Fall 2025
A Matter of the Invisible, an exhibition at NON STNDRD will be up through November 21st 2025. Curated by Pia Singh, the show will feature work by Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford and Leticia Pardo. Each artist will take over a concrete sand-casting bunker of NON STNDRD at the National Building Arts Center (NBAC), formerly the campus of the Sterling Steel Casting factory and currently a regional repository for modernist architectural objects at the NBAC. Engaging NBAC’s archive and collection, Hulsebos-Spofford and Pardo explore an inventory of parts, tethering the long histories of architectural relics and regional labor movements to present-day concerns of daily-wage laborers and migrant workers. Struck by building fragments cut off from circulation and defunct industrial machinery, the hauntology of NON STNDRD’s site led artists to re-inscribe the laboring body on site through architectural and sculptural intervention.
A Matter of the Invisible asks what might happen if labor communities were given the same autonomy given to bodies engaged in building industrial capital or training A.I.? In an era of the mechanization of the mind, how does the site at NON STNDRD and NBAC render visible the predominance of human intelligence over machine intelligence as a social and cultural necessity?
Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford is an interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Visual Art at Indiana University Northwest. He is also a co-director and co-founder of the collective, Floating Museum, based in Chicago. His work has been shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, Malmo Konstmuseum, Chicago Cultural Center, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Palais de Tokyo Hors les Murs, the DuSable Black History Museum, and the Hyde Park Art Center, among other spaces. He has held fellowships from the Sculpture Space, the Illinois Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Brown Foundation Program at the Dora Maar House, and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. His work has been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Harpo Foundation, the Propeller Fund, the Chauncey and Marion Deering McCormick Foundation, the Field Foundation, Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, The Stephanie Field Harris Charitable Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, an Indiana University New Frontiers Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Sicily, among others. Reviews and coverage of his work have been included in outlets like the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Newcity, Hyperallergic, Artforum, CBS News, NPR, the Chicago Sun Times, USA Today, Dezeen, and the Chicago Tribune. He recently served as artistic director of the 5th edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Leticia Pardo is an artist and architect from Mexico City, based in Chicago. Her practice operates at the intersection of architecture, research, and art, with a particular focus on themes of placemaking, migration, and political boundaries within the built environment. Her creative work often begins with acts of documentation, unfolding into sculptural and spatial investigations through casting, architectural drawing, photography, printmaking, and other media. Through these material investigations, she engages specific sites, unfolding personal and political dimensions within the architectures that shape social life—from the domestic to the territorial scale. Her work has been shown at the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, MAS Context, Hyde Park Art Center, FotoMuseo Cuatro Caminos in Mexico City, among others. She has participated in residencies such as Art Omi (NY), Pocoapoco (Oaxaca), KinoSaito (NY) and Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago). She is currently an Assistant Professor in the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program at Indiana University Bloomington.
Pia Singh is an independent curator and writer born in Bombay, based in Chicago, IL. Initially working as the Associate Director of Volte Gallery (DXB), Singh has mounted significant exhibitions by Bharti Kher, Ranbir Kaleka, Sheba Chhachhi, and William Kentridge. Relocating to Chicago in 2014, she pursued her Masters in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Pursuing research on community-engaged arts practice, Singh went on to serve the interim Director of Eye on India and the National Into-American Museum, Chicago. By 2019, she returned to the curatorial, supporting a wide range of experimental practices that center ideas of ‘otherness’. Singh has mounted transdisciplinary exhibitions with institutional galleries, regional museums, commercial galleries, and artist-run spaces. Over the past five years, she has been writing for regional and national publications, exploring how language can be wielded to situate oneself amidst the immigrant experience. Singh continues to work as a full-time critic and writer for Sixty Inches from Center, Chicago Reader, NewCity, Brooklyn Rail, Tussle Magazine, Hyperallergic, Cultured Magazine, Frieze, and ArtIndia, alongside regional publications.
For inquiries, please email contact@stndrd.org.
Summer 2025
a different, better self
“The Parts” is a photo and text-based project combining seemingly diaristic personal writing, political commentary, and original photographs from everyday life. Originally launched for public audiences on Instagram in 2018, this open-ended, ongoing series of works has taken both digital form as a series of storyboards, and physical form as public signage and flags. The project considers the many registers of personal and public experience, as they become living history. Taken together, each element of “The Parts” develops an alternative archive capturing and processing the shared context of national current events. Previous exhibitions of work from the series have taken place at the Brooklyn Public Library (New York), the Middelheim Museum (Antwerp), and Asphodel Gallery (New York).
