Jay Ryan: Flock: The Bird Machine is the name of Jay Ryan’s shop in Skokie, Illinois where colorful limited-edition silkscreen posters are produced. Driven less by technological fads than by old-fashioned visual inventiveness and hard work, Ryan’s designs have become highly sought-after worldwide. The North Gallery will recreate studio walls, with posters tacked up from floor to ceiling.

Images of Death and Life

This is a survey exhibition of prints by renowned German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945). Kollwitz is famous for both her empathic humanity and mordant social commentary, represented through an unmistakable graphic style. This exhibit, curated by Assistant Director Peter Olson, brings together prints from Illinois and Midwest collections.

Moonlight Cocktails are the Thing

Illinois artist and printmaker David Driesbach weaves rich narratives in his complex, colorful and whimsical etchings. Although Driesbach retired from teaching many years ago, he has continued a prodigious production. This exhibition attempts to summarize a lifetime of remarkable achievements. Co-organized with students enrolled in “Museum Exhibitions and Interpretation,” a graduate-level Museum Studies course.

The Mayor of Palookaville

A selection of hand-printed, hand-bound books by David Johnson, a mid-career artist from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Johnson’s tools are simple and direct: etching, relief printing and letterpress. His observations are not: perceptive, shrewd, satirical and compassionate views of the people around him and the quotidian spaces they inhabit.