![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1721418167/itdrdtvw7b68klneai3i.jpg\")
By KEVIN NANCE
\r\n\r\nThere will be no special exhibit, no monograph, no hoopla whatsoever commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Richard Gray Gallery this fall. “We spent a lot of time thinking about that, but didn’t come up with anything that needed to be done,” gallery director Paul Gray says one recent morning in his office at the John Hancock Center. “Fifty years is a substantial achievement, I recognize that, but we looked at things others have done on major anniversaries, and none of them inspired me to devote time to that. We started work on a publication, but it seemed self-indulgent and not very meaningful, so we canceled it.”
\r\n\r\n","body":"By KEVIN NANCE
There will be no special exhibit, no monograph, no hoopla whatsoever commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Richard Gray Gallery this fall. “We spent a lot of time thinking about that, but didn’t come up with anything that needed to be done,” gallery director Paul Gray says one recent morning in his office at the John Hancock Center. “Fifty years is a substantial achievement, I recognize that, but we looked at things others have done on major anniversaries, and none of them inspired me to devote time to that. We started work on a publication, but it seemed self-indulgent and not very meaningful, so we canceled it.”
So, this fall it will be business as usual: two major openings (new paintings by Alex Katz September 20–November 2, 2013, followed by a show of older works by David Hockney at Frieze Masters in London and later in Chicago), participation in large international art fairs (including EXPO CHICAGO at Navy Pier) and the usual whirl of buying, selling and brokering transactions of mostly blue-chip work by famous artists to deep-pocketed clients in the Windy City and around the world. The gallery’s clients now include more than 10 percent of the Forbes 400 list, including nine members from the Chicago area, as well as similarly high-rolling collectors and museum curators from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South America. In 2012, sales were just under $100 million.
The decision to avoid anniversary-related festivities is both typical of Paul Gray (who took over management of the city’s most successful gallery from his father, Richard Gray, nearly two decades ago) and telling. The younger Gray, now 58, is known for his preference for a tightly focused business strategy, concentrating on a single niche of the art market—the high end—rather than the more eclectic approach once favored by his father, who dealt in antiquities, tribal art and works on paper in addition to the early and mid-20th-century paintings and sculpture that have always been the gallery’s primary stock-in-trade.
“My father always wanted to be sure that there were many opportunities for success in the course of the year, but I felt that that was making us more mediocre on all levels, that we were spreading ourselves a little thin,” says Gray, whose hair, elegantly tailored suit and even his argyle socks are visual reminders of his family name. “I wanted to be more of an expert in something, so I decided to specialize in more expensive art, regardless of medium, and I wanted to relate to collectors who were a little further along on thedevelopment timeline—collectors who were really knowledgeable and demanding, and who would be appreciative of whatever we could bring to them.” If it can’t be done well, in short, Paul Gray doesn’t want to do it, including anniversary celebrations.
The Richard Gray Gallery opened on November 4, 1963, at 155 E. Ontario. The elder Gray—his son was 9 years old at the time—had worked for his own father for several years and had been casting about for a new direction. Trained as an architect, he’d long been interested in the visual arts, particularly painting and sculpture, and he’d married into a family of art collectors. When a friend suggested that he open an art gallery, it struck him as an opportunity to combine business with pleasure.
“Maybe because of my architecture background, I had a particular interest in draftsmanship, prints and drawings,” says Richard Gray, 84. “When I opened the gallery, I had the idea that I’d be handling that kind of thing, and that’s what happened. I started out by representing established and emerging artists primarily working on paper.” Quickly, however, Gray sold works by a number of painters and sculptors, including Jules Olitski, Morris Louis, Louise Nevelson, Hans Hofmann, Fernand Léger and Jim Dine, an impressive list that would eventually grow to include Hockney, Josef Albers, Joseph Cornell, Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Roy Lichtenstein, Agnes Martin, Henry Moore, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol, among many others. Gray also made significant forays into aboriginal and African art.
