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When Jenelle Forrester entered Vertical Gallery, she had no idea her life was about to change. 

Jenelle — the founder and president of NYC IT GIRL Collective, a New York City-based nonprofit dedicated to forging deeper, more meaningful relationships between artists and the communities they call home — first visited Vertical’s flagship West Town location in October 2024, coinciding with the opening of Chicago illustrator, designer and muralist Blake Jones’ solo exhibit ‘B-Sides.’ 

“I was the first one there, and I was like ‘Oh, my goodness! I crashed this opening reception that I was not even invited to!’” Jenelle laughs. “But Patrick [Hull, Vertical’s owner and curator] and Laura [Catherwood, the gallery’s manager] were so welcoming and nice, and I was able to tour the space before others arrived. Then they said ‘Since you're here already, why don't you visit this art walk?’ And I said ‘What's an art walk?’”

Patrick and Laura handed Jenelle a map produced in conjunction with the West Town Chamber of Commerce’s First Fridays series, where on the first Friday of each month, neighborhood galleries and arts-themed businesses stay open until 8:00 p.m. to encourage patron engagement and exploration. Jenelle was instantly smitten. 

“You just walk around and see art. That’s it. There’s nothing to sign up for, and no group to join,” the lifelong art enthusiast explains. “I liked that it was a self-directed experience. I’m very independent, and I tend to trail off or stroll away in group settings, because I'm looking at something for longer than everyone else. I made the decision on the plane home from Chicago to bring the idea to New York.” 

NYC IT GIRL Collective will soon descend on Queens’ bustling Jamaica neighborhood to host the organization’s first annual IT WALK, a free, self-guided public art experience running Friday, Aug. 8 through Sunday, Aug. 17. IT WALK features emerging artists from all five Big Apple boroughs, and exhibits their work across more than two dozen different small business locations along Jamaica Avenue between 146th Street and 171st Street — a pedestrian-friendly environment noted for its vibrant and dynamic atmosphere.

“IT WALK is my way to highlight and glorify New York City artists, and to remind people they don’t have to go to Manhattan to see art — there are four other boroughs here, too,” Jenelle says. “Everyone who attends is going to have a true, authentic New York experience. If you’ve ever been to Jamaica Avenue, you know it’s lit. There’s going to be so much happening.”

The Queens businesses participating in IT WALK stretch across an eclectic mix of verticals — retailers, restaurants, beauty salons, barbershops, etc. 

“NYC IT GIRL was created to bring attention to underfunded communities, and underfunded communities don't have galleries. Showcasing art inside of small businesses brings attention to the artists, the small business owners and the neighborhood as a whole,” Jenelle says. “IT WALK isn’t just about attracting people to Jamaica Avenue. It’s about getting them to spend money there, and giving them reasons to return when the art walk is over.” 

All IT WALK exhibitions and programming are free and open to the public. Event maps will be installed in all participating Jamaica Avenue locations, and NYC IT GIRL Collective is rolling out a digital map as well. 

Jenelle thanks Vertical and First Fridays for setting IT WALK in motion. “NYC IT GIRL was created to be a lifestyle brand. At first, art was just one part of it. But after I visited Vertical, everything just fell into place,” she says. “I want everyone in New York to feel what I experienced in Chicago.”

Vertical Gallery, Chicago’s premier urban-contemporary art gallery, is very proud to present ‘#wishyouwerehere..,’ the much-anticipated return of British graffiti legend Mau Mau.

‘#wishyouwerehere..,’ on display July 11 through Aug. 9, wryly surveys the wreckage of a planet in epistemic freefall — a misinformation wasteland where seeing is no longer believing. Mau Mau will be in attendance for Friday, July 11’s opening-night reception, taking place from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.

‘#wishyouwerehere..’ brings Mau Mau back to Chicago for the first time since 2019’s Vertical showcase ‘Bombing walls and painting bridges,’ his U.S. solo debut. During the intervening years, the artist’s career-long preoccupations — social injustice, corporate greed and environmental catastrophe foremost among them — have grown even more pervasive, intensified by political and technological forces conspiring to tear apart the fabric of reality.

