Explore West Town on the first Friday of every month, when our neighborhood galleries and arts- based businesses stay open until 8PM.
September 4th, 2026 from 6pm-8pm
September Featured Galleries
West Town Chamber of Commerce
1819 W Chicago Ave
Masquerade Menagerie
Artwork by Jared and Jessica Joslin
Opening: Friday September 4th, 6pm-8pm
Jared and Jessica Joslin are artists who have shared their lives, and a studio space in the Ukrainian Village, for the past 30 years.
They create complementary yet distinct bodies of work; Jared in painting, and Jessica in sculpture. Their work is animated by a fascination with the glamour, mystery, and theatricality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially circuses, carnivals, and cabaret culture. This exhibit, Masquerade Menagerie, celebrates that tradition, and the spirit of mystery and magic that it represents.
Jared Joslin is a painter whose rich oil canvases feel like windows into dreams of a past life. His subjects are rendered meticulously, radiating an evocative mix of melancholic isolation and allure. Influenced by the 1920s and 1930s Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, his portraits feature carnies, circus animals, and other enigmatic characters and tableaux.
www.instagram.com/jared_joslin
Jessica Joslin is a mixed media sculptor, who creates elegant creatures of vivid character and intricate anatomy. An unexpected union of antique metalwork and animal skulls, rich with ornamentation, and imbued with the illusion of sentience.
www.instagram.com/jessica_joslin
ARC Gallery
1463 West Chicago Ave
ARC Gallery is pleased to present three solo exhibitions by the Athena Fund awardees Alexa Wheeler, Anat Wegier, and Xinchen Li. Exhibitions: Alexa Wheeler: kept + carried "kept + carried" examines how care is inherited, performed, and remembered through the ordinary objects and rituals of domestic life. Drawing from family photographs, German folk traditions, household vessels, and stories gathered through community participation, the work considers the labor historically assigned to women: preserving, nourishing, mending, witnessing, and carrying memory forward.
Learn more here
Chicago Artists Coalition
1431 W Hubbard St, Ste 201
On View: September 4 – October 15
Opening Reception: Friday, September 4 from 5-8pm at Chicago Artists Coalition
“Wherever you go, there you are.”
“It ain’t over till it’s over.”
“He who is meant to be a basket-carrier is born with the handle in his hand.”
The intended meaning of a proverb or idiom should be self-evident. Something has happened, an unwanted outcome has materialized, and these familiar phrases offer a way to make peace with it in order to move on. Passed down from the likes of Confucius, Solomon, and goodreads.com, they promise wisdom, purpose, or direction when certainty feels out of reach.
The Portuguese proverb “All is fish that comes to the net” could be dismissed as just another platitude, another version of “It is what it is.” But, viewed from another angle, it proposes an ethic of agency rather than resignation. It asks: How do we turn what we are given into what we need and honor it?
All Is Fish That Comes to the Net brings together fragmented objects, inherited ideas, and materials displaced from their original contexts and reassembled into new ones. Viewers are invited to linger with the contradictions, misreadings, and unlikely connections presented to them and imagine the hand behind purposefully reimagining each object and thought. Rather than presenting fixed meanings, the works ask how observation and defamiliarization can be a transformative tool used in any creative act.
Through photography, sculpture, assemblage, and material exploration, Sebastian Bruno-Harris, Rob Croll, Nick D’Alessandro, and Van Payne each engage the found object and the proverb as a method of thinking. Their practices treat collection, reuse, and reinterpretation not simply as aesthetic strategies, but as ways of navigating history, memory, and meaning. Like the proverb that gives the exhibition its title, the works are evidence that what arrives in our lives—whether by chance, inheritance, or accident—can always become an answer to our questions.
Learn more here
.jpeg)
Ken Saunders Gallery
2041 W Carroll Avenue Suite C-320
Photographs by TOM DOODY - Momento Mori, The architecture and landscapes we create around death and remembrance.
Learn more here
The WTFF program facilitates connection amongst West Town's galleries and arts-based businesses and their represented artists, collectors, and patrons, as well as independent area artists.
The West Town Chamber of Commerce launched the First Fridays program in October 2022 at the request of and with support from a contingency of its Member galleries.
The goal of WTFF is to ensure the continued success of West Town area galleries, both emergent and established, as cornerstones of the West Town neighborhood—a nexus of organic growth and sustainable development in the arts and beyond.
The program intends to amplify Member galleries' own programming efforts by creating a monthly guide to exhibitions and events and supplementary programming for patrons to utilize when visiting the neighborhood on the first Friday of each month.
Is your business interested in participating? Here are the guidelines:
-
Be located within (and be a Member of) the West Town Chamber of Commerce's service area: Division Street to Hubbard; Halsted Street to Kedzie Avenue. Not a Member yet? Apply today!
-
Be showcasing art in some form. This includes traditional galleries, as well as retail, food & beverage, or service businesses that are exhibiting art.
-
Be open from 6-8 p.m. the First Friday of each month. Extended hours of programming before or beyond that window are fine, but 6-8 p.m. is the minimum requirement.
-
Provide your programming details in advance of the first Friday of the month via this google form.
Interested in presenting an exhibition or event in our office gallery?
In addition to organizing the monthly initiative, the Chamber has also transformed its office space into a rotating gallery where arts-based Members that lack a traditional gallery space are invited to utilize the space for their own exhibitions and related programming.
Interested Members can fill out this Member Expression of Interest form. Not a Member yet? It's easy to apply!
Chicago Truborn
1741 W Chicago Ave
🧨 13 YEARS OF CHICAGO TRUBORN 🧨 Chicago Truborn opened its doors in West Town with a pretty simple idea: make art accessible, to support artists, and create a space that felt less like a traditional gallery and a more like a place to call home. It's only right to celebrate that history by showing an artist who has been Instrumental in my experience, both professionally and personally. An artist whose name and work can not be seperated from the history of Chicago: That artist is my friend Anthony Lewellen. ANTHONY LEWELLEN is a Chicago based multidisciplinary art maker. In his formative years he was an innovative figure within Chicago’s graffiti culture and is still active to this day. Early on he made a name for himself in the Midwest and beyond hallmarked by street work that featured a simple bold palette and emotionally complex characters born out of direct observation and digestion of life in the city. His work has come to include a growing body of large-scale public murals along with numerous private commissions. Highly prolific in the studio as well Lewellen’s work is always building upon a highly personalized visual vocabulary rooted in a love of drawing that continues to evolve and grow. The elements of this visual language are quintessentially Midwestern and even more precisely quintessentially Chicago, consistently appearing in his work. The images he creates seem to evoke unspoken narratives written in the urban landscape like images torn from a story. He continues to live and work on the cities North West side. This is his third solo show at Chicago Truborn.
Learn more here
