ICP’s Incubator is located on ICP’s ground floor. The space is free and open to the public during café and museum hours. Since 2018, photographer Melissa Ann Pinney has documented Chicago Public School students as part of an artist residency. As the students began to invite her into their world, the project became a document of identity, community and urgent social issues. Pinney’s thoughtful portraits of young people navigating the transformations of adolescence contain all of the triumph, grief, humor, and tenderness of growing up.

Melissa Ann Pinney’s work first garnered attention in the Museum of Modern Art’s major 1991 exhibition, Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort. Her studies of the social lives and emerging identities of American adolescents have earned her many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Midwest Regional Fellowship. Pinney was selected for three documentary projects that were exhibited, published, and archived in Chicago: Changing Chicago (1987), City 2000, and most recently, her work in the Chicago Public Schools. Pinney’s first monograph, Regarding Emma: Photographs of American Women and Girls (2003) was followed by Girl Ascending (2010), TWO (2015), and In Their Own Light: Photographs from Chicago Public Schools (2023).

Recent exhibitions include The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today, at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, Go Down Moses at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago (2019), A History of Photography, at the George Eastman Museum (2019 and 2023), Girl Transcendent at the Schneider International Gallery, Maui (2018), Photographs from the Collection, at the Art Institute of Chicago (2018), American Photographs, 1845 to Now, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (2017); The Gender Show, at the Fundación Canal, Madrid, Spain (2016), and Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2008.

Pinney’s photographs are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, George Eastman Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Modern Art, International Center of Photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

ICP’s Incubator Space is a new exhibition program designed to highlight the work of emerging photographers who are responding in real time to the world around us. ICP will present a rotating selection of projects by imagemakers experimenting with and pushing boundaries around the documentary tradition. ICP’s Incubator Space is curated by Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions at ICP.