A site responsive installation featuring photographs and text from her series “The Parts“ combined with materials borrowed from the National Building Art Center, “a different, better self” is a loose reflection on the passage of time over the course of a day (the movement of light), the season (the movement of water), and a lifetime (the movement of emotional memory). “a different, better self“ features two sets of photographs printed on reflective aluminum: three images of the Missouri landscape (one urban, one suburban, one rural) shot during the locked-down spring of 2020, and three images of a beam of light moving through the architecture of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, where Bass had a solo exhibition in 2021. The featured text, applied directly to the bunker in spray chalk (a temporary and changeable medium designed to erode over time), questions the role of empathy as a central lens of understanding, highlighting implicit challenges in the mandate to love: one wall reads “the shadow institution of kindness,” and the other “the part of you that rages underneath all that tenderness.” The exhibition’s title is also drawn from “The Parts”: an excerpt of the statement, “In isolation, you imagine you might be able to become a different, better self: someone who gardens, someone who’s calm.”
Chloë Bass is a muliform conceptual artist working in performance, situation, conversation, and installation. She lives in Brooklyn, NY and St. Louis, MO.
Dead Creek Survey
Lauren Yeager presents a collection of scavenged survey stakes recovered from various construction and excavation sites. These remnants of earthmoving are assembled in series and suspended from overhead. Spanning the height of the bunker, the vertically layered remnants allude to what lies underground, in this case, a long list of chemical contaminants that a history of unchecked industrial negligence has injected into this landscape, and the unknown depths to which these pollutants have affected the health and future of residents, the land, and the surrounding Superfund sites.
This project is a collaborative acknowledgment and response to the geographic and financial limitations shared by the artist and NON STNDRD. Working with found objects, the primary challenge was the 500-mile distance between the artist’s studio in Cleveland, Ohio, and the exhibition site in Sauget/East Saint Louis, Illinois. Fortunately, the site is located within the campus of the National Building Arts Center, which serves as an educational collection and research library. This allows for shipping at USPS Library Mail rates for “museum materials, specimens, collections, etc.” Discovering and meeting the qualifications for this discounted shipping rate enabled the collection of survey stakes to be sent to NON STNDRD for on-site assembly and installation by their team. This description aims to provide insights into the logistics of this exhibition and share practical information for artists and artist-run initiatives.
Lauren Yeager (Cleveland, OH) re-imagines commonplace objects as sculptural components. Using salvaged materials, she references classical and modernist forms through sculptures that recover and elevate the value of these reclaimed objects. Yeager received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2009.
Her work has been highlighted in several important national and regional exhibitions including Sculpture Milwaukee 2021, FRONT International 2018, “NMWA: Women to Watch – Ohio,” and MOCA Cleveland’s “Realization is Better than Anticipation.” In 2023 she participated in the exhibition “Everlasting Plastics,” representing the United States at the Venice Architecture Biennale. For the Biennale, she was commissioned to create a collection of thirteen sculptures for the courtyard of the US Pavilion. The exhibition then travelled to Carnegie Museum of Art in 2024. Her work is in the collections of Progressive Insurance, the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, the CWRU Putnam Sculpture Collection, and other prominent private collections. In 2021, she was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for Emerging Artists. Recent press includes The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Whitewall, and Archinect.
SPRING 2024
NON STNDRD will present Hidden Rhythms, a three-person exhibition featuring Cathy Hsiao, Frances Lightbound, and Anika Todd.
Join us for a free public reception on Saturday, April 5, 2025. The reception is at NON STNDRD, located at the National Building Arts Center, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM, and up through May 30th.
Hidden Rhythms presents artists Cathy Hsiao, Frances Lightbound, and Anika Todd, whose work investigates the underlying structures and imperceptible patterns that shape our built environments. Movement, mapping, and material interventions uncover the subtle systems, both natural and human-made, that regulate space and perception.
A sculpture that mirrors the slow, imperceptible shifts of a lock and dam, screen prints suspended in fluctuating light, and architectural symbols that blur the boundaries between physical and digital space; each artist reveals the rhythms embedded within structures we often take for granted. Situated within the raw industrial spaces of NON STNDRD, Hidden Rhythms challenges fixed notions of space and movement to encourage an awareness of the subtle and often imperceptible systems that guide our environments.
