Atrium Project: Edie Fake
Mar 25, 2025 - Mar 29, 2026
About the Exhibition
For this iteration of the Atrium Project series, artist, author, and activist Edie Fake transforms the two-story lobby wall in the museum’s second floor atrium with his mural The Free Clinic for Gender Affirming Care (2024–25). An imagined facade of a clinic for free transgender healthcare, the mural offers a majestic counterview to the present reality in the United States, where transgender and nonbinary people are under constant threat of political repression, restriction, and scapegoating. The mural, with its layered architectural motifs and undulating prismatic colors, invites visitors into Fake’s utopian vision of access and open expression.
Following his earlier Memory Palace series—examples of which are included in the exhibition City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago, on view at the MCA from July 5, 2025, through May 31, 2026—wherein Fake reimagined the facades of historic queer and feminist establishments in Chicago, this work underscores the artist’s shift in focus from the past to the future, from what was to what could still be.
Atrium Project: Edie Fake is organized by Jack Schneider, Assistant Curator.
About the Artist
Edie Fake (b. 1980, Evanston, IL; lives in Twentynine Palms, CA) is a painter and visual artist whose work examines issues of trans identity and “queer space” through the lens of architecture and ornamentation. Fake’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY, and Marlborough Contemporary, New York, NY, and in group shows at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA. His collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Fake’s large-scale projects include mural installations for The Drawing Center, New York, NY, and Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive, CA.