Convergence 2024 features arts-integrated investigations by Chicago Public School students engaged in CAPE’s Artist/Researcher Partners Program. Exhibition on view May 7th-31st, Tuesday-Friday, 11am-5pm or by appointment, contact mark@capechicago.org.

Convergence is CAPE’s annual end-of-the-year exhibition celebrating the arts-integrated investigations by Chicago Public School students engaged in CAPE’s Artist/Researcher Partners Program. This year’s Convergence presents artworks by over 900 students from 45 classrooms across the city. Artist/Researcher Partners are CAPE’s long-term teacher and teaching artist collaborators who push the boundaries of arts-integrated, inquiry practice.

As part of an iterative development over the past few years, collaborating teams have been exploring ways of decentering curricular design and practices to understand how material explorations fully expand notions about student agency. This year, the teams consider how frameworks around materiality-the way in which the materials are imbued by time, history, and culture reconstitute the nature of materials and matter themselves redirect lines of inquiry and the process of creating and understanding what is being made.

Rather than using materials to make art and learn, how do we make and learn with materials? How does blurring the boundaries between subject and object provide a nuanced understanding of student agency and the potential co-constitution of agency?