Installation view | More Drawings about Buildings and Food | at (northern) Western Exhibitions | January 7 to April 14, 2024

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, Noel Herrera 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 Thu-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: Cooper in 2016, 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. Cathrine Whited will have her first solo show with the gallery in September 2024.

Arts of Life

Noel Herrera (b. 1999) creates marker drawings that are direct extensions of his everyday life and interests, paying tribute to his favourite foods, restaurants, tv shows, and toys. Art-making and the process of quickly generating new ideas is instinctual to Herrera: he is prolific, focused, and imaginative.

Bill Lilly (b. 1972) makes work inspired by the music he listens to: “I’m a metalhead and that’s what my art is about.” Like heavy metal, Lilly’s art is a force of technical dexterity, distortion, aggression, masculinity, and raw, unapologetic loudness.

Christianne Msall (b. 1969) is a strong self-advocate, dedicated to both her personal and professional development. Her meticulous graphite and colored pencil drawings are a vibrant marriage of intuitive shapes and symbols inspired by her spirituality: “When I look at my work, I see how happy I am, my positivity. I’m very proud of myself.”

Susan Pasowicz (b. 1955) is a dreamer and visionary. Fascinated by colour, shapes, and organic forms, she uses coloured pencil to create compositions that reflect a dream-like state. Often incorporating windows, doors, or portals, Pasowicz transports the viewer to a new environment: “I usually draw houses, people, curly top trees, clouds, the future. I like watercolors, portals, and rainbows.”

Hubert Posey (b. 1964) uses his art-making process as a tool for connection and communication with others, building multidimensional sculptures from amassed materials collected around the studio. He can often be found laughing as he paints, opening himself up to the world around him and to the community of the studio.

LAND

Raquel Albarran (b. 1987) is preoccupied with toes, noses, and encapsulated forms. Her art is full of juxtapositions and playful explorations of life, illness, and objects begging to be squeezed. Albarran’s drawings and sculptures reflect her delightful sense of mischief, humor, and energy. She describes the fantastical and sometimes bizarre pairings in her work as endearing mixes of light and dark, warning viewers that there are “a lot of amputations going on” in upcoming work.

Carlo Daleo (b. 1961) is a talented draftsman, painter, writer, animator, and voiceover artist. He started making art at the age of five following two pop culture tragedies: the unfortunate car accident injuring Jan Berry and the death of Walt Disney. Daleo decided he wanted to continue the legacy of Disney and other cartoonists like Hanna-Barbera and DePatie-Freleng. Daleo’s interests and aesthetic influences are incredibly diverse, including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Soupy Sales, New York City cultural institutions, newscasters, and local librarians.

Garrol Gayden (b. 1960) is inspired by a childhood trip to New York City’s historic Coney Island. His saturated images often start with layers of figures, landscapes, and words related to the amusement park. Gayden weaves phrases from his life, family, and fellow studio members between these landmarks, explaining: “I write the things I see, it makes me feel a whole lot better.” His lines are sculptural and bold, alternating from hatch marks to tangled descriptions, a fusion resulting in highly detailed and deeply personal compositions.

Kenya Hanley (b. 1975) has devoted countless hours to assiduously drawing his two great loves: food and reggae musicians. His meticulously organized images, often color coded and labeled, pay homage to the food he grew up eating, the sweets he tries to stay away from, and the music he so lovingly listens to. Hanley is one of LAND’s founding members, and his first book, Tasty Reggae, was published in 2017 by All-You-Can-Eat-Press.

Michael Pellew (b. 1979) is a prolific illustrator and humorist, constantly working on his line of greeting cards, album covers, narrative art books, wooden sculptures, and large drawings. Self-proclaimed “Godfather of Art,” Pellew’s never-ending love affair with pop music and rock-and-roll shows in his comic-style drawings, cassette-tape drawings, and life-sized cut-outs of his favourite musicians, including David Byrne, Alice Cooper, and Michael Jackson.

Byron Smith (b. 1965) makes gentle, celebratory, and intriguing derawings and paintings of women. Sourcing inspiration images from fashion magazines, Smith exaggerates his model’s features. His figures have long, bold, eyelashes, polished nails, and plump, puckered lips. Smith is originally from North Carolina, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Project Onward

Kareem Davis’ elegant graphite drawings focus on the simple and straightforward beauty of buildings that may or may not exist. Davis is a life-long Chicago resident and works full time at both Anitque Taco locations in the city. When he is not drawing skyscrapers, he is rendering images of the CTA L-trains and buses while enthusiastically informing his viewer of the design and function. Most of his drawings contain a small rendering of the sun or moon to show scale.

