the Chicago Printers Guild.

Gia Theodoropoulos (b. 2005; Athens, Greece) is a curator, collector, and researcher based in Chicago. Her curatorial practice is heavily driven by the process of how artworks operate as signifiers towards the conceptualization of an idea. Parallel to her curatorial practice, she is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Chicago Journal of Visual Art, a journal aiming to showcase the work of young writers, historians, and artists.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse