1224 W Loyola Ave is a storefront project space for exhibitions and events in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
Roman Susan encourages and accepts artist proposals for new projects at this space.
170 artist-led projects have taken place at this location from November 2012 through April 2025.
1224 W Loyola Ave has three descending stairs to a recessed floor; regrettably, the interior of the exhibition space is not wheelchair accessible. The public washroom is a very confined space, up two stairs from the exhibition floor. If these factors or others present a barrier for your visit, please write to art@romansusan.org or leave a voicemail at (773) 270-1224 in advance for alternate arrangements. Roman Susan at 1224 W Loyola Ave is located 85 meters northwest of the Loyola CTA Station, with direct access for public transit via the Red Line train and the 147 bus line. A Divvy bike-share hub is located at the west exit of the CTA. There is on-street parking on W Loyola Ave, and a paid parking garage at 1210 W Arthur Ave immediately to the south. For all projects at 1224 W Loyola Ave, open hours are scheduled in advanced, and available at other times by appointment. All projects are visible from the sidewalk immediately outside the space 24/7.
170 artist-led projects have taken place at this location from November 2012 through April 2025.
1224 W Loyola Ave has three descending stairs to a recessed floor; regrettably, the interior of the exhibition space is not wheelchair accessible. The public washroom is a very confined space, up two stairs from the exhibition floor. If these factors or others present a barrier for your visit, please write to art@romansusan.org or leave a voicemail at (773) 270-1224 in advance for alternate arrangements. Roman Susan at 1224 W Loyola Ave is located 85 meters northwest of the Loyola CTA Station, with direct access for public transit via the Red Line train and the 147 bus line. A Divvy bike-share hub is located at the west exit of the CTA. There is on-street parking on W Loyola Ave, and a paid parking garage at 1210 W Arthur Ave immediately to the south. For all projects at 1224 W Loyola Ave, open hours are scheduled in advanced, and available at other times by appointment. All projects are visible from the sidewalk immediately outside the space 24/7.
Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 12, 2025 - April 27, 2025
Open Hours Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays 4-7 PM
Closing Performance Sunday, April 27 at 2:30 PM featuring Graciela Gonzalez, Clara Nizard, Steph Patsula, and Tina Wang
Roman Susan is pleased to present Shir Ende’s Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building, the artist’s first solo exhibition pairing site-specific installation with live performance. Curated by Lauren Leving.
Both the installation and performance, created for Roman Susan’s final year in their 1224 W. Loyola Avenue home, draw from an artist-created score rooted in the language of architecture. Guided by this visual score, Ende expands upon her drawing practice to use the gallery’s walls, windows, and floor as her canvas. Embracing the possibilities of speculative design, she uses charcoal, chalk, and Velcro to overlay symbols from the score atop Roman Susan’s existing structure. A cyclical arrow signifying a revolving door is drawn onto the hinged door, the stairs become an accessible ramp, the window panes transform into a corridor, and the ceiling swaps roles with the floor.
Each element in Ende’s notational system of images has an associated movement. For instance, the sweeping gesture of a drawing charcoal curve onto Roman Susan’s wall can also be performed by two people leaning on each other. To create a column: jump; to build a wall: run.
Within Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building, Ende assumes the role of choreographer-cum-architect, working alongside a troupe of four performers to explore movement’s potential to build environments. By employing a concept that the artist has termed “Movement-generated architecture,” choreography grafts to Roman Susan’s building, deepening our bodily relationships with inanimate structure.
A set of performances, developed in collaboration with performers Graciela Gonzalez, Clara Nizard, Steph Patsula, and Tina Wang, will take place during the run of the exhibition. Within them, physical movement responds to the gallery as a site of creative possibility and asks us to consider the future of this soon-to-be razed site. While Ende, Gonzalez, Nizard, Patsula, and Wang break ground on an ephemeral architecture, our awareness of Roman Susan’s impending removal heightens. The question, “What happens when a space is demolished?” lingers. Opportunity and disappointment are layered over memories past.
The mark-making and performance of Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building operate in tandem as an experiment in embodied placemaking. Through this project, Ende shrinks the monumentality of the built environment down to human scale, proposing a more personalized spatiality that rejects the rigidity of building and allows us to imagine architecture with the absence of edges.
Shir Ende (she/her) is a Chicago-based artist and educator. Ende received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has exhibited at the University of Illinois Springfield, Riverside Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Comfort Station, Gallery 400, and was a sponsored artist at High Concept Labs. She has participated in the Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center, and residencies at the Chicago Artist Coalition and the Alex Brown Foundation in Des Moines, Iowa. For more information, please visit shirende.com.
Spilling, sprawling, and other ways of building exhibition guide (PDF)
The Sound is in the Telling
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
March 8, 2025 - March 29, 2025
Open Hours Mondays, Thursdays, Saturdays 4-7 PM
The Sound is in the Telling proposes an incomplete but expansive sonic picture of 1224 W Loyola. Sound exists in sound waves, but also in conversation with (and sometimes inextricable from) meaning, imagination, sight, and touch. Through a series of texts rendered in embroidery, videos, and sound pieces highlighting and responding to the sonic landscape of the gallery’s surroundings, Kohl pays homage to the possibility of mundane sounds to tell us when and where we are.
Lia Kohl is a cellist, composer, and sound artist based in Chicago. Trained as a cellist, she also incorporates synthesizers, field recordings, toy instruments and radios into her work, searching for a balance between virtuosity and curiosity. She gravitates towards sound practices which reveal and speak to their time and place: field recording, improvisation, radio broadcast and transmission. She often focuses on mundane or pedestrian sounds – sounds which often go unnoticed or under-documented, searching for the profound, unknown, or beautiful in everyday life. For more, visit liairenekohl.com.
