Pope.L, Package Received But Never Opened #75, 2015.
Despite Chicago being a major arts hub existing at the intersection of some of the most influential developments in postwar American art, the city has not always been closely associated with the conceptual art tradition. GRAY Chicago is pleased to present IT’S ABOUT TIME: Counterproductive Conceptualisms in Chicago, an exhibition that traces the contours of a newly emerging conceptual art ethos among younger generations of Chicago-based or -trained artists.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Chair for poet, 2025.
Organized by DRAW, the curatorial duo composed of Dieter Roelstraete and Abigail Winograd, IT’S ABOUT TIME includes artists with disparate practices but who maintain a shared spirit of studied nonchalance: what might be described as a “Midwestern” alternative to the demands of artistic production as a rat race. The artists include Alex Chitty (b. 1979), Shir Ende (b. 1993), Max Guy (b. 1989), Jinn Bronwen Lee (b. 1984), Dave Lloyd (b. 1991), Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. 1961), Devin T. Mays (b. 1985), Pope.L (b. 1955 – d. 2023), Nick Raffel (b. 1982), and Miao Wang (b. 1988). Working in a broad range of disciplines and media—from drawing, painting, and photography to installation, moving image, performance, and sculpture—these artists often combine different artistic personas and profiles.
Bucking the tendency of art history to focus on a handful of seminal conceptual practices in Chicago from the mid-1970s to early 1990s (“ancient history in these accelerationist times,” the curators maintain), this exhibition focuses primarily on a new generation of artists who prefer taking their time, and who use “time” itself as one of their subjects. Shaped to a discernible degree by the local legacies of artists like Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle and Pope.L, this distinctly contrarian strand of conceptualism in Chicago seeks to restore the social magic of both art and the artist’s life.
Pushing against the current cultural obsession with “vibes,” this exhibition posits conceptualism as art’s most compelling means of a far more crucial mode: attitude. Self-effacing as they are ambitious, the works in IT’S ABOUT TIME may appear laidback and slapdash, but by emphasizing the importance of time and space to create such “counterproductive conceptualism,” the result is works of art that are radically different from life as we know it.
Installation view of IT'S ABOUT TIME: Counterproductive Conceptualisms in Chicago, GRAY Chicago, 2026.
ABOUT THE CURATORS
DIETER ROELSTRAETE is the curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where he has organized exhibitions by Gelitin, Rick Lowe, The Otolith Group, Pope.L, Raqs Media Collective, Martha Rosler, Betye Saar, Cecilia Vicuña, and Christopher Williams among many others. He was part of the curatorial team of documenta 14, worked as a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2012 until 2016, and the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen from 2003 until 2012. Trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent, Roelstraete has written extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues.
ABIGAIL WINOGRAD is an independent curator who acted, most recently, as the co-commissioner and co-curator of the U.S. pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale (Jeffrey Gibson: The Space In Which to Place Me), and who is currently preparing a survey show by Rick Lowe at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Winograd is also the founding director of Pueblo Unido Gallery at the Centro Romero on Chicago’s northside. She has organized exhibitions at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. She has held positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Blanton Museum of Art. Winograd received a PhD in art history from the University of Texas in Austin and has additional degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Alex Chitty (b. 1979, Miami, FL) is a Chicago based artist. Chitty received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Smith College and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through shifts in context, display and function, Chitty’s practice draws attention to how gender, emotion, politics, and culture are intrinsically embedded in the images, objects, designs and overall infrastructure of our everyday surroundings. Her conceptually layered works combine multiple artistic disciplines, materials and techniques borrowed from both the hand-crafted and industrially produced. Chitty is a professor at SAIC in the Printmedia, Sculpture and Ceramic Departments. She has exhibited nationally and internationally.
Shir Ende (b. 1993) is a Chicago-based artist and educator. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago. She has created performances for: the Chicago Architecture Biennial at Stony Island Arts Bank; Inverse Performance Art Festival at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Arkansas; as well as Patient Info, W.I.H.S.H. projects, and Roman Susan in Chicago. She has exhibited at: the University of Illinois Springfield, Western Exhibitions, Riverside Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Comfort Station, and Gallery 400. Ende has participated in residencies and programs at: High Concept Labs, Chicago Artists Coalition, Hyde Park Art Center, and the Alex Brown Foundation in Des Moines, Iowa. She received an Individual Artist Support Grant from the Illinois Arts Council and was named a Newcity Breakout Artist in 2022. She currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago.
Max Guy (b. 1989) works with sculpture, video, performance, assemblage, and installation, using fast, ergonomic ways to make poetry of the world, filtering it through personal effects. Guy lives and works in Chicago, where he lectures in the Printmedia and Sculpture departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is inspired by the various creative communities he's been immersed in since childhood. Guy's work straddles different registers of understanding and perception, and is at times personal and political – obliquely witty and tender, while interrogating art-making, humanity, violence, and subjugation.
Guy has exhibited locally and internationally at: the Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Gallery 400, Chicago; Good Weather, Chicago; Prairie, Chicago; The Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois; Centralbanken, Oslo; Each Modern, Taipei; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Kai Matsumiya Fine Arts, New York; Kings Leap, New York; Laurel Gitlen, New York; Nicola Vassell, New York; Malmö Museum of Art, Malmö; and Galeria Federico Vavassori, Milan. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Jin Bronwen Lee 이 진 (American, b. 1984 in Korea, lives and works in Berlin)
Solo/Duo Exhibitions: Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2023); Regards, Chicago (2022).
