The third annual CXW is a exercise in conceptualist and postconceptualist approaches
A page from an issue of Art & Antiques published in 1990, the heyday of neoconceptualism, sits in a vitrine in Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015, a ten-artist show that occupies two floors of a former office building in Chicago and serves as the flagship exhibition of the third annual Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW). The page carries the start of an essay by American artist and critic Carol Diehl titled ‘Mixed Emotions: Chicago’s Ambivalence Toward its Own Art’, in which Diehl explains why, during the mid-1970s, she joined an ‘exodus’ of artists who moved from the Midwestern city – the third-largest metropolitan area in the US – to New York, leaving behind a place where craft and representational art were the norm and ‘idea’-driven approaches like East Coast conceptualism were ‘suspect’.
The problems Diehl references, like Chicago museums snubbing local artists who weren’t the Hairy Who or the Monster Roster, or abstract artists being decried as wannabe intellectuals, are now over 50 years old. But the core of the issue – the feud between the perceived snobbery of the New York scene and the presumed provincialism of the ‘flyover’ cities in the geographic centre of the US – remains alive and politically potent in this divided country. For the latest CXW, galleries and arts spaces across Chicago seem to have aligned their shows to counter this cultural antagonism. With its wry title and revisionist spirit, Over My Head makes the case that Chicago galleries have in fact always supported conceptual practices. Here, 14 postconceptual artworks that were ‘at some point exhibited, sold, or produced in Chicago’ are accompanied by a display of archival documents including a postcard invitation to Donald Young Gallery’s 1987 Martin Puryear show and a photo of Dara Birnbaum’s five-channel video installation Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission (1990) at Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
The screens and speakers of Birnbaum’s Tiananmen Square fill nearly a third of the ground floor exhibition space, while on the opposite wall Puryear is represented by a bronze falcon sculpture from 1989. Besides these, other notable pieces include Wendy Jacob’s Untitled (1988), eight rubber bags on the floor that gently ‘breathe’ like a pack of sleeping animals thanks to the vintage hairdryers supplying airflow and Rosemarie Trockel’s She is Dead 4 (2008), a mixed media work composed of snapshots of women’s clothing and shoes crudely stapled, with no explanation, to the inside of a scuffed wooden frame.
Meanwhile, CXW’s partner galleries continue to encourage conceptualist and postconceptualist approaches. Down the street, David Rimanelli has curated a group show at Bodenrader around John Boskovich’s short film North (2001), in which Gary Indiana reads from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s eponymous novel while clips of Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) flash by. At Patron, a show of works by Bethany Collins pays homage to another book, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), which Collins has hand-copied; Or, the Whale, Vol. 1 (2024–25), 225 pages of her efforts, is presented at the gallery in a glass case. Laveen Gammie, as part of a three-person show at LVL3, and Sara MacKillop, in her solo exhibition The Cutaway View at Good Weather, both turn bright, kitschy gift bags into ready-made sculptures.
The phrase ‘over my head’ also evokes the power politics of being overlooked and ignored, pertinent to those who believe the art scenes of flyover cities are wrongfully bypassed when local artists decamp to centres of cultural power elsewhere. By highlighting the historical and contemporary presence of conceptualism in Chicago, CXW suggests that such cities may not be as culturally shortchanged as one might suspect.
What remains to be seen is how conceptualism might endear itself to its actual detractors, who may live anywhere and find it opaque and deceptive. Gaylen Gerber’s Backdrop / Over My Head: Encounters with Art in a Flyover City (n.d.), a creased and faintly rumpled sheet of grey paper lining the entirety of a wall of CXW’s main exhibition, could make a fitting ambassador. While Gerber is known for inviting other artists to hang their works on top of his Backdrops – for the 2014 Whitney Biennial, he made a wall-size grey canvas of his recede behind works by David Hammons, Trevor Shimizu and Sherrie Levine – here, Backdrop stands on its own, without interference, its materiality laid bare in an irregular progression of folds, shadows, bulges and fine lines. Although the work is easier to miss than most others in the show, if we notice and confront its surface, we find no feints, no mind games, no evasions – just a droll reminder that we should be paying more attention to what’s around us.
Chicago Exhibition Weekend, various locations, 19–21 September 2025
From the November 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
