For decades, self-taught immigrant artists in Chicago have collected, sculpted, woven, painted, built, and sustained a creative practice in their everyday lives. “Catalyst: Im/migration and Self-Taught Art in Chicago” at the Intuit Art Museum is a celebration of these works made since the 1940s.

Many of the working-class artists on view used tools from their trade. Stanislaw “Stanley” Szwarc used metal from dental equipment. Marion Perkins sculpted figures with baling wire from bundled newspapers at his newsstand. The troubled faces from his Skywatcher series—made in response to the Hiroshima bombing—were carved from the stone of abandoned buildings. Shopkeeper Aldobrando “Aldo” Piacenza filled his yard with small Italian cathedrals he built for birds.

Themes of activism and social justi

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