“My standards were about trusting my own eye, my own sense of aesthetics,” Gray recalls. “It wasn’t the particular style or period that interested me; it was the individual work of art.”
Demonstrating a talent for networking with artists and clients, Gray quickly established a reputation as the Chicago gallery with the deepest bench, the longest reach and the highest ambition. “They were the best gallery in Chicago, as far as I was concerned,” says Dine, still one of the Grays’ most-shown artists. “Richard has a tremendous eye and a great world view, and he was really the only truly international gallery in Chicago for a long time. I was very pleased to be there.”
For most of his youth and early adulthood, Paul Gray gave little thought to the prospect of joining the family business. He was mildly interested in visual art—like his father, he had dabbled in painting and drawing in high school—but lacked a deep or abiding passion for it. As his father went about the business of making the gallery into a success, the younger Gray was no more absorbed by the process than most young people are in the careers of their parents. “I was raised around the art world and didn’t totally take it for granted, but I didn’t idolize it in any way, either,” he recalls. “It certainly wasn’t preordained that I would go into this field. I didn’t even think about it until I was nearly 30.”
After five years as a theater producer on the East Coast, Gray returned to Chicago to attend graduate school at Columbia College and began working at his father’s gallery one day a week, hanging art, making follow-up calls to artists and clients, and generally learning the business. It was a ground-up apprenticeship that eventually led to his succeeding his father as managing partner in 1994. (Richard Gray maintains a presence at the gallery, where he keeps an office from which he manages his personal affairs, but he no longer plays an active role in its management.) Paul Gray opened a New York branch of the gallery in 1996. In years since then, he gradually phased out many of his father’s initiatives, including separate departments for tribal art and prints and drawings, as part of his overall strategy to pursue a narrower and potentially more lucrative focus on the market’s highest strata.
As part of that process, the younger Gray also represents fewer emerging or even mid-career artists than his father did. There are exceptions, such as Jan Tichy, a Czech-born new-media and video artist who moved to Chicago to attend the School of the Art Institute. “Jan is very busy, but he doesn’t have a large commercial market at this point, and he doesn’t have any commercial impact on our business,” Gray says. “But I took him on because I find his work compelling.” Still, Tichy is the exception that proves the rule.
“Of course Paul had his own notions, his own particular tastes, some of which were different from mine,” Richard Gray says now. “But he’s done extremely well, building a first-rate reputation, not just in Chicago but internationally. I was absolutely happy for him to do his own thing.”
In at least one respect, Paul Gray is a chip off the old block. Just like his dad, he quickly showed a flair for cultivating professional and sometimes deeply personal relationships with clients and artists, despite—or perhaps because of—the latter group’s reputation for eccentricity and prickliness. “Artists play a special role in culture, because they’re the bravest, most adventurous, the most willing to bare their souls in public,” he says. “They have a lot to teach us, and that’s why people are drawn to their work. On the other hand, I think most artists would acknowledge that they’re not the easiest people to be close to, because they’re pretty uncompromising and pretty self-involved; they’re focused on making that next discovery in their work. They can be social, but they can be highly antisocial also, and that’s one of the things I respect about them.”
Gray has formed a particularly close relationship with the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, best known in Chicago for his Crown Fountain in Millennium Park, and to whose portfolio Gray now assigns two full-time staff members. About the same age, Gray and Plensa initially met at the artist’s first show in Chicago in 1996. “We hit it off in two seconds,” Plensa recalls. “Since that day Paul and I have grown together, developing a beautiful friendly relationship. Richard and his wife, Mary, really embraced me as one more member of their family, and I consider Paul a brother, even though he insists on teaching me to swim in any ocean despite knowing that I can only swim in the Dead Sea.”
