Compound Yellow @ HPAC Artist Run Chicago 2.0

To mark the ten-year anniversary of the original Hyde Park Art Center exhibition, Artists Run Chicago (2009), Artists Run Chicago 2.0 examines the core motivations, trajectories, and philosophies that have made the past decade generative for new models of artist-run initiatives to exist throughout the city and suburbs. As they did in 2009, artists-run spaces have continued to transform storefronts, apartments, warehouses, garages, and nomadic existences into environments in which art can be experienced at its most experimental and intuitive stage.

However, the artist-run model has also found a heightened criticality during this time as well. Despite taking on a multitude of forms and models, these spaces have come to represent a merge between artistic practice and social engagement, in which their small, independent, and hyperlocal status can be constantly modified and tailored to serve the communities they call home, whether through online forums to discuss art or engaging with community activists in support of social justice. In a time in which institutions are reevaluating their missions and relevance in a rapidly changing social landscape, artist-run initiatives have found themselves at the forefront of new conversations around art, challenging conventional expectations of exhibition, discourse, and community, while injecting new models, ideas, and faces into our understanding of what experiencing art can be.

Art spaces represented in Artists Run Chicago 2.0 hail from a wide range of Chicago neighborhoods, from Beverly to Rogers Park, Englewood to Oak Park; here is the complete list: 062, 4th Ward Project Space, 65Grand, ACRE Projects, Adds Donna, AMFM, Annas, Apparatus Projects, Bad At Sports, Blanc Gallery, boundary, Chicago Art Department, Chuquimarca, Clutch, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Comfort Station, Compound Yellow, D Gallery, Devening Projects, Document, Experimental Sound Studio, F4F, The Franklin, Heaven Gallery, Iceberg Projects, Ignition Project Space, Julius Caesar, Lawrence and Clark, LVL3, Mujeres Mutantes, Night Light Studios & Gallery, Ohklahomo, Nightingale, Practise, Prairie, Roman Susan, Roots & Culture, Rootwork Gallery, The Silver Room, Slow, The Suburban, Sweet Water Foundation, table, Terrain Exhibitions, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Trunk Show, TRQPITECA, VGA Gallery, Wedge Projects, and Western Pole.

Artists Run Chicago 2.0 is organized by Noah Hanna and Allison Peters Quinn with contributions from Max Guy and Andi Crist.

Compound Yellow & Friends at Artist Run Chicago 2.0

About Artists Run Chicago (2009):

Chicago has long been known for cultivating a strong entrepreneurial/Do-It-Yourself spirit in business and the arts. Art organizations like Randolph Street Gallery, N.A.M.E., and the Uncomfortable Spaces in the 1980s and 1990s provided respected role models for independent art initiatives that followed. The 38 artist-run venues that participated in Hyde Park Art Center’s 2009 exhibition were responsible for transforming storefronts, sheds, apartments, lofts, industrial warehouses, garages and roving spaces into contemporary art galleries testing the notion of “exhibition” while complicating the definition of art. Coinciding with the Hyde Park Art Center’s 70th anniversary, Artists Run Chicago reconnected the Art Center to its beginnings as an artist-run space through collaborations with spaces that demonstrated a similar dedication to fostering

Free online public programming accompanies this exhibition, including monthly performances, workshops, and artist and curator-led Art Center tours. Hyde Park Art Center has partnered with Public Media Institute and Sixty Inches from Center to produce a special Artists Run Chicago 2.0 edition of Lumpen magazine for its 136th volume, distributed for free at Hyde Park Art Center and Buddy, located in the first floor galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center.

Now a decade later, only six of the spaces in the original exhibition survive: 65 Grand, Co-Prosperity Sphere, Devening Projects, Julius Caesar, Roots & Culture, and The Suburban (relocated to Milwaukee, WI). Several of the spaces included in Artist Run Chicago 2.0 are celebrating a 10-year anniversary and cite the attention around the early 2000s as impetus for their existence.