Nate Young
The Well
June 5 - July 26, 2025
Artist Reception: Saturday, June 28, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Nate Young works across media, creating sculptures, works on paper, and installations that engage with issues of race and racialization. Using diverse materials (wood, glass, pencil and paper, bone, and sound, among others) his work explores the systems and objects that impact one’s beliefs. Often addressing theological themes through text and architectural elements, Young strips away any specific content, leaving behind a universal lexicon of primordial signs and symbols. These arrows, circles, grids, and negative spaces strongly suggest meaning without in fact conveying it; a profound void, at once empty and full, invites the viewer’s activation. This quiet gravitas and austerity, at odds with the work’s meticulously hand-crafted nature, prompts a post-minimalist interrogation of authority, material, and the artist’s hand.
Young has exhibited nationally at museums and galleries, including MASS MoCA, MA; The Studio Museum, Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Visual Arts Center, Richmond, VA; Front Triennial at the Cleveland Institute of Art, and moniquemeloche gallery, Chicago. His work is in the collections of MOCA, Chicago, DePaul Art Museum, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Milwaukee Art Museum, the Walker Art Center, and the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. A co-founder of the experimental gallery The Bindery Projects (Minneapolis, 2011-2016), Young is currently Assistant Professor of Art at University of Illinois at Chicago, and lives and works in Chicago.
Nate Young
IN BLACK UNTIME NO. 11, 2024
Graphite on paper and vellum, archival tape and oak
Phyllis Bramson
The Bliss of the Picturesque
June 5 - July 26, 2025
Artist Reception: Saturday, June 28, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Phyllis Bramson’s paintings include elements of collage and assemblage, and inspire feelings of childlike wonder, longing, heartbreak, frustration, and delight. Inspired by 18th-century Rococo, Chinoiserie, Chinese Pleasure Garden paintings, French artists Boucher and Fragonard, and American Henry Darger, fairy tale illustrations, erotic bedtime stories, and knick-knack kitsch, many of Bramson’s paintings are reactions to romantic events–the courting, the longing, the risking, the coupling, and every unpredictable event in between. Refusing to separate matters of taste from larger questions about “good behavior,” her work nods to decorum but exposes its more colorful underside with wit, theatrics, and subtle innuendo.
A recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and multiple NEA fellowships, Bramson has an extensive exhibition history. Beginning with The New Museum in 1979, she has shown at the Smithsonian Institution, The Chicago Cultural Center, Smart Museum, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI, Littlejohn Contemporary in New York, and Phyllis Kind, Carl Hammer, Zolla/Lieberman, and Engage Projects galleries in Chicago. A longtime Professor of Studio Art at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Bramson lives and works in Chicago, keeping a studio and an apartment in the same loft building, on different floors.
Phyllis Bramson,
Mary Mary Is Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?, 2024
Mixed media and collage on canvas
60 x 50 inches
Cross Country
In the spirit and legacy of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, Cross Country is a partnership with the Nemeth Art Center in Minnesota. Cross Country is a developing artist-in-residence program between CGBF and NAC, in which we exchange an artist-in-residence once a year. In that vein, the Cross Country exhibition presents a collection of artists who have shown at the Nemeth Art Center, or will be showing in the 2025 season. The exhibition offers a preview of the upcoming season, and brings the spirit of promoting artists cross country.
A new exhibition curated by Mark Weiler, Executive Director of the Nemeth Art Center. Works are available for purchase.
All sales support the NAC, CGBF, and the artists. Email director@nemethartcenter.org with inquiries.
Madeleine Bialke
Amber Fletschock
Nate Young
Nancy Friedemann-Sanchez
Aaron Spangler
Nathanael Flink
Charley Friedman
Daniel Kerkhoff
Christopher Harrison
Brad Kahlhamer
Rachel Collier
Yunior Rebollar
Emma Beatrez
John Salhus
Image above left: Daniel Kerkhoff, Ghosted, 2023, Latex, gesso, acrylic, oil, soil, nails on mat board, 23 1/2 x 30 1/4 inches
This activity is made possible by the generous support of our members, sponsors, and Minnesota voters through grants from the Region 2 Arts Council, thanks to legislative appropriation from the Arts and Culture Heritage Fund.