The Chicago Show
Curated by Clare Britt
October 18 – November 23, 2025
Opening Reception Saturday, October 18th, 6–8pm

Ortega y Gasset Projects is pleased to present The Chicago Show, a group exhibition featuring artists from Chicago, curated by Clare Britt. The exhibition will be on view October 18th through November 23rd, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday, October 18th, from 6 to 8 pm.

The artists participating in the exhibition are:
Lynn Basa, Leslie Baum, Phyllis Bramson, Jason Branscum, Judith Brotman, Robert Burnier, Dee Clements, William Conger, Laura Davis, David Ese Gagoh, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Steven Husby, Sam Jaffe, Kelly Kaczynski, Michael Kaysen, Anna Kunz, Olivia Schreiner, Joe Scott, Edra Soto, Shonna Pryor, Tony Tasset, Ann Toebbe, Selina Trepp, Nathan Vernau, Christine Wallers, Justin Witte

With an Installation in The Skirt by Rosalynn Gingerich  

Chicago’s artists, who have relocated from all over the world, experience the city as an industrial and vibrant landscape, and carry with them the weight of its history and the pulse of experimentation. Grown from harsh topographies of prairie and factory, the city gives birth to unique artistic voices that thrive in ambiguity while delicately balancing a coexistence of nature and technology. In this tension, we find a dialogue not just between forms, but between ideologies: the rigid structures of the city versus the infinite openness of nature.

The "otherworldliness" inherent in this show is also a product of Chicago’s unique geography. The city, positioned on the edge of the prairie, with the lake stretching endlessly to the east, offers a peculiar kind of atmospheric space—both dreamlike and grounded in reality. 

This exhibition invites viewers to consider the evolution of abstraction through a distinctly Chicagoan lens, one infused with an irreverence toward tradition and a deep connection to place. It is an invitation to think about abstraction not just as a visual form, but as a metaphor for the ongoing exploration of our relationship to the world, to nature, and to each other.

Artist Bios:

Lynn Basa’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Rhode Island School of Design Museum (Providence), Spencer Museum (Lawrence, Kansas), Tacoma Art Museum, and others.  It was included in Craft Today: Poetry of the Physical organized by the American Craft Museum before traveling to the Louvre and museums in eleven other European capitals.  Her work was part of the Smithsonian Institute’s Threadworks exhibit, which traveled throughout eastern Africa. She has completed numerous permanent, site-specific public art commissions throughout the country for airports, courthouses, hospitals, and universities. She was on the faculty of the Sculpture Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the author of the Artist’s Guide to Public Art, now in its second printing.  Basa has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MPA in public art policy from the University of Washington, and a BA in ceramics from Indiana University. 

Leslie Baum’s iterative painting practice includes installation, animation, ceramics, and painting. Equally inspired by the giants of art history as by work made by non-artist friends, she frequently revisits work to gain new perspectives. Her practice is invitational in nature and informed by her long tenure as museum educator at the Art Institute of Chicago and at Thresholds, a progressive arts studio in Chicago. Baum states “Like a migratory bird and its nesting ground, I repeatedly return to the same paintings - my own, art historical, and now within my ongoing Plein Air Project, watercolors painted by friends, peers, and colleagues. This process pushes me to gain a deeper understanding of what might otherwise become familiar, stale, and even invisible.” 

Baum received her BA from the University of Vermont and studied abroad at the Glasgow School of Art. Her drawings and paintings are in permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Elmhurst Art Museum. Baum's exhibitions have been reviewed extensively, including in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, New City, and the Chicago Tribune. She received residencies at Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, ME; the Nido project in Monte Castello di Vibio, Italy; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Vermont Studio Center, VT.

Recent solo exhibitions include  a garden in a vase, echoes, Nicelle Beauchene, ordinary awe, Goldfinch, Chicago, for IRIS and Other Flowers, Compound Yellow, Chicago; The Plein Air Project, Wege Center, Maharishi International University, Fairfield, IA; An Instrument in the Shape of A Woman, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; and A Garden in a Vase, the Drawing Room at The Arts Club of Chicago.

Phyllis Bramson is a visual storyteller of romantic folly, tragedy, and comedic relief, Bramson is a surrealist painter best known for her maximalist style and cosmic disorder. A self-described “painter-comedian,” Bramson’s palette is a colorful array of beauty, humor, love, and lust. Bramson is a Rococo artist of the present day with an acute awareness for painting’s long history of male-gaze media. Engaging with imagery that depicts women as objects of affection rather than humans of individual agency, Bramson flips this narrative on its head by centering women’s empowerment and pleasure with her erotic anecdotes.

