By FRANCK MERCURIOWhat happens when one of the country’s most renowned artists collaborates with one of the nation’s preeminent architects? The result is&nbsp;Here Hear, a series of performances combining the unique talents of artist Nick Cave and MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang, debuting this September at EXPO Chicago and during the Chicago Architecture Biennial.The joining of forces during such a key time in the city’s cultural calendar was the brainchild of Michelle T. Boone, the current Chief Program and Civic Engagement Officer for Navy Pier, home of EXPO, and former Commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE).“Michelle felt this was a good way to partner two artists and also tie together the Biennial and the fair,” says Cave.According to Gang, the opportunity to team up with Cave was destined to be, “We have these parallel worlds, and every once in awhile they intersect.” She adds, “We knew each other before, but we’ve never done a project together. Michelle made it happen.” Over the past couple of years, EXPO and the Biennial have brought renewed international attention to Chicago’s vibrant art and design scenes, and&nbsp;Here Hear&nbsp;will help celebrate the opening of both exhibitions this fall in a fantastic way.EXPO CHICAGO, now in its sixth year, and building on a steady rise in prominence on the international art fair circuit, will see 135 exhibitors representing galleries from 25 countries. The Chicago Architecture Biennial, in its second edition, features 141 participants from 20 countries. Architects’ work will be displayed at the Chicago Cultural Center through the end of the year, as well as in several satellite venues around the city.Here Hear,&nbsp;premiering the evening of September 13, during Vernissage, EXPO’s kick-off party on the Pier, will be performed at the start of the Biennial on September 16 and promises to be a showstopper.“The introduction to the festivities will be led by the South Shore Drill Team, with a group of 30 performers in Soundsuits,” said Cave. “This is really the piece that will be engaged with Jeanne’s work.”Cave is best known for his performance pieces featuring dancers dressed in his signature Soundsuits – wearable works of art that are colorful, textured, and sometimes unsettling in their forms. The pieces are often exhibited in static museum displays, yet they come to life in exciting and unexpected ways when presented in motion to an audience, while inhabited by performers.Complementing Cave’s works will be “dynamic custom-fabricated objects” designed by Gang and her team of architects that will define the spaces where Cave’s performances take place.“These sculptural/architectural forms can be moved around the pier, creating various spaces to perform in,” said Cave. “The idea is organic enough that you can create this sort of environment to play within. The dancers will have the ability to dictate whether it’s a square box, or a long rectangular space, or a line with performances happening on both sides of the objects.” The space-defining objects themselves will be kinetic, and Gang’s inspiration for their design centers on the wave action of Lake Michigan, which of course surrounds the Pier on three sides.“The performance site is on Navy Pier, so there’s this idea of water and the movement of water and how things bob up and down in the water. This inspired how the objects move and their balancing properties,” said Gang. “Dance is so much about balance, and human movement is so much about that as well. The objects should have a nice relation with the performance.”Gang is known for some very high-profile buildings, including Chicago’s Aqua Tower (completed in 2009), Vista Tower (currently under construction), and the Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (scheduled for completion in 2020). But she is also known for her socially conscious and environmentally friendly projects, such as the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (2014), the Nature Boardwalk at Lincoln Park Zoo (2010), and perhaps most notably, proposals for the sustainable redevelopment and resilient design of riverfronts in Memphis, Milwaukee, and Chicago (the latter published in&nbsp;Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago’s Waterways).“More and more, people are focused on their virtual world and not as aware of the space they’re in or the people&nbsp;around them,” explained Gang. “I feel that in architecture and public space we have to work to get people to engage each other. It’s the biggest challenge and the most important thing we can do right now for our environment, for our politics—for everything. We need to get people to talk to each other and have empathy and have a conversation.”This goal, to help generate greater social awareness, is something that Gang shares with Cave. In previous interviews, Cave has said that his intention as an artist is to make an imprint on his audience, rather than just an impression. In many of his works, the audience participates, rather than just observes. Cave’s&nbsp;HEARD, to be performed at both EXPO and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, explores the collective power of people working together.&nbsp;Up Right,&nbsp;also slated for multiple performances, focuses on the challenges of being young and black in America. To perform these larger than life pieces, Cave needs to recruit dozens of people from across the city. His troupe of participants will be made up of creative professionals, but also everyday people—perhaps as many as 150 in total—including adults who work in public service and kids from the Chicago Children’s Choir, reflecting the variety of experiences from so many citizens in our city.“I’ve been performing all over the world, but this is really my first performance piece in the city,” said Cave. “We’re very excited about working with young people and as well as professionals, creating opportunities for individuals interested in performance, dance, the arts. It’s nice to be able to create a platform of possibility, and so&nbsp;Here Hear&nbsp;is really all about that.”“I’m thrilled to be working with Nick and to see a glimpse of what inspires him and what he’s thinking,” added Gang. “It’s been really great so far. I’m looking forward to everything coming together.”&nbsp;<h3>September Performance Schedule:</h3>Wed, Sep 13, 9-10pm – Aon Ballroom, Navy PierNick Cave’s&nbsp;Up Right Chicago, 8pm. The performance will start with a procession from EXPO CHICAGO, beginning at 8:30. Free; limited, ticketed seating avail. to the public.Sat, Sep 16, 1pm and 3pm – Navy Pier, Polk Bros ParkHEARD,&nbsp;Includes live music by Kahil Elzabar and Chicago Children’s Choir. Soundsuits activation at Navy Pier Wave Wall at 2pm. Here Hear Film Festival at Polk Bros Park Performance Lawn, Lake Stage, 5pm (runs approx. 2 hours).Note: The Sep 16 performances are free and open to the public.&nbsp;No tickets necessary.

