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CGN is thrilled to partner with Chicago-based artist Brian T. Leahy to present Prop(House), an exhibition of new sculpture and drawing. We invite you to join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 2 from 5-8pm at our space in River North. In advance of the opening, we had the opportunity to interview Brian about his background as an artist and art historian and his particular interest in domestic spaces, interior construction materials and the history of Minimalism.
\r\n","body":"BY ALISON REILLY
\r\n\r\nCGN is thrilled to partner with Chicago-based artist Brian T. Leahy to present Prop(House), an exhibition of new sculpture and drawing. We invite you to join us for an opening reception on Friday, June 2 from 5-8pm at our space in River North.
\r\n\r\nIn advance of the opening, we had the opportunity to interview Brian about his background as an artist and art historian and his particular interest in domestic spaces, interior construction materials and the history of Minimalism.
\r\n\r\nBrian received a master's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and is currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at Northwestern University. Prop(House) is on view through July 21 at Chicago Gallery News.
\r\n\r\nChicago Gallery News: You’re an artist, an organizer and an art historian. How does your research experience influence your art practice?
\r\n\r\nBrian T. Leahy: This is an ongoing and active question for me. My background as an artist is rooted in studio painting and a commitment to abstraction; however, my research interests have tended towards conceptual and performative practices, such as the work of Tehching Hsieh. The easy answer—which is also truthful—is that my research, reading, and writing practices are always somehow informing how I am thinking in the studio, and vice versa, even if those connections are not always explicit.
\r\n\r\nHowever, over the last few years, I’ve been trying to work through how these practices might more specifically coincide. These recent investigations of wallpaper, a bit of which I’ll be showing at Chicago Gallery News, are one attempt in that direction. They arose out of simultaneous considerations of wallpaper as a pictorial strategy—which has a long history in modern painting, including the seductively patterned backgrounds in Matisse, Bonnard, and Vuillard, and an active life in contemporary painting, which you can see in work by a number of Chicago-based artists who are exploring ideas around pattern, textile, and abstraction now—and thinking about the cultural, aspirational, racialized, and political dimensions of wallpaper as a social material.
\r\n\r\nCGN: Tell me about your background. How did you end up in Chicago?
\r\n\r\nBL: I grew up in a small suburb just north of Milwaukee. I was able to escape the northern cold for the southeast, and spent a number of years in North Carolina. I went to school there, where I first wanted to study biology, and then realized I didn’t want to spend sixty to eighty hours a week inside in the lab. I decided to study art and Buddhism, instead, and that’s where I first learned what painting might do. After school I lived in the western part of the state in the Appalachian mountains—first I helped get a Buddhist community center started, and then worked with a small construction company as a carpenter’s assistant, all while trying to keep making paintings. At some point, I wanted to be involved in the conversations around art that only seemed possible in a larger city, and ended up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I’ve just begun studying for a PhD at Northwestern University, so I’ll be in Chicago at least a few more years—and now I spend all my time in the library, instead of the lab.
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CGN: Can you describe your experience as a carpenter and homebuilder in North Carolina?
\r\n\r\nBL: I was working with a construction firm that built large, well-made, super-insulated, expensive homes. I did it for a few reasons, other than just needing a job—at that time, I was thinking about trying to work in architecture. But I was also interested in knowing how a house goes together, how a pile of industrially produced materials gets re-configured into a place in which life happens.
\r\n\r\nCGN: How does that influence your art practice?
\r\n\r\nBL: It influences how I think about sculpture, certainly—often, when a house was framed but not yet sheathed in plywood, I wanted nothing more than to paint the whole thing monochrome and call it a sculpture. There are many sculptural moments that happen when building a house, from the way materials are stacked, to provisional two-by-four braces put up when the walls are raised, to the strange perspectives you get when installing hardware underneath the eaves of a three-story rise. It changed how I thought about form, but also how I thought about what materials might be meaningful, what kinds of things I could bring into the work I make, and how I thought about some of the relationships between labor and material.