Paul Gray has also proved adept at the delicate art of connecting some of the world’s richest art collectors with each other, acting as a go-between in private transactions involving large egos and even larger sums. In his biggest such coup several years ago, Gray brokered a deal between Los Angeles mogul David Geffen and Chicago hedge-fund billionaires Anne and Kenneth Griffin. The Griffins, regular clients of Gray’s, were interested in acquiring a Jackson Pollock; Geffen, also a client, was interested in selling one—for which purpose Gray introduced the two sides. “Over lunch at Geffen’s home, Ken Griffin’s eyes kept drifting toward a very, very important Jasper Johns painting on the wall nearby,” Gray recalls. “When we left the house, he said to me, ‘I think that painting is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen.’”
The Griffins didn’t buy Geffen’s Pollock, but after a week of intense negotiations overseen by Gray, the Griffins purchased Johns’s False Start (1959) for $80 million, the highest price ever paid for the work of a living artist at the time. (The Griffins have since loaned the work for exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Art.) In the process, Gray’s reputation as an experienced liaison between collectors buying and selling art to each other was cemented.
“It used to be that any serious art collector in Chicago would come by the gallery at least once a month, but that rarely happens now,” says Gray, who recently moved the gallery to a larger space with higher ceilings on the Hancock Center’s 38th floor. “Now we largely go to the collectors as advisors and curators. It’s part of the evolution of the business.” The Richard Gray Gallery keeps evolving right along with it.
Image: Paul Gray, photo by Kevin Nance
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'whatsoev':24B 'whirl':180B 'whose':412B,1478B 'wife':1534B 'will':1362B 'willem':695B 'windi':203B 'work':106B,152B,192B,341B,532B,650B,657B,764B,1012B,1235B,1387B,1429B,1759B,1773B 'world':208B,828B,943B,1590B 'would':476B,683B,971B,1396B,1825B 'year':2A,74B,388B,526B,539B,990B,1102B,1620B 'york':1094B 'young':928B 'younger':296B,917B,1152B 'youth':856B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721767374/uiuz2zjheyctfwa9rhvy.jpg","editor_pick":false,"category_name":"Interviews"},"related":[{"id":13767,"title":"Anticipating a Season of Art: Five to Talk to – Nikko Washington","excerpt":"","body":"Fall offers a full slate of exhibitions across galleries and museums throughout the Midwest. Behind the scenes, many people in the community are working tirelessly to support artists and bring fresh perspectives to the public. We spoke with five insiders about what excites them now and what they anticipate next.
The following preview is one of five conversations that appear in CGN's Fall 2026 magazine. To receive a copy of the print edition click here.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1789517637/noxz9olp47gfneafz8xg.jpg\")
“I’m thrilled to further expand my artistic and design practice by introducing other mediums into the mix. I’m looking forward to watching the seasons change and devoting a lot of time in the studio as well. Fall/winter is my favorite time to create new works.
I have an upcoming solo show with VSG Contemporary that I am excited about. The work will delve further into the topics of cultural mythology and how these tales and narratives have helped shape my worldview.
Also, it wouldn’t be right if I left out my excitement for this upcoming season of Chicago sports.”
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961823/s3lp0uull2s8mvd8funj.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Extension Cords, Glazed stoneware, chrome, Sizes vary 2021-present. Photo: Mikey Mosher
This interview is part of CGN's Fall 2026 issue. Purchase a copy or subscribe.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961824/mghrpnghxd9j9ko2dsjt.jpg\")
Andi Crist
BY ALISON REILLY
Andi Crist’s warm, engaging demeanor is evident in the first few minutes of our conversation. Generous with her time and forthcoming in her observations, she cares deeply about building relationships through her art making. Crist grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, devoured art classes, wrote songs and played music in high school, and moved to Chicago to study visual art at Columbia College. In 2024, she received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a woodworker, sculptor, ceramicist, and conceptual artist, and she teaches at Illinois Institute of Technology. We discussed her multidisciplinary practice, her experience working as an art handler, preparator, and fabricator, and how she thinks about labor, creativity, and value in the art world.
CGN: You grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. How did that environment shape your point of view as an artist?