Nick Cave and Jeanne Gang collaborate in Chicago fall 2017

Nick Cave & Jeanne Gang: An Interactive Collaboration Between Artist & Architect

<html><head></head><body>&nbsp;<figure class="image"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721417691/iedjuj1hxhm8a6egxivo.jpg"></figure>&nbsp;&nbsp;By ALISON REILLY“I had a roll of duct tape, and I would make my G.I. Joe into 20 other types of G.I. Joes,” Faheem Majeed says. “I was always making but I didn’t understand that as an art practice. In high school, I had an art teacher who said, ‘You’re really creative.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, that’s not real. That’s not work.’ I always assumed that work had to be something that you didn’t enjoy. I didn’t understand that you could love your work. Art was not something I took seriously, but it was something I did all the time.”Majeed, who grew up in Minneapolis, continued art classes throughout high school but ultimately had plans of becoming a veterinarian. It wasn’t until his art teacher took one of his paintings and sold it for $75 that he understood that something he loved could also support him.“The spark for me was my art teacher,” he says. “And then my mother supported my impulse and understood the value of art production and making. She was very happy, because she saw I had a passion.”Today Majeed’s practice extends well beyond a two-dimensional canvas. For each installation of his ongoing series, Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden, Majeed builds a room made of cedar planks that serves as a platform for other artists to meet, interact and perform. The walls, inspired by Margaret Burroughs Gallery at the South Side Community Art Center (SSCAC), pay tribute to the woman and community who supported him when he first moved to Chicago in 2003.<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2238/original/majeed-11.jpg" alt=""></figure>Majeed eventually became Executive Director of SSCAC and served the organization from 2005-2011. He speaks often of Margaret Burroughs, a co-founder of SSCAC (1940) and the founder of the DuSable Museum (1961), whom he befriended. “Margaret Burroughs was a teacher who was frustrated about the lack of diversity in the Chicago Public School art curriculum. She complained, and it fell on deaf ears, so she gathered a group of people who had objects, some were valuable and some not so much, but they all had a story. She assembled the objects in her home and invited the community, her kids and neighbors to come in,” Majeed explains. This collection in Burroughs’ home eventually became the DuSable Museum of African American History. “The community started calling it a museum, and she realized that there was a need.”Tuning into the concerns of the local community now defines Majeed’s art practice. His work often acknowledges the dynamics of the space in which it exists and the changes that happen when the installation moves from one community to another. Around 2013 he built a shack in an empty lot on his street in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. When one of his neighbors asked him, “Why are you making this ugly shack in my neighborhood?” Majeed started to explain, “Hold on, I live here,” but the man interrupted and said, “Well, that’s not what I asked you.”“This was a defining moment of understanding for me,” Majeed explains, “that when I build a shack in my neighborhood, it is connected to all the artists and the organizations in the city that support me. Those people are going to come to that shack but not necessarily to the neighborhood. When they visit, they might discover that area and see different types of potential, but that may or may not be of interest to the people who live in proximity to where I build.”As he talked with his neighbor, Majeed not only recognized the effect of building a sculpture in his neighborhood, but also the perception of his body in space. “When I walk down the street as a black man, in a neighborhood that is predominantly black, I disappear. I realized that my art body is different than my physical body. I’m personally invisible in one way, but my art body sticks out because of what I draw in.”The first shack that Majeed built became part of an ongoing series called Shacks and Shanties, in which he creates structures for both artists and organizations to utilize as a community and performance spaces. Because of the prevalence of empty lots across the city, Majeed wants to reimagine them as areas of potential.Not blind to the controversy of his practice, in response to his own work as an artist engaged with local communities, Majeed started another series called My Socially Engaged Protest. “Basically, I protest my own art in the communities that I work in,” he says. “If I understand the problems of what it means to build a shack in a vacant lot in my neighborhood and what comes with that, then I can then ask, ‘What are the tools I can create to protest that action at the same time?’”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2237/original/majeed-19-v2.jpg" alt=""></figure>By protesting his own work, Majeed calls attention to the complex relationships artists can have with the communities they serve. While some in the neighborhood may welcome art installations, others might be hostile or simply uninterested. “The real work happens with the people on the fringes who don’t want to engage with what I’m doing, because they think they’ve seen this before,” Majeed says. “But that’s where the work should happen.”Majeed’s self-awareness recently took the form of a 10-foot high inflatable balloon. Inspired by the fat cats and rats one might find at a union picketing strike, Majeed’s balloon is a Mario Brothers-like caricature of a black artist holding a palette in one hand and choking an adolescent with the other. “It’s hard to look at,” he admits. “It’s a complete, cartoony hot mess.”But for Majeed, both the content and the form are significant. The balloon protests against “the role of artists as first wave gentrifying agents in under-resourced neighborhoods,” he explains. “And it’s mobile. I can have it up and running in five minutes, because it’s designed for people to put up and break down quickly for protests on the fly.”This fall, for the first time, he will bring Planting and Maintaining a Perennial Garden to a commercial space. Supported by the Chicago Community Trust, Majeed will install a new iteration of his cedar gallery in a booth at EXPO CHICAGO. He has invited four local organizations and previous grantees of the Chicago Community Trust, including SkyART, Project Onward, Hyde Park Jazz Festival and Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Celebration, to activate the space.For Majeed, who identifies both as an artist and an arts administrator, it is essential to bring local artists from organizations like SkyART and Project Onward into dialogue with EXPO. “It’s really thinking about leveling value and saying, ‘Yes, you have this space, and there’s this type of monetary value but there’s also another type of value.’ When these groups respectfully meet each other then they can see how their relationship can be mutually beneficial.”Along with his own work, Majeed is one of the founders of the Floating Museum, which operates without a permanent physical space. This summer, the Museum took on the literal embodiment of its name and organized an expansive project to float an industrial barge from southeast Chicago to the new Riverwalk in downtown Chicago. The barge, which is now installed at Navy Pier, serves as a mobile gallery for an impressive roster of cultural institutions, community organizations and artists including Maria Gaspar, Pope.L, Edra Soto, Cauleen Smith and Amanda Williams.&nbsp;“It’s just a different way of thinking about a networked museum,” Majeed says. “We’re making the city into a museum, and its neighborhoods are the galleries. Its partners are museums and community organizations. The Floating Museum is the city of Chicago.”<figure class="image"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/2231/original/faheemsidebar.jpg" alt=""></figure>Top image: Artist Faheem Majeed in his studio in Chicago. Photo: Devin MaysPublisher's note: The Fall 2017 print version of this interview misspelled Margaret&nbsp;Burroughs's name as BurrowsSaveSave</body></html>

