Have we hyped you up enough for EXPO Chicago? Featuring over 170 exhibitors, Navy Pier is hosting one of the biggest art expositions in the world from April 13th through April 16th. Showcasing the most innovative programs, most forwarding curatorship, and most intriguing artworks in one space, 2023 EXPO is here to impress and provoke. After reviewing the full EXPO Chicago exhibitor list, we’ve chosen a few from each category to help you build your EXPO itinerary.
Meanwhile, if you want art week alignment recommendations, click here.
CURRO
Booth: 315
Curro, known as a dialogical space and a platform for Mexican and non-Mexican artists, has established itself as an obligated reference for the Guadalajara art scene. For EXPO, Curro will present a group exhibition featuring works by Alejandro Almanza Pereda, Claudia Peña Salinas and Octavio Abúndez, as well as a site-specific installation by Andrea Galvani. For those interested to see what Mexico’s second art-hub, other than the nation’s capital, has been working on, a stop by CURRO at Booth 315 is mandatory!
Almine Rech
Booth: 332
Tarvel through the colorful, vibrant, and comprehensive mixed-media paintings by California-based painter Daniel Gibson at Almine Rech’s booth. Made from charcoal, ink, and watercolor, Gibson illuminates his personal and cultural experience growing up in the border town of El Centro. Anyone who grew up in the California desert is sure to find the artist’s display of the area’s migration history and cultural semiotics nostalgic.
Mindy Solomon
Booth: 248
For EXPO, Mindy Solomon, a leading contemporary art gallery based in Miami, Florida, will showcase a variety of work that express diasporic identity through material-based media. Lively, textural, and thoughtful- this grouping will provide an overview of what is happening socially and artistically in society today. Featured artists include Anya Paintsii, Moises Salazar, Basil Kincaid, Natalia Arbelaez, Sydnie Jimenez, Malaika Temba, and Melissa Joseph.
Chicago Printmakers Collaborative
Booth: 407
As Chicago’s longest-run independent print shop, Chicago Printmakers Collaborative (CPC) has always been a pioneer in showcasing and supporting Chicago’s experienced and emerging printmakers. At EXPO, CPC will showcase the beautiful printmaking work of 30 artists ranging from mono-printing, block printing, letterpress, screenprinting, and more.
LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies
The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies is a not-for-profit printshop located in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. The Center provide students and invited artists a rich environment in which to investigate and produce images through a myriad of printmaking techniques including intaglio, lithography, screenprint, relief, and digital imaging. If you’re looking for a booth to take you a quick tour through the many possibilities printmaking has, stop by LeRoy Neiman’s booth at EXPO.
Wildwood Press
Wildwood Press is known not only for its custom papermaking, but also as a destination for artists who want the challenge of an etching press capable of printing 5-foot by 10-foot images. Ellison Simmons invites a select number of artists to work with her in St. Louis every year. We highly recommend any printmakers interested in producing large-scale works to stop by Wildwood’s press at EXPO next week.
ENGAGE Projects
Booth: 107
ENGAGE Projects will present work by Chris Larson at the tenth anniversary edition of EXPO CHICAGO, returning to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall April 13–16. Amid the global showing, ENGAGE Projects will participate as part of PROFILE, a distinct gallery section which highlights single artist installations and focused thematic exhibitions by established international galleries. Meanwhile, the gallery walls will be covered in towering large-format oil paintings that use semiotic concepts as a means of exploring ideas about the meaning of objective and subjective human theories, from evolution to psychiatry to social justice.
Spinello Projects
Spinello Projects is a Miami-based contemporary art program founded in 2005. It is a gallery, and an innovative platform for nomadic site-specific and curatorial projects. For those visiting EXPO Chicago, there isn’t a more relatable exhibition in the fair than the one at Spinello Projects, because it talks about the people in museums and galleries looking at art.
The art has been curated to accidentally reveal a poignant or darkly comic psychological undercurrent that is sensed and felt before it is understood. The museum-goers in the paintings exclusively include women, parents, caregivers, and children experiencing varying levels of dissociation, panic, and stress. Their bodies act out, are out of control, distorted, or are beginning to merge with the artworks and exhibition spaces themselves.
kó
Booth: 374
A first-time participant, kó is a contemporary art gallery in Lagos telling stories of the stunning Nigerian culture by incorporating traditional trades such as pottery and weaving. At EXPO Chicago, the gallery will showcase seven new ceramic artworks by nigerian artist Ozioma Onuzulike.
Ozioma Onuzulike creates large-scale ceramic installations that hang like tapestries, formed from thousands of ceramic palm kernel beads, terracotta, copper rings, and natural shells. He explores the aesthetic, symbolic and metaphorical nature of the clay-working processes – pounding, crushing, hammering, wedging, grinding, cutting, pinching, punching, perforating, burning, and firing. Adopting the laborious process of firing the materials through multiple kilns, each firing creates unique colors and textures in transforming the clay, oxides, glazes and recycled glass.
Featured Image: EXPO CHICAGO 2022. Courtesy of Printed Matter, Inc.