Join us for a very special evening with music, drinks, and performance celebrating the inaugural opening of Gertie's new Office Hours exhibition and residency AND the housewarming for the Gertie Hub located at 400 N. Peoria in Fulton Market.

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Gertie Office Hours is a quarterly exhibition and residency initiative that runs alongside our marquee programming on the first floor in the two upstairs galleries at the Gertie Hub. Each season, the program alternates between a solo presentation by an artist who has never had a solo exhibition in Chicago, an artist not yet positioned for a large-scale institutional presentation, or an artist seeking a foothold in the local gallery ecosystem who would benefit from greater visibility and support, and an exhibition organized by an emerging independent curator. Through this model, Office Hours creates meaningful opportunities for artists and curators at pivotal moments in their development, providing both exposure and resources to help advance their practices.

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Gertie’s inaugural Office Hours features Erol Scott Harris, an artist working across painting, collage, and installation. His practice investigates the floor and the ground as sites where material histories, labor, and memory accumulate exploring the idea of an impression. To the artist, an impression can be a mark left on a surface, a copy or image, or even a feeling that stays with us. In his work, an impression holds the memory of the action that made it: the pressure, the movement, the force. Each mark carries a life-lived.

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Additional programming, information about Harris's practice, and ways to engage with the work will be shared throughout the residency.

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The Gertie Hub is a space for Chicago’s creative community, bringing together institutional exhibitions, commercial programming, and emerging artists under one roof in a way that reflects how we believe the art world should work. Visitors can experience large-scale conceptual shows in the main exhibition space, discover and purchase work through our Gertie X and Gertie Presents programs, and engage with emerging artists in residence upstairs through Gertie Office Hours, all while gathering in the hospitality area we are building out at the front of the building.

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About Erol Scott Harris

Erol Scott Harris is drawn to the surfaces that hold memory that often go unnoticed. This inquiry grows from his family’s history: on his mother’s side, his family migrated from Mexico, and on his father’s side, from the American South, where traditions of building, making, and care converge, shaping how lives and spaces take form and how materials are used, reused, and carried forward.  In his practice, the floor becomes both material and metaphor, a site where buried histories press upward. He also draws on the idea of the ground in painting, the often unseen surface that supports and stabilizes an image, thinking of it as a parallel to the built floors beneath us, both foundational and rarely acknowledged. Painting is not only an image, but a place of uncovering. Through it, Harris asks us to consider how spaces are made, who builds them, and how those histories remain present, even when unseen.  The studio becomes a space of circulation and return, where materials, gestures, and meanings gather over time. Layers are built, disrupted, carried forward, and transformed. Each work emerges through accumulation, holding traces of what has been added, removed, worn down, and remade.

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Harris received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2025, where he was awarded the Dean’s Prize and the Golden Paint Award. He previously earned a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. His work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally, including presentations with Perrotin (New York), Cam Contemporarie (Chicago), Chili Art Projects (London), and the Afro-American Cultural Center in New Haven.  His work has been recognized through awards and residencies including the Newcity Breakout Artist award (2023), the TSA CHI/NY Residency (2022), and the ACRE Residency (2020). He recently developed a new body of work in collaboration with SkyART in Chicago, extending his studio practice through public programs and community engagement.

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6-9 PM