<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418570/dboyt3kymbqq5yce6zyi.jpg"></figure>Each week, CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Scott Speh of <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/organizations/western-exhibitions">Western Exhibitions</a>.Gallery: Western Exhibitions Name: Scott Speh Age: 46 Previous occupations: Artist, various day-jobs Hometown: Oxford, OhioChicago Gallery News: Please describe your gallery’s program in one sentence.Scott Speh: Western Exhibitions shows thought-provoking, visually innovative artists who work across most media, with an emphasis on LGBTQ artists, personal narrative, works on paper and artist books.CGN: How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;SS: I moved to Chicago 15 years ago after two years in Brooklyn and became frustrated that friends of mine who I thought were great artists weren’t getting the recognition they deserved, so I decided to open a gallery. I was still an artist then and had no experience with such a thing. I did co-run the exhibition program at a small non-profit in lower Manhattan in the early aughts but it was decidedly non-commercial. I learn something new every day on the job, and I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years.CGN: What's the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;SS: Make a pot of green or chamomile tea.CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?SS: In the middle!CGN: Artists you admire but don't represent?SS: Kerry James Marshall, Nick Cave, Jessica Campbell, Daniel Rios Rodriguez, Erin Washington, Cary Leibowitz, Elizabeth Atterbury, Barbara Rossi, Faith Wilding, Judy Ledgerwood, Suzanne Treister, Hermonie Only, Ebecho Muslimova, Tyson Reeder, Katie Halton, Steve Reinke, Leah Mackin, Tony Tasset, Julia Fish, Tony Lewis, Gladys Nilsson and about a thousand more.CGN: Best sale you ever had?SS: Placing a beautiful but elaborate and logistically challenging Stan Shellabarger print (really an installation) into both the Art Institute of Chicago and the Baltimore Museum of Art collections was pretty cool.CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?SS: Spend. Spend. Spend! Just kidding (sort of). But seriously, go the distance with artists you love and admire. Support their mercurial shifts in tone/materials/subject matter/aesthetics; artists don’t want to make the same thing all the time. Basically, trust artists! Follow their instincts wherever it might lead.CGN: What’s coming up next at your gallery?SS: A group show opening in July with a ridiculously specific conceit: the image of a fabric/textile sagging between two upraised points, titled <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/a-sag-harbored">A Sag, Harbored</a>. Artists include Michelle Grabner, Tanya Aguiñiga, Nicholas Frank, Rachel Niffenegger, Holt Quentel, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. In the fall we’ll show animations, drawings and ceramic sculptures by Lilli Carré (opening in September) and two bodies of work by pioneering feminist artist Faith Wilding: a seminal series from the early 1980s in Gallery 1 and work fresh out of the studio in Gallery 2 (opening in November).CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?SS: Opening in our <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/news/2016/10/document-paris-london-hong-kong-volume-gallery-and-western-exhibitions-to-relocate-to-ukrainian-village-neighborhood">new location on Chicago Avenue</a> counts a major success, I think. It’s our fifth space in Chicago and the first one we were able to design from scratch. Every day running a small business is a challenge.CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago?SS: I love living in Chicago. I’m incredibly grateful that I live and work here. No lie though, it is challenging in that we don’t have the density of art enthusiasts that, say, NYC does, but, and this is a big but, we do not have to suffer the overhead that NYC galleries do. I also love the camaraderie amongst dealers in this town. I share a building with three other galleries, and we all get along famously, sharing resources and working together for the greater good. And with the great art programs in Chicagoland, there are always interesting artists in this city.CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?SS: I know that I’m getting older, as I seem to care a lot more about baseball than I used to.CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago? &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;SS: Batcolumn by Claes Oldenburg.CGN: What are the top five exhibitions you’ve seen in the past year?SS:<ol><li>Jessica Campbell (Bria) at THE SUB-MISSION, Chicago, IL</li><li>Rei Kawakubo (Art of the In-Between) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY</li><li>Raymond Thunder-Sky (Demolition Man: Selected Works from the Raymond Thunder-Sky Archives) at The Carnegie, Covington, KY</li><li>William Weege (Peace is Patriotic) at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL</li><li>Sylvia Fragoso at The Good Luck Gallery, Los Angeles, CA</li></ol>Scott Speh is the owner of Western Exhibitions located in the Ukrainian Village. For more information about his gallery visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/organizations/western-exhibitions">Western Exhibitions</a>.</body></html>

CGN interviews dealer Scott Speh of Western Exhibitions.

An Interview with a Dealer: Scott Speh

Each week, CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with&nbsp;Louise Rosenberg&nbsp;of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/cultivate-urban-rainforest-gallery">Cultivate Urban Rainforest &amp; Gallery</a>.

Gallery: Cultivate Urban Rainforest &amp; Gallery &nbsp; &nbsp; 
Name: Louise Rosenberg 
Age: 54 
Previous occupations: Records Store Manager, Office Manager at Cabaret Metro, Massage Therapist at a holistic healthcare center 
Hometown: Skokie, Illinois

Chicago Gallery News: Cultivate Urban Rainforest &amp; Gallery is unique because you offer a selection of indoor plants alongside a rotating exhibition space. How did you decide to pursue art alongside gardening?

Louise Rosenberg: Great art and design are often inspired or informed by plants and the natural world. Many plants are in and of themselves works of art. We feature indoor plants and terrariums as a way to bring nature inside living and workspaces.

CGN: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

LR: Our works are directly informed and inspired by pattern, texture, color and organic form found within nature, with an emphasis in flora.

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;

LR: Turn on the music.

CGN: Who are artists you admire but don&#39;t represent?

LR: Andrew Goldsworthy.

CGN: What is the best sale you ever had?

LR: When our buyers really deeply connect to a work of art, every sale is wonderful!

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

LR: I really am bolstered by kind words from other curators and artists that appreciate the exhibits here at Cultivate. Our neighbors have said we are a wonderful addition to the community. Cultivate is different in many ways. We are not solely an art gallery. We offer many things that add life and dimension to any space. That is both an advantage and a challenge.

CGN: How do you find new artists to work with?

LR: Several different avenues. Artists sometimes make connections and suggestions. Being a business on Main Street in Evanston with longer hours than a more typical gallery setting, I am exposed to many people. Sometimes those conversations turn out to be with other artists or art lovers. I many times discover wonderful artists that live in the area. I have been approached on a pretty regular basis as well.

CGN: What are your favorite places to see art in Evanston?

LR: Artists studios and looking around me while walking the neighborhood.

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

LR: Music, plants&nbsp;and cats.

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at Cultivate?

LR: In August, we have an exhibition called <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/flora-and-fauna-works-by-stephanie-chambers-lucy-engelman">Flora and Fauna: Stephanie Chambers &amp; Lucy Engelman,</a> which includes painting and illustration and in October, Shar Coulson will present mixed media on linen.

Louise Rosenberg is the owner of Cultivate Urban Rainforest &amp; Gallery located in Evanston. For more information visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/cultivate-urban-rainforest-gallery">Cultivate Urban Rainforest &amp; Gallery.</a>

CGN interviews local art dealer Louise Rosenberg. 

An Interview with a Dealer: Louise Rosenberg

Each week, CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with&nbsp;Richard P. Norton of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/richard-norton-gallery">Richard Norton Gallery</a>.

Gallery:&nbsp;Richard Norton Gallery 
Name:&nbsp;Richard P. Norton 
Age:&nbsp;48 
Previous occupation:&nbsp;Distracted undergraduate 
Hometown: Chicago

CGN: How did you become an art dealer?

Richard P. Norton: Born and bred.

CGN: Please describe your gallery&#39;s program in one sentence.

RN: Great 20th century American paintings.

CGN: What is the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?

RN: Hot coffee!

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

RN: Big thumbs up!

CGN: Artists you admire but don&#39;t represent?

RN: Aziz&nbsp;Ansari, Leslie Jones, John&nbsp;Mulaney.

CGN: Best sale you ever had?&nbsp;

RN: Happy, appreciative and grateful for all of them!

CGN: Advice would you share with new or young collectors?

RN: Don&#39;t drink at Art Fairs; the &quot;stupid question&quot; is the one not asked and never buy anything online without seeing it first!&nbsp;

CGN: Which artist that you represent or work of art you have recently acquired are you most excited about?

RN: I&rsquo;m very keen on the gallery&#39;s collection of large, Post-War abstractions by the Bauhaus trained artist Eugene Dana, and the 1930s &amp; 1940s Modern Cubist paintings by&nbsp;LeRoy&nbsp;Turner we plan to exhibit this fall at <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/art-services/expo-chicago">EXPO CHICAGO</a>.&nbsp;The artwork hasn&#39;t been seen by the public eye in over thirty years.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

RN: My erg score is holding up pretty well, and I hope our set in the quad is better during the head races this fall.

CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago?

RN: Find a good art fair in Grand Cayman during February!

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside the art world?

RN: Democracy in America

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

RN: Lake Michigan

Top 5 
CGN: What are your favorite art spaces to visit?

RN:

<ol>
	<li>D&#39;amato&#39;s&nbsp;</li>
	<li>Bennison&#39;s</li>
	<li>Sweet Mandy B&#39;s</li>
	<li>Manny&#39;s</li>
	<li>Furama</li>
</ol>

Richard P. Norton is the owner of Richard Norton Gallery located in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. For more information about his gallery visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/richard-norton-gallery">Richard Norton Gallery.</a>

CGN interviews local art dealer Richard P. Norton.

An Interview with a Dealer: Richard P. Norton

Each week, CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Francois Grossas of <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/galerie-waterton">Galerie Waterton</a>.

Gallery: Galerie Waterton &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; 
Name: Francois Grossas 
Previous occupation: World Bank Executive 
Hometown: Originally from Provence, France

CGN: How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

Francois Grossas: I had a career as an investment banker, working for Chase and for the World Bank. With the latter, I spent several years in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Hong Kong, and Indonesia) and while working there, I spent my spare time visiting art galleries, meeting and developing personal relationships with local artists and building an art collection. I also participated in the life of galleries, forming friendships with gallery owners and sometimes &ldquo;babysitting&rdquo; their galleries while they were away. Then one day I decided to open my own gallery in Singapore (2009).

CGN: Describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

FG: Galerie Waterton promotes and exhibits emerging and established artists mostly from South-East Asia.

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;

FG: After opening up, I tour the gallery and look at every painting on the walls, making sure that everything looks good before visitors arrive.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

FG: I like attending art fairs but would not participate as an exhibitor. I find the cost to be excessive for the potential return.

CGN: Best sale you ever had?

FG: It was in Singapore, when I had an exhibition for an Indonesian woman artist. A collector from Malaysia bought six of her paintings a couple of days before the opening reception.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?

FG: Don&rsquo;t be obsessed by names or reputations, go for what you like, follow your instinct and above all, buy an&nbsp;artwork only if it literally fascinates you. Art appreciation is a personal thing, and you have to fall in love with an art piece before buying it. Our challenge is always to introduce new and attractive artwork so that our collectors and buyers keep coming back.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

FG: An exhibition for the late Indonesian artist Chandra Johan was well received and some major pieces were purchased. We also had an exhibition for another Indonesian artist, Gatot Widodo, and sold practically all the paintings exhibited.

CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago?

FG: Being part of the River North Gallery District is very satisfying. It&rsquo;s a nice community of dealers who exhibit quality art, are friendly to one another and make a coordinated effort to promote the district as an important art destination. I am proud to be part of it.

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

FG: Traveling, mostly by car on the open road, going West to California and visiting the wonders of national parks.

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

FG: The Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at your gallery?

FG:&nbsp;We are exhibiting several women artists for the remainder of 2017. Our next show is Mamas, Monks and Marigolds featuring two artists, one from Singapore and the other from Germany (June 23), followed by Chicago-based French artist Laurence Lignel, who will present her latest sculptures and paintings (September 8) and Indonesian artist Diah Yulianti (November 3).

TOP FIVE 
CGN: What five differences do you see between Chicago and Singapore?

FG:

<ol>
	<li>Singapore is a much smaller town, but it has proportionately more expats, who are good buyers and collectors.</li>
	<li>Singapore is a major regional center and attracts elites and wealthy visitors from neighboring countries.</li>
	<li>Singapore&rsquo;s government is very involved in promoting art, galleries and art fairs.</li>
	<li>Chicago has more local artists than Singapore and a much longer artistic tradition.</li>
	<li>Asian buyers tend to look at art more as speculative investment than for its decorative and artistic value.</li>
</ol>

Francois Grossas is the owner of Galerie Waterton located in River North. For more information about his gallery and upcoming exhibitions visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/galerie-waterton">Galerie Waterton</a>.

CGN interviews art dealer Francois Grossas of Galerie Waterton.

An Interview with a Dealer: Francois Grossas

Each week, CGN interviews a local art dealer to discuss the ins and outs of running a gallery in the city of Chicago. This week we caught up with Bert Green of <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/bert-green-fine-art--2">Bert Green Fine Art</a>.

Gallery: Bert Green Fine Art 
Name: Bert Green 
Age: 57 
Previous occupations: graphic designer, nonprofit curator, art supply store manager 
Hometown: New York City

CGN: How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

Bert Green: I started organizing independent art shows right after college in the East Village in New York in the early 80s, and did a series of jobs with nonprofit organizations for the subsequent decades in New York and San Francisco. That work led me to decide to open a gallery when I moved to Los Angeles, where rent was affordable, in 1999.

CGN: Describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

BG: Bert Green Fine Art represents and exhibits emerging and mid-career artists and publishes original limited edition prints.

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;

BG: Update our website, Artsy page, and social media accounts.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

BG:&nbsp;I hate art fairs but they are a necessary evil in small quantities. I am convinced they are really thinly disguised real estate operations and do not provide any real service to the art world.

CGN: Artists you admire but don&#39;t represent?

BG: Cauleen Smith, Wafaaa Bilal, Christian Rex van Minnen

CGN: Best sale you ever had?

BG: Limited edition letterpress print I published with Ed Ruscha, which sold out in 11 days to collectors all around the world.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?

BG: Buy what you love and can afford. By following your nose you can build a collection that can grow into a wonderful asset and provide a significant boost to your quality of life.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

BG: Our print publishing program is in its fourth year and the quantity and quality of artists participating is continuing to grow.

CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago?

BG: I love living in Chicago and thrive on its vitality. However, having been located in multiple cities over the past decades, I have found that physical location is way less important than it used to be. My gallery deals with collectors all around the country and the world, and few if any ever step through the door. Transitioning the business to the Internet has been the greatest challenge of the last decade, but I think we have managed to be successful doing that.

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

BG: Swimming and travel.

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

BG: The Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor). It is across the street from my gallery and never fails to amaze. I think it is one of the most successful pieces of public art in the world, because it manages to be both a crowd pleaser and a profound object of contemplation.

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at your gallery?

BG: In July/August we are showing Robert Horvath, painter and professor of art at Herron College in Indianapolis. The show is in association with <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/art-services/aron-packer-projects">Aron Packer Projects</a>.

TOP FIVE 
CGN: What five differences do you see between Chicago and Los Angeles?

BG:&nbsp;

<ol>
	<li>Both Chicago and LA have vibrant art scenes, which in many ways are more similar than different. Chicago has a more developed nonprofit support network and Los Angeles has a much larger number of artist communities.</li>
	<li>Chicago is urban and centralized and Los Angeles is multi-centric. The multi-centric model allows for many independent communities, but they often do not interact as fully as the communities in Chicago do.</li>
	<li>Both cities are very diverse, but they have a very different mix of ethnicities, so there is always something unexpected to discover in each city. Los Angeles has massive immigrant communities that act as satellite expat capitals for their respective nationalities. Chicago has smaller and more defined historical ethnicities, but they continue to expand and morph with new arrivals.</li>
	<li>Chicago is politically expedient while Los Angeles is often politically paralyzed.</li>
	<li>Weather (LOL).</li>
</ol>

Bert Green is the owner of Bert Green Fine Art&nbsp;located across from Millennium Park in Chicago. For more information about his gallery and upcoming exhibitions visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/bert-green-fine-art--2">Bert Green Fine Art</a>.

CGN interviews Chicago art dealer Bert Green.

An Interview with a Dealer: Bert Green

BY ALISON REILLY

CGN is thrilled to partner with Chicago-based artist Brian T. Leahy to present Prop(House), an exhibition of new sculpture and drawing. We invite you to join us for an <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/brian-t-leahy-prop-house">opening reception</a> on Friday, June 2 from 5-8pm at our space in River North.