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CGN: Your work Prop(House) appropriates Richard Serra’s 1969 sculpture One Ton Prop (House of Cards). What prompted your interest in Serra’s work and in Minimalism?
\r\n\r\nBL: Richard Serra’s work is complicated for me. He has an epic status in histories of sculpture, and the October editorial board has championed his work for some time. On the one hand, I do love his work. The lead throwing pieces were important to me when I first saw them, and the Verb List is an incredibly beautiful moment in which language, drawing, and sculptural concerns all coincide. Balance as a component of sculptural practice is something that I am deeply interested in, and something that I first learned from Serra.
\r\n\r\nHowever, his work certainly has a darker side: multiple incidents in which preparators were injured during installation of his large plate works, and the installation of Sculpture No. 3 actually killed one technician, Raymond Johnson, in 1971. (Not incidentally, wallpaper also has a deadly history, something Lucinda Hawksley writes about in Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the Nineteenth-Century Home.) Serra’s work also seems to refuse to consider the social dimensions of its context—while he has often insisted on site-specificity, best exemplified in the legal case around Tilted Arc, he seems invested in the spatial and formal repercussions of site, rather than the socio-political implications. At the same time, I think Minimalism offered a kind of serious consideration of material that is still important now—and so, I’m interested in working through the ways in which materials interact with the socio-political.
\r\n\r\nCGN: Serra’s sculpture uses lead antimony plates, but you’ve decided to use sheets of drywall and wallpaper. What is the significance of the material?
\r\n\r\nBL: The idea for Prop(House) actually began for dimensional reasons. I noticed that each of the lead antimony plates for One Ton Prop (House of Cards) are 48” square—this is precisely one half of a standard sheet of drywall that you can buy at any building supply store. So, there was a kind of potential material efficiency in the replication of Serra’s work with drywall—and, as anyone who has ever installed drywall before will know, it is always a question of material and temporal efficiency, minimizing waste and maximizing speed.
\r\n\r\nI was also interested in how drywall as a mass-produced, standardized material might update the rhetoric of industrial materials and standard sizes that Minimalist artists were engaged with, while simultaneously deforming their insistence on a kind of over-determined masculinity that materials like lead antimony seem to signal. I wanted to domesticate Serra, somehow—something that I feel like has already happened, in a certain sense, in the way that the imaginary of the cheap, rough, downtown New York loft scene of the 1960s and 1970s—which is crucial to early images of One Ton Prop—has been commercialized by real estate practices of the “soft [newly constructed] loft.” Indeed, this is the situation in River North, to a large extent, and one for which artists, galleries, and artworks have been a driving factor.
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CGN: You’ve described your interest in binaries, particularly the domestic versus the industrial. How do those relationships relate to Prop(House)?
\r\n\r\nBL: I suppose it’s important to clarify my own interest: I am not interested in constructing binaries, per se, but rather in the processes by which binaries tend to structure so much of our cultural and psychological perspectives. A friend once told me that she thought good art is that which can hold multiple, seemingly contradictory things together. That’s what I would hope my work as a whole, and specific works like Prop(House), might do: to hold the poles of a binary together in a single object or event. In that sense, I’m interested in the way Prop(House) might be both industrial and domestic, unthreatening and disturbing, all in the same moment. To collapse seemingly disparate poles into a single object, I think, can make us a little more conscious of how those binaries get constructed in the first place. To me, houses themselves already do this—the contradictions are already present—but making a sculptural version of a “house” is a way of intensifying some of those contradictions, making them more distilled.
\r\n\r\nCGN: In November 2016 Mayor Emanuel announced that a record 33 tower cranes were installed in the city. However, the Chicago metropolitan area as a whole lost 19,570 residents in 2016, which was the greatest loss in any metropolitan area in the United States. Do you see a connection between your work and the current Chicago landscape?
