Join EarlyWork for a lively Saturday evening of art and martinis! We’ll kick things off with an intimate studio visit with artist Madeline Gallucci, who will walk us through her practice and share insights into her work—martini in hand.

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From there, we’ll head to Grunts Rare Books in the Midland Building for a walkthrough of Sympathy Ribbon, Madeline’s two-person exhibition with artist Margaret Crowley. Both artists will be on hand to share their perspectives on the show and what it was like to collaborate. Taylor Payton of Grunts Rare Books will also speak about the bookstore and project space. The store will be open, so stick around to browse their specialty archival media available for purchase!

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About Sympathy Ribbon: 

Grunts Rare Books is pleased to present Sympathy Ribbon, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Margaret Crowley and Madeline Gallucci. The exhibition considers the transitory and its relationship to what is fixed or permanent, bringing together two practices attentive to the fragile ways time, sentimentality, and recognition are held in form.

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In her paintings, Gallucci performs an accumulation of dust and weather, often treating the surface as if standing behind it, like fingers on fogged glass. These reflective grounds register time and perception, holding the residue of what pollutes or passes across them. Onto this atmosphere Gallucci affixes trompe l’oeil strips of ‘tape,’ a framing device immediately referring to the everyday, to labor, or to the provisional act of masking in utility painting. Stripped and twisted across Gallucci’s surfaces, the frame’s dual nature comes forward: tape is both precious as a material and utterly ubiquitous as a symbol, discernible here by its color. In some works the tape begins to spell, or cast spells, acting as a device for language and abstraction. For example, a shadow appears above the text in SPAT (2025) as if a body looms or has just passed by it. The distinct impression of another recalls the first double, the self split into a shadow on the ground or in a watery mirrored reflection. 

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These echoes of presence, temporary and insistent, find a counterpart in Crowley’s sculptures where memory and loss, or a blend of them called devotion, are formalized in fixed or enduring objects. Occupying the center of the floor is 50 years of service (2022), an enlarged replica of a watch given to her grandfather by the International Union of Operating Engineers. The gift, meant to honor a lifetime of labor, is commemorative yet alarmingly slight, collapsing decades into a single object designed to keep time. What is meant to stand for permanence instead exposes its own instability and slips under the weight of what it is tasked to hold. Crowley’s scale shift, mâchéd in postmortem paperwork, marks and exaggerates the imbalance while also operating as an act of loving, allowing Crowley to commemorate better. Similarly, Husband (2025)  is a token of loss; such sympathy ribbons typically adorn funeral arrangements so guests can easily identify the sender of each bouquet. Considered here as a found spool, the ribbon strings mourning into ritual and extends the given language beyond its set occasion. 

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Both practices beg how remembrance might be translated into form, and how fragile these forms may be. Gallucci and Crowley create works that measure: tokens of debris, labor, love, or grief. In their work, time and attachment play against the edge of memorial. The two suggest that the things we make to measure, to honor, or to keep ultimately disclose the impossibility of holding experience, or a synthesis of time, intact.

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About Madeline Gallucci: ‍

Madeline Gallucci (b. 1990, Greensboro, NC) is an artist and arts administrator living in Chicago, IL. Gallucci's work has been recently exhibited at venues such as Ivory Gate Gallery (Shanghai, China); Goldfinch, Produce Model, Patient Info, Weatherproof, Space & Time, and LVL3 (Chicago, IL); Below Grand (New York, NY); Rebekah Templeton (Philadelphia, PA); Skylab (Columbus, OH); Terrault Contemporary (Baltimore, MD); Pelican Bomb Gallery X (New Orleans, LA); Special Effects Gallery, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Plug Gallery, and 21c Museum Hotel (Kansas City, MO). Her work is also included in the collection of Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS). Gallucci received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2012 and her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2020. 

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About Margaret Crowley:

Margaret Crowley (b. 1987, Ottawa, Illinois) is a Chicago-based artist. Recent solo shows include Hazard at University Galleries at Illinois State University, and Comb at Devening Projects in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at Ditch Projects in Springfield, Oregon; Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago; Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Chicago Artists Coalition; Cue Foundation, New York City; and Área: Lugar de Proyectos, Caguas, Puerto Rico. Crowley has received the Jarislowsky Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award, which included a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Canada. Crowley has also been awarded multiple individual artist grants from the Illinois Arts Council and a residency at Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists. NewCity Chicago named her one of Chicago’s 10 Breakout Artists of 2023 and her work is also included in the Booth School of Business Art Collection. From 2016 to 2023, Crowley was the co-director of Produce Model Gallery, Chicago. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Chicago, M.A. from Eastern Illinois University, and B.S. from Illinois State University.

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5-8 PM