{"article":{"id":6272,"title":"Amanda Williams: Her Kind of Blue","excerpt":"","body":"

Amanda Williams. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacAthur Foundation



BY ALISON REILLY


I spoke with Amanda Williams the morning her exhibition Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain opened at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York. Traveling with her family, she quietly slipped out of their hotel room before they woke up to talk with me about her journey—growing up in Chicago, her early career as an architect in the Bay Area, and the path that led her to years of research into Prussian blue pigment. Throughout our conversation, Williams reflected on how her training in architecture continues to shape her artistic practice, her deep love for Chicago, and the ways her work translates complex ideas like discriminatory housing policies into visual form. Williams will be exhibiting with Rhona Hoffman Gallery at EXPO CHICAGO from April 24-27. 



CGN: Did you grow up making art?


Amanda Williams: Yeah, I did. All of us grow up making art, and it’s the stage when we stop thinking we’re artists that’s interesting to me. I think everyone is an artist initially, and then we get all these cues from family or society that we’re not artists. I grew up making art from an early age and felt like that was a natural format for me.


CGN: What was your experience like growing up in Chicago?


AW: Oh, it was great. We had a great neighborhood, great families. Summers stand out, but in general, there were lots of kids the same age playing and making up games and super active, whether stick ball or jacks or hopscotch. There was always something we were inventing or plotting, some kind of idea we were exploring, like planting seeds from our apples. I had a really great experience. I have one brother who’s six years younger, so despite the age we were very close and had a lot of friends in the neighborhood. We went to a school across town that was really wonderful and gave us a completely different set of perspectives and friends and so forth. 


CGN: How has your relationship to this city changed?


AW: I don’t think my relationship to the city has changed. I’ve always been in love with the city. My passions and my desire to care for it and make it better have always been there, but the sophistication with which I can express that has changed. A lot of people say they don’t like Chicago anymore. They say it’s not what it was. There’s definitely elements that I can understand. But in a lot of ways for a lot of people, the city has always had its limitations and its inequities. It’s not that those things haven’t been impactful in shaping the work that I do, but it’s never been a reason why I don’t think the city is great. My through line is that I really love and believe in the city.




Installation view: Amanda Williams: Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain, Casey Kaplan, New York, February 28 - April 26, 2025. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio




CGN: When did you know that you wanted to be an architect and an artist? 


AW: As long as I can remember, I knew that would be my orbit. The drive to go into architecture initially was fueled by nervous parents who couldn’t really see a runway for what life as an artist might be, especially for black people in the seventies to imagine that as a viable career. My parents, well-meaning, but naively thought that, well, she’s really good at drawing, and she’s really smart, so that sounds like an architect. Architecture is stable. Growing up in Chicago, you know, somebody joked architecture’s like the fifth sport. In many ways, you wonder why everyone doesn’t want to be an architect in Chicago, because we have such an amazing cross-section of both historic skyscrapers and the Burnham Plan. I would also argue that neighborhoods and what I experienced growing up had an equal influence. But for as long as I can remember, I said I would be an architect. 


It drove a lot of my thinking until I got to college at Cornell University. It was a really fantastic experience. There were lots of other Chicagoans there and lots of folks that came from very similar experiences. I didn’t realize it until hindsight, but it was a really special time to be at Cornell in architecture, in particular. 


CGN: Did you stay in New York then or come back to Chicago?


AW: I actually graduated and moved immediately to the Bay Area. When I graduated, the economy was very different than right now for the job landscape. There was an abundance of enthusiasm and projects and work. The Bay Area was an epicenter of the dotcom boom–the Silicon Valley boom was in full swing. That meant a lot of opportunities, a lot of jobs, and very creative, ambitious thinking around technology and enterprise. It was a wonderful time to be there. I graduated and had a job immediately, as did my classmates. That transition looks nothing like what I see young people experiencing now. 


I worked for about six and a half years as an architect in two firms, McCall Design Group, and then SMWM–Simon Martin-Vegue Winkelstein Moris. The founders and principals of both firms played instrumental roles as mentors, informally, and then helped me make the professional decision to transition from architecture to take this huge leap into art full time. Mike McCall and Cathy Simon, principals respectively of McCall Design Group and SMWM, were huge cheerleaders and thought partners.


CGN: What kinds of projects were you working on? 


