Expo Chicago 2025 Best Booths & First Day Report

In the Exposure section, Buffalo’s Rivalry Projects is presenting works by two artists who mine different image sources to create compelling pieces. 

Ryan Patrick Krueger maintains an ongoing correspondence with photography curator Vince Aletti, who sends him queer-related images, clippings, and mail art. Krueger collages these into dense visual narratives of gay men’s lives from earlier generations. In one work, a studio portrait of two nude men, strategically covered by a draped towel, is slightly obscured by an archival personals ad promoting the “romantic secrets of Jeff Stryker,” the gay porn star—for $2 a minute.

In dialogue with Krueger’s pieces are works by Jen Everett, who collages images of her parents with found photographs and photographic materials like print sleeves and test strips. At the center of the booth, Everett also presents sculptures of legacy technologies—radios, speakers, televisions, vinyl records, and cassette tape cases—that she sources for their personal resonance. Some are in working condition, others aren’t. Everett sees it as a way to memorialize both sound and silence.

Chicago’s Engage Projects has a solo presentation of local artist Edra Soto in the Profile section. Along the side walls hang several of her well-known sculptural pieces that draw on Puerto Rican architectural motifs and incorporate viewfinders displaying photographs from her family archive. At the booth’s center is an installation of several white plastic chairs outfitted with custom-made slipcovers, many made from blankets and shirts of Bad Bunny. Interspersed among them are box fans, spray painted and affixed with cut-out shapes. Soto’s practice revolves around exploring various everyday objects and motifs—like outdoor porch chairs and decorative metal fences—common in Puerto Rico and using different methods of artistic intervention to explore the meanings underlying their ubiquity.

But the booth’s tour-de-force hangs on the back wall. Titled the place of dwelling (2025), the sculpture presents a new direction for the artist. Developed during her recent Arts/Industry residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, the work embeds four ceramic shell vessels into one of her orange-painted metal architectural elements. Soto’s parents together ran several business out of her childhood home, including a ceramics workshop. It’s a moving tribute to her familial history that adds a new depth to her practice.

The booth for LA-based Walter Maciel Gallery in the Profile section has been transformed into a locker room. There’s a charged eroticism to the installation, complete with lockers, benches, communal showers, and even shower drains. What’s especially intriguing about Locker Room (2011) is that much of it is crocheted, with some elements draped over wooden armatures built from materials found at Home Depot. Artist Nathan Vincent is interested in creating tension between spaces and creative endeavors that have been socially conditioned to be gendered (masculine and feminine, respectively). 

For the Expo presentation, Vincent has added a timeline tracing major developments in LGBTQ+ rights from 2011, when Locker Room debuted, to the present. It opens on an optimistic note with the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Between 2012 and 2014, several athletes came out publicly, and in 2015, the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. But by 2016, the trajectory shifts: North Carolina’s HB2 bill restricted bathroom access for transgender people. In 2023, over 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in state legislatures across the country, and in 2024, restrictions on gender-affirming care for minors spread to at least 27 states. Four months into 2025, a slew of executive orders have further restricted the rights of trans people.

In this context, Locker Room takes on an even more pointed resonance as trans and queer rights remain under attack.

Ho Chi Minh City–based Galerie Quynh has on view several fascinating sculptures by Vy Trịnh. The artist uses materials that she considers to be “Vietnamese objects” due to their ubiquity in the country, especially in open markets in Saigon, where she is based. One sculpture uses the parts of a Honda Dream motorcycle, which can be seen zipping around the streets of the capital city. To this she has affixed, in various knotting techniques, pieces of electrical wire and strips of silk organza. The armature for her sculptures, which also includes standing fans and clothing racks, are objects that she says move between public and private spaces as a way to think about the different economies and ecologies in contemporary Vietnam. Born in 1996, the year Vietnam reopened to the world, Trịnh captures, in her practice, the rapid transformation the country has undergone over the past three decades.

In the Exposure section, São Paulo’s Verve has on view a two-person booth for Nádia Taquary and Lita Cerqueira, two Afro-Brazilian artists from Bahia. Working since the late ’60s, Cerqueira is considered the first Black woman photographer in Brazil. On view are her images of everyday life in Salvador, spanning the ’70s to the ’90s. In one, taken in 1999, we see a smiling Black girl elaborately dressed for a Carnival celebration, considered the largest in the world. In another, a portrait of a woman’s face, the bottom half of the film strip seems to have been exposed to light, giving it an eerie quality.

In the center of the booth is a large sculpture by Taquary, as well as an installation on its exterior wall. The installation brings together various pieces from her “Orikis – Salute to the Head” series. These mixed-media works feature a base of carved wood to which she affixes different combinations of lagdibá beads, cowrie shells, glass beads, copper, silver, and straw, among other materials. Each piece is based on how an orisha (a spiritual deity in the Yoruba religion) has appeared to her, depending on the different shapes and colors she sees. The series title “Orikis” refers to the art of praise poetry that Yoruba-speaking people make.  They are imbued with a certain energy that rewards seeing the works up close. Verve partner Ian Duarte said he brought her work to the fair as a teaser for a commission the artist is planning for the upcoming Bienal de São Paulo, opening in September. 

An interesting assortment of colorful sculptures by Copenhagen-based artist Kristine Mandsberg are on view in the booth of Galerie Roberston Arès. Six of these sculptures show two pieces of PVC cardboard and foam that butt up against each other. The works resemble the abstractions of Hugette Caland, which themselves recall the crevices and folds of the body. (Caland is the subject of a must-see solo show at the Arts Club of Chicago right now.) To these forms, Mandsberg has applied different hues of nylon flock fiber—yellows, greens, and blues—that give the pieces a tactile texture upon closer inspection. Nearby are a suite of half spheres that also make use of the nylon flock fiber technique but via a different application technique that gives it a gradient.

Hudson Valley–based artist Cal Lane has on view various plasma-cut steel sculptures. Growing up on Vancouver Island, Lane spent much time in her mom’s hair salon and worked there for some time. She was fascinated by the expressions of femininity and beauty she witnessed there; at the same time, she was equally interested in donning more masculine clothing. That tension between the masculine and feminine is present in her sculptures of various panties in steel, as she has translated the delicate lace into hard-wrought metal. It’s a fascinating combination. On a pedestal in one corner of the booth is Pantie Chain (2018), a chain of weathered metal panties that cascade downward. Lane has also on view two pieces using found ammunition boxes to which she has added intricate floral elements as well as views of plush babies and birds. The destructive past of these objects is now tempered by the idyllic scenes she has crafted onto them.