Irish & US Artists Talks & Meets during Expo Chicago

The Consulate General of Ireland in partnership with Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Limerick, invites you to join us for this lunchtime event during Expo Chicago 2026.

Join us at Ireland House 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.

The event foregrounds three key cultural voices and inspirations for Askeaton Contemporary Arts’ activities.

Gabriel Chalfin-Piney-González is a multi-hyphenate artist and administrator with over 15 years of experience working with community art organizations, orchestrating multidisciplinary programs, and supporting artists in a career-changing capacity. They are the Exhibitions and Residency Manager at Hyde Park Art Center and founder of the Jewish Museum of Chicago.

Independent curator Risa Puleo makes exhibitions, such as Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System at The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018, about how artists intervene in social structures. Risa increasingly uses artistic and curatorial channels to implement changes in the material, infrastructural, and social fabric of a place. In collaboration with the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial in St. Louis and Native film collaborative, New Red Order, she supported the rematriation of a sacred site back to Osage Nation. She teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Mark O’Gorman is the inaugural curator and producer of visual art at The Complex, a multi-disciplinary arts centre in Dublin’s north inner city, since 2018. He focuses on commissioning site-specific work with a prolonged developmental process and conversational approach with artists, who are carefully brought together in relation to one another. Mark has presented exhibitions and events at The Complex featuring artists including Jeremy Deller, Vivienne Dick, Aleana Egan, Jaki Irvine, Sean Lynch, and Locky Morris.

In addition, 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.

John Carson’s American Medley (1981-86) is also represented, embodying a tour to fifty locations in the United States famed in popular music, from ‘What Made Milwaukee Famous to ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ and more in-between. Postcards and Polaroid photographs were initially sent back to Carson’s native Belfast, displayed during the conflict of The Troubles of Northern Ireland in the window at one of Carson’s favourite haunts, Delany’s ‘American-style’ diner.

This event will be moderated by Seán Lynch, an artist and collaborator at Askeaton Contemporary Arts. Seán represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2015. Prominent solo exhibitions include Edinburgh Art Festival, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Rose Art Museum, Boston and Modern Art Oxford. He has held fellowships and been a visiting professor at universities and colleges in the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, and is a graduate of the Stadelschule, Frankfurt. Alongside Michele Horrigan, he works at Askeaton Contemporary Arts, an artist-led residency, commissioning and publication initiative situated in the west of Ireland since 2006.

All are welcome. Supported by Culture Ireland.

IRISH ARTISTS EXHIBIT IN CHICAGO NEIGHBORHOOD GALLERIES SATURDAY APRIL 4 - MAY 24.

Opening reception information also included below

Léann Herlihy
Jackman Goldwasser artist-in-residence
Hyde Park Arts Center
5020 South Cornell Avenue
Open studio Saturday 4 April, 1-4pm
Léann Herlihy’s practice is informed by trans, queer ecological, feminist and abolitionist theoretical frameworks, producing exhibitions, live performances and workshops that explore collective engagement and resistance.
John Carson, Martin Folan, Max Guy, Léann Herlihy, Niamh Schmidtke, Frank Wasser
Tuneful Places
Curated by Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch
Co-Prosperity
3219 South Morgan Street
Opening reception Tuesday 7 April, 4-6pm
Exhibition until May 9
Tuneful Places is a group exhibition exploring artists that disrupt and challenge representations of geography, state and capital within an Irish idiom.
Andy Fitz
One Twenty-Nine
Curated by Benjamin Stafford
Patient Info
902 North Western Avenue
Opening reception Friday 10 April, 6-10pm
Until May 10
In Andy Fitz’s new exhibition, unremarkable domestic objects are balanced in precarious abstraction from their usual surroundings, subtly placing 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 and corruption.
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
Opening reception Saturday April 11, 2-5pm
Until May 24
Renowned for his early work that explicitly dealt with the conflict in the North of Ireland –Locky Morris has gone on to develop a working vocabulary informed by the complexities and intricacies of his immediate landscape and the often chaotic details of the everyday. In dialogue with artist Liz Vitlin and the local Chicago art scene, you see the thing of the thing is is gives form to a sustained and growing conversation between Mark O’Gorman and Julian Van Der Moere, whose exhibition programmes focus on site-specific work and durational conversational approaches with artists.

Michele Horrigan is the founder and curator at Askeaton Contemporary Arts, Askeaton, Limerick and organises the citywide series of exhibitions and public events in Chicago bringing together artist-led activities between Ireland and Midwest USA. Over the past three years, Michele has developed strong relationships between artists and curators from Ireland and Chicago's independent art spaces, upholding an ambitious ingenuity and egalitarian attitude to the shaping and sharing of culture.

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Host or Publisher Consulate General of Ireland, Chicago