20 Years of Western Exhibitions

 Western Exhibitions is humbled to announce our second show of the 2024 Fall season at our Chicago location, an exhibition that plumbs the history of the gallery through archival materials, press releases and the gallery owner’s to-do journals. Please join us for the opening reception on Friday, November 1 from 5 to 8pm. The show, 20 Years of Western Exhibitions, will run in Gallery 1 through December 21. In Gallery 2 during the same time frame, we are showing paintings by the New-York-by-way-of-China artist Zhi Ding, a new artist to us. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm. 

Western Exhibitions, started by Scott Speh as a nomadic space in 2002, put on shows in other people’s spaces, friends’ lofts and Speh’s apartment. Western Exhibitions participated in the second Stray Show, one of the first satellite fairs, in tandem with Art Chicago. (“Stray” was a term coined by Chicago critic Chuck Mutscheller in 2000 to describe the spaces involved in the resurgence of the alternative art scene in Chicago during the late ’90s.) The gallery then moved into an actual space, a shared “loft” with Lisa Boyle in 2004. They co-habited two locations in West Town the next four years until Speh finally quit his day job in 2008.  The gallery moved into the West Loop, then the heart of Chicago’s contemporary art gallery scene, at the behest of Shannon Stratton, who was moving her seminal not-for-profit gallery Threewalls into a larger space in the 119 N Peoria Building and asked us to take over their old lease. 

A couple years prior, through the help of friend (and patron) Jason Pickleman, the gallery sold several artists books by Miller & Shellabarger to Lew Manilow, the legendary Chicago arts patron who helped found Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (and was a political activist proud to be on Nixon’s enemies list.) In planning the first show in the new space by Stan Shellabarger which would focus on his artist book practice, Speh asked Pickleman, who had designed the catalog for the Manilow artist book collection to tell Lew about the show. Jason replied “YOU call him.” So Speh did, with great trepidation, in September 2008. The call was brief as he stumbled to remind Manilow who he was and what Lew had bought from the gallery. Manilow quickly cut Speh off to say “I can’t talk to you right now, the stock market is collapsing.” Speh groaned to himself: “How did I pick the worst time ever to quit my day job?”

And somehow, the gallery muddled through The Great Recession, participating then in a disastrous Armory show in March 2009 while the market was at its very bottom (the work we showed was great, mind you; it was disastrous as we couldn’t sell anything). We moved the gallery into the old Tony Wight Gallery space around the corner on Washington Boulevard, then moved again with the other two galleries in the Checkered Cab building, Document and Volume, to our current location on Chicago Avenue. Most of the rest of the Chicago gallery scene followed us to West Town. We opened a second location in 2022 in Skokie, yes, Skokie! All told, the gallery has had 6 locations and 3 logos; participated in over 60 art fairs, near and far; and has put on 233 shows that have included 425 artists. We are proud to also report that the gallery’s very first intern (a position she created herself), Jamilee Lacy, continued on into a successful curatorial career and is now Executive Director of the Frye Art Museum. So today, we look up from our laptop to realize that the gallery has been in business for 20 years. How’d that happen?!

20 Years, 6 Locations, 3 Logos, 233 Shows, 425 Artists

Image: Postcard from our first brick-and-mortar show, courtesy of The Anthony Elms Artist and Exhibition Ephemera Collection because the gallery founder wasn’t smart enough to save any for posterity