Event

Over My Head Curator-led Walkthrough

Tuesday, September 30, 2025, 5:30-8 PM

Over My Head Curator-led Walkthrough

EarlyWork members are invited to the MCA's Emerge season kickoff!

Members of both groups will enjoy a reception and walkthrough of the CXW group exhibition Over My Head with curator Iris Colburn and Gertie founder, Abby Pucker.

Over My Head examines Chicago’s oft-forgotten position as a nerve center for post-conceptual art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The exhibition brings together works by artists whose practices were championed by several of Chicago’s influential (many now closed) galleries, including Donald Young, Rhona Hoffman, Feature Inc., Robbin Lockett, Rowley Kennerk, Shane Campbell, Monique Meloche, Corbett vs. Dempsey, and GRAY. Many of the works in Over My Head cite specific moments in these galleries’ histories, a pivotal exhibition in an artist’s practice, or are illustrative of a long-term relationship between a dealer and an artist.

While the works in Over My Head together pay tribute to these galleries’ legacies, they themselves consider ideas of time, place, memory, and the inevitability of forgetting. By focusing on this recent, vital art history, the exhibition also complicates the dominant narrative of an artistically insular Chicago, which has eschewed intellectually cool or formally oriented work in favor of the immediate, surreal, psychological, and figural.

Featured in Over My Head are artists Dara Birnbaum, Gaylen Gerber, Wendy Jacob, Rashid Johnson, Tony Lewis, Martin Puryear, Kay Rosen, Rosemarie Trockel, Jordan Wolfson, and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.

If you didn't have the opportunity to check out Over My Head during CXW, now is your chance!

The walkthrough will follow remarks from Emerge curators, Jack Schneider and Jadine Collingwood.