EXPO CHGO ONLINE Programming
EXPO CHGO ONLINE | April 8 – 12, 2021 was a curated digital exposition of contemporary and modern art complemented by five days of virtual programming, presented in collaboration with Hook. EXPO CHGO ONLINE featured over 80 international galleries including Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) members, EXPOSURE galleries, and Special Exhibition participants.
EXPO CHGO ONLINE opened to the public on April 9 via hook.art/expo and featured unique opportunities to navigate the site through Curated Selections from Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Marcella Beccaria, Humberto Moro, Renaud Proch, and Eric Shiner, an Environmental Thematic which invited participating galleries to present an artwork that contributed to a broad rethinking of the environment, and our special Dealer’s Choice section provided an opportunity for each of the participating exhibitors to select one artwork from another gallery’s presentation that they find interesting.
EXPO CHGO ONLINE also offered five days of dynamic discussions, film screenings, exhibition tours, and performances reflecting Chicago’s interdisciplinary arts scene. Programs taking place during EXPO CHGO ONLINE were free and open to the public via the EXPO CHICAGO microsite. A portion of the programming, including our Environmental Thematic, evolved from the environmentally focused Alternate Assembly: Environmental Impact in the Era of Pandemic symposium launched January 21 – 23, 2021.
Curator-Led Digital Tour | EXPO CHGO ONLINE Environmental Thematic with Katie A. Pfohl Ph.D
Thursday, April 8, 2021 | 2:00PM
Virtual Program
This tour streamed live on Thursday, April 8 at 2pm CDT. Please view a recording of the event linked above.
Join Katie A. Pfohl, Ph.D., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and EXPO CHGO’s Environmental Curator, for a tour of select artworks from the digital exposition’s Environmental Thematic. Pfohl completed her Ph.D. in art history at Harvard University in 2014, and has held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her recent major group exhibitions at NOMA include Mending the Sky, focusing on artists responding to a world in distress and Ear to the Ground, examining environmental activism in contemporary art. EXPO CHGO ONLINE’s Environmental Thematic invites participating galleries to present an artwork that contributes to a broad rethinking of the environment and is conceptually linked to the EXPO CHICAGO’s recent symposium Alternate Assembly: Environmental Impact in the Era of Pandemic.
EXPO CHGO Kick-Off Program | Framing the Moment: On Music, Architecture and Improvisation
Thursday, April 8, 2021 | 5:00PM
Virtual Program
This panel + performance premiered at 5pm CDT, Thursday, April 8. Please view the recording of the event linked above.
Featuring David Brown (Artistic Director, Chicago Architecture Biennial), Ken Vandermark (Musician), Rosa Barba (Artist), and moderated by John Corbett (Gallerist, Corbett vs. Dempsey), this panel convenes thought leaders from visual art, music, and architectural backgrounds to discuss the ways improvisational techniques influence their diverse practices in the creation of visual, sonic, and constructed spaces. Panelists will explore how improvisational methods impact both collaboration and community.
Included in the program will be a short improvised set performed by Ken Vandermark titled Proximity. The locations of the camera and microphone are meant to play on acoustic “depths of field,” and the piece was inspired by musician, filmmaker, and visual artist, Michael Snow.
Presented in partnership with Chicago Architecture Biennial
Curator-Led Digital Tour | Collecting Emerging Artists
Friday, April 9, 2021 | 11:00AM
Virtual Program
This panel premiered at 11am CDT, Friday, April 9. Please view the recording of the event linked above.
Join Humberto Moro, deputy director and senior curator at the Museo Tamayo and EXPO CHICAGO’s EXPOSURE curator, for a tour of EXPO CHGO ONLINE. Since 2016, Moro has been an adjunct curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia and has previously held curatorial positions at the Park Avenue Armory in New York and Museo Jumex in Mexico City. In this program, Moro will present a selection of works from a range of galleries featured in the EXPOSURE section of the digital exposition, in addition to key pieces from emerging artists throughout the exposition.
Arts Funders Forum | Art for Environment: How can cultural philanthropy help solve climate change
Friday, April 9, 2021 | 12:00PM
Virtual Program
This panel premiered at 12pm CDT, Friday, April 9. Please view the recording of the event linked above.
