Explore West Town on the first Friday of every month, when our neighborhood galleries and arts- based businesses stay open until 8PM.
June 5th, 2026 First Friday
June Featured Galleries
West Town Chamber of Commerce
1819 W Chicago Ave
creased is an evolving body of photographic relief sculptures that examines the quiet, inherited emotional tensions passed through three generations of women in my family. This work emerges from an awareness of an emotional architecture shared between my grandmother, my mother, and myself—shaped by care, restraint, and the unspoken weight of what we withhold. A pivotal experience in 2023 brought these dynamics into sharp focus and initiated this project, which is currently being developed with support from the Illinois Arts Council (IAC) grant. At the core of creased is my mother’s changing relationship with her own mother, who now lives with dementia. As I witness my mother navigate caregiving—balancing tenderness, exhaustion, frustration, and devotion—I recognize echoes of our own mother–daughter dynamic. Over time, we have learned to hold our emotions tightly, equating restraint with protection. These unexpressed tensions persist like fine cracks in glass: subtle, but structurally significant. This project seeks to make those invisible pressures tangible. To translate these emotional inheritances into form, I manipulate photographic prints through repeated acts of folding, pressing, and unfolding using the Korean tradition of 종이접기 (paper folding). The crease becomes both gesture and metaphor—an imprint of strain made before breaking, a point of vulnerability, a boundary line, and a form of resilience. Through these interventions, the photographs shift from flat images into sculptural, relief-like surfaces defined by ridges, shadows, and dimensional shifts, occupying an in-between space between image and object. This exhibition presents a series of new and in-progress works developed through the support of the IAC grant. The installation includes mid- to small-scale folded photographs mounted as wall-based reliefs, paper sculptures using folding and sewing methods, and a central floor-based accumulation of smaller experimental studies that trace the evolution of the folding process. Together, these works visualize the physicality of tension—how it accumulates, distorts, and reshapes both image and relationship over time. Presenting creased in a physical exhibition space allows the work to expand in dialogue with architecture and viewers. The installation foregrounds process, material transformation, and intergenerational storytelling, inviting attention to the ways emotional histories are held in the body and in material form.
PATRON
1612 W Chicago Avenue
PATRON announces Garden of Prayer, our second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Nour Malas (b. 1995, Cannes, France). Borrowing its title from a 1971 song by Max Roach and The J.C. White Singers, the exhibition invokes jazz’s improvisational exploration of form and gospel’s devotional intensity, through a series of expansive paintings and pastel works on linen, paper, and silk fabric. Over the past five years Malas has developed a physical, poetic practice, driven by an inert impulse to give form to the emotional states of being alive. Spending her formative years between Europe and the Middle East, before studying in London and Chicago, Malas’s work is informed by her experience of cultural hybridity, transforming diverse legacies of song, poetry, music, and visual culture into abstraction. PATRON presents She is sitting on her own shadow, our first solo exhibition with Mexico City-based artist Manuela García (b. 1982, Mexico City, Mexico). García employs subtle adaptations of natural materials to hone physical perception of human space. Through her sculptural and painting practice García shapes intimate encounters between material and the human body–manipulating and repurposing architectural and physical elements to challenge understandings of reality and solidity.
Fulton Street Collective
1821 W Hubbard St, Unit 307
Over By There: All Things Chicago FIRST FRIDAYS ART EXHIBIT at Fulton Street Collective Curated by Ryan Miller What is it that makes Chicago unique? To some, it’s tall buildings and old memories of mobsters. To others, it’s sports teams and Italian beef sandwiches. Come to West Town’s First Friday and see our artistic vision of all things Chicago in our current installation. To ensure the organic growth of West Town as Chicago’s emergent gallery district and further unite the neighborhood as a cultural destination, please join us in our gallery on the first Friday of every month for a collaborative art opening. West Town Chamber of Commerce supports and elevates similar efforts while further facilitating connection among Chicago’s gallerists, artists, collectors and patrons.With enthusiastic participation from area galleries, First Fridays offers the potential to ensure the continued development of the West Town neighborhood as a nexus of fine art and arts development in Chicago and beyond. Friday, June 5, 6-10pm Free parking, free admission
Ken Saunders Gallery
2041 W Carroll Avenue
ZOELLE NAGIB - if not right here. New Works Exploring Queer Identity and Imagined Futures.
