Micah Lewis-Văn Sweezie: Simpler Times
Old Friends is pleased to present Simpler Times, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Vietnamese-American artist Micah Lewis-Văn Sweezie. Sweezie uses industrially molded and cast forms to appropriate symbols of rubber, ceramic, and latex production, narrating histories of material and labor exploitation in Vietnam. At the root of their studies, a revolutionary path incited on rubber plantations is the suppressed material history haunting the “readymade.”
April 23rd - June 7th
Opening reception: April 23rd, 6-9pm
Old Friends is pleased to present Simpler Times, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Vietnamese-American artist Micah Lewis-Văn Sweezie. Sweezie uses industrially molded and cast forms to appropriate symbols of rubber, ceramic, and latex production, narrating histories of material and labor exploitation in Vietnam. At the root of their studies, a revolutionary path incited on rubber plantations is the suppressed material history haunting the “readymade.”
This body of work was completed during Sweezie’s 2024 residency in the Vietnamese village of Bát Tràng. The village has operated as a major ceramic production site for centuries, each household traditionally specializing in one element of the process - clay mixing, surface painting, mold making - diversifying production across multiple family businesses, and developing interreliance within the community. Embedding themself in Bát Tràng’s artisan community, Sweezie studied these production techniques, working with local masters to reconstrue forms typically designated for export. Sweezie alters the ornamental patterns covering each piece, weaving an ominous impression of tire treads through the floral and geometric illustrations, as in Traditional/Tread Bottle Set (2024). Though familiar in basic design, individual attention remains deeply present in the cobalt brushstrokes. The ceramic vessels are porcelain - a material once deemed so valuable by colonial interests that it earned the moniker “white gold.”
Sweezie’s sculpture straddles a divide between industrial lineage and material presence. Mass-produced forms hold a mournful sense of displacement from their cultural source, yet through personal attentiveness, Sweezie awakens a critical presence. The works center human intervention in industrial production, rebuking the colonial mechanisms that obscure and dislocate evidence of labor.
New Friends: 9th Annual Cranbrook x SAIC Ceramics Exhibition
March 14 - April 12
Opening reception: March 14, 6-9pm
Old Friends is honored to host New Friends: the 9th Annual Cranbrook x SAIC Ceramics Exhibition. The Cranbrook Academy of Art x SAIC Ceramics Department partnership was founded in the Fall of 2015 by SAIC alumni Katie Doyle and Cranbrook alumni Ebitenyefa Baralaye and has occurred annually (with a brief interruption during the COVID pandemic). This ongoing collaboration fosters cross-institutional dialogue around shared material engagements and presents an opportunity to lay groundwork for sustained connections across the greater midwestern region.
pictured:
Matthew Kaufman
Bedroom Pillow, 2024
Glazed stoneware
15 x 8-1/2 x 22-1/2 inches
Luis González Palma: Un Recuerdo, Un Sueño
Old Friends is pleased to present Luis González Palma: Un Recuerdo, Un Sueño | A Memory, A Dream, works from the Schneider Gallery collection spanning the past four decades. Luis González Palma (b. 1957, Guatemala) chronicles contradictions in hierarchies of ethnicity, class, and religion through photographs charged with tactile materiality.
January 17 - February 28
Opening reception: January 17, 6-9pm
Old Friends is pleased to present Luis González Palma: Un Recuerdo, Un Sueño | A Memory, A Dream, works from the Schneider Gallery collection spanning the past four decades. Luis González Palma (b. 1957, Guatemala) chronicles contradictions in hierarchies of ethnicity, class, and religion through photographs charged with tactile materiality.
Luis González Palma highlights erasure and wear in both subject and material approach. Embracing highly tactile photo techniques, the artist manipulates static images with painterly motion, using bitumen and asphaltum to emphasize the subject’s arresting gaze. Working in transparency over gold leaf, González Palma captures evidence of his process - remnants of handling marks, scratches, cuts, and folds are recorded in the gold ground. The visible action of each piece unfolds into the suggestive dimension of memory.
In early portraiture, González Palma interrogates the weaponized distinction of “mestizo,” individuals of Mayan and Indigenous descent who face discrimination and dissociation from their ancestry. The subjects of absence and memory continue as prescient themes in González Palma’s work as he identifies idiosyncratic qualities of personal identity excluded from the political and religious hegemonies that form his environment.
