![\"\"](\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/285/original/cezanneovercoat.png\")
BY LAURA MILLER
\r\n\r\nI met one of Chicago’s most revered painters, Vera Klement, on a brisk day this past spring when the 84 year-old had just returned from an afternoon yoga class. Inspirational yet humble, philosophical yet witty, Klement welcomed me into her home and studio, where the high walls of the loft were dominated by her large canvases. Over the course of a few hours, I eagerly absorbed Klement’s rich history as an artist, educator and active member of Chicago’s art community.
\r\n","body":"BY LAURA MILLER
\r\n\r\n*An edited version of this interview was orginally published in the May-August 2014 issue of Chicago Gallery News.
\r\nTop Image: Vera Klement, Sibelius, 2012, oil on canvas, (triptych) 84" x 160"
I met one of Chicago’s most revered painters, Vera Klement, on a brisk day this past spring when the 84 year-old had just returned from an afternoon yoga class. Inspirational yet humble, philosophical yet witty, Klement welcomed me into her home and studio, where the high walls of the loft were dominated by her large canvases. Over the course of a few hours, I eagerly absorbed Klement’s rich history as an artist, educator and active member of Chicago’s art community.
\r\n\r\nBorn in 1929 in the independent German Hanseatic city/state of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), Klement moved with her family to New York in 1938 to escape the encroaching Nazi government. She developed an interest in art and studied at Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture. In 1964 she moved to Chicago with her then-husband. She taught art at the University of Chicago for 26 years until retiring in 1995.
\r\n\r\nKlement’s work is included in many prestigious collections, and her resume boasts numerous awards and recognitions. Today the artist is as prolific as ever and continues to produce engaging, thought-provoking work that references themes of historical grandeur while maintaining a certain approachability.
\r\n\r\nKlement lives and works in Chicago and is represented by Zolla/Lieberman Gallery.
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LM: Do you recall your first artistic aspirations?
\r\n\r\nVK: I came to New York City at the age of nine and was sent to school not knowing English. When my teacher told the class to paint a clown, I was at a loss. The last years of hiding and turmoil in Europe had made education impossible. I felt humiliated by my ignorance and went home, took a cardboard from my father’s laundered shirt and a pencil with an eraser, and I worked and re-worked the drawing until a clown appeared on the board. Three years later that gift enabled me to pass the entrance exam to the High School of Music and Art where I studied art.
\r\n\r\nWhen I was 11 my father, an amateur artist, gave me a watercolor set and helped me make my first painting. I understood then that no one could ever take away the world I had created through paint. I knew then I would be an artist.
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Did you work with your father a lot?
\r\n\r\nNo; he had little time. But he did help me create a portfolio for entrance into the High School of Music and Art, and I recall painting a green pepper under his supervision.
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What has sustained your creative drive throughout the years?
\r\n\r\nI don’t know, but it’s never stopped. I’m amazed at the amount of work I’ve produced. 66 years of paintings and works on paper – a huge amount of stuff. I feel some guilt at clogging the environment with it. I work on one piece at a time, and when I’m lucky I get an idea for the next project as I’m working on something else. Sometimes I have to wait until a new idea comes to me, and I live with the anxiety that the flow might stop, but so far that hasn’t happened.
\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/286/original/cradle.png\")
How was your transition from New York to Chicago?
\r\n\r\nVery hard. I was married to the composer Ralph Shapey. We had a 4-year old son and little money. When my husband received an offer from the University of Chicago to teach and conduct a group to play contemporary music, we came here. As an artist I found myself on someone else’s turf. I was labeled a “New York painter” in a community hostile to New York. I thought I’d be able to transfer my early success in New York to Chicago but instead found myself in Hyde Park working in silence for my first 7 years here.
\r\n\r\nTwo things saved me: through Participating Artists of Chicago (PAC), a loose group of about 100 artists that held exhibitions in store fronts and college hallways, I met two artists, Larry Salomon and Martin Hurtig, who also felt their work was incompatible with the current Chicago taste. We decided to form a group and added Ted Argeropolous and the architect Laurence Booth. We formed The FIVE. We worked together for about seven years and had annual exhibitions of huge site-specific works in the lobbies of Chicago’s great buildings. I was the designated writer for the group and wrote a manifesto for our first show’s announcement, in which we decried the regional climate here. Franz Schulze wrote a page-long article in the Daily News about our manifesto and we became notorious for that, but no one responded to the work itself.
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Did you feel like you wanted to return to New York?
\r\n\r\nI didn't think of it that way. What I missed was not a place, but rather a time - which was gone forever.
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How did you get involved with teaching and the University of Chicago?
\r\n\r\nThe New York art critic Harold Rosenberg was a friend of mine. He would come to the University one quarter out of the year. At a meeting of the Art Department he learned that Max Kahn, a painter who had been teaching studio for years, was retiring. Rosenberg suggested me by saying he knew someone and they could have her cheap. Midway Studios was very informal then. I went down to see Harold Haydon who was the Director, and he suggested we try it (teaching) for a year even though I held no degrees. A few years later, the program became professionalized. I was there for twenty-five years and gradually became a full professor.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
What did you teach?
