Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Remembering Betye Saar, 1926–2026.

IMAGES:

1: Visiting the Neubauer Collegium gallery to see her exhibition “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” on view Jan. 30 – April 27, 2025. Portrait by Abel Arciniega.

2–4: Reviewing sketches from her early career in costume design during a home studio visit with (from left) Neubauer Collegium Curator Dieter Roelstraete, Roberts Projects Co-Owner Julie Roberts, and UChicago Political Scientist Adom Getachew, a member of the research team on the Neubauer Collegium’s Panafrica project, Feb. 19, 2024. Photos by Elspeth Carruthers.

5–10: Panafrica Days Reception, Neubauer Collegium, March 7, 2025. Photos by Abel Arciniega.

5) With her daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh, and UChicago English and Visual Arts​ Professor Bill Brown;

6 & 7) With (from left) Midwest Bamum Community Chief Paul Mbouombouo, Bamum Association Vice President Abdou Youffone, and Midwest Bamum Associate Jean-Brice Ngouen;

8) Welcoming guests with Dieter Roelstraete;

9) Signing “Let’s Get It On” posters;

10) With Theaster Gates.

11: “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” published this month by Roberts Projects.

Boundaries of Benevolence, a seed-stage project launched July 1 at the Neubauer Collegium, will bring together a team of medical experts, ethicists, and others to study community health care settings across regional and social divides. The team will explore the dynamics of compassion, ethical obligations, and pathways for fostering empathy in places where advantaged and disadvantaged populations live in close proximity yet experience radically different life conditions.

Learn more: https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/boundaries-of-benevolence

IMAGE: A Palestinian Red Crescent Society blood donation campaign at Al-Amal Hospital, Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, May 21, 2026. Photo by Doaa Albaz / Activestills.

As Betye Saar approaches her 100th birthday on July 30, the celebrated artist has no interest in slowing down. "My thing, after all this time, is just to create art," she writes in a lush new book published this month by her Los Angeles gallery, Roberts Projects.

"Let's Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar" features vibrant images, archival materials, and thoughtful reflections organized around Saar’s early work in costume and jewelry design. The publication accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Roberts Projects, which runs through August 22, and emerges in part from our own 2025 exhibition, a joyous exploration of Saar's early designs presented as part of our Panafrica research project.

"The show knitted together narratives of cultural borrowing that brought new understanding to bear about a critical stage in the life and work of Betye Saar," writes Neubauer Collegium Executive Director Elspeth Carruthers in the preface, "and said something important about the nature of inspiration itself." Our curator, Dieter Roelstraete, has also contributed an essay on the significance of Saar's encounters with African material culture during a pivotal trip she took to Chicago's Field Museum in 1974.

Roberts Projects will host a book launch and signing this Saturday, July 25, 12-2pm. It is an honor to celebrate this occasion with Betye Saar and her gallery, and a great pleasure to mark a century of inspiration with one of this country's most justly prized artists. As Roelstraete writes, Saar's work reminds us to "trust art to light the way ahead."

Cheers, to Betye!

In a wide-ranging interview with Mike Cloud and Nyeema Morgan published on the occasion of their Neubauer Collegium exhibition, Suzette Bell-Roberts talks to the artists about language, ambiguity, power, and the ways stories shape our understandings.

Read the piece in Art Africa magazine: https://artafricamagazine.org/making-meaning-in-an-age-of-uncertainty/

IMAGE: Installation view, Mike Cloud & Nyeema Morgan: Story Structure, Pt. 2, on view at the Neubauer Collegium April 7 – June 26, 2026. Photo by Robert Chase Heishman for Bob.

The Neubauer Collegium’s Future of the Humanities initiative, supported by the MacArthur Foundation, invites applications for one-year collaborative research projects that model promising forms of humanistic research. Each team must include at least one faculty member whose principal residence is in the Chicagoland area and who is affiliated with an accredited college or university in the area. Applications are due Sept. 15 for projects that will begin Jan. 1, 2027.

To learn more about this unique research opportunity, please visit our website and register to attend a virtual informational session.

https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/news/future-of-the-humanities-cfp

Info Sessions

Friday, July 31
1:00 – 2:00 pm
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-of-the-humanities-info-session-zoom-tickets-1994313705980?aff=oddtdtcreator

Friday, August 28
12:00 – 1:00 pm
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/future-of-the-humanities-info-session-zoom-tickets-1994365515945?aff=oddtdtcreator

The 2026-27 cohort of collaborative research projects at the Neubauer Collegium represent an astonishing range of scholarly interests, but all adopt an interdisciplinary approach to addressing a complex question. We are excited to support our newest research teams in the months to come.

