Curated by David Norr

Scrambling one’s creative practice and domestic life, as conceptual painter Michelle Grabner has done since the mid-1990s, carries forward feminist critiques while opening up the contradictory poles of intimacy and circulation inherent in the artist’s studio. This exhibition of more than eighty of the Chicago-based artist’s works will highlight her commitment to painstaking process as well as to the invention of platforms for others: Grabner will hang some of her paintings on backdrops made by Gaylen Gerber, and exhibitions by Karl Haendel, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Michael Smith will be mounted in an on-site replica of the Suburban—the project space run by Grabner and Brad Killam adjacent to their Oak Park home. Grabner’s tendency to pose one mode of practice as appendage to another results in a complex layering, as richly ambiguous as the ’80s appropriation art that the artist has championed in recent curatorial projects.

— Solveig Nelson