Chicago-born artist Nathaniel Mary Quinn is back on home turf this week with his first solo museum exhibition in the city, A Love Letter to My Mother, opening Thursday at the National Public Housing Museum. The show pairs Quinn’s collage-style "paint-drawing" portraits with a memory-soaked re-creation of his family’s Robert Taylor Homes living room. Opening day comes with a neighborhood picnic and an artist talk, and the exhibition is set to run through Aug. 23.
Now 49 and based in Brooklyn, Quinn traces his career back to drawing on apartment walls and doing early commissions around the neighborhood. He often credits his mother’s belief in his talent, recalling how she told him, “Baby, you can be the best artist you can possibly be,” a refrain he still carries into the studio. That trajectory, from South Side sketches to museum walls, is laid out in reporting by WBEZ.
From Robert Taylor Homes To A Rolling Stones Cover
Quinn’s profile recently jumped to a new level after one of his 2025 paintings, Stones Trinity, was picked for the Rolling Stones’ album Foreign Tongues, according to a press release from Universal Music. The band introduced the record and its artwork at a Brooklyn launch that drew wide coverage, including reporting by The Guardian.
What’s On View
The National Public Housing Museum describes the exhibition as a pairing of Quinn’s paintings and works on paper with a reconstructed version of his family’s living room and a reading room stocked with archival material, rooting the show firmly in the history of public housing. The museum is also promoting a free neighborhood picnic and an artist talk as part of opening day programming, positioning the exhibition as a community-centered event rather than a standard white-cube debut, per the National Public Housing Museum.
Why It Matters
Museum director Lisa Yun Lee said that "Quinn’s portraiture gives visibility to African American and traditionally marginalized people," underscoring how the show links personal memory to civic history, according to WBEZ. Quinn is represented by Gagosian, and his work appears in institutional collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art. That mix of hometown roots and high-profile attention has turned the show into a rare kind of Chicago homecoming with national reach.
Visiting Info
Admission to the exhibition is free. The museum is located at 919 S. Ada St., and the opening picnic is listed on the museum’s events calendar with registration recommended. For full hours and programming details, see the events page at the National Public Housing Museum.