CGN interviews local artist Faheem Majeed about his history with art and his upcoming projects. 

Into the Neighborhoods: Faheem Majeed's Artistic Evolution

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;Jayson Lawfer&nbsp;of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/the-nevica-project">The Nevica Project</a>.

Name: The Nevica Project 
Dealer: Jayson Lawfer 
Age: 43 
Previous occupation: Director of a nonprofit 
Hometown: Freeport, IL

Chicago Gallery News: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence. &nbsp;

Jayson Lawfer: Selling and promoting art and artists in both the primary and secondary markets&mdash;international in scope, personal in nature.

CGN: How did you become an art dealer?

JL: Long before I opened my gallery, I started collecting art and spending quality time with artists, collectors and dealers. Over time I saw an opportunity to create an interesting and fulfilling business. In 2008, while living abroad in Italy, I created the The Nevica Project and set it up as an online gallery working off of images and contracts. NEVICA is an Italian word that means &ldquo;it snows,&rdquo; and my idea was to build a small gallery business that would snowball into something bigger and bigger every year.

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;

JL: I mentally pinch myself, because I feel fortunate to do what I enjoy each day.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

JL: Thumbs up. Anytime you can corral millions of dollars worth of art and the population that can afford it, you create a win-win situation.

CGN: Artists you admire but don&#39;t represent?

JL: Jonas Wood, Theaster Gates, Kerry James Marshall and Richard Serra. But the great thing about collection management is that my gallery has work by all these artists within our secondary market situations.&nbsp;

CGN: Best sale you&rsquo;ve ever had?

JL: One of the most profitable was a Viola Frey 9-foot sculpture but one of the most exciting was a Magdalena and Michael Frimkess vase I sold to Jonas Wood.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?

JL: I really believe one should buy what touches his or her soul. But I also feel like making investments with artwork is underrated, exciting and smart. I always inform young collectors that when they support artists and buy their artwork, they have a position in the success of that artist.

CGN: Which artist that you represent or work of art you have recently acquired are you most excited about? Why?

JL: I recently acquired a Ruth Duckworth wall mural.&nbsp; It was an interesting story because I was picking up a rare Duckworth we just sold (from a Wilmette private collection) and transporting it back through Evanston.&nbsp; I saw an estate sale, so I decided to stop for a second. I couldn&rsquo;t believe there was a Ruth Duckworth sculpture hanging on the wall in front of me.&nbsp; I made an offer and next thing I knew I was transporting two pieces of historic art back to Chicago. I have only been to a few estates sales in my life, and it just seemed like something told me to stop there.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

JL: In this day and age, if you can keep your doors open, then that is a success in itself.&nbsp; We have definitely reached a more global audience this year with sales happening in England, Holland, Saudi Arabia, Italy, Japan and Australia. That being said, The Nevica Project does about 95% of all our sales online and to people outside of Chicago. I do feel it is a bit of a challenge to keep paying rent for a brick and mortar space.&nbsp; But it is our gallery&rsquo;s dedication to the public that we keep a physical space and make art available. We want people to have opportunities to personally see the artwork by great artists such as Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Richard Tuttle, Peter Voulkos, Neha Vedpathak, Jun Kaneko and Warren MacKenzie.

CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago and Kansas City? &nbsp;

JL: In Kansas City when you have an exhibition and an opening, people come. In Chicago it is different, because there is so much going on that we end up competing with other spaces. We recently had an exhibition of Magdalena and Michael Frimkess&mdash;two artists that are getting great press right now. We sold work to major collectors and other artists such as KAWS and Jonas Wood (we even had interest from Reese Witherspoon), but we only had a handful of Chicago residents come and see the show.

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

JL: Food and vintage motorcycles.&nbsp;

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

JL: I would say Richard Serra&rsquo;s Reading Cones. I do wish it were one of his larger pieces so viewers could lose themselves in the space and be intimidated by the scale. But I am still grateful our city has one.

I also love looking at Theaster Gates&rsquo; house in Dorchester. I know it is technically private, but it is there for the public to see. To me, it really does stand for his roots in social art practices by creating a space and bringing communities together in it. He once said, &ldquo;The word artist has been too small for too long&hellip; And I think I am just trying to fill the word up again so that it means more.&rdquo; I feel like that house is a gift to Chicago and has graciously invited myself, collectors, investors, supporters, neighbors and friends to have a memorable art experience.

CGN: What are your five&nbsp;favorite art spaces to visit in Chicago?

JL:

<ol>
	<li>Rhona Hoffman Gallery</li>
	<li>Shane Campbell Gallery</li>
	<li>Peanut Gallery</li>
	<li>Marilyn and Larry Fields Private Collection</li>
	<li>Museum of Contemporary Art</li>
</ol>

Jayson Lawfer is the owner of The Nevica Project located in Ravenswood&nbsp;in Chicago. For more information about his gallery visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/the-nevica-project">The Nevica Project. &nbsp;</a>

CGN interviews local art dealer Jayson Lawfer. 

An Interview with a Dealer: Jayson Lawfer

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;Claire Warner of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/volume-gallery">Volume Gallery</a>.

Gallery: Volume Gallery 
Name: Claire Warner 
Age: 37 
Previous occupation: Specialist, Wright Auction 
Hometown: Dayton, Ohio

Chicago Gallery News: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

Claire Warner: Volume Gallery focuses on American decorative arts and design with a strong emphasis placed on emerging contemporary architects, artists, designers and makers.

CGN: How did you decide to open Volume Gallery with Sam Vinz?

CW: Sam and I worked together very briefly at Wright. When the market collapsed in 2008, I had an idea of starting a gallery that featured new work from emerging designers. In my head there was really no stress to starting something when the market seemed in ruins. I connected with my friend, the very talented Jonathan Nesci, to be the first exhibition. He asked if I remembered Sam Vinz, who had also approached him about exhibiting in a new gallery that he was starting with the same mission. All three of us sat down to discuss, and Sam and I joined forces to start Volume. Jonathan Nesci&rsquo;s The New was our first exhibition. &nbsp;

CGN: What were you doing before you opened the gallery?

CW: Working at Wright in Chicago as a 20th century and contemporary design specialist.

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;

CW: Go through the day with Sam.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art/design fairs?

CW: Thumbs up&mdash;fairs have gotten a bad reputation lately because of their abundance and expense to galleries, but it is the best way for people to see a condensed amount of work. And if you are not able to afford multimillion-dollar pieces, you get to see master works before they go into a private collection and might not be able to be viewed publicly in our lifetime. For us in the contemporary market, the fairs offer a snapshot into the now and a way to connect in person with new work. Dealing largely in material based work, it is crucial for us to be able to get people to view and feel. Exhibiting on an international platform like Design Miami gives us the opportunity to reach more people than we can in Chicago and expose our program to emerging collectors.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?

CW: Buy from galleries! Galleries have gotten the reputation as intimidating places to purchase, but 90% are approachable and offer works in a wide range to fit emerging collectors budgets. If you don&rsquo;t have the budget for an original, you can buy a multiple. If you can&rsquo;t buy a multiple, you can buy the exhibition catalog. Buy what you love and stretch to get a work you really want. Buying from galleries supports the artist directly and contributes culturally in your community.

CGN: Best sale you ever had?

CW: The most fun has been the project we are doing with Commune (Los Angeles) and Ace. We worked intimately with Commune to commission nine works of art and design for the Ace Hotel Chicago, a beautiful new Bauhaus inspired building in the Fulton Market area. The hotel opens officially this September and features artists and designers from Volume&rsquo;s program as well as some new additions from Chicago. &nbsp;

CGN: Designers you admire but don&#39;t represent?

CW: Charlotte Perriand, Claire Zeisler (they don&rsquo;t have to be living right?)

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

CW: Fortunately, this has been our most successful year to date. We moved into a new location, which has increased traffic, and more people are aware of the gallery and our program. Challenges have been to balance running a growing business while equally focusing on curation and finding new work to exhibit.

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

CW: My daughter Ada.

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

CW: Not just saying this because Volume is having a solo exhibition opening this September with Kreuck and Sexton&mdash;but Crown Fountain is truly amazing. Jaume Plensa&rsquo;s video sculpture executed by Kreuck and Sexton is a perfect balance of interactive art and design.

CGN: What else is coming up at your gallery?

CW: After Kreuck and Sexton&rsquo;s exhibition, we have Tanya Aguiniga&rsquo;s third solo show with the gallery, which opens in November.

Claire Warner is the co-founder of Volume Gallery located in the Ukrainian Village. For more information about her gallery visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/volume-gallery">Volume Gallery</a>.