\r\n\r\nBL: That’s an incredible fact. I think the work can relate to similar changes happening across a number of urban centers in the United States—I’m not sure how much of Chicago can be specifically read into the work. But, this fact—that high-rise construction is increasing even as population dwindles—certainly gives us some clues about the relationship between high-end construction, cost-of-living, and the political and economic priorities of a city. For me, the question is: what kind of material reconfigurations are occurring, and who are those arrangements affecting and how? And, what kind of questions can artistic labor introduce into those dynamics?
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CGN: Do you often collaborate with other artists?
\r\n\r\nBL: I try to collaborate with artists as much as I can. It can be a way of having a more intensive kind of conversation with someone, one that allows each of you to figure out more clearly what the stakes—and blind spots—of your own practices might be. As just one example, I worked on an exhibition last summer called Our Lovely Secret Wreck at Hume Chicago, a non-profit gallery in south Logan Square that is run by an amazing group of artists and organizers. That show involved my own work, but also the work of J. Michael Ford, an artist here in Chicago, and Margaux Crump, who is based in Houston. I also worked with a large group of writers to develop something in between a catalog for the show, a collection of experimental writing, and an artist’s book, which was in turn designed by Kitemath, an incredible design collective here in Chicago. The Chicago Design Museum has actually just acquired that book for their collection, in large part due to Kitemath’s efforts. That whole show was a huge collaborative effort.
\r\n\r\nCGN: What’s on the horizon for you? Do you have shows or projects planned for the summer and fall?
\r\n\r\nBL: The next major project is a solo show in Charlotte, at the New Gallery of Modern Art, opening July 13th. That show is called Easy Colors, and will involve an installation, paintings, and some works on paper, all thinking through the relationship between wallpaper and painting. In some ways, it’s a companion to the work here at Chicago Gallery News. After that, I’m not sure—I’d like to find somewhere to show the new material that is more about aspirational, DIY diagrams from the 1970s and 1980s, these drawings and paintings on drywall that I’ve mentioned. I’ll be travelling some for research related to art historical projects, and I always like to draw when travelling. There are some projects that I’ve been thinking about for a while that I’d like to move forward on, including a large artist’s book, and another painting series. Hopefully, there will also be time for some new collaborative projects.
\r\n\r\nFor more information about Brian T. Leahy visit: briantleahy.com. Prop(House) is on view at Chicago Gallery News through July 21. Please email or call to schedule a time to visit the exhibition.
\r\n\r\nTop image: Brian T. Leahy, Prop(House), 2017. Installation view at Chicago Gallery News, June 2-July 21, 2017.
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Behind the scenes, many people in the community are working tirelessly to support artists and bring fresh perspectives to the public. We spoke with five insiders about what excites them now and what they anticipate next.
The following preview is one of five conversations that appear in CGN's Fall 2026 magazine. To receive a copy of the print edition click here.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1789517637/noxz9olp47gfneafz8xg.jpg\")
“I’m thrilled to further expand my artistic and design practice by introducing other mediums into the mix. I’m looking forward to watching the seasons change and devoting a lot of time in the studio as well. Fall/winter is my favorite time to create new works.
I have an upcoming solo show with VSG Contemporary that I am excited about. The work will delve further into the topics of cultural mythology and how these tales and narratives have helped shape my worldview.
Also, it wouldn’t be right if I left out my excitement for this upcoming season of Chicago sports.”
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961823/s3lp0uull2s8mvd8funj.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Extension Cords, Glazed stoneware, chrome, Sizes vary 2021-present. Photo: Mikey Mosher
This interview is part of CGN's Fall 2026 issue. Purchase a copy or subscribe.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961824/mghrpnghxd9j9ko2dsjt.jpg\")
Andi Crist
BY ALISON REILLY
Andi Crist’s warm, engaging demeanor is evident in the first few minutes of our conversation. Generous with her time and forthcoming in her observations, she cares deeply about building relationships through her art making. Crist grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, devoured art classes, wrote songs and played music in high school, and moved to Chicago to study visual art at Columbia College. In 2024, she received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a woodworker, sculptor, ceramicist, and conceptual artist, and she teaches at Illinois Institute of Technology. We discussed her multidisciplinary practice, her experience working as an art handler, preparator, and fabricator, and how she thinks about labor, creativity, and value in the art world.
