10/15/2024
Major Exhibition at the Balzekas Museum Highlights the Legacy and Impact of 125 Years of Lithuanian Immigrant Artists in Chicago
beLONGING: Lithuanian Artists in Chicago, 1900 to Now
Open September 29, 2024 Through May 17, 2025
The Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture announces a major exhibition showcasing over a century of art by Lithuanian immigrant artists with ties to Chicago. Three years in the making, the exhibition beLONGING: Lithuanian Artists in Chicago, 1900 to Now reveals the role and impact of these artists within Chicago’s rich cultural landscape and beyond. The first such expansive survey, beLONGING features nearly 30 artists representing three waves of immigration to Chicago and more than 115 works of art in various media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, print media, and photography, as well as rare books, video interviews, interpretative materials, and ephemera. Curated by art historian Victoria Kašuba Matranga, a native Chicagoan of Lithuanian heritage, with support from the Terra Foundation of American Art, the Lithuanian Foundation, the Lithuanian Culture Institute, the Illinois Arts Council, DCASE CityArts, and private donors, beLONGING opens on September 29, 2024, at the Balzekas Museum at 6500 South Pulaski Road, Chicago.
Drawing extensively on holdings in the Balzekas Museum’s art collection and loans from artists, private collectors, and Chicago institutions, beLONGING explores the immigrant artist’s existential dilemma: forging a life and career in the new world while reconciling with one’s past. Some sever all ties to the identity and culture they have left behind, while others carry elements forward in new work and ways. Narrated in six thematic sections—Changing Chicago, Art as Activism, Mythic Feminine: Lithuanian Women Artists, Sacral Art, and Designed in Chicago—the exhibition examines personal and cultural identity by considering how refugee status, displacement, trauma, and the process of assimilation reconfigured and ultimately enriched the artistic output of Lithuanian artists, the Chicago neighborhoods in which they lived and worked, and the city’s art scene as a whole.
As part of the Terra Foundation’s Art Design Chicago initiative, which seeks to highlight Chicago’s creative communities, beLONGING emphasizes the interaction between Lithuanians and their adopted communities, as well as the businesses, churches, galleries, and schools, through which the immigrant artists re-established their lives on this side of the Atlantic. The exhibition also explores how Lithuanian artists influenced and integrated into Chicago’s diverse cultural landscape. Timely, in light of the global refugee crisis and the implications for Chicago as a self-proclaimed sanctuary city, beLONGING delves into the emotional, practical, artistic, socio-political, and psychological stakes that define the complex process of building a new life—and a new community and identity—in a foreign country from the perspective of immigrant artists who lived the experience.
These photos are from the exhibition opening.