Long Habits @ Julius Caesar
3808 S Ashland
Opening Saturday, September 19th from 6-9PM
Open Saturdays, 12 - 4PM, 9.26.26 - 10.24.26
Julius Caesar presents Long Habits, a group exhibition of works by Mike Cloud, Michelle Grabner, Barbara Jenkins, Judy Ledgerwood, Madeleine Leplae, Cameron Martin, Trey Rozell, Jonathan Worcester, curated by MJ Lounsberry. Opening reception Saturday, September 19th, from 6 to 9 PM at 3808 S Ashland Ave, coinciding with Chicago Exhibition Week produced by Gertie. For a pdf preview, please email roartservices@gmail.com
Long Habits
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Nothing repeats. The light changes, the hand ages, and pattern accrues.
Some of that pattern is found. It arrives already made in textile and ornament and inherited symbol, carrying use and belief that predate any individual mark. Some of it is imposed, an organizing decision laid over a situation that will not organize itself.
Each artist here has spent years returning to a form, a mark, a color, a symbol, a system. No repeated unit is identical to the one before it, and the difference accumulates. That return is not a claim that the world is stable. Things rhyme closely enough to work with, and a body of work built over decades holds together through the decision to keep going back.
Pattern works structurally in some of this, thought carried out through color and seriality and the discipline of a unit that only registers once it appears again. In other work it is inherited rather than invented, coded and symbolic, carrying meaning that no single repetition contains. Elsewhere it is a rhythm kept mostly so that a break in it lands.
Repetition does not fix anything in place, and none of the work is asking it to. It offers a way to keep working toward an order that will not hold. Some habits run the length of a painting, some the length of a career. Each gets made again tomorrow.
Mike Cloud (b. 1974, Chicago, IL; lives in Chicago) earned a BFA from the University of Illinois Chicago (2001) and an MFA from Yale University (2003). He is currently Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. Cloud speaks openly about teachers who have influenced his practice, including Mel Bochner, Peter Halley, Byron Kim, Kerry James Marshall, and Jessica Stockholder. Cloud’s solo and two-person exhibitions include Story Structure, Pt. 2, The Neubauer Collegium, University of Chicago (with Nyeema Morgan, 2026); Hammer Projects: Mike Cloud, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2026); Circle Chat, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago (2025); Called Ahead, Fahrenheit Madrid (2024); The Myth of Education, Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago (2018); Bad Faith and Universal Technique, Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2014); Systems, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (2006); and Special Project: Mike Cloud, MoMA PS1, New York (2005). He has also participated in group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Good Weather, Chicago; White Columns, New York; and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Cloud received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ Richard Pousette-Dart Award in 2023, and the Jules Guerin Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in 2023. His work is also held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, WI) Lives and works in Milwaukee, Chicago, and Waupaca County, WI as an artist, writer and curator. She co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial and was the Artistic Director for the inaugural 2018 FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. Her practice spans a variety of media including drawing, painting, and sculpture, and finds a creative center in operating across platforms and towards community. Her work has been the subject of several national museum surveys. She is presently represented by James Cohan, New York and Green Gallery, Milwaukee, among others. Grabner is the Crown Family Professor of Art and the Senior Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has taught since 1996. She has also held teaching appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art; Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts—Bard College; Yale University School of Art; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.
Barbara Jeanne Jenkins (b. 1978, Trenton, NJ) lives and works in Chicago, IL. As an elementary art teacher in the Chicago Public Schools, she has a radical daily morning routine that allows her to enter the studio each day before commuting to her school. This routine is the substance that has led to her current practice. She now spends weekends or days off from school organizing her canvases with oil sticks to manage her daily painting routine and create substantial works of art. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 and recently graduated from the American University, Washington DC with her MAT. She holds a BA from Northwestern Illinois University, 2007. Her most recent solo exhibition was Bird Show organized by Erin Toale. Group exhibitions include RE: CONNECT Teacher’s Art Exhibit, C33 Gallery, Drawing On Patient Info, 2025, among others.
Judy Ledgerwood (b. 1959, Brazil, Indiana) received a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has held solo exhibitions at numerous venues, including the Graham Foundation, the Smart Museum of Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Renaissance Society in Chicago; Häusler Contemporary in Zurich, Switzerland, Munich, Germany and Lustenau, Austria; and Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana; the University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, Kentucky; and Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY. She has received awards from the Driehaus Foundation, Artadia, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Illinois Art Council. Ledgerwood is professor emeritus at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she served as Chair of the Department of Art Theory and Practice. She lives and works between Chicago and Sawyer, Michigan.
Madeleine Leplae (b. 1994) received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2025. She has exhibited in multiple group shows at Left Field along with Stowaway, Main Projects, Quarters Gallery, the Gentler International Drawing Space, Care of Gallery, Andrew Refacz and a solo show at the Cleaner Gallery.
Cameron Martin (b. 1970) received his BA from Brown University and continued his studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Columbus Museum of Art, City Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand), and Tel Aviv Museum. His work is included in the public collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Martin is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2010), the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2008), and the Artists at Giverny Fellowship and Residency (2001).
Trey Rozell (b.1996) is an artist from the American South who is currently living and working out of Chicago, IL. His practice is firmly rooted in painting, but extends into sculpture, performance, installation, and animation. His work is made considering the perpetuated structures embedded within the history of painting, Trey utilizes absurdity, repetition, and gamesmanship as a means of inquiry into these age-old subjects with the hope to observe how the rhetoric of painting continues to survive and evolve today. Trey has had work exhibited at Twelve Ten Gallery (Chicago, IL), The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA), The End Project Space (Atlanta, GA), Ruschman (Chicago, IL), The Ionian Center for the Arts and Culture (Kefalonia, GD) and recently received his MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jonathan Worcester lives and works in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024, and his BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2015. He is the Departmental Specialist in the Applied Arts of Europe Department at the Art Institute of Chicago and was awarded as a Teaching Fellow in Painting and Drawing at SAIC. In 2023 Worcester’s solo and two person exhibitions include Dead Reckoning 65 Grand, Chicago (2025), Tempers Cleaner Gallery, Chicago (2024), along with group shows at Rockford University, Secrist Beach, Old Friends, and Patient Info among others.