AW: At McCall Design Group, they did a lot of retail work, which involves very fast-paced projects where you are essentially upholding a style guide or a standard that a company has created for themselves. It was exciting and allowed me as a recent graduate and junior architect the ability to see the entire project all the way through, very quickly. At SMWM, they did a lot of civic work, and I was part of this incredible team, probably 30 people, working on the reimagining and refurbishment of the San Francisco Ferry Building. Chicago has a pier, but not every city has that kind of architecture. Then to be involved in a moment where the building was gaining a new life, and we were mining the history of its old life. I was happy to be riding on the coattails of fantastic leaders that really helped me see the process. 




Amanda Williams, In Her Rich Deposits of (Blue), 2024, New Orleans African American Museum for the Prospect.6 Triennial. Courtesy of Amanda Williams LLC and Tom Harris Photography.


Amanda Williams, In Her Rich Deposits of (Blue), 2024, New Orleans African American Museum for the Prospect.6 Triennial. Courtesy of Amanda Williams LLC and Tom Harris Photography.



CGN: How has your training as an architect influenced your work now?


AW: Being an architect was absolutely amazing and fun. I think it did what I imagined it was going to do. What I, in hindsight, understand is that I’ve always been interested in space. Architecture is a part of that, but spatial experiences, spatial practices, the way people navigate space, the way culture and power influence the way people can move through space and what they get to do in those spaces. That’s really more intriguing to me and really what drives a lot of the way I think about public art and installations and to some degree even the studio based two-dimensional paintings and other media, works on paper, photography and so forth. But architectural education is such an amazing training, because it really is about teaching you how to think a certain way and to problem solve creatively. 


It’s also been so central to the way that I imagine projects, either ones that are commissioned or I’m invited to participate in, like Prospect New Orleans or Venice Biennale, but also projects I generate myself, like Redefining Redlining. I’m always trying to think about making that translation of a complex idea that you can understand in words, but what would it mean to expand that so you’re seeing a symbol or a translation of it in another medium? You understand racism, you understand segregation, but how do you translate segregation into art? How do you translate racist housing practices into art? Those processes take longer for me to come up with strategies, but it is definitely impacted and fueled by an ability to think creatively through this architectural training that I had. I might not be making buildings in the traditional sense as an architect, but I very much still carry the identity of architect, because a lot of the ways that I have to go about imagining and executing projects feels very similar.





“I come to every project with color as the foundation. I’m either thinking about a specific palette that reminds me of something I want to talk about, like the red for Redlining and using tulips as the source material or Candy Lady Black and thinking about these saturated colors of candies that I would enjoy growing up and the extended significance of the candy lady as a kind of grandmother figure in the neighborhood giving these sweet confections.”
 - Amanda Williams




CGN: I read about your research into George Washington Carver’s blue and your collaboration with Tuskegee University and University of Chicago to reproduce the pigment and then paint an arts building at Xavier University and a shotgun style house at the New Orleans African American Museum. What did you learn as part of that process and why was it important for you to continue Carver’s work? 


AW: I come to every project with color as the foundation. I’m either thinking about a specific palette that reminds me of something I want to talk about, like the red for Redlining and using tulips as the source material, or with CandyLadyBlack, thinking about these saturated colors of candies that I would enjoy growing up–and the extended significance of the candy lady as a kind of grandmother figure in the neighborhood giving these sweet confections. 


It wasn’t like I started with George Washington Carver–it was that I stumbled upon this patent for the color blue, and he happened to be the person that had done it. I thought it was strange that you’d have a patent for a color, because we imagine that color belongs to everybody and that it’s just always been there. We don’t really think about the origins of color as a material and so that seemed very intriguing to me. When I learned that it was Carver who had patented it, I thought, “Is this the same Carver, the peanut Carver? This guy has three patents and they’re not for sweet potatoes or peanuts or all the things that he’s known for? Why?” 


