STNDRD + NON STNDRD is pleased to announce our summer program of exhibitions, opening on Saturday, June 14th, 2025 at STNDRD in Granite City, and Saturday, June 28th at NON STNDRD on the campus of the National Building Arts Center. STNDRD will feature Artist Outposts curated by Purple Window Gallery, while NON STNDRD will present two solo exhibitions a different, better self by Chloe Bass, and Dead Creek Survey by Lauren Yeager.
Join us for a free public reception at STNDRD on Saturday, June 14th from 6-8:30pm. NON STNDRD, located at the National Building Arts Center, will open with a reception on Saturday, June 28th from 3-6pm.
STNDRD’s summer show, Artist Outposts, will features a collaborative flagpole structure created by nine Midwest artist-run spaces. The work celebrates community connections that span five state lines with work contributed by The Waiting Room, Abstract Lunch, Sit/Stay Gallery, Late Night Copies Press, Yes Project Space, and Wildfruit Projects. The show will also feature a zine takeaway by Late Night Copies Press. This exhibition is part of a gallery exchange between Purple Window Gallery and STNDRD Exhibitions. Artist Outposts is the second of three projects Purple Window Gallery will facilitate during their Curatorial Residency at STNDRD during 2025.
Abstract Lunch is an artist-run curatorial project emphasizing experimentation, play, and community engagement. It manifests in various forms and places, such as Abstract Acres, an outdoor art festival gathering over 30 international artists, and Lunchbox Gallery, a mail art project in the form of a lunchbox-sized gallery with rotating participating artists over the course of a year. Abstract Lunch was founded in 2019 in Chicago by Rachel Hefferan, Molly Blumberg and Théo Bignon.
North Branch Projects was founded by Chicago-based artist, Regin Igloria. Originally located in the business district of the Albany Park neighborhood, the storefront closed in November 2014 and began operating on a pop-up basis, offering workshops at various arts organizations, cultural institutions, schools, cafes, and other public and private venues. North Branch Projects found a temporary studio space in the basement of the Read/Write Library in Humboldt Park.
Purple Window is an artist-led, community-supported project space and gallery located inside Mana Contemporary Chicago. As an artist cooperative, Purple Window is jointly owned and democratically controlled by its members. These members form a panel of Chicago-based artists devoted to cultivating a sense of community and empowerment for artists both within and outside of city limits. Purple Window Members include Lauren Iacoponi (Founder), Rebecca Griffith, Natalie Pivoney, Millicent Kennedy, Amy Shelton, Naomi Elson, Antoinette Viola, Angelina Diana, and Madison Manning.
Sit/Stay is an outdoor gallery project located in Northern Illinois. Outdoor exhibitions run throughout the year and utilize the natural habitat of a private yard. Artists are asked to utilize the space in and around a vintage metal chair in the landscape.
The Waiting Room is a 5,000 sqft. art space, founded by David Lieffring & SK Reed in the basement of the Holsum Warehouse building in the West Bottoms district of Kansas City, MO. The gallery is a continuation of a space formerly known as Beco Gallery, founded in 1999 by Rebecca Ederer and Collette Keenan.
Workshop for Independent Publishing is an artist-run, community-focused print & copy shop in Minneapolis. WIP is a project of Late Night Copies Press.
Wildfruit Projects is a queer-led project space dedicated to building community through exhibitions & events.
Yes Project Space is all about saying yes to yourself, yes to the work and yes to community.
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NON STNDRD’s summer program will feature two solo exhibitions with work by Chloe Bass and Lauren Yeager.
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.
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NON STNDRD exhibitions are site-responsive and installed within the industrial landscape of the National Building Arts Center, once home to the Sterling Steel Casting Company. NON STNDRD utilizes two adjacent concrete bunkers–raw, exposed spaces–now repurposed as experimental venues for contemporary art. Marked by history and time, the NON STNDRD bunkers recast industrial sites into immersive environments where art explores the narrative of place.
STNDRD exhibitions are on view at all times for the duration of the exhibition run. Artist Outposts will run through September 5th. 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. Summer exhibitions at NON STNDRD will run through August 22nd. NON STNDRD is located at 2300 Falling Springs Rd., Sauget, IL 62206, on the campus on the National Building Arts Center.
NON STNDRD and STNDRD are artist-run initiatives, with programming curated by collaborators Bruce Burton, Sage Dawson, and Allison Lacher. For inquiries, please email contact@stndrd.org.