Cathy Hsiao is a diasporic artist and educator based in Chicago. Her practice examines the intersections of democracy, technology, and ecology, often intervening in existing cultural iconographies through coded language and a touch of play. Her diasporic experience growing up between Taiwan, the US, and Hong Kong, has shaped her interest in exploring various forms of sculptural storytelling. Utilizing both craft techniques and emerging technologies, Hsaio’s multidisciplinary approach manifests in installations that can include sculpture, sound, and sourced imagery. Past projects include growing indigo as a response to the police use of blue dye on protesters during the 2019-20 HK pro-democracy movement, using the supply chain as an exhibition model for tracing the socio-cultural and material microhistory of the iPhone, and translating the facade of the Forbidden City architecture into sculptures and wall reliefs. She was most recently a resident of Kohler Arts/Industry.
Frances Lightbound (b. Sheffield, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Her work addresses the materiality of architecture, and relationships between time, bodies and buildings. Using printmaking as a two- and three-dimensional medium, she pairs print with sculpture and installation to explore layering in the continual (re)production of urban spaces. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues in the US and Europe, with recent solo exhibitions at Rule Gallery (Marfa, TX) and the John David Mooney Foundation (Chicago). Lightbound was awarded a Luminarts Visual Arts Fellowship in 2017. She holds a BA from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, and an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Anika Todd is a sculptor/media artist who investigates the Western impulse to own and control. Their works critique the cultural assumptions and legislative frameworks that legitimize private ownership of earth and sky. Todd (b.1992, Boston, MA) earned a BFA from MassArt and an MFA from The University of Texas at Austin. Primarily working between Texas and New York City, Todd has presented solo exhibitions in New York at Flux Factory (2022) and Lydian Stater (2023), as well as in Texas at Cluley Projects, Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (2024), and CoLab Gallery in Austin (2019). They have been awarded residencies at Stove Works (2021), NARS Foundation (2020), and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2019). In 2022, they were a finalist for the NYFA Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design Award. Todd currently serves as the Beaumont Artist in Residence at the Sam Fox School of Art and Design, where they teach sculpture.
FALL 2024
NON STNDRD will present three solo exhibitions opening on Saturday, September 7th, 2024: “Hold Tight” by Aimée Beaubien, “The Center Never Holds” by Joe DeVera, and “Try and again” by Jeff Robinson.
Please join us for a free public reception for these exhibitions on Saturday, September 7th. The event begins at NON STNDRD, located at the National Building Arts Center, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM, and will continue with an opening of “The Wind Still Whispers” by Micah Mickles from 6:00 to 9:00 PM at our flagship site, STNDRD, located at G-CADD in downtown Granite City, Illinois.
Aimée Beaubien: Hold Tight
Hold Tight delves into resilience and adaptability, using lightweight suspension lines—often associated with survival situations and friendship bracelets—to create woven and knotted structures. These paracord forms scramble through a former steel casting sand bunker, echoing the unpredictable paths of vines as they climb, twist, and touch their surroundings. Suspended and intertwined, these interconnected forms respond to an epoch of uncertainty and succession of change. Paracord tendrils drop down, brushing up against weightlessness and formlessness, while driftwood sways in and out of tangled networks within the exposed cement structure of NON STNDRD.
Aimée Beaubien reorganizes photographic experience while exploring networks of meaning and association between the real and the ideal in immersive installations, collages and artists books. Her work has been shown in national and international exhibitions including SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Newport Art Museum, RI; Houston Center for Photography, TX; UCR Museum of Photography, Riverside, CA; Gallery UNO Projektraum, Berlin, Germany; Virus Art Gallery, Rome, Italy. Aimée Beaubien is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL where she has taught since 1997.
Joe DeVera: The Center Never Holds
The Center Never Holds is a sculptural installation that can be simultaneously viewed as an aggregate of weaponized material and/or a marshaled victim of the military complex. The work is amalgamated from various sources to form shambling archetypes of “beasts of burden” – constructed with a combination of repurposed military equipment, domestic household items, and discarded materials from local sites.
Joe DeVera’s paintings and installations examine the possible relationships between historiography and art objects while investigating mass conflict’s resonant aftermath. Having emigrated from the Philippines as a youth and enlisted in the Marines Corps after high school (serving two combat deployments) — DeVera’s works are also autobiographical observations of power structures and the machines of empire. Joe DeVera lives in St. Louis, MO, where he is an Assistant Professor at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art. He received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art.
Jeff Robinson: Try and again
Jeff Robinson explores the concept of “try and again,” emphasizing a commitment to experimentation and the role of practice in artistic development. The works on display feature wood and relief carvings inspired by the natural elements of the artist’s backyard, where a newfound practice of tending to the land informs his process. With no prior landscaping experience, Robinson navigates the challenges of identifying, cultivating, and sometimes removing flora—transforming the cuttings and uprooted plants into materials for his art. These creations serve as an offering to the landscape and a reflection on the ongoing process of learning and personal growth.