William Douglas (b. 1967) hails from Knoxville, TN, and draws upon this substantial creative home in his work. Tennessean local artworks based on folk and craft techniques as well as personal and spiritual stories have a special resonance in the artist’s extensive array of objects and images. His compositional strength comes not only from drawing but also from collecting and fusing objects and materials. He explains: “I am inspired by craftspeople in my family – quilt makers, fiddle-makers. I am also inspired by comic books and have made a few of my own. I’m interested in B-movies, reading, science fiction, outer space, nature, and beauty, animals, love, death, color. I get bored unless I’m working with many mediums; I use my intuition and instinct. There is a lot of ugliness in the world, but the ugly can be beautiful.”

David A. Holt (b. 1984) expressed an early interest in music, romance, and celebrities with special mention to any celebrity in the Virgo-Cancer club, being a Virgo himself. Holt’s drawings rely heavily on memory and association, connections running through social media and current events. He turned his attention to obituaries and memorial portraits after the death of his grandmother in 2009. His memorial paintings and drawings are often done in one day, showing Holt’s sense of immediacy and directness.

Ricky Willis (b. 1968) is an architectural historian and sculptor, depicting high-hise apartment buildings, Shell gas stations, CTA buses and trains, and water towers. With simple material and found wood, he recreates these structures from memory with startling elegance, charm, and insight. Willis can pinpoint virtually any building in Chicago and relay when it was built, what building existed before it, and the best bus route to visit it. Contact with real places and locality drive his work: collecting materials for his sculptures during his transit and bicycle commutes, Willis builds objects of the city from the city itself.

Visionaries + Voices

Courttney Cooper (b. 1977) draws large, elaborate, and exuberant maps of Cincinnati by hand and from memory. Cooper’s obsessive drawings made on collaged pieces of found paper from his grocery store job map out neighbourhoods in his hometown with remarkable detail. He often walks the streets of the city committing all the places he visits to memory, a process he has been using since he was a child. His maps often address seasonal events, such as the WEBN fireworks, Oktoberfest, or the Taste of Cincinnati. Cooper often goes back into drawings to update them when buildings are newly constructed or torn down.

Jenny Crowe (b. 1985) has loved to fill journals for as long as she or anyone who knows her can remember.  Her fragments of text combine poetry and the mundane in a struggle to find a whole within her experiences.  Crowe’s words are layered to the point that they visually flatten themselves into powerful and immovable forms. Her process is methodical, as she works from left to right and top to bottom, filling the page’s void of empty space until the viewer is trapped somewhere between the impulse to decode text and the desire to enjoy a purely visual experience.

Elmer divides the blank pages of sketchbooks into composed, balanced ratios of space using geometric shapes and color. With simple calculated movements, he applies pencil and then colour to fill some areas and see how they overlap. Elmer approaches portraiture in the same reductionist manner: faces become circles and bodies are condensed to squares. He often draws the same images, and seeing the entirety of them grouped together in the sketchbooks allows us to understand them as daily meditations, as Elmer finds balance and control in his world.

Andrew Hostick (b. 1962) is self-taught and takes as his subjects advertisements and reproductions found in various art magazines including Art in America and Artforum. Hostick inscribes and scores mat board with heavy-handed marks, slowly building up a velvety sheen of coloured pencil in each drawing. The resulting works constitute a beautiful collapse of both primitive and contemporary sensibilities, commenting on the voyeuristic access to an art world which is largely inaccessible to the artist as outsider practitioner.

Trip Huggins comments and memorializes past and current news events of importance. His work is narrative and direct, focusing on moments like the death of President Kennedy, WWII, The Cold War, and stories from the Book of Exodus. Huggins chooses pencil and wax crayon because they look realistic and will often pause between the creation of his pieces for several days, filtering out ideas before settling on the most pressing issue. 

Cathrine Whited writes lists as the first step in her art-making process. She then proceeds to draw each item on the list, with themes like “what’s in my fridge?” She starts her drawings using a ruler to make guidelines in pencil, renders the image and text, then applies coloured pencil before moving to the next item on the list. Her work acts as a vehicle for viewers to isolate, experience, and analyze our collective everyday interactions with the objects and cultures that surround us.