Presented in partnership with the Arts Funders Forum, this panel featuring Zaria Forman (Artist), Tracey Robertson Carter (Co-Chair, AIRIE) and Sarah Sutton (Principal, Sustainable Museums) will examine how philanthropists can work with artists to fund initiatives focused on addressing climate change. Moderated by Melissa Cowley Wolf (Arts Funders Forum + MCW Projects) as part of the Remake the Model series.
Industry Panel | Collection Management Best Practices
Friday, April 9, 2021 | 3:00PM
Virtual Program
This panel streamed live on Friday, April 9 at 3pm CDT. Please view a recording of the event linked above.
Join leading professionals in art insurance, conservation, storage and shipping in an open discussion on best practices to consider in the management of personal art collections. Featuring Heather Becker (CEO, Conservation Center), Terry Dowd (Terry Dowd, Inc.), Olivia Cinqmars-Viau (AXA XL), Lela Hersh (Museum and Fine Arts Consulting LLC), and moderated by Maureen Bray (Executive Director, ADAA).
Presented in partnership with the ADAA
Program | How to Sell Hardware with Theaster Gates and Zachary Cahill
Friday, April 9, 2021 | 6:30PM
Virtual Program
This conversation premiered at 6:30pm CDT Friday, April 10.
Theaster Gates (Artist and Founder of Rebuild Foundation) and Zachary Cahill (Interdisciplinary Artist and Writer) explore notions of space, need, desire, cultural legacy and labor relations through the lens of the Hardware installation at University of Chicago’s Gray Center. Throughout their discussions, Theaster and Zachary will reflect on the ways in which the installation functions as a surrogate for reimagining the world of artistic practice.
Image credit: Halsted Hardware Store, Chicago. Image: Chris Strong.
Presented in partnership with Rebuild Foundation
Curator-Led Digital Tour | Collecting International Artists
Saturday, April 10, 2021 | 11:00AM
Virtual Program
This tour streamed live on Saturday, April 10 at 11am CDT. Please view a recording of the event linked above.
Join Marcella Beccaria (Chief Curator and Curator of Collections, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea) as she leads guests through her selection of works from EXPO CHGO ONLINE, in addition to a brief exhibition tour of Giulio Paolini’s “Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu,” a three-part exhibition comprising a large number of new artworks by one of the pioneers of the Italian art movement Arte Povera.
Artist Talk | Jill Magid: Tender: Balance
Saturday, April 10, 2021 | 6:00PM
Virtual Program
This conversation streamed live on April 10th at 6pm CDT. Please view a recording of the conversation linked above.
Featuring the premiere of a new film and other new works, Jill Magid’s Tender: Balance at the Renaissance Society thinks about the circulation of currency and measures of absence and loss, with dimensions that are both intimate and attuned to larger systems. This exhibition is the second manifestation of a larger unfolding project by the artist, set against the backdrop of the pandemic. While developing new threads, Tender: Balance parallels Magid’s monumental but nearly-invisible public artwork, Tender, produced by Creative Time in New York last fall, for which Magid engraved the edges of 120,000 new US pennies with the words ‘THE BODY WAS ALREADY SO FRAGILE’ and quietly put them into everyday circulation. On the exhibition’s opening day at the Renaissance Society, artist Jill Magid joins curator Karsten Lund to discuss the project and its various manifestations, in Chicago and beyond.
Presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society
Photo credit: Paul McGeiver
Sequesterfest 5 | Solo Sets by Jeff Tweedy, Nels Cline & Glenn Kotche
Saturday, April 10, 2021 | 7:00PM
Virtual Program
These performances premiered at 7pm CDT on Saturday, April 11 via the Experimental Sound Studio Twitch stream. Please view the recordings of the event linked above.
now(more near ourselves than we)
is a bird singing in a tree,
who never sings the same thing twice
and still that singing’s always his
eyes can feel but ears may see
there never lived a gayer he;
if earth and sky should break in two
he’d make them one(his song’s so true)
who sings for us for you for me
for each leaf newer than can be:
and for his own(his love)his dear
he sings till everywhere is here
– e. e. cummings
Corbett vs. Dempsey presents the fifth incarnation of its Sequesterfest series, this time as part of the program for EXPO CHGO ONLINE art fair, presented in the Experimental Sound Studio’s miraculous Quarantine Concert series, which has been streaming live music and audio art directly into people’s homes since the outbreak of the pandemic.
