Chad Kouri is a Chicago-based artist, musician, and cultural worker known for his vibrant, intuitive compositions that harness the healing powers of improvisation, color, and abstraction. His multidisciplinary practice reflects his mixed-race identity, spanning visual art, music performance, and design while exploring themes of minimalism, color theory, semiotics, improvisation, radical joy, and community care. Through his diverse skill set, Kouri emphasizes the importance of curiosity, play, rest, and introspection for personal and collective grounding, understanding, and empowerment.
As a co-founder of The Post Family, Kouri has significantly contributed to fostering national and international dialogue about Chicago’s creative community. He has also served as the Art Director for the contemporary art magazine Proximity. His work has been exhibited at prestigious venues including Subliminal Projects in Los Angeles, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Rochester Museum of Fine Arts in New Hampshire, and Apexart in New York.
He has been a visiting artist at institutions such as The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Glasgow School of Art, Portland State University, and The Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany. Kouri’s projects range from unique and editioned artworks to self-publishing, interactive displays, large-scale installations, design direction, book design, and explorations in music performance and composition.