Current and Upcoming
Scores
Jesús Hilario-Reyes
September 17 - November 21
Opening September 17, 5-8PM
Minor Attractions (London)
October 13 - 19, 2026
Asia Now (Paris)
October 20 -24, 2026
Jon Cuyson
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
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
Website currently under construction -
full documentation to come for:
Neighbors Fair (Chicago)
Joseph J. Greer
April 8-12, 2026
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
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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 - opening on September 17, 2026
1644 West Chicago Ave #1, Chicago IL
info@talachicago.com
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Opening Sept 17,
5-8PM
September 17 -
November 21, 2026
ScoresJesús Hilario -Reyes
“... in fallness, a club arises. Disorder is our service, our antidote and anteroom, our vestibule without a story. We can’t survive intact. We can only survive if we are not intact. Our danger and saving power is always an open door. Our venue is mutual infusion, the holy of holies in the wall, a glory in a kind of open chastity, where the explicit body reveals itself demure in disappearance…”
Black and Blur
By Fred Moten
Tala is pleased to present Scores, a solo exhibition by anti-disciplinary artist and DJ Jesús Hilario-Reyes (NYC) including his most recent drawing and sculptural works.
In the late 1960’s classical composer and jazz musician Frederick Tillis took a step towards composing the form of the spiritual as a written score. Trained in the conventions of European-centered arrangement styles, his chamber works are infused with the harmonic dissonance of jazz and Black vernacular music traditions, arriving at a timbre that echoed the persistent candor of pioneering Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Fully embodied in his work Five Spirituals for Chorus and Brass Ensemble (1967), a five-movement choral work whose lyrics and cadence draw from Brooks’s The Second Sermon on the Warpland. Tillis’s faltering notes intersect and blend with Brooks’s sonorous phrases, at once melding into a singular voice: “Salve salvage in the spin [...] / prop a malign or failing light / but know the whirlwind is our commonwealth.”
Within contemporary underground club culture, modalities of whirlwind as refuge emerge through conditions of enmeshment. Here, indeterminacy is inherent. As bodies flicker in and out of sight within an engulfing fog on the dancefloor, fugitivity becomes footwork underneath the DJ and lighting technician’s unyielding choreography: a slippage occurs as the individual self melds into a collective mass. Then, as quickly as it comes, it all dissolves into darkness with the hiss of accumulating haze (famously named Chauvet DJ Hurricane 1200, 1600, 1800, or Hurricane Bubble Haze.) Collective embodiment, intensified through darkness and density, is not a destination but a "no place," an impossible site - Hilario-Reyes’s work exists within this site of blur.
How does one score an impossible site? In his newest series of drawings and sculpture, this proposition is staged. Hilario-Reyes utilizes the lilting language of dance notation to materialize a mangrove-like entanglement across his drawing works: a cloud of markings strewn across layers of translucent vellum, mapping the imagined movements of dancers into abstract forms. Fog swirls in a mahogany vitrine, filling and emptying in a perennial fall towards disappearance; its own ability to be contained a paradoxical ephemera. As if standing amidst the cacophony of the hurricane itself, Hilario-Reyes’s works recall The Second Sermon on the Warpland’s final injunction: “It is lonesome, yes / For we are the last of the loud. Nevertheless, live / Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.” And in fallenness, freedom arises in the erasure of a singular intactness, unintelligibilty welcomes us in.