CGN: You grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. How did that environment shape your point of view as an artist?
Andi Crist: That’s such a funny question. Nobody’s ever really asked.
CGN: Oh, really?
AC: Yeah, maybe because I never was super connected with the arts community down in Birmingham. I moved to Chicago in 2007, so it’s been 20 years since I lived in the South. I was definitely one of those art kids—one art credit was required in high school, and I graduated with like seven. I was surrounded by artists who had a big impact on me, because they were working artists. All my art teachers were trained in Alabama and then continued to teach and work in Alabama, which gave me this desire to try to expand my community outside of what I was familiar with.
CGN: Do you identify as a Chicagoan?
AC: My family still lives in Alabama, and I go back every year. I love being in Alabama. Maybe now being in Chicago for almost 20 years, I identify as a southerner living in the city. I carry on the social qualities of a friendly southern person [laughs].
CGN: You have a varied art practice—woodwork, ceramics, mold making. What drew you to those types of fabrication methods and that type of art making?
AC: My dad is a carpenter and a hobbyist woodworker, but his career was psychology, and my mom was a professor and an incredible craftswoman. I absorbed my mom’s model of creativity, which is to try a bunch of different things and not necessarily finish them but to try to learn as much as I can by just going for it. My practice over the years has become an exploration of conceptual elements of what makes art art and not just craft. Do you have to be a master craftsperson or a professional artist in order to make something that resonates with people?
I make a lot of work that references the mode of making and requires a variety of different media. I just finished teaching a ceramics production class where students learned how to produce molds, think about positives and negatives, and get into a level of production rather than just handicraft as a way to multiply their output.
I got into fabrication because I’ve always liked working with other artists. I have a background in theater and gallery work. I’m a voracious learner, and I like being able to share those skills with my community. Then I end up making work about that. It’s a self-feeding cycle.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961825/zzejqwibga5f5wk6einh.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Artist’s Ladder, 2023. Photo: Jeff Perlman
CGN: Thinking about your background as an art handler and preparator—how did you get to the point where you were making work about that experience?
AC: In 2010, right before I graduated from Columbia, I was living in a storefront in West Logan Square with my partner at the time. We started a gallery called Autotelic in the space and had to build it out using the worst tools with very minimal resources. Then we started curating shows there and that meant helping other artists figure out how to install their work in our unusual space. Eventually, I gained the reputation for knowing how to do that type of work. I started getting invited to work in museums and galleries.
The Holocaust Museum was the first museum I worked at, and as difficult as that subject matter is, that experience was really important to me because I was learning more about the larger world of gallery work. As an artist working as a preparator, you’re straddling both sides of that space. You’re really seeing how the sausage is made. You’re hearing all the conversations about artists, curators, the process of exhibition making. There is a lot of information you can gather about the economics of the art world by just being the person that has the know-how to touch and handle artwork. Eventually that started feeding into my art practice because I wanted to make work that was contributing to a conversation around art as a type of job. It fueled a methodology of seeing everything in the world as the result of a long line of processes that required effort and thoughtfulness by many hands.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961826/uv5bysb5fbne30gr5czh.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Fair Warning, 2025.
CGN: The title of your recent exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum—Live, Laugh, Lo—sorry, not Live, Laugh, Love—Live, Laugh, Labor.
AC: [Laughs] That’s what everybody does.
CGN: I love the title—it’s perfect. You incorporate humor along with thoughtful critiques about labor and value in your work. What role does humor play? How does it help you connect with your audience?
AC: One of my biggest criticisms of art with a capital A is how easily it can be overly intellectualized. I think that’s why I end up making a lot of work that references things that already exist or have some kind of real purpose. It’s important to give people a foothold so there’s an obvious place to board that train of thought. As an artist—maybe this is me getting into a sweeping argument about what artists should be—but I personally believe in intellectual accessibility. Humor is a swift way to drop defenses and allow people to come in without feeling like they are not getting the joke or not understanding. I like to make work that can hold both of those things at the same time—it’s funny on the surface level, it’s kind of cheeky, but there’s also another way to look at it that is intellectually clever. There is a joy in the attempt to “get it”. Like the satisfaction of grasping how a crossword puzzle actually works.
