Chicago Exhibition Weekend: ICI Conversations

As part of the third annual Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW), ICI is hosting two talks with some of Chicago's most innovative gallerists and arts organizers.

The keystone exhibition of CXW, Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984-2015 presents Chicago as a nerve center for post-conceptual art, foregrounding the histories of some of the city's great art dealers and the artists they championed. In this same spirit of expanding our understanding of Chicago's artistic legacies from multiple perspectives, these two talks aim to "zoom out" and "zoom in" on the themes brought up in Over My Head. 

First, on Friday, September 19, 2025, we'll "zoom out" to build awareness of the artists that get left out of the gallery and dealer systems: What institutions support these artists, and how do different communities and spaces in Chicago fit together to create and sustain the larger art ecosystem? This conversation centers around the South Side Community Art Center, as former Executive Director Faheem Majeed and current E.D. Monique Brinkman-Hill discuss the Center's historical role in supporting the careers of Black artists in Chicago and its evolution into the future. 

The second conversation, on Sunday, September 21, will "zoom in" and engage with Over My Head through the lens of a long-standing friendship between Hamza Walker (Director of The Brick) and John Corbett (co-owner of Corbett vs. Dempsey). They discuss their experiences living through, and shaping, Chicago post-conceptual art in the period 1984-2015, as well as the importance of our personal relationships in sustaining a city's larger cultural fabric.

About Chicago Exhibition Weekend

Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW) is presented by EarlyWork, a community-building initiative founded by Abby Pucker and led by Chanelle Lacy that offers elevated cultural experiences and access to arts programming across the city of Chicago. The third CXW edition will convene over sixty participating galleries, artist-run spaces, museums, and cultural organizations, featuring citywide programming that reflects the depth and diversity of Chicago’s arts and culture ecosystem.

CXW 2025 will be anchored by a centralized location at 400 N. Peoria Street, the site for CXW’s central exhibition Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984-2015. Curated by Iris Colburn, Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Gareth Thomas Kaye, Independent Curator, the group exhibition presents Chicago’s history as a nerve-center for post-conceptual art. Examining many of the influential, now closed, galleries in the city and their championing of these practices between 1984 and 2015, Over My Head sets up a contemporary conversation between key works, artists, and exhibitions from spaces such as Donald Young, Rhona Hoffman, Feature Inc., Robbin Lockett, Shane Campbell, and Rowley Kennerk, among others. While nodding to this history, the works in this exhibition themselves consider ideas of time, place, memory, and the inevitability of forgetting. The 400 N. Peoria Street site will also host CXW’s inaugural partnership with the Chicago Art Book Fair, and talks in partnership with ICI.