Uptown Arts Center

Uptown Arts Center   Mission Statement

The Uptown Arts Center, housed in a series of iconoclastic spaces within the historic Preston Bradley Center, has created shared art studio and workshop spaces, exhibition galleries, and boutique performance arenas.  We welcome the synergy of experiences and place to inform our unique vision of a supportive and nurturing artistic community.

Our mission dovetails with the Preston Bradley Center’s through our focus on bringing visual and interdisciplinary arts to  Uptown to improve the quality of life in our community.

Exhibitions in the center encourage interaction between community, artists and art enthusiasts.

We showcase emerging and mid-career artists predominantly from the Chicago area in a variety of thematic exhibitions from group shows to solo ones.

We are an incubator for artist-lead workshops, readings and classes.   Some taking place in the arts center studios and others, focused on digital media, book & paper arts, photography & writing may be based in-house but take place in the wider community around us.  We are the home of quarterly Lagoons Sessions Readings sponsored by Lagoons Editions

Running throughout our future programming will be threads of both the nature of creativity  and the roles of artists and community in the wider world

 

Colette Wright Adams
Uptown Arts Center  Curator

Colette  founded the Uptown Arts Center in  May 2012  and currently  serves as  curator. The Uptown Arts Center is an emerging arts non-profit currently a program of  the Preston Bradley Center, 941 W Lawrence Ave, Chicago

Colette received a BFA (visual arts) and MFA (painting) from the University of Michigan and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) respectively.  She spent more than a decade working as both a scriptwriter and assistant  director in Industrial film alongside her 30 years painting & drawing.