old friends is an art gallery located in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago, IL. The gallery presents practices with increased focus on material application, supporting critical conversation through archival and communal programming.
old friends was founded by Fawn Penn and Delia Pelli-Walbert in 2024. For inquiries, please email office@oldfriendsgallery.com
The entrance is two steps below street level, off of Halsted, north of the intersection of Briar and Halsted. The main doorway is 37-1/2 inches wide; an accessible entrance is available as needed. The gallery is located off the Belmont Red and Brown line train stops and the Halsted bus line. If you need physical assistance or a virtual viewing of any of our exhibitions, please contact us at the email above.
Image: Installation view of E. Saffronia Downing: Tracks and Other Signs at Old Friends
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On view August 14 - September 21, 2025. Curated by Bianca Bova.
Following Chicken Stingel, a performance and exhibition at the Connelly Family Project Space in London in May 2025, Old Friends presents Kenny’s Schachter’s Chicken Stingel: The Sequel.
The jumping off point for Chicken Stingel is a series of Rudolf Stingel works begun in 2002, utilizing large-scale panels of Celotex Tuff-R insulation. The panels were affixed to gallery and museum walls where viewers were encouraged to graffiti them via scratching, writing, or otherwise leaving marks on the malleable surfaces. A decade later the artist readdressed the brittle pieces by casting them in electroformed copper plated in nickel and gold, preserving for posterity an archive of the public’s interactions.
Schachter engages Stingel’s process, exchanging chickens for the public as his collaborators. For the production of the works, a group of micro-sized canvases are coated in edible adhesive, covered in feed, and placed on a wooden workspace structure Schachter has constructed within the participating chickens’ coop. The works that result from the hens’ consumption of the feed from the surfaces of the canvases are then digitally scanned, cast, and coated in silver and gold finishes.
Chicken Stingel: The Sequel encompasses an exhibition of the cast works from the initial performance by Maura and Margaret (London), and will include the initiation of a second series of works with a performance by Jiji and Henrietta (Chicago). By bringing this work to completion in the American heartland, Schachter (who is himself not a stranger to farm life, having worked on one managing its chicken enclosure after graduating from high school early) brings into consideration the multifaceted nature of the animal. They are foodstuffs, undeniably, but also themselves the producers of foodstuffs; companionable collaborators; an intrinsic part of the Midwestern landscape integral to its identity and inhabitability.
— Bianca Bova
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