In advance of the opening, we had the opportunity to interview Brian about his background as an artist and art historian and his particular interest in domestic spaces, interior construction materials and the history of Minimalism.

Brian received a master&#39;s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Northwestern University. <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/brian-t-leahy-prop-house">Prop(House)</a> is on view through July 21 at Chicago Gallery News.

Chicago Gallery News: You&rsquo;re an artist, an organizer and an art historian.&nbsp; How does your research experience influence your art practice?

Brian T. Leahy: This is an ongoing and active question for me. My background as an artist is rooted in studio painting and a commitment to abstraction; however, my research interests have tended towards conceptual and performative practices, such as the work of Tehching Hsieh. The easy answer&mdash;which is also truthful&mdash;is that my research, reading, and writing practices are always somehow informing how I am thinking in the studio, and vice versa, even if those connections are not always explicit.

However, over the last few years, I&rsquo;ve been trying to work through how these practices might more specifically coincide. These recent investigations of wallpaper, a bit of which I&rsquo;ll be showing at Chicago Gallery News, are one attempt in that direction. They arose out of simultaneous considerations of wallpaper as a pictorial strategy&mdash;which has a long history in modern painting, including the seductively patterned backgrounds in Matisse, Bonnard, and Vuillard, and an active life in contemporary painting, which you can see in work by a number of Chicago-based artists who are exploring ideas around pattern, textile, and abstraction now&mdash;and thinking about the cultural, aspirational, racialized, and political dimensions of wallpaper as a social material.

CGN: Tell me about your background. How did you end up in Chicago?

BL: I grew up in a small suburb just north of Milwaukee. I was able to escape the northern cold for the southeast, and spent a number of years in North Carolina. I went to school there, where I first wanted to study biology, and then realized I didn&rsquo;t want to spend sixty to eighty hours a week inside in the lab. I decided to study art and Buddhism, instead, and that&rsquo;s where I first learned what painting might do. After school I lived in the western part of the state in the Appalachian mountains&mdash;first I helped get a Buddhist community center started, and then worked with a small construction company as a carpenter&rsquo;s assistant, all while trying to keep making paintings. At some point, I wanted to be involved in the conversations around art that only seemed possible in a larger city, and ended up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I&rsquo;ve just begun studying for a PhD at Northwestern University, so I&rsquo;ll be in Chicago at least a few more years&mdash;and now I spend all my time in the library, instead of the lab.

<img alt="" data-caption="Brian T. Leahy, &lt;i&gt;Untitled&lt;/i&gt;, 2017, gouache on panel, 7&quot; x 5&quot;" data-rich-file-id="2121" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2121/original/leahy3.jpg" />

CGN: Can you describe your experience as a carpenter and homebuilder in North Carolina?

BL: I was working with a construction firm that built large, well-made, super-insulated, expensive homes. I did it for a few reasons, other than just needing a job&mdash;at that time, I was thinking about trying to work in architecture. But I was also interested in knowing how a house goes together, how a pile of industrially produced materials gets re-configured into a place in which life happens.

CGN: How does that influence your art practice?

BL: It influences how I think about sculpture, certainly&mdash;often, when a house was framed but not yet sheathed in plywood, I wanted nothing more than to paint the whole thing monochrome and call it a sculpture. There are many sculptural moments that happen when building a house, from the way materials are stacked, to provisional two-by-four braces put up when the walls are raised, to the strange perspectives you get when installing hardware underneath the eaves of a three-story rise. It changed how I thought about form, but also how I thought about what materials might be meaningful, what kinds of things I could bring into the work I make, and how I thought about some of the relationships between labor and material.

<img alt="" data-caption="Brian T. Leahy, &lt;i&gt;Untitled&lt;/i&gt;, 2017, graphite on paper, 15&quot; x 15&quot;" data-rich-file-id="2122" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2122/original/leahy4.jpg" />

CGN: Your work Prop(House) appropriates Richard Serra&rsquo;s 1969 sculpture One Ton Prop (House of Cards). What prompted your interest in Serra&rsquo;s work and in Minimalism?

BL: Richard Serra&rsquo;s work is complicated for me. He has an epic status in histories of sculpture, and the October editorial board has championed his work for some time. On the one hand, I do love his work. The lead throwing pieces were important to me when I first saw them, and the Verb List is an incredibly beautiful moment in which language, drawing, and sculptural concerns all coincide. Balance as a component of sculptural practice is something that I am deeply interested in, and something that I first learned from Serra.

However, his work certainly has a darker side: multiple incidents in which preparators were injured during installation of his large plate works, and the installation of Sculpture No. 3 actually killed one technician, Raymond Johnson, in 1971. (Not incidentally, wallpaper also has a deadly history, something Lucinda Hawksley writes about in Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Nineteenth-Century Home.) Serra&rsquo;s work also seems to refuse to consider the social dimensions of its context&mdash;while he has often insisted on site-specificity, best exemplified in the legal case around Tilted Arc, he seems invested in the spatial and formal repercussions of site, rather than the socio-political implications. At the same time, I think Minimalism offered a kind of serious consideration of material that is still important now&mdash;and so, I&rsquo;m interested in working through the ways in which materials interact with the socio-political.

CGN: Serra&rsquo;s sculpture uses lead antimony plates, but you&rsquo;ve decided to use sheets of drywall and wallpaper. What is the significance of the material?

BL: The idea for Prop(House) actually began for dimensional reasons. I noticed that each of the lead antimony plates for One Ton Prop (House of Cards) are 48&rdquo; square&mdash;this is precisely one half of a standard sheet of drywall that you can buy at any building supply store. So, there was a kind of potential material efficiency in the replication of Serra&rsquo;s work with drywall&mdash;and, as anyone who has ever installed drywall before will know, it is always a question of material and temporal efficiency, minimizing waste and maximizing speed.

I was also interested in how drywall as a mass-produced, standardized material might update the rhetoric of industrial materials and standard sizes that Minimalist artists were engaged with, while simultaneously deforming their insistence on a kind of over-determined masculinity that materials like lead antimony seem to signal. I wanted to domesticate Serra, somehow&mdash;something that I feel like has already happened, in a certain sense, in the way that the imaginary of the cheap, rough, downtown New York loft scene of the 1960s and 1970s&mdash;which is crucial to early images of One Ton Prop&mdash;has been commercialized by real estate practices of the &ldquo;soft [newly constructed] loft.&rdquo; Indeed, this is the situation in River North, to a large extent, and one for which artists, galleries, and artworks have been a driving factor.

<img alt="" data-caption="Brian T. Leahy, &lt;i&gt;Toasters&lt;/i&gt;, 2017, gouache on drywall, 24&quot; x 24&quot;" data-rich-file-id="2120" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2120/original/leahy2.jpg" />

CGN: You&rsquo;ve described your interest in binaries, particularly the domestic versus the industrial. How do those relationships relate to Prop(House)?

BL: I suppose it&rsquo;s important to clarify my own interest: I am not interested in constructing binaries, per se, but rather in the processes by which binaries tend to structure so much of our cultural and psychological perspectives. A friend once told me that she thought good art is that which can hold multiple, seemingly contradictory things together. That&rsquo;s what I would hope my work as a whole, and specific works like Prop(House), might do: to hold the poles of a binary together in a single object or event. In that sense, I&rsquo;m interested in the way Prop(House) might be both industrial and domestic, unthreatening and disturbing, all in the same moment. To collapse seemingly disparate poles into a single object, I think, can make us a little more conscious of how those binaries get constructed in the first place. To me, houses themselves already do this&mdash;the contradictions are already present&mdash;but making a sculptural version of a &ldquo;house&rdquo; is a way of intensifying some of those contradictions, making them more distilled.

CGN: In November 2016 Mayor Emanuel announced that a record 33 tower cranes were installed in the city. However, the Chicago metropolitan area as a whole lost 19,570 residents in 2016, which was the greatest loss in any metropolitan area in the United States. Do you see a connection between your work and the current Chicago landscape?

BL: That&rsquo;s an incredible fact. I think the work can relate to similar changes happening across a number of urban centers in the United States&mdash;I&rsquo;m not sure how much of Chicago can be specifically read into the work. But, this fact&mdash;that high-rise construction is increasing even as population dwindles&mdash;certainly gives us some clues about the relationship between high-end construction, cost-of-living, and the political and economic priorities of a city. For me, the question is: what kind of material reconfigurations are occurring, and who are those arrangements affecting and how? And, what kind of questions can artistic labor introduce into those dynamics?

<img alt="" data-caption="Brian T. Leahy, &lt;i&gt;Allen Wrench&lt;/i&gt;, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 30&quot; x 30&quot;" data-rich-file-id="2119" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2119/original/leahy1.jpg" />

CGN: Do you often collaborate with other artists?

BL: I try to collaborate with artists as much as I can. It can be a way of having a more intensive kind of conversation with someone, one that allows each of you to figure out more clearly what the stakes&mdash;and blind spots&mdash;of your own practices might be. As just one example, I worked on an exhibition last summer called Our Lovely Secret Wreck at Hume Chicago, a non-profit gallery in south Logan Square that is run by an amazing group of artists and organizers. That show involved my own work, but also the work of J. Michael Ford, an artist here in Chicago, and Margaux Crump, who is based in Houston. I also worked with a large group of writers to develop something in between a catalog for the show, a collection of experimental writing, and an artist&rsquo;s book, which was in turn designed by Kitemath, an incredible design collective here in Chicago. The Chicago Design Museum has actually just acquired that book for their collection, in large part due to Kitemath&rsquo;s efforts. That whole show was a huge collaborative effort.

CGN: What&rsquo;s on the horizon for you? Do you have shows or projects planned for the summer and fall?

BL: The next major project is a solo show in Charlotte, at the New Gallery of Modern Art, opening July 13th. That show is called Easy Colors, and will involve an installation, paintings, and some works on paper, all thinking through the relationship between wallpaper and painting. In some ways, it&rsquo;s a companion to the work here at Chicago Gallery News. After that, I&rsquo;m not sure&mdash;I&rsquo;d like to find somewhere to show the new material that is more about aspirational, DIY diagrams from the 1970s and 1980s, these drawings and paintings on drywall that I&rsquo;ve mentioned. I&rsquo;ll be travelling some for research related to art historical projects, and I always like to draw when travelling. There are some projects that I&rsquo;ve been thinking about for a while that I&rsquo;d like to move forward on, including a large artist&rsquo;s book, and another painting series. Hopefully, there will also be time for some new collaborative projects.

For more information about Brian T. Leahy visit:&nbsp;<a href="https://www.briantleahy.com/">briantleahy.com</a>. Prop(House) is on view at <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/chicago-gallery-news">Chicago Gallery News</a> through July 21. Please email or call to schedule a time to visit the exhibition.&nbsp;

Top image: Brian T. Leahy, Prop(House), 2017. Installation view at Chicago Gallery News, June 2-July 21, 2017.

An interview with artist Brian T. Leahy about his exhibition of new work at Chicago Gallery News

The Art of Domesticity: An Interview with Brian T. Leahy

<h3>CURATOR YESOMI UMOLU BRINGS RESEARCH-BASED PROGRAMMING TO LOGAN CENTER</h3>

By ALISON REILLY

The voice of a Ghanaian woman proselytizing reverberates within the walls of a dark room as images of a Roman Catholic church slowly appear on the screen. The video, titled Sunday&rsquo;s Best, was the focus of Larry Achiampong&rsquo;s solo exhibition, OPEN SEASON, which opened last September at the Logan Center Gallery. But the show extended well beyond the walls of the University of Chicago building. Yesomi Umolu, the curator of the exhibition, organized a mini-residency for the Achiampong, who spent three weeks visiting different religious organizations and community groups on the South Side.&nbsp;

&ldquo;He was able to do interviews, live recordings and shoot new footage,&rdquo; Umolu said. The field recordings and videos that the London-based artist gathered in Chicago were not included in the exhibition, but for Umolu, that was not the point. As curator of <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/institutions/logan-center-exhibitions">Logan Center Exhibitions</a>, she hopes to give artists access to the vast resources and rich community that the gallery, the University of Chicago and the greater South Side can offer. &ldquo;There is intellectual capacity here, there are interesting cultural histories, there are a number of great people to talk to, and there are practical resources, especially in this building. We have production facilities, and we have access to different types of spaces for making and thinking creatively.&rdquo;

Umolu recently brought the Canadian born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga to the Logan. While preparing for her show, Kiwanga stumbled upon the archives of twentieth-century color theorist Faber Birren in the Special Collections Library at the University of Chicago. Kiwanga, who studies the design of institutional spaces like prisons and hospitals, searched through folders of Birren&rsquo;s color design studies and sketches for clients. Eventually, she was able to create prints for her exhibition that incorporated images from the archive as well color palettes used by Birren and his colleagues. But Umolu noted, &ldquo;there was a lot she gathered that didn&rsquo;t materialize in this exhibition but will be presented elsewhere, including&nbsp;an upcoming publication that we are co-publishing with the Power Plant, Toronto. I&rsquo;m really excited that when we bring artists to the Logan it&rsquo;s not solely about what they can do for us; there is a long-term investment on our part. There might be something that we are able to spark here that will have a life outside of our program.&rdquo;

<img alt="" data-caption="Kapwani Kiwanga: &lt;i&gt;The Sum And Its Parts,&lt;/i&gt; 2017. Installation view at Logan Center Gallery. Courtesy of Logan Center Exhibitions, University of Chicago. Photo by RCH | EKH" data-rich-file-id="2029" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2029/original/rch-ekh-logan-center-020617-026.jpg" />

Since joining the Logan in August 2015, Umolu has launched an impressive international exhibition series and introduced a program to commission new work. She also takes seriously the mission of the University to educate students and prepare them for life after graduation.&nbsp;

&ldquo;So much of this context is about pedagogy,&rdquo; Umolu said. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s about investing in individuals and giving them the tools to go out into the world and apply that in the best way for them. I see that in a similar way to the artists we work with.&rdquo;

This fall, Umolu is working with artist Cinthia Marcelle and filmmaker Tiago Mata Machado to present a trilogy of videos. Hailing from Brazil, Marcelle and Mata Machado are longtime collaborators, and the exhibition will be the first time their works Community (2016), One Way Street (2013), and The Century (2011) have been shown together. &ldquo;The videos are in different ways a meditation on political agency and resistance in public space,&rdquo; Umolu said, &ldquo;with depictions of what look to be confrontations of bodies and objects in those spaces.&rdquo; The exhibition will coincide with the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and Umolu is planning to use the opportunity to host a critical discussion on their collaboration.

In addition to planning exhibitions, Umolu is in the midst of an ambitious research project that explores the histories of Pan-Africanism and in particular the history of a Chicago delegation that attended FESTAC (Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture) in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977. &ldquo;Chicago has always been a meeting point for members of the African diaspora especially in relation to progressive political and social movements,&rdquo; she noted. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m really interested in mining that history.&rdquo;

The project, tentatively titled The Ties That Bind: Waves of Pan-Africanism in Contemporary Art and Society, is supported by a curatorial fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and will take shape through a series of three public forums, organized by Logan Center Exhibitions but with the potential to be hosted at various sites around the South Side. &ldquo;The aim is that the project is steeped in an ethos of collaboration and open exchange,&rdquo; Umolu said. &ldquo;Given that I am new to Chicago, and my colleagues are already well versed in Chicago&rsquo;s art history, there&rsquo;s a lot that I can learn from them and a lot that the Logan can learn as well.&rdquo;

<img alt="" data-caption="Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago Mata Machado, &lt;i&gt;O Século (The Century),&lt;/i&gt; 2011. Courtesy of the artists and Galeria Vermelho, Sao Paulo" data-rich-file-id="2041" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2041/original/logancenter-2.jpg" />

The first forum, which is scheduled for October 2017, explores the idea of the return. Umolu is interested in asking, &ldquo;What does it mean to return to Africa as a site of artistic engagement, a site of political emancipation and a site of social inquiry? How is that related to Chicago and the history of the black arts movement here?&rdquo; The second and third forums, which will take place in the spring and fall of 2018, will consider the themes of non-alignment and horizons in relationship to the African diaspora.

&ldquo;The Warhol fellowships allows curators to have a certain level of autonomy to explore an idea at the very beginning of its genesis,&rdquo; Umolu said. With this freedom, she was able to first delve into the research and then propose the format of the public forums. &ldquo;Eventually the hope is that this is good groundwork for an exhibition. But what&rsquo;s exciting about the Warhol is that there&rsquo;s not necessarily a defined product that you have to deliver, you just have to follow the course of your research. The public forums will be things in and of themselves. They&rsquo;ll bring a lot of value and conversation to this context.&rdquo;

Yesomi Umolu is Exhibitions Curator at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago, where she is also a lecturer in the humanities division. Prior to joining the Logan, Umolu was Assistant Curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU and Curatorial Fellow for Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

Top image:&nbsp;Larry Achiampong, Sunday&rsquo;s Best, 2017. Courtesy of the artist

Curator Yesomi Umolu brings research-based programming to the Logan Center.

