ARTIST-RUN CHICAGO: Alternative to What?
This panel will attempt to answer a series of questions that swirl in the ether:
What does it mean for artists to build an alternative—not only to the commercial gallery, but to the systems that decide which art receives resources, attention, and a place in history?
What becomes possible when artists themselves set the terms of participation?
Whose organizing becomes part of Chicago’s cultural memory, whose remains undocumented, and what an artist-run culture committed to experimentation, mutual support, and artistic self-determination could make possible now.
At stake is not a simple opposition between commercial and noncommercial art. Can artists sustain work without having to justify it either as a salable object or through prescribed expectations of activism and social benefit? What exclusions can arise within markets, institutions, and artist-led communities themselves? How do funding, criticism, publicity, and archival preservation confer different kinds of recognition—and why might recognition in one system fail to produce visibility in another?
MODERATOR
Meg Duguid is an artist and an arts administrator. She has curated and organized numerous exhibitions and public art projects, written scads of essays, and advocated for artists. Recent curations include Where the Future Came From, an exhibition and resulting book exploring the history of feminist artist-run spaces in Chicago from 1880 to 2018. From 2009 to 2011, she ran Clutch Gallery—a 25-square-inch white cube located in the heart of her purse—since then, she lends her purse to others to curate and carry. Duguid, along with her partner Michael Thomas co-founded culture/Math, an artist service organization that artist develops tools to support the deep and rich cultural community in Chicago. Through culture/Math they are currently working to develop The Visualist into a comprehensive and searchable cultural archive of artist-run projects and actions in Chicago. Duguid also serves as the Executive Director of Spudnik Press, a community Printing press in Chicago.
Tom Burtonwood (b. United Kingdom) is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist, curator and educator. He/they are Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Like the critical theorist Deleuze, Burtonwood maintains a Baroque sensibility, a fascination with complexity, multiplicity, and the infinite play of forms. Deleuze’s description of the Baroque fold as a "fold within a fold" resonates with his layered sculptures and intricate drawings. These works reveal their complexity through a series of folds, each layer adding depth and richness to the overall structure. He/they hold an MFA from Southern Illinois University (USA) and a BA from Loughborough College of Art (UK). Recent venues presenting Burtonwood's work include FermiLab Art Gallery, Batavia, IL; Taiteen Talo and Tramhall, both Turku, Finland; MOM Art Space, Hamburg, Germany; MUU Helsinki Contemporary Art Center, Helsinki, Finland; Material, Chicago; The Donut Shop, Chicago; Bert Green Fine Art, Chicago; DesignLab Gallery, Pasadena, CA; Dock 6, Chicago, IL; Monaco, St. Louis, MO; Platform, Evanston; Riverside Art Center, Riverside, IL; CICA Museum Gyeonggi-do, Korea; DEMO Project, Springfield, IL; Terrain Biennial 2017, Oak Park, IL. Burtonwood is a member of the international art collective videokaffe and a board member and co-organizer of Terrain Exhibitions, a Chicago based not for profit arts organization. Terrain makes private space public through sculpture, installation, performance and interventions. Apart from Terrain he/they have curated over twenty exhibitions of contemporary art working with Chicago - based artist run galleries GARDENfresh (2002 - 2009) and What It Is (2010 - 2015).
Photo: Holly Holmes
Jean Alexander Frater is a Chicago-based painter and the host of Material, an artist-run project space in the storefront of 2025 W. Belmont Avenue. Alexander Frater’s practice centers on painting, experimenting with materials inherent to the medium while integrating other histories, traditions, and language into the form. Alexander Frater has exhibited with The MISSION Projects, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Engage Projects among others, and is represented in Chicago by THE MISSION. Recent programs at Material include Garry Noland: Loot Box and Dana DeGiulio and Matthew Girson: Paintings that have the look of paintings that are looked at. Alexander Frater holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Dayton.
Photo: Mark Frater
Lauren Iacoponi (Ike) is a Chicago-based artist, curator, and arts administrator who has spent a decade developing artist-run spaces. She co-founded Unpacked Mobile Gallery (2017–present), served as exhibitions coordinator at Rubberneck Gallery (2017–2019), and founded Purple Window Gallery (2020–present). Iacoponi has curated exhibitions at MdW Fair, BOCCARA Art, Heaven Gallery, Mies van der Rohe's McCormick House, STNDRD Exhibitions, PWG, and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern.
Unpacked Mobile Gallery partnered with the Lubeznik Center for the Arts (LCA) in 2025 and received project grants from the Michigan City Community Enrichment Corporation (MCCEC) and the Cleveland-Cliffs Foundation to support the mobile exhibition tour, ‘Color in Transit’ (August 26 - September 8, 2025). They received funding for a second mobile exhibition (October 1 - 13, 2026). This fall, Unpacked visited 13 locations over 14 days and offered 22 docent-led tours. Iacoponi received an Individual Artists Program Grant from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2025), in support of Unpacked's satellite exhibition ‘Home Grown Vol. III,’ which toured non-profit art institutions, forest preserves, public parks, and community gardens (July 11-18, 2026).
Susannah Papish is a Chicago-based artist, curator, and writer who earned an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002) and a BA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago (1995). Her work has been exhibited at numerous Chicago-area venues, and she has received grants from 3Arts, the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund, and the Illinois Arts Council.
Papish is the director of boundary, a contemporary visual arts project space founded in 2017 and located in her renovated garage. boundary was featured in the Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago 2.0 exhibition in 2020. In 2021, she participated in the Hyde Park Art Center’s Center Program residency cohort, and in summer 2022, she was a visiting artist at Chautauqua Institution. She has taught at several colleges and universities throughout the Chicago area.
In spring 2023, Papish released Invisible Labors, a limited-edition artist book co-authored with Melissa H. Potter. Her subsequent projects included a lecture for the Field Museum’s A. Watson Armour Seminar series, an exhibition planned for spring 2024 at Cultivator, and ongoing exhibition programming at boundary.
Michael Workman is an artist, writer, reporter, and sociocultural critic whose bylines have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Guardian US, Newcity, WBEZ Chicago Public Radio, and numerous other national and international publications. He is the former Chicago correspondent for the Italian art magazine Flash Art and Executive Director, Publisher, and Editor-in-Chief of Bridge, a Chicago-based nonprofit publishing and cultural organization founded in 1999. Workman also serves as Development Coordinator at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (UIMA).
Recent awards to Bridge include 2026 support for the Festival of Holes from the Warhol Foundation, Artists United support from the NEA and Driehaus Foundation, and a LoganArts cohort general operating grant. His work for UIMA secured the Warhol Foundation’s Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Award, and in 2024 he wrote the successful proposal to secure Ukrainian Village permanent recognition as an Illinois state-designated cultural district.
His choreographic writing appears in Propositional Attitudes, an anthology of performance scores, directions, and instructions published by Golden Spike Press. Perfect Worlds: Artistic Forms & Social Imaginaries, the first in a three-volume series, was released by StepSister Press in October 2018 with a day-long program of performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His practice brings together performance, literary history, place, and phonemic poetics, including Active Investigation at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium in 2023 and Choreographic Place at the Evanston Art Center in 2026.
Workman received a 2025 Illinois Arts Council Creative Projects grant and a Rabkin Foundation travel grant, and was the Fall 2025 Joan and Peter Hood Artist-in-Residence at Allerton Park & Retreat Center in Monticello, Illinois. They are a member of the 2026–2027 Illinois Humanities Road Scholar Speakers Bureau, presenting Writing as Cultural Archaeology and the Poetics of Place.