A new video game gallery has been announced to be opening next The 606’s Bloomingdale Tail in Chicago. The Video Game Art Gallery has been doing random pop-up exhibits all around Chicago and has decided to take create a new gallery in the Bloomingdale Arts Building at 2418 W. Bloomingdale Avenue.
The gallery is set to open on August 11th from 5pm to 8pm and will be open during those times on Wednesdays and from noon to 5pm on Sundays. The founders of the Video Game Art Gallery (VGA) and co-directors, Jonathan Kinkley and Chaz Evans met while studying art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two were both heavily into video games and became fast friends and founded the VGA in 2013 as a nonprofit exhibit that Kinkley and Evan worked hard to maintain the exhibit on top of working full-time jobs to fund it.
The main goal of the gallery was to open a dedicated where people could not only appreciate video games as an art form but also play them and learn about their place in history. VGA even pays tribute to lesser known games such as Dateline: Bronzeville a mysterious adventure game centered around Chicago’s own Bronzeville neighborhood, otherwise known as Black Metropolis due to it being vibrant with black culture and booming businesses during the Great Migration. The game has a still in the gallery depicting a lively bar filled with black people dancing, playing music, talking and enjoying themselves. Chaz Evans teaches classes at Northwestern University on video game development, new media and coding created the gallery’s first exhibit and will be highlighting a still being tested video game from Cuba known as Savior created by Josuhe Pagliery and Johann Armenteros.
The gallery will host three to five exhibitions yearly and talks, screenings, and tours regularly. The gallery will also be selling original video game posters, prints, and provide free copies of their peer reviewed journal, “VGAReader.” Chaz and Kinkley also give credit to their volunteer staff who help them with running the gallery Kinkley had this say in regards to the opening of their new gallery, “Globally, there’s this common acknowledgement that, ‘Wow games are really becoming a really rich, mature and diverse medium. There deserves to be a place for group conversation, for study, for inquiry, for play. And we wanted to do that for Chicago.” The Video Game Art Gallery is set to open in Chicago on August 11th be sure to visit to see, play, and learn about video games you love and may not have heard of. Happy gaming!
Featured Image via Wikimedia Commons
