Blackpuffin

Outside High and Low.

From High Art to Low Art and their peripheries.
Join us to hear Curator Ayrika Hall, Multi-media Artist Zach Weber converse with Art Entrepreneur and Curator Chanelle Lacy.
Friday April 18 at 6:30 pm.
600 W Van Buren Chicago.

Chanelle Lacy is a curator, cultural producer and Reiki Master. Passionate about bringing
ambitious, rigorous, and challenging projects to life, Chanelle works closely with artists both
emerging and established to expand not only their creative practices, but the art historical canon at large. Chanelle forged her path in the arts working at a contemporary gallery where she lent her vision to the program for six years. During three years of her tenure, she held the position of Director. Her passion for art and her commitment to amplifying underrepresented and
marginalized voices makes her a true champion of the arts.
Chanelle is currently Director of Art Initiatives at civic & cultural agency, Gertie, where she is at
the helm of city-wide activations such as EXPO CHICAGO’s Art After Hours and Chicago
Exhibition Weekend (CXW). She is also GM of Gertie’s new arts and culture membership
network, EarlyWork. Chanelle continues to be a force, serving as a trusted advisor to artists,
collectors and institutions across the globe.

Outside High and Low
Solo by Zach Weber
Curated by Ayrika Hall.
April 5 to 27th.
Gallery Hours Th.Fr. Sat. 1 to 5 pm

Throughout Outside High and Low, Zachary Weber examines the conditions of form, where material asserts its agency through recurrence, reconstruction, and interplay. His work brings together clay, gold leaf, tarp, found objects, photography, canvas, paint, and botanical fragments in a space where inherent properties are continually tested and reimagined. Materials such as drop cloths, painter’s tape, and tarps—sourced from industrial contexts as barrier materials—are reconfigured as compositional agents, disrupting distinctions between provisional and resolved, functional and expressive.

Outside High and Low.
Zach Weber
Curated by Ayrika Hall.
Through April 27
Hours :
Th-Fr-Sat. 1pm to 5pm.

600 W Van Buren Chicago.

Ayrika Hall is a Chicago-based curator and art historian specializing in the historicization of Black art as a contingent, affective, and materially engaged process—an ongoing negotiation in which narratives take shape and acquire function. She works with the conditions under which Black artistic practices are absorbed into history, questioning how their legibility is achieved, what conceptual habits regulate their interpretation, and where those habits begin to break down. For her, art history is less a stable record than a site of artistic activity, where meaning is produced through accumulation, omission, and contestation. In her curatorial practice, Hall treats exhibition-making as a historiographic act, a space where the mechanics of visibility and reception play out in real time. Writing in response to the constraints of inherited models, she insists on approaches that neither resolve nor contain but extend toward what remains unrecognized, unaccounted for, and yet to be imagined.

Outside High and Low
Zachary Weber
April 5- April 27, 2025.
600 W Van Buren Chicago.
Opening April 5th - 5 to 9pm.

Meaning and value emerge as mobile forces, shifting through relation to composition and material, yet never subordinated to aesthetic hierarchy or resolution. Weber raises a fundamental inquiry: How can process, itself a temporal and relational act, be held in suspension, indefinitely present within its objecthood? The exhibition offers a space in which structure escapes the inherited binaries of totality and fragmentation, of elevated and mundane; instead, proposing a language built on exchange, accumulation, and visual dialogue.

Curated by Ayrika Hall.

Zach Weber (b. 1997) was born and lives in Chicago, IL. His work is both self-referencing and an interrogation of how physical environments speak through urban language and universal geometry.
Weber’s sculptural and installation work hinges on form and freedom as a pair of communicative forces, and ultimately finds how they denote space as a medium, all its own. Weber carries specified awareness for how shape informs all else. In his practice, what is strict in form is handled freely — observing the apparent rigidity of urban banalities, arriving at an inevitable view of their idiosyncrasies and improvisations. Weber holds a BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago and is pursuing an MFA from Pratt University.

Outside High and Low engages Weber’s spatial language as a choreography of encounter, where sculptural arrangements unfold like visual stanzas, guided by rhythm, proximity, and emotional resonance. Across the exhibition, Weber constructs a grammar in which structure organizes thought and material carries meaning. Through this, Weber raises a fundamental inquiry: How can process, itself a temporal and relational act, be held in suspension, indefinitely present within the form?

Outside High and Low
Zachary Weber
April 5- April 27, 2025
Curated by Ayrika Hall.

600 W Van Buren Chicago.
Opening April 5. 5 to 9pm.

Artwork: Cosmos,
(23.75 x 21 inches) 2024
Oilstick, enamel, oil, oilstick, on dropcloth.

Blackpuffin Presents.

Outside High and Low.
Zachary Weber
April 5- April 27 , 2025 600 w van Buren st Chicago.

