The Museum Will Be Closed Today, Saturday 1/18/25. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you.
For over four decades, Chicago-based Greek American photographer Diane Alexander White has photographed Chicago’s community festivals and street parades. Gather Together: Chicago Street Photography by Diane Alexander White will explore the role of community and connection in our lives through a selection of these photographs.
In his treatise Politics, Aristotle argued that it is our connections to other people that make us truly human. Before that, in the Iliad, Homer declared that a person living without community is a “dreadful man” prone to hatred and violence, because he does not have his own loved ones. Later Patristic writers, like St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great, would identify in community not only the nature of the Godhead (the Triune God of orthodox Christianity is a God defined by community), but the essential nature of human beings created in the image of that God. Simply put, it has been the common understanding since ancient times tha to be ourselves we need each other. Gather Together celebrates this universal reality within the specific context of the great city of Chicago.