Please visit our website to learn more about our research projects, and sign up for the Collegium newsletter to stay current on upcoming events.

IMAGES: 1) Raqs Media Collective, Cavalcade (detail), 2025. 2) A blood donation campaign in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, May 21, 2026. Photo by Doaa Albaz / Activestills. 3) A sandstone sphinx with Sinaitic hieroglyphs. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 4) Beverly Buchanan, For Mallory, 1995. © 2026 Estate of Beverly Buchanan / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 5) A cuneiform tablet and an Arabic manuscript. Photo illustration by el lee. 6) Robert Reiss, Untitled, circa 1960s. Courtesy of Martha Feldman. 7) Detail of a mural in Jerash, Jordan, October 11, 2011. Photo by Omar Chatriwala via Flickr. 8) Ezz Monem, Revolutionary Failure #1 (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist. 9) This photo, reportedly taken in a library at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City, circulated on social media in May 2024 and prompted an Israeli military investigation. 10) Illustration of “the soul of man” from Johann Amos Comenius’s Orbis Pictus (London, 1705). Boston Public Library digital collection. 11) Tabitha Arnold, Hot Labor Summer (detail), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

The 2025–26 cohort of collaborative research projects at the Neubauer Collegium represent an astonishing range of scholarly interests, but all adopt an interdisciplinary approach to addressing a complex question. We are excited to support our newest research teams in the months to come.

Please visit our website to learn more about our research projects, and sign up for the Collegium newsletter to stay current on upcoming events.

IMAGES: 1) Raqs Media Collective, Cavalcade (detail), 2025. 2) A Palestinian Red Crescent Society blood donation campaign in Khan Yunis, Gaza Strip, May 21, 2026. Photo by Doaa Albaz / Activestills. 3) A sandstone sphinx with Sinaitic hieroglyphs. © The Trustees of the British Museum. 4) Beverly Buchanan, For Mallory, 1995. © 2026 Estate of Beverly Buchanan / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 5) A cuneiform tablet and an Arabic manuscript. Photo illustration by el lee. 6) Robert Reiss, Untitled, circa 1960s. Courtesy of Martha Feldman. 7) Detail of a mural in Jerash, Jordan, October 11, 2011. Photo by Omar Chatriwala via Flickr. 8) Ezz Monem, Revolutionary Failure #1 (detail), 2021. Courtesy of the artist. 9) This photo, reportedly taken in a library at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City, circulated on social media in May 2024 and prompted an Israeli military investigation. 10) Illustration of “the soul of man” from Johann Amos Comenius’s Orbis Pictus (London, 1705). Boston Public Library digital collection. 11) Tabitha Arnold, Hot Labor Summer (detail), 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

What does it mean to be a “citizen of the world” at a moment when nearly every corner of our lives is shaped by the planetary risks of extractive capitalism, rising nationalism, and the rapid development of socially disruptive technologies? The aim of the Reimagining Cosmopolitanism project was to initiate a robust dialogue about cosmopolitanism that responds to the contemporary moment. The research team collaborated with an international group of scholars to develop a new and critical set of conceptual tools and categories. They also partnered with the Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective to develop and showcase a film that takes up these themes, Cavalcade, which premiered in the Collegium gallery in May 2025.

At the University of Chicago John W. Boyer Center in Paris tonight, the team will celebrate the publication of a volume they produced through the project, The Oxford Handbook of Cosmopolitanism. The event has been organized by Dipesh Charkrabarty and Lisa Wedeen and includes a performance by Syrian opera singer Noma Omran.

Illustration by Anna Searle Jones.

Learn more: https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/events/reimagining-cosmopolitanism-book-launch

We're excited to see that art historian and critic Lucas Gomez-Doyle has published a sharp review of our current gallery exhibition, "Mike Cloud & Nyeema Morgan: Story Structure, Pt. 2," in Newcity.

"Of all the enduring predicaments that continue to reverberate across the contemporary art world, questions of meaning-making and intended function are perhaps the most tantalizing," he writes. "In a cerebrally dexterous and elastic display, the two artists have outmaneuvered the field, flanking normative conventions of 'meaning' from its literal and conceptual margins. How refreshing to be in their presence."

Read the review: https://art.newcity.com/2026/06/15/nyeema-morgan-and-mike-cloud-turn-the-neubauer-collegium-into-a-riddle/

The exhibition runs through June 28. Gallery hours: M-F, 9-4.

Installation photography by Robert Heishman for Bob.