CHICAGO, IL.- Gallery Wendi Norris is presenting a selection of career-defining works by María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Ambreen Butt, and Chitra Ganesh for its exhibition in EXPO CHICAGO's expanded Galleries section, "Embodiment." Curated by Dr. Louise Bernard, Director of the Obama Presidential Center Museum, this section features works inspired by the architecture and commissioned artists of the Obama Presidential Center ahead of its anticipated opening in June 2026.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons (b. 1959, Matanzas, Cuba), who will debut new work at the 61st Venice Biennale this May, draws on the body—specifically, her own—as a vessel through which she navigates Afro-Cuban diasporic narratives. She produces work that is at once historically grounded and spiritually charged, materializing themes of migration and memory.
In her monumental twelve-part Polaroid composition, De las Dos Aguas (Of the Two Waters) (2007), the artist renders the trauma and sensation of being split between two continents through a double self-portrait. The two figures, joined at the hair and holding aloft a boat—which Campos-Pons herself constructed—bearing four seafarers carved in the form of Yoruba deities, bridge the expanse between the Americas and Africa.
An earlier work on view, The Truth Doesn't Kill You (La Verdad No Mata) (1991), presents three silhouettes of the artist's body cut from woods of three distinct tones, collapsing the boundary between nature and the human form.
Through her politically engaged work in the tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting, Ambreen Butt (b. 1969, Lahore, Pakistan) trains her eye on those rendered vulnerable by war, nationalism, and the politics of belonging.
Pages of Deception (2012) is a six-foot-tall diptych formatted in the style of a muraqqa—a traditional Islamic album of miniature paintings and calligraphy—incorporating the transcript from the 2012 trial of Tarek Mehanna. Over the course of a year, the artist tore and collaged the legal documents by hand, embodying the prosecution on one panel and the defense on the other. The result resembles a sacred manuscript: meticulous, inscrutable, and charged with the unresolved tensions between national security and First Amendment rights that the trial raised. The work served as the centerpiece of Butt's solo exhibition Mark My Words (2018–19) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Butt, who recently received the prestigious Anonymous Was a Woman Award, recently debuted her newest body of work, I Bear Witness, which is currently on view at Gallery Wendi Norris through May 9, 2026.
Chitra Ganesh's (b. 1975, Brooklyn, NY) speculative hybrid figures are drawn from the language of mythology, surrealism, feminist futurism, science fiction, and queer theory, deconstructing the boundaries of the normative human body.
Her mixed-media painting Enter the Jungle (2024) places a transforming figure—part woman, part tiger—amid lush, imaginary flora whose palette of greens, pinks, and violets evokes the jungle paintings of Henri Rousseau. In doing so, Ganesh reclaims that landscape, which was once deployed by colonial powers as a symbol of exotic otherness, into a site of transfiguration and possibility.
In summer 2026, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, will present Journey to the Great Below, Ganesh's first major UK solo exhibition in a public institution.
