Window of opportunity: the recent opening of the Hyde Park Art Center in new quarters provides Chicago with a chance, rare in any art community, to rethink the overall ecology of its art institutions and their missions

Several works addressed the larger political and geographic spaces of Hyde Park, a diverse community that encompasses both affluent and low-income residential areas, as well as the University of Chicago. Dan S. Wang's suite of 16 text-based works on paper (collages, found signage, bits of ephemera and original graphics) comment on politics, race and win, as well as issues specifically germane to the local community. Joan Livingstone's Re/Site, a patchwork installation combining the artist's signature fragments of felt, cloth, vinyl and other soft materials with digital photos, junk-food wrappers and found/readymade debris, mines the social and material culture of the immediate environs. Re/Site was installed horizontally along one wall of the main corridor that divides the lower-level galleries from approximately 11,000 square feet of teaching studios and classrooms for HPAC's on-site student program. Garofalo's well thought out plan devotes equal attention to the needs of exhibition and educational programs, while creating open, less-defined spaces for potential exchanges between the two.

Julia Fish's subtle intervention guided visitors between the first and second floors. A series of small aluminum bars painted red, yellow and blue were placed at measured intervals along, as a portion of the title states, "fifty-nine steps/seven flights/three stairways." Upstairs one finds administrative offices, additional galleries, a digital arts lab and seven studios, four of which are reserved for University of Chicago art faculty--currently Tania Bruguera, Laura Letinsky, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle and David Schutter. The building is still owned by the university and provided to HPAC rent free. The institutions are collaborating on an international artist residency program to be launched in 2007.

Strong multimedia installations by M.W. Burns, by Anne Wilson and Shawn Decker working together, and by Manglano-Ovalle confirmed HPAC's commitment to supporting new and experimental art forms. The hallmark of Garofalo's design is the glass-and-steel digital facade that cantilevers out from the preexisting structure. The 80-foot-long, 12-foot-high facade serves as an additional exhibition area, visible from the outside and accessed from the inside by a catwalk that bridges the offices and second-floor gallery. According to Garofalo, who is known for his architectural advances with digital technologies, this high-tech platform is "equipped with an integrated system of digital projection screens, scions, and shades" that can display up to 7 million pixels, and is easily adapted to fit individual projects' needs. (1)

For "Takeover," Mangiano-Ovalle, along with scientist/engineer Mark Hereld and artist Rick Gribenas, transformed the facade into a wall of alternating blue and white vertical bands. This seemingly abstract composition, titled Random Sky and purposely reminiscent of Daniel Buren, was actually scripted by live weather information taken from a weather station attached to the front of the building, then digitally projected onto it. Viewed at night, Random Sky also became interactive from another source, as viewers' silhouettes were traced on its glowing surface, creating an environment that theatrically merged exterior and interior spaces.