{"article":{"id":81,"title":"Artist Insights: Judy Ledgerwood","excerpt":"

BY LAURA M. METTAM

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Judy Ledgerwood’s bold use of color and pattern transforms the spaces in which her art exists. She establishes a dichotomy between precision and abstraction, order and chaos, the vividly decorative and the subtly conceptual. Ledgerwood has received numerous awards from prestigious arts organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts and Artadia. Her work is held in international private collections as well as in many of the nation’s top art museums, such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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BY LAURA M. METTAM

Judy Ledgerwood’s bold use of color and pattern transforms the spaces in which her art exists. She establishes a dichotomy between precision and abstraction, order and chaos, the vividly decorative and the subtly conceptual. Ledgerwood has received numerous awards from prestigious arts organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts and Artadia. Her work is held in international private collections as well as in many of the nation’s top art museums, such as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Currently a Professor and the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, Ledgerwood lives and works in Chicago. She is represented by Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery, as well as by several other international galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Houston, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.

Top image: Judy Ledgerwood, Chromatic Patterns for the Graham Foundation, 2014, Graham Foundation, Chicago, IL

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LM: Do you remember when your interest in art first began?

JL: My mother was in graduate school for education at Indiana State University. In her early childhood education class, she learned that kids would be more creative if they weren’t given coloring books but instead, made their own pictures. This early encouragement reached a crisis when I was seven and lost a coloring contest to a girl named Lori. I was disappointed that her Cinderella picture, neatly colored within the lines, was selected over mine, which I clearly thought was more artistic. I’ve been seeking attention for my art-making ever since.

 

• You earned your BFA from The Art Academy of Cincinnati and your MFA from SAIC. Can you provide a brief background about where you grew up and then elaborate on your decision to study art through the graduate level? Any comments on your experience as an art student?

I grew up in a tiny farming community in Indiana. I identified as an artist at an early age, so I understood that artists need to be a part of a larger community. I chose what I thought was the surest path to my success through education. I had studied the biographies of other artists whom I admired, and this was the path that they followed so I emulated them.

I met my husband, Tony Tasset, in undergraduate school. He shared my ambition of becoming an artist and together we still make a strong team. We grew up together sharing successes and failures in a very difficult field. I’m his biggest fan and vice versa. It’s invaluable to have a person who believes in you and understands what you do.

At SAIC, for the first time I met artists who were better than me. That’s the thing about moving from a small town to a larger one. The challenge to keep up was just the kick in the pants that I needed. That and a fear of truly becoming a starving artist pushed me to focus on what I needed to do to become a professional artist.

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• Were you always interested in teaching? What path led you to your current role as Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University?

I didn’t teach until I was out of grad school for almost a decade. I got lonely working in my studio and I found that socially, artists wanted to network more than discuss art. I wanted to discuss the big questions; I missed that about school. I started teaching one class at SAIC, then soon after I began full time at Northwestern. Our students rarely self-identify as artists, but most go on to contribute to society. I am in the perfect position to proselytize for art. Many high schools no longer offer courses in art, but I think it’s the best way to learn critical thinking. There are no right choices when making art, only ones that work. Learning how to determine a working method and the criteria for judgment is something that I’ve only recently gotten good at. The icing on the cake of my job is working with graduate students. Northwestern fully supports the MFA candidates, so we get the cream of the crop in our graduate program since it is so competitive for top candidates.

 

• How do you think today’s art students and art schools differ from when you were in school? What has changed? Where are things headed?

The big change has been in the softening of disciplinary boundaries. Young people no longer say, “I’m a painter.” They say, “I’m an artist,” or maybe even something like, “I make things.” Art school in the 21st century focuses to a lesser degree on the artist as an individual author, and more on community solutions to aesthetic, political or even practical problems - a reflection of how the art world really is now. Of course some fields like painting will not change much pedagogically. And hopefully education can do more than train worker bees for artists like Jeff Koons.

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• Your work is vivid and energizing. Repetitive patterns are controlled but not exact. They are precise yet loose. When viewing the larger installations of repeat patterns, I think about the performative aspect of creating the work and how the physical act of painting is also repetitive and controlled. I find the thought of creating these wall paintings - such a time consuming, perhaps meditative process - as an almost comforting, contemplative change of pace from our culture’s digital age need for instant results. Can you comment on your work process for both large installations and smaller works on canvas?

I think about creating experiences that must be seen first person - whether work on canvas or large-scale installations painted on the wall. Patterns suggest regular continuity, but life is not like that, even with many repetitive gestures that make up a day, like morning coffee or showering. Each moment is unique if you’re aware.

I try to make paintings that not only breathe in the after-image created by visual color interactions that flicker visualy, but allow the performative act of painting to create a sense of time, especially through repetitive patterns. The drips suggest real time. I experience time as elastic. Moments spent on hold with the utility company are endless; moments spent with your young child pass in a heartbeat. I think my work functions well if the viewer’s experience brings about a greater self-awareness. This is not so different from the aims of all abstract painting.

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• I love the transformative environments that your installations and immense wall paintings create. The installations have the power to alter familiar spaces as seen in your recent Chromatic Patterns for the Graham Foundation, and Chromatic Patterns for the Smart Museum, among many other pieces you’ve done in the past. Can you talk about your use of such vivid colors and repeat patterns, and how the scale and content of your work has evolved over the years? Are you experimenting with any new methods or materials?