The Bodyguard series features nine goldtone portraits expressing nuances of individuality at an intimate scale. His subjects wear dramatic ruff collars, reminiscent of 16th- and 17th-century class symbols, their characteristics unified under the costume of colonial authority. González Palma places these portraits in unique vintage daguerreotype and ambrotype cases, originally designed to fit in a pocket and be carried close to the body. Each intricately crafted case holds a single figure, shielded between the covers.
This exhibition is presented with generous support from Verge Frames and Schneider Gallery.
Luis González Palma was born in Guatemala and lives in Cordoba, Argentina. He has held exhibitions at The Art Institute of Chicago, USA; The Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, USA; The Australian Centre for Photography, Australia; Palacio de Bellas Artes de México; The Royal Festival Hall in London; Palazzo Ducale di Genova, Italia; MACRO and Castagnino Museums, Rosario, Argentina; Fundación Telefónica in Madrid, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, and Santiago de Compostela, España, among others. He has been included in expositions internationally, including at Les Rencontres de Arles, France, the 49th and 51st Venice Biennials, Italy, Fotobeinal de Vigo, Spain, XXII Biennial in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the V Biennial in Havana, Cuba. González Palma’s works are held in numerous public and private collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago, The Daros Foundation in Zurich, Switzerland, La Maison Europeénne de la Photographie in Paris, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts in USA, la Foundation pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris, France, the Fondazione Volume! in Roma, Italia; the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogotá, Colombia; The Fogg Museum in Harvard University, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, USA; the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan.
Luis González Palma: Un Recuerdo, Un Sueño will be on view at old friends, 3405 N. Paulina Street, Chicago, IL, from January 17 – February 28, 2025. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (917) 971-7566 or office@oldfriendsgallery.com.
Ambulance Chase
Old Friends is pleased to present Ambulance Chase, featuring new work by three Chicago artists: Peter Fagundo, Michelle Grabner, and Jonathan Worcester. Drawing on the extant intergenerational social and professional relationships between the artists, as much as on the shared investigatory formalities of their work, the exhibition is organized in the spirit of its predecessorial counterparts mounted in the Chicago art galleries operational in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
The exhibition itself takes a cold view of running headlong in the direction of something awful, and the twin act of surveying the aftermath, always more absurd and sinister and glorious than anything one expects to find. If there is any sort of salvation, it suggests, it is perhaps in Worcester’s efflorescent, self-sabotaging clown paintings; in Fagundo’s lascivious and deathly renderings of Newton girls; in the holy, pedestrian ham cans of Michelle Grabner. If there is not, then Ambulance Chase hopes merely to serve as an exercise in the distillation of the most complicated circumstances down to art, love, sex, and death, which–everyone knows–are all the same thing.
Peter Fagundo
Michelle Grabner
Jonathan Worcester
Curated by Bianca Bova
September 27 - November 30
Opening reception September 27, 6-9pm
BIANCA BOVA
Bianca Bova is a Chicago-based curator and writer. As director of her eponymous gallery, she exhibits the work of conceptual artists who utilize research and art historical content in their work.
Ambulance Chase will be on view at old friends, 3405 N. Paulina Street, Chicago, IL, from September 27 – November 30, 2024. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (917) 971-7566 or office@oldfriendsgallery.com.
Penalty
Old Friends is pleased to present Penalty, a dual exhibition featuring paintings by Marc Benja (b. 1970, Chicago, IL) and sculptural works by Nancy Fleischman (b. 1980, Chicago, IL). Both artists explore the fragile and impermanent mechanics of the body, each offering a unique reflection on chronic pain.
Penalty relays an essential disruption of physical equilibrium. Benja and Fleischman negotiate sensitivity and severity, embedding their bodily experience into the works. Through acts of wounding and repairing, the two artists offer a sincere exploration of the punitive cycle of pain.
Marc Benja / Nancy Fleischman
August 16 - September 21
Opening reception August 16, 5-9pm
Old Friends is pleased to present Penalty, a dual exhibition featuring paintings by Marc Benja (b. 1970, Chicago, IL) and sculptural works by Nancy Fleischman (b. 1980, Chicago, IL). Both artists explore the fragile and impermanent mechanics of the body, each offering a unique reflection on chronic pain.
Penalty relays an essential disruption of physical equilibrium. Benja and Fleischman negotiate sensitivity and severity, embedding their bodily experience into the works. Through acts of wounding and repairing, the two artists offer a sincere exploration of the punitive cycle of pain.
Many of Marc Benja’s paintings depict improbable structures, unstable and imbalanced. His works are composed of distinct layers with years between them, painted on either side of a debilitating injury. Turbulent, muted revisions obscure candy-toned foundations. Benja’s repetitive brushstroke creates a static harmony between two disparate chronologies as the artist works to both return to and rewrite history. A semitransparent wash of blue on the surface of Slow Fog, 2023, covers a horizon line, the intermediate landscape undefined and unmade.