Image: Claire Warner with co-director Sam Vinz

CGN interviews art dealer Claire Warner. 

 An Interview with a Dealer: Claire Warner

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 Jackie Pernot of <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/chicago-art-source-gallery">Chicago Art Source Gallery</a>.

Gallery: Chicago Art Source Gallery 
Name: Jackie Pernot 
Age: 45 
Previous occupation: Art consultant 
Hometown: Born and raised in Lake Forest, IL; Chicago since 1989

Chicago Gallery News: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

Jackie Pernot: The gallery represents emerging and mid-career contemporary artists with a focus on painting, mixed media and photography.

CGN: How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

JP: After graduating with a bachelor&rsquo;s degree in art history, I worked as a framer for a couple years and then moved into art sales. I always thought I&rsquo;d go back to school for my master&rsquo;s and end up in a museum, but I fell in love with the gallery world and found that working both with artists and different types of clients was much more diverse and satisfying than I had imagined. It still feels fresh and challenging almost twenty years later!

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;

JP: I go through my emails and voicemails with coffee in hand and make a list of what I want to accomplish that day.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

JP: I have to say thumbs up. The right art fairs are excellent opportunities to see a lot of work from around the world in one place. Of course, they&rsquo;re exhausting and not how work should ideally be viewed, but they&rsquo;re worth the effort.

CGN: Artists you admire but don&#39;t represent?

JP: Patrick Wilson, Keun Young Park and Kara Walker.

CGN: Best sale you ever had?

JP: The most rewarding sales have been large-scale commissions that I&rsquo;ve done for a number of clients. There is an extended interaction between the collector, the artist and myself when going through the commission process, which makes for a deeper and more memorable experience.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?

JP: Ignore trends and go with your gut. And buy what you love and can afford. Or can nearly afford&mdash;I still wish I hadn&rsquo;t been &ldquo;too fiscally responsible&rdquo; to purchase one of the Rembrandts that we exhibited at my first gallery.&nbsp;

CGN: Which artist that you represent or work of art you have recently acquired are you most excited about?

JP: I have to preface this by saying that I&rsquo;m genuinely excited about all of the work that I show in the gallery, but if I had to single out one recent acquisition it would be Lisa Kokin&rsquo;s Prosody. It&rsquo;s a textile piece made with felt and thread that looks like a giant soft book with the most delicately rendered asemic text. It&rsquo;s language abstracted, yet highly tactile at the same time.&nbsp;

CGN: What major successes have you had this year?

JP: We have been in growth mode since I joined Chicago Art Source Gallery in 2009, and each year has been stronger in terms of sales than the previous one, so I am very excited about where we&rsquo;re headed.

CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago?

JP: In many ways, I feel like it&rsquo;s the best of both worlds. We have a savvy collector base with the ability to financially support the arts without the art market saturation of a city like New York. And it&rsquo;s wonderful to have so much local talent to tap into!

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

JP: Family, friends, food, wine, music, books, film and travel.

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

JP: Leonardo Nierman&rsquo;s Flame of the Millennium. This piece feels like a part of my personal history in the art world in Chicago. We represented Leonardo in my first gallery, and I&rsquo;ve met him several times, including at an intimate dinner that was given in his honor around the time that Flame of the Millennium was installed. He is a fascinating and gracious gentleman and a great talent.

CGN:&nbsp; What are your five favorite art spaces to visit?

JP:

<ol>
	<li>&nbsp;Galleria Borghese, Rome</li>
	<li>The Cloisters, New York</li>
	<li>Street art in Lisbon</li>
	<li>Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Venice</li>
	<li>The Broad, Los Angeles (it&rsquo;s really hard to stop at five!)</li>
</ol>

Jackie Pernot is the Gallery Manager of Chicago Art Source located in Lincoln Park. For more information about the gallery visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/chicago-art-source-gallery">Chicago Art Source Gallery</a>.

An Interview with a Dealer: Jackie Pernot

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;Matthew Rachman of <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/matthew-rachman-gallery">Matthew Rachman Gallery</a>.&nbsp;

Gallery: Matthew Rachman Gallery 
Name: Matthew Rachman&nbsp; 
Age: 47 
Previous occupation: I spent 25 years primarily in risk management.&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

Chicago Gallery News: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

Matthew Rachman: Contemporary art with a heavy concentration of Chicago artists paired with modern furniture.

&nbsp;CGN: How did you become a dealer?

MR: I have always been a collector and over and over people would tell me I should open a gallery, so I did as a hobby. We caught traction quite fast, so I gave up my career in finance to run the gallery.

CGN: What&rsquo;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?

MR: Open my email and answer client inquiries.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art and design fairs?

MR: Thumbs down. Barriers of entry are too high for most galleries, and fairs are so big that buyers experience &ldquo;fair fatigue.&rdquo;

CGN: Who inspires you?

MR: My family.

CGN: Artists you admire but don&rsquo;t represent?

MR: Carlos Rol&oacute;n (Dzine).

CGN: Best sale you had?

MR: Recently, I found a stolen bike and returned it to the owner who happened to be an interior designer. She is now a client.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?

MR: Buy art because you love it, not because you think it has room to appreciate.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

MR: Success has come from courting clients around the country and Europe, but it is still challenging to find local buyers.