Selected Group Exhibitions: Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago (2026); Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2025); JUBG, Cologne (2024); Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2024); The Page Gallery, Seoul (2024); Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich (2024); Secci Gallery, Florence (2024); Galeria Ehrhardt Florez, Madrid (2023); Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago, Chicago (2023 and 2014); ZO2 Gallery, Rome (2018); Salon Dahlmann, Berlin (2016); American Academy in Rome, Rome (2016); among others.
Dave Lloyd (b. 1990) lives and works in Chicago. Describing the underlying motivation of his work, Lloyd says, "it is to integrate art with life and defend against their division." For 12 hours on September 21, 2024, a group of his paintings were shown strapped to a fence in the I-90/94 underpass at Sacramento Avenue in Chicago. His first solo exhibition, Fief pt. 2, took place at Regards, Chicago, in 2025. Lloyd is a recipient of the 2026 Re/Match Grant and his work is in the permanent collection of The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle (b. 1961, Madrid, Spain) is a conceptual and visual artist working across media to create large-scale installations and architectural interventions.
Manglano-Ovalle has presented major projects at: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; both the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Documenta, Kassel; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Chicago Architectural Biennial; Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; KW Institute for Contemporary Art – Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Krefelder Kunstmuseen, Krefeld; The International Exhibition of Architecture, La Biennale di Venezia; Barcelona Pavilion, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona; The Power Plant Contemporary, Toronto; and the São Paulo Biennial.
Major awards Manglano-Ovalle has received include: a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a United States Artists Guthman Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship; and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award.
Devin T. Mays (b. 1985, Detroit, Michigan) holds a BBA from Howard University and an MFA from The University of Chicago. Mays's interdisciplinary practice is an exercise in wandering that he often refers to as a "practice-in-practice." Through sculpture, installation, sound, performance, photography, and video, he creates poetic gestures of observation and ritual. His work engages found object traditions, drawing out nuances and subtleties in a balance between raw or found material and artistic intervention, and the myriad ways we create meaning with our everyday objects and environments. As he describes, his practice is "a place for things to become Things."
Mays is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at Rice University, Houston. He has exhibited and performed at the: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; SculptureCenter, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Driehaus Museum, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Nahmad Projects, London; The Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, The University of Chicago, Chicago; the Renaissance Society, The University of Chicago, Chicago; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Regards, Chicago; The Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, The University of Chicago, Chicago; and The Power Station, Dallas; among others.
Pope.L (1955-2023) was a visual artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice used binaries, contraries, and preconceived notions embedded within contemporary culture to create artworks across media, including writing, painting, performance, installation, video, and sculpture. Building upon his long history of enacting arduous, provocative, absurdist performances and interventions in public spaces, Pope.L applied some of the same social, formal, and performative strategies to his broader interrogations of language, systems, gender, race, and community.
Pope.L began his career in the 1970s, creating works that found their foothold in personal travails, philosophy, and his performance and theater training with Geoff Hendricks and Mabous Mines. He studied at Pratt Institute and later received his BA from Montclair State College in 1978. He also attended the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, before earning his MFA from Rutgers University in 1981. His first performances occurred in the public domain, often on city streets, and later at various notable institutions, such as the: Anthology Film Archives, Franklin Furnace, Just Above Midtown, Museum of Modern Art, New Museum, Performa, The Sculpture Center, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial in New York; MIT and Mobius in Boston; MOCA Los Angeles; Shinjuku Station in Tokyo; Diverse Works in Houston; Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio; the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead Quays, United Kingdom; Prospect.2 in New Orleans; Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and CAM Houston; among others. Major performances include: Baile (2016); The Problem (2016); Pull (2013); The Black Factory national tour (2002-09); The Great White Way (2001-02); Community Crawls (2000-05); Eating the Wall Street Journal (2000); Black Domestic aka Roach Motel Black (1994); How Much is that Nigger in the Window (1990-92); Times Square Crawl (1978); and Thunderbird Immolation (1978). His work has been the subject of countless solo and group exhibitions, and celebrated with numerous, prestigious awards and fellowships.
Nick Raffel (b. 1982, Portland, Maine) lives and works in Chicago. His work in sculpture and installation considers architectural and infrastructural systems which facilitate the flow of air, water, and gas. Recent works intervene in pre-existing mechanical systems, questioning their efficiency, sustainability, adaptability, and healthfulness. Raffel considers passive solutions to energy production and the ways designed objects, including his sculptures, are situated within and relative to natural forms of energy.
Upcoming and recent exhibitions include Bodenrader, Chicago; Artists Space, New York City; Cushion Works, San Francisco; Swiss Institute, New York City; Bridget Donahue, New York City; Fondazione Prada, Venice; Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown; Prairie, Chicago; Pied-à-terre, San Francisco, and Kunstverein Nürnberg. Raffel holds an MFA from the University of Chicago.
Miao Wang (b. 1988, Jilin, China) received her BA in Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago and her MFA at The University of Chicago. Wang's materially committed practice honors a human, physical relationship to the passage and reality of time. Collapsing histories and processes of photography, Modernist abstraction, and choreographies of chance, Wang has developed a nuanced, conceptual language of abstraction. Over the past three years, Wang's work has centered upon a unique approach to watercolor in which synthetic paper is exposed to layers upon layers of pigment. The resulting paintings, installed directly on the wall, bear, like skin, the cumulative impact of emotion and environment on each painted surface. Reliant on the effects of natural forces – sun and moonlight, air, wind, temperature, and dewpoint, Wang's practice documents the otherwise transitory moments of interaction between our bodies and the environment in which we live.
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