A few days ago three Austrian artists who were visiting Chicago came out to Oak Park to see The Suburban’s summer exhibitions by Minneapolis-based artist, Joe Smith, and St. Louis-based artist Michael Byron. They also viewed The John Riepenhoff Experience, a small white box that is currently tied high up on the trunk of the maple tree in the yard adjacent to The Suburban spaces. This white box with a hole to stick your head in is an extension of John Riepenhoff’s Milwaukee Wisconsin’s Green Gallery. Its summer show hosts an exhibition by Paul Dreucke.
The first thing the Austrian artists said after finding me in my house making muffins with my two-year old daughter, is that the gallery is hard to recognize. And they are right. The Suburban is as much an idea and an attitude as it is a physical exhibition space. It is comprised of three pale yellow buildings on the corner lot at Lake Street and Harvey Avenue in the Chicago first-ring suburb of Oak Park. It is a unique Chicago suburb because one hundred years ago Frank Lloyd Wright chose this leafy location to set-up his home and studio.
The reason The Suburban is hard to recognize is that from the outside it doesn’t look like what an art exhibition space should look like. It is also located in a suburb, typically a site void of cultural imagination. So when an avant-garde exhibition space sets up a practice in a suburb it is difficult to recognize from the sidewalk. Of course the Austrians also pointed out that we have no proper signage. And again, they are correct. But the yellow stucco four square house, the unkempt garden, the N55 LAND pod and the pair of tombstones by New York artist Gabe Fowler inscribed THEM and US residing in the yard is its own, more accurate, type of signage given the definition of The Suburban. Most simply put, it is purely a pro-artists exhibition space. The Suburban is not interested in sales, curators, critics, or collectors. Its values are more closely aligned with the activities of the studio, the site where artists make decisions, experiment, and take risks. The Suburban hopes to offer an exhibition platform for these activities minus the pressures of the commercial or curatorial distribution system. Sales, press, and attracting a curator’s eye are not The Suburban’s goal. It is a space offered to artists who reside outside of Chicago with the opportunity to explore an idea in front of an intimate, mostly local, albeit art literate, audience.
To date The Suburban has worked with nearly one hundred artists. The Suburban has been supporting artists’ projects and good ideas for nine years. And because it is tethered to a family household with three children, it operates on a timeline and economy different from most alternative or institutional spaces. The Suburban is driven by my own curiosity and deep-seated desire to be continuously confronted with artistic thinking as it is committed to a protraction of studio practice. The Suburban is as much fueled by institutional critique as it is pragmatically concerned with the proximity of my children(‘s) with public schools.
An essay written a few years back by Peter Ribic, my oldest child, insightfully sums up The Suburban this way:
One of the first things my Advanced Placement European History teacher, who I have grown to thoroughly respect, said to us, came in a class discussion about the children of historical figures. “I want each of you to go home and thank your parents for not being artists,” she said. “The children of artists are the ones who lose their minds, fall into madness or commit suicide, and I wouldn’t want any of you to turn out that way.”
Her commentary was obviously striking: I am not only the child of two artists, but I am constantly surrounded by art and its supplementary activities (its viewing, selling, and making). The nucleus of this part of my life lies in the tiny yellow building formerly attached to my garage. My parents call it The Suburban.
The Suburban is a social perculiarity that I have not yet learned to cope with. Since its conception in my preteens, The Suburban has created a varying array of effects on my life, the majority being positive. I have dissected my entire record collection with a British artist named Simon, I have shared fruity nonalcoholic drinks with my friend Sam at a fully functional tiki-bar-cum-art-installation, and developed to some degree, an understanding of what constitutes contemporary art.
However, life within intimate proximity to an art gallery is not entirely beneficial for a self-conscious teenager and his ten-year old brother. While awkwardness does arise when sharing a house with half-a-dozen large, unshaven Scandinavians, the major difficulty of living with The Suburban is explaining the idea and function of it to the more traditionally “suburban” mothers of my friends.
“Were your parents throwing a party at your house on Saturday?”
“Yes, it was an art opening.”
At this point I try to convince her that The Suburban is a serious pursuit of my parents, and that is has a “real” significance in the art world. What this significance is I do not know.
Among my peers, The Suburban has brought me neither recognizable fame, (I can’t imagine “My garage is also an art gallery” would serve as a successful pick-up line) nor overwhelming scorn. My general rule is to discuss the gallery and its work only with close friends or those who question what “The Suburban” means on our household’s telet answering machine prompt. My reasoning for this is simple; debates about the artistic merit of a fictional Swedish Citizen Recruitment Center are not something I enjoy taking part in, let alone fully understand.
Because of The Suburban and my parents’ choice of career and life style, I have seen and learned to appreciate art on levels unknown to my peers. From Marfa, Texas, to Budapest, I have traveled the world to see it. I have eaten bratwurst in my yard with those who make it. I have traded my bedroom away for weeks to Englishmen for duty-free tubes of Toblerone chocolate. For this uncommon exposure, it should have been the request of my history teacher to come home and thank my parents for becoming artists.
Michelle Grabner is a artist, critic, and professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Oak Park, IL where she runs The Suburban. Her work is represented by Rocket, London; Southfirst, Brooklyn; and the Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago. Her writing is published in X-tra, Artforum, Artlies and other art publications.
