FALL 2025 

Public Collectors Publication Survey

September 4–November 4, 2025

Public Collectors is a Chicago-based project administered by Marc Fischer. Since 2007, Public Collectors has elevated subcultural, underground, marginal, amateur, and collective perspectives that many museum and institutional collections neglect. The exhibition features several durational and collaborative projects that resonate with the Center's 2025/26 theme Period., including: 

• QUARANZINE is a one-page zine (a complete publication that is just a double-sided sheet of paper) that Public Collectors began to publish on a daily basis starting on March 15, 2020 as "A printed space for creative work produced during the COVID-19 pandemic" that culminated in 100 issues, whose process is documented in A SINGLE SHEET PUBLICATION (also on view).  

• CHEST WOUND TO THE CHEST is a text that was drawn from more extensive daily notes made while listening to the police scanner in Chicago for 75 days straight between September 10, 2020 and November 23, 2020. The larger project PUBLIC COLLECTORS POLICE SCANNER (also on view) was a meditation on policing in America (and Chicago specifically) with an eye toward an abolitionist future where we no longer depend on police forces to solve common social problems.

• THE COURTROOM ARTIST RESIDENCY REPORT series chronicles the meal based residency program where artists and creative workers are invited to observe approximately three hours of court proceedings with Marc Fischer of Public Collectors at Cook County Criminal Court on 2600 S. California in Chicago. Following court, he treats the resident to a meal at Taqueria El Milagro on 3050 West 26th street in Little Village, where they talk about their observations over lunch. All four issues in the series (Residencies #1–16) are on view. 

SPRING 2025

Celebrate People's History Poster Series 

"Rooted in the do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda, but detourned to embody principles of democracy, inclusion, and group participation in the writing and interpretation of history," the Celebrate People’s History posters have been organized and curated by designer, artist, and archivist Josh MacPhee since 1998. "The goal of this project is not to tell a definitive history, but to suggest a new relationship to the past."