The fifth exhibit of the 2024-2025 Arts and Music department Call for Artists cycle, Chicago Neighborhoods: Stitched Together, opens October 20, 2024 on the 8th floor of Harold Washington Library Center. The show includes two-color silk screen prints, multicolored monoprints, and digital prints by local artist Jill Nahrstedt, inspired by the unique imagery of Chicago's neighborhoods.
Jill Nahrstedt is an artist, mother, surfer and traveler. Her paintings pivot between realism and abstraction, in some pieces combining them both. She also prints serigraphs of local architectural groupings, dabbles in surf art, and paints portraits of stranger-neighbors she sources from social media. She is the founder and curator of Far North Side Gallery, a micro gallery, and is a member of Spudnik Press and Thrive Together Network. Her work has been shown throughout the United States and can be found on several walls as murals in Chicago, where she lives with her husband and two children.
The concept for Chicago Neighborhoods: Stitched Together, began in 2011 with photographing boarded-up houses on the West Side. For this project Nahrstedt spent quality time with these abandoned homes: photographed them, spoke to the neighbors about them in some cases, and created line drawings of them. She pieced them together as a nod to quilts and printed the images on wood to evoke the boards found in houses. Over the years she continued to create these abstracted neighborhoods, now assembled into this exhibit.
Chicago Neighborhoods: Stitched Together will be on display from October 20 to November 30, 2024 on the 8th floor of the Harold Washington Library Center.
