West Town's Gallery Row Has a Six-Week Calendar This Season. It Starts Friday.

Most gallery nights are over by the time you've finished your first lap of the room. How often does a West Town opening bring the artists back on a Tuesday afternoon to light candles on a table they first used in 1995?

This fall on Chicago Avenue, it does. The West Town First Fridays gallery night on Friday, November 6, opens shows at Western Exhibitions that run through December 19. Between those dates the gallery has scheduled four free, drop-in performances. The West Town Chamber of Commerce's holiday Sip & Shop falls the day after the December performance. A resident who treats November 6 as a one-off misses most of what is planned for these same two blocks.

Five Doors Between Paulina and Wolcott

On the first Friday of every month, the West Town Chamber's participating galleries and arts businesses stay open until 8 p.m. The Chamber started the program in October 2022 because a group of its member galleries asked for it. Venues have to stay open from 6 to 8 p.m. at minimum. Any Chamber member in the service area that shows art can take part, including shops, restaurants and service businesses as well as galleries. That area runs from Division Street to Hubbard and from Halsted Street to Kedzie Avenue.

November's featured venues are mostly on one short run of Chicago Avenue, so the walk is easy to plan. The Chamber's First Fridays page links a map of the November 6 route. From east to west:

1. Western Exhibitions, 1709 W. Chicago Ave. Miller & Shellabarger's Always Now in Gallery 1 and Paul Nudd's Plasticakes and Gore Orbs in Gallery 2. Public reception 5 to 8 p.m.
2. Chicago Truborn, 1741 W. Chicago Ave. The Seer, The Slayer, and The Stray, the first solo show by Chicago artist Kolormore. The Chamber's listing connects it to a mural he recently finished in West Town. The show centers on three figures: the Seer, a mink; the Slayer, a rider; and the Stray, a horse. The artist describes all three as aspects of himself.
3. West Town Chamber of Commerce, 1819 W. Chicago Ave. For Here! by Elsie How, a series of playful paintings of diners set under fantastical skies. The Chamber made its office into a rotating gallery for arts businesses that are members but don't have their own exhibition space.
4. MATCH I A, 1857 W. Chicago Ave. Not on the gallery list, but it sits on the route. Block Club Chicago reported in April 2026 that the matcha cafe had opened in the former Tribute storefront, with a menu that runs from classic lattes to a matcha affogato.
5. Altar Home, 1858 W. Chicago Ave. Mixed media on canvas by Georgios Angelakopoulos: acrylic, oil, raw crayon and spray paint, with collage and wood surfaces set in geometric frames.

There are two detours south for anyone who wants to stretch the night. Fulton Street Collective, 1821 W. Hubbard St., opens Collective Brilliance on November 6. It is a members-only group show of artists affiliated with the collective, curated by Jessica Hu. Sunroom Space, 2401 W. Ohio St., will have a rotating selection of risograph prints designed in-house.

The Gallery That Keeps Going After the Reception

Western Exhibitions is the reason this First Friday turns into a season. Always Now is Miller & Shellabarger's sixth show there. The married artist collaborators adapt traditional American craft techniques, including silhouette cutting, sewing, crocheting and bookmaking, into work about partnership and loss. This show includes artists' books, screenprints, photographs and, for the first time, paintings.

The new artists' books and paintings on paper use silhouettes of the two artists as stencils, stamps and resists. Western Exhibitions' notes for the show quote the artists on why the silhouette keeps coming back in their work:

"A silhouette is made from tracing a shadow. A shadow is a reminder that a body is present and a silhouette is a reminder that a body is gone. What is missing causes loneliness."

The show also includes tintype photographs taken in 2024 on the coast of Maine. Three wooden urns hold the ashes of earlier cut-paper installations, which the artists ritually burned at the end of each exhibition.

Gallery 2 is a first as well. Paul Nudd's fifth show at Western Exhibitions is the first devoted entirely to his ceramics, a room full of brightly colored mutant ceramic heads. His work over the past twenty years has also included paintings, prints, video, zines and installations.

Both shows are on view Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., until December 19. If you miss the reception, the work is still there. The performances are the parts that happen only once or twice.

Two Performances Last Staged in 1995 and 2006

The gallery calls all four performances "non-theatrical." They are free and open to the public. You can arrive at any point in the posted hours, and visitors are welcome to talk with the artists while they work. A seat and a start time aren't required. On a weeknight you can stop in on the way home.

On Tuesday, November 17, the artists restage Untitled Performance (Tabletop), last presented in 1995 in Madison, Wisconsin. This version moves indoors, but it uses the same table. Shellabarger strikes a match on the zipper of Miller's pants to light a small candle. The two then take turns lighting 12 candles, about one every five minutes, and setting them in pre-drilled holes in a circle on the table. The piece ends when the last candle melts down and goes out. It is staged on a large, mandala-like cut black vinyl piece made from silhouettes of the two artists' entwined bodies. The two-hour window, 4 to 6 p.m., is the shortest on the calendar.

On Friday, December 4, they bring back Untitled Performance (Sewn Together), last performed in 2006. Over four hours, Miller & Shellabarger repeatedly sew themselves together and then rip the seams apart. The gallery describes the piece as a metaphor for the changing rhythms of relationships: working together and coming apart.

Untitled (Pink Tube) opens and closes the run, on November 13 and December 18. It is the pair's best-known work, an ongoing performance they started in 2003 and plan to continue for life. The two crochet at opposite ends of a long tube of pink yarn at the same time. A photograph of an earlier staging, on the steps of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, is in the show. Seeing the photograph on November 6 and then watching the piece in person a week later shows how the exhibition is built: it is a record of work the artists are still doing.

In a 2023 Chicago Reader review of the pair's work, Vasia Rigou concluded that "togetherness can and will save the world."

December 4 and 5, Back to Back

The busiest stretch of the season is the first weekend of December. First Fridays happen on the first Friday of every month, which makes December 4 the next one after November. Sewn Together runs at Western Exhibitions that same afternoon and evening. The Chamber hadn't posted a December guide when this went up, so check the First Fridays page for that month's participants.

The next day, Saturday, December 5, the Chamber kicks off It's a Wonderful West Town, its holiday shopping promotion, which runs through December 24. The Sip & Shop runs from noon to 5 p.m. The Chamber is promising carolers and drinks, treats and deals across the neighborhood. Businesses that want to take part have until November 10 to apply. The Chamber says it will post more details closer to the date.

You can plan the weekend in two pieces. Friday evening covers the gallery and the performance on Chicago Avenue. Saturday afternoon covers holiday shopping, from the same stretch of blocks out across the neighborhood. Both Western Exhibitions shows close two weeks later, on December 19, and the final Pink Tube is the night before.

The five-door walk between Paulina and Wolcott was a good season for a few blocks of Chicago Avenue, and it's the kind of local detail our team follows in the neighborhoods we cover. If you'd like to talk through what's happening on your block, or what nearby galleries and businesses mean for a home you're thinking about, Dwell Wisely Group is happy to help. Schedule a Free Consultation.