Exhibition Design & Branding Chicago Design Archive (CDA) Archeworks, 2019
In the first public event hosted by the CDA, this exhibit showcases highlights of the collection in Chicago Design Milestones. Developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, the Chicago Design Milestones installation visualizes the evolution of Chicago design by its examination and accentuation of historic characteristics of design works in the CDA collection over the last 10 decades.
Physical + Virtual Exhibition Design Tonika Lewis Johnson / Chicago Justice Gallery September 2020
Tonika Johnson chronicles the ways in which nine young people have been made to feel they don’t belong in their own city in a series of portraits and interviews. While Johnson’s portraits of young peoples’ experiences paint a grim picture of hierarchy, surveillance, entitlement and narrow mindedness, it is not a tale of defeat.
Through their own creative agency, young people push back against the politics of racism, exclusion and containment by creating their own “free spaces” and organizations that contest the commons.
In addition to the artwork, the exhibition features a mural by Joe “Cujodah” Nelson, scholarly research and an interactive map encouraging visitors to explore their own experiences with belonging and exclusion.
Due to COVID-19, both Johnson and Chicago Justice Gallery wanted to put out a virtual exhibition that made the content available to all. We developed an interactive parallax website, where visitors can scroll through portraits, listen to interviews, add content to the interactive map, and experience “alternative spaces” through a change in scrolling direction.
Instead of showcasing rarefied objects in the standard museum fashion, this one put on display mundane things from public housing residents — a mason’s tools, a Pyrex dish, a garden hose — and told the deep human stories behind them. Objects were loaned from public housing residents, past and present, and each label was written from the object owner themselves during a writing workshop held at the museum.
Raymond “Shaq” McDonald stands with a model airplane he was given as a child. (Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)
Exhibit designed for the National Public Housing Museum at ArcheWorks, curated by Lisa Yun Lee and Richard Cahan, with design assistance from Andrés Alejandro Chavez.
Exhibition Design National Public Housing Museum Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2017–2018
A pop-up exhibit on housing as a human right for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, this exhibit tells a brief history of public housing using artifacts that will be featured in the forthcoming National Public Housing Museum.
Double-Sided Broadsheet Poster 5″ x 3.5″ Pocket Book MFA Thesis Exhibitions Materials, 2016
UIC’s 2016 MFA graduates hosted three separate exhibitions in Gallery 400. The poster/mailer served as promotion for all three. It was accompanied by a pocketbook with more details on the shows and each artist’s work.
All materials are designed in two-colors. The front of the poster and the cover of the pocketbook feature fragments of the exhibited student work. Each show was assigned a shape—triangle, rectangle, and circle—and artwork from each show is abstracted in their respective shapes. The reverse of the poster nods to the work of Eve Fowler and features a quote from Rihanna.
Approx. 15’x20’ Projected Prose on Smoke from Fog Machines, 2015
To/Through explores the relationship between visual and written storytelling, memory, and history via letterforms, words, and phrases projected onto smoke. Words and phrases only become readable as light catches the smoke—a reference to the ephemeral nature of recollection and memories.