Curated by Ayrika Hall.

Throughout Outside High and Low, Zachary Weber examines the ontological conditions of form, wherein material asserts its agency through repetition, reconstruction, and continuous interplay. Weber’s work—assemblages of clay, gold luster, tarp, found objects, photography, canvas, paint, ceramic, and botanical fragments—operate in a space where their inherent qualities are continually interrogated, reformed, and reimagined. Many of these elements—drop cloths, rolled aluminum, tarps—emerge from industrial contexts as barrier materials, originally intended to conceal, shield, or be discarded. Recast as aesthetic agents, they disrupt distinctions between the provisional and the resolved, the functional and the expressive. Further, through probing infrastructures that traditionally impose order, such as grids, vessels,
and archives, Weber explores the generative tension between coherence and entropy, establishing a field in which process produces meaning as an ongoing condition rather than a fixed outcome. Through punctures, weavings, cutouts, and structural breaks, these works render their construction legible, allowing the process to register as part of their formal and conceptual integrity.

Opening April 5 - 5 to 9 pm.

Today we are highlighting the Portland Art Museum and their collaboration with artist Otis Kwame kye Quaicoe (). Together they released a limited edition with 100% of the proceeds going to support the museum’s Endowment for Black Art and Experiences.

“Long overdue, growing our endowment will support access, exhibitions, and programming, as well as provide sustainable funding for Black art and experiences, showcasing important works from local, regional, and global Black artists.”

To purchase the edition, go to https://fundraise.givesmart.com/e/8V7S-w?vid=16f27r.

Otis Kwame kye Quaicoe
“Self Portrait”
Direct gravure, with chine collé and screen printed overlay
30” x 22”
Edition of 50 signed by the artist.

Hand printed by Paul Mullowney, Harry Schneider and Alejandra Arias Sevilla at Mullowney Printing in NW Portland.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1988 and raised in Accra, Ghana, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe now lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Quaicoe presents his subjects in the form of portraiture where he engages with ideas of empowerment through his bright and luminous depictions of African men and women. This is embodied in the postures of his sitters, who appear set against bright, vibrant monochromatic backgrounds.

Curated by blackpuffin and now open at POVOS gallery in Chicago - Conflicts of Freedom - featuring artists Regina Agu, Scott Vincent Cambell, Nkechi Ebubedike, Lola Ayisha, Na'ye Perez, Jamaal Peterman, Kiyomi Quinn Tayler and Modou Dieng Yacine. 🔥🔥🔥

It’s our last day at The Armory Show, and we introduce artist Na'ye Perez
() creates paintings,
drawings, and socially engaged performances
that explore themes of community, shared
experiences, identity, and accessibility.
On view in "Looks of Freedom IlI"' at
, a collaboration between For
Freedoms and .co, Perez's
paintings stem from a black presence,
transcended into a shared experience:
"Sometimes it belongs to me, it belongs to us.
What's already known, don't gotta be
explained.
" Opening Hours
Friday, September 9, 12-8pm
Saturday, September 10, 12-7pm
Sunday, September 11, 12-6pm
Learn more at blackpuffin.co

Artist Joiri Minaya’s () “The Veil” series works are a continuation of my postcard series, started in 2015 after a Google Images search for "Dominican women." Many of the image results from that search came from online catalogues for foreign men who want to date a Dominican woman while on vacation there. "Postcards" series, makes a link between the representation of Brown and Black women in the painting tradition in tropical geographies and the way these bodies continue to be represented in contemporaneity as a continuation of the same male, white gaze.

On view this week in "Looks of Freedom III" at
, a collaboration between For
Freedoms and .co

Learn more at blackpuffin.co (link in bio)

Artist Kiyomi Quinn Taylor () creates work that examines iconographies of her mixed-race (Black and Japanese) heritage, as well as her family’s narrative history. Using collage and mixed media, Taylor examines ancestral memory and her own inner, emotional life through allegorical imagery.

On view this week in "Looks of Freedom III" at , a collaboration between For Freedoms and .co, Taylor's works portray allegorical scenes, alter egos, and inner identities.

Learn more at blackpuffin.co

In artist ’s large-scale watercolor paintings, monuments are in transition, broken or veiled. At their core, these works question how monuments participate in the construction and narratives of state power and supplant lived memories and histories.

On view this week in "Looks of Freedom III" at , a collaboration between For Freedoms and .co, Olujimi’s watercolor painting titled "When Monuments Fall" confronts manifestations of colonialism and their intersections with current conversations around the recontextualization, revision, and removal of monuments.

Learn more at blackpuffin.co

Opening in 1 week at The Armory Show, For Freedoms in collaboration with blackpuffin.co presents its third visual essay, "Looks of Freedom III." A meditation on the power of time and language in shaping the present, the exhibition explores themes related to memory, reconciliation and agency.