Carl Hammer

By CGN Staff

After four and a half decades in business, Chicago mainstay Carl Hammer is closing his eponymous River North gallery in just a few weeks on April 1, 2025. CGN Publisher Ginny Van Alyea interviewed Hammer this past fall. You can read the interview here.

In a shared statement this week, the gallery announced, "The Carl Hammer Gallery will close on April 1, and the current exhibition provides a historic representation of what Hammer envisioned for his gallery forty-five years ago. He opened the Hammer & Hammer Gallery at 620 North Michigan in Chicago in 1979 while maintaining a full-time English teaching position at Evanston Township High School.” His “singular vision for the gallery was to present the very best of American folk and outsider art to a public that had limited knowledge or appreciation of such material. Carl haunted flea markets and antique shops, in and beyond the upper Midwest, becoming known for his discriminating eye, finding extraordinary examples of folk art and material culture.”

With the work that he found—”examples of tramp art, memory jugs, objects made by inmates, one-of-a-kind shop signs, sideshow banners, waterfowl decoys and unique handmade objects”—many examples of the folk art were by artists who were unidentified, and others didn’t refer to themselves as artists. Carl represented them all with the utmost respect. The gallery soon became a gathering place for the growing community of Chicagoans intrigued by and embracing art from beyond the mainframe.” Early shows included Bill Traylor, S.L. Jones, Minnie Evans, Frank Jones, and other self-taught artists, but he promoted Chicago’s homegrown talent, including Gregory Warmack (aka Mr. Imagination), Albert Zahn, Joseph Yoakum, Lee Godie, William Dawson, Aldo Piacenza and Lee Godie. In the 1990s Carl represented the Henry Darger estate and expanded beyond the genre of self-taught artists.”

He also drew from emerging artists at Chicago art schools, including Hollis Sigler, Ken Warneke, Chris Ware, Fred Stonehouse, Mary Lou Zelazney, ‘CJ’ Pyle, Martin Mull, Vanessa German, David Sharpe and Elizabeth Shreve. The gallery also showed Chicago Imagist artists and work by Roger Brown, Karl Wirsum, Ed Paschke and other Chicago artists. Hammer “extends his heartfelt thanks to the uncountable people–artists, fellow gallerists, clients, critics, curators, educators, scholars and students for their unequivocal support and for sharing in the years and joys of Carl Hammer Gallery.”