Comfort Station
2011-2025
Chicago, IL
Since 2011 a great deal of my time and artistic/curatorial/administrative efforts was wrapped up in Comfort Station, a multi-disciplinary art space in Logan Square. My roles evolved over the years from co-founding and programming the Comfort Music series, to my role as executive director starting in 2016 when we formed a 501c3, until 2025 when I stepped down to pursue my studio practice full time. Since its inception Comfort Station has been extremely grass-roots and ad hoc in terms of its identity and organization, and it is in part an ongoing experiment in how to cultivate a programming space that is porous and hyper-collaborative in nature. We also tried to embrace the schizophrenia and scrappiness that inevitably comes with an eight hundred square space that acts as gallery, music venue, cinema, community meeting space, workshop site, performance venue, micro-cultural center, and more. Comfort Station eschews the conventional wisdom of “don’t be everything to everyone”, instead aiming to do just that.
I exercised the same collage-muscles in my administrative and curatorial roles and Comfort Station that I use in my own studio practice: looking for surprising connections between seemingly disparate things, finding the most natural way to join things together, engaging in non-linear thinking to let surprising things come to the surface, and paying attention to the flow between different elements within a complex system.
