Exhibition Opening: A Different Future in the Making

About the exhibition

What can bottom-up, systemic change look like in the garment industry—and beyond—when exploitation and violence are replaced by community and care? And what role might architecture and design play in this transformation?

A Different Future in the Making shows how these questions are being explored by Chicago’s Blue Tin Production, the first apparel manufacturing worker co-operative in America run by immigrant, refugee, and working-class women of color. Blue Tin is set on ending the fashion industry’s reliance on sweatshops and gender-based violence to make our clothing, and in its place building garment worker power and destabilizing power structures from the bottom up.

Materializing Blue Tin’s radical model and vision using the tools and techniques of garment work, this exhibition also reveals how the co-operative is seeding greater change through their newest project: 63rd House, a multifunctional community space and manufacturing studio in Chicago Lawn. Designed by Studio Gang and envisioned in partnership with local Black and brown youth-led organizations, the project aims to remake a vacant former post office into a neighborhood center where Blue Tin and the community’s larger abolitionist vision can flourish—and in doing so, create vital infrastructures of care and safety outside of police, prisons, and sweatshops.

Register for the opening here

All guests must present proof of vaccination at entry and wear a face covering at all times.