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.
171 artist-led projects have taken place at this location from November 2012 through May 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.
171 artist-led projects have taken place at this location from November 2012 through May 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.
my father’s imagination
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
May 8, 2025 - May 18, 2025
Closing
Sunday, May 18 from 4-7 PM with a solo performance by Rafi at 5 PM
There is a point in time when I had been one of me.
My personality has been detached from the other personality of mine, which is now.
So you feel like you are talking about somebody else?
Yes.
Because, it is not only that circumstances changed me.
I also changed myself, consciously.
I had to see at some point that I was somewhere, some place.
I could not be everywhere or nowhere.
It was my declaration that when I get married, I will no longer do revolutionary politics.
Although I repent it now.
Eshan Rafi (b. 1986, Lahore) is an artist working across time-based, lens-based and choreographic practices. Their works deal with the intersection of political events and personal archives, often staging the impossibility of representation. Rafi is an alumni of the Home Workspace Program at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, Lebanon, and has participated in residencies at Fondazioni Antonio Ratti in Como, Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Berlin, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, among others. Their work has been exhibited, performed and screened internationally including at Links Hall, Chicago; SummerWorks Lab, Toronto; Sharjah Film Platform; M:ST 9 Performance Art Biennale, Calgary and neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Berlin. Rafi’s artistic practice rests on a history of community building in queer of color communities, including working in collectives to develop decolonial and anti-capitalist pedagogies. They have participated in anti-surveillance and hacker spaces such as at the Allied Media Conference in Detroit and Chaos Computer Congress in Leipzig, informing their research into how information and images circulate. Their work has been extensively supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council, as well as by the generosity of queer and BIPoC communities. In 2025, they are a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto, and a danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz Vienna. Rafi holds an MFA in Art, Theory and Practice from Northwestern University (2023) and a BFA and BEd in Visual Arts from York University (2013). More information at eshanrafi.com.
On May 14, 2025 this project featured a performance by Ashwaty Chennat and Eshan Rafi, with live sound by Erin Thomas.
my father’s imagination | Bad at Sports - May 8, 2025
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)