Nancy Fleischman uses fragility to convey her internal theater of pain – slicing, fracturing, and rupturing porcelain skins to translate a felt brutality which rarely manifests visually. Pushing an already fragile material beyond the bounds of its structural security, Fleischman imbues her sculpture with the same bodily vulnerability. Her pieces are improbable, their existence a testament to the labor of preservation.
Works included in Penalty articulate pain as obfuscation of physical order, the bewilderment of the body when stasis is unachievable. Both Benja and Fleischman attempt to soothe, repair, and maintain their mutinous bodies, yet the works reveal a relentless irritant. Ruminating on discomfort, these artists uncover an intimate vulnerability, a skeletal archeology.
Penalty will be on view at Old Friends, 3405 N. Paulina Street, Chicago, IL, from August 16 – September 21, 2024. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (917) 971-7566 or office@oldfriendsgallery.com.
Above:
Marc Benja
12 Legged Table, 2023
oil, graphite, and wax on panel
12 x 12 inches
E. Saffronia Downing: Tracks and Other Signs
Old Friends is pleased to present Tracks and Other Signs, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with E. Saffronia Downing (b. 1992, Baltimore, MD). Collecting remnants of landscape, E. Saffronia Downing acts as cartographer and wayfinder. Her sculptures employ locally dug clay, brick pebbles from the lakeshore, and impressions of animal tracks made in sidewalk pavers to follow patterns of habitation. Often unseen, the presence of these patterns is given form, recorded by the artist’s touch.
June 7 - July 20, 2024
Opening reception June 7, 5-9pm
Old Friends is pleased to present Tracks and Other Signs, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with E. Saffronia Downing (b. 1992, Baltimore, MD).
Collecting remnants of landscape, E. Saffronia Downing acts as cartographer and wayfinder. Her sculptures employ locally dug clay, brick pebbles from the lakeshore, and impressions of animal tracks made in sidewalk pavers to follow patterns of habitation. Often unseen, the presence of these patterns is given form, recorded by the artist’s touch.
In Downing’s installations, fragments of material and image are arranged into fractalized geometries, each surface a window into a unique instance. Glassy pools shine from the ceramic tiles: pebbles, sand, and other detritus collected in situ, transformed by the heat of the kiln. The seams between the sidewalks (2024) illustrates an imagined topography of Chicago. Risograph images of goose tracks on the lakeshore are framed by ceramic tiles bearing incised grids, undulating glazes, and geological residue. Alchemical interactions between materials collected on Downing’s surfaces mirror relationships observed in the environment.
Eroding surface impressions, Downing sandblasts many of her ceramic forms before glazing, prior to the final firing. Crookneck vessels (2024) bear holes worn through by the persistent friction. The reductive process is echoed in the artist’s collection of brick pebbles — industrial masonry debris polished over time by the motion of the lake. Brick and clay surfaces both reflect a soft light, a familiar touch.
Through Downing’s studied approach to material, she records the delicate balance held within interdependent systems. Her sculptures map animal migration and ecological patterns to illuminate pathways to safety through a shifting environment. In kinship with interspecies neighbors, Downing joins them in pursuit of habitable space.
E. Saffronia Downing is an artist and educator invested in craft processes, embodied research, and ecological thought. Downing forages local materials to create site-specific installations and sculptures. Downing received her MFA in ceramics from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. She has received fellowships from the College of the Atlantic (2023), Lunder Institute of American Art (2022), and Oxbow School of Art (2021). Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Download CV
E. Saffronia Downing: Tracks and Other Signs will be on view at Old Friends, 3405 N. Paulina Street, Chicago, IL, from June 7 – July 20, 2024. For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 (917) 971-7566 or office@oldfriendsgallery.com.
Above:
The seams between the sidewalks, 2024
Risograph prints, ceramic decals, porcelain, stoneware, glaze, Chicago clay, organics, stones, glass
Crookneck, 2024, stoneware and glaze
OK SO WE’RE FIGHTING
Old Friends is pleased to present Ok So We’re Fighting, a multigenerational selection of artists invoking confrontation and conflict to relate intricate structures of identity. In dialogue with social critique, these artists play with material relationships, carrying through a syncopated sense of pattern and appreciation for the formal aesthetics of abstraction. This exhibition includes work by: Modou Dieng Yacine, William J. O’Brien, and Kris Waymire.