CGN: Your gallery specializes in mid-century furniture and presents a program of emerging artists. How did you decide to pursue both?

MR: Mid-century has always been a love of mine. After looking around we found a void in the market of people who were curating art and furniture together correctly. It seemed to be either one or the other. It was important for us to share our vision of how the two mediums could live together.

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

MR: Outside of visual arts, I am passionate about travel.

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

MR: My favorite public art in Chicago is the work of Ruth Aizuss Migdal. Her work is prominent around the city yet few know her by name. Her work has been shown in the Art Institute of Chicago, but at 84 years old, she has never shown in a gallery in Chicago. We will feature her work in our fall show opening September 22nd.

CGN: What&rsquo;s currently on view at your gallery?

MR: Our summer show, a solo exhibition by Hannah Perry Saucier, just opened. Hannah is an artist residing in Barcelona, Spain who has never shown in Chicago before.

Matthew Rachman is the owner of Matthew Rachman Gallery located at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Paulina Street. For more information about his gallery visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/matthew-rachman-gallery">Matthew Rachman Gallery</a>.

An Interview with a Dealer: Matthew Rachman 

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;Linda Warren&nbsp;of&nbsp;<a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/linda-warren-projects">Linda Warren Projects</a>.

Gallery: Linda Warren Projects 
Name: Linda Warren 
Age: 55 
Previous occupation(s): Film Producer/Production 
Hometown: Rochester, New York

Chicago Gallery News: How did you become an art dealer? &nbsp;&nbsp;

Linda Warren: A friend of mine was evicted from his studio, so I let him store over 100 pieces of artwork inside my home and garage. Friends would stop by to visit and began to buy some of the work. Two other artist friends brought their artwork over to my house to see if I could sell theirs as well, which I did.

Initially, I wasn&rsquo;t trying to make any money at all&ndash;I was just basically helping my friends out. But I started to realize that I could possibly make a living as an art dealer, and I was tired of the film industry and being out of town for months on end shooting films. I decided to convert my home into an art gallery and started having rotating shows every three weeks, introducing new artists. It was in Silverlake (Los Angeles), and there were a few others who were doing the same thing out of their apartments and homes. It became a little scene that drew a lot of people to the neighborhood. It all took off from there.

CGN: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence. &nbsp;

LW: An eclectic mix of aesthetically and academically compelling artwork by emerging, mid-career and established artists working in all media and styles, but with an emphasis on strong painting and Chicago-based talent.

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery? &nbsp;&nbsp;

LW: We have a staff meeting to discuss and prioritize goals of the day and week. The art consulting end of my business is extremely busy and demanding. To integrate that with the daily needs of the gallery, exhibitions and artists requires a lot of teamwork and juggling.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs? &nbsp;

LW: I am happy to be evolving more into a buyer then a seller. As a seller, art fairs are not my favorite way to use my energy or money. But as a buyer, they are a helpful and easy way to research and see a lot of good work.

CGN: Artists you admire but don&#39;t represent? &nbsp;&nbsp;

LW: Nick Cave, Jacob Hashimoto, Richard Hull, Claire Sherman, Jason Salavon, Anne Toeb, Jean Pierre Roy, Angel Otero, Merlin James, Anselm Keifer and Kerry James Marshall, to name just a few.

CGN: Best sale you ever had? &nbsp;

LW: As a gallerist, selling four very large-scale paintings by Michiko Itatani to one client; as an art consultant, commissioning a monumental kinetic sculpture by Pedro de Movellan.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors? &nbsp;

LW: Spend time researching online. Visit sites like artsy.net, artnet.com or Chicago Gallery News (plug&hellip;though I&rsquo;m serious). See what moves you and what you gravitate towards. Make lists of what you like and visit galleries. Buy what you love and what you would want to hold onto, not what you think you can resell. Don&rsquo;t rely on your first reaction to anything. Often the work you wind up loving the most is the work you might first have an aversion to. Be prepared for your taste and style to change over time and go with it. Don&rsquo;t be afraid to have and express your opinion. There should be nothing wishy-washy about your feeling towards what you buy. When in doubt&hellip;don&rsquo;t buy it.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges? &nbsp;

LW: I have completed three corporate projects&mdash;one in LA, one in SF and one in Chicago. &nbsp;&nbsp;I am about to do a major install in Houston this summer for a corporate job and am working on another corporate project in Boston. I spent most of the winter in LA, and it&rsquo;s challenging being away from the gallery for too long. But I have a fantastic staff and wonderful Gallery Director, Natalia Ferreyra, who keep things running smoothly and effectively, so I am lucky. &nbsp;&nbsp;

CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago? &nbsp;

LW: It is what I love to do and could not see myself doing anything else. I love Chicago and will always view this as my home base. I feel the most connected now and think it&rsquo;s a great city for me to live and work. &nbsp;&nbsp;

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world? &nbsp;

LW: Traveling.

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago? &nbsp;

LW: Crown Fountain by Jaume Plensa in Millennium Park.

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at your gallery? &nbsp;

LW: On view now are three exhibitions: Chris Uphues: Heavy Sunshine, Chris Cosnowski: I Love Humanity This Much and David Reninger: Transformation. Our fall opener is Chris Silva and after that, ending the 2017 season, is Peter Drake.

