I love thinking about how we experience artworks in our everyday lives through living with them in own homes: waking up to them in the morning, glancing at them behind a loved one while eating a meal, noticing a weird detail that you never saw before in something that you’ve lived with for a decade…
I’m grateful to have been invited to share some thoughts on this at Room and Board in Oakbrook, Saturday September 26th.
Below are the six principles I spoke about, and some further resources for folks in the Chicago area looking to expand the presence of artwork in their homes
Collect art that you love
Expand and deepen what you love
Leave room for ambiguity
Collect a variety of media, from a variety of sources
Connect with the local art ecosystem
Don’t be too precious about everything
1. Collect art that you love
Art is more than mere decoration; it's a living entity that changes over time, with you. It offers a kind of slow release of meaning and a dynamic, evolving relationship that engages a home’s inhabitants over time. When you consider what you want to bring into that environment, hold yourself to a high bar and focus on works that really speak to you, and that you want to take care of in this ongoing relationship.
Prioritize personal resonance, curiosity, and emotional connection over decorative trends or other external factors. Be aware of the materiality of the works you collect, making sure they were made with care and archival materials. Invest in good framing not only because it looks great, but it will preserve the work!
Treat art in your home as a primary, dynamic component rather than an afterthought. Embrace daring juxtapositions with subtle, complex connections to the surroundings rather than mere color matching.
2. Expand and deepen what you love
One of the pleasures of having art in your life is the ongoing cultivation and discovery of what you are drawn to and why. It’s a thread you can keep following your whole life, however much or however little you want to engage with it. Think about the ways that we learn to expand our understanding and appreciation of things like wine, music, fashion, etc. The more you engage with what you are drawn to and why, the more you will hone your taste, discover more work and grow what you are noticing not only with the art you bring into your home but also in the world around you.
Art invites us to be mindful of our attention to our experience of the world. It can calibrate our senses differently, mirror or open up strange psychological associations, or simply offer a passing experience of wonder and free-floating imagination. Giving yourself over to this process creates an ongoing feedback loop that will unlock other avenues of thinking and feeling about art as you continue to collect works to bring into your home.
Depending on the scale of art purchases you might be planning, it could be a good idea to hire an art consultant. Local Chicago consultants include DeGroot Fine Art, Johalla Projects, and Patti Gilford among others.
3. Leave room for ambiguity and weirdness
Art can shake up, complicate, deepen or expand our everyday experience. Works that do this best often have a mysterious, irreducible or enigmatic quality. Something that we can’t put our finger on, or even something quietly unsettling that we have to gently wrestle with. Leave room for this weirdness!
People can be intimidated about art they don’t understand. Don’t worry about that too much. Understanding is itself overrated, and not understanding is one of the best things about art, forcing us to delve more into intuition, feeling and non-verbal sensing of how something affects us. Lean into that with works that defy easy understanding and continue to open up to you in new ways.
4. Collect a variety of media, from a variety of sources
2D works (Paintings, drawings, prints, photography) tend to be the most convenient and obvious formats, but textile/fiber works open up a whole range of other possibilities for texture and materiality. Sculpture can be daunting at first, but so much of contemporary sculpture plays with a variety of materials and formats, it can be a fun element to integrate into the spatial volume of your home, whether on a shelf next to books, on the floor, hanging from a ceiling, etc. Ceramics are another great rabbit hole to go down.
Be expansive with what you can pull into your home and where you’re getting it. A pricier passion purchase from a contemporary gallery can coexist with a peculiar flea market find. A historic woodblock print bought on Ebay can be paired with a contemporary photograph, or vintage poster.
“Prints” as a category is a huge topic! It can be daunting but prints are a great way to collect works often at a more accessible price point, whether from emerging or established artists. This is a solid overview of various traditional print methods.
5. Connect with the local art ecosystem
Engaging with the local network of galleries, arts non profits and other institutions makes collecting art both more exciting and more accessible. Fold it into your social life, go to art openings and talks, gallery hop on weekends, plug into programs like Gertie, track art events through local guides like The Visualist.
