{"article":{"id":8912,"title":"Dedicated to Collecting: Melissa Weber and Jay Dandy","excerpt":"","body":"

Pictured: from left: Tom Friedman, Steven Criqui, Sammantha Bittman, Andy Warhol, Abigail Lane, Kota Ezawa, Anne Collier. 

Ceramics by Stanya Kahn, Melissa Weber, Matthew Metz, Xavier Toubes, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Aneta Regel, Pae White, Michale Kaysen, and Theaster Gates. 



By BIANCA BOVA


Photos by CGN


On a quiet corner in the Kenwood area of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood sits a gothic revival home built by Charles Sumner Frost for the president of the Union Stock Yards in 1909. It is every bit as stately and charming as its present day owners, Jay Dandy, the Collection Manager for the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and his wife, the ceramicist Melissa Weber. The couple have called it home for over 20 years, raising four children–two sets of twins–there, while restoring much, and renovating where needed in the process. The house’s austere copper and tile roof and imposing gargoyle-laden facade belie the warm (if eccentric) environment the family has cultivated inside, at the heart of which lies a multi-faceted collection.


“I grew up in a household of American and English antiques,“ says Weber, “So there’s that element, things that I inherited from my family, which can be really bizarre next to this passion for mid-century furniture we have. Add to that that Jay came home one day and said, ‘Look what I got!’ and a taxidermy bear has been with us ever since. The bear wears a fez, and at Christmastime, it gets a Santa hat. Jay also acquired a full bear rug, and then that started a whole bunch of other smaller taxidermy things.”



Pictured: Vintage Stuffed Cinnamon Bear, circa 1940s. In doorway: Stephanie Brooks. Above doorway: George Nelson Clocks.



Add to all of this an extensive collection of George Nelson clocks (“I own about 80 or 90 of them, and have been collecting them for over 30 years,” notes Dandy), Michelin ephemera ranging from ashtrays to advertising statuettes, all featuring Bibendum, better known as the Michelin Man (and about which, Dandy remains somewhat sly, only conceding “I just think he’s really cool.”), and an uncommonly thoughtful collection of pop and contemporary art, ranging from Tom Wesselmann to Tom Friedman.


“I’ve been collecting for 40 years,” says Dandy, who was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, and has spent his adult life in Chicago, “I bought my first piece when I graduated from college. It was a Warhol print. I acquired it here in Chicago, from a friend of mine who was working at a gallery downtown that I don’t think is around anymore. I took all my graduation money and got a Soup Can. 


“Had I known better,” he adds with the wistful regret that seems specific to collectors, “I would have gotten a Marilyn.” This early lesson was to be followed by a more poignant one. 



Pictured left of fireplace mantle: Sammantha Bittman; on the right, a print by Andy Warhol.




“Not long after I acquired the Warhol print, I convinced my mother that we should be buying art together. This must have been about 1985, and I wasn’t about to just waltz into Leo Castelli at that point, I just didn’t have the nerve back then,” Dandy says, “It was around that time I met this really wonderful woman–I can’t remember how I met her–who was a private dealer, Judy Goldberg. She was in New York, and probably 20 years older than me, so she lived through the art world of the 1960s. She had a teeny, tiny little space at 1081 Madison Avenue where she did shows and she did a lot of resale, had a lot of secondary market work. We were friends for awhile–phone friends. We’d talk on the phone now and again, and when I had to have back surgery in 1988, I remember she bought me this book on Lord Duveen, this very old biography, which was great. So there was this Roy Lichtenstein print that I really, really, really, really wanted. It was $4,000–a lot of money considering, I think, I was making about $17,000 a year working in commercial advertising at that time. This is what I got my mother to say she’d split with me. The print was Melody Haunts My Reverie, the woman singing into the microphone. Well, I moved very slowly then, so it was taking me a while to get there in buying it. Then the May auctions happened–this was the late 1980s–and the market just went nuts. A Lichtenstein print that [had an estimate] of $4,000 bucks sold for $28,000 and I remember calling Judy the next day, and she said, ‘Jay, I can’t sell you [Melody Haunts My Reverie]. I’m sorry, but you understand I just can’t do that.’ It was a hard lesson, but it was a really good lesson. That experience motivated me, and I started buying more, being more deliberate in my interests and in collecting.” 


In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chicago was at the height of its authority in the art world, and Dandy took full advantage. 


“I started going to Randolph Street Gallery–the original location, out on West Washington or something, back then it felt like no-man’s-land. I remember going to Phyllis Kind, to Young-Hoffman, to van Straaten, and Ten In One in Wicker Park. Feature was a great Chicago gallery, but I never went or met Hudson until after he moved operations to New York. I was actively going to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago as well. This is in the years before they built the current building they’re in, when it was ​​at [237 East] Ontario Street, in the old Playboy headquarters,” recalls Dandy, “Back then, Chicago felt a little more laid back. I remember one time, lighting Gerhardt Richter’s cigarette. We were smoking outside the museum and there was no one else around. I remember Dennis Hopper coming to an opening at the museum too, and he was just sort of with a couple girls, there wasn’t this mob of people or anything. Everything felt a bit more low-key in those days.”



