Organized on the occasion of Chicago Exhibition Weekend, Over My Head presents a fragment of Chicago’s oft-forgotten position as a nerve center for post-conceptual art. The works on view (or a version of them) were at some point exhibited, sold, or produced in Chicago between 1984 and 2015. Their inclusion here both recalls particular exhibitions and, more tangentially, the complex entanglements between artists, dealers, curators, critics, and collectors that come to shape how we know a place (and an artist’s work) in hindsight. Among the cohort of galleries and institutions whose programs laid the foundation for this recollection of Chicago are Donald Young, Rhona Hoffman, Feature, Robbin Lockett, Rowley Kennerk, Shane Campbell, Monique Meloche, Corbett vs. Dempsey, GRAY, the Art Institute of Chicago, the MCA Chicago, and the Renaissance Society. This exhibition may be approached in two distinct, if not reciprocal, ways: as an assembly of discrete artworks relating to a distinct moment in an artist’s history with Chicago and as a chorus asynchronously inciting a contemporary conversation around time, place, and memory, which might remind us that forgetting can sometimes be an invitation to return.

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Artists

Dara Birnbaum


Gaylen Gerber


Wendy Jacob


Rashid Johnson


Tony Lewis


Martin Puryear


Kay Rosen


Rosemarie Trockel


Jordan Wolfson


Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

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Documents

‍View exhibition labels‍

‍View exhibition checklist

‍‍View archival checklist

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