Western Exhibitions is a contemporary art gallery that shows thought-provoking, and visually innovative artists who work across most media, with an emphasis on personal narratives and cosmologies; LGBTQ and feminist artists and issues; pattern, decoration and surface concerns; works on paper; and artist books. Western Exhibitions presents unique artist projects, curated group shows and maintains a specific inventory of artist books and multiples, gathered together as a sister entity and store, WesternXeditions.
Artists represented:
Dan Attoe, Marshall Brown, Elijah Burgher, Jessica Campbell, Lilli Carré, Courttney Cooper, Edie Fake, Nicholas Frank, Julia Schmitt Healy, Richard Hull, Jessica Labatte, Dutes Miller, Miller & Shellabarger, Aya Nakamura, Rachel Niffenegger, Paul Nudd, Robyn O’Neil, Stan Shellabarger, Geoffrey Todd Smith, Deb Sokolow, and Ben Stone.
Upcoming 2026 exhibitions:
Jan 9-Mar 21: Spaces for People, Systems for Spaces (group show about the built environment)
Mar 27-May 30: Marshall Brown
Jun 5-Aug 15: Richard Hull
Image: Marshall Brown, installation view of Remastériser, Western Exhibitions, 2023. Photo by James Prinz.
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The show opens on Friday, March 27 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm, and will run through June 6, 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
In Gallery 1, Palaces of Industry is a new series of large-scale collages on panel that returns to Brown’s earliest influences: the floating geometries and dynamic equilibrium of Suprematism, Constructivism’s photomontage tradition and layering, Giacometti’s surrealist structures, Duchamp’s readymades. He appropriates images from contemporary artists who make architecture their subject, reconstructing them as monumental collages. These are imagined futures inspired by great industrial palaces built at the birth of modernism: the Crystal Palace, factories that housed new collective labor, the production sites that promised transformation. White space floods the compositions. Fragments hover. The scale creates immersive worlds you can step inside—flatness expands into depth. Building utopian space from contemporary art’s fascination with architecture, Brown turns art’s gaze at architecture back on itself. These are not pictures. They are visions.
In Gallery 2, these never-before-shown works continue his ongoing collage-on-paper Prisons of Invention series, named for Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione. Brown constructs these paradoxical, labyrinthine spaces from fragments of recent architectural photography, just as Piranesi built his imaginary dungeons from the ruins of Rome. Multiple viewpoints collide and diverge within a single composition. Light and shadow emerge from hidden sources. Fragments layer and overlap, creating perspectives that can’t belong to the same space. These are visions of many moments struggling to coexist—each piece holds multiple experiences that refuse to settle into one.
Marshall Brown is an architect, urbanist, and futurist whose work creates new connections, associations, and meanings among disconnected architectural and urban remnants. His 2022-23 show, The Architecture of Collage at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, was Brown’s first solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive presentation of his collages to date. Works from the show, exploratory essays, and additional pieces are published in a book of the same name, available at the gallery. Brown’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography and the University Club, both in Chicago. Brown has exhibited at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles, and in a 10-year survey, Recurrent Visions: The Architecture of Marshall Brown Projects, at the Princeton University School of Architecture. Marshall Brown received his masters degrees at Harvard University. He is a full professor with tenure at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. Marshall Brown lives in Princeton, NJ and Philadelphia, PA.
Foundry, 2026, collage on prepared panel, 72 x 87 inches