\r\n\r\nWe were a small faculty of five and didn't have separate departments for painting, sculpture, etc. We all taught undergraduate and graduate students. I taught undergrad classes in Visual Language 101, Painting, Drawing and Color Analysis and I was assigned a number of graduate students. As a group, the faculty handled everything that came along - the serious and the ridiculous.
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Do you miss teaching?
\r\n\r\nNo. Not at all. When I retired in 1995 I had a great surge of energy. I started a project in which I translated poetry from Russian and German into English. The images in those great poems provided me with images for my paintings, and in 2002 I began work on a memoir. I divided my time between painting and writing.
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Did you finish your book?
\r\n\r\nI'm more or less finished but each time I look at it, it seems as though a poltergeist got into the computer in the night and rearranged things. I once read how Flaubert would fuss about each sentence and I'm afraid that's what I do. But I know I have to let it go at some point.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
What is the book about?
\r\n\r\nIt's about my life and my work. It's not linear, and chapters are of varying length and can be in different ways of writing. In that way it resembles my paintings.
\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/287/original/sebastia.png\")
How and when did you first start exhibiting in Chicago?
\r\n\r\nI began having solo exhibitions because of the Feminist Movement in the early seventies. A call went out to women artists to meet in order to start a Feminist cooperative gallery. The turnout was so great that two groups formed: one became Artemisia Gallery and the other ARC. We did all the things that we had been taught women could not do: carpentry, electrical work, business, and making decisions. It was a fabulous time. We were mutually supportive and showed whatever work we wanted to. No one was there to tell us our work was not sellable.
\r\n\r\nWhen the women's galleries opened the art climate in Chicago changed. We invited artists and critics from New York and L.A. and that opened up this claustrophic atmosphere. I was with Artemisia Gallery for about three years until Marianne Deson, a gallery that showed contemporary, international art, picked me up.
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Do you have a personal collection of art?
\r\n\r\nNo. I don't like collecting anything. I try not to have many things and as I get older I try to have fewer things. I try to get rid of things, but then people give me gifts and they add up again. We all have too much stuff.
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You’ve been an active member of Chicago’s art scene since the ‘60s. How has the landscape changed over the years?
\r\n\r\nI think it became more open, aided by the formation of three cooperative galleries: N.A.M.E. and the two feminist galleries, Artemisia and ARC, as well as the New Art Examiner. At the time, in the ‘70s, there was a major (silly) argument in the art world between Imagism and Abstraction. There were panels; discussions and the New Art Examiner stirred the pot of controversy. I can’t tell you what fervor there was about that. It was great fun, like putting a grain of sand into an oyster to produce a pearl. It created a sense of community that was lost when corporations began to buy art and each artist turned to their own career. It’s difficult now. I’m fortunate to still be exhibiting in a climate that looks to discover emerging artists – I’m not emerging. I’m rather submerging. It’s hard to be an old artist in a novelty-seeking culture.
\r\n\r\nThe Chicago art world seems to open, to become more inclusive, and then some force shrinks it back. Perhaps because it's a small world it has remained in the hands of the few who seem in key positions for years on end. In that it resembles the Supreme Court whose ancient members continue to pass down judgements.
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Your paintings are typically large scale, often with multiple panels. Do you enjoy the physical aspect of building your blank slates? Do you have help?
\r\n\r\nI’ve never had a studio assistant. I used to enjoy making my own stretchers because it helped me imagine the space I had to work with. But it’s getting hard. I now have someone else build them for me, and I’ve had the last few canvases stretched as well, but I still feel the need to prime them myself.
\r\n\r\nMy large scale comes from New York. In the late ‘40s to early ‘50s, it was thought that the canvas size should relate to the human body, one-on-one. You had to be able to extend the full length of your arm to make a gesture. Once I did that, there was no shrinking back.
\r\n\r\nThe first show for The FIVE was in a beautiful Mies van der Rohe building on the UC campus. I planned a 10’ x 20’ painting to relate to the lobby wall and then realized it wouldn’t fit through the door. It would have to be broken up into sections, so I decided to use the breaks as part of the formal concept, the way bar-lines function in a musical score. That painting consisted of eight pieces that could be bolted together and taken apart for transportation. I built everything myself even though I’m not a very good carpenter – the holes for the bolts had to line up perfectly. I liked the new complexity of the breaks so much that I kept that format even when I no longer needed it for size or space reasons. In time, that morphed into separate canvases. I realized that a single seamless fiction on canvas couldn’t represent my experience of life, which is abrupt, disjointed and fragmentary.
\r\n\r\nI began to think that the concept of the breaks and putting different elements together had more resonance with my life. I found that I could push the differences and tried to see how far I could push them and still retain unity. I began to use different techniques, materials, collage elements, colors, subjects in one work. I make them hang together by force of will; by a formal severity.
\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/288/original/expulsion.png\")
Vera takes me to the wall-easel she set up and a large workbench / paint station she built herself. She explains that installing her easel was the first thing she did when she moved into her space decades ago.