Jeff Robinson is an artist, fabricator, and curator based in Chicago, Illinois. He has exhibited at venues that include Julius Caesar (Chicago), Roman Susan (Chicago), Ski Club (Milwaukee), University Galleries of Illinois State University (Normal), Des Lee Gallery (St. Louis), and Monaco (St. Louis). His work has been featured in New American Paintings, Daily Serving, NewCity Magazine, Sixty Inches from Center, FLOORR Magazine, and the Riverfront Times. Robinson was a HATCH curatorial resident with the Chicago Artists Coalition and has held artist residencies with Ragdale and ACRE. In 2020, he received the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award in Visual-Based Arts. He currently serves as Exhibitions Preparator for the Hyde Park Art Center and previously served as Director of the UIS Visual Arts Gallery and Co-director + Co-founder of DEMO Project. STNDRD exhibitions are on view at all times for the duration of the exhibition run. The Wind Still Whispers by Micah Mickles will run through October 19. STNDRD is located at 1822 State Street Granite City, IL 62040, on the campus of the the Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD).
NON STNDRD can be viewed by appointment and during National Building Arts Center ticketed tours that take place every second Saturday of the month at 11:00 am. Fall exhibitions at NON STNDRD will run through November 2. NON STNDRD is located at 2300 Falling Springs Rd., Sauget, IL 62206, on the campus on the National Building Arts Center.
NON STNDRD is an artist-run initiative, with programming curated by collaborators Bruce Burton, Sage Dawson, and Allison Lacher. For inquiries, please email contact@stndrd.org.
Copyright © 2024, STNDRD + NON STNDRD, All rights reserved
SUMMER 2024
NON STNDRD is pleased to present “Key Loop”, a group exhibition that explores iterations of visual and conceptual pattern. “Key Loop” will open with a free and public reception from 4:00 – 7:00 pm on Saturday, June 22, 2024. This exhibition will run through August 17th. NON STNDRD is located on the campus of the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, Illinois.
The title “Key Loop” is inspired by the Greek key—a motif prevalent in Ancient Greece that epitomizes the interlocking, recursive patterns found in life and art. Combined with the concept of “loop,” which denotes endless repetition and continuity, “Key Loop” reflects the cyclical nature of patterns, considering both the persistence and the inevitable transformation of forms and ideas across time. This thematic exploration considers the enduring relevance and evolution of patterns in both historical and contemporary contexts.
Exhibiting artists include Poppy DeltaDawn, Katie Ford, kg, Rashawn Griffin, Craig Hartenberger, Anna Horvath, Nick Larsen, Michael Jones McKean, Guen Montgomery, Emily Mueller, Garry Noland, and Anna Schenker. “Key Loop” is curated by STNDRD + NON STNDRD Co-Directors Bruce Burton, Sage Dawson, and Allison Lacher.
NON STNDRD is uniquely situated in two adjacent industrial concrete spaces on the National Building Arts Center campus — previously the Sterling Steel Casting Company. These spaces, once steel casting sand bunkers, now serve as experimental venues for contemporary art exhibitions. The stark industrial setting, with its exposed roof, provides a critical backdrop for the thematic concerns of the exhibition.
Here, the artworks, vulnerable to weathering, embrace the temporal dynamics of patterns—how they evolve, decay, and mirror the transience of experience alongside cycles of nature and history. This interplay emphasizes the pervasive influence of patterns—be it personal habits, cyclical cultural shifts, or imprints left by historical events. The works on display engage in a visceral dialogue with the raw architecture of NON STNDRD and the immediate landscape and decorative collection at the National Building Arts Center, enriched by the history and prior function of the facility, as well as the local geography and terrain.
NON STNDRD is an expansion and evolution of site-based inquiry first established by STNDRD, a flagship program in Granite City, Illinois, where exhibitions rely on a flagpole as a site and examine the power and potential of flags. NON STNDRD and STNDRD are artist-run initiatives.
Funding for NON STNDRD was provided by The Luminary’s (St. Louis) Futures Fund Regranting Initiative.
SPRING 2024
NON STNDRD is pleased to present two solo exhibitions by Chicago-based artists: Radiant Pearl by Claire Ashley and Snake in the Grass by Assaf Evron.
These exhibitions will open with a free and public reception on Saturday, April 6, from 3:00 – 6:00 pm, and run through June 1, 2024. NON STNDRD is located on the campus of the National Building Arts Center in Sauget, Illinois.