Expanding Exhibitions at the Logan Center

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418558/mjzpnjc6kjnyghvuvnuj.jpg"><figcaption>Roger Brown,&nbsp;Chicago Hit by the Bomb, 1985, oil on canvas, 48" x 72"</figcaption></figure><h3>&nbsp;</h3><h3>A CHICAGO IMAGISTS COLLECTION SPANS TWO CITIES</h3>&nbsp;By GINNY VAN ALYEAChristopher Slapak and Michael Robertson’s shared passion for contemporary art began decades before they would start to build a collection of work by Chicago Imagists and other related artists. At the University of Chicago in the 1980s, the two met when they were medical students in the same class. When a colleague in the University’s Masters of Fine Arts program recommended that they see a show of famed Chicago Imagist Ed Paschke’s work at the Renaissance Society in 1982, they went as two poor medical students who didn’t know what to expect. What they saw blew them away; looking back now, they say if they’d had any money they would have bought the whole show.After that experience, they became increasingly interested in the Imagists, a group of representational artists who banded together in the 1960s, learning about figures such as Roger Brown and seeing shows at the Hyde Park Art Center. At the time, their lives were dominated by their medical education. A love for art was in the background, but they did not think they would ever collect art. They didn’t know what a gateway that Ren show would ultimately be to weekends packed with gallery visits and two art-filled homes.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2021/original/paschke.jpg" alt=""><figcaption>Ed Paschke, Vibrex, oil on canvas, 1982, 42" x 80"&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;When Christopher and Michael finished medical school at UChicago, as well as their internships and residencies in Chicago, they moved to Boston to continue their medical training. Contemporary art was not&nbsp; a focus for the pair during nine years in Boston.&nbsp;They returned to the Midwest when Christopher was recruited to work at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis, and Michael was offered a position at the Indiana University School of Medicine. After a decade in Indiana, around 2005, they made the decision to purchase a condo in downtown Chicago, so they could visit on weekends and enjoy all that the city has to offer. Living in a contemporary high rise was a contrast to their traditional, 100-year old, antiques-filled home in Indianapolis. The time was right, with a new base in Chicago, to begin exploring the contemporary art scene again.Michael and Christopher met Chicago dealers Ann and Roy Boyd early on in their reacquaintance with the art community. The Boyds’ gallery had been in business for over 30 years, and their program’s focus fit well with Christopher and Michael’s taste for vibrant, unique works by living artists, such as William Conger and Brigitte Riesebrodt. The four quickly became good friends, with Ann and Roy introducing them to many artists and showing them a range of works. A focus on unique art that was abstract, rather than representational, defined their early collecting.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418559/te1c8jwwgv8ojjis9xj3.jpg"><figcaption>Robert Lostutter</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;The couple also enjoyed supporting living Chicago artists. Explains Christopher, “We want to support the artists who are working now, because if they’re deceased you’re just supporting the person that owns the piece, not the artist. We came to appreciate that half of what you’re paying for goes to the artist.” From Michael’s perspective, “It was an ethical thing, we just thought it would be better buying the work of living artists in this area and supporting them – we love Chicago.”&nbsp;What began as a somewhat casual desire to buy art while also supporting local artists quickly became more serious and sophisticated. Michael recalls, “That was the ironic thing. I said, ‘Oh, it will take us years to find anything we like,’ and of course that was not the problem, no, not at all.” Christopher adds, “There was a handful of artists we quickly started collecting: Rebecca Shore, William Conger, Brigitte [Riesebrodt], and John Phillips. Those artists led to an exploration of more up and coming contemporary artists, such as Geoffrey Todd Smith, Dana Degiulio, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, and Matthew Metzger. Before they knew it, they had started to define and build a collection.&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418560/hcus5wlicp8upje29wep.jpg"><figcaption>Gladys Nilsson</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;When Michael and Christopher moved back to Chicago in 2005, they were eager to return to the galleries and take in all that was happening in the contemporary world. They immersed themselves, often going to as many as 25 galleries in a day. They visited dealers, met artists and attended opening receptions. By looking at so much, the focus of their collection shifted radically.&nbsp;Christopher says, “When an artist had caught our eye, we would explore a little bit more and get to know who they were.” Michael adds that though they did do their research, it was mostly hands on, spending entire weekends in town going from gallery to gallery.&nbsp;When they would travel to other cities gallery hopping was their starting point. Christopher notes, “My business takes me to New York a lot, so we also started going to the&nbsp;Chelsea&nbsp;and Upper East Side galleries to get an understanding of the full breadth, as much as we possibly could.” Michael and Christopher each confess they just like seeing what’s there each time they visit. One difference they’ve noticed when traveling, according to Michael, “In Chelsea they rarely talk to you, but they do in LA and San Francisco. And Chicago.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418561/izkbxuryiytjrqfxhcfb.jpg"><figcaption>Jim Nutt</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;They each feel at home in galleries and have done the majority of their exploration and buying through dealers, but according to Christopher, a key collecting moment presented itself at Art Chicago in 2006, the same year the longstanding art fair unexpectedly moved to the Merchandise Mart. “When we went to our first fair, we were overwhelmed.” Michael concurs, “There was so much stuff to see, it was a sensory overload.”&nbsp;Chicago dealer Russell Bowman had a booth at Art Chicago that year, and that was where Christopher and Michael first met him. Bowman was showing BG Summer, a work by Ed Paschke from 1991, which sent the couple right back to that 1980s exhibition at the Renaissance Society. Christopher recalls, “We both remembered how much we really loved him, and when we saw this piece at the fair – it was more money than I thought we would ever pay for a piece of art, but we’d always wanted a Paschke – we bought it.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418562/mivu5tm61bqfqm8m9vuz.jpg"><figcaption>Roger Brown, Long Wait, oil on canvas with artist's frame, 1968, 12" x 12"&nbsp;</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;For the next couple of years they were satisfied, as they admired the Paschke on weekends in their Chicago condo. Like a tempting sweet that they couldn’t resist forever, they eventually considered buying other Imagist works. In the mid 2000s, a few paintings by Paschke and Brown were available on the secondary market, but many were still privately held. First, they bought a Roger Brown. Then a work by Karl Wirsum. They continued their research and made inquiries.&nbsp;The pair got to know local dealers Carl Hammer, Jean Albano and Karen Lennox, and they kept in touch with Bowman, who would call if he had something that he thought might interest them. Once they bought a large Roger Brown, and then a couple more Wirsums, they made the decision that they should find space to display the works at their home in Indianapolis, since the house has a third floor.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418562/igb21ggb2if2sdsne9na.jpg"><figcaption>Karl Wirsum</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Michael admits that whenever he makes a declaration about collecting, usually the opposite will happen. Around 2008, when the national recession was beginning, and with their buying increasing in frequency and expense, Michael said to Christopher, “You know, we will never really put together a serious Imagist collection at this point,” Despite the headwinds that were ravaging collectors in the rest of the art world, Christopher and Michael were in fact inspired to do just that. Christopher reflects, “No one was buying much of anything at that time.” Michael was skeptical, “It was too late – we agreed that all the best works were already in collections and that we would get a few dribs and drabs.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418563/okg5sspenzlbuogawwbe.jpg"><figcaption>Barbara Rossi</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Christopher figured it was worth attempting anyway, so they reached out to the four Chicago dealers they already knew to let them know that if they had more pieces come up to let them see them. What they began to see struck them as much more remarkable than dribs and drabs. “They started showing us incredible examples coming out of private collections.” Not only was the recession motivating some collectors to sell, but there was also some generational turnover due to collectors who passed things along to heirs who wished to sell what they inherited. To Michael, who wasn’t counting on those scenarios, he figured these prime works would end up in museums. Christopher points to that period as yet another tipping point, “We got a few pieces, and then we got a few really lovely pieces, and then we had to start thinking seriously about actually putting together a Chicago Imagists collection.”Ironically, the Chicago artists collection is in the couple’s Indianapolis home. The collection prompted a remodel of the second and third floors, and the house’s traditional feel provides a striking setting for contemporary works.&nbsp; In Chicago they ended up displaying an array of contemporary abstract works. John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, of Chicago’s Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery, suggested that the way to stitch the two pieces of the collection together was to think about the abstract painters who were contemporaries of the Imagists. Around 2012 they began to actively buy works from the ‘60s and ‘70s by abstract painters who either worked with the Imagists directly or were clearly influenced by them, including Richard Hull, Jordan Davies and Evelyn Statsinger, who preceded them.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418564/akxfdjiqbuvfoz7foang.jpg"><figcaption>Evelyn Statsinger</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Prior to having a focus for the two parts of the collection, Christopher and Michael would go to a fair or gallery, see something they liked and just buy it. Now, for the most part, they are very disciplined about what they buy and why. There are pieces in the collection that they still love but which they acknowledge they would not buy now. Christopher points to two distinct works in resin by German-born artist Markus Linnenbrink, “We would not likely buy a piece [by Markus] right now because he’s really outside of our collecting focus.”&nbsp;That discipline has not come at the expense of maintaining relationships with artists living in Chicago. Michael points out that the couple is still buying work by young, up and coming&nbsp; Chicago artists, such as Matthew Metzger and Andrew Holmquist, among others, in an effort to keep up with the contemporary scene, even though much of their focus and resources have gone towards pursuing the Imagists and more historical works. According to Christopher, one artist they have collected in depth is Rebecca Shore. He says they have visited her studio several times and haven’t missed an opening since first buying her work. It was through Shore that the pair was first introduced to Corbett vs. Dempsey, when she moved to the gallery from the now-closed Byron Roche Gallery in River North.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418565/at7ifjl8dj9vl1zmztwa.jpg"><figcaption>Rebecca Shore, Untitled 01, 15 x 11", Casein on panel, 2014</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;They began collecting with a desire to support living artists, but then they bought their first Paschke after the artist had passed away. They both admit that the rules can change over time, and how you start out is not where you’ll end up. Either way, the contemporary as well as historical relationships all seem to be connected.&nbsp;More than building a collection or just pursuing elusive works, Michael and Christopher enjoy the experiences that the art world offers. As Christopher sees it, “The diversity of contemporary art is just stunning right now, I mean it can be overwhelming for anyone.” Michael confesses, “We love looking at everything. It’s just interesting to us. It’s challenging. It’s intellectually stimulating. There’s tons of stuff that we would have no interest in collecting – some of the really conceptual work I find fascinating, but I would absolutely not want to live with that in my home. We are drawn to things with a lot of visual interest. We’ve got enough purely intellectual activity in our professional lives, we don’t need that in our art collecting lives.”Michael and Christopher seem to represent an old fashioned way of doing things in the art world. At a time when so much is experienced virtually or through a screen, both men are passionate about in-person visits to galleries and about relationships with living artists. Michael admits, “I can’t see how people would not go to galleries because, unless you collect videos, it’s an analogue experience. How can you appreciate a Markus Linnenbrink or a Teo Gonzalez through an image? It just doesn’t work; you have to be there to understand the scale and texture – all of it.”&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418566/rklgq2dobrebc0fe6ucc.jpg"><figcaption>Richard Hull</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;For Christopher, “If you know the artist, maybe you can acquire art from afar. You’ve collected their work before, so you might understand it through an image. I think it’s still best to see it in person.” The couple has bought art sight-unseen via auctions, if something prevents them from travelling to a gallery or auction preview, but ultimately they are adamant that up close is the ideal way. They recommend that anyone trying to get introduced to art should rely heavily on personal visits and not just virtual research. They are hopeful that once people tire of looking at everything on a tiny screen and viewing art only for the selfies, the trend will return to participating in the physical art community.&nbsp;Michael and Christopher seem to be very busy professionally, yet they always find time to go and see art. They will switch roles this summer when they curate a show at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in River North. <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/zolla-lieberman-gallery">Chicago and Indianapolis – What’s the Connection?</a> is a&nbsp;group exhibition (July 14–August 16, 2017) featuring the work of faculty members at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. This exhibition explores common themes and concerns of contemporary artists working in Chicago and Indianapolis. Herron started out like the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where there was a museum collection and then an associated school. Eventually Herron became part of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis system, and the art collection became the Indianapolis Museum of Art.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418566/az7scl43mtkuxoakgla4.jpg"><figcaption>Ray Yoshida</figcaption></figure>&nbsp;Today the school is very studio-oriented, devoted to producing working artists. Michael and Christopher had been attending shows at the school for some time, but they did not know much about the academic program. It was William Lieberman who suggested that the couple curate a summer group show at the gallery, and when the subsequent discussions were taking place, the idea took shape to do a faculty show. Michael and Christopher are candid about the fact that they are not curators, and that they have never done something like this before, but they were up for the adventure, and the idea of putting together a gallery show of work they find compelling was appealing. They are also excited for the opportunities it could present to the artists.Amidst the pressure of assembling a public exhibition for the first time, Christopher and Michael still find themselves doing what they love most – seeing art, visiting studios and talking to artists. The couple continues to&nbsp;hunt for what appeals to them, and their passion for art never dims.&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

Christopher Slapak and Michael Robertson have acquired an impressive collection of Imagist works.

The Personal Art of Collecting

ARAM HAN SIFUENTES CREATES A SPACE FOR DISSENT&nbsp;By ALISON REILLYI meet Aram Han Sifuentes on the first floor of the Chicago Cultural Center in the Garland Gallery. She is working at one of the tables set up in her public studio—a “workspace, workshop” as she calls it, with her young daughter Nara and her collaborator Verónica Casado Hernandez. On each of the tables is a sewing machine, scissors and assorted fabrics. Hanging above them are large, cloth banners with slogans like “America Was Never Great,” “Climate Change is Real,” and “We Are In This Together.” Across from their workstation, I see hundreds of postcards answering the question posted on the wall: “What does your banner say?”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2031/original/ccc-protest-banner-making-10-x2.jpg" alt=""></figure>Aram’s Protest Banner Lending Library offers those feeling taxed by a divided political system a space for creative expression. The project is part of the Chicago Cultural Center’s ongoing artist-in-residence program, which provides a stipend and dedicated studio space for artists who hope to interact directly with the public. Along with walk-ins, Aram, Verónica and their two other collaborators, Ishita Dharap and Tabitha Anne, often host school and community groups. Visitors are invited to imagine what their protest banner would look like and then, if time allows, they can make one of their own.&nbsp;“We have all the materials, and we teach people how to make their own protest banners,” Aram says. “It takes about an hour and a half, so it’s a bit of a time commitment.” Sewing is inherently a slow process. In a digital world where political activism can mean copying and pasting a form letter to a representative, designing and sewing a cloth banner can be a radical exercise.&nbsp;For Aram, the act of sewing is itself a form of resistance. After the 2016 election, she began making banners at home by herself and then started to invite friends over to create their own designs. Soon, she was hosting workshops at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum and the Smart Museum. This past month she was invited to the Whitney Museum in New York to co-present a banner-making workshop with another Chicago-based artist, Cauleen Smith.&nbsp;“Before any big protest we get a wave of people all wanting very specific slogans so we try to be good about keeping up with it. But there’s too much to keep up with these days!” Aram says. Although the banners have been popular for protests like the January 2017 Women’s March, they can be checked out for other purposes, too. “A high school teacher recently took one out to put in her classroom for a couple weeks.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2032/original/ahs-sampler.jpg" alt=""></figure>Politics and sewing have always been intertwined in Aram’s life. Her mother, Younghye Han, was an artist in South Korea and ran her own art center. When Aram’s family immigrated to Modesto, California in 1992, her parents started working at a dry cleaner and Younghye became a seamstress. Like many in the garment industry, Younghye was paid per item, which Aram says, “leads to unregulated working conditions.” Aram learned to sew when she was six years old by helping her mother with small pieces. “For me engaging in the act of sewing is always about that history and social context.”&nbsp;Aram has questioned her own status as an immigrant in her ongoing project, US Citizenship Test Sampler. In 2012, as she beganstudying for the United States Naturalization Test, she decided to hand sew the 100 questions and the answers onto a single piece of fabric. The questions range from “Who makes federal laws? (Congress)” to “During the Cold War, what was the main concern of the United States? (Communism).”&nbsp; The long scroll, which is still in progress, is now on display at the Hull-House, along with a collection of other needlework samplers.&nbsp;After starting the project, Aram decided to start teaching other non-citizens how to create samplers. The idea is based on needlework samplers that were used in colonial America to teach children how to sew. “They would sew the alphabet and numbers and learn educational concepts,” Aram notes. “Adolescent girls from wealthier families would create another decorative, pictorial sampler to show her worth as a woman and as a wife to her potential suitor.” &nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2033/original/1ccc-protest-banner-making-183.jpg" alt=""></figure>Each participant that Aram has worked with chooses one question and answer from the test and sews it, along with their own decoration, on a square of fabric. The completed samplers are available for purchase for $725 each, the cost of applying for citizenship. The full amount goes directly to the participant to help cover any costs associated with the process.&nbsp;Symbolically, the project speaks to the monetary value associated with immigrant labor. While working on her own sampler, Aram tracked the number of hours she spent working on it and estimated that after selling the piece, she had only made about $2 an hour. But, like the colonial samplers, the project functions on another level. “I teach people how to sew and depending on their needs I tutor English or we study for the citizenship test together.” The longer Aram spends with an individual, the more she is able to help them execute complex ideas for their sampler and better prepare them for their test.US Citizenship Test Sampler also serves as a reminder of the uphill battles that people who want to become citizens have always faced. Even if they have prepared by studying, the cost of taking the test can be prohibitive. There has been a renewed interest in Aram’s project following the 2016 election, and many of the samplers have sold within the last few months. “It’s been really awesome because before the recent election the samplers that sold were more aesthetically beautiful, but now the ones that are selling are about need—either to apply for citizenship or get legal help, because a lot of my participants are undocumented.”After her residency ends at the Cultural Center, Aram will travel to Washington D.C. for the month of June. As a Smithsonian artist research fellow, she will have access to the archives of American art. “I’m going to research recipes, which includes food and drinks, but also syllabi and templates for unrealized projects. I use the word recipe, but it’s really a very broad interpretation.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2038/original/ccc-20protest-20banner-20making-205-x4.jpg" alt=""></figure>The recipes will become another piece of Aram’s work. “These banners, some were made by me, but a lot are made by other people who come in here or to workshops and then donate them. In a way this is a collection in and of itself. That [pointing to postcards on the wall] is a collection of many different people and their contributions. Ballots, needles, samplers, I think all of them are pieces from individuals that come together as a collection.”The Protest Banner Lending Library at the Chicago Cultural Center is open Tuesday-Friday, 12-6pm through May 18, 2017. For more information visit <a href="http://aramhan.com">aramhan.com</a>.Top image:&nbsp;Aram Han Sifuentes (Right) and Verónica Casado Hernandez (Left) in the protest banner lending library at the Chicago Cultural Center. Photo: eedahahm