Bramson has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1993), the Rockefeller Foundation Residency/ Grant (1997), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1976 and 1983) Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2004),  Selected as one of NewCity magazine’s “Art 50 (2020/ 23): Chicago’s Artists’ Artists”, Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant (1980) among others. She has shown work in galleries and museums in the U.S. and internationally including the New Museum of Contemporary Art in NYC, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Rockefeller Center for Studio Arte in Bellagio, Italy, and The Renaissance Society (Mid-Career Survey).  Bramson’s work is part of numerous private and public collections such as The Bronx Museum of Arts, Rhode Island School of Art and Design Museum,  the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Bard College, to name a few. Bramson is Professor Emeritus from the University of Illinois/ Chicago 1985 - 2007 and  served as an advisor to MFA students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 2007 - 2023

Jason Branscum is a Chicago-based fine art photographer whose practice investigates the perceptual and temporal qualities of light. He earned his BFAAH in Art History with a focus in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  His academic background informs a conceptual and research-driven approach to the image-making process.

Branscum’s work often employs the use of long exposures to reduce the landscape to its most essential forms, transforming light into the central subject of his compositions. By stripping away the familiar, he reimagines natural environments as fields of abstraction, where light becomes both structure and surface. This minimalism invites viewers to slow their looking and consider not only what is seen, but how perception shapes meaning.

His ongoing Lake Michigan Project embodies this approach through a sustained study of the lake’s horizon. Using a consistent compositional framework, Branscum records shifting conditions over time, allowing light alone to redefine the scene. Each image captures a moment of transience—an ephemeral intersection of time, atmosphere, and illumination—revealing the enduring subject of his practice: the ever-changing presence of light.

Judith Brotman is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago. Her work includes works on paper, mixed media installations, theatrical immersive environments, and language/text-based projects. In a world of uncertain outcomes, Brotman emphasizes the possibility of healing and transformation. Brotman considers spaces of not knowing to be both complex and generative despite, or perhaps due to, the resulting cliffhanger of uncertainty. Exhibitions venues include: Smart Museum of Art, SOFA Chicago, Columbia College/Chicago, Indiana University Northwest, Franconia Sculpture Park, Hampshire College, The Society of Arts & Crafts/Boston, Mobilia Gallery, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Asphodel Gallery/Brooklyn, Tetrapod Callery/LA, INOVA, the DeVos Art Museum, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Threewalls, Circa Modern, Slow Gallery, Chicago Cultural Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid/Chicago, Chicago Artists Coalition, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, and The Illinois State Museum. Brotman’s work is in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Illinois State Museum, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection as well as in many private collections. Brotman received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught for over 20 years. 

Robert Burnier lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2016 and his BS in Computer Science from the Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania in 1991. He has been a resident at the Ragdale Foundation for the Arts, and recently received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2025. Solo exhibitions include ANDREW RAFACZ (Chicago, IL), Corvi-Mora (London, UK), blank projects (Cape Town, SA), Massey Klein Gallery (New York, NY), David B. Smith Gallery (Denver, CO), and The Arts Club of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Group exhibitions include the Astrup Fearnly Museum (Oslo, Norway), Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland, OR), Secrist Beach (Chicago, IL), Brintz + County (Palm Beach, FL), ANDREW RAFACZ (Chicago, IL), New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Southern Indiana (Evansville, IN), Corvi-Mora (London, UK), Vacation (New York, NY), Korn Gallery at Drew University (Madison, NJ), The Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL), and Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, IL). Burnier’s large-scale installation Black Tiberinus was on view on Chicago’s riverfront in 2018 and 2019. He has exhibited at art fairs in Chicago, Copenhagen, London, Mexico City, Milan, Miami, New York, and Toronto. His work has been written about in many publications, including Chicago Tribune, Art Forum, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, and Artnet. Burnier currently holds the position of Assistant Professor in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is included in numerous public and private collections.

Dee Clements is a process-based artist with interests in materials, craft, and ethnography. She holds an MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA in Fiber/Material Studies and Sculpture from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited her work with Nina Johnson Gallery, Kasmin, R and Company, 65 Grand, The Pit, Design Miami, Felix Art Fair, and Salone del Mobile in Italy. Clements has lectured at universities including Pacific Northwest College of Art, University of Texas San Antonio, Arizona State University, and has taught intensive workshops in fibercraft around the world including Universidad Catolica de Temuco in Chile, Haystack, and Anderson Ranch. From 2010-2023 she was the founder and designer behind the textile brand Studio Herron. As of 2025, I have founded a new school for basketry in the United States called The Weaving Workshop. She lives and works in Chicago.