Pictured: Stephanie Brooks (steel and enamel stars), Andy Warhol (silkscreen), Claes Oldenburg (sculpture on table), Drew Langlois (dolls).



Another view of the dining room



Dandy met Weber in the Autumn of 1989. 


“For our first date, Jay took me to go see the Martin Puryear show at the Art Institute,” Weber recalls. While the two come from disparate backgrounds, their shared appreciation for art and design laid the groundwork for both their relationship and their collection. 


“I grew up in New York City, and my mother was very involved with the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” says Weber, “Unlike Jay, who has always been interested in art, for me it was something that was more just always in the background. When I took art classes in grade school I certainly loved it, but I literally never took an art course in high school or college. Despite that, I knew I wanted to do something creative, so I decided I’d get a degree in interior design. I attended Parsons School of Design and received my Associate’s Degree, and then ended up in Cambridge, Massachusetts working for an architecture firm. I loved it, but after three or four years, I realized, ‘What I really love is materials.’ So I enrolled in a ceramics studio class at Harvard–it’s part of the school, but it’s also a community studio. One class is all it took. Eventually I quit interior design and I was just doing ceramics full time. When I married Jay and came out here to Chicago, I bought a kiln and found a studio, and I just learned as I went.”


Weber’s studio practice took a more serious turn when she enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 


“I began taking some classes at SAIC as a student at large, and then did a lot of workshops all over the country, all in functional ceramics. I didn’t learn how to draw, I never painted. I didn’t actually do any two dimensional work. When I learned at Harvard, I was throwing pots on the wheel, I never did any hand building. I really focused on functional work for probably 15 years.The Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine, Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado, all of those places were sort of my education, because I didn’t have a formal education in ceramics. Then around 2007 or 2008, I was just like–’I can’t make this stuff anymore. I can’t make decorative, functional work anymore. And I need help.’ So I applied to SAIC in the Ceramics Department for an MFA, and I got in, and then it just changed my life. I found the mentorship and the sort of critical education I was looking for there. At the same time, grad school was just pure fun for me. A lot of people go to grad school to teach, and I had no intention of teaching–which I ended up doing, but it got thrown at me, it was not something I had planned on. I went purely because I just could not make what I was making anymore, and I felt like I needed to really broaden my horizons. And it really did. Before grad school, I’d never had a critique, I’d never been expected to make any work for something. I had no context for sculpture. I had no context at all! I started from scratch in grad school. If you can imagine, I felt like a totally clean slate, which is kind of incredible. I mean, I had a very good eye. I certainly grew up in a very sophisticated New York City environment where there was a lot of art around me, and I had a background in interior design, but personally, I didn’t have any context for making anything other than a utilitarian object, though I have always been interested in how things are arranged and how things are put together.“


Weber has continued developing her practice since completing her Masters of Fine Arts, and now operates out of a private studio in the renovated coach house of her home. She continues to participate regularly in residency programs and exhibit her work. Her perspective and artistic development have, over the years, influenced and shaped the art collection that Dandy began before their meeting. 


“[Collecting] is much more fun to do with someone else,” he notes, “If I was solo, still single, I would have continued and collected stuff and–fine. I think when you start doing it with someone else, then there’s a difference. I usually don’t buy anything without telling Melissa, because that sort of takes the fun out of it. While we may not look at every single thing together and say, ‘should I get that, should I not get that, should I get that?’ The ‘hey–I really like this, what do you think?’ aspect is really enjoyable. We inform each other’s perspectives from our own experiences.\"



Pictured: Center: The Campbell’s Soup Company, The Souper Dress, 1966–67. 

Right, on wall: Various artists including works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Joe Brainard, Fred Tomaselli, Laurie Simmons, and John Wesley. 



Dandy’s own professional career path in the art world was in some ways less direct. 


“After I lost out on the print from Judy Goldberg, I still really wanted a Lichtenstein, but I was interested in work from the mid-60s. He was doing work on lenticular plastic then, on this stuff called Rowlux. I love those pieces, and at the time when they showed up at auction, they were in pretty good shape. So I began going to the Christie’s and Sotheby’s auctions in New York back then, and just watching. The people you were bidding against in those days were mostly dealers. I remember starting to buy stuff, and paying this whopping 7% commission–7%, I know, that’s nothing now!–and then shipping it to Chicago, that way there’s no sales tax. In the mid-1990s I remember going to Christie’s East, which was then located in this really scummy building [on 67th Street] in Manhattan. There was Christie’s and Christie’s East, and all the junk was at Christie’s East. They had a Claes Oldenburg multiple of a wedding cake slice. Oldenburg had done it for somebody’s wedding and he made, I believe, ten cakes that are 18 slices each, and he stamped each one on the bottom. The one that was for auction at Christie’s East, the orientation of the stamp was upside down. I remember thinking, ‘Oh no, is this fake?’ I decided I should call the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut. I had seen one of these works there before, and thought maybe I could find out what orientation their stamp was. So I called up the Wadsworth, and I got a hold of a then–junior curator named James Rondeau [now the President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute of Chicago]. That was my first interaction with James. I had no idea five years later he would come to play a major role in my life.”