I have shifted from a palette based on a response to decorative color in architecture that commented on Modernisms’ failures, to work that creates cast color or uses color interaction to leak out from the surface of the painting into the space in front of the canvas, the space where the viewer is. Each era develops a new model for describing space, and space reflects the age that produces those responses. Think of the Cartesian model of space developed during the Renaissance as a model of rationalism as just one example. When I started my career in the artworld of the late 80s at the moment of the first art boom, the thing that seemed most urgent to address was the increasing power of images circulating as reproductions. There are paintings that look good reproduced that are generally not very satisfying to look at in person. For me, an art experience is between a viewer and a work of art, not between a viewer and an electronic device. It’s even more of an issue now, so I still stand by my desires to make painting a first person experience.

I started using enormous scale early in my career. Then, as now, I want to create immersive environments - to make paintings that act like architecture. Once I felt that the scale was becoming habitual, I had to learn to make smaller paintings that were effective. I discovered that making smaller paintings scaled to the human body and installed to emphasize that relationship helped to make a direct connection to the viewer. I still make a lot of 15 x 15\" paintings to try out a new idea on a manageable scale.

I tried encaustic painting recently. I wanted to see what happened when color was not contained within the edges of a shape and edges between figure and ground were more erratic. I like the object quality of these kinds of paintings, but the encaustic is limited because it has to be done on panels, which get too heavy at large scale. So now I’m trying to achieve a similar goal with more familiar painting materials and techniques.

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• Is there a way in which your work is displayed that you feel it has the potential to have the most impact on the viewer? For example, how might a smaller painting on canvas compare to a wall installation compared to something even larger like your 2014 collaboration with EXPO Chicago and The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel that resulted in a very public display of your artwork around Chicago during EXPO. Any comments on your experience with this particular public art project or others you may have been involved with in the past?

For me the reason to make paintings is to address a viewer. I am always aware of the viewer when I make installation choices. Small paintings are hung to correspond to the viewers’ head, and the size of the shapes is at human scale, often in response to architecture, which is also built for bodies. The EXPO Chicago and The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel project was an opportunity to make a work outside a gallery or institution, which was new for me. Although one response to spending time at Rauschenberg’s studio in Captiva Island might have resulted in a typical Ledgerwood painting in a palette inspired by the light of Florida, I instead made work inspired by the light and space. For me the most profound experience of the place was the vast expanse of sand, sea and sky, and just as important this was conceived of as a project for everyone, not just your typical art going public.

I wanted to work in a genre that most people understand, and landscape seemed appropriate to the site of presentation. I also liked the contrast between horizontal landscape in the billboards and their placement in an urban environment. These landscapes harkened back to the kind of paintings that I made twenty years ago at the start of my career. I know that I was very privileged to have the Florida experience to respond to. I wanted to create an image in the city for those that didn’t have that experience, to share a little of what that experience was like for me with everyone who encountered the billboards.

 

• Do you have a favorite public art piece here in Chicago or elsewhere?

I love the Picasso in Daley Square and the Dubuffet on the corner of the State of Illinois building.

 

• Who are some of your favorite artists – older influences, or currently working artists?

I grew up visiting the impressionist collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. I think that I learned color theory in those galleries. So I am indebted to Monet as much as I hate to admit it. Matisse, Blinky Palermo, Mary Heilmann, Harriet Korman, Pamela Fraser & André Butzer are just a few favorite artists that come to mind.

 

• Between your practice, your husband also being a prominent artist, and your teaching, do you ever reach a saturation point when it comes to art consumption? When you need to tune out, so to speak, what’s a favorite non-art interest of yours?

We are busy just trying to keep up, so there is not enough down time, which I hope to address - as soon as I have time! Tony is very good at cooking, and I wish I could spend more time gardening. My garden it pretty Darwinian, but I grow mostly perennials, a few vegetables, and I have a tiny cutting garden every summer.

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• You mentioned that you’d be traveling to Lustenau soon for an exhibition. Can you describe this exhibition or project? Do you have any other plans coming up this summer or fall? 

My show in Lustenau is with the same gallerist I have worked with in Europe since 2005, Wolfgang and Christa Hausler (Häusler Contemporary). They have galleries in Munich, Zurich and this newer one in Lustenau, Austria. My upcoming project for Lustenau is called Lose Loos in response to the influence of Adolf Loos on contemporary taste even though his seminal contribution, Ornament and Crime was written in 1908. Loos counseled against excessive pattern and advocated the use of only specific colors. His attitude was heavily influential for Le Corbusier, who of course is much admired. Chromophobia is shared by many people who think that colors limited to a few basics; black, white, ultramarine blue, grey, yellow ochre reflect a higher level of sophistication, with brighter colors relegated for children and people from ‘other’ cultures. Of course my work goes against all of this. Since the show is in Austria, it seems likely that many viewers will be aware of Loos position and see my work in opposition to his ideas.

Over the summer I plan to devote concentrated time to finishing a body of new work that I’ll show in Houston at Barbara Davis Gallery. I am also working toward a show in New York at Tracy Williams Ltd. for her new space on the lower East Side, and in January 2016 I have a sort of retrospective opening at the Kennedy Museum where I’ll make a wall painting installation, and show a selection of paintings and drawings. Also in September I was offered a five-day lectureship at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolbermoor near Munich. I am interested in the global exchange of ideas.

 

• Would you share your thoughts on Chicago’s art community?

Chicago has more great artists than a city this size has any right to. Many do not get the recognition they deserve because it’s Chicago I suppose. The audience is not as large as one would think for a city of more than two and a half million. I’m lucky to have access to world-class museums here. Galleries are good - I wish more people supported them so that young artists didn’t feel so pressured to move to New York or Los Angeles to find the support they need.

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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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