Exhibitions

Public Collectors is a Chicago-based project administered by Marc Fischer. Since 2007, Public Collectors has elevated subcultural, underground, marginal, amateur, and collective perspectives that many museum and institutional collections neglect.

On view September 4–November 5, 2025, the exhibition featured several durational and collaborative projects that resonate with the Center's 2025–26 theme Period. Marc Fischer gave an artist talk at the opening and led a one-day single-sheet publication, with participants zines distirbuted at the Cincinnati Art Book Fair the next day. 

Celebrate People's History Poster Series 

"Rooted in the do-it-yourself tradition of mass-produced and distributed political propaganda, but detourned to embody principles of democracy, inclusion, and group participation in the writing and interpretation of history," the Celebrate People’s History posters have been organized and curated by designer, artist, and archivist Josh MacPhee since 1998. "The goal of this project is not to tell a definitive history, but to suggest a new relationship to the past.”

On view from January 16–May 15, 2025, the opening featured an artist talk “Building Counter-Institutions through Material Culture”  by Josh and the workshop "A Crash Course in Political Poster History and Making" the following day where students, faculty, and community members collaged materials from the history of political graphics and posters to create new posters relevant to issues of concern on UC‘s campus.