Radiant Pearl and Snake in the Grass and will occupy two adjacent industrial spaces. These raw, exposed concrete spaces formerly served as casting bunkers on the campus of the Sterling Steel Casting Company, and now as an experimental venue for contemporary art. These spaces, nearly identical in scale and architectural design, are marked by history, time, and exposure to the elements.
Radiant Pearl by Claire Ashley presents inflatable sculpture as the surface for painting to live and breathe, becoming a tattooed skin of sorts, on a kind of hybrid body. Mobility and portability are important considerations in the work, both functionally and conceptually; Radiant Pearl engages NON STNDRD as a site to explore the possibilities of scale shifts, as the work moves from packed cube to expansive room-filling amoebic sculpture. The ephemerality of the object serves as a metaphor for the body – its fragility and vulnerability, and in that realization, its urgent call for attention and demand to be seen.
Scottish born, Chicago-based artist Claire Ashley mines the language of painterly abstraction, monumental sculpture, and slapstick humor to investigate inflatables as painting, sculpture, installation and performance costume. These works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and museums as site-specific installations, performances and collaborations.
Her work has been featured in Studio International, VICE, Hyperallergic, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Time Out Chicago, Yorkshire Post, and Condé Nast Traveller (European). She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and her BFA from Gray’s School of Art (Aberdeen, Scotland). She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices, and the Department of Painting and Drawing.
Snake in the Grass by Assaf Evron will present a set of sculptural interactions and ready-mades that respond to the collection of built environment artifacts housed at the National Building Arts Center, on whose campus NON STNDRD resides. Drawing from the history of art and architecture — and their connection to pagan origins — the exhibition pulls from Durer’s iconic engraving, Melencolia I, and its exploration of failed rationality. Snake in the Grass features imagery of rainbows, stars, rivers, and gazing eyes hanging in the space.
Assaf Evron is an artist and a photographer based in Chicago. His work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. Looking at moments along the histories of modernism, Evron questions the construction of individual and collective identities, immigration (of people, ideas, images) and the representations of democracy.
His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he currently teaches. In conjunction with his exhibition at NON STNDRD, he is presenting a special architectural intervention project at the Mies van der Rohe-designed Edith Farnsworth House in Plano Illinois.
NON STNDRD occupies two adjacent spaces on the National Building Arts Center campus that formerly served as steel casting sand bunkers – and now serving as experimental exhibition venues. Exhibiting artists are encouraged to explore an interplay between raw architecture and immediate landscape, contextualized by the history and function of the facility and the surrounding place, geography and terrain. NON STNDRD embraces artistic experimentation and critical inquiry and shines a light on the non-standard and exploratory nature of contemporary art by presenting it in a space that radically and intentionally breaks from traditional exhibition venues. The National Building Arts Center occupies a sprawling campus that formerly functioned as the Sterling Steel Casting Company, and today serves as a unique, emergent study center housing the nation’s largest and most diversified collection of building artifacts, supported with broad holdings in architecture and allied arts.
Funding for NON STNDRD was provided by The Luminary’s (St. Louis) Futures Fund Regranting Initiative from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
FALL 2023
“Lived-in” will open with a free and public reception on Saturday, August 12, 2023 from 3:00 – 6:00 pm. The exhibition will run through October 31. Featured artists include Grant Benoit, Joseph Canizales, Jen Everett, Abby Flanagan, Gina Hunt, Lee Hunter, Sarah Knight, Melissa Pokorny, and Lynne Smith.
“Lived-in” will span the two adjacent spaces that NON STNDRD inhabits. These raw, exposed concrete spaces formerly served as casting bunkers on the campus of the Sterling Steel Casting Company, and “Lived-in” will launch their new identity as an experimental venue for contemporary art on the campus of the National Building Arts Center (NBAC).
These spaces, nearly identical in their scale and architectural design, are marked by their history, age, and exposure to the elements. Despite their industrial identity, there is an intimacy, familiarity, and even comfort that invites engagement by artist and audience alike. “Lived-in” will present a spectrum of site-based and mixed-media works that draw from these prompts of the site, among them NBAC’s vast collection of building artifacts and holdings in architecture and allied arts.
Like all exhibitions and projects presented at NON STNDRD, “Lived-in” is time-based and durational. Exhibited works are installed in a pristine form, but these works are at the mercy of the site they inhabit. Exposure to sun, wind, rain and other environmental factors present the potential of works changing – perhaps degrading or evolving in the process – over the course of the eleven-week exhibition period.
Funding for NON STNDRD was provided by The Luminary’s (St. Louis) Futures Fund Regranting Initiative.