Aram Han Sifuentes creates a space for dissent at the Chicago Cultural Center.

A Protest Banner Lending Library 

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418556/qs6rujqejucnegftgnhc.jpg"><figcaption>Photos by M Lindsay Photography</figcaption></figure>By GINNY VAN ALYEASally Schwartz says she has always been a hoarder. As a child she was always saving various objects, and she’s continued to hold onto many of those things even today, from an old record case and all of her 45 records, to Winnie-the-Pooh’s Piglet and a resultant collection of pigs. If Sally is drawn to something, she will hunt for many more examples of it. Her passion for seeking just the right vintage needle in a cluttered haystack has led her to become queen of Chicago’s vintage market scene, having founded the Randolph Street Market Festival in 2004.“I used to go antiquing as a kid,” Sally recalls. Whenever her mom and her friends would head into the city from the North Shore, she would tag along so she could check out the antiques stores in Boystown. Recalling the unusual pieces she found there, she says, “They had really cool, funky style. I’ve always loved the stuff – I like looking at it. It makes me happy.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2005/original/sally-schwartz-398.jpg" alt=""></figure>Sally’s taste in art and vintage clothing is much the same as what she looks for in antiques. She explains, “I’ve always loved art, and my taste is just all over the place. I like some of the really formal things, and then I like really wild stuff.” She seems to greatly appreciate so many things, from old vases to antique sconces, just for what they mean to her, rather than considering whether or not they have potential to be a monetary diamond in the rough.&nbsp;She loved vintage clothing so much, even as a kid when no one else was wearing it, she says she didn’t care if she ever wore it – she just loved to have it. That same appreciation and enjoyment is a large part of the fun for her today.&nbsp;Sally has long specialized in festive gatherings, and it was through event planning that she would get her start organizing markets. She began doing very elaborate theme parties while also working as a decorator. Sally explains, “If I was doing a ‘50s party, I would go find the grill of a 1957 Chevy, or I’d find a jukebox. If it was a jazz party I would find all this Art Deco stuff. I’d have these really big budgets to put together these parties, but I had to start buying and keeping the decorations, since they could be hard to find – there was no market in the city of Chicago to source these types of authentic props.”&nbsp;Sally saw an opportunity not just for herself but for others hunting for eclectic pieces, too. In the mid ‘90s she organized three big markets with her then-husband, but then, Sally recalls, “I lost the site, and then my marriage ended, and everything sort of fell apart.” Around 2002 she was recruited to take over the Taste of Randolph, but that was not the type of event she wanted to do. Instead, she pitched the idea of an antique market. At the time, she says, there was nothing happening in the West Loop. “It was pretty much dead,” she recalls. “On Randolph Street it was just HARPO, Ina [Pinkney’s diner], Michael Jordan’s One Sixtyblue, and Jerry Kleiner’s restaurants.”Her first market, in 2004, was outside on the street, and the next one was in Hoops the Gym, a basketball space where Jordan and former Bulls teammate Scottie Pippen practiced before they retired.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418557/nlfetpvm4vjnpxoebijz.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;Since then Sally has expanded from one-day sales six times a year, to indoor and outdoor markets the last weekend of each month. The Randolph Street Market is internationally known as a go-to source for finding vintage and antique furniture, jewelry, clothing and art. Over 300 vendors take part, and the people who show are an eccentric bunch. The markets have become popular because visitors can find anything from vintage handbags and china to sterling silver candlesticks and high-end rugs. Special themes and on-site events introduced throughout the year make it an unusual experience every time.&nbsp;Sally’s professional life seems to have evolved to perfectly embody who she is personally, while offering her an endless source for finding treasures. While the pace of running the monthly markets is frenetic, she has her own life, away from Randolph Street, in a serene yet glamorous contemporary house in Lakeview, with her husband, Reid Brody.&nbsp;Sally likes to joke that Reid sent away for a mail order bride. The reality is that the couple met in Chicago 14 years ago. Friends had insisted they knew someone who was perfect for her. After getting his name wrong for a while – she thought she was looking for Reid Brophy – Sally finally tracked him down through another friend’s boss. They went on a date, and that was it.&nbsp;The couple got married this past December, after years of living apart in order to raise their own children. Their marriage aligned with their decision to move into a new home together, where they have combined their tastes as well as their belongings and collections. Sally came from a vintage Hyde Park home with art everywhere, while Reid was living in what Sally called a frat house/man cave in Wrigleyville. In their Lakeview house they wanted to display their pieces with more air and a much less cluttered feeling. Reid admits, “The good thing about moving was getting a ton of stuff out.” To Sally, “When we moved in here, we wanted things quiet and spaced. We have a lot of art that we have gotten rid of, and there are pieces that we don’t hang, because putting too much in this space wouldn’t look right.”The home’s open spaces are filled with blonde wood floors, and big windows that let in generous light. Each room is sleek and bright. Even though Sally says they tried not to have too much in the space, there is still something to look at on every wall and around every corner. Many of the pieces and objects have personal stories associated with them: a pair of imposing needlepointed chairs in the dining room were stitched by Sally’s grandmother. A metal sculpture of a woman, created by Sally’s aunt, is installed in the same room up by a large window. Custom built shelves display a range of objects in the living room: Sally’s extensive collection of vintage cigarette lighters is set off by glass and a mirrored background, while Reid’s vintage speakers, receivers and amps are plugged in and arranged opposite the lighters. How to make everything come together, in a single home after more than 14 years of living separately, was the challenge as well as an opportunity for the couple. Sally notes, “Taking our things – like the red couches in our kitchen – and curating how they would work together was fun. I just looked for art and pieces that had accents of red, and then you start to find them – that pillow I found at my market, these works are from the Project Onward program.”&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2007/original/sally-schwartz-160.jpg" alt=""></figure>So much comes through the markets each month, one wonders how Sally could possibly resist making impulse purchases all the time. “It’s hard, but I’ve become more limited,” she admits. She has undoubtedly found a lot of special pieces at the markets over the years, but she must try to be discerning in what she chooses to take home. The items she has acquired range from simply interesting things to overlooked steals. One hand grooved woven piece from the 1920s was dumped in a shopping bag. Sally bought it for $20, paid to clean&nbsp;and&nbsp;frame the piece, and it now complements the pair of needlepoint chairs by her grandmother in her dining room. A pair of salon style bucket chairs add to the glamour of her modern living room, and remarkably, they feature the original fabric – she only had a pair of pillows made to go with them. Sally restores or fixes some pieces, so she tries to find things with good bones no matter what.&nbsp;Sally and Reid’s new house is big enough to accomodate multiple collections of two different people who each have one foot in the past and one in the present. They both have developed an eye for making history their own. &nbsp;Reid’s collecting history is no less serious than Sally’s and just as eclectic, though he has a very different and personal focus. Sally sums up Reid’s extensive collection, “He doesn’t only collect guitars, he collects microphones, he collects clock radios, he collects little lights that you put next to your bed; in his last house he had this entire wall unit that was filled with clock radios, lights and gadgets, and they were all plugged in.” Reid has also long admired toaster ovens. He says, “The downfall of America can be traced to one of these [toaster ovens]. They’re amazing. It’s just the greatest thing ever.” Sally still can’t seem to believe Reid’s fixation with the common household device, but with more fondness than exasperation, she smiles at him when she says, “Can you believe he’s talking about a toaster oven?”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2040/original/reidsinstruments.jpg" alt=""></figure>Although Sally and Reid say they have very different taste in just about everything, they each end up looking out for what the other collects. Sally remembers, “Reid was at a guitar show in Dallas when he found a really cool cigarette lighter that looks like a microphone – the best of both our worlds. He’s found me a few lighters at his shows.” Says Reid, “The two really good ones were a Jet, and then an RCA microphone lighter.”When Sally comes across a guitar she immediately sends photos to Reid, but she says he’s so picky because he knows what he wants and he’s collected so much already. Reid has spent his career in the film and music industries, and his interest in guitars and recording equipment springs from his childhood, when he says his family couldn’t really afford anything. As an adult, it led him to chase what he once couldn’t have. Today he says he’s mostly held off acquiring things, since he more or less thinks he’s gotten everything he wanted. His collection spans mid-century digital recording equipment, guitars and vintage Hi-Fi, as well as a lot of vinyl. Reid has spent years in search of these objects, and Sally calls their lower level of the home Reid’s Fun House, where he displays nearly 50 guitars as well as more audio components. There is a custom built retro recording environment for ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s sound in a basement room that measures around 12’ x 10’. The equipment in the room also features a digital overlay so that Reid can work with a digital hybrid system. He uses vintage equipment to record an authentically old sound, but he captures it in an up-to-date format.&nbsp;He’s acquired a number of old microphones that each have a place in history. Their sound is distinct and so are the voices that have used them in the past. One example is a U47 mic that was made in post-war Germany and is still closely associated with Frank Sinatra and other ‘50s singers. To Reid, “These things have been used to record history, so they become very collectable. This is all restored, and it’s the original stuff.” Reid admits, “It all can start to own you after awhile, so I think at this point I’ll just enjoy what I have. I don’t feel that precious about anything anymore.” It’s the best way, he says, to appreciate what he already has.&nbsp;Sally and Reid’s children are each into their parents’ collections in their own way. Reid says his kids have a good sense of the sound collection. He dragged them around to flea markets and estate sales when they were young, and that they learned to collect items of their own, like comic books, Yu-Gi-Oh! Cards and other paper things. Today Reid and his son buy and sell vintage guitars together, and someday his son will inherit his collection of guitars, amps and microphones. Reid’s daughter is captivated by Sally’s lighters, so Sally says she’ll never sell them as long as she wants them. Her daughter, about to be a junior in college, has said to her, “You know I’m going to sell everything when you’re dead,” but Sally says she’ll hold onto most things, just in case she has a change of heart.&nbsp;&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2009/original/sallyflickers-2.jpg" alt=""></figure>&nbsp;Sally’s markets are built on the concept of trading and sharing things between generations. Some people are naturally interested in the search, while others love to look through pieces of history. Many are seeking a unique style in an age of sameness. When she looks to future generations of collectors, Sally says it can be helpful to start something small and fun for a child. Sally had her own collection of pigs, and for her daughter she started picking up various poodles when she was a baby – a collection to complement her French-themed nursery. Sally says, “When they have outgrown that, or they decide, ‘I’m bored with this I want to collect something else,’ they may have developed an eye and be inspired to look at things more deeply,” eventually building a collection on their own. She loves to see kids tagging along at the market. As she points out, almost wistfully, “It helps kids to start looking at stuff, at materials, at the way things were made and how they last, to see that not everything is disposable.”Top image: Sally and Reid’s living room features a pair of salon chairs from the Randolph Street Market, his (architecture) and her (Nancy Drew books) bookshelves, a collection of vintage cigarette lighters, and vintage sound equipment (not shown.) All photos: M Lindsay Photography.&nbsp;</body></html>

CGN interviews collector Sally Schwartz and her husband Reid Brody. 

In Search of the Eclectic 

CGN interviews Ross Jordan, the curator of "The Presidential Library Project: Black Presidential Imaginary" at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Exploring the Black Presidential Imaginary: An Interview with Ross Jordan

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image image-style-side"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418555/epwvl9ui1hakxcisyvsl.jpg"></figure>Hebru Brantley is one of Chicago's rising stars. Brantley’s pop-infused contemporary art is inspired by Japanese anime and the bold aesthetics of street art pioneers Jean-Michel Basquiat, KAWS and Keith Haring. His latest show, Hebru Brantley: Eat Crap King, explores the relationship between the two major contemporary art archetypes of Basquiat and Andy Warhol.&nbsp;His second solo show at Vertical Gallery opens February 4, showcasing a style of work he has not shown in some time. Brantley shared a few thoughts with&nbsp;CGN&nbsp;on his&nbsp;new show.CGN:&nbsp;Tell us a little about&nbsp;Hebru Brantley:&nbsp;Eat Crap King,&nbsp;your second solo show at Vertical Gallery.Hebru Brantley:&nbsp;Eat Crap King&nbsp;explores the relationship between two major contemporary art archetypes Jean Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Placing these&nbsp;two artistic celebrities in the same two-dimensional frame fosters inquiries of power, race and the true nature of the celebrity relationship. The work considers the chasm between the two in their artistic careers. Warhol becomes a representative of the traditional institutionalized art world status, while Basquiat remained more rebellious and navigated the art world through non-conforming means previous to his death. Additionally,&nbsp;Eat Crap King&nbsp;exposes similarities between Brantley and Basquiat’s identities and modes of operation throughout the art world. Brantley’s non-traditional relationship between street art and the art world mirrors his muse.Eat Crap King&nbsp;subversively probes the art world’s lineage by using familiar, iconic Pop-Art imagery and contemporary art archetypes. The series inspects hierarchy and status, while also reflecting on my own&nbsp;identity and the merging of the traditional and non-conforming&nbsp;within my career.CGN: Give us&nbsp;some insight into the key image from the show, featuring a young, bare chested, African American man (Basquiat) in boxing gloves, next to a white haired, older man in a turtleneck (Warhol), also wearing boxing gloves. &nbsp;&nbsp;HB: It comes from the campaign that they did for their collaborative show back in the 80s, again with Basquiat representing the young, hungry, unestablished – and&nbsp;more primitive notion – of the art world, and Warhol representing the established traditionally accepted art world. The two worlds are always at odds, depending on who you're talking to.&nbsp;CGN:&nbsp;Your career has been moving at a breakneck pace the past 5 years or so. What does this show mean to you?&nbsp;HB: It's a chance to continue to show work as part of an&nbsp;exhibit and to&nbsp;get it out to the public. This show in particular is me switching gears a bit and going back to an older style that I haven't exhibited in quite some time.&nbsp;CGN: Where do you usually view Chicago in relation to your work? Do you try to share a certain personal story about your city with viewers?&nbsp;HB: I am from Chicago so there is naturally a bit of my personal life in it. It's where the work is created and where I'm from.&nbsp;CGN: In addition to your art work, you also have built the Hebru Brand - what are the latest developments on that front?We're working on different projects, expanding the merchandising arm and working more in the digital space. Just trying to grow it organically.&nbsp;&nbsp;Hebru Brantley: Eat Crap King is on view at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/hebru-brantley-eat-crap-king">Vertical Gallery</a>,&nbsp;1016 N. Western Ave.,&nbsp;from February 4-25, 2017.An opening reception with the artist takes place Saturday, February 4, 6-10pm.</body></html>

Hebru Brantley's second solo show at Vertical Gallery is on view February 4-25, 2017.

