Installed within the expansive, vaulted architecture of Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, IN/SITU features sculpture, installation, video and site-specific works. For the 2025 program, Jessica Hong, Chief Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, has curated a selection of works featuring artists from leading international exhibitors participating in the fair.

2025 IN/SITU Curator

Jessica S. Hong is a curator and cultural worker who has dedicated her practice to highlighting under-recognized narratives and stimulating generational change within institutional sites. Hong is the newly-appointed Chief Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO. She is formerly the Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA). At TMA, she organized the premiere of Stan Douglas’s major film installation Doppelgänger (2021) in a U.S. institution, Living Legacies: Art of the African American South (2022), Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg–Machine Auguries: Toledo (2023), and Toledo’s presentation of Marisol: A Retrospective (2024). Additionally, she launched TMA’s digital artist residency and, in 2022, she was awarded Toledo’s 20 Under 40, which recognizes leaders in the community.

Prior to the TMA, she was the Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art and the first to fill this position on the occasion of the museum’s major expansion. Hong was Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where she organized exhibitions including Arthur Jafa: Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2018) and the Boston presentation of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2018). Before the ICA, she was part of the new Division of Modern and Contemporary Art that launched the renovated Harvard Art Museums. Hong was previously based in New York and held curatorial positions at Independent Curators International (ICI), SculptureCenter, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Hong continues to serve as a national critic and juror for numerous fellowships, awards, prizes, and residency programs and was a member of the U.S. Pavilion curatorial advisory committee for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. She received her M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University.

우리 Uri: We, Us, Our

In times of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, we may feel forced to retreat inward and even relinquish our agency. Yet, paradoxically, it is this shared sense of fear that unites us. The artists associated with 단색화 (Dansaekhwa), highlighted in this year’s IN/SITU, provide historical context, having lived through Japanese occupation (1910-45), the Korean War (1950-53), and the authoritarian regimes of Park Chung-hee (1963-79) and Chun Doo-hwan (1980-88). Their experiences deeply resonating with today’s global climate. Nevertheless, they persisted, forging transformative cultural pathways with generational impact. Across the globe, artists continue to push forward in times when their safety and livelihoods are under threat, drawing strength not only from their individual practices but also from broader communities of creators and cultural practitioners, determined to persevere and shape a generative future.

우리 (uri)—meaning "we," "us," or “our"—is not just a term. It reflects an embodied understanding of belonging to and contributing to a collective. Expounding upon 우리, this year’s IN/SITU features artists working in duos, collaboratives, and cooperatives, including families and those tied to artistic movements. 우리 foregrounds intentional practices of exchange, co-authorship, and co-creation, urgently reminding us of our place within and responsibility to a complex and entwined sociocultural fabric.

2025 PARTICIPATING ARTISTS & COLLECTIVES

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan | Sundaram Tagore Gallery

Christo & Jeanne-Claude | Hexton Gallery

CrossLypka | april april

Dansaekhwa | BHAK, Wellside Gallery and Keumsan Gallery

Deborah Oropallo & Andy Rappaport | Catharine Clark Gallery

John Ahearn & Rigoberto Torres | Charlie James

Langlands & Bell | Cristea Roberts Gallery

Native Art Department International | Patel Brown

Papuyna Tula Artists Collective & Pwerle Sisters | SmithDavidson Gallery

POSTCOMMODITY | Bockley Gallery

Tromarama | DOCUMENT