Maya Chen has been on both sides of the velvet rope. Ten years ago she was an emerging painter cold-calling galleries from a Pilsen studio, sleeping four to a two-bedroom, watching her work rejected by the same institutions that now email her asking what she's making. Today she curates for a mid-tier gallery in West Loop and sits on selection committees for art fairs across the Midwest. She sees the fracture happening in real time... and she's angry about it.
The truth is, Chicago's art infrastructure is breaking. Not visibly. Not in a way that makes the news. But quietly, in the way systems break when money tightens and institutions stop pretending they serve everyone. Expo Chicago's public struggle to stay relevant while maintaining booth fees that started at $3,000 and climb higher every year is just the visible part. The real story is happening in conversations like the one below.
When did you first notice the system wasn't built for emerging artists?
Honestly... the moment I graduated. I had a good portfolio. Real gallery training. And I realized I couldn't afford to show anywhere that mattered. A solo show in a respectable gallery costs money upfront—you're paying for the space, the opening, sometimes the framing. Or you're showing in a friend's apartment or a pop-up in a warehouse. Those shows don't get reviewed. Nobody from the Tribune comes. You're making work for people who already know you exist.
But here's what kills me: that hasn't changed. It's worse now. The fairs that used to be breeding grounds—Undercover, smaller booths at Expo—they're disappearing or getting swallowed by the big galleries. A booth at Expo now is a commitment. You need inventory. You need to ship. You need to be ready to sell at scale. That's not emerging anymore. That's already arrived.
You mentioned watching Expo Chicago struggle. What's actually happening there?
Expo's caught between two worlds and they're trying to keep both. They want to be a fair that serves emerging artists and small galleries. They also want to be Frieze. Those are opposite goals. Frieze doesn't care about emerging. Frieze cares about money and prestige and collectors who make seven-figure bids. You can't serve both. You have to choose.
What's happening is they're losing the middle. The collectors who used to browse smaller galleries at the fair... they're online now. Instagram. Artsy. They find work without flying to Chicago. So the fairs have to get more exclusive, more expensive, more destination-level to justify the cost. Which means the booths that got priced out are the ones run by people who can't afford $5,000 plus travel plus hotel plus food. Those are your emerging galleries. That's your diverse representation. That's your new voices.
The fair isn't dying. It's just becoming a place where you go to buy blue-chip art and watch the art world congratulate itself.
Is there a tier system emerging... or was there always one?
There was always one. But it used to be permeable. You could work your way up. Show in smaller fairs, get reviewed, build a collector base, graduate to bigger booths. It took years, but it was possible. The path was narrow but it existed.
Now... there are two separate ecosystems. Tier one is the fairs, the major galleries, the institutions. Tier two is everything else—pop-ups, artist collectives, Instagram, TikTok if you're young enough to make that work. And almost nobody moves between them anymore. If you don't start with institutional backing or money, you stay in tier two forever. You can build a real career there. Some artists are. But you're not getting a gallery in a serious art fair. You're not getting reviewed by the major critics. You're not getting into the permanent collections that matter.
The access issue isn't about snobbiness anymore. It's about infrastructure. It costs money to be professional in tier one. Studio rent. Framing. Shipping. Insurance. A good photographer to document work. An accountant. A lawyer for contracts. An emerging artist can't afford all that while also making work. So they don't. They stay in tier two.
What would actually fix this?
Funding. Public funding, specifically. The model that works—the one that actually produces diverse art worlds—requires institutions to subsidize emerging artists. Not prize money. Subsidized studio space. Subsidized booth fees at major fairs. Direct grants that pay for professional documentation and framing and shipping. That's what every city that's serious about art does. Berlin. Barcelona. Even Toronto is better at this than we are.
Chicago talks about being a serious art city. We're not. We have great artists and good taste. But we don't fund emerging work at scale. So we lose people. They move to New York. They move to LA. Or they quit and get corporate jobs because they have to eat.
What's wild is... it would cost less than what we already spend on arts funding if we allocated it differently. But that requires the big institutions to agree to smaller pieces of the pie. Smaller endowments. Smaller prestige. And they won't do that voluntarily.
You sit on selection committees. How do you actually choose?
With a lot of guilt. We get more applications than slots. Way more. And after you filter for quality—and there's so much quality—you're looking at logistics. Can this gallery afford to be here? Can they handle the exposure? Do they have a mailing list, a social media presence, a track record of selling? And all of that skews toward galleries that have already made it.
I try to fight for slots for people I know are doing excellent work but just... broke. It works sometimes. But I'm one voice in a room of five or six. And the people running the fair have financial pressure too. They need to fill booths with galleries that will sell, that will attract serious collectors, that won't cause problems. That's not evil. That's just how the machine works now.
The worst part? I remember being the person on the outside. I remember the specific feeling of knowing your work was good enough and the system telling you it wasn't... yet. The difference between those two things—good enough and good enough yet—is just money and timing and knowing someone. That's not art. That's not talent. That's luck.
What's changing on the ground level in Chicago right now?
The collectives are getting more serious. Artists are building their own infrastructure instead of waiting for institutions to include them. There's a real movement toward artist-run spaces, cooperative galleries, pop-up networks. The quality is good. The work is interesting. But it's invisible to collectors who have money and it's exhausting for artists who have to be painters and curators and administrators and accountants all at once.
What excites me is seeing younger artists just... not buying into the fair system at all. They're building on TikTok and YouTube. They're doing NFT stuff or print-on-demand or direct sales. They're bypassing the whole tier one infrastructure. Is that sustainable? I don't know yet. But it's real and it's growing.
The downside is we're losing the idea of the art world as a collective space. It's becoming fragmented. Which might be healthier... or might just mean the system is too broken to repair.
Last question: are you still making work?
No. And that's the real answer to everything we just talked about. I had to choose between being an artist and being employed in the art world. I chose employment because I needed health insurance and a steady paycheck. That's what happens to a lot of people. You start as a maker and you end up as a steward of other people's making. Which is meaningful work. But it's not what I wanted to do when I was 23 and thought I could change the world with paint and stubbornness.
The system didn't kill my art. It just made it impossible to keep practicing while also paying rent. So I made a rational decision. But every rational decision like that is a loss for the art world. It's one fewer voice. One fewer perspective. And Chicago's losing too many voices right now.