Andi Crist: That’s such a funny question. Nobody’s ever really asked.
CGN: Oh, really?
AC: Yeah, maybe because I never was super connected with the arts community down in Birmingham. I moved to Chicago in 2007, so it’s been 20 years since I lived in the South. I was definitely one of those art kids—one art credit was required in high school, and I graduated with like seven. I was surrounded by artists who had a big impact on me, because they were working artists. All my art teachers were trained in Alabama and then continued to teach and work in Alabama, which gave me this desire to try to expand my community outside of what I was familiar with.
CGN: Do you identify as a Chicagoan?
AC: My family still lives in Alabama, and I go back every year. I love being in Alabama. Maybe now being in Chicago for almost 20 years, I identify as a southerner living in the city. I carry on the social qualities of a friendly southern person [laughs].
CGN: You have a varied art practice—woodwork, ceramics, mold making. What drew you to those types of fabrication methods and that type of art making?
AC: My dad is a carpenter and a hobbyist woodworker, but his career was psychology, and my mom was a professor and an incredible craftswoman. I absorbed my mom’s model of creativity, which is to try a bunch of different things and not necessarily finish them but to try to learn as much as I can by just going for it. My practice over the years has become an exploration of conceptual elements of what makes art art and not just craft. Do you have to be a master craftsperson or a professional artist in order to make something that resonates with people?
I make a lot of work that references the mode of making and requires a variety of different media. I just finished teaching a ceramics production class where students learned how to produce molds, think about positives and negatives, and get into a level of production rather than just handicraft as a way to multiply their output.
I got into fabrication because I’ve always liked working with other artists. I have a background in theater and gallery work. I’m a voracious learner, and I like being able to share those skills with my community. Then I end up making work about that. It’s a self-feeding cycle.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961825/zzejqwibga5f5wk6einh.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Artist’s Ladder, 2023. Photo: Jeff Perlman
CGN: Thinking about your background as an art handler and preparator—how did you get to the point where you were making work about that experience?
AC: In 2010, right before I graduated from Columbia, I was living in a storefront in West Logan Square with my partner at the time. We started a gallery called Autotelic in the space and had to build it out using the worst tools with very minimal resources. Then we started curating shows there and that meant helping other artists figure out how to install their work in our unusual space. Eventually, I gained the reputation for knowing how to do that type of work. I started getting invited to work in museums and galleries.
The Holocaust Museum was the first museum I worked at, and as difficult as that subject matter is, that experience was really important to me because I was learning more about the larger world of gallery work. As an artist working as a preparator, you’re straddling both sides of that space. You’re really seeing how the sausage is made. You’re hearing all the conversations about artists, curators, the process of exhibition making. There is a lot of information you can gather about the economics of the art world by just being the person that has the know-how to touch and handle artwork. Eventually that started feeding into my art practice because I wanted to make work that was contributing to a conversation around art as a type of job. It fueled a methodology of seeing everything in the world as the result of a long line of processes that required effort and thoughtfulness by many hands.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961826/uv5bysb5fbne30gr5czh.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Fair Warning, 2025.
CGN: The title of your recent exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum—Live, Laugh, Lo—sorry, not Live, Laugh, Love—Live, Laugh, Labor.
AC: [Laughs] That’s what everybody does.
CGN: I love the title—it’s perfect. You incorporate humor along with thoughtful critiques about labor and value in your work. What role does humor play? How does it help you connect with your audience?
AC: One of my biggest criticisms of art with a capital A is how easily it can be overly intellectualized. I think that’s why I end up making a lot of work that references things that already exist or have some kind of real purpose. It’s important to give people a foothold so there’s an obvious place to board that train of thought. As an artist—maybe this is me getting into a sweeping argument about what artists should be—but I personally believe in intellectual accessibility. Humor is a swift way to drop defenses and allow people to come in without feeling like they are not getting the joke or not understanding. I like to make work that can hold both of those things at the same time—it’s funny on the surface level, it’s kind of cheeky, but there’s also another way to look at it that is intellectually clever. There is a joy in the attempt to “get it”. Like the satisfaction of grasping how a crossword puzzle actually works.
