Marcus Brutus Vol. 1

June 11 - July 10, 2021

St. Louis, MO — Monaco is pleased to present Marcus Brutus Vol. 1, an exhibition of works from Julius Caesar co-directors Josh Dihle, Tony Lewis, Roland Miller and Kate Sierzputowski.  Julius Caesar (JC) is an independent artist collective in Chicago's East Garfield neighborhood.  The exhibition opens with a reception, 6 – 9 pm, on Friday, June 11, 2021 and will run through July 10, 2021.

 Supporting Chicago’s contemporary art scene outside the commercial gallery ecosystem, JC began as a Sunday afternoon showcase of SAIC students, graduates and teachers. Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Dana DeGiulio, and Diego Leclery founded the artist-run experimental space in 2008 with a few rules in mind: all shows would be democratically voted on, but each director had one month for unilateral programming; the space would be free of commercial objectives; directors would pay dues to fund operations. Exhibitions remain democratically selected, although leadership has rotated over the years. The current directors are Josh Dihle, Tony Lewis, Roland Miller, and Kate Sierzputowski.

JC began a series of projects to engage with other Artist Run Project Spaces in 2019. Our first effort was Barely Fair, when JC hosted 24 galleries from around the world in a miniature art fair designed to bring attention to non-commercial spaces during Art Week in Chicago. MONACO was one of those galleries to participate in the art fair. JC @ MONACO represents a continuation of these efforts to grow shared communities and networks within the artist run project world. In April JC hosted MONACO and their directors in an exhibition to share their curators with the Chicago art world. Now we are coming to St. Louis. We hope that efforts like these can help bring attention to Artist Run Project Spaces beyond their localities where they already provide a rich cultural resource.

JC is open to the general public through free, monthly exhibitions. Programming features emerging and under-represented Chicago artists alongside national and international programming. Since 2014, exhibitions have featured artists from Chicago, Berlin, Portugal, Malta, Romania, Toronto, Paris, New York, Israel, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Boston, Michigan, Tampa, and Milwaukee. Exhibitions have been featured in The New York Times, ArtForum, Contemporary Art Daily, Hyperallergic, Frieze, Chicago Tribune, ArtSlant, New City, and Bad At Sports among others.

BIOS

JOSH DIHLE (American, b. 1984) received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and his BA at Middlebury College in 2007. Recent solo exhibitions include Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL), The McAninch Arts Center (Chicago,IL), Valerie Carberry Gallery (Chicago, IL), and Pleasant Plains (Washington D.C.). Group exhibitions include Essex Flowers (New York,NY), Unisex Salon (New York, NY), Annarumma Gallery (Naples, Italy), Shane Campbell Gallery (Chicago, IL), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, IL), the University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor, ME), and DUTTON (New York, NY). Dihle teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and codirects the Chicago artist project space Julius Caesar.

TONY LEWIS lives and works in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Anthology 2014-2016, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018); Plunder, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2017); Alms, Comity and Plunder, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2016); and nomenclature movement free pressure power weight, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2015). Lewis participated in the 2014 iteration of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY and was the recipient of the 2017-2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.

ROLAND MILLER (American, b.1987) is a Chicago based artist and curator. He is a co-founder of Barely Fair and co-directs Julius Caesar, an artist-run project space in Chicago. He graduated from SAIC’s MFA program in 2014, and Boston University in 2009. Finding inspiration in contemporary body culture, source material includes famous bodybuilders, their relationship to childhood toys and adverts, and a ritualized workout routine. The Body Journal series centers around auto-fictional figure paintings drawing on a journaling practice.

KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI is a freelance writer and arts organizer based in Chicago. Fascinated by artists’ studio processes, she founded the website INSIDE\WITHIN in 2013 to physically explore and archive the creative spaces of Chicago's emerging and established artists. Kate contributes art writing to Hyperallergic, Colossal, the Chicago Reader, and Chicago Magazine. She serves as half of the curatorial duo Episode with Tusk-founder Mary Eleanor Wallace, runs a small gallery on her ear called Chandelier, and has been a co-director of the artist-run gallery space Julius Caesar since 2015.