ARC Gallery
1463 W Chicago Ave
Body Sovereignty Curator: Danni O’Brien The body has always been contested territory. Legislated, pathologized, fetishized, disciplined—the body and its desires have rarely been left in peace, let alone in the control of the people who inhabit them. With this perennial conflict in mind, and on the occasion of Pride Month, ARC Gallery is pleased to present Body Sovereignty, a group exhibition of works that collectively investigate questions of bodily autonomy, and how that autonomy—or lack thereof—impacts corporeal and sexual expression. Curated by Danni O’Brien (she/they), a queer, interdisciplinary artist based outside Baltimore, Body Sovereignty brings together nearly 40 artists’ works that claim radical ownership over sexuality, desire, and bodily identity. This exhibition showcases art that refuses to be tamed; work that finds the erotic in the accidental, the absurd, the domestic, and the discarded; work that borrows the visual language of instruction and mechanism only to subvert it; work that is bold in its irreverence, polymorphic in its affect, and unafraid to blur lines between innocence and perversion, function and fantasy, the handmade and the found. The art included in Body Soveriegnty spans mediums, including art assembled from cultural cast-offs, scavenged and repurposed into something fantastical and alive. Art that is cheeky and meditative in equal measure. Art that takes months to resolve what was gathered intuitively, that which arrives slowly at something unsettling and true. In these artists' hands, the body isn’t treated as mere subject matter, but as a site of survival. Body Sovereignty is not about shock. It is about depth of feeling, and about understanding, as Audre Lorde wrote nearly fifty years ago: “The erotic is a measure of our most expansive sense of self.” Exhibiting Artists: Sarah Barnett, Patrick Bell, Neb Berry, Harley Burns, Daisy Canaan, Ollie Caplin, Jana Cariddi, Kelly Clare, Genevra Daley Bell, Stephanie Dishno, Elizabeth Folk, Henry Gepfer, C Hancock, Brooks Harris Stevens, Yani He, Anna Henson, Jamie Ho, Benjamin Hunt, Ali Hval, Erin Juliana, Lauren Kalman, Ariana Leon, Aida Lodge, Maria Macko, Thomas McIntyre, Shug Munic, Matthew Nicholas, M.A. Papanek-Miller, Emily Peca, Emmett Ramstad, Mia Rose, Brooke Schuh, Emma Schwartz, Ivette Spradlin, Leah Tacha, Jean "J.C." Villalon, Kenzie Wells, Melissa Wilkinson, and Isabel Zeng. About the Curator: Danni O’Brien Danni O’Brien (she/they) is a queer, interdisciplinary artist based outside Baltimore, MD. Through scavenging and collecting, O’Brien builds enigmatic sculptures and reliefs from found objects, vintage patent diagrams, handmade paper pulp, ceramics, and the cast-offs of consumer culture. Her work grapples with queer identity, dystopian survival, and conspicuous consumption — playful and absurd on the surface, deeply meditative underneath. O’Brien has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Hamiltonian Gallery, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, and has held residencies with The Wassaic Project, Baltimore Clayworks, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Byrdcliffe Colony, and Stove Works, among others. She is the recipient of Individual Artist Grants from the Belle Foundation for Cultural Development and the Maryland State Arts Council. Visit Dani @ www.danielleobrienart.com Opening Reception, Friday, June 5th, 5:00-8:00pm Exhibition dates: June 5-26, 2026 Gallery hours: Thurs – Fri 2-6pm, Sat – Sun 12-4 pm This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Ghost Omikron Studios
3052 W Carroll Ave
Pull up for an intimate night of sound, creativity, and community.
We’re opening the studio for First Fridays, a live music + open mic experience surrounded by art on the walls, all available for sale.
What’s happening:
🎶 Live music & open mic performances: 8:00–9:00 PM
🖼️ Art on the walls from featured creatives
🤝 A cozy, creative crowd. Come vibe, listen, and connect
This is an intimate studio setting, so arrive early, get settled, and respect the space and performers.
Entry Instructions:
Text 347-515-2916 when you arrive and buzz the doorbell for entry.
Come support local artists, discover new music, and experience the studio in its full creative energy.
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:
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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!
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Be showcasing art in some form. This includes traditional galleries, as well as retail, food & beverage, or service businesses that are exhibiting art.
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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.
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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!