April 5 - May 25
Opening reception: April 5, 5-9 pm
Artists: Modou Dieng Yacine | William J. O’Brien | Kris Waymire
Old Friends is pleased to present Ok So We’re Fighting, a multigenerational selection of artists invoking confrontation and conflict to relate intricate structures of identity. In dialogue with social critique, each artist constructs playful material relationships, carrying through a syncopated sense of pattern and appreciation for the permeable space of abstraction. This exhibition includes work by: Modou Dieng Yacine, William J. O’Brien, and Kris Waymire.
Pulling conceptual friction into their material processes, these artists fix denim to photo print, pierce felt, and collage cowhide to suggest a resonant dissonance. William J. O’Brien holds this tension with levity in geometric forms that draw from legacies of Outsider and Funk art to embrace a vulnerable awkwardness. Preserving a sense of malleability, he envelops ceramic figures in an oily blue-black surface in Bashful Cover, 2023, and Puzzler, 2023. In technicolor glass beads, Kris Waymire tessellates with geometric patterns from Old Bering Sea hunting tools, using leather, sinew, and furs to reclaim familial Iñupiaq knowledge.
Modou Dieng Yacine similarly calls upon historical figures to construct an iconographic language through which he navigates Black identity and systems of colonial oppression. We all have a Lumumba, 2023 continues a series of portraits of the revolutionary Congolese politician Patrice Lumumba, projecting his gaze through serial repetition. Bestowing the figure with sunglasses and soccer jerseys in Dieng Yacine’s characteristic nod to Pop, the artist places Lumumba as an omnipresent everyman.
As each artist negotiates psychological conflicts, their works trace an inner logic. Materially rich processes meet the bodily gesture of abstraction, taking on a significant dimensionality. In this coalescence, surfaces record both physical impressions and emotional residue.
Ok So We’re Fighting will be on view at old friends, 3405 N. Paulina St., Chicago, IL from April 5 – May 25, 2024, with a reception on Friday, April 5, 5-9p. For more information, please contact the gallery at office@oldfriendsgallery.com
Above: William J. O’Brien, Bashful Cover, 2023, ceramic, 16 x 12 x 3 inches.
Must See Exhibition on Artforum
Modou Dieng Yacine (b. 1970, Senegal) is a contemporary African visual artist based in Chicago, Illinois. Dieng Yacine has spent the last 20 years between the United States and his native city of Dakar, Senegal. His work dwells on notions of asymmetrical parallelism, a term invented by African poet and philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor, defined as a diversified repetition of rhythm in time and space. Dieng Yacine attended the National School of Art in Dakar, and holds a BFA from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Senegal, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. He has been included in exhibitions internationally, at the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; and Museum of African Diaspora Art, New York, NY, among others. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC; and the Kranzberg Arts Foundation, St Louis, MO.
William J. O’Brien (b. 1975, Eastlake, OH) works in multiple media: drawing, painting, ceramic, metal sculpture, installation, and assemblage. Inspired by Modernism and the history of material usage of Outsider Art, O’Brien’s multidisciplinary practice is a search for identity and genuine expression through material and process. His prolific output in these various media offers a visual profusion of color, pattern, and exuberant excess. O’Brien has held solo exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Renaissance Society, Chicago, KMAC Museum, Louisville, MAD Museum, NYC, Witte De With, Rotterdam, and The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City among others. In 2014 he had his first major museum survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago curated by Naomi Beckwith. He has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the UCross Foundation. O’Brien has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Artadia. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Clinic, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Miami Art Museum, Pérez Art Museum, Hammer Museum, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. O’Brien is also Professor of Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Kris Waymire (b. 1999, Seattle, WA) lives and works in New York, NY. Waymire’s work is fueled by memories of power grids, combining “what does not belong.” They hold a BFA from New York University and were a recipient of the Windgate-Lamar Fellowship in 2023. Waymire has exhibited at 81 Leonard Gallery, 80 Washington Square East, and Governor’s Island WetLabs in New York, NY.
Centering
Old Friends is pleased to present Centering, a selection of artists aligned with the artistic philosophy outlined by M.C. Richards in her eponymous 1964 book. The exhibition includes work by: Ava Carney, Michelle Chun, Tong Pan, Will Schaeuble, and Emily Schroeder Willis. Each demonstrates a frank sincerity, charged with poetic perception.
March 1 - 31
Opening reception: March 1, 5-9 pm
Artists: Ava Carney | Michelle Chun | Tong Pan | Will Schaeuble | Emily Schroeder Willis
“An act of the self, that’s what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center.”