William Conger is a Chicago-based abstract painter. He received his B.F.A. from the University of New Mexico and his M.F.A. from the University of Chicago. He is professor emeritus, Art Theory and Practice, Northwestern University. He began exhibiting in 1958 and has an extensive record of solo and group shows, most recently (2024-5) at Zolla Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and at Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis. He has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Illinois Arts Council and was awarded a 50-yr Retrospective Exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2010. Museum collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary Art, CHICAGO, The Indianapolis Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of The Arts, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Illinois State Museum, The Wichita Art Museum, The University of New Mexico Art Museum, plus others nationwide. Conger's art has been reviewed and featured in ARTnews, ArtForum, Art In America, Art Criticism, Arts Magazine, and others. He has completed five public art commissions, most recently a major project for the Chicago Public Transit Authority (CTA) and is included in ART50, 2025 in NewCity Magazine. His career record and Oral Interview is in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Online references include Wikipedia. Also see www.williamconger.com

Laura Davis is a studio artist whose work explores notions of social and material value through drawing, sculpture, and installation. Solo exhibitions include 65GRAND (Chicago), the Wright Museum of Art (Beloit, Wisconsin), the Chicago Cultural Center, the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Chicago Artists Coalition, and threewalls (Chicago). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including King’s Leap (New York), Luminary (St. Louis), The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), High Desert Test Sites, (Joshua Tree, California), Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation (Chicago), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago) and SPACES (Cleveland). Davis’s work has been featured in Art in America, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Art21 Blog, ArtSlant, and Newcity. She earned her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2004 and her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1996. She currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. lauraanndavis.com

Ese Ametri Gagoh is a visual and sonic artist working in Chicago, IL. Gagoh’s practice leads with a focus on photography; while spanning across music production, film, and printmaking. Gagoh has developed a signature visual and sonic language that captures the world around one with honesty and transparency. He exhibits photographic frames saturated by rich, opalescent colors, sample distorted sonics, and rough-edged alternative printing methods. Gagoh creates works that gaze back at the viewer, compositions that state the obvious or encourage deeper investigation.

Rosalynn Gingerich is a Chicago-based visual artist who creates large-scale installations, sculptural forms and public interventions. Engaging the hard edges of existing architecture with vibrant inflatable organic structures, her work often destabilizes the conventions of traditional art viewing experiences and examines how spatial relationships impact perception. Gingerich holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Ringling College of Art & Design. In 2025, she presented a solo exhibition and site-specific installation, Luna, at Waubonsee Community College, Sugar Grove, IL. Other recent exhibitions include: Wormfarm Institute, Sauk City, WI; The Mill at Vicksburg, Vicksburg, MI; The Residency Project, Pasadena, CA; and Terrain Exhibitions, Chicago. Gingerich’s work has been featured in WTTW Chicago Tonight, Newcity Chicago and Bad At Sports, among others. She is a recipient of numerous residencies, including the Ragdale Foundation Artist Residency, Lake Forest, IL; The Residency Project, Pasadena, CA; and the Prairie Ronde Residency, Vicksburg, MI. Gingerich currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices and the Department of Arts Administration & Policy.

Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s largely abstract hybrid works engage with myth, iconography, symbols, and color.  She is known for poetic abstract paintings constructed from textiles, collaged works on paper, and sculptural objects.  Her solo show Strange Forest is currently on view at Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley, CA.  Her recent solo, Paintings for Birds at Secrist-Beach Gallery, Chicago was reviewed in ArtForum, March 2025.  Guerrero-Maciá is one of the inaugural 2023-4 Lenore Tawney Fellows, a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellow, and a MacDowell Fellow. 

Guerrero-Maciá’s artworks are held in multiple collections both public and private. She has exhibited at public institutions such as The John Michael Kohler Art Center; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Artpace, San Antonio; Elmhurst Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis, and the Crocker Art Museum. Guerrero-Maciá is an alumnus of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Penland School of Craft, Cranbrook Academy of Art, and Villanova University.   She holds an endowed Presidential Professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Fiber & Material Studies and Painting & Drawing.

Steven Husby is a visual artist who lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught in the Painting and Drawing Department since 2009. His work investigates the relationship between the universal and the particular, collapsing the distance between the axiomatic and the idiomatic. Recent Solo exhibitions include Paths of Least Resistance at Roman Susan, myotherisanother at devening projects + editions, BRUTE FORCe at 65GRAND, and RUBICON at Julius Caesar. Group exhibitions include Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School with SAIC Painting Alumni, Oh Truant Muse at Accessory Dwelling Unit in Chicago, Fragments of an Unknowable Whole at Urban Art Space in Columbus, Ohio, and Afterimage at the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago.

Sam Jaffe is an artist currently living and working in Chicago, IL. Characterized by wacky, toxic color and overstuffed, mutated forms, her recent work explores labor, folk and domestic art traditions, ornamentation, collecting behaviors, craftsmanship, and the grotesque fallibility of the human body. All art materials are recycled, reused, repurposed, dead-stock, vintage, or otherwise sustainably sourced. Sam received her BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design in 2005 and her MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She is represented by 65GRAND in Chicago and is an Associate Professor, Adj. in The Department of Painting and Drawing at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Kelly Kaczynski is a Chicago-based artist working within the language of sculpture. Selected exhibitions include Julius Caesar, IL; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, IL; Peregrine Program, IL; Songs for Presidents, NY; Ortega y Gasset Projects, NY; Soap Factory, MN; Comfort Station, IL; Gahlberg Gallery, IL; threewalls, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, IL; University at Buffalo Art Gallery, NY; Triple Candie, NY. Curatorial collaborations include the cooperative endeavor Working Group for Unmaking: Living Within the Play, Poor Farm, Wisconsin, 2019-ongoing; Manatee at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Illinois, 2018; the 2014 exhibition, Roving Room, Georgia. Independent curation includes Virtually Physically Speaking at Columbia College, Chicago, IL and the 2011 exhibition Mouthing (a sentient limb) at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL. Kaczynski is a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award '15; Artadia, Chicago '08; Visible Republic, Boston, '00. Kaczynski received an MFA from Bard College, NY and BA from The Evergreen State College, WA. They are Professor, Adjunct with the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.

Michael Kaysen was born and raised in the Midwestern United States and has been living on the south / southeast side of Chicago for his entire 61 years of existence. What that has to do with his work, he has not figured out yet, but that is part of what making art is; the repeated attempt to try and figure it all out. Michael is currently investigating the temporal qualities of art-making: what is 'making' and what is it to be a 'maker' of hand-made original objects at a time when the individual is in the process of being obliterated? He is fascinated by the qualities, variety and abundance of materials available to an artist to make art and by the expanded scope of what 'making art' is by contemporary standards.

Michael is the owner and proprietor of SideCar Studios, Northwest Indiana's premier contemporary art space. SideCar is a combination studio, art laboratory and, on occasion, an artist-run, for-profit gallery space. SideCar's mission is to showcase contemporary art, working closely with the artists involved, encouraging artists to take chances and attempting to bring the creative process and the viewing public closer to each other. Michael’s work is included in several private collections. Recent solo exhibitions include “24HRS/25DAYS”, New Capital, Chicago, Illinois, 2012, “Look Long, Look In Vain”, 65Grand, Chicago, Illinois, 2015, “Tables, Legs and 10 Bottles”, 65Grand, Chicago, Illinois, 2019, “Superluminal Scissors”, Calumet College of St. Joseph, Whiting, Indiana, 2019. Michael received his BFA in Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1988. He was an adjunct professor of ceramics at Calumet College of St. Joseph from 2010 - 2019.

Anna Kunz makes luminous, vibrant paintings with an emphasis on color, material, and process. Her practice thoughtfully considers the viewer’s experience, taking into account—with deep awareness and intentionality—how each work, each gesture, affects the exhibition space and, by extension, the viewer. Kunz’s tessellating shapes seep into and lean on one another; she calls this “compassionate geometry.”

Kunz received an MFA from Northwestern University, Evanston, IL and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Kunz participated as an artist-in-residence in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY; The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME, and the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary, New Jersey, among others. The artist’s work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions including: The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, IL; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX; McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL; Providence College Galleries, Providence, RI; and TSA Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Brooklyn, NY, and Madrid, Spain. Her work is included in the public collections of The Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA; The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, IL; The Block Museum, Chicago, IL; and Columbia University Teachers College, New York, NY; among others. Kunz has been honored with nominations from: Anonymous Was a Woman, 3Arts Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Emerging Artist award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Artadia, the Rema Hort-Mann Foundation’s Individual Artists Grant, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation.

Olivia Schreiner earned an MFA from Northwestern University and a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. In between, she spent several years in Philadelphia, where she was a member of the cooperative gallery Vox Populi and served as Project Coordinator at The Fabric Workshop and Museum. She has exhibited nationally and frequently in Chicago, including at the Elmhurst Art Museum, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and most recently, Carrie Secrist Gallery. Through her paintings, Schreiner explores her experience of landscape, closely studying patterns of light and dark. The resulting works are ephemeral surfaces built up with thin washes and bold moments of organic and architectural form. She currently resides in Oak Park and paints in her garage studio.

Joseph (Joe) Scott lives and works in Chicago and received a BFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In both his drawn and sculptural work, each configuration explores an interaction of line and spatial planes with an inherent engagement of the adjacent open space. Joe has shown work at 65grand and 1100 Florence galleries. 

Edra Soto is a Puerto Rican-born artist, educator, and co-director of the outdoor project space The Franklin. Her interdisciplinary work integrates multiple approaches and engagement goals. She initiates meaningful, relevant, and often difficult conversations regarding socioeconomic and cultural oppression, the erasure of history, and the loss of cultural knowledge. Soto recent exhibitions include The Sculpture Center, OH, Comfort Station, IL, Maine College of Art & Design, ME, Hyde Park Art Center, IL, and ICA San Diego, CA. Her accolades include grants from the Joyce Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Public Art Dialogue Funders Award, Ree Kaneko Award, US LatinX Art Forum, 3Arts Next Level Award, and MacArthur Foundation’s International Connections Fund. Soto’s work has been commissioned by Public Art Fund (2024 - 2025), Noor Riyadh (2024), Chicago Architecture Biennial (2023), and Millennium Park (2019), among others. Her work is part of the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. Soto holds a master’s degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico.

Shonna Pryor is a conceptual artist, art programs producer, and an educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her interdisciplinary art practice references food theory and its peripheral objects and concepts as a lens through which to critically engage the politics of identity, memory, power, and play. An Afrofuturist aesthetic also underscores the language of these expressions via reclaimed objects, installation, painting and public programming. Pryor's work has been exhibited in major cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York, with esteemed artist residencies at Hyde Park Art Center; The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; High Concept Labs; and Chicago Council on Science and Technology, and Chicago Artist Coalition’s Hatch residency, respectively. Her visual art and community-based collaborations extending from local organizations to nationally recognized institutions have been instrumental in bridging the gap between cultural and applied arts, towards a just and equitable society. 

Tony Tasset lives and works in Sawyer, Michigan. Major exhibitions of Tasset's work include Front International: Cleveland Triennial For Contemporary Art; 2014 Whitney Biennial, curated by Michelle Grabner; Tony Tasset: As It Is, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; MCA DNA: Chicago Conceptual Abstraction, 1986-1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980’s, curated by Helen Molesworth, ICA, Boston; Life During Wartime, Walker Art Center; and Unnatural Rubber, Andy Warhol Museum. Tasset’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum für Moderne Kunste, Frankfurt, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco MOMA; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; The Baltimore Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum Of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Ann Toebbe’s meticulously rendered interiors transform quotidian domestic spaces into spatial tapestries—part memory, part structure, part symbol. Her flattened, often disorienting compositions speak to family, friendship, motherhood, and marriage, turning the rooms of her life into arenas of psychological and emotional resonance. Toebbe has been the recipient of numerous grants including a DAAD, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant, two Pollock Krasner Foundation Grants and an IL Arts Council Fellowship Grant. In 2024 Toebbe created an immersive painting installation, Tornado Warning, for Process Art Space at The Mill in Westport, NY. Toebbe has exhibited widely and her solo exhibition Field and Stream of Consciousness at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery runs concurrently with The Chicago Show. She has lived in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood for twenty years and will open a version of her 2021 exhibition "Cooler by the Lake" at the Hyde Park Art Center in February 2026.

Selina Trepp is an artist researching economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is a goal. “If in doubt, be radical” is the best advice she ever received. She works across media and space; combining performance, installation, painting, and sculpture to create intricate setups that result in photos, drawings and animations.