Dandy has a long history of philanthropy and support within Chicago’s museums.


“I started my involvement with the Art Institute as a member of the Auxiliary Board, which was the junior board at the time. It no longer exists. That was in the mid-1990s, and I did sort of everything on that board. Then I got involved with the Society for Contemporary Art around the time James came to the museum, in 1998. I served on the executive committee of the SCA’s board, and was president for a number of years. There was also a group at the MCA that I was in that doesn’t exist anymore, called the New Group,” he notes, “In 2007, James had said to me, ‘I’ve got a project, do you want to work on it with me? I’m going to do this Roy Lichtenstein retrospective,’ and he asked, ‘Would you like to volunteer to do the research?’ They did, of course, have other people who were researching, because it was co-organized with the Tate Modern in London. The managing director of Lichtenstein’s Studio was a friend of mine, though, so I actually had access. When James asked if I wanted to help, I said yes, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. But you find your your way, and you do it. Which I did for about five years.”



Pictured from left: Charles Spurrier, Tom Friedman, Jeanne Dunning, George Nelson Clocks for the Howard Miller Company, Zealand Michigan.



This long-term volunteer role is what led to Dandy’s joining the staff in the Museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art Department. 


“I started working at the Art Institute after the Lichtenstein show. I got hired as a part time researcher in the Modern and Contemporary Art department. I worked with James [then the department chair], predominantly, on whatever exhibition he was working on. Of course, because of my job, I did have to resign myself from all the committees and groups that I was in–it took me a minute to wrap my head around that. As a researcher, I always wanted more hours. Finally I was told, ‘You’re never going to get more hours as a part-time research person. If you want more hours, you have to take a full time job.’ And so I ended up applying for the Collection Manager role when it became available. I started in 2019 and still hold that position now. I made the transition while working on the Andy Warhol retrospective.” 


Dandy, as those in the know can tell you, is one of Chicago’s preeminent authorities on Warhol. His enthusiasm for the artist extends well beyond the masterworks of his heyday in the mid-1960s. On the uppermost floor of their home is what Dandy and Weber refer to affectionately as “the archive.” A modestly-sized space with a pitched ceiling, it houses Dandy’s vast and meticulously cataloged collection of Pop Art ephemera, along with one of the most extensive privately-held libraries of Warhol and Pop-related literature, and, naturally, his own papers. It is, more than any singular work in the collection or thoughtfully curated room in the house, the thing that defines Dandy as a collector’s collector. 


“All the records for our collection live up here in the archive,” Dandy says, “I’ve always been a pretty conscientious records-keeper–so many people don’t think that that’s also part of what you want to preserve, but it is! I remember many, many, many years ago going over to [art collector and philanthropist] Stefan Edlis’s home and walking into his library and being bowled over and saying, ‘I want that. I want to do this. I want to do something as cool as this one day.’ He was such a great collector, he documented everything, he was really a scholar of the works in his collection.”


“The first thing that started all of this for me really, was a book I bought in 1982 at the Strand in New York,” Dandy continues, “It was a book on pop art from 1965, and I opened it up, and oh my God, stuck in right there in the front was this opening invitation to a party at Warhol’s Factory for the launch of this book. I thought, ‘What the hell is this?’ I had no idea this stuff existed. Which almost immediately became, ‘How do you find this stuff?’ It was a little harder back then to track specific things down, but it was–not a smaller world, exactly–but just the art world, you start meeting people, and you start asking them questions, and they would say, ‘Oh, I know so and so, who has XYZ, you should call them up.” It was really fun, and frankly, they weren’t considered important by and large, the things I was after. It was things people just put in their files, just had laying around, didn’t really care that much about. Because I can’t afford to buy all the Warhols and Pop prints and works I’d like, this became another avenue, another way of collecting for me. I still add to it today.”




Views of a bedroom in the couple's home, featuring a mix of sculptural works, including a Blob Monster by Tony Tasset, as well as prints by Tom Wesselmann.




Indeed, collecting remains an active practice for the couple. 


“We buy a lot of Chicago artists,” notes Weber, “Jay’s love of Pop Art is certainly strong, but we still acquire all sorts of things, and if there’s another thread to it all, I think it’s that we have bought and continue to buy a lot of Chicago artists’ work.” 


“It’s just something that happened,” adds Dandy, “I don’t know that it was ever intentional, but I do enjoy acquiring works from people I have met–they don’t have to be my best friend–but it is nice when you know the artist somewhat. That’s been easy to do here in Chicago.” 


Easier still, it seems, when one takes into account how fully and uncommonly devoted the two have remained in their passion, enthusiasm, and support for the Chicago art world over the decades.


#



One of Dandy's prized Bibendum figures.


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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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