It’s also so much a part of my personality. I take myself seriously as an artist, but my ego isn’t at the heart of it. It’s really something that I do because I love to make things, and I love to connect with other people. My parents raised me on puns, creating those language relationships between things and people and space. Understanding a joke is the same way that we understand art, and while neither of my parents would consider themselves artists, they taught me how to think about art.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961828/gnotyfijabr7e15kb6hm.jpg\")
Andi Crist, 69 Bananas
CGN: Your work, Artist’s Ladder, explores hierarchies, workplace cultures, and institutional values. What experiences shaped your reflections on these themes?
AC: The ladder piece distinctly represents the complicated relationship between front of house, back of house, and the hierarchy of labor. Who is the artist in those relationships? How much does another person’s knowledge and expertise contribute to the success of another artist?
There are enormous, industrialized art practices out there, warehouses full of people making things, and those people are also artists. When you make work that involves other people, it’s important to acknowledge their contributions. I’ve had complicated interactions with other artists who are like, ‘Hey, do you want to collaborate with me on this thing?’ but really they just want me to make their idea. I made Artist’s Ladder while I was in grad school at UIC, and it really represented my relationship with a lot of other artists, because I could be an actual support structure for them. Then it turned into this absurd physical thing. It’s extremely overbuilt with inlaid racing stripes made of exotic hardwood, and a butcher’s block-style plaid top. It’s not really like an FU as much as it is asking for acknowledgement of my skills and the essential support structures that exist.
CGN: I want to ask you about another piece, Five O’Clock Somewhere, a wool rug that resembles a children’s play mat. I work at a library, and it reminded me of rugs I see all the time. It’s a peaceful image of an office park with a large fountain surrounded by a parking lot. I’m curious why you chose a rug as the medium to depict that image.
AC: To me the heart of that joke was that it was a landscape. I wanted it to be physically traversable. And that was, I don’t want to say controversial, but it was something that I had to talk about a lot. The critique of that work was the fact that I didn’t want to hang it on the wall and turn it into a tapestry. I really wanted it to be a rug that people could walk on. When I showed that work at Chicago Artists Coalition for the New City Breakout Artists show. There was a lot of pushback about having it on the floor and allowing people to walk on it.
That, to me, was such an important conversation, because, in my mind, the fact that you could walk across it and traverse it was part of how I was thinking about the object. Rugs are utilitarian–they are floor coverings. When you make art that doesn’t do anything, you don’t get to participate in that part of the conversation.
I enjoy sparring around art like that. I am totally tickled by the pushback. The critique of display is exciting, and sorting through the politics of utilitarianism in art spaces is fun to me. And then—it was so crazy—we ended up showing it halfway on the wall and halfway on the ground.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961829/r1zylkwfw9rkw191skdl.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Five O’Clock Somewhere, on display at Live, Laugh, Labor: Thoughts on Usefulness and Other Myths at The Cleve Carney Museum of Art, 2025.
CGN: Oh, wow.
AC: I was like, this is the epitome of compromise! I had to build a structure so that it could hang that way safely.
CGN: I would say just put it on the ground if that’s what you want to do. It’s interesting that there are still very fixed ideas about the way that art should be displayed.
AC: That preparator part of it, that’s what I’m all about. I was having that conversation about what physically supports the work or what conceptually supports it in the way that it’s shown.
CGN: Have you always been a writer? How do your art and writing practices work together?
AC: I can’t say that I’m a writer, it’s probably the same way that it can feel weird to call yourself an artist. But I feel like I’ve always been relatively good at writing. The first time I ever did any kind of professional writing was contributing, a long time ago, to a website called eHow. The editors would send me a title, and then I would have to research how to do that thing. Then I would write out step-by-step instructions for how to do that.
