On September 29, 2018, presented by the Chicago Humanities Festival before a live audience at Navy Pier in Chicago, international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist conducted his first US marathon interview session as part of Art Design Chicago. Obrist, who has undertaken a life-long project of interviewing cultural figures, spoke with more than twenty of Chicago’s most influential emerging and established artists, designers, architects, writers, and other creatives. In their interviews, this diverse group of creatives provided insights into their artistic processes, influences, and ideas about and hopes for their shared city of Chicago. Among the participants were social-practice artist/developer Theaster Gates, architect Jeanne Gang, writer Eve Ewing, Hairy Who artists Art Green and Suellen Rocca, AfriCOBRA artist Gerald Williams, performance/installation artist Shani Crowe, and the city’s cultural historian Tim Samuelson.

Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon serves as documentation for this event, including edited transcripts of the interviews, biographies of the participants, photos of the event, and images of the artists’ work. It is published by the Terra Foundation for American Art and distributed by The University of Chicago Press. Purchase a copy of the publication or view a PDF.