Rising Star Hebru Brantley is Back in the Gallery

Franck Mercurio interviews young art collectors Jessica and Tim Canning

Young Couple Eyes Chicago’s Future

By ALISON REILLY

One year ago, Emanuel Aguilar and Julia Fischbach opened the doors of their gallery, PATRON. The two had previously worked together as directors at Kavi Gupta Gallery. Since opening in fall 2015 they have doubled the number of artists they represent while presenting impressive shows by Alex Chitty, Daniel G. Baird, and Myra Green, to name a few. I recently sat down with Emanuel and Julia at their space in River West. 
 
CGN: Tell me about your background. How did you get&nbsp;started in the art world? 
 
Julia Fischbach:&nbsp;I&rsquo;m from Chicago. I grew up here, and then I went away to a school in central Kentucky called Asbury University. Soon after I graduated, I came back to Chicago and I met an artist who had started working with Kavi. I started going to the openings and things like that. After a series of conversations I was hired by Kavi when I was 23. I was there for just over 17 years.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: What about you Emanuel? 
 
Emanuel Aguilar:&nbsp;I grew up in the city as well. I went to Columbia College and double majored in art history and marketing. But when I was very young, seventeen, I met a gallerist, Jean Albano in River North, through family and friends. I worked for her for about eight years, through college. When I left school I launched a magazine called Jettison Quarterly with some of my fellow graduates. One of the other founders of the magazine, Peter Skvara, worked with Julia and Kavi, and so I formed a relationship with the gallery. At one point our offices were in the same building. Kavi offered me a job and I took it. I was there for a few years, and then it led to this. 
 
CGN: Was the idea of opening up your own space something that you had been thinking about for awhile?&nbsp; 
 
EA: It&rsquo;s an industry where you eventually reach the point where, either you do it on your own, or you leave. Especially in a city like Chicago, there are only so many opportunities. To continue up the ladder you need to think about how or if you want to continue. It wasn&rsquo;t something we planned for until after we left and thought about what we wanted to do. We had options to leave the city and work for other spaces.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: Are you happy with the decision to stay in Chicago? 
 
EA: Yeah, it&rsquo;s difficult. Chicago is a very difficult place. I think that&rsquo;s something we both learned at Kavi&rsquo;s. Anything you can imagine in the art world globally, we were exposed to. When you have that kind access to the industry at large you have to reflect on&mdash;in order to stay sane&mdash;what aspects of the job are fulfilling. You come out of it really exhausted and you think to yourself, &lsquo;Why do I want to keep doing this for the rest of my life? What is it about this that makes me want to wake up?&rsquo;&nbsp; 
 
But Chicago has a lot of opportunities. There&rsquo;s definitely a void to fill. It has a lot of challenges because the community and the collector base is small. The collector base often isn&rsquo;t as risky; they sometimes wait for the rest of the world to approve something and then they follow through. You have to reach out to the rest of the world. But we&rsquo;re happy because the reception has been great. 
 
CGN: Julia, what about you? Are you happy with the decision?&nbsp; 
 
JF: Yes, for sure. When we left there was no plan for anything because we had different opportunities coming our way. I needed time to completely regroup. We had people who wanted us to go to the West Coast, East Coast, the whole thing, but I was like, &lsquo;You know we have both been here, we love the city.&rsquo; It&rsquo;s easy to leave sometimes, but I felt like more and more of the world&rsquo;s eyes were turning towards Chicago. In my heart I felt like I needed to stay.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: But I&rsquo;m sure you&rsquo;ve both been traveling a lot. 
 
EA: When we were at the other gallery we were on the road so much, flying out almost every other week. I almost felt like a stranger, because I was never here. At one point I was talking to a friend about my apartment and I mentioned that I had slept like five nights out of the last three months in my own bed. Sometimes you disconnect with your own community. Being in Chicago now has helped me to reconnect with what is going on here and to be a part of it. But eventually travel happens. The way that the art world functions these days you have to be on the road.

CGN: You&rsquo;ve said you want to foster connection between South America and Chicago. Have you been traveling to South America this year or do you have plans in the future to do so?

JF: We&#39;re starting the conversations and then doing research. I don&#39;t want the program to feel like &lsquo;These are South American artists! And artists from the States!&rsquo; so we want to make sure that there&#39;s a lot of crossover as far as conversations that can be blended beautifully. We are starting to work with artists from South America who live in Chicago or have lived here for a time.&nbsp;

CGN: Last year, you had a booth at EXPO, but I didn&rsquo;t see you on the exhibitor list for this fall. Are you planning on participating in other ways? 
 
JF: Yes, EXPO asked us to do a project. We will have a piece up by Samuel Levi Jones. It&rsquo;s an earlier work from 2012 called 48 Portraits Underexposed that informed where his work is today. We&rsquo;ll also be focused on Harold Mendez&rsquo;s exhibition opening here. He lived in Chicago at one point, he&rsquo;s down in Houston now. It&rsquo;s going to be very different and fresh. It&rsquo;s really amazing work.

<img alt="" data-caption="Harold Mendez, &lt;i&gt;At night we walk in circles&lt;/i&gt;, 2016 Cotton, graphite, spray enamel, watercolor, toner, litho crayon on ball grained aluminum lithographic plate mounted on dibond, 72&quot; x 60&quot;" data-rich-file-id="1381" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1381/original/hm-at-night-we-walk-in-circles-.jpg" />

CGN: You started with four artists when you opened a year ago, and now you represent eight. How did you get there? 
 
EA: It&rsquo;s a process to build relationships with artists. Not only do we have to believe in the practice and in the work, but we also have to develop good relationships with these artists as people, because we work very intimately with them. We are gallerists who like being in the studio often, collaborating with the artists and working side by side. It&rsquo;s forming a relationship that functions as a productive partnership for both sides to realize whatever it is that the artist&rsquo;s aspirations are. It took some time to get to know who&rsquo;s right for that and whether we can also do something for those artists. There are a lot of artists we like but for whom we&rsquo;re just not the right space. 
 
CGN: The mold making process for Daniel G. Baird&rsquo;s&nbsp;recent exhibition at PATRON seemed very intensive. He travels into caves across the United States and makes molds of the surfaces. Is Baird&rsquo;s project one that you were involved with specifically? 
 
EA: Yes, if you look at our artist roster, I&rsquo;d say 95% of everything the artists are doing we&rsquo;re involved with, at some point, even if it&rsquo;s just a discussion. Dan has very ambitious ideas and his exhibition was laying foundation for those ideas to grow even bigger and get more ambitious. Everything in his show happened through months and months of conversations. 
 
CGN: Tell me about your philosophy for the gallery. How does it relate to the name PATRON?&nbsp; 
 
JF: Even though we&rsquo;re a newer space we want to make sure that we are really accessible to people. We want the space to feel very open; our offices are almost in the middle of the space instead of hiding. Anybody who comes into the gallery is welcome to walk back into the showroom area. We&rsquo;re interested in helping someone who&rsquo;s never bought a piece of art in their life and has no idea how to go about that, as well as working with those who&rsquo;ve been doing it for forty years. Everyone is a different case.&nbsp; 
 
There are many, many ways to be a supporter. The original definition of patron&mdash;usually you think it&rsquo;s someone who has money and is giving to something&mdash;is actually a much more beautiful, generalized term. It&rsquo;s a supporter, a protector. That is our job. We do that everyday when we cross a threshold. We chose the name very carefully. It&rsquo;s at the foundation of who we are as a space.

CGN: What was the most challenging part of opening up a space this year?

JF: Even though we&#39;ve been in the industry for a long time we&#39;re starting from scratch. It&rsquo;s been very thrilling. It&#39;s a completely different thing when your problems are your problems. We&#39;ve had so many experiences in our lives that it&#39;s allowed us to say &lsquo;It&#39;s okay.&rsquo; You make a decision and you move forward.

EA: It&rsquo;s a challenge to redefine your identity and your life. Both&nbsp;locally and&nbsp;internationally people saw us under a certain umbrella&mdash;we belonged to this other place. We&rsquo;ve had to restructure the way that the world sees us and&nbsp;reconfigure our networks into the fact that we&#39;re no longer there and we&#39;re here. But it&#39;s been really good.

For more information visit <a href="http://patrongallery.com/">patrongallery.com</a>

Top image: Samuel Levi Jones, 48 Portraits (Underexposed), 2012, inkjet print on paper, 48-28&quot; x 22&quot; each or 8.5&#39; x 23&#39; overall, Edition of 1&nbsp;with 1 AP, SLJ025

One year ago, Emanuel Aguilar and Julia Fischbach opened the doors of their gallery, PATRON.

PATRON: Committed to Chicago

By ALISON REILLY 
 
In her exhibition last fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Ania Jaworska presented an impressive set of screen prints titled A Subjective Catalog of Columns. In one print, a flattened flame of concentric lines burns behind a cartoon capital filled with a wood grain pattern. Beneath the image, a line of text reads, &ldquo;Wooden Column on Fire (It Was Always Burning).&rdquo; Hung side-by-side within inches of each other, Jaworska&rsquo;s playful columnar designs reimagine the canonized history of architecture while offering many entry points for the casual viewer.

<img alt="" data-caption="Ania Jaworska, &lt;i&gt;Wooden Column on Fire (It Was Always Burning)&lt;/i&gt;, 2015. Screen print on folio paper. Courtesy of the Artist. © MCA Chicago" data-rich-file-id="1375" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1375/original/aniajaworska-column.jpg" />

In an adjacent gallery, Jaworska installed monochromatic black sculptures within a room of black walls and carpet, creating an island of architectural misfits. A HERE sign marks nowhere in particular. A set of stanchions and a corded rope form a circle only to guard an empty space. Throughout the exhibition, Jaworska questions the implicit power of signage and archetypal forms like an arch, a column or a step.&nbsp; 
 
&ldquo;A column is still a very powerful symbol,&rdquo; Jaworska said, &ldquo;that is not really questioned. It sends a powerful message and it does an excellent job.&rdquo; More recently, the Polish architect has been researching how universities, banks, law firms and other institutions interpret columns graphically in their logos. By cataloging these graphic designs, Jaworska hopes to more thoughtfully assess how they function in contemporary life.&nbsp; 
 
This fall Jaworska will present a new body of work&mdash;functional furniture&mdash;at Volume Gallery in the West Loop. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m building up my interest in simple forms,&rdquo; Jaworska noted, &ldquo;very bold forms that bring references that are not necessarily specific to anything else.&rdquo; Producing functional objects is not entirely new for the designer who was commissioned in 2013 to create the now iconic mesh metal bookshelf for the Graham Foundation. However, she considers that project &ldquo;more as an installation in space. I&rsquo;ve thought about furniture before but this [at Volume Gallery] is a new experience. &rdquo;&nbsp; 
 
Jaworska grew up in Stary Sacz, a small town in southern Poland along the border with Slovakia. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s an old town, 750 years old,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;It used to be a prominent town, but it never really grew so it stayed very small. There are gothic and baroque churches, a market square and it&rsquo;s all still cobblestones, so people are very much aware of their heritage in the town. They keep as much of the original old town as possible, which influenced my understanding of what architecture is, because I was surrounded by really beautiful buildings&mdash;not many, but some.&rdquo; 
 
At that time in the eighties, Poland was coming to terms with what it meant to be post-communist state. &ldquo;If you wanted to build your own house in my town you had to do it on your own,&rdquo; Jaworska said. Her parents, with the support of friendly neighbors, built their house from start to finish, which she compared to a barn raising&mdash;a community coming together to help a neighbor construct a necessary structure. Jaworska, who attended the Cracow University of Technology and Cranbrook Academy of Art, connects these early memories to her decision to study architecture. &ldquo;I always knew I wanted to study something related to art, and the more I thought about it architecture seemed to be the best approach.&rdquo; 
 
As a designer, Jaworska benefitted from the traditional architectural approach at Cracow focused on drafting, drawing, and planning, coupled with the hands-on, material based studies at Cranbook. &ldquo;I explored two different sides of architecture,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;At Cranbrook I was mostly building so I had the experience of how to actually make things, which of course as an architect you know it&mdash;in theory. But I think that really changed my practice. I had two years of studio time. There are no classes and no grades. It&rsquo;s really you and your own ideas.&rdquo;&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Ania Jaworska, &lt;i&gt;Study for Coffee Table&lt;/i&gt;, forthcoming exhibition at Volume Gallery" data-rich-file-id="1376" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1376/original/aniajaworska-coffee-table-image.jpg" />

While it&rsquo;s common for young architects to experiment with proposals as a means of developing their practice, Jaworska continues to employ this method in her work. &ldquo;I use proposals deliberately as a way to express ideas and communicate what I would like to do,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The proposals also exist as works that are already done and finished. They can be experienced as they are but also can promise works of a larger scale.&rdquo; Monument for Them, an oversized kneeling &ldquo;Hi&rdquo; sign that was installed at the MCA, functioned as a unique sculpture but also represents Jaworska&rsquo;s desire to engage viewers within public spaces.&nbsp; 
 
&ldquo;My interest in language came directly from signage,&rdquo; Jaworska said. &ldquo;I started with &lsquo;Hi&rsquo; in my explorations because I realized that signage really is about saying what we as a group of people or specific company or institution represent in the most direct way. It sends a message.&nbsp;You can&rsquo;t get any more direct than &lsquo;Hi!&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp;

Ania Jaworska&rsquo;s upcoming exhibition opens&nbsp;November 12 at Volume Gallery.&nbsp;

Top image:&nbsp;Installation view, BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: ANIA JAWORSKA, MCA Chicago, August 25, 2015-January 31, 2016. Photo: Travis Roozee. &copy; MCA Chicago

CGN interviews architect and designer Ania Jaworska.

Ania Jaworska: Relocating the Canon

By FRANCK MERCURIO

 
Lawrence &amp; Clark is an unassuming storefront gallery that functions as a public venue for graphic designer Jason Pickleman&rsquo;s private art collection. Over the past 30 years, Pickleman has assembled an eclectic collection of more than 1,000 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by the likes of Sterling Ruby, Michael DeLucia, Jin Lee, Judy Ledgerwood, Tom Friedman, and his current favorite, Puppies Puppies (Drew Olivo). On a recent visit to the gallery, I spoke with Pickleman about his collection and his deep roots in Chicago&rsquo;s art community. 
 
Pickleman&rsquo;s approach to collecting: 
 
I buy almost everything at first sight. I see it; it piques my interest; I buy it immediately. Very seldom do I hem, haw, think, research. I do almost no research when it comes to collecting&mdash;purely instinctive, always impulsive&mdash;much to my wife&rsquo;s chagrin! 
 
Purchasing a sculpture by Jenny Buffington: 
 
Jenny Buffington had a one-woman show at Heaven Gallery. So I picked up [this sculpture], and I bought it not knowing anything about the artist. Never seen her work before. I was there for a party. [The piece] was available. One glass of whiskey later, I walked home with it! That happens a lot. 
 
Ground up vs. museum down: 
 
I guess my collecting started from the ground up, as opposed to from the museum down. It has been brought on by my relationship with the Chicago cultural community, by being engaged with arts groups, artists, architects, entrepreneurs, and designers &ndash; by going to openings and doing studio visits. I go to places like Heaven, LVL3, and the Chicago Artists Coalition. 
 
&ldquo;Emerging&rdquo; is a dirty word: 
 
You know, I don&rsquo;t like the term &ldquo;emerging.&rdquo; Actually, I take offense to the word. Because, I mean, everybody&rsquo;s emerging as something else. 
 
When you go into a more established gallery, a more commercial gallery, there&rsquo;s a certain pedigree that shapes one&rsquo;s responses to the work. When I go into a &ldquo;scruffier&rdquo; gallery, I find the lack of pedigree to be freeing. I can have a more personally authentic experience with an art object when I don&rsquo;t know the artist&rsquo;s name, their reputation, or their exhibition history. 
 