It’s also so much a part of my personality. I take myself seriously as an artist, but my ego isn’t at the heart of it. It’s really something that I do because I love to make things, and I love to connect with other people. My parents raised me on puns, creating those language relationships between things and people and space. Understanding a joke is the same way that we understand art, and while neither of my parents would consider themselves artists, they taught me how to think about art.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961828/gnotyfijabr7e15kb6hm.jpg\")
Andi Crist, 69 Bananas
CGN: Your work, Artist’s Ladder, explores hierarchies, workplace cultures, and institutional values. What experiences shaped your reflections on these themes?
AC: The ladder piece distinctly represents the complicated relationship between front of house, back of house, and the hierarchy of labor. Who is the artist in those relationships? How much does another person’s knowledge and expertise contribute to the success of another artist?
There are enormous, industrialized art practices out there, warehouses full of people making things, and those people are also artists. When you make work that involves other people, it’s important to acknowledge their contributions. I’ve had complicated interactions with other artists who are like, ‘Hey, do you want to collaborate with me on this thing?’ but really they just want me to make their idea. I made Artist’s Ladder while I was in grad school at UIC, and it really represented my relationship with a lot of other artists, because I could be an actual support structure for them. Then it turned into this absurd physical thing. It’s extremely overbuilt with inlaid racing stripes made of exotic hardwood, and a butcher’s block-style plaid top. It’s not really like an FU as much as it is asking for acknowledgement of my skills and the essential support structures that exist.
CGN: I want to ask you about another piece, Five O’Clock Somewhere, a wool rug that resembles a children’s play mat. I work at a library, and it reminded me of rugs I see all the time. It’s a peaceful image of an office park with a large fountain surrounded by a parking lot. I’m curious why you chose a rug as the medium to depict that image.
AC: To me the heart of that joke was that it was a landscape. I wanted it to be physically traversable. And that was, I don’t want to say controversial, but it was something that I had to talk about a lot. The critique of that work was the fact that I didn’t want to hang it on the wall and turn it into a tapestry. I really wanted it to be a rug that people could walk on. When I showed that work at Chicago Artists Coalition for the New City Breakout Artists show. There was a lot of pushback about having it on the floor and allowing people to walk on it.
That, to me, was such an important conversation, because, in my mind, the fact that you could walk across it and traverse it was part of how I was thinking about the object. Rugs are utilitarian–they are floor coverings. When you make art that doesn’t do anything, you don’t get to participate in that part of the conversation.
I enjoy sparring around art like that. I am totally tickled by the pushback. The critique of display is exciting, and sorting through the politics of utilitarianism in art spaces is fun to me. And then—it was so crazy—we ended up showing it halfway on the wall and halfway on the ground.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961829/r1zylkwfw9rkw191skdl.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Five O’Clock Somewhere, on display at Live, Laugh, Labor: Thoughts on Usefulness and Other Myths at The Cleve Carney Museum of Art, 2025.
CGN: Oh, wow.
AC: I was like, this is the epitome of compromise! I had to build a structure so that it could hang that way safely.
CGN: I would say just put it on the ground if that’s what you want to do. It’s interesting that there are still very fixed ideas about the way that art should be displayed.
AC: That preparator part of it, that’s what I’m all about. I was having that conversation about what physically supports the work or what conceptually supports it in the way that it’s shown.
CGN: Have you always been a writer? How do your art and writing practices work together?
AC: I can’t say that I’m a writer, it’s probably the same way that it can feel weird to call yourself an artist. But I feel like I’ve always been relatively good at writing. The first time I ever did any kind of professional writing was contributing, a long time ago, to a website called eHow. The editors would send me a title, and then I would have to research how to do that thing. Then I would write out step-by-step instructions for how to do that.