CGN: You began your career as an art dealer in Los Angeles. What five differences do you see between LA and Chicago?

LW:

<ol>
	<li>LA&rsquo;s art scene is thriving and feels more alive and ever expanding than Chicago.</li>
	<li>Geographically, the art scene in LA is even more spread out then Chicago, so that, combined with the horrible traffic, makes it more challenging city to get around. &nbsp;</li>
	<li>There are many more galleries in LA then Chicago and in particular more significant international galleries have a presence there.</li>
	<li>Large-scale artwork seems easier to place in LA then in Chicago.</li>
	<li>LA is the opposite of conservative &ndash; so anything &ldquo;out of the box&rdquo; is looked upon favorably.</li>
</ol>

Linda Warren is the owner of Linda Warren Projects located in the West Loop in Chicago. For more information about her gallery visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/linda-warren-projects">Linda Warren Projects</a>.

An Interview with a Dealer: Linda Warren

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 Randy Alexander of <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/randy-alexander-gallery">Randy Alexander Gallery.</a>

Gallery: Randy Alexander Gallery 
Name: Randy Alexander 
Previous occupations: Fundraiser, Actor, Truck Driver, Curator 
Hometown: Chicago

Chicago Gallery News: How did you become an art dealer?&nbsp;

Randy Alexander: I lost my mind one day and the first thing that came to me was running a gallery.

CGN: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

RA: Emerging and established conceptually-based art.

CGN: What&#39;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?&nbsp;

RA: Use the restroom.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

RA: Down.

CGN: Artists you admire but don&#39;t represent?

RA: Berenice Abbott, Gertrude Abercrombie, Vito Acconci, Ansel Adams, Nicolas Africano, Josef Albers...I won&#39;t even get beyond the A&rsquo;s before we run out of space for this answer.

CGN: Best sale you ever had?

RA: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaine_Sturtevant">Sturtevant&#39;s </a>Joseph Beuys&rsquo; Fat Corner.

CGN: What advice would you share with new or young collectors?

RA: Buy everything I tell you to buy.

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at your gallery?

RA: Opening on September 16, two shows with Inigo Manglano-Ovalle and Jeff Prokash.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

RA: Major success this year was staying in business. Major challenge this year was staying in business.

CGN: How do you view working as an art dealer in Chicago? How does it compare to New York in the 1990s?

RA: Chicago has a dynamic emerging scene and my job is to find, exhibit and translate the most powerful work I encounter from that scene. &nbsp;The 1990s collectors in New York were more passionate about investing in emerging artists.&nbsp;

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

RA: Movies.

CGN: What is your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

RA: Kwagulth Totem Pole (east of Lake Shore Drive at Addison).

CGN: What are the five best shows you&rsquo;ve seen so far in 2017?

<ol>
	<li>Kerry James Marshall: Mastry at the Met Breuer</li>
	<li>Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends at MoMA</li>
	<li>Joan Jonas: what is found in the windowless house is true at Gavin Brown&rsquo;s enterprise</li>
	<li>Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry at the Jewish Museum</li>
	<li>Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Gar&ccedil;ons: Art of the In-Between at the Metropolitan Museum of Art</li>
</ol>

Randy Alexander is the owner of Randy Alexander Gallery located in the South Loop in Chicago. For more information about his gallery visit: <a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/randy-alexander-gallery">Randy Alexander Gallery.</a>

CGN interviews local art dealer Randy Alexander. 

An Interview with a Dealer: Randy Alexander

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 Martha Schneider of <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/schneider-gallery">Schneider Gallery</a> who is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the opening of her gallery in River North. Join her for the opening reception of <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/calendar/then-now-30th-anniversary-show">Then + Now: 30th Anniversary</a> on Friday, July 14 from 5-7:30pm.

Gallery: Schneider Gallery 
Name: Martha Schneider 
Age: 76 
Previous occupations: Assistant secretary at law office 
Hometown: Buenos Aires

Chicago Gallery News: Please describe your gallery&rsquo;s program in one sentence.

Martha Schneider: Contemporary photography from around the world.

CGN: How did you become an art dealer?

MS: I started when my husband was a lowly resident in psychiatry and I fell in love with collecting art. He soon said I needed to find my own way of making money, so I started getting more involved in the art world, making friends with dealers, collectors and artists. My husband and I are originally from Argentina, so I started bringing small works back with me, and finding friends in my social circles to buy them. My circle grew and with the help of time, persistence and word of mouth I had a nice and growing base of collectors. I made some more important connections with larger corporate collections like US Bell. Eventually, I started to use my home for a display space and invited groups to view the work. For example, when I lived in Park Ridge, I invited the members of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to come to my home and look around.&nbsp;

I moved to Highland Park and began advising people about art from home. I could be with my children and continue to pursue art dealing. I dedicated one of the bedrooms into a small home-gallery. From there I generated more clients and followers. Everything was working fine until one Sunday my doorbell began ringing like crazy; still in my pajamas, I opened the door to discover three clients in need of an emergency present for a friend. &nbsp;We solved their problem, but the experience was enough to make me decide not have my home disrupted any longer. So, I rented a gallery space on Green Bay Road in Highland Park, on the second floor. I opened it in 1982 and at the time specialized in ceramic and handmade jewelry. In 1988, my husband and I decided to move to the city, so the gallery moved with me to the River North and there it stayed. It&rsquo;s from the River North location that I started to add photography. The ceramics faded, and today I focus on contemporary photography exclusively. &nbsp;

CGN: How did you decide to focus on contemporary photography?

