Signals & Mysteries celebrates Chicago Public School students amid the formidable challenges of our day, and honors the future they are striving to create.

In approaching this project, Pinney considers momentous events such as the pandemic, the merger of segregated schools, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, racial inequity and gun violence in Chicago as foundational to her work in the Chicago Public Schools. She shares, "As supremacist politics and denial of history permeate our public schools I can’t think of a more crucial subject than the children affected by these policies. My understanding of the ways privilege makes me complicit in systemic racism and my desire to be of service has deepened throughout this project." 

This project is grounded in topical events and the students are her focus. It’s about the teens, their relationships and their emerging identities. She’s made portraits both of individuals and the spaces students briefly inhabit and make their own. 

Pinney takes inspiration from a James Agee quote of a world which “brings to the surface its own signals and mysteries.” As her project delves into this world, Pinney shows us her discoveries: imagery on t-shirts, costumes worn for ordinary school days, elaborate hairstyles and make-up, and childhood totems carried to school are signals; mysteries may be suggested by shadow figures, reflections, scar traces or an unexpected gesture. 

Melissa Ann Pinney (American, b. 1953) is a Guggenheim Fellow whose evocative studies of the emerging identities of American women & girls have received critical acclaim since featured in Pleasures & Terrors of Domestic Comfort at MOMA. Pinney’s photographs are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Eastman Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MOMA; SFMOMA; Whitney Museum of American Art; and many others. Pinney has exhibited her work nationally and internationally and received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, and the NEA. Pinney's monographs include: Regarding Emma (2003), Girl Ascending (2010), and TWO, with Ann Patchett (2015). Pinney is working on a book of her Chicago Public School pictures: Signals & Mysteries, to be published in 2023.