The exhibition spaces that line the east side of the Chicago Cultural Center’s first floor are amongst the city’s hidden gems. The programming installed in the three interconnected galleries is always inventive and surprisingly challenging — let’s hope that Mayor Emanuel’s proposed budget cuts and ongoing restructuring that has decimated the Center’s programming staff don’t affect the displays.

The current exhibitions continue the impressive streak. On the surface, the three showcased artists — Antonia Contro, Art Fox and Terence Hannum — have little in common. However, a shared concern marks all of their work, specifically the power and impact of other mediums: books, architecture and music.

“Antonio Contro: Ex Libris” probes Chicago’s history while remaining absolutely modern. Inspired by the Cultural Center’s past as the home of the city’s first public library, Contro constructed a variety of pieces that comment on the lives of — and lives within — books. The results are inspiring.

Books come alive in video installations and, well, books of varying shapes and sizes. The dominating centerpiece, “Ex Libris,” projects a large sketchbook onto the gallery’s east wall. Its pages flip open revealing sketches and newborn ideas which move about the page.

The well-worn books featured in “Ex Libris” are displayed under glass in the space, allowing for a tangible view of the books brought to life via animation, as well as a look behind the magic. These books are no different in shape or form than any other book, but it’s their contents (and those who put the contents within) that make them special.

In “Walls,” photographer Art Fox captures beauty in the architectural decay that surrounds us.

Traveling to Sweden, Norway, New York City, Austin and various Chicago destinations, Fox documented innocuous bits of everyday ephemera that usually go unnoticed by passersby — walls, doorways, windowsills, culverts, silos, street corners, downspouts, alleyways, fire escapes and more. Chipped, corroded, rusted and ramshackled by time and the elements, they’re the stepsisters to modern architectural Cinderellas. Fox gives them new life, though, in impeccably composed and detailed photos bursting with vivid color that recall formalist and, at times, abstract paintings.

A fire escape cuts diagonal across blue brick patterns along the alley wall behind the Chicago Theater. Red paint chips pop on the green canvas of a Brooklyn wall. Graffiti plays in the reflection of a puddle (of water? of oil?) outside of a building on Elston Avenue.

These aren’t merely pretty pictures, though. By focusing on urbanity’s forgotten corners, Fox forces viewers to contemplate both the reasons for the decay — neglect, poverty, blight — and those who inhabit such spaces. The message is sugar-coated, but such measures help the medicine go down.

Terence Hannum interjects darkness into the series with “Amidst Our Throng,” a collection that explores the transcendental, collective and near-religious power of music, specifically heavy metal and other underground subcultures.

At first glance, Hannum’s oil paintings are mere snapshots of live concerts, with musicians, crowds and movements obscured by darkness, stage smoke and rig lights. They mine deeper territory, however.

The ecstatic immersion that accompanies the live music experience is rendered perfectly in Hannum’s work. He captures the moment where the trinity of fan, musician and music become one in a perfect blur of motion and half-seen scenes. The paintings’ titles — “Mass,” “Descent,” “Coronation,” “Transfiguration” and “Assumption” — cement this notion.

The video installation, “Halo,” suggests bliss at the end of the cycle. Staged in a long, cavernous space, the piece is a loop of blurred lights and hanging heads projected through a pentagon and accompanied by a deep, droning tone soundtrack. The effect simulates a post-concert experience, where eardrums ring and the night’s memories exist in a haze.