Encountering Rothko at age 10: 
 
I remember a trip to New York when I was maybe nine or ten and seeing Rothkos at MoMA. That lodged in my brain, that level of atmospheric abstraction as a field of interest for an artist. It was mind-blowing for a ten-year-old. [The Rothko] wasn&rsquo;t a picture of something. It wasn&rsquo;t a place. It wasn&rsquo;t recognizable as anything. But at the same time, it was suggestive of a state of thinking, a state of emotion. I kind of sensed all that at a young age: that art could be this thing that was both specific and ambiguous, suggestive and abstract. And I think that my collection and my habits in collecting are absolutely informed by those contradictions. 
 
Art as memory device: 
 
[The works I collect] are mnemonic devices, memory devices for me. They are snapshots of where I was at certain point in my adult life. And my adult life&mdash;I&rsquo;m 51 now&mdash;has been 100 percent engaged with the Chicago art community. And I haven&rsquo;t left Chicago. I&rsquo;ve been able to find opportunities in Chicago&mdash;both personal and professional opportunities&mdash;and I&rsquo;ve watched multiple generations of artists come up. Many of them leave. Many of them disappear. And owning the work of so many has been one way for me to acknowledge their importance in my adult life. 
 
Opening Lawrence &amp; Clark: 
 
I think opening the gallery was one way for me to rationalize buying more work and as a way to treat the work more respectfully. Because I do&mdash;passionately&mdash;enjoy, love, and respect everything I buy. And often, collectors buy work and then it just disappears into this very private realm, and on one level, that does a disservice to the artist. So by having this gallery space, I open the possibility of not sequestering the work&hellip;that&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;m here every Saturday, with open hours.

<img alt="" data-caption="Pictured clockwise from top: Claire Valdez, Invader, Jenny Spota, Ivan Thorpe, Ken Fandell, William S. Burroughs" data-rich-file-id="1378" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1378/original/overall100-jasonpickleman.jpg" />

Collecting as part of living a creative life:&nbsp;

 
[The collection is an] end result of a professional life, lived in Chicago from 1987 to 2016. I mean, as a designer, I&rsquo;ve produced over 200 books for the most well known artists in the city of Chicago. I&rsquo;ve befriended artists who ended up having significant careers&mdash;Sterling Ruby, Tony Tasset, Judy Ledgerwood, Kerry James Marshall, I&ntilde;igo Manglano-Ovalle. These are people I have relationships with. I&rsquo;ve worked for major museums. I&rsquo;ve worked with very important curators and museum directors. My entire adult life has been centered around art making, art exhibiting, and art appreciation. Collecting is the end result of those relationships. I did not say, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to become a collector.&rdquo; Instead I said, &ldquo;I&rsquo;m going to live a creative life in the city of Chicago.&rdquo; And owning all these rectangles and sculptures and neon, that&rsquo;s the residue.

Lawrence &amp; Clark, 4755 N. Clark. Open Saturdays 1&ndash;5pm and by appointment via text 773-459-0586

Top image:&nbsp;Pickleman in front of one half of Sol LeWitt&rsquo;s Wall Work No. 391 (1983-2016) at Lawrence &amp; Clark 
&nbsp;

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Lawrence & Clark is an unassuming storefront gallery that functions as a public venue for graphic designer Jason Pickleman’s private art collection.

Collector Jason Pickleman’s Creative Life

By GINNY VAN ALYEA 
 
Professor Lisa Wainwright is actually an East Coast transplant, someone who unexpectedly found her way to Chicago and stayed &ndash; an opposite path from so many in the art world who get their start here only to flee to the coasts. Living the life of a native Chicagoan today, she first came to the city 27 years ago via the University of Illinois, Champaign, where she befriended a group of people connected to the Art Institute of Chicago. A highly respected art historian, she is now Dean of Faculty and Vice President of Academic Affairs at the School of the Art Institute (SAIC). Most of all she is a fountain of knowledge on the ins and outs of the local art scene, with her finger on the pulse of the global creative community. 
 
CGN: Tell me how you first came to Chicago.&nbsp; 
 
Lisa Wainwright: The individual who started the Art History program at the School of the Art Institute, Sir Robert Loescher, he was knighted by the king of Spain &ndash; he was a Hispanist. A formidable teacher in Art History &ndash; the school is known for its art historians &ndash; Loescher and I met when I was a graduate student in Champaign, and immediately bonded around my work on Robert Rauschenberg, because he was a huge Rauschenberg fan. Loescher was one of the early historians to think about queer theory, and at the time I was working on gay iconography, including tube socks. A side note &ndash; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson&rsquo;s gift to the Art Institute includes an untitled, gorgeous Rauschenberg, and it has a parachute, and other typical Rauschenberg paraphernalia, but it has a tube sock, basically a gay fetish item. So, Bob and I bonded over this, and the next thing I knew, I went from studying tube socks to a full-time job in Chicago. I&rsquo;m from the East Coast, from Miami and then outside of Annapolis, Maryland, so I never imagined I would be in Chicago, never! But I dig it, I think it&rsquo;s a great city, and the art scene is pretty interesting.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: We always talk about stemming the tide the other way, in particular how to keep more of our art talent from leaving Chicago.&nbsp; 
 
LW: I think it&rsquo;s something about being a historian of modern and contemporary art and working in one of the top art schools in the country,&nbsp;connected to one of the most amazing&nbsp;museums in the world. I&rsquo;m not bookish, you know, and I love being around living artists and students who are attempting to move through the practice. As an art historian surrounded by working artists,&nbsp;why would I leave? So I never left. 
 
CGN: I don&rsquo;t blame you.&nbsp; 
 
LW: In all that time I&rsquo;ve moved up through AIC. I was a tenure track faculty, then I got tenure, then somebody said, &lsquo;Oh, you should try administration, we have these elected faculty positions &ndash; run for this. I said, &lsquo;What the hell? I&rsquo;ll run.&rsquo; Then I became the Graduate Dean, and when Carol Becker left, I became the Dean Dean.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: Are you still teaching? 
 
LW: I don&rsquo;t teach that much. I taught this pretty interesting class, recently, called Chicago Collections with Shane Campbell. It was the second time I taught it. We took graduate students into private homes in Chicago and looked at the amazing wealth of works in private collections. We talked to the collectors about their choices and their installation strategies and the market. Shane knows the ins and outs of what&rsquo;s going on in the gallery world, so that was super fun.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: So that was one recent course.&nbsp; 
 
LW: I teach every other year or so. I just wrapped up SAIC&rsquo;s first MOOC [Massive Open Online Course]. It&rsquo;s gone live (<a href="http://kadenze.com">kadenze.com</a>) and it&rsquo;s called Touring Modernism: From the French Avant Garde to American Pop and Beyond. It&rsquo;s 200 years of art history &ndash; Western art history. I&rsquo;ve spent the last year writing the script, and filming. I went to LA to film &ndash; when in my life will I ever be able to say that again? Never. I used the Art Institute as the primary collection, and several AIC curators appear in the videos. They&rsquo;re going to keep rolling it out. This round it goes through, I think, September or October, and then they&rsquo;re going to launch it again. And it&rsquo;s free. It&rsquo;s online. Anyone can take it. 
 
CGN: What do the students do? Do they just sit there and watch videos?&nbsp;Is there course work?&nbsp; 
 
LW: There are quizzes; there are some assignments. The big project at the end, if you take it for credit, uses this system so that you basically design a gallery and then you drop images in and curate a show virtually. 
 
CGN: Playing paper dolls. It&rsquo;s like a game. 
 
LW: I mean, curators do that, you know. 
I&rsquo;m excited to see what they do at the end with the course, but that&rsquo;s been a lot of work &ndash; oh my God! I used to teach the big freshman survey, from cave paintings to Anselm Kiefer; I taught the second half, so 19th and 20th century essentially. 
 
CGN: It&rsquo;s been a long time since I took Art History.&nbsp; 
 
LW: Right, but you remember. You&rsquo;re going through hundreds and hundreds of slides. I had all of those notes and I dusted that off with my usual feminist bent &ndash; I&rsquo;m pretty much an angry feminist when it comes to the history of art. Too many images of objectified women, and not enough women artists. 
 
CGN: It&rsquo;s getting better. There&rsquo;s still work to do.&nbsp; 
 
LW: Boy, is there still work to do. 
 
CGN: Do you think that more women artists are being recognized today, or not? The numbers are a little better. 
 
LW: Yeah, it&rsquo;s kind of like the Linda Nochlin problem. Nochlin wrote that famous essay in the 70s, Why Are There No Great Women Artists? And it&rsquo;s because the artists weren&rsquo;t allowed into the art schools mostly. In the 19th century, the Royal Academy had three women, and then they weren&rsquo;t allowed to draw from the nude, and it was Realism in the History of Painting, so you&rsquo;re kinda screwed.&nbsp; 
 
I think, yes, things have changed, post-1970, and we&rsquo;re even discovering more female artists from the 60s and 50s, but still, in comparison, I mean when you talk about the 19th century and early 20th century, it&rsquo;s a boy&rsquo;s game.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: What&rsquo;s the difference today?&nbsp; 
 
LW: It&rsquo;s interesting because SAIC is, I want to say, 65% or 67% women. That&rsquo;s a lot of women. 
 
We&rsquo;ve definitely gotten more global, too. You can&rsquo;t teach a contemporary art course today and only talk about western art history; that would be highly problematic, so you&rsquo;ve got to talk about Asia and Africa and South America as well. 
 
CGN: You travel a lot.&nbsp; 
 
LW: I do travel a lot. I just got back from Italy, where I saw the Christo site. It&rsquo;s stunning in photos, but to be there, you don&rsquo;t have the same vista and you don&rsquo;t have the same perspective, and it was like a big pier. It undulates, but I mean it also was 90 degrees. With 100,000 people. It was Italian craziness at its best, and you know, the thing about Christo, it&rsquo;s an event, and you don&rsquo;t know what&rsquo;s gonna happen and there were all these people &ndash; it very much reminded me of the Seurat painting of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grande Jatte because it was the masses of all classes and shapes and sizes and they were lounging on this vivid golden drape on the blue water and that was kinda beautiful. But Christo is smart, he know&rsquo;s that media is the lens. It looks great in photographs, it looks great on television. It&rsquo;s a spectacle. You get everybody asking, &ldquo;Is this art?&rdquo; I love that question. 
 
CGN: You see the world, and then what do you see when you return home to Chicago?&nbsp; 
 
LW: I think Chicago is completely in the running of major cities and major art experiences. I mean there is a smaller number of galleries compared to some art centers, but from Shane Campbell, to Rhona Hoffman to the old standards like Zolla/Lieberman and Carl Hammer, and then all the Julius Caesars and alternative spaces, there is some really exceptional energy here. This summer, for instance, I went from Kerry James Marshall at the MCA down to the Terracotta Warriors at the Field in a day, and I thought, &lsquo;Yeah, this is all Chicago,&rsquo; from the high art to the general interest in all kinds of expressions that the Imagists enjoyed so much. I can&rsquo;t even get to everything, so what does that mean?&nbsp; 
 
CGN: What else sets Chicago apart for you?&nbsp; 
 
LW: I think Chicago is one of the most important cities for public sculpture. There&rsquo;s no city that has the Picasso that we have. I don&rsquo;t think there is another public Picasso in the United States.&nbsp; 
 
The collection throughout the city is great. From Oldenberg&rsquo;s [baseball] bat to Anish Kapoor&rsquo;s Cloud Gate, the Crown Fountain, even the 19th century and early 20th century sculpture in the city is terrific. It&rsquo;s a great walking city for architecture as well for sculpture.&nbsp;I always bicycle by the Richard Serra [Reading Cones] &ndash; it&rsquo;s out there, very lonely and minimalist power punk that it is. You can see the [Buckingham] fountain if you look through the slit, if you catch it right, which is cool. 
 
CGN: There&rsquo;s a lot of overlap between art and design and architecture in Chicago; all those things exist here in a unique way.&nbsp; 
 
LW: From the Logan Center to the Block Museum, and the Smart and the Renaissance Society, I think there are a lot of amazing artists and intellectuals in Chicago who work within art and design. This is a rich, rich, rich city. 
&nbsp;

CGN interviews Lisa Wainwright, a fountain of knowledge on the ins and outs of the local art scene, with her finger on the pulse of the global creative community. 

SAIC’s Lisa Wainwright: A Native Transplant

By GINNY VAN ALYEA

 
EXPO CHICAGO may seem like a fixture on the art world calendar now, but a few short years ago there was a serious possibility that the city who led &nbsp;the art fair craze from the beginning in the &lsquo;80s would be left without an international contemporary fair of its own. We spoke with Tony Karman, President, Director of EXPO, about the fifth edition of EXPO Chicago and the rapid changes that have been a part of the evolving show as well as the surrounding art community. 
 
<img alt="" data-caption="Tony Karman, photo by Audia" data-rich-file-id="1407" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1407/original/tony-karman-photo-by-audia.jpg" />

CGN: You&rsquo;ve made it to five. Tell me where you were back in 2012 and where you are now in 2016.&nbsp; 
 
Tony Karman: I have been saying that it feels like we are going to Kindergarten but we are actually quite mature. Five years is an incredible milestone. I didn&rsquo;t have any great foresight to understand where I hoped to be, but I&rsquo;m awfully proud of where we are. I think that from the beginning, in 2012, we made a huge mark, and we&rsquo;ve built upon that mark, not only being true to the tradition of a great art fair in Chicago, but more important, making sure that this was, and is, and will be, a great international art fair that has programming of merit, has galleries of merit, and represents an incredible list of artists. We move to the fifth year with great optimism.&nbsp; 
 
<img alt="" data-caption="Visitors to EXPO 2015" data-rich-file-id="1408" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1408/original/expoinsta.jpg" />

CGN: You&rsquo;ve managed not only to&nbsp;survive, but to build. 
 
TK: That&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;m most proud of. From the beginning we&rsquo;ve had an extraordinary list of dealers. Maintaining this in a world of too many art fairs, despite great swings in the economy, there&rsquo;s no question that we&rsquo;ve continued to not only provide a great international fair but grow with a list of powerful international art dealers. That&nbsp;is a testament to our city, our curators, our institutions, our collectors, our &nbsp;galleries &ndash; to our artists.&nbsp;In 2012 there wasn&rsquo;t the IN/SITU&nbsp;program or /Dialogues series; there wasn&rsquo;t THE SEEN. All those elements are maturing to be of service to the fair, as well as, hopefully, the whole ecosystem of the Chicago arts community. &nbsp;I don&rsquo;t think that there&rsquo;s any laurel to rest on. We&rsquo;re only as good as our last fair, and all of us here feel that urgency to continue to push and create new programming. It&rsquo;s all built on the dealers&rsquo; backs, they&rsquo;re the ones taking the greater risk here.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: Did people sign on at the start, figuring it was a gamble? Now, five years in, maybe they think, &ldquo;This is a fair that I need to be a part of.&rdquo; 
 
TK: I think you just hit it. We are at that place. Year one &ndash; there was no question that we came out of the box with an extraordinary list of dealers. I wouldn&rsquo;t say they necessarily sold that much, but they believed in the city, they believed in the mission of the fair, and they believed in the intent enough to want to come back to a year two. In year two they actually sold. Then the machine starts to work in everyone&rsquo;s favor because collectors hear, &ldquo;Something&rsquo;s happening in Chicago again. We gotta go next year.&rdquo; By year three you had even more people wanting to attend and support, and more sales taking place. In year four I think the programming and the cumulative good word meant that they did well.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="EXPO 2015 at Navy Pier" data-rich-file-id="1406" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1406/original/expo2015.jpg" />

CGN: Did some people count you out before you got started? 
 
TK: No question. I will say healthy skepticism was there, but not enough to deter the great dealers to attend, but the cultural and civic leaders in Chicago to jump in and support us. I think that&rsquo;s a testament to our city. I&rsquo;ve said this often, because it&rsquo;s critical: I don&rsquo;t know of any city in the world that would have rallied in that way and in that first year, I would say that we maybe had 95% or 98% of everyone&rsquo;s support, with that other 2% going, &ldquo;Well let&rsquo;s just see what it looks like.&rdquo; People questioned, &lsquo;Can Chicago sustain a great international fair?&rsquo; &lsquo;Is this the fair that one would want to participate in?&rsquo; After 2012 doubts were erased about what we were and what we wanted to be, so it allowed for even greater support to flow in &ndash; support to me is when everyone wants to be an ambassador to tell the world to be here. 
 
