To celebrate the opening of Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories, join the Smart Museum of Art for a panel with commissioned artists Bethany Collins, Caroline Kent, and Mary Mattingly, moderated by curator Galina Mardilovich. The panel will be followed by a public reception with hors d’oeuvres and drinks. Free, register online.

4:30 - 6:00PM: Panel discussion, at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering, Rm. 161. 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637.

6:00 - 7:30PM: Public reception, at the Smart Museum of Art. 5550 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637.

About the speakers:

Bethany Collins is an Alabama-born, Chicago-based conceptual artist. Drawing from extensive archival research and grounded in a text-based artistic practice, Collins’s work offers a critical lens on American history and the nuance of racial and national identities.

Caroline Kent is a Chicago-based visual artist, who builds on personal experiences and cultural background to explore the relationship between and limits of language, translation, and abstraction through an expanded painting practice.

Mary Mattingly is a New York-based artist whose research-based practice blurs boundaries between fact and fiction, present and future, as a way to center pressing issues related to climate change, survival, and endurance in the face of ecological degradation and violence.

Moderated by Galina Mardilovich, curator at the Smart Museum of Art. A specialist in work on paper and the long nineteenth century, Galina holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.