Chicago’s Art Scene Offers a Beacon of Hope for Artists and Dealers

Luke Agada could have moved anywhere after finishing his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023, showing his work in national and international exhibitions, and receiving several awards and fellowships along the way. 

But the Nigerian painter and his wife decided to make Chicago their home—instead of New York or Los Angeles, the two biggest art hubs in the US.

“Chicago has a good balance of everything,” Agada told ARTnews just before the opening of his solo exhibition, “To Translate Is to Move Across,” at Monique Meloche Gallery during the third edition Chicago Exhibition Weekend (CXW) last month.

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There’s a lot of uncertainty and concern in the art market right now, with slower sales, higher tariffs, and federal arts grants being cut. But among America’s art cities, Chicago might be the one best positioned to get through it, in part because it continues to draw and inspire people like Agada. 

Chicago has art schools, art museums, and the 7th most-connected international airport in the world. Art professionals, artists and gallerists told ARTnews that the city’s collaborative approach, affordable residential and commercial real estate, better work-life balance, and long history of fostering talent continue to be strengths even during this period of greater economic and political turmoil.

“In the past 10 years, I’ve seen a lot more artists moving to Chicago,” said Monique Meloche, whose namesake gallery recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. “There’s always good artists here anyway, but there has been this palpable influx of outsiders who are realizing how great the city is, minus those first couple weeks in January.”

“Chicago is part of the strength of doing what it is, we do.” Emanuel Aguilar, co-founder of PATRON, told ARTnews, noting how often he can give tours of exhibitions to visitors. “And then, because of that, we can do things that others can’t. Like share the work with the community, with anyone that walked through that door.”

Working Together to Figure Things Out

More than 70 galleries took part this year in CXW, which also featured talks, exhibition openings, studio visits, collection tours, and its popular tennis mixer.

For its third edition, the four-day event expanded in scope and programming to include the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the curated exhibition “Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City“
showcasing works by artists including Rashid Johnson, Rosemarie Trockel, Dara Birnbaum, Martin Puryear, and Gaylen Gerber at “some point exhibited, sold, or produced in Chicago between 1984 and 2015”.

CXW is the brainchild of Gertie, a cultural and civic consultancy firm founded by Abby Pucker, the daughter of billionaire film producer Gigi Pritzker and Michael Pucker (and the cousin of billionaire Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker). Pucker started the event in 2023 in part to remedy a gap in Chicago’s art scene: the city already has a fair—Expo Chicago, which co-organized CXW this time—but the last edition of Gallery Weekend Chicago, modeled after Gallery Weekend Berlin, took place in 2019.

Local gallerists said CXW helped them connect with and educate young and emerging collectors—and even offered them the ability to reach more locals than they had in the past. “The foot traffic is amazing,” Volume Gallery cofounder Claire Warner told ARTnews. “Even starting out today, we had more people in the gallery than we have any other Thursday of the year.”

The city’s spirit of collaboration can also include making an extra effort to avoid scheduling conflicts with other institutions. 

“Any smart dealer is going to check, does somewhere else in town have an opening that night?,” Meloche told ARTnews, noting her namesake gallery just changed the opening of her next exhibition opening in November to avoid overlapping with a gala at the Hyde Park Art Center. “They’re honoring one of our favorite artists who is not even on our roster, but she’s just like a dear friend of ours. And I’m just like, You know what? So many of our clients are going to be there. Let’s just have it the night before.”

Meloche’s spirit of collaboration extends to the operations of Mariam Ibrahim Gallery, next door. “We’ll bring clients over to her,” Meloche said. “She’ll bring clients over to us. We’ve collaborated on dinners before. It’s like somebody buying something from next door is not going to stop them [from buying from us], or it might that year or that week or that month or whatever, but in the end, it’s like in everybody’s best interest. That is not a New York thing or an LA thing.”

Compared to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, Chicago has cheaper commercial and residential real estate. This means galleries like Corbett vs. Dempsey and Mariane Ibrahim Gallery can afford larger spaces, including on-site or nearby storage. Artists, meanwhile, can obtain apartments and art studios for less money, thrifty curators can launch apartment-galleries, and collectors can buy bigger homes and spend more on art decorating them. 

“You can get 2.5 times more real estate for half the price of New York,” Michael Poulos, an art collector and distributor for Molteni stoves, told ARTnews.

“There are one bedrooms here for, like, $1,500,” said Old Friends Gallery cofounder Delia Pelli-Walbert, who relocated to Chicago from LA. “For the first two months, I felt rich.”

“I bought my 2,000-square-foot house for $250,000,” a University of Chicago professor told ARTnews. “And I fill it with art.”

One of the biggest benefits of Chicago’s affordability is that it gives artists the mental and financial space to experiment and try different things. 

“You can fail,” Independent Curators International Midwest programs manager Scott Vincent Campbell told ARTnews last year. “I feel like we forget about how necessary that is: that you can attempt to do a project, that you can rent a space, try to do a show and it fails, and it won’t devastate you for years.” 

Several people also noted the importance of how many Chicago artists didn’t feel beholden to the expectations of collectors and institutions—a factor they couldn’t find in other cities.

“Chicago still has artists that are making work that they want to make instead of what the market tells them that they should make,” artist Armani Howard told ARTnews. Pelli-Walbert, the Old Friends Gallery cofounder, agreed, saying, “You can afford to be an artist in Chicago and make art that doesn’t really sell that much.”

Areas of Growth and Hope for the Future

After focusing on incubating young artists through sustainable, conservative growth, and observing the growing demand for design, Volume Gallery now has plans to expand into a larger space in January, near Monique Meloche and Mariane Ibrahim, two of the city’s top dealers. Warner said it will feature a main gallery space and a private area for secondary market material, as well as smaller spaces for the gallery to “incubate young talent” and for established artists to “incubate new ideas.”

In the meantime, Agada, the artist, is spreading the word. “A friend just moved who’s also from Nigeria,” he said. “He had a studio in Brooklyn for about a year, and then when he got his O-1 [artist] visa, he decided Chicago was a place he wanted to come too. He arrived earlier this week.”

“Sometimes I feel a little selfish because I don’t want people to come because it’s like, so great that I kind of want to protect it,” Howard said. “But at the same time, if that means that there could be more opportunities that come into the city that can create and sustain financial growth, I’m all for it.”