MS: I had been collecting contemporary photography, and when I was still representing ceramicists, one of the photographers I met, Luis Gonzalez Palma, asked what was on my walls. When I said nothing, he insisted, &ldquo;Put my photos on your walls,&rdquo; and so we started. Today, I still believe that photography is the media of our time. &nbsp;When I began, there were not a lot of galleries interested in taking a risk on photography, and contemporary photography especially. Some may say that I was a pioneer, but I just think there are some interesting living artists making powerful work, and I want to give them a platform.

CGN: What&rsquo;s the first thing you do each morning when you get to the gallery?

MS: I turn on the lights, grab a glass of water and start up my computer to begin checking my email.

CGN: Thumbs up or down on art fairs?

MS: Thumbs down, for me personally. I do have mixed feeling about them, but I don&rsquo;t enjoy the rhythm of them from the dealer&rsquo;s side. I enjoy taking time with my clients, and don&rsquo;t feel I can work the same way at a fair. I will go to fairs to see what is out there, who the new artists are, and what is being shown. The one thing I always come away with is a reassurance of what I like. I don&rsquo;t usually find the best work at art fairs.

CGN: Artists you admire but don&rsquo;t represent?

MS: Pierre Goonord, Fazal Sheik, Cindy Sherman, and David Hilliard, among others.

CGN: Best sale you ever had?

MS: The best part of any sale, for me, is being part of what connects the artist and the collector. Money keeps us alive, but it is not the most rewarding part of the exchange. I like working personally with specific clients, and my favorites are the ones who come back year after year to look, talk and share what they have seen and in turn what I&rsquo;ve seen to recommend for them. They are friends more than anything else. Some of my most faithful patrons are couples&mdash;one duo of lawyers out of New York, another major collector and museum patron out of Nebraska, some Italians who live in France, and a man in the hotelier business from Indonesia.

CGN: Your gallery is celebrating its 30th anniversary. What advice would you offer to your younger self?

MS: I am celebrating my 30 years in River North and 35 years as a dealer. However, my work in this business of art began quite a time before. When my oldest daughter was 9 months old and just starting to crawl, one of the members of the Museum of Contemporary Art came to my house and was interested in the art that I&rsquo;d brought back from Argentina. He acquired a few copies. So in less formal ways, I&rsquo;ve been in this business for more than 40 years.

As for advice, I would say first try to start with some experience in both art and sales. Try to establish a few clients and grow slowly and steadily. Keep a moderate sense of goals in the beginning, and stick with it. You must know what you like, and stay true to your own aesthetic. If you can, you will be able to transmit why to existing and new patrons.

CGN: What&rsquo;s coming up next at your gallery?

MS: The anniversary show. It opens the 14th of July and is on display through the first week of September. It will be a wonderful selection of old and new works by artists we have worked with through the years. The work I&rsquo;m most excited about is some new pieces we will have from Luis (Gonzalez Palma). As I mentioned, Luis was the artist who helped me shift from ceramics to photography, and probably the artist I was most influential in developing through the years. It&rsquo;s a special moment to have his work in our show, and they are as beautiful as ever.

CGN: What major successes have you had this year? What about challenges?

MS: I worked with Father Terry Dempsey to put a show together for Erika Diettes in the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art in St. Louis, Missouri that was very successful. Luis (Gonzalez Palma) is having a traveling retrospective in Spain that will likely travel more broadly in Europe, and he was also invited to contribute work to a site related to the Venice Biennale. This is the third time he is being affiliated with the global art initiative.

35+ years in business is also a major milestone for me. &nbsp;

The challenge is staying relevant and alive in the art world with critical work and not resorting to &ldquo;fluff&rdquo; that is easy to sell, but not as critical or valid as the sort of work we have stood by all these past years.

CGN: What is your favorite interest outside of the art world?

MS: My husband and my family. Also, traveling plays a huge part in my life and major interests. I love seeing how other people live and their customs. I believe that experiencing other parts and people in the world is important. &nbsp;

CGN: What&rsquo;s your favorite work of public art in Chicago?

MS: The Jaume Plensa Crown Fountain and Anish Kapoor&rsquo;s Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.

CGN: What are your five&nbsp;favorite places to see art in Chicago?

MS:

<ol>
	<li>Art Institute of Chicago</li>
	<li>&nbsp;Galleries including Stephen Daiter Gallery, Addington Gallery and Ken Saunders Gallery</li>
	<li>&nbsp;Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago</li>
	<li>&nbsp;Museum of Natural Science</li>
	<li>&nbsp;Exhibition of college graduates at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago</li>
</ol>

Martha Schneider is the owner of Schneider Gallery located in River North. For more information about her gallery visit: <a href="http://www.chicagogallerynews.com/galleries/schneider-gallery">Schneider Gallery</a>.

CGN interviews local art dealer Martha Schneider. 

 An Interview with a Dealer: Martha Schneider

<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.