I think that’s how I had to make myself think through my conceptual practice—I had to do the research, coagulate that into some kind of document, and then I would have stream-of-consciousness conversations with myself. “Why are we interested in this? Why would we make it this way? What would I want to talk about if someone were to ask me about this?” It’s almost like I was pre-interviewing myself.
I think the writing is just another way for me to process that idea before I put in all of the time and energy to actually accomplish it.
CGN: What are you working on right now? What projects do you have coming up?
AC: The biggest project that I have right now is my house. My family and I suffered a major house fire on New Year’s Day. We’ve been displaced since then and are navigating rebuilding our house. It was a total loss.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961830/kekfqzf9f87fq48juogh.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Single-Use Fireplace, 2025. Photo: Mikey Mosher.
CGN: I’m so sorry to hear that.
AC: Thank you. We’re all okay, but it’s been a really tumultuous year. I moved my studio into a storefront last summer, and so most of my, at least relatively recent, work is safe, and I still have all of my materials, but my home life is starting over. I just had my first full year at this space, and it’s got a little gallery built out in the front called Coming Soon. It’s beautiful with floor-to-ceiling windows on Division and Central Park. I’ve been inviting people into the space to try things out.
After teaching the ceramics class, I came into a bunch of nice slip casting molds, and I’m making some really playful, weird, ceramic stuff. I want to be open and not put too much pressure on myself. Having a big studio by myself is very expensive, so it’s easy to want to make it feel like it’s worth it. But if for now all I can do is make it a resource for other people, then that will be the thing I do. Be less selfish, but more selfish with my time. Saying I can’t do that, or I don’t want to do that. It’s not my nature to say no—I’m such a yes man. I’m learning how to be a yes man for myself.
CGN: That makes sense after going through something so traumatic.
AC: I have an amazing support system. Our friends started a GoFundMe. It was incredible. I’m so humbled and floored by how held I felt by Chicago. I can’t help but throw a little shout out to my Chicago people. I can see how people’s lives get totally ruined by this kind of tragedy. I feel so lucky. Chicago definitely showed its love back.
CGN: For your project Coming Soon, are you bringing in other artists?
AC: My philosophy is that I want to be involved as little as possible. I am thinking about it more as a hosted than curated space. I’m actively soliciting proposals or ideas for workshops, meetings, book clubs—I’m down for making it a resource, whatever that means. I don’t want to over-think it, I want it to be an intuitive and organic thing, which is why I call it Coming Soon—it can be a placeholder for anything. It’s exciting. Taking my hands off the reins is a good exercise for me.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1788961831/gno5dhliwfnzpuaim78s.jpg\")
Andi Crist, Extension Cords, Glazed stoneware, chrome, Sizes vary 2021-present. Photo: Mikey Mosher
Fall offers a full slate of exhibitions across galleries and museums throughout the Midwest. Behind the scenes, many people in the community are working tirelessly to support artists and bring fresh perspectives to the public. We spoke with five insiders about what excites them now and what they anticipate next.
The following preview is one of five conversations that appear in CGN's Fall 2026 magazine. To receive a copy of the print edition click here.
![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1789516769/izokunnmrufdyjbjnypk.jpg\")
“Intuit Art Museum’s renovated, expanded spaces give audiences the chance to connect with art through daily art-making, third Thursday Art After Work, group Slow Looks designed to provide a mindful experience with a single work and upcoming conversations with sculptor Bill Brady (Oct. 3) and Dr. Mary Trent (Oct. 15), who curated our current exhibition on the role of scrapbook-making in Henry Darger’s art.
On view is the thought-provoking Monumental: The Sculpture of Dr. Charles Smith, which encourages guests to consider the lack of historical representation of African Americans and Black people in America. Dr. Smith’s memorials champion Black history and stories of everyday life he sees missing in mainstream narratives.
This fall we’re opening an exhibition of paintings by Karla Wong, an artist who immigrated from Oaxaca and who explores themes of life and death, gender identity and self-discovery.”