By Bram Ritchie

65GRAND is an alternative gallery located on the third floor of 1378 W. Grand (entrance on Noble) in West Town. Converted to a gallery from a studio, the space presents work from artists in Chicago and all over the United States. Recently featured in Artforum, this interview is from a conversation with 65GRAND gallerist Bill Gross about the beginning of the gallery, its evolution to a serious artistic space, and its place in the Chicago art scene.

David Ingenthron, Triumph, mixed media; Natural Love, acrylic on gesso board, both 2007.

BR: What’s the history of 65GRAND? Why did you decide to begin a gallery and continue it?

BG: Well, I really hadn’t thought about starting a gallery, but some friends ran a space called the Guest Room Project, in their house in Logan Square and one of the principal people running it was David Corbett. When he decided to move to Portland we thought that it would be interesting to show his work at my apartment and, well, we thought it would be funny if we could get listed. We invented a gallery name and converted the space, we painted the walls white, we put up lights and we got listed in all the papers, so we thought that was really great. We did the show for David as a going away party. I wasn’t really intending to do any shows after that, but I had gallery hours since I figured I could be here. It was my studio also at that point, so I figured I could just paint while people visited.

So after his show I didn’t really do another show for maybe two months. Then I saw another friend and artist’s work, Michelle Faust, and I realized that the way she wanted to present it, no one would. She had a body of work that involved graphite drawings of astronauts, in all sorts of sexual positions, in space, and in their space suits. She wanted to present the drawings paired with these cast iron pieces. So I thought, well, that’d be a cool show and the space was cleaned up and converted, so why not use it? We did that show, and then it evolved like that for that for a while, where I wasn’t really planning shows back-to-back. Anyway, people were talking to me about what I was going to do for the next show, and I did enjoy it. At a certain point I decided that I was going to do shows back-to-back and that became a lot more work, getting artists lined up, getting the cards, the press releases, and stuff like that, also I stopped using it as my studio. So it evolved further again.

BR: Could you talk more about what you think the importance is to the artistic community of having alternative, artist-run spaces, especially in Chicago?

BG: Well the big issue is there just aren’t enough spaces in Chicago to show art, so you know there are going to be artists who can’t get shown just because of the lack of venues. [It’s tough] to maintain a gallery space and pay the rent . . . you know before I did this, I always wondered why the dealers were worried about the postage and the small bills. Now running this I really understand it better, because you may sell work and you may not, so you really have to watch your costs. If you are running a storefront gallery space or even in the West Loop or something like that, you have these worries about paying your bills. So it does make it more difficult to just allow an artist to come in and do what they want. Once I decided to keep doing this I thought, well I’ll just stay in this space. I didn’t want the pressure of having to sell work. I like the flexibility and freedom of being able to show the kind of work that I am interested in and not have to worry about the commercial pressure. I can just show what I want. As to the importance of these alternative spaces to the artistic community, I think that it does give more artists more opportunities to show work. What hopefully happens is that spaces like this encourage growth. I’m comfortable with this space being a feeder space. I typically do solo shows, some of the other alternative spaces do group shows, and I have to believe that the broader gallery community is paying some attention to what’s going on in these spaces. Maybe once a name pops up a few times, and as the artist gets more seasoned, and as their name gets out there a little bit, they become a little bit more attractive to the next level of gallery. I do think that there is this natural progression from showing in a space like this to showing maybe in a West Loop gallery. I think it works. So [alternative spaces] are ways for artists to get into a practice of showing work in galleries and in a less pressured, more experimental and freer environment.

BR: As an artist in your own right, does your own sensibility affect the work you show? Why do you pick the artists you do?

BG: My goal when I first started thinking about who I’d show was to find artists of different backgrounds here in Chicago. A lot of apartment galleries are run by people who are either in school or just out of school, and of course I have been out of school for a long time so my slant is a little different. What typically happens is apartment galleries will show people they were colleagues with at school so they’re typically based out of one school or another. So there’ll be the UIC gallery, the Art Institute and I’m sure there must be University of Chicago gallery spaces. But I thought I’d like to have artists from the various schools and also artists in different age ranges, so I didn’t have just all younger artists. There are galleries here that just show older, more established artists. I like the idea of blending [artists of different ages]. As an artist and painter, there are certain things that I’m not interested in or I don’t know that much about so I don’t feel qualified [to show it]. For instance I haven’t done any new media shows, though there are video artists that I am interested in, because I just don’t know enough about it. And I have only shown one photographer. I feel like other people might be more qualified to work with those artists. So because I am a painter I guess I have gravitated towards painting.

BR: Right, so as a painter you are drawn towards more painterly work.

BG: Yes, it’s funny because there are certain things that I don’t really care about with my own painting but when I see other artists doing it, it’s [really interesting]. It gives me an opportunity to work with people who share an almost opposite aesthetic from me. I didn’t know what would happen with my own painting when I started really taking this gallery seriously. But at this point in my life I thought it would be interesting to see what a different type of engagement to the art world would be. I had been painting for a number of years and had opportunities to show and I thought it would be interesting for me to intersect with the art world in a different way. [I wanted to] have that experience and see how that would inform my practice of painting. At some point I will get back to more actively painting; it will be interesting to see what I have learned along the way working with all these artists.