Relying on existing curatorial conduits like galleries, non profits and art institutions helps you learn more about what you are drawn to, what excites you, what is happening now in artists studios that you might love to learn more about. There’s still a huge variety of practices to encounter, and a wide array of emerging talent within this field. But starting with channels that are already searching, vetting, reviewing, curating and selecting artists narrows the process for you.
Commercial galleries vary in their taste, emphasis and price points from one to another, but each will have its own internal range of emerging-to-established artists on their roster, and a variety of sizes, media and entry points. If you want to do a deeper dive into more emerging artists who have not yet been fully embraced in that world – and who will likely have works at a more accessible price – tap into local non profits, artist run spaces and MFA programs.
Here is a very partial list of the Chicago galleries, non-profits, and art institutions to connect with:
Non-Profits, Community Incubators & Resources, Artist-Run & Alternative Spaces
Comfort Station — A historical, multi-disciplinary, non-profit arts space in Logan Square known for exhibitions, film screenings, and its Artists to Watch program.
Heaven Gallery — A long-running, non-profit, artist-run gallery and vintage space in Wicker Park that presents emerging visual artists, musicians, and community programs.
Tiger Strikes Asteroid (TSA Chicago) — An artist-run, non-profit network space in East Garfield Park dedicated to artist-curated exhibitions and cross-city exchanges.
Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC) — A foundational non-profit offering residency programs, exhibition opportunities, and professional development resources for local artists and curators.
Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center — A West Town non-profit incubator prioritizing exhibition opportunities for emerging artists and curators through paired and collaborative shows.
Hyde Park Art Center — A major South Side community art hub featuring expansive exhibition spaces, residency programs, open studio courses, and artist talks.
LATITUDE Chicago — A non-profit, community digital print lab and residency program offering affordable high-end scanning and printing tools to local photographers and artists.
Buddy — An artist shop and exhibition space located inside the Chicago Cultural Center, dedicated to selling work by local Chicago artists, makers, and performers.
Chicago Art Department (CAD) — A Pilsen-based artist-run non-profit offering studio residencies, learning cohorts, and civically-minded community exhibitions.
SAIC Galleries / SAIC Dialogues — Institutional spaces run by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago featuring public lectures, panel discussions, and curated student/faculty exhibitions. Attending MFA exhibitions at the end of each school year is a great place to see a lot of emerging talent before they are advanced in their career and less accessible in pricing!
Commercial Galleries
PATRON Gallery — A West Town gallery focused on contemporary art, featuring strong programming with both emerging and established multidisciplinary artists.
DOCUMENT — A commercial space specializing in contemporary photography, film, and media-based art, operating alongside a high-end digital printmaking studio.
Western Exhibitions — A contemporary art gallery in West Town representing conceptual, artist-driven practices, works on paper, and artist books/editions.
Kavi Gupta Gallery — A prominent international gallery with multiple spaces in the West Loop, showcasing major mid-career and underrepresented global contemporary artists.
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery — A West Town gallery highlighting contemporary art from the African diaspora and emerging global voices.
Devening Projects — A West Side gallery founded by artist and curator Dan Devening, focusing on site-specific installations, thoughtful artist pairings, and publishing experimental artists' editions and multiples through Devening Editions.
Andrew Rafacz Gallery — A West Loop gallery showing national and international contemporary artists across diverse media, with a strong focus on conceptual practices and works on paper.
Regards — A contemporary gallery in West Town dedicated to artists who challenge formal, conceptual, and spatial boundaries in their work and exhibition strategies.
6. Don’t be too precious about everything
You can be intentional about what you collect, how you care for it, how it is framed, etc, and still leave room for playfulness and experimentation.
Your art doesn’t need to perfectly match your decor; in fact, it might be more interesting if it complicates things!
Thoughtfully curated artwork can exist among everyday objects like family photos and keepsakes. An abstract painting might look fantastic next to a picture of your grandmother. It also doesn't require gallery-like pristine conditions like perfect lighting and ample spacing at all times – it can thrive in dynamic arrangements, close groupings, and unexpected juxtapositions that evolve over your lifetime as your relationship with the work changes.