Jazz musicians call it woodshedding. Time apart, to develop one’s own sound or ideas. Time out. A turn in the shed. Sonny Rollins in hiatus on the Williamsburg Bridge. We’ve been in an enforced year-long woodshed. In this episode of Sequesterfest, we consider the fate of the ensemble in a time of isolation, turning attention to one of Chicago’s most adventurous and beloved bands: Wilco. With a self-determined sensibility that breathes life into the moribund notion of independence in alternative music, Wilco has managed to balance experimentation and rock song-smithing with great deftness, producing a quarter century worth of gems, including Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, The Whole Love, and 2019’s Ode To Joy.
Sequesterfest 5 singles out three members of Wilco – singer and guitarist (and most recently author!) Jeff Tweedy, guitarist Nels Cline, and drummer Glenn Kotche – inviting them to show how a few seasons off-road adds up. To be truthful, they’re all adept at navigating unaccompanied scenarios, with lengthy discographies apart from Wilco that include an impressive number of solo releases. Along with other bands like On Fillmore and Loose Fur, Kotche has recorded five CDs of solo percussion, highlighting his own compositions; the sensitivity to nuances of time and timbre in his playing bring to mind Levon Helm and Bun E. Carlos, with Bonham-esque rock-out-ability filtered through an experimentally-minded improvisor’s ear. Cline’s extraordinary solos are an integral part of the Wilco experience (hear, for instance, “Impossible Germany” on Sky Blue Sky), and he draws on four decades in creative music, with a shockingly rich list of projects (42 of them, but who’s counting?) as a leader. On his solo records, Tweedy spotlights the results of a songwriting method he generously unpacks in his brilliant new book How To Write One Song; for this event, he has suggested that we may be watching that process unfold in real time via spontaneous improvisation.
Solo sets by these three Wilco-ites. Sequesterfest 5 unveils brand new music. Accept the paradox: expect surprises. Three monadic performers defying isolation, playing until everywhere is here.
To ice the proverbial cake, our emcee for the event is none other than legendary broadcaster, the voice of Chicago, heard regularly on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me…Bill Kurtis!
As always, we thank Experimental Sound Studio for hosting this Sequesterfest as part of their Quarantine Concerts. Countless hours of labor to keep the music alive. Un forte abbraccio.
Check out Sequesterfest Vols. 1-4 and all Quarantine Concerts old and new here: https://ess.org/the-quarantine-concerts And remember to donate to the artists while you listen!
Presented in partnership with Corbett vs. Dempsey’s Sequesterfest 5, part of the Experimental Sound Studio’s The Quarantine Concert series.
Screening | Daata Films
Sunday, April 11, 2021 | 12:00PM
Virtual Program
These films were streamed as a full Daata compilation on Sunday, April 11th at 12pm CDT.
EXPO CHGO ONLINE was complemented by a thematic selection of short films on the environment by emerging contemporary artists, curated in partnership with Daata (daata.art). The works were screened together as a compilation on Sunday, April 11 at 12pm CDT, and were on view throughout EXPO CHGO ONLINE (April 8-12, 2021).
Cadence and Village (Veil) by Melanie Manchot
Eternal September I-VI by Rustan Söderling
Feel My Metaverse by Keiken + George Jasper Stone
Little Lo Ting by Zoe Marden
Re-Wildling by Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Shivering Sands: Chaos and Coincidences of History by Rohini Devasher
Image: Still from Re-Wildling by Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Presented with Daata.
Panel | In Conversation with the Driehaus Museum’s A Tale of Today: Emerging Artist Fellows
Sunday, April 11, 2021 | 2:30PM
Virtual Program
This program streamed live on Sunday, April 11th at 2:30pm. Please view a recording of the conversation linked above.
This virtual panel discussion will explore the conceptual and programmatic impact of the Driehaus Museum’s A Tale of Today: Emerging Artists Fellowship on the work and trajectory of the museum’s Fellows. Now in its second pilot year, the Fellowship program supports promising and emerging talent from Chicago’s art community through a career-building opportunity to engage with the network and audience of the Driehaus Museum.
The Fellowship is inspired by the many facets of the Nickerson Mansion, the Driehaus Museum’s home, but especially by the building’s legacy an incubator for learning as art students in the late 19th century were invited to study from the Nickerson’s extensive art collection and to utilize their art gallery as a place to develop and gain inspiration for their own work.
We will discuss how the history and architecture of the Driehaus Museum inspired the works on view as well as the key insights the Fellows have gained from this experience.
