Chicago My Kind of Town

Askeaton Contemporary Arts continues to create new dialogues and partnerships in Chicago and American Mid West in 2026. Alongside exhibitions and public events at Hyde Park Arts Center, Co-Prosperity and Good Weather during Chicago’s art week, we invite you to many more places to join in celebrating this initiative.

Download the programme here


ARTIST TALKS, MEETS AND SCREENING WITH STUART WHIPPS

Ireland House
401 North Michigan Avenue
Suite 1500
Chicago

Wednesday 8 April
12pm

Join at Ireland’s Consulate in downtown Chicago to meet participating artists and guests in our 2026 programme, discussing the key issues and themes in contemporary art and how it is made in Ireland and Chicago today. STUART WHIPPS’ video Askeaton Hands will be screened, a 2025 portrait of the local Askeaton community and a representation of the hands that move, handle and shape the very existence of everyday life in Askeaton and its hinterland.




ANDY FITZ
One Twenty-Nine
Curated by Benjamin Stafford

PATENT INFO
902 North Western Avenue
Chicago

Opening reception: Friday 10 April
6–10pm

Exhibition until 10 May

Andy Fitz’s new exhibition continues a recent series of sculptures debuted at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow, curated by Benjamin Stafford. Unremarkable domestic objects are balanced in precarious abstraction from their usual surroundings, each building on these unresolved tensions; the personal in the political, and the present in light of the past. Memory, like the nature of Fitz’s materials, is mutable; open to use, misuse, interpretation, corruption. Memory failure can be understood as a technological fault but also a human one, prompting one to look again, and again.




LOCKY MORRIS
LIZ VITLIN
you see the thing of the thing is is

Curated by Mark O’Gorman in collaboration with Met him pike hoses

GERTIE
400 North Peoria Street
Chicago

Opening reception:
Saturday 11 April
2–5pm

Exhibition until 24 May

For decades, Locky Morris is a key and influential voice in Irish art. Renowned for his early work that explicitly dealt with the conflict in the North of Ireland – most notably from a socially-embedded perspective in his native Derry -–he has gone on to develop a working vocabulary that moves fluidly between the personal, public and political. While still informed by the complexities and intricacies of his immediate landscape, today his practice extends across video, sound, photography and gallery installations, with a fascination for what confronts him in the often chaotic details of the everyday.

A series of his video artworks make their American debut alongside building dialogue with artist Liz Vitlin and the local Chicago art scene. you see the thing of the thing is is will give form to a sustained and growing conversation between Mark O’Gorman and Julian Van Der Moere, which began in 2024. This exhibition continues the curatorial interests of both Mark and Julian, whose exhibition programmes in the last decade have focused on site-specific work and detailed conversational approaches with artists, bringing together carefully-considered yet surprising outcomes.

Image: Stuart Whipps, Askeaton Hands, 2025