Current and Upcoming

Jesús Hilario-Reyes
Opening Sept 17, 2026

Minor Attractions (London) 
October 13 - 19, 2026

 





Exhibition & Fair Archive

Riga Contemporary (Latvia)  
Roland Knowlden
July 2 - July 5, 2026

Rituals for Field Transmissions
josh brainin
Curated by Youssef Boucetta

Barely Fair (Chicago)  
Jesús Hilario-Reyes
April 3 -19, 2026

Neighbors Fair  (Chicago)
Joseph J. Greer
April 8-12, 2026

THROAT
KC Crow Maddux
December 13, 2025  - January 31, 2026

How Close Can You Get to a Stranger
Steven Piper
November 14 - November 23, 2025

Minor Harmonies
Laila Majid, Joseph J. Greer, Anastasia Sif Karkazis. Curated by Misael José Oquendo
October 8 - November 9, 2025

Marked  
Lola Ayisha Ogbara
May 22 - July 22, 2025

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Website currently under construction -
full documentation  to come for:

Verge Showroom (co-curated)
josh brainin, Corrine Slade,
Jairo Granados-Cardenas,
Wendy Robles, Elaine Schutz Kurtz
March 27 - June, 2026

Temenos
Misael José Oquendo
March 14 - April 12, 2025

Barely Fair 2025
Roland Knowlden

Stars Shown In the East
Mandela Hudson, Curated by Denny Mwaura
January 17 - March 1, 2025

[Hold]
Fengzee Yang, Sharon Xinran Zhang, Janet Lee, Eric Saudi. Curated by Rupture

Blinked Twice
Vani Aguilar
August 9 - October 6, 2024

Iceberg Process 5
Pierre-Alexandre Savriacoty. Curated by Stephanie Cristello
June 28 - July 21, 2024


Inaugural Exhibition
Ang Ziqi Zhang, Chaveli Sifre, Corrine Slade, Farah Salem, Jasmine Huaimin Yeh, Isra Rene, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Kushala Vora, Roland Knowlden, Roland Santana, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty
April 12 - June 9, 2024

Chicago, IL •

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Tala is a contemporary art gallery located in the West Town neighborhood of Chicago, IL founded in 2024 by Francine Almeda. The space includes a gallery, a library, and an atrium marketplace, offering a new model of gallery format that champions confluence and experimentation across disciplines and programming. Tala’s library is the permanent home of Chuquimarca Art Library.

The name Tala means ‘bright star’ in Tagalog and is derived from the mythology of Tala, the goddess of the morning and evening star, who was revered for her guidance of light during times of loss.


Closed for summer



1644 West Chicago Ave #1, Chicago IL


info@talachicago.com
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On View:
July 2 - July 5,
2026   Riga ContemporaryRoland Knowlden Jr.


Press Release PDF






Tala is proud to present a new series of works by London-based, Liberian-American artist Roland Knowlden Jr. for Riga Contemporary 2026. 

Working across sculpture and painting, Knowlden Jr.examines the material poetics of the “entryway,” using the visual language of the West African mask as a conceptual point of departure alongside his conceptual abstract paintings.  

In sculptures such as not memory but the lack thereof, Knowlden turns the decorative face of a mask towards its smooth, inner concave, foregrounding its interior void. In doing so, he universalizes its unmarked surface and emphasizes the mask’s reverse side as an allusion ritual entry, suggesting the individual’s active role in engaging with the mask’s sonic and spiritual dimensions, while resisting its aestheticization as an object within Western art canon. Alongside these sculptures, a linear arrangement three paintings are extend the mask’s exploration into abstract, spiritual realms. Knowlden Jr.’s paintings navigate the visual language of chaos as a modality of opacity - in part drawing on Édouard Glissant’s contentions with reductive containment and on Jack Whitten’s use of layering to create innite depths. To him, abstraction is equal parts destruction and reconstruction, a process he likens to the combustion of a ame’s inferno. Here, re is a conceptually rich premise within which systemic oppression has been historically dissected (as foregrounded by James Balwdwin’s seminal text The Fire Next Time) - Knowlden Jr. echoes this lineage while expanding the horizons of his practice towards new conventions of conceptual abstraction.  

Roland Knowlden Jr. (b.1995, New Jersey) is a Liberian-American artist currently based in London. Exploring a material poetics - his practice engages the unknown, the absent, and the chaotic in tension with systems of order and control. Knowlden utilizes processes of collage and assemblage across painting, drawing, lm and sculpture- destabilizing objects and materials through their convergences/ divergences.

Knowlden is a 2026 MFA Fine Art candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London and received his B.Arch in 2020 from Illinois Institute of Technology.

His work has been exhibited in multiple art spaces in across Chicago and London, where he was previously and is currently based, including DePaul Art Museum (Chicago, IL), Elmhurst Art Museum (Chicago, IL), South Side Community Arts Center (Chicago, IL), Public Gallery (London) House Works Presents (London), among others.