Ordinary Wonders Curator Gallery Talk at LCA

Event Information

Lubeznik Center for the Arts (LCA) presents Ordinary Wonders, a two-person exhibition elevating and celebrating domestic life. 

The artists in Ordinary Wonders, Jessica Labatte and Cecil McDonald, Jr., utilize the photographic medium in contrasting ways to illuminate the extraordinary brilliance within the everyday. Their exquisitely staged pictures made in and around domestic spaces with family, friends and objects are meant to elevate the mundane and develop quiet yet radical gestures of expansion and liberation.

Labatte’s beautifully composed still-life images, featuring flowers from her carefully tended garden alongside her children’s toys and homemade sculptures, capture the joy and wonder of everyday domestic life. At the same time, they reflect the challenges of art-making as a working mother. 

Her process and resulting artworks offer a vision of a loving, connected and playful balance for artist mothers, while also delivering a feminist critique of the world and its demands on women, particularly working mothers.

McDonald’s seemingly candid but carefully staged, beautifully lit, sumptuously colored, cinematic images of his family and friends expand the breadth of visual representations of Black people. Within his series of photographs McDonald positions extraordinarily ordinary pictures of Black people existing between the poles of Black misery and Black exceptionalism as a celebratory act of inclusion and representational expansion.

"Ordinary Wonders brings together two of Chicago’s most accomplished contemporary artists working in photography! Their work is breathtakingly beautiful! Don’t miss it!" – LCA Curator, Whitney Bradshaw.

Curator Gallery Talk with ASL Interpreter: Saturday, April 12 • 11:30 AM (CT)