There was research done at Tuskegee, and then simultaneously working with chemistry students at the University of Chicago, to try to get at it from an empirical standpoint but then also this historical component to piece together parts of the story that may not be obvious. Historically, this is 1927. At this time most black people are trying to stay alive. This is very similar to the moment we find ourselves in now. After Reconstruction, a period called Redemption occurs where white people in power didn’t like that black people had figured out a way to start to integrate themselves into society, so there was a huge pushback. This is the moment we find ourselves seeing Carver own a color, essentially. The patent is for a method to make an existing color, Prussian blue. Prussian blue had been accidentally discovered well before that in Europe in the early 1700s. The color’s not new, the synthetic making of the color’s not new, but his ability to understand that there was the source material of the clay that was in abundance on Tuskegee’s campus could be used as a substitute. I’m reducing it a lot but essentially, iron within the red clay that’s in the soil in Alabama, North Carolina, and many parts of the South, could be used as source material. 


That seemed very powerful when you think about ownership and identity and then tying that to some kind of financial value and autonomy. This was the opportunity potentially to use the sales of a synthetic paint that Carver could make from the pigment to fund the work that the university was doing. That was the brainchild of Booker T. Washington who was the president and founder of Tuskegee. He was always enterprising and quick to think about things like this. Carver and Washington did try to start a paint company, but it did not succeed. More research is needed, but I suspect that good old-fashioned racism is going to be at the top of the list of factors that made it quite difficult. Carver was an artist as well, and so the more I dug into the biography, the more intrigued and interested I got in him as such a multifaceted person.


At the same time, I was retracing those chemistry steps to see what it might mean to try to follow the recipe of the patent to make the pigment. That process took about a year, and then from there I was able to find a partner in a New-York based company that has facilities in Germany, called Kremer Pigments. The students at University of Chicago were able to make the pigment in very small volumes, and Kremer took the recipe and further refined it and made it at a larger volume for me, so that I could make paint from the pigment.


That led to applications of that pigment with [Prospect] New Orleans being one and then the show at Casey Kaplan Gallery is the culmination of more traditional paintings on canvas, abstractions. I’m debuting 20 paintings and 10 collages that all use this pigment in some form. There’s watercolors, casein, and distemper. These are the traditional media that Carver likely would have used in his own artwork and in painting structures in the Tuskegee area. 




Amanda Williams, In Her Rich Deposits of (Blue), 2024, New Orleans African American Museum for the Prospect.6 Triennial. Courtesy of Amanda Williams LLC and Tom Harris Photography.




CGN: Congratulations on your show. That blue is so powerful, so I’m excited to see it translated into your work. 


AW: Yeah, it’s amazing because it behaves very differently. These media behave very differently than oil, which is what I paint with most of the time. When you’re asking about learning, I’ve described a lot of the research that had to go into understanding the elements, but the learning in terms of an art practice or an art form was very driven by having to try to start to master new painting media. Making things from scratch versus just going to Blick and picking out the tubes of color. It’s not a lost art, a lot of people still do it, but the mixing of your own colors even from pre-mixed base colors, I took a certain pride in that I always make my black, and I always make my palettes, but it’s from a pre-bought tube of something else, so to go one step back was not a party trick or trying to show off. It really was like, “Oh, okay, wow we did all this just to get this pigment, but wait a minute, pigment, it’s not paint. How do we do that? We have to mull it and grind it, then what do we do?” 


There was a lot of technical learning but also just letting the material be what it is. Each of these media behave differently–they’re like personalities–oil, watercolor, acrylic, casein, tempera, all of those behave very differently. You really have to allow the medium to be what it wants to be. That’s also a beautiful metaphor or signifier, that the best results come when you let people be who they can be. 


CGN: What other projects do you have coming up? 


AW: The number one project should be rest, so I’m going to try to do that. I haven’t been successful with that yet, but I’ve been going hard and long and strong for a long time. But I do have some public projects that will be coming up in Chicago. One is an intervention upon the George Washington statue that sits at the northwest corner of Washington Park. That’s part of a multi-pronged grant that former DCASE commissioner Erin Harkey secured for the city for eight or nine different public projects including the Torture Justice Memorial and some projects by Brendan Fernandes. I’m one of the artists. A Long Walk Home is doing a tribute to Rekia Boyd. A beautiful cross section of projects that are both new and then also ones that support retelling. 