The Sound is in the Telling opened with a vocal performance featuring Maria Jacobson, Margaret McCarthy, Paige Naylor, and Veronica Anne Salinas.
THE EXPECTANCIES
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
February 8, 2025 - March 1, 2025
The forms in this exhibition are “baby vessel instruments” made out of clay. The surfaces are covered in a network of “stuff” impulsively stuck on with various fast drying glues and putties. I began these while wondering about the fetus life growing inside of me. The instruments served as a site for mulling the responsibility of bringing a new human body into the world; articulated through the material and memories of my human childhood.
Roe vs. Wade was overturned by the supreme court when I was 10 weeks pregnant. As a result, I was very aware of myself, not just as a pregnant person but as a vessel, growing an autonomous creature inside of me. Even before birth, the thing was controlled by socialized expectations, laws; and growing under the influence of my physical habits and maintenance. The awareness that the thing inside of me was also a vessel, both for my personal expectations, as well as the collective norms it would be born into.
I looked at old pictures of myself as a baby and found clothes and artifacts from my infancy. This baby inside of me was inspiring a new nostalgia. After my daughter was born, I continued making these babies, as my experience having one shifted the significance of the vessels.
In infancy she was just a small helpless breathing creature, with so little of her own content.
As my husband and I stared at her we could feel the oxytocin rushing through our animal brains, eliciting profound joy. She is life created from our shared genetics; affirming our own material existence on this planet. The small creature had so much potential to be filled with our expectations and desires.
As she has morphed into a force in the world, a toddler, I wonder what is hers—hidden in the labyrinth of her cerebral architecture—and what is imitation, as she performs everything she sees and hears, echoing in the chamber of her mind.
These baby instruments are not her or me. They are exercises in material collection and dissection; material ceremonies birthed out of the anxiety, love, mourning, joy, frustration, and fear that haunts new motherhood.
–– Liz McCarthy
Liz McCarthy (She/they) is a Chicago-based artist that combines ceramics with other objects and performances. Her work explores ways in which her body is an ever-changing material intertwined with human and nonhuman environments. Her sculptures often take the form of whistles that have the potential for instrumental performances. These objects harken potential modes for human collectivity, vulnerability, and play. For more information, visit liz-mccarthy.com.
This exhibition featured a closing performance with Daniel Alfredo Suarez, Eugene Maltez, and Liz McCarthy.
Performing Care | Chicago Reader - February 17, 2025
Messy Babies and Mother-Monsters: Liz McCarthy’s Post-Natal Overload | Femme Art Review - March 24, 2025
Exhibition Guide (PDF)
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
January 18, 2025 - February 2, 2025
Open Hours Saturdays, Sundays, Mondays 4-7 PM
Closing Sunday, February 2 from 4-7 PM
You, of course is a show put together by Kevin Stuart to celebrate the work of five artists he has admired for years. Some of these are friends who helped him immeasurably through the years, all whose work has something to do with relations, love, circumstance, and an indefinable and constantly changing humanity and world. If nothing is left, then of course we are all that remain, and we are all eventually carried, and where we end up is of course, with you.
Elena Ailes (she/her) is concerned with the encounters, intimacies and discordances found between human (actions, bodies, histories) and nonhuman (thing, being, astral) worlds. She has presented her texts, videos, and installations widely, including at Apparatus Projects, the SculptureCenter, Randy Alexander Gallery, Sector2337, Ski Club, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and 4th Ward Project Space. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute. She is interested in that which makes her a better person and a worse person, especially in theory. In reality, she is an artist and writer living and working in Chicago, and currently teaches at SAIC. For more information, please visit elenaailes.com.
Sarah Bastress is a dyke and painter from West Virginia who lives and works in Chicago. She also lives in resolute silliness with her cat and her wife, and shows at RUSCHMAN. When Sarah first met Kevin over a decade ago, she thought wow, this is what a real artist looks like, this is the kind of artist I want to be like, and that has turned out to be beyond true. She loves Kevin very much. For more information, please visit sarahbastress.com.
Sarah Crow was born in Santa Cruz, California in 1984. She earned her BFA in Painting with a minor in Creative Writing from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013, and her MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016, where she has also taught as a lecturer in the Painting and Drawing department. She has exhibited in numerous national juried exhibitions and has done commissioned work for private institutions and clients throughout the United States. She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, where she is Artist-in-Residence at St. Gregory’s Hall and Adjunct Faculty in the Art & Design Department at Saint Xavier University. For more information, please visit sarahcrowart.com.
Nathanael Jones is an Afro-Caribbean Canadian writer and artist currently based in Montreal. He holds degrees in fine art and writing from NSCAD University (BFA 2014) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA 2017). He has exhibited and performed his work in Canada, the US, and the UK, and has been published online and in print with DREGINALD, Ghost Proposal, Aurochs, Heavy Feather Review, and TIMBER, among others. His debut poetry collection, Aqueous, is out now through The Porcupine's Quill. For more information, please visit theporcupinesquill.com/nathanael-jones.
Sabeen Omar (b. 1987) is a Colombo-based artist who contemplates what can infuse everyday, discardable objects, like cardboard boxes and garment fragments, with the value of a precious family heirloom. She juxtaposes geometric motifs from Islamic architecture against a soft, ever-shifting sky to allude to the duality of meaningless yet preciousness in her work. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BSc in Mathematics with Economics from University College London. Sabeen's first solo exhibition, Tiger Balm & Other Boxes, was at Cornell University in 2022. For more information, please visit sabeenomar.com.
Kevin Stuart is a painter who lives and works in Chicago. He also runs a carl. For more information, please visit kevin-stuart.com.