CGN: Where does art rank in Chicago&rsquo;s international reputation? Among architecture, food, design, sports,&nbsp;art is not at the top of that list yet.&nbsp; 
 
TK: I think you&rsquo;re fair in that observation. This sounds horribly one-sided but I see the fair playing a large role in telling the art world to convene here at the very least once a year. I wish they would convene 365 days of the year.

That&rsquo;s not possible, but I think the fair has reestablished the city and regalvanized the galleries, the artists and the institutions around this weekend in a way that we can export what is happening here in a pretty profound way. There&rsquo;s still room to grow, even in the 360 days out of the year that the fair isn&rsquo;t taking place. So many people don&rsquo;t recognize yet how many great artists are now living here and staying here, the number of galleries showing amazing work. Collectively we all have a responsibility to make sure nobody forgets that, &lsquo;Damn! There&rsquo;s a lotta good happening here.&rsquo; 
 
CGN: How do you sum up EXPO now for someone who doesn&rsquo;t know what an international art fair is?&nbsp; 
 
TK: To some extent, sadly, I have to reference another experience [like Art Basel Miami Beach] for those who don&rsquo;t realize we had that legacy once. I&rsquo;m going to start to change my tune a little bit and say we are that legacy again. There are 20 and 30 year olds who know what Art Basel Miami Beach is &ndash; I mean that is an extraordinary thing &ndash; but from 1979 until really the early 2000s, Chicago was the only place the international art world came to in North and South America. That&rsquo;s hard to imagine now, since there are so many fairs taking place around the world, but it basically started here. Now that we&rsquo;ve established EXPO, there&rsquo;s never a minute that we&rsquo;re not pushing to make another person more aware of what the fair is or what the scene is in Chicago. 
 
CGN: Are you headed for 10 next?&nbsp; 
 
TK: I&rsquo;m pleased we&rsquo;ve made it to five, and now I know we&rsquo;re continuing in the right direction. This fair has established a place where, I think even after year five, it&rsquo;s undeniable that it deserves to exist and has a future. I can&rsquo;t guarantee that; there are so many factors that can come into play, but I feel that it&rsquo;s not overconfident for me to say that the fair has its own energy.&nbsp; 
 
CGN: What makes Chicago so special for EXPO, as well as for emerging&nbsp;galleries in the fair and in the city?&nbsp; 
 
TK: I think Chicago overall, but especially the emerging art world players, deserve greater recognition. There&rsquo;s no question &ndash; I say this to collectors or&nbsp;curators who have been kind enough to&nbsp;be great supporters of the fair &ndash;they&rsquo;re&nbsp;really coming for them, after all. The collection of galleries at Navy Pier is important, as is the programming we put together, but the reason why a dealer is doing our fair or a collector or curator comes here is to see what&rsquo;s new and experience all that Chicago has to offer. I don&rsquo;t think there&rsquo;s been a time in my 35 years in Chicago that the curatorial teams of all of the institutions have ever been this strong. Or the artists graduating from our amazing schools have not only been this strong, but are finding a way to actually work here. Artists are figuring out that they can still be represented on the coasts or in Europe but have a great studio space here. That&rsquo;s something that we need to foster together, that this is a place where one can be a maker and still be represented and be tied into the international art world and not have to leave. The more that happens, the more the gallery scene becomes richer the more, more, more. I really do believe that this city&rsquo;s never been this strong, and that is why I keep saying the world wants to come here. 
 
 
EXPO Chicago 
At Navy Pier, September 22-25, 2016 
<a href="http://expochicago.com">expochicago.com</a>

Top image:&nbsp;Tony Karman. Photo by Paul Audia.

CGN interviews EXPO President & Director Tony Karman about the fifth edition of EXPO Chicago.

EXPO Chicago: Five Years and Counting

By GINNY VAN ALYEA

&nbsp;

GV: Tell me a little about your Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT residency.

SB: The 2015-2016 BOLT residency has been a wonderful experience, and I was thrilled to be accepted. The residency is a year-long assignment for 10 artists who work in a variety of mediums. We have monthly meetings and meet different curators from various organizations, which is such a gift. We have a group show and then a final solo show. Recently, Michael Darling, Chief Curator at the MCA, came to visit our studios, which was amazing.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

GV: For your residency exhibition this summer you&rsquo;re showing portraiture, a classic subject, using somewhat outdated equipment. What role does technology play in your work?&nbsp;

SB: I am making portraits without a camera. I use a scanner like an old fashioned box camera. Each image takes at least two minutes and has a section that is hyper sharp and then other sections with a shallow depth of field. The images reference various aspects of the history of and truths in photography and also speak to our close and complicated relationship with technology.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

GV: Does your new series continue or depart from themes in previous work?

SB: Both. For over a decade I have been looking at various aspects of our landscape with and through various new technologies &ndash; first, digital cameras and printers, and then camera phones &ndash; the cameras most of us use. My last body of work, the Walk series, featured landscapes that almost became self portraits. The photographs are comprised of 100 steps in various walks I took over the course of two years. The images are performative and time-based. These issues are also in my current portrait series. The images are not instantaneous; they take about two minutes to complete. Movement occurs while the sitter is scanned. No image can be replicated because of this. The subjects work with me to create their images. They are almost self portraits, but not quite selfies.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Suzette Bross, Walk 2/7/14 Brooklyn Museum, New York (2:01:03-2:02:00pm)" data-rich-file-id="1108" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1108/original/07-suzettebross.jpg" />

&nbsp;

GV: How do you fit art into your already very busy life? You truly are one of the busiest people I know.&nbsp;

SB: On the fly and in between!&nbsp;

&nbsp;

GV: What will you explore next?&nbsp;

SB: I am really excited to start my next project. It is broadly about homelessness in Chicago, and I have been lucky enough to work with Heartland Alliance and Streetwise.

&nbsp;

Suzette Bross is a Chicago-based photographer. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The National Gallery of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; the Block Museum; and more.&nbsp;

For the Glass opens June 3, 6-9pm at the Chicago Artists Coalition, 217 N Carpenter (60607). <a href="http://suzettebross.com">suzettebross.com</a>

&nbsp;

Top images from left to right: Suzette Bross,&nbsp;Portrait No. 2, Suzette, Archival Pigment Print, 2015;&nbsp;Portrait No. 1, Teresa, Archival Pigment Print, 2015;&nbsp;Portrait No. 3, Molly, Archival Pigment Print, 2015

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

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Interview with photographer Suzette Bross, Chicago 2016

Photographer Suzette Bross: On the Fly

By KEVIN NANCE

There&rsquo;s a widely held perception that to build a significant art collection, you have to be rich. But Nancy and Bob Mollers, down-to-earth Chicago natives who describe themselves as of relatively modest means compared to the high-flying collectors who snap up blue-chip pieces at Sotheby&rsquo;s, have spent most of their life together demonstrating that you don&rsquo;t have to be wealthy to collect art. What&rsquo;s required instead is commitment, discernment and, most of all, lots of time.

For nearly half a century, Bob, now a retired teacher and ceramic artist, and Nancy, a retired risk-management executive, have spent much of their time and resources looking at, studying and acquiring art&mdash;almost all of it by emerging artists.&nbsp;

Today, the couple&rsquo;s 2,300-square-foot West Loop condo is a destination of choice for art students, museum curators and other collectors who want to see what&rsquo;s achievable on what Bob Mollers calls &ldquo;a shoestring budget.&rdquo;

The answer: plenty. The Mollers apartment fairly bulges with art, much of it bearing testament to their good taste and deep knowledge of the contemporary art world. The highlight of the 300-piece collection, displayed in and near a hallway shielded from direct sunlight, is a fine group of works on paper by Jim Nutt, John Currin, Nicole Eisenman, Sol LeWit and several others. Displayed elsewhere are works by Mel Bochner, Adam Pendleton, Kehinde Wiley, Damien Hirst, Wolfgang Tillmans, Erik Parker, Tony Tasset, Thomas Hirschhorn, Nan Goldin, Dan Peterman, Jeanne Dunning, Spencer Finch, William J. O&rsquo;Brien, Ruth Duckworth, Joyce Pensato, Stanley Whitney and Roger Brown, among many others. The late Chicago Imagist Ed Paschke has a special place in the Mollers&rsquo; collection in that an early work, Jointed Heel, was one of their first acquisitions in 1971; Nance, a Paschke portrait of Nancy Mollers, followed in 1975.

Chicago Gallery News recently toured the Mollers collection and sat down for a chat. Here&rsquo;s an edited transcript.

&nbsp;

CGN: How did you meet?

Bob: We met 50 years ago on the Kedzie bus, going to North Park University.

Nancy: I sat down next to him on the bus. I knew he was also going to North Park, so I decided to go for it, and started a conversation, which was very atypical for me. (Laughs.)&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Nancy Mollers seated in front of Ed Paschke’s portrait of her, Nance. Photo by Kevin Nance." data-rich-file-id="1104" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1104/original/nancy-mollers-6.jpg" />

CGN: And the rest was history. When did you start collecting together?

Bob: We&rsquo;ve been asked that a million times, and basically I always say we didn&rsquo;t &ldquo;start&rdquo; collecting. That is something that evolves slowly. It isn&rsquo;t like we decided one day, &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s starting collecting art.&rdquo; It was a natural, slow process for us. We didn&rsquo;t have much money&mdash;we still don&rsquo;t&mdash;so we always bought things on a tight budget.

Nancy: And neither of us had an art background or families interested in art. So it was a pursuit we developed together since we began dating.&nbsp;

Bob: We just liked going to galleries in the Chicago area, looking at art a lot, and now and then we&rsquo;d stretch and buy something. We focused on young artists, mostly because it was more affordable. After about a year of this, we decided, &ldquo;Let&rsquo;s collect only living artists.&rdquo; We&rsquo;ve stuck to that ever since.&nbsp;

Nancy: That&rsquo;s our only rule.

Bob: Nancy and I would be doing this even if nobody else was doing it. By which I mean, we&rsquo;re not into collecting because of social interaction with other collectors or whatnot. We do it because we just love it. It stimulates the intellect. It&rsquo;s visually interesting. And it keeps you young. There&rsquo;s always something new and intriguing going on in the contemporary art world.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Bob walking in the collection" data-rich-file-id="1101" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1101/original/20150324-100906.jpg" />

CGN: A lot of people start collecting figurative art and then transition to more abstract work. Has that been the case with you?

Nancy: I think it was a mix all along.&nbsp;

Bob: When we started in the early 70s, we collected a lot of the Imagists, who were mostly figurative. The Bay Area Funk movement, which we also collected, was largely figurative. But we also collected abstract art early on. Of course we don&rsquo;t still own some of that early work; we&rsquo;ve donated about 100 pieces to museums already. After about 15 years of our marriage, Nancy made a professional move to Houston, so we were in that community also, and we placed a lot of our Chicago artists into Texas museum collections. More recently we&rsquo;ve donated several works on paper to the Art Institute of Chicago. But good art is good art, whether it&rsquo;s figurative, abstract, conceptual, whatever. It&rsquo;s true that we don&rsquo;t get into video.

Nancy: We don&rsquo;t have a place for it.&nbsp;

Bob: And of course we don&rsquo;t collect things that are too big. We like to be comfortable with what we live with.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Students visiting the collection" data-rich-file-id="1103" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1103/original/dsc05029.jpg" />

CGN: Has where you&rsquo;ve lived influenced your collecting?&nbsp;

Bob: For her work in Houston, Nancy traveled to Europe fairly often, and I would go with her and we&rsquo;d look at art. But it&rsquo;s also true that Art Chicago was a great thing for us, in that it would bring in art from galleries around the world that we knew nothing about. It was like a crash course in contemporary art. I have never missed a single one of the art fairs, and Nancy saw most of them.

&nbsp;

CGN: How do you go about acquiring pieces? I know you rarely do auctions.

Bob: Most of the time we find works we really like through galleries. You walk in and see things you like or you ask about other works by that artist.

Nancy: We don&rsquo;t necessarily discover artists at art galleries.&nbsp;

Bob: Sometimes we do. And nowadays we use the computer a lot. Galleries send us their openings, or they&rsquo;ll send a list of things they&rsquo;re bringing to the art fairs. It&rsquo;s totally different from the way we started, when you had none of that. Now I can see a show online anywhere in the world. If I have a question, I can get a response quickly. Years ago, if you were inquiring about something in Italy, you never even knew if the letter got there. Two months later, you might get a reply, but the image might be a terrible photograph.&nbsp;

<img alt="" data-caption="Bob and a guest listening to an Isa Genzken &quot;Radio&quot;" data-rich-file-id="1102" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/1102/original/img-2942.jpg" />

CGN: Are there certain galleries you work with more often than others?

Bob: In the beginning, we worked with local galleries basically, although many of those galleries no longer exist. Some, like Zolla/Lieberman and Rhona Hoffman, are still around. Certainly we never stayed with just one gallery anywhere. As time has gone on, we&rsquo;ve gotten to enjoy the program at Rhona&rsquo;s, Corbett vs. Dempsey and Shane Campbell. There&rsquo;s a new gallery in town, Patron, that I think has great potential. But we&rsquo;re not captive to any particular gallery.

&nbsp;

CGN: Do you use an art advisor?

Nancy: No. We like doing our own thing.&nbsp;

Bob: And now basically the entire collection is in trust to various museums. The curators come and select the works they want every few years. Sometimes there are three or four museums that want the same piece, so you have to make that selection. But our intent is that after we both pass away, our trust funds will continue to do what we love doing, which is acquiring works by living artists. We&rsquo;ve got that set up. &nbsp;

Nancy: Any remaining assets that we have will be in an endowment fund that the Art Institute&rsquo;s Prints and Drawings Department can use to purchase additional works for years to come.

&nbsp;

CGN: You often open your collection to art classes. What&rsquo;s that like?

Bob: They&rsquo;re generally very attentive, extremely interested. It&rsquo;s very exciting for them, I think, to see a collection like this outside of a museum. Oftentimes they ask&mdash;

Nancy: &ldquo;What&rsquo;s your favorite work?&rdquo;&nbsp;

Bob: And we tell them there isn&rsquo;t a favorite. If there was a fire, there isn&rsquo;t one piece that we&rsquo;d run out with.

Nancy: It&rsquo;s like asking who&rsquo;s your favorite child.&nbsp;

Bob: Sometimes it&rsquo;s the latest piece you&rsquo;ve acquired, or the piece that you&rsquo;re trying to acquire. If I were to walk into a collection and wanted to get an idea of how it developed, I would ask to be shown the earliest piece and the latest piece. That would show me the evolution.

&nbsp;

CGN: In any case, it must be a treat for the students, coming here.

Bob: I hope so. We allow them to photograph the collection, which many collectors don&rsquo;t allow. One student contacted me recently and said she wants to write her thesis on our collection. I said, &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll help you out as much as possible.&rdquo; I love having the opportunity to meet young people who enjoy what we enjoy. The fact that they&rsquo;re able to be in what I call an upper-middle-class home that has spent 40-plus years acquiring art by generally younger artists&mdash;they understand the significance and the beauty of that.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: It&rsquo;s interesting, Bob, given your background as a ceramic artist, that the collection doesn&rsquo;t include many pieces in that medium.

Bob: We used to have a lot more pieces, but their fragility became an issue. And there was somebody we knew who was building a massive ceramic collection, and so our pieces ended up in his collection.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: There&rsquo;s a sort of diaspora of your collection.