\r\n\r\nI will put the canvas on the easel, which can be raised or lowered, and I'll stand on a ladder to reach the top section. Or I lay the painting on the floor and throw paint on it, sometimes from the height of the top of a ladder to make the paint spread.
\r\n\r\nStanding in her work area, Vera points to a connected room full of large, neatly arranged, wrapped canvases.
\r\n\r\nThe question is, what will happen to all this work?
\r\n\r\nMy friend Peter has a house in the woods in Wisconsin where I have a small studio to do works on paper. Some years earlier there had been a severe storm that did a lot of damage to the woods that surround his house. Many trees had come down. Trunks and limbs were strewn about. One day in the winter of 1993 we were walking in the woods after a snowfall. The trunks, partially covered in snow, looked like corpses flung about on a battlefield. These were powerful images. Although I had never been attracted to photography as a medium, I felt only photography could capture these scenes that looked like documentary war photos. I borrowed Peter's point and shoot camera and began to take pictures as we walked along the little path in the woods. The more I shot, the more images needed to be recorded. I had them developed at the local drug store adn selected the ones I liked best and had them enlarged at a photo lab back in Chicago. I made collaged drawings and turned them into diptychs with the photos that I had thought of as ready-mades. I returned to the woods the following autumn and had a similar experience and photographed the limbs buried in the fallen leaves. To my surprise the two series are now in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College.
\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/298/original/warmonodyseries4-4.jpg\")
Vera shows me a rubbing from an old wood print she did.
\r\n\r\nI often recycle my own work and re-use elements of discarded drawings or woodcuts in collage form. I think that collage was one of the great inventions of the 20th Century. It speaks to disruption and fragmentation as well as disjunctive relationships. It is an important working method in my drawings and in my paintings as well.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Compare your earlier and recent work.
\r\n\r\nThat’s hard because as it is each of my paintings looks different. I follow a strict rule I invented that will prevent me from cranking out a brand product; it prevents me from painting by rote. The rule is that if I paint, let's say a tree, one of my favorite icons, I can't paint another tree for at least a year, by which time I will have forgotton how to do it and will be forced to re-invent it. The rule would apply to color relationships and formal resolutions as well. I don't work in series. As a result each work is unique. I'm happy with that. I have a small vocabulary of icons that I paint in a variety of combinations and they also follow a strict rule: they must be images that are recognizable by any and all, and they cannot be time-bound. For example, figures can't be clothed. I can't paint a telephone or other objects from a given period of time.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Do you find that your style has changed? Do you have fewer inhibitions? Are you more laid back?
\r\n\r\nI went through different styles until 1980 when what I would call my "late style" was formed. Since then I do feel that my paintings have become more sure, and as a result, less loose. I think the mind is essentially conservative. It likes order. I try to disrupt that order, to be poised on the edge between the paint looking like paint at the same time that it looks like the icon I'm depicting. But before I know it, the image tightens up. That's the paradox of my painting. I want it to look spontaneous, as though it occured by accident, and at the same time I want it to look exactly as I envision it.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
How much time do you spend on a piece?
\r\n\r\nThat's hard to say. I paint fast. But when I walk by a painting hanging on the wall I see things that need changing and I find myself reworking it, sometimes even several years later.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Your art often references other artists, poets, and musicians – what inspires you?
\r\n\r\nI like to see myself as a link in an ongoing chain. I am a link to the past as well as to the future. Many of my ideas come from artists of the past whom I admire and my work is a form of homage to them. Ideas come also from literature, poetry, and music. I am attracted to images in Renaissance art, ecstatic saints, exalted madonnas, gestures of intense emotion.
\r\n\r\nThe first icon I painted after leaving abstraction was the vessel. I chose it as a female image; a fecund form, one that contains, shelters, nurtures. It's rounded, like a pregnant belly, like the world. It was likely the first art object formed, probably by women kneeling in the mud on a riverbank.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Your work, while powerful, has a certain approachability to it because of some familiar imagery. How important is it for you to maintain representational elements versus pure abstraction?
\r\n\r\nI rarely have pure abstraction on my work. All the elements have a reference. A rectangle is a door or a window. Abstract splotches will form a landscape as light and color create the near and the far.
\r\n\r\nIdeas come from poetry or other readings. In 1995 I had a fabulous project involving my translations of poetry. I chose the poets carefully - they had to be 20th Century great poets who had lived under totalitarian rule - either Soviet or Nazi. While translating a poem I would envision what the poet might have looked like without ever looking at a photo, and I would paint their imaginary portraits based on images from their poetry. I painted a series of poet poems. Then my rule prevented the painting of a series.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
Before your rules kicked in...
\r\n\r\nThat was an exhilerating project. The translation was exciting and imagining the poets' likeness was an almost mystical experience.
\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n
What are you drawn to working with?
\r\n\r\nI like oil paint because it’s an old medium, and it doesn’t call attention to itself, unlike unconventional or new media. Oil paint, charcoal, pastel and graphite become invisible and subservient to the idea even as they create it.
\r\n\r\n![\"\"](\"https://s3.amazonaws.com/chigal/rich/rich_files/rich_files/289/original/dsch.png\")
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.
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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.
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“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.”