In early December, Chicago arts and culture blog Bad at Sports ran a series of article on the persistence of what they call “apartment galleries” (obviously galleries run out of peoples apartments and studios). These texts were mostly put together for a publication by Floorlength and Tux (who’ve made the rest of the texts available as a pdf on their website).

While it is mostly presented as a Chicago-only phenomenon (Check out this post about New York’s apartment galleries), it would appear to me that there seems to be an upswing of this type of activity in Toronto. Maybe it’s because I’ve recently graduated and I’m now seeing friends and colleagues try their hand at running a space, but it seems odd in a city as rich with artist-run centers (ARC) and galleries as Toronto. Liz Nielsen tries to explain the impulse:

I have come up with several reasons but there is one that I continually spiral back to, and that is that Chicago has very few “parent galleries”, relative to the number of artists. At risk of being cutesy, parent galleries are the commercial venues that give us artist children shelter, that help us with our homework, hang our work on the refrigerator, talk us up like crazy, send us to art camps/residencies, and above all help us grow into the artists that we are capable of becoming. As it stands, hundreds of art students are pumped out of our schools in Chicago every year — and these are great schools — only to be orphaned with nowhere to show, nowhere to go.

So we parent ourselves.

Judging by recent activities in Toronto (Jamie’s Area, Double Double Land, Butcher Gallery, 107 Shaw, etc) young Toronto artist seem firmly affixed to this no man’s land; orphaned by art school but not quite ready for ARC life. There are other issues at stake here in Toronto, which we can get into in another post, but for now lets see how our neighbours in the windy city do it.

• FLAT’s EC Brown on Chicago’s Domestic/Apartment Gallery Spaces
• Lucia Fabio on Chicago Apartment Galleries
• Erik Wenzel on the State of the Chicago Apartment Gallery
• Jaime Groetsema of the Green Bicycle Organization on Chicago Apartment Galleries
• Eric May of Roots and Culture on Chicago’s Apartment Galleries
• On the matter of public space: or my apartment gallery is an arctic explorer
• Some Notes on Hosting
• Liz Nielsen on Chicago Apartment Galleries