The 5th Floor Market opens at the University of Illinois Chicago

The 5th Floor Market: Grocery Store as Cultural Institution is an upcoming exhibition at The 5th Floor Gallery at the UIC School of Art & Art History. The exhibition opens August 29, 2019 and will run until December 5, 2019. The 5th Floor Market is a social commentary installation on food, cultural institutions, and the start-up, Instagram culture that fuels our consumerist tendencies. 

This exhibition is curated by Araceli Medina-Castillo, Nina Versenyi, and June Ahn, second year graduate students in the UIC Museum and Exhibition Studies Program. For their Exhibition Practices class, they designed an exhibition section on food inequality in Chicago and began noticing parallels between grocery stores and museums. This inspired them to further analyze the politics of food and where/why we buy it, focusing on the grocery store as a cultural site. 

The 5th Floor Market asks visitors, is it outlandish to claim that museums and grocery stores are actually quite similar. While the installation is largely satirical, both critiquing and acknowledging the appeal of the consumer driven marketing strategies museums and grocery stores employ, the accompanying series of public programs is more generative. The programs focus on promoting healthier, more informed consumers and sustainable practices. They will include a grocery store tour with a UIC nutritionist, and a global dumpling potluck and film screening. 

The 5th Floor is located at 400 South Peoria Street, in the same building which houses Gallery 400 on the east side of campus. Admission to the exhibition and programming is free.

The gallery has open hours on Fridays from 1pm–6pm, and Monday-Thursday, 12pm-2pm. Join us for the exhibition reception on August 29 from 6pm–8pm. See the School of Art & Art History online calendar for full details of events. https://artandarthistory.uic.edu

For updates on hours, events, and speakers, follow @uicsaah and @muse_uic on Instagram and Facebook. 

Follow The 5th Floor Market on Instagram @5thfloormarket. It’s not just food, it’s a lifestyle.