Bob: That&rsquo;s right. We do place art in a few friends&rsquo; homes. There&rsquo;s one friend in the suburbs who has about 40 of our pieces. We also give art, just outright, to friends. It keeps on going.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer. His work appears in the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, USA Today, Poets &amp; Writers Magazine and other publications. Follow him on Twitter @KevinNance1&nbsp;

Kevin Nance interview with Nancy and Bob Mollers, Chicago art collectors

Nancy and Bob Mollers: Down-to-Earth Collectors

BY GINNY VAN ALYEA

Carl Hammer has been in the art business for nearly 40 years, but his journey to being one of the most well-respected dealers in Chicago started when he was an Evanston High School English teacher during a tumultous time in the nation&rsquo;s history.&nbsp;

Today, Hammer runs a gallery program from a historic building on North Wells Street in the heart of River North. Exhibitions feature work that alternates between that of noted Outsider artists like Lee Godie and Henry Darger, and contemporary art by Michael Hernandez de Luna, an artist who cleverly works with stamps, and graphic novelist Chris Ware. Hammer sees himself as a bit of an outsider, since he never had any formal art training, and it&rsquo;s his inherent curiosity and self-awareness that continues to guide his explorations and discoveries.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: Tell us a little about how you got into the art business, and how did you come to focus on Outsider art?&nbsp;

CH: As a high school English teacher in Evanston during the &lsquo;60s and &lsquo;70s, I, along with my wife, decided that we should begin collecting art. Due to the political and civil rights upheaval the country was experiencing, we decided to collect &ldquo;grass roots&rdquo; art, a term that one commonly used during that period, based on a concept of how one should live. Without fully understanding what grass roots art might be, I knew I wanted our collecting to fully integrate the ethnicity and politics of inclusiveness. Teaching at Evanston High School provided the incentive for me to do just that. During school vacations, we traveled around the country by car and looked for our interpretation of &ldquo;grass roots&rdquo; art and artists. As we did we began discovering the world of the self-taught artist. These were people who often lived in out of the way places, where they were compelled to invent and discover ways to express who they were and what they thought, without being trained nor realizing that they were creating art. The term &ldquo;Outsider&rdquo; hadn&rsquo;t been invented yet. Vernacular art, folk art, art brut, self-taught art was used in its place. In 1972 Roger Cardinale, a professor at the University of Kent, coined the phrase Outsider Art as a synonym of art brut, or art created outside the established scene, much as Dubuffet did in finding work which helped to establish his well known art aesthetic.&nbsp;

The Chicago Imagists were also major and instinctive collectors/foragers of this kind of art, and it figured greatly in the creation of their own style/genre of creating art.

The business of selling art followed suit with our interest in collecting it and doing something within the art world that was somewhat unique, yet kept within the parameters of our own idealism at that time.

&nbsp;

CGN: You&rsquo;re known for keeping up with emerging talent. What&rsquo;s your approach to finding new artists?&nbsp;

CH: I have let the same principles of discovering outsiders guide me in finding emerging talent. I travel a lot to see work by different up and coming artists. I visit all of the graduate thesis shows that I can. Not having been instructed in art making or criticism, I&rsquo;ve been somewhat freer to look beyond the prescribed components one should be looking for in creating art or in becoming an artist.

&nbsp;

CGN: What do you think about the ever-growing business of art fairs and its impact on galleries?&nbsp;

CH: Carl Hammer Gallery became known early on because we were, in our second year, invited to participate in Chicago&rsquo;s Art Expo. My first time at Expo I wall-papered my booth with work by the newly discovered Bill Traylor. We nearly sold everything. Traylor went on to become a super star with galleries and collectors throughout the world. It was a remarkable phenomenon back then. But the proliferation of art fairs today seems to have become competitive with the old notion that clients establish loyal relationships with galleries and purchase work because they identify with the aesthetic of a particular gallery. Now, collectors seem to align themselves with the art fairs as a way to build art collections. &nbsp;

&nbsp;

CGN: What are the most striking changes you have experienced in the local as well as national art scenes?

CH: My gallery&rsquo;s 37 years of existence have been a tremendous experience, due to connections with people and, especially, in the discovery process of finding new ideas expressing the essential components of our being human. I don&rsquo;t know what&rsquo;s in store for us as collectors/gallerists here in Chicago, our nation and world-wide. Certainly, today&rsquo;s average person is more engaged than ever in the pursuit of finding meaning in life through art, and our acquisition of it and appreciation for art in our daily lives. &nbsp;

Regarding the future of the River North art district, I do not like to think of a time when it eventually meets with its demise. On the other hand, River North itself was the reincarnation of a decades old art district once thriving at North Michigan Ave. and Ohio St. Perhaps, like the proverbial Phoenix rising from the ashes, there will be a rebirth of a similar River North elsewhere.

&nbsp;

<a href="http://carlhammergallery.com">carlhammergallery.com</a>

&nbsp;

Pictured at top of page: Carl Hammer in his gallery, in front of Mary Lou Zelazny&rsquo;s The Eyed Tree #4, 2015 Acrylic, collage, oil on canvas, 48&rdquo; x 60&rdquo;

Carl Hammer: 37 Years an Outsider

An interview between Chicago-based artist Claire Ashley and Chicago Gallery News. Claire Ashley’s work blurs the lines between painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. It evokes feelings of playfulness and curiosity; a desire to touch and feel and interact. It’s fun. The artist has stated that contemporary art takes itself too seriously, and her work is the perfect antidote for this plague.

Claire Ashley: The Evolution of Surprise

<html><head></head><body><figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418210/bj6amv3bnunbiiln8fop.jpg"></figure>By KEVIN NANCEJudith Tullman has a special name for the Art Loft, the office/clubhouse/gallery space of her husband, the entrepreneur, venture capitalist and prolific art collector Howard Tullman. She calls it “The Breast Home.”No wonder. Perhaps one-third of the roughly 1,200 pieces on display in the 6,000-square-foot loft are paintings and drawings of nudes. The vast majority of them are female, and most are naturalistic in style, including several photorealistic pieces lifelike enough to appear in Playboy.Overall, Tullman’s collection is merrily eclectic, if almost exclusively figurative, and includes sculpture, paintings and works on paper. Most of the pieces are by young and/or emerging artists from Chicago and around the world (especially Germany and Mexico) who exude a youthful, often alternative or outsider sensibility. Several are witty, impish riffs on pop-culture figures, including David Hevel’s sculptures of Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson made of taxidermied animals, and Lizabeth Eva Rossof’s faux-Chinese warriors referencing Batman and Bart Simpson. One large painting, I’ll Have What She’s Having by John Jacobsmeyer, is a Renaissance-fair parody of the famous scene from&nbsp;Rob Reiner’s romantic comedy “When Harry Met Sally…,” with Linda Lovelace, Harry Reems and other 1970s pornography stars acting out the parts. (The exception is the director’s mother, Estelle, who appears in the painting in her original role as the speaker of the title phrase.)But there’s also an elephant in the room, and she is bodacious indeed. Visitors to the Art Loft are routinely dazzled by the display of pulchritude—which is housed at the loft, rather than at Tullman’s home, out of deference to the wishes of his wife and co-collector, Judith, whose artistic tastes lie elsewhere. &nbsp;&nbsp;Would it be accurate to classify Tullman, 70, as an admirer of the female form?“Yeah, I’d say that,” he concedes with a you-got-me smile during a recent visit. “But I also have to say, what I really admire is the execution of a lot of these artists; it is quite extraordinary.”Tullman isn’t kidding. Gazing at a realistic painting by New York artist Jenny Morgan of a young nude woman standing in a swimming pool, he says the most interesting part of the work for him is the highly accomplished way Morgan has rendered the water in the pool. “Now, I realize that that’s like saying you read Playboy for the articles, but it’s true,” he says. In front of a different painting—this of a young woman kneeling in a bathtub, presenting her glistening derriere to the viewer—Tullman focuses on the bathtub rather than its occupant. “That’s someone’s rear end, I get that,” he says. “[But] the most complicated thing for the artist is to represent water and motion.”To some extent, Tullman’s focus on the figure is an outgrowth of his desire to narrow the choices he’s forced to make as a busy executive who also happens to be an art collector. “I think it’s almost impossible to keep on top of what’s going on in the art world across all its different dimensions,” he says. “One of the ways I’ve addressed the glut—just the sheer volume—has been to say to the galleries I work with, ‘Please don’t send me an abstract piece or a landscape.’ My philosophy has been that I want to see the world’s best examples of realist, figurative representations. That’s how I’ve made my life more manageable as a collector, and that’s how I explain the concentration. Certainly I don’t acquire things to aggravate my wife or make her life more difficult.”At the same time, Tullman—a restless business innovator whose latest enterprise is a technology startup incubator called 1871, whose offices at the Merchandise Mart now house parts of his art collection—seems to enjoy his reputation as a sort of art-world Hugh Hefner. He tells with evident pleasure an anecdote of the president of a company who was photographed at the loft, but the next day, a member of his staff called and said, “Can we come back? We need to take different pictures.”&nbsp; All of the artwork shown in the background, it turned out, featured nude female figures, perky as can be.*Tullman’s interest in the figure dates back to his early years as a collector when, as a young corporate lawyer, he and his wife came to know several of the Chicago Imagists, the Pop-and-Surrealist-influenced group that included Ed Paschke, Roger Brown, Jim Nutt, Gladys Nilsson and others. The Tullmans amassed a significant collection of Imagist painting, almost all of it figurative, before donating most of it to the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art about two decades ago.Tullman then found himself attracted primarily to photorealism—again with the figure front and center—before drifting away from that genre, which he came to regard as too technical, in favor of somewhat less naturalistically drawn or painted works with greater subjectivity, drama and storytelling. “Over the years, photorealism became a little boring,” he says. “These things were pristine but had no story, no particular emotion. After a while, they didn’t seem as alive as some of the pieces which are a little looser in technique but have more personality and more narrative.”During the past decade or so, Tullman has increasingly bought sculpture—much of which, in high contrast to the naturalism of the two-dimensional work in the collection, is decidedly non-realistic. Examples include works by two Chicago artists: Joe Seigenthaler’s Fly Dog, a striking male figure with a canine face hovering mournfully at the top of a ladder near Tullman’s desk, and another large piece, by Christophe Roberts, resembling a neon orange lion made from Nike shoeboxes carved up with an X-Acto knife.In these choices, as in so many others, Tullman sometimes differs from his wife. At one art fair, a quirky sculpture of a policeman prompted Judith Tullman to ask, “Who in the world would buy that?” The answer, she later discovered, was her husband.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;“Howard has a taste for the bizarre,” says Linda Warren, one of three Chicago art dealers—the others are Ann Nathan and Carl Hammer—with whom Tullman works most often. “He likes a lot of things that are just weird. He likes nudes, he likes eroticism, and he likes things that reflect subcultures: young people, people with tattoos, people with a very 21st-century mentality. He also likes very strong images that are almost iconic from the beginning; there’s not a lot of subtlety in what he goes for. You walk in there and go, ‘Whoa! This guy’s a wild man.’ But there’s nothing amateur about the work he collects; there’s a cohesiveness to the insanity. And you know, he wouldn’t be where he is today if he didn’t think outside of the box all the time.”*The other major element that has shaped Tullman’s collection is his commitment to supporting young and emerging artists (the latter group including several painters and sculptors who turned to making art after long careers in other fields). Unlike many collectors in Chicago and elsewhere who keep artists at arm’s length by dealing exclusively with gallerists, the Tullmans are in direct, regular contact with many of the artists they collect.“As a young lawyer and having friends who were struggling artists, it seemed reasonable that we should spend some of the money we were earning to support what they were doing, which we thought was (a) more fun and (b) certainly more rewarding than being a corporate lawyer,” Tullman recalls. “That’s how we got connected with some of the earlier Imagists. They were trying to make a go of it, practicing their art, and it was a very challenging time. It’s always been a challenging time for young artists.”Today, the Tullmans work with about 20 galleries around the world that “regularly keep us in the loop on new work by artists that we have and, more importantly, work by artists that they think we should see,” he says. “Most of the artists in the collection keep us abreast of what they’re doing. A number of them are also teachers, so they feel free, and sort of make it their business, to call our attention to new artists that they think are worthy. Sometimes these artists are their students, or just young artists they’ve been exposed to one way or another.”It’s that generosity, in part, that has earned the Tullmans the respect and affection of much of the Chicago art community. “Unlike a lot of collectors, Howard doesn’t feel like he has to have a lot of blue-chip artists hanging on his walls,” Hammer says. “He’s more interested in taking risks, taking a chance, and expressing confidence in the new artists coming along. Here’s a guy who can afford pieces by established artists, but he seems to have this vision of moving the next generation along, which is a great thing.”Unlike many collectors who acquire pieces only after lengthy deliberation, Tullman is known for his quick trigger finger. “Someone comes along and he makes an acquaintance with them, or he sees their work somewhere, and he just buys it,” Hammer says. Adds Warren: “I told one artist, ‘Howard Tullman’s going to buy this.’ And the second he got the exhibit invitation, Howard picked up the phone and said, ‘How much is that?’”It helps, of course, if the piece features a figure. If she’s not overly burdened with clothing, so much the better.Top image: Howard Tullman at ease among his art. Photo: Kevin Nance.12/17/15:&nbsp;Editor’s note: Because of inaccurate information given to reporter Kevin Nance, an earlier, printed version of this article in the January-April 2016 issue of CGN misattributed the phrase “Breast Home.”&nbsp;&nbsp;</body></html>

An interview with art collector Howard Tullman

An Art World Figure: Howard Tullman

<figure class="image"><img></figure>&nbsp;By FRANCK MERCURIO“I never really enjoyed going to galleries,” confesses Patrick Hull, 45, owner and director of Vertical Gallery. “I always felt like I’d walk in, and it wasn’t the right environment for me.”That all changed, however, when Hull became enamored with street art and began visiting galleries in San Francisco that featured the work of prominent urban artists. The vibe, for Hull, in these specialized galleries was different from those that sold more conventional art.“I found [the atmosphere] very approachable,” explains Hull. “You could go to the openings and meet the artists. It really spoke to me that they were allowing everybody to see their art—it wasn’t exclusive.”Hull is a former marketing VP for Birkenstock and Woodruff-Sawyer &amp; Co., and by all accounts, was tremendously successful in his previous career. But three years ago, he left the corporate world, bid farewell to his long-time home in San Francisco, and moved across the country to establish Vertical Gallery in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood.Vertical features a constantly changing roster of urban and street artists, some of whom are just getting established and others with international prominence. It’s a mix that Hull felt was missing from the Chicago art scene.“Even though there were some galleries exhibiting this type of art [in Chicago], I didn’t feel like they were showing what I was seeing in London, Paris, New York, LA, or San Francisco,” explains Hull. “So, I decided to bring this hybrid of local, national, and international urban street artists here.”Since opening Vertical in 2013, Hull has shown the work of many well known artists, including Ben EINE, OAKOAK, Shepard Fairey, and StinkFish. Perhaps Hull’s most famous local artist is Hebru Brantley, whose public murals are popping-up around the city. Brantley has even designed shoes for Nike’s Jordan Brand.“Hebru is primarily a gallery artist, but he loves getting out on the street,” says Hull, referring to Brantley’s public murals. “He’s done graffiti before in the past, and then went into film, and now he’s a full-time artist. We did a very successful, sold-out solo show with him in June.”Which begs the question, how does one sell “street” art—a genre that is typically created for free for public consumption—within a gallery context?“Some of the artists we work with are definitely studio artists, like Hebru,” explains Hull. “While Ben EINE is a graffiti artist, he has a whole body of [outdoor public] work that he’s transformed to be shown in a gallery space.”“I wasn’t exactly sure how OAKOAK would interpret his art for the gallery space,” adds Hull, referring to the French street artist known for his clever public interventions featuring visual puns. “But I think it’s brilliant what he’s done with composition, making his art interactive within a frame.”Indeed, in OAKOAK’s recent solo show at Vertical Gallery, cartoon like figures physically bust through mats that surround his images. In other works, gargantuan movie monsters—including Godzilla and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man—invade the ready-made landscapes of vintage French posters. Even though these smaller works are made for commercial consumption, they stay true to the intentions of OAKOAK’s signature public works.In addition to bringing street artists from around the world to Chicago, Hull also helps coordinate public commissions of their work here in the city. He’s connected to private building owners, as well as business and non-profit organizations, such as the West Town Chamber of Commerce and the Wabash Arts Corridor, who commission large-scale mural installations. Recently, Hull has helped facilitate public murals by Ben EINE, Never2501, and Hebru Brantley. Four more are planned for 2016, including murals by Collin van der Sluijs, Seth Globepainter, HERA, and a second by Ben EINE.“When I work with the artist, I try to find out what kind of space they want, scale-wise, and try to get some funding and get their work out there,” says Hull. “It’s great PR—I mean, a smart artist will definitely realize that ‘If I get a 240-foot-long mural, that’s going to mean a million people will see my work who never knew my work existed.’”April 2016 marks the third anniversary of Vertical Gallery, and Hull is planning a special group exhibition featuring three well-known artist duos: Jana and JS, Ella and Pitr, and Expanded Eye. An opening reception will take place Saturday, April&nbsp; 2, 6-10pm. Upcoming solo shows will feature Collin van der Sluijs, Greg Gossel, and HERA, perhaps the best known female street artist working today. All exhibition openings will incorporate Hull’s welcoming, accessible approach to visitors.“If you come to one of our openings, you will see a wide range of people in one room, and it’s really great,” says Hull. “I love that we can bring people together.”Vertical Gallery 1016 N. Western, Chicago (60622) <a href="http://www.verticalgallery.com">www.verticalgallery.com</a>

An interview with art dealer Patrick Hull