The Suburban, the microscopic gallery that influential artist/curator Michelle Grabner and her husband, artist Brad Killam, created in 1999, sits in the narrow space between their Oak Park home and their garage. It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it deal — a 9-by-9-foot cube, constructed of cinder blocks and for a while, partly cream-colored and partly gray in those spots where the building had to be repaired after an artist drove her car into it. As part of an exhibition, a comment on Grabner’s growing influence. But then the Suburban has been that kind of gallery, developing a serious reputation, far outside the Chicago area, for allowing artists broad sway over what they present. The gallery — which now encompasses part of the garage — has hosted exhibitions of relatively traditional sculpture, painting and multimedia work, but also allowed artists to repaint the building itself, install a vending machine, even toilet paper the Grabner-Killam estate (a.k.a., their modest patch of real estate just off Lake Street).
And now it’s over.
Or rather, it will be sometime this summer. On Sunday, the Suburban opens its final exhibition in Oak Park, though the show — works by St. Louis artist Michael Byron and North Carolina artist Ron Laboray (who is, indeed, repainting the facade again) — will likely take a backseat to the eventual closing of the space, whenever Grabner and Killam sell their home (it goes on the market June 1). They are moving to Milwaukee, where they are relaunching the Suburban in a former laundromat in September. The Oak Park opening is at 2 p.m. and includes BBQ, and yes, it’s open to the public. I spoke with Grabner by phone Thursday; she was in Indianapolis, installing a new show of her work at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This is an edited version of a longer conversation.
Q: Why is the Oak Park space closing?
A: A handful of reasons. Being in Milwaukee puts us right between our work and our other (gallery) space, the Poor Farm, in northeast Wisconsin. I’m still going to teach (at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago), but moving allows us to give the Farm more love and attention, and it was a four-hour drive from Oak Park in traffic. This is also about, for me, going home. Which is something I can be political about: I am from Wisconsin and this is a state that had a long-held progressive frame work and now it’s an incubator for a conservative agenda. I want to pay more attention to my home state. And not that Chicago is a distraction, but Milwaukee will take me away from professional distractions in general. In fact, after the Whitney Biennial (which she co-curated last year), I had a big show in New York and the New York Times referred to me as a soccer mom, and that led to me designing a soccer ball for the (FIFA) Woman’s World Cup! But I need fewer of those kind of art-world distractions. I also need a bigger studio and I can’t afford a big studio in Chicago. We need to nurture our studio practices and that is something we are talking about less and less in Chicago. I have to say, I often felt like Chicago makes me into a parody, and that is frustrating. Maybe it’s that second city syndrome, but it seems like dedication and hard work is seen in Chicago as a means to a strategy, and it’s not that for me. I don’t know what role I am supposed to play here now.
Q: You mean, dedication is seen as a careerist thing.
A: Exactly. And I think that is particular to Chicago, which is always looking for a way to improve its want in the cultural landscape, and I would rather it be an intellectual pursuit, not a business one.
Q: You told me once you never measured the gallery’s success by sales. How did you measure it?
A: If the artists learned something about their own work from their relationship with the space, and the suburbs. Many of them had never been to Chicago before. But remember, we never sold work. There was work that sold later, but we never negotiated it.
Q: What was your most memorable show in Oak Park?
A: Two come to mind. Tony Feher, whose work is in Art Institute, he came out for a couple of weeks in November and spent days tapping up the windows with this heavy artist tape to create this beautiful pattern — he had just gotten back from a large show in Istanbul and here he was in November in Oak Park, slogging it out. Also, Gavin Turk, who has this hard-ass London persona, and he not only brought over a work from London, he created works, using those “fragile” stickers you see on glass. I loved we had these artists with international reputations who come to this tiny suburban space and create impressive works, which is a sign of being a true artist.
Q: Do you think the local art scene appreciated the Suburban? All these years into it, despite the quality of the people you have exhibited, I meet people who never heard of it.
A: The artist scene in Chicago is a young scene — people move through it. So I don’t know. But I would have to say it never really mattered to us. I’m tongue-tied on that, I guess. Last night I had dinner at (the novelist) John Green’s house and we were talking about the move to Milwaukee and he was tongue-tied himself about what a huge fan he was of the Suburban. So at the very least, there are people all over who did appreciate it.
Twitter @borrelli
