A City in Full Chorus: Chicago Exhibition Weekend
Gertie x Chicago Exhibition Weekend, Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015. Chicago, 2025. Photo by Bob (Robert Heishman)
“It’s hard to discuss contemporary art in Chicago without hearing about Abby Pucker and her ambitious initiatives,” writes Christopher Borrelli at the Tribune in his recent profile of the Pritzker scion. Since Pucker moved back to the city four years ago, she has made some big waves through Gertie, a civic cultural agency she founded that has sparked many initiatives, including Art After Dark during Expo Chicago in April. Another Gertie’s signature production is the Chicago Exhibition Weekend, or CXW, which came around for its third iteration this past weekend, enlisting over 70 participating galleries and institutions across the city to kick off a new season of cultural productions.
Chicagoans usually enjoy their healthy art scene that—perhaps with the exception of the Expo Chicago weekend in April—produces just enough options to choose from but not too many to induce FOMO. This past weekend, however, the city saw innumerable overlapping events, thanks to CXW’s concerto of programming that also coincided with other major openings, such as the Architecture Biennial, the long-awaited return of the Chicago Art Book Fair, as well as the MCA’s fall Chicago Performs series. Beyond galleries and museums, the Chicago Underground Film Festival drew crowds to the Harper Theatre in Hyde Park. Goodman Theatre just kicked off its centennial season as Steppenwolf celebrates its fiftieth. And did I even mention the Riot Fest?
Building off last year’s success, CXW added a new section this year: CXW Curated. At the majestic main hall of the event’s Fulton Market hub, 400 N. Peoria—an architecture photography studio turned art exhibition space with bare concrete walls—curators Iris Colburn and Gareth Kaye present a research-based exhibition, Over My Head: Encounter with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984-2015, showcasing 14 works by ten artists that “at some point exhibited, sold, or produced in Chicago” within a somewhat arbitrary 31-year range that’s bookended by the year where Rhona Hoffman and Donald Young had their first full year of exhibitions at their former River North gallery locations (1984), and the year 2015 that Kaye considers as the end of an era.
Gertie x Chicago Exhibition Weekend, Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015. Chicago, 2025. Photo by Bob (Robert Heishman)
Kaye and Colburn want to consider Chicago as “a nerve center for post-conceptual art.” But the term “post-conceptual” is messy; it’s a definition that easily collapses into all contemporary art. Even Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, and John Corbett, co-founder of Corbett vs. Dempsey, in their witty and juicy conversation on Sunday afternoon that flexed important oral history on Chicago’s art scene and its transformations over the past decades, seemed to have trouble defining the term and Chicago’s relationship with it. “Chicago . . . is a place, a perch far removed from that whole art historical narrative leading up to conceptual art. So art after conceptual art, in a place that never really embraced conceptual art, is really kind of funny in a certain way,” Walker quipped. But this inquiry does implicitly point to Chicago’s unique positioning within the national and international art scenes, which is its capacity to embrace anything that comes in and through it.
A “flyover city” may be a self-deprecating joke, but Chicago often serves as a “springboard city” for industries of all kinds to leave from, and artists’ Chicago connections may not always be evident. The ten artists that Over My Head cherry-picked include Chicago’s rising star Rashid Johnson, whose major museum survey is filling the Guggenheim’s spiraling rontunda; artists who came through Chicago for education, such as Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Kay Rosen, and Martin Puryear, who moved to Chicago in 1977 to teach at University of Illinois; and artists who had a Chicago dealer, such as the late New Yorker Dara Birnbaum, whose seminal piece Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission showed at Rhona Hoffman in 1991 and was sold through Hoffman to the then-fledging Kremlich Collection. But most importantly, it does include artists, albeit too few, who have stayed and continued to contribute to the Chicago scene, such as Texas-born Tony Lewis, and Gaylen Gerber, whose body of conceptually quirky works in the show are either only conceptually present (meaning, physically absent) or ingeniously hidden in plain sight.
