More Drawings about Buildings and Food

Selections from four Progressive Studios:
Arts of Life, LAND Gallery + Studio, Project Onward, and Visionaries + Voices

More Drawings about Buildings and Food celebrates Western Exhibitions’ relationship with and fandom of artists from four progressive studios— Arts of Life from Chicago, LAND from Brooklyn, Visionaries + Voices [V+V] from Cincinnati, and Project Onward from Chicago — all non-for-profit studios that provide space, materials, mentorship, and exhibition opportunities to adult visual artists with disabilities.

More Drawings about Buildings and Food (the show title riffs on the art rock band Talking Heads’ second album) will feature drawings (and sculpture) about buildings (and cities and architecture) by Courtney Cooper, Kareem Davis, and Ricky Willis; drawings (and paintings) about food by Raquel Albarran, Kenya Hanley, and  Cathrine Whited; exultations of rock stars and celebrities in multiple mediums by Bill Lilly, Michael Pellew (including Pellew’s near life-sized sculpture of David Byrne from the aforementioned Talking Heads), and David Holt; portraiture, still lifes and quirky narratives by Carlo Daleo, William Douglas, Elmer, Andrew Hostick, Trip Huggins, Byron Smith, and Mark Smith; and wildly varied approaches to abstraction in drawings and assemblages by Jenny Crowe, Garrol Gayden, Christianne Msall, Susan Pasowicz, and Hubert Posey.

More Drawings about Buildings and Food, a companion exhibition to Courttney Cooper’s solo show at our Chicago space, opens at (northern) Western Exhibitions in SKOKIE, on Sunday, January 7, 12 to 4pm at 7933 N Lincoln Ave, Skokie, Illinois. Gallery hours at Wed-Sat, 12-6pm, and Sundays, 12-4pm.

Western Exhibitions’ founder Scott Speh was introduced to Courttney Cooper’s work at V+V in Cincinnati in 2011 and was blown away by his large maps of Cincinnati, drawn from memory; intricate and throbbing with energy. Shortly thereafter, Cooper was included in the four-person show Indirect Observation at Western Exhibitions, featuring works based on idiosyncratic observations and notational processes, and was subsequently added to the gallery roster. Since then, Western Exhibitions has presented artists from these studios at the Outsider Art Fair, NADA Miami and EXPO Chicago and in five solo shows at the gallery: Michael Pellew in 2018 and 2022; Andrew Hostick in 2019; Kareem Davis in 2021; and two group shows, Visionaries + Voices at Western Exhibitions in 2020 and Bed-Stuy to Chi: Artists from LAND Studio & Gallery in 2022.