An Irish Cultural Takeover of Chicago, as Experienced by a Local

Brandon Alvendia:

When an art initiative hailing from a rural Irish town, smaller than many Chicago Public high schools, sends a group of artists from across Ireland to make waves during the buzzy EXPO Chicago art fair week, something quietly profound is afoot. I’m humbled to have been invited by Michele Horrigan of Askeaton Contemporary Arts to respond in writing to the wide-ranging project.

Their integration into the sprawl of Chicago’s artist-run scene was less a cultural parachuting and more a gentle grafting. The outcome doesn’t simply import and plop Irish art into the dense hub within the vast Midwest, but reiterates how successful exchanges operate: subtle, open-ended, elemental, messy, porous, entangled, in other words, human. A set of conditions best played out into the night with conversations over a heady pint, NA or otherwise.

Not merely a showcase of an essentialized ‘Irishness’, instead the project is framed as a discussion among sites, contexts, and materials. The program unfolds not in the cold historicity of an imagined national pavilion, but across select points of interest in the archipelago of Chicago’s independent spaces: Weatherproof, 4th Ward Project Space, and Good Weather. These spaces resist institutional legibility and offer another more complex read and spatial possibility, and the Irish cohort met them on their own terms-by honoring process over product, intuition over rigid strategy.

At root is a belief that artist-run spaces work. Not just as alternatives, but as structures that are alive to uncertainty, chance, and locality. These are spaces shared with others, and in doing so, articulate a different kind of infrastructure interested in mutual responsibility and respect.

The work of Liliane Puthod, curated by Michael Hill (Temple Bar Gallery & Studios in Dublin, Ireland), presented at Weatherproof (in Albany Park, a northside multicultural immigrant working/middle-class enclave). Titled work wear blues, the exhibition proposed both archaeology and improvisation. Puthod’s work is steeped in materials that embed histories: worn textiles, reworked metal, borrowed remnants, and the overlooked.

The works stay nimble despite the bold iconography and geometry. Denim uniforms splay across the longest wall in a perpetual choreography, and neon hands point to the work of manipulating parts to make the whole. Ad-hoc window coverings display a satisfying patina as do the small sculptural accumulations. The work to assemble this materially vast show, subject to supply chains, and shop schedules alike, balances an exuberant formal approach with a quiet poetic of labour.

Over at the 4th Ward Project Space (located in the Hyde Park neighborhood, home to the University of Chicago, Milton Friedman, and Henry Moore's sculpture Nuclear Energy), Amanda Rice, curated by Noelle Collins (Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK), teases out the politics of extraction, extinction, and access. The quick-cutting and layering plays with the frame of reference, contrasting studied studio shots of objects being handled with a cascading montage of formerly orphaned clips from distant eras. The source materials additionally act as a kind of media anthropology, tracking technology from ancient clay to 4K.

Two films anchored the show, No One Can Ever Embargo the Sun (2021) and The Flesh of Language (2023) and on a second monitor on headphones: a ‘sketch’ for a work tracing the tensions between Neolithic burial grounds and green energy infrastructure in Knock Iveagh, Northern Ireland. Rice’s process is notably durational, spanning multiple eras both human and geological. The films’ wry humor unravels rather than declare, letting found footage, archival research, and associative logic guide a tranquil yet persuasive storytelling, aptly set into a gallery screening room underground.

The final articulation of the exchange, artist-to-artist, city-to-city, came at Good Weather (in a westside industrial corridor, near Cinespace Studios, producer of Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, and other primetime television hits), where Áine Mac Giolla Bhríde and Devin T. Mays shared a joint exhibition titled Building A. Curated by Mark O’Gorman (The Complex, Dublin), the show frames the idea of ‘a visit’ and how that might provide mental scaffolding for an artwork.

Mac Giolla Bhríde’s sculptural arrangements and photo diptych dramatize a rematerialism of an indeterminate invisible labor – albeit higher up from the factory floor, pressed suits not overalls, desk tools not shop tools. In either case, bodies conform and contort to the tools that propel contemporary productivity forward (as I write this hunched over my laptop).

A group of beige upholstered adjustable office rolling chairs, conspiratorially huddling by the window, exiled by Mays, are an example of a long investment in what he calls ‘the here and there of things.’ One contribution was laced with attention to the seen and the nearly missed. Trained in marketing, Mays brings an agility to the work, offering not so much answers as invitations to linger in the liminal space. The door is always open, literally held with two door stops.

‘A place for things to become Things,’ he says – a phrase that imagines worlds in the negative space. That is, until the ‘after-work’ party (opening reception) a number of revelers, Tecate in hand, almost step on and nearly shatter the large glass paned door, laid gently at the foot of the doorway. It’s a fine line between post-minimalism and needing a dustpan.

If there’s a through-line for the citywide Irish art takeover, it might be conversation itself; not just as subject, but as method. The week was full of talk: between curators and artists, between artists and materials, between the works and their hosts. It manifested in a careful choreography of visits, shared meals, borrowed tools, and open questions.

So, in a time when cultural diplomacy gets flattened into a superficial photo-op, the Irish project in Chicago opts for something quieter and thus egalitarian. No grand conclusions, my takeaway was not in any one gallery exhibition but in the stories of the psychic traversals and encounters from here to there and there to here. Hear, hear!

Brandon Alvendia, Chicago-based artist and curator, promotes artist-run initiatives across America through community-driven exhibitions, events, and publications. Co-founder of artLedge, The Storefront, Silver Galleon Press, and the revived MdW Coalition, he supports a growing ecosystem of hyperlocal art scenes, building lasting coalitions of purposeful, artist-led cultural production across the American Midwest.