Another feature of CXW is its curated routes, selected by Chicago curators and artists who underscore neighborhood highlights—from art spaces to restaurants and bars. My favorite route is by artist and administrator Hope Wang, which would bring visitors to Tala, new blood to the West Town gallery cluster, Wang’s very own LRMR (or “Loom Room”), a community project space that fosters activities around digital weaving, and Charis Listening Bar, a newly minted wine bar à la Japanese-style kissa cafes with a Midwestern twist.
Beyond CXW Curated, galleries and community art spaces have coordinated openings, closings, and programs. My favorite exhibitions go to those that delve into the rich Chicago history—art or not—and those that zero in on the artists’ responses to the current political crises.
Sunday Shopping by RJ Juguilon. 11.5 x 15 in. Marker on paper, 2025. Courtesy of the artist
At the Bridgeport Art Center, Project Onward, the nonprofit art space that focuses on artists with disabilities, held a closing reception for Poor Man’s Paradise, an exhibition that features artworks depicting or commemorating the bustling Maxwell Street Market—a century-old street market that saw the rise of Chicago Blues. David Holt paints portraits of blues musicians, such as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, in vibrant colors on cardboard; RJ Juguilon’s highly detailed marker drawings of the open-air market and shop signs, in a muted, nostalgic palette, are breathtakingly beautiful.
Sayeda Misa Sourour, installation view of When There is No One Left to Sit at Co-Prosperity Sphere, 2025. Photo by Nicky Ni
Co-Prosperity Sphere, the experimental art space under the umbrella of Public Media Institute, the nonprofit leg of the “Mayor of Bridgeport,” Ed Marszewski’s myriad of endeavors that span restaurants, brewery, publishing, art, and community organizing, opens with two shows that seem to represent two different reactions to the madness that is going on around the globe. In her solo exhibition When There is No One Left to Sit, Sayeda Misa Sourour traces absence and loss as negative spaces by lining the window vitrines of Co-Pro with a series of chairs. A chair covered with dust, a chair mutilated, chairs in rubble. The metaphor is clear; the atrocities are destroying the support systems of humanity. Inside, Two Roses and a Briar Pipe, a traveling group show co-presented by Berlin-based Scherben and the Goethe-Institut Chicago, gathers works by artists such as Adrian Piper and John Neff that verge on absurdity and futility.
Down at Hyde Park, The Renaissance Society’s new exhibition, however, departs from Chicago’s local identity in comparison. On Sunday, when asked about The Renaissance Society’s curatorial model that gives its functions as a Kunsthalle, Walker, who is the former director of education and associate curator of The Ren and had been with the institution for 20 years, humorously but adamantly rejected the proposition: “No! In all the many tributes to Susanne [Ghez, former executive director of The Ren for four decades], I would always say no—she did not have a vision [for The Ren to be] a little Kunsthalle on the prairie.” But since Walker left The Ren in 2015, this independent nonprofit that sits on the top floor of a lecture hall of UChicago has very much seen curators hailing from Europe running it as an internationally relevant Kunsthalle, aesthetically detached from what’s considered Chicago. Its new exhibition, for example, especially reflects that. With the windows lined with privacy film and the interior painted entirely yellow—from ceiling to floor, the rather insular space draws all the attention to a monolithic LED screen that loops Italian artist Diego Marcon’s newly commissioned musical dance film, in which clothing pieces gently harass an androgynous young kid as they fly around the bedroom while singing—“Why don’t you eat your krapfen?”
The absolute star of the weekend, if I may digress beyond CXW’s programming but within its participant network, is Red Clay Dance’s dance performance, Freedom Square: The Black Girlhood Altar, premiered at the fall Chicago Performs series at the MCA on Saturday evening, against the stage set up like the original Black Girlhood Altar, which commemorates missing and murdered Black girls and women. To the music by Jamila Woods, Red Clay’s all-female crew knew how to empower each other and the audience through poetry, through their youthful energy and positivity, and through their electrifying movement rooted in African diasporic dance and modernist techniques.
Chicago Exhibition Weekend ran from September 19 to 21, 2025. Over My Head: Encounter with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984-2015 runs until October 11, 2025.
