Connect to the healing benefits of art and nature! Join Brushwood Center for exhibitions, programs, performances, markets, and art classes.
Brushwood Center works collaboratively with community partners, artists, health care providers, and scientists to improve health equity and access to nature in Lake County, Illinois, and the Chicago region. Brushwood Center engages people with the outdoors through the arts, environmental education, and community action. Brushwood Center’s programs focus on youth, families, Military Veterans, and those facing racial and economic injustices.
Brushwood Center’s art programs amplify artists, musicians, community members, and scientists who provide insight to the challenges facing our communities and creative approaches to solutions.
Images: Upper left: Viewing art at At Ease in Nature, an annual exhibition of Veteran and Military community artists. Credit: InLife Photography. Right: Ephemeral artist Lydia Cheshewalla with her work, Before Dreams Are The Last Place We Find You. Credit: Michael Kardas Photography. Lower left: Young artist at work. Credit: InLife Photography
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Sunday, March 1 | 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm | Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods | Free
Rest and Recharge: Practicing Radical Self Care in an Uncertain World invites visitors into a spacious pause. In a world saturated with constant alerts, urgent headlines, and an unrelenting stream of information, our nervous systems are rarely given time to settle. While some messages truly demand our immediate action, many linger as ambient noise, subtly shaping our thoughts, elevating stress, and eroding our capacity for presence and rest.
This exhibition acknowledges the quiet toll of that overload and offers a gentle counterbalance. Through visual art, space, and silence, Rest and Recharge creates an environment that encourages slowing down, tuning inward, and reconnecting with rhythms that sustain us rather than deplete us. The works on view explore rest not as withdrawal or passivity, but as an active, necessary practice—one rooted in attention, care, and renewal.
The exhibition features work from over forty artists, including: Joan Ackerman-Zimny, Cat Aldana, Anna Archinger, Beverly Behrens, Sinead Carus, Margarete de Soleil, Maureen Ivy Fisher, Jennifer L. Hodges, Ruth Hutter, Jack Vonty, Moritz Kellerman,Karen Kloubec, Phyllis Levun-Agostino, Hope Limbos, Carol Luc, Patrick Miceli, David Narens, Julie Nauman-Mikulski, Lisa Nemacheck, Jua Nochio, Marcela Adeze Okeke, Jacalin Oser, Mielle Park, Rochelle Peeples, Amy Pilkington, Paula Poda, Rhonda Popko, Marty Potts, Kathryn Rodrigues, Lorra Rudman, Kirsten Saunders, Lilach Schrag, Kathryn Scott, Emily Settles, Vavi Sol, Letitia L. Star, Raychel Steinbach, Steffanie Tulk, Sue Turayhi, J.C. Villalon, Deborah Weil, and Betty Wolff.
Join us for an opening reception and artist panel discussion on March 1, 2026, at 1:00 pm. Moderated by Farah Salem, artists Marcela Adeze Okeke, Maureen Ivy Fisher, and Jennifer L. Hodges discuss their own relationship to rest. What brings a sense of grounding or ease? What practices, places, or moments allow the body to soften and the mind to breathe?