“‘#wishyouwerehere..’ is about deceptions,” Mau Mau says. “We're bombarded with social media images, and there's a lot of confusion out there about what’s true and what isn't. At this moment, the truth seems to be for sale.”

Enter the star of ‘#wishyouwerehere..’: Mau Mau’s signature fox character, a truth-to-power mouthpiece adorning walls, surfboards and billboards across the globe. The burnt-orange trickster — wily and quick-witted, both trespasser and target — first emerged via Mau Mau’s work alongside Bristol, England’s famed TCF and Burning Candy graffiti crews.

“I've always loved cartoons, so when I came to painting the fox, it felt like it was meant to be,” Mau Mau says. “A cartoon fox is so neutral. You can make so many statements with it, without showing a bias. I love that.”

The nameless fox’s ‘#wishyouwerehere..’ misadventures unfold across an eclectic array of paintings, upcycled maps and found objects, amplifying Mau Mau’s hilariously barbed and savagely concise commentary on the state of our dysfunction.

“If you're dealing with issues that are quite heavy or dark, it's important to deliver your message with humor. You can't bash people with what you believe — you have to invite people to think about it,” Mau Mau explains. “Humor reaches so many more people. When you paint something dark but do it in a funny way, it's like ‘Oh, yeah, that's a good point.’”

Mau Mau hopes viewers of ‘#wishyouwerehere..’ find catharsis in its comic perspective.

“I want everyone to have a bit of a laugh. That's the main thing,” Mau Mau says. “People that are gonna come to my show are probably in agreement with my sentiments — I’m guessing that I'm not going to change anyone's mind. But we're all in this together, and we all need to speak up. Sharing our experiences is empowering to all of us, because it’s important to know that other people feel the same way.”

Mau Mau, a native of coastal Devon, adopted his tagging alias while surfing in Ghana, where locals struggled to pronounce his given name, Mark. He first gained attention designing graphics for surf and skate apparel brand Sewerside, which he co-owned and operated from 1995 to 2001. Mau Mau turned to street art after the company shuttered, painting message-themed pieces tackling topics from affordable housing to the Bush administration’s war on terror; his work now graces cityscapes, galleries and private collections the world over.

Mau Mau made his first Vertical Gallery appearance in partnership with longtime creative ally Beejoir, co-headlining the 2017 duo exhibit ‘Foreign Policy.’ His career is the subject of the retrospective ‘Talking Out of My Art,’ published in 2024 by Velocity Press; Mau Mau will be signing copies of the book during Vertical’s ‘#wishyouwerehere..’ opening event (2006 W. Chicago Ave. #1R, enter via the alley off Damen Avenue).

Vertical Gallery, Chicago’s premier urban-contemporary art gallery, is very proud to present ‘Prickly portraits of a fragmented world,’ the long-awaited return of Colombia-based street artist Stinkfish.

‘Prickly portraits of a fragmented world,’ on display June 6–28, captures glimmers of hope in the faces of a human population on the brink, enriching the immediacy and visceral impact of Stinkfish’s signature spray-painted stencils via bolder color fields and intricate freehand detailing. This urgent new exhibition arrives 11 years after Stinkfish’s first Vertical solo showcase ‘Savage Gaze,’ followed in 2019 by ‘The short distance between lands. The long distance between ports;’ the artist will be in attendance for Friday, June 6’s opening-night reception, taking place from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.

‘Prickly portraits of a fragmented world’ brings Stinkfish back to an America ruled by chaos. The portraits in question commemorate the resolve and resilience essential to our species’ continued survival, nesting each anonymous subject within a fantastical outer shell: armor-like spikes reminiscent of porcupine quills and hedgehog spines.

“We’re living in a complex time, marked by the resurgence