Legit Exhibition

2020

It was a pretty serious exhibition.

Most of the artists participating were aware of themselves being in this show, except one - Fox Hysen. It all started after I had a studio visit with Artist Fox Hysen inside my ghosted MFA studio space, and somehow we started making drawings together to kill time, probably because my studio practice sucks and we didn’t have much to talk about. After Fox left my studio, I still got Fox’s drawings in my studio, and it felt wrong to throw away someone else’s drawings, even if they were done on trashy papers.

And so I thought to utalized the abandoned announcement board outside my studio as a exhibition space. This might sound lame, but I joke you not, before the pandemic, the school actaully hosted legit open calls to let you hang your work on those boards. IT WAS SELECTIVE. In fact, I applied once, and got REJECTED. Now that the school was literally falling apart because of COVID, of course policing over the rights of using the annoucement boards around campus was the school’s least priority (or as I thoguht).

To make the exhibition more legit, I started posting posters of it around downtown Chicago, inside every building of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In total, I put out over 60 large size posters.

Just when I thought nobody would ever notice my cute little legit exhibition and its poster, I got an email from the Department Co-Chair. Which surprised me, since everyone was working remotely (which was something I felt a strong sense of betrayal of, not gonna lie. I was under the impression that things would all be back in-person if I committed my 2nd-year of MFA program. That’s what they said at the school townhall. They changed the policy after tuition deadline.)

I gave a quick but serious reply to that email.

and then, I guess it was not funny.

after a couple more email exchanges, the show goes on, and the posters stayed.

Fun fact, the Co-Chair used to call a previous project of mine “lame art school inside joke.” Which I took personally for a while. But I’ve learned to own it. I think he’s indeed correct, I make lame jokes in response to the even more lame things happening in the community I’m in. My work is a constant reaction to my surrounding.︎

While the “show” might not look impressive at first glance, it was actually pretty wholsome to look at in person! Being the board right outside the bathrooms on the floor, people spent time making their masterpiece before going back to their studios after a bathroom trip. I also got some alumni sending their works in (hence the printouts). The community felt less like a ghosttown after this space was up. While it was only scheduled to last 2 weeks, it never came down.

After graduated for more than a year, I received an instagram message from a curent MFA student, telling me that the legit exhbition 2020 is still up in May 2022. I’m not sure if the school found it cute and decided to not take it down, or it only shows that the school is simply still recovering from COVID, and really can’t give a shit about managing spaces still.

I actaully made a way better digital presence of this legit show on instagram and Mozilla Hubs. One can possibly be thinking it’s a legit group show if only saw the online presence of it.