Presented in partnership with the Driehaus Museum
Performance | Tiny Performances in Empty Rooms
Sunday, April 11, 2021 | 5:00PM
Virtual Program
These performances streamed on Sunday, April 11th at 5pm CDT. Please view the event linked above, and watch an in-depth follow-up with the artists that was streamed live on Monday, April 12 at 11:30 a.m. CDT, linked here.
With The Arts Club of Chicago in a pandemic-induced hibernation during the cold winter months, three polymath artists explore the club’s rooms and think experimentally about how to perform in an empty institution. Featuring musical artist Angel Bat Dawid collaborating with composer and multi-instrumentalist Isaiah Collier, dance-maker/performer/choreographer Jasmine Mendoza collaborating with filmmaker Keaton Fox, and theatre artist/performer Kurt Chiang collaborating with performer Livia Chesley.
Presented in partnership with The Arts Club of Chicago
Panel | For and From the Void: Artists on Making in an Empty Institution
Monday, April 12, 2021 | 11:30AM
Virtual Program
This conversation was streamed live on Monday, April 12 at 11:30am CDT. Please view a recording of the event linked above.
Unable to host audiences en masse for performances in the actual building, The Arts Club of Chicago opted, during a pandemic-induced hibernation, to explore the generative potential of emptiness. The club invited three artists in three disciplines to ponder the question, “What does one do with an empty institution?” Musician Angel Bat Dawid, Dancer Jasmine Mendoza, and Theater maker Kurt Chiang (with their collaborators Isaiah Collier, Keaton Fox, and Livia Chesley respectively) took on the task of making art for and from a void. The three lead artists, with programmer Jenna Lyle, discuss their discoveries from the process and the inherent contradictions in the original prompt: is an arts institution ever really empty?
View Tiny Performances in Empty Rooms here.
Presented in partnership with The Arts Club of Chicago
Industry Panel | Collection Management Best Practices
Monday, April 12, 2021 | 1:00PM
Virtual Program
This conversation was streamed live on Monday, April 12 at 1pm CDT. Please view a recording of the event linked above.
Join leading professionals in art advisory, valuations, legal and art finance in an open discussion on best practices for managing personal art collections. Featuring Elizabeth Amundsen (Gurr Johns), Naomi Baigell (TPC Art Finance) and Marisa Murillo (K&L Gates).
Artist Talk | Music and Art with Omar Velázquez
Monday, April 12, 2021 | 2:30PM
Virtual Program
This conversation was streamed live on Monday, April 12 at 2:30pm CDT. Please view a recording of the event linked above.
In his first solo museum exhibition, artist and musician Omar Velázquez (Puerto Rican, b. 1984) presents recent paintings and sculptures that address the intersection of painting, music, and folklore at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Velázquez speaks with Carla Acevedo-Yates, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator, giving a peek into his painting and instrument-building practice as well as his influences, including Puerto Rican painters Francisco Oller and Carlos Raquel Rivera.
Presented in partnership with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Panel | Exhibiting Latinx Artists in an International Field: Connecting Mexico City + Chicago
Monday, April 12, 2021 | 4:00PM
Virtual Program
This conversation was streamed live on Monday, April 12 at 4pm CDT. Please view a recording of the event linked above.
Join Laura-Caroline de Lara (Interim Director, DePaul Art Museum) in conversation with Humberto Moro (Deputy Director and Senior Curator, Museo Tamayo), a member of Museo Tamayo’s young collectors circle Fátima González (Co-Founder González Jassan), and artist Harold Mendez, who currently has work in DePaul’s recent exhibition LatinXAmerican on the challenges of representing Latinx communities on an international scale, and the many connections between artists living and making work between Mexico City and Chicago.
Exhibition Tour | Jill Magid: Tender: Balance
Monday, April 12, 2021 | 5:30PM
Virtual Program
This tour streamed live on Monday, April 12 at 5:30pm CDT.
Karsten Lund (Curator, Renaissance Society) leads a virtual walk-through of Jill Magid’s Tender: Balance at the Renaissance Society, navigating immersive 3D documentation of the gallery space and discussing the works in the show, their installation at the Ren, and broader conceptual threads running through Magid’s practice.
Presented in partnership with the Renaissance Society
Image Credit: Jill Magid, from Tender, 2020. Courtesy of the artist.