I’m hoping to reframe the way we think about George Washington Carver, literally with a frame. The project is called The Other Washingtons, and it looks at the biographies and the significance in a neighborhood of other people with the last name Washington that might be more important or impactful to the lives of the residents of Washington Park in Bronzeville. Whether that be Denzel or Harold or Dinah or Candice Washington, who’s an amazing educator on the South Side, who should go down in history, but maybe won’t have the largesse of George Washington. What does it mean to bring Candice’s biography and put it in conversation with George Washington? Her presence is going to make more of an impact in that community with the work that she does with young people than their understanding of a largely embellished biography of George Washington. It’s not erasing him or erasing the legacy of what it means to monumentalize individuals, but what does it mean when that’s applied across the board, whether you’re famous or not, whether you are white and male or not? That project is in the works and will probably come in the fall or early in 2026.





Installation view: Amanda Williams: Run Together and Look Ugly After the First Rain, Casey Kaplan, New York, February 28 - April 26, 2025. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio




CGN: Earlier you mentioned the moment that we’re in right now. Has your own artistic approach shifted at all as a result of Donald Trump’s election and his administration’s attempts to censor Black history and dismantle programs meant to fight systemic inequity? How are you thinking about your work in light of the current political climate? 


AW: No, it hasn’t shifted–not one bit. I was saying to somebody recently, there’s never been a moment where the majority of Black Americans have felt like they’re not fighting for their lives. There are small ebbs and flows of life seeming to get better or seeing the result of that commitment to be steadfast and fight. Anybody that’s surprised or not understanding how we got to this moment, maybe either isn’t old enough to have already cycled through other moments that were really bad in terms of Black history, and it’s not just Black history, it’s American history. America likes to glom onto Blackness, which is ironic, right? Because the atrocities have nothing to do with the victim, it has to do with the perpetrator. The responsibility always seems to fall on the person being oppressed. 

These are the things I’ve always been talking about. They feel amplified now because the temperature has been turned up on the people that don’t want that to happen. When that temperature got turned up, they turned their temperature up. I’m glad I’m a parent, because I can observe all this behavior as I did when I had toddlers. When it’s time to go to bed, and you’re really sleepy and you know you’re losing the battle, you throw a tantrum. You run, you knock things over, you do whatever you can to distract from the fact that the inevitability is coming: you’re going to fall asleep. I see it in that same way, where we’re in this last surge of fighting against the reality, which is that straight, white men are not the majority in this country, and they’re going to fight to the death to maintain that power. While it’s disconcerting–it’s distracting, it’s draining, it’s all of those things–the people who have had to fight that at different degrees their entire lives are not surprised. This is not to at all minimize being scared, the violence with which these things that we assumed were pillars are being ripped. But they are all constructs. We’ve just gone along with it because many of these things seem like inalienable rights. 


My strategy is to stay the course, doing what I’m doing. Obviously, as young people say, have your head on swivel. I’m not naive to imminent danger, but I don’t give oxygen to fire; I have to be water. Not to sound hokey, but we have to be the thing that remains the constant. The more of us who know that, we can link together and help those of us who are maybe experiencing something so heinous for the first time. 


These are active stories from my childhood. My father was from Memphis, my mother is from Alabama. My day-to-day experience in Auburn Gresham was not hoses and dogs, and being turned away at lunch counters, but those are active stories. That’s not past-tense. My father picked cotton. I went to private school–imagine the leap! He was college-educated as well, but he existed in a time where that was a job. 


Technology has pressed the fast forward as well as the amnesia button, and so right now it seems that much more traumatic. The strategies for not being harmed by that trauma are not present, because people have gotten comfortable–they either have never had to experience it, or they are a generation removed from when that felt like an active threat. We’re hopeful that people have resilience enough to push through, but the majority of people who are feeling overwhelmed is a result of not ever having to think about this. 


AMANDA WILLIAMS: RUN TOGETHER AND LOOK UGLY AFTER THE FIRST RAIN is on view at Casey Kaplan Gallery in New York thru APRIL 26, 2025 at Caseykaplangallery.com


View more information and works at:

awstudioart.com 

and rhoffmangallery.com


#





This article appears in the Spring/Summer 2025 issue of CGN. Click here to subscribe and receive the print edition in early April. Subscriptions help support independent print media and Chicago's art community.


 

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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.





Nikko Washington – 

Artist


“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.”


Nikko Washington


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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.




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.


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.



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.



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. 


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. 



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.


andicrist.com



Andi Crist, Extension Cords, Glazed stoneware, chrome, Sizes vary 2021-present. Photo: Mikey Mosher



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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. 




Debra Kerr – 

CEO, Intuit Art Museum


“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.”


Intuit Art Museum

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