83rd Annual Salon Show: My America

June 19 - August 15, 2026

Members and Artists Preview Reception: Thursday, June 18, 2026: 6-8pm

Awards Celebration: Sunday, August 2, 2026: 1-3pm

South Shore Arts’ first themed Salon Show - My America - invites artists to engage with the United States’ semi-quincentennial through personal, political, cultural, and historic lenses. What does 250 years of America mean? See how it is celebrated, critiqued, and reimagined through the eyes of regional artists.

Are you an artist? Learn more about submitting to this exhibition by clicking below

Still Crazy: 40 years of the Crazy IN style Artists

August 28 - November 7, 2026

In the early nineteen-seventies, when New York City was busy declaring bankruptcy, fiscal and otherwise, its teenagers were drafting a parallel ledger on brick and steel. Armed with fat markers and pilfered rattle cans, they wrote their names into the margins of the city: on alley walls, roll-down gates, and, most spectacularly, on subway cars that shuttled their aliases through the boroughs like emissaries. The courts called it vandalism. The writers called it being seen. What began as tags - cryptic signatures paired with street numbers - evolved into something more operatic, a self-aware art movement that grew alongside hip-hop and, by the mid-eighties, found itself paradoxically celebrated in galleries even as the city spent millions attempting to scrub it away.

Far from the mythologized skyscrapers of Manhattan, a group of young Latino artists in Northwest Indiana were paying attention. The region, steel mills coughing into the lakefront sky, neighborhoods calibrated to shift changes, rarely makes anyone’s travel itinerary. A quintessential example of the ‘fly-over states,” it is a place people drive through, not to. And yet it was here, amid viaducts and factory walls, that the Crazy Indiana Style Artists, or CISA, took shape.

 They did not materialize from art school critiques or foundation grants. Their classrooms were alleys; their résumés, walls. In its early days, the collective - then known as the IN Style Artists - was a loose confederation of nearly a hundred (graffiti) writers locked in a rigorous, reputation-driven exchange. Letters mattered. Nerve mattered. Showing up mattered most. What began as raw, sometimes illegal assertion matured into a multigenerational conversation about public space: not as backdrop but as forum.

 Over four decades, CISA’s practice expanded beyond graffiti’s adrenaline rush into murals, installations, music, and mentorship. There is no singular “CISA style,” which is precisely the point. Painters work beside DJs; photographers beside dancers. The ethos is consistent - raw over refined, expression over approval - even as the forms shift. Members such as Ishmael “Ish” Muhammad Nieves, Felix “Flex” Maldonado Jr., and Geraldo “OMEN74” Guevarra have stewarded the collective without sanding down its edges, insisting that growth need not entail amnesia.

 Still Crazy: 40 Years of the Crazy IN Style Artists, a new exhibition curated by Nieves and Maldonado, gathers more than fifty works and unveils eight new murals scaled to twenty-foot gallery walls. The show nods to influences like Keith Haring while keeping its center of gravity firmly Midwestern. If the white cube once kept graffiti at arm’s length, here the gallery feels less like a domestication than an extension of the street.

 Outside, in neighborhoods long shortchanged by investment and attention, CISA’s murals continue to operate as declarations rather than decorations. They address identity, humor, pressure, and pride without romanticizing hardship. In a region that has lived in Chicago’s shadow, the collective’s message is neither plaintive nor polite. It is large, chromatic, and insistent: We are here. We matter.