I think that’s how I had to make myself think through my conceptual practice—I had to do the research, coagulate that into some kind of document, and then I would have stream-of-consciousness conversations with myself. “Why are we interested in this? Why would we make it this way? What would I want to talk about if someone were to ask me about this?” It’s almost like I was pre-interviewing myself.
I think the writing is just another way for me to process that idea before I put in all of the time and energy to actually accomplish it.
CGN: What are you working on right now? What projects do you have coming up?
AC: The biggest project that I have right now is my house. My family and I suffered a major house fire on New Year’s Day. We’ve been displaced since then and are navigating rebuilding our house. It was a total loss.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961830/kekfqzf9f87fq48juogh.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Single-Use Fireplace, 2025. Photo: Mikey Mosher.
CGN: I’m so sorry to hear that.
AC: Thank you. We’re all okay, but it’s been a really tumultuous year. I moved my studio into a storefront last summer, and so most of my, at least relatively recent, work is safe, and I still have all of my materials, but my home life is starting over. I just had my first full year at this space, and it’s got a little gallery built out in the front called Coming Soon. It’s beautiful with floor-to-ceiling windows on Division and Central Park. I’ve been inviting people into the space to try things out.
After teaching the ceramics class, I came into a bunch of nice slip casting molds, and I’m making some really playful, weird, ceramic stuff. I want to be open and not put too much pressure on myself. Having a big studio by myself is very expensive, so it’s easy to want to make it feel like it’s worth it. But if for now all I can do is make it a resource for other people, then that will be the thing I do. Be less selfish, but more selfish with my time. Saying I can’t do that, or I don’t want to do that. It’s not my nature to say no—I’m such a yes man. I’m learning how to be a yes man for myself.
CGN: That makes sense after going through something so traumatic.
AC: I have an amazing support system. Our friends started a GoFundMe. It was incredible. I’m so humbled and floored by how held I felt by Chicago. I can’t help but throw a little shout out to my Chicago people. I can see how people’s lives get totally ruined by this kind of tragedy. I feel so lucky. Chicago definitely showed its love back.
CGN: For your project Coming Soon, are you bringing in other artists?
AC: My philosophy is that I want to be involved as little as possible. I am thinking about it more as a hosted than curated space. I’m actively soliciting proposals or ideas for workshops, meetings, book clubs—I’m down for making it a resource, whatever that means. I don’t want to over-think it, I want it to be an intuitive and organic thing, which is why I call it Coming Soon—it can be a placeholder for anything. It’s exciting. Taking my hands off the reins is a good exercise for me.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961831/gno5dhliwfnzpuaim78s.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Extension Cords, Glazed stoneware, chrome, Sizes vary 2021-present. Photo: Mikey Mosher
Fall offers a full slate of exhibitions across galleries and museums throughout the Midwest. Behind the scenes, many people in the community are working tirelessly to support artists and bring fresh perspectives to the public. We spoke with five insiders about what excites them now and what they anticipate next.
The following preview is one of five conversations that appear in CGN's Fall 2026 magazine. To receive a copy of the print edition click here.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1789516769/izokunnmrufdyjbjnypk.jpg\")
“Intuit Art Museum’s renovated, expanded spaces give audiences the chance to connect with art through daily art-making, third Thursday Art After Work, group Slow Looks designed to provide a mindful experience with a single work and upcoming conversations with sculptor Bill Brady (Oct. 3) and Dr. Mary Trent (Oct. 15), who curated our current exhibition on the role of scrapbook-making in Henry Darger’s art.
On view is the thought-provoking Monumental: The Sculpture of Dr. Charles Smith, which encourages guests to consider the lack of historical representation of African Americans and Black people in America. Dr. Smith’s memorials champion Black history and stories of everyday life he sees missing in mainstream narratives.
This fall we’re opening an exhibition of paintings by Karla Wong, an artist who immigrated from Oaxaca and who explores themes of life and death, gender identity and self-discovery.”