— M.C. Richards
Old Friends is pleased to present Centering, a selection of artists aligned with the artistic philosophy outlined by M.C. Richards in her 1964 book of the same name. The exhibition includes work by: Ava Carney, Michelle Chun, Tong Pan, Will Schaeuble, and Emily Schroeder Willis. Each demonstrates a frank sincerity, charged with poetic perception.
M.C. Richards, a self-described “poet potter,” seminary Black Mountain artist, and lifelong educator, defined the experience of artistic spiritual presence through the metaphor of centering in pottery. Richards’ philosophy is an ethos of authenticity - the maker, the material, and the work aligning to project the artist’s psyche. The artist is made tactile in the surface of clay, and weave of canvas.
Centering reflects internal landscapes in works which at times serve as a protective shield or protracted meditation. In Circus (2023) Schaeuble conjures a surreal vignette humming with rhythmic breath, each subject a tender impression of pigment. Chun orchestrates a collision of motion and color in Year of the Rabid, (2022), a kaleidoscopic abstraction that beams with fractals of light. Willis’ Shields (2024), reference angels and battle axes, serene figures equipped with a warning edge.
In Richards’ words, a pot “bears the future well within it.” Centering presents work that is timeless and truthful. The artists embrace a sublime intelligence, translated through revelatory expressions of self.
Please email office@oldfriendsgallery.com for inquiries.
Above: Michelle Chun, Edenic Exile, 2023, soft pastel, gouache, acrylic on raw canvas, 30 x 35 inches
Ava Carney
Ava Carney explores how distortions of the figure influence emotional and psychological responses to the human form. She received a BFA from Alfred University in 2017 and is currently pursuing an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Carney has held solo and two person exhibitions at ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Garfield Park Conservatory, Chicago, IL; and Robert C. Turner Gallery, Alfred, NY, and has been included in exhibitions at The South Shore Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; The Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; PULSE Contemporary Art Fair, Miami, FL; and many others. She has been awarded residencies at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France, and the Chicago Park District. Carney currently develops youth arts programming for the Chicago Public Libraries.
Michelle Chun
Michelle Chun (b. 1993) is a painter living and working in Chicago, IL. Chun received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016 and a MAR (Master of Arts in Religion) in Visual and Material Culture from Yale Divinity School in 2020. Chun recently held a solo exhibition at Lillstreet Art Center, Chicago, IL, and has been included in exhibitions at Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Yard: Williamsburg, New York, NY; Ice Cream Social, Port Chester, NY; and Gelman Gallery, Providence, Rhode Island among others. She has been awarded residencies at HATCH Chicago Arts Coalition (2023-24), Lillstreet Art Center (2023-24), Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist’s Residency (Longform Scholarship), and the Black Arts Movement School Modality.
Tong Pan
Tong Pan (b. 1998) is a Chinese-American interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago, who migrated from Guangzhou, China to the Bay Area of California in the fall of 2011. He received a Bachelor of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Though primarily a painter, Pan has additionally worked in glass, new media, sound design, and installation. He doubles as a musician and composer, playing in the bands Kuleshov, High-Speed Death Cult, and Tunnel, and produced a solo project dubbed Studio Practice in 2023. Pan has exhibited at Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL; Povos, Chicago, IL; and Soft System, Chicago, IL.
Will Schaeuble
William Schaeuble (b. 1999) earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. Schaeuble observes and records distinct personal moments, altering those memories through humor and intimate reference. He was featured in a solo exhibition at Povos, Chicago, IL in 2022, and has participated in group exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York City, NY; Platform (in collaboration with David Zwirner), New York City, NY/Online; and Povos, Chicago, IL.
Emily Schroeder Willis
Emily Schroeder Willis grew up in Minnesota, where she was strongly influenced by Japanese mingei traditions, as well as her mother’s upbringing in a Mennonite community. Presently, she is using the history and language of historical vessels to reevaluate the roles and spaces that women occupy. Willis received a BFA from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is an Associate Professor, Adjunct at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Willis has been featured in exhibitions at the Dubai Design Fair, UAE; the Kansas City Museum, Kansas City, MO; the Ohio Craft Museum, Wooster, OH; Ralph Arnold Gallery, Chicago, IL; and many others. She is the recipient of a Jerome Fellowship from the Northern Clay Center and the Sage Fellowship from the Archie Bray Foundation. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Archie Bray Foundation, the Zentrum für Keramik in Berlin, Germany, the Alberta University of the Arts in Canada, and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine.