Myriam Ben Salah

If you want to find the next hot artist, you could do worse than scanning the list of upcoming exhibitions at the Renaissance Society, a small but widely influential art space at the University of Chicago. Since Myriam Ben Salah took over as director in 2020, the institution has staged shows by a litany of rising stars who went on to broader art-world acclaim, including Diane Severin Nguyen, Lydia Ourahmane, and Meriem Bennani. Ben Salah credits her sharp eye to her international and interdisciplinary background. Born in Algeria and raised in Tunisia, she speaks five languages and studied theater and philosophy in France before moving to the U.S. This year, she organized the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. “I'm very interested in the overlap between contemporary art and popular culture or between the avant-garde and the mainstream,” Ben Salah says. Upcoming exhibitions include a project with Spanish artist Antoni Miralda to be staged at a local restaurant, recreating the one he ran in New York in the 1980s.