Quiet Intersections Exhibits

Four Chicago Artists – Four Solo Exhibitions – One Unforgettable Experience

This spring, four Chicago-based artists present concurrent solo exhibitions across the galleries of Voices Studios—together forming Quiet Intersections, a multi-faceted experience that reveals how individual artistic voices can converge, diverge, and share creative space. Though each artist works from a deeply personal lens, their practices intersect in their investigations of memory, materiality, and the quiet tensions that shape contemporary life. Each of these artists has chosen a distinctively different path to navigate a personal studio practice within the demands of the urban art world.

Allie Kushnir — Main Gallery
Allie Kushnir explores the emotional architecture of natural forms. Her paintings and works on paper balance lush organic movement with a studied restraint, inviting viewers into spaces where growth and stillness coexist. Kushnir’s sensitivity to color and gesture creates a contemplative environment—one that anchors the broader exhibition with its meditative, breathing presence.
https://www.alliekushnir.com/foliage

Shalen Stephenson — JM Gallery
Shalen Stephenson’s work expands the language of abstraction through layered mark-making, shifting transparencies, and a rhythmic sense of construction. His compositions feel both architectural and atmospheric, revealing the tension between control and improvisation. Stephenson’s practice intersects with Kushnir’s through a shared interest in organic rhythm, yet his visual world is more structural—an exploration of how form emerges from repetition, erasure, and the persistence of the hand.
https://www.shalenstephenson.com/

Thérèse Mulgrew — Mezzanine Gallery
Dubuque native, Thérèse Mulgrew’s figurative paintings bring an intimate, cinematic quality to Quiet Intersections. Her portraits and interior scenes capture fleeting emotional states with a softness that belies their psychological depth. Mulgrew’s work introduces the human presence into the exhibition’s dialogue, bridging the abstract and material investigations of her peers with a focus on vulnerability, memory, and the quiet drama of everyday life.
https://www.theresemulgrew.com/

Noel Mercado — Studio Gallery
In the Studio Gallery, Noel Mercado transforms found materials into sculptural forms that challenge assumptions about value, labor, and cultural identity. His assemblages and object-based works carry a raw physicality that contrasts sharply with the delicacy of Mulgrew’s paintings and the atmospheric qualities of Kushnir and Stephenson. Yet Mercado’s practice intersects with theirs through its deep engagement with process—each artist, in their own way, reveals how transformation occurs through attention, repetition, and care.
https://www.noel-mercado.com/

A Collective Experience
Together, these four exhibitions create perspectives on how we build meaning from the fragments of our environments—natural, emotional, material, and cultural. Quiet Intersections invites viewers to move between galleries, noticing the echoes that pass from one space to another: a gesture that reappears, a color that resurfaces, a shared sense of searching. The result is a multilayered experience, one that celebrates the richness of Chicago’s contemporary art community.