In addition to her studio based work, Selina is active in the experimental music scene. In this context she sings and plays the videolah, her midi controlled video synthesizer, creating projected animations in real-time as visual music. She performs with a varying cast of collaborators and as one half of Spectralina.

Nathan Vernau earned his BFA from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 2005 and his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2009. He has been living and working in Chicago since 2010. His work has been reviewed and featured in The Chicago Tribune, The Madison Review, New American Paintings – No 89, Studio Visit Magazine, and MISC Magazine. He’s exhibited his work across the US, at Bertrand Productions (Philadelphia, PA), Lula Café (Chicago, IL), Lawrence University (Appleton, WI), Morton College (Cicero, IL), UW-Milwaukee, and Avenue for the Arts (Grand Rapids, MI). His work consists of colorful, flooded interior spaces using layered and cut paper, color pencil, graphite, and string. Quite a few symbols appear in this work: shelves, doors, letters (both physical text and envelopes), and picture frames. Communication and relationships appear, evoking the stability (or instability) that surround them.

Christine Wallers is based in Chicago, IL. She makes installations and works on paper. She has lived and exhibited in Illinois, New Mexico, Washington, France, and Germany. Wallers has been reviewed in Art in America and other publications, was a visiting artist at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, and is a 2025 Ragdale artist in residence.

Justin Witte is an artist and curator who has been active in the Chicago area for over two decades. His recent work consists of small gouache and acrylic paintings that weave together humor and personal narrative, while playfully exploring color and pattern in ways that aim to surprise and spark joy. Over the course of his career, Witte has exhibited widely in Chicago and beyond, with shows at 65 Grand, the Hyde Park Art Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and many other venues, several of which no longer exist. His curatorial work includes organizing nationally recognized exhibitions such as Frida Kahlo: Timeless, which brought international partnerships and record audiences to the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, where he serves as Director and Curator. His contributions to the arts have been recognized through press coverage, awards, and inclusion in Newcity’s Art 50: Chicago’s Visual Vanguard.

Curator Bio:

Clare Britt joined OyG Projects in 2013 as a founding co-director. She curated the first solo exhibition of photographic work with Chicago artist Kelly Kaczynski Yes; Or As If. She co curated the group exhibition Code Switch with co-director Lauren Whearty, curated the group show Shadow of the Gradient, and curated the exhibition entitled Apparitions with artist Alicia Smith. Clare has been instrumental in creating virtual content for the gallery including starting the YouTube Channel and creating content for the virtual space.  She spearheaded Rendezvous, an interactive virtual experience that serves as a platform for creative exchange between artists. Clare is a freelance photographer and lives in Chicago, IL and works all over the country creating art.

Support the Future of OyG Projects with a Monthly Gift

Dear OyG Community,

Like many artist-run spaces, OyG Projects is navigating a challenging financial year. Since COVID, we've worked tirelessly to keep our doors open — drawing down our emergency reserves and steadily repaying an SBA loan that helped sustain us during the most uncertain times. While we’ve been fortunate to receive support in the past from grant makers, including the NEA, those sources are increasingly unpredictable in today’s rapidly shifting funding landscape.

Because of these challenges, we are currently faced with a $25,000 deficit for 2025. We must raise these funds in order to complete this year's programming, and to begin planning for our near future.

We are asking you to help sustain it

The most impactful way you can contribute is by becoming a monthly donor with a recurring gift of $5, $10, $25 or more a month.

We hope you will help us meet a tangible short-term goal:
75 monthly donors by the end of Summer. 

Recurring gifts provide us with the steady support we need to plan ahead, produce ambitious exhibitions, and keep our programs free and accessible to all.

We’re incredibly proud of the work we’ve done: providing a platform that has launched the careers of countless artists and bringing meaningful, challenging, and joyful exhibitions to our community. With your help, we can continue this vital work — and grow it.

 At OyG, we believe in building space for experimentation, dialogue, and community — especially for artists who have historically been excluded from mainstream platforms. Our artist-run model prioritizes innovation and quality over commercial outcomes, offering artists a rare opportunity to take risks and grow.

Thank you for 12 years of OyGoodness!

OyG Projects 

Clare Britt
Eric Hibit
Annamariah Knox
Xingze Li
Leeza Meksin
Nickola Pottinger
Adam Liam Rose
Zahar Vaks
Lauren Whearty

Walls Wearing Worlds, a full color catalog is co-published by OyG Projects and Space Sisters Press with a curatorial essay by Eric Hibit and an interview with Jodi Hays and Leeza Meksin. Link to preorder.