Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City, 1984–2015

Organized on the occasion of Chicago Exhibition Weekend, Over My Head presents a fragment of Chicago’s oft-forgotten position as a nerve center for post-conceptual art. The works on view (or a version of them) were at some point exhibited, sold, or produced in Chicago between 1984 and 2015. Their inclusion here both recalls particular exhibitions and, more tangentially, the complex entanglements between artists, dealers, curators, critics, and collectors that come to shape how we know a place (and an artist’s work) in hindsight. Among the cohort of galleries and institutions whose programs laid the foundation for this recollection of Chicago are Donald Young, Rhona Hoffman, Feature, Robbin Lockett, Rowley Kennerk, Shane Campbell, Monique Meloche, Corbett vs. Dempsey, GRAY, the Art Institute of Chicago, the MCA Chicago, and the Renaissance Society.

This exhibition may be approached in two distinct, if not reciprocal, ways: as an assembly of discrete artworks relating to a distinct moment in an artist’s history with Chicago and as a chorus asynchronously inciting a contemporary conversation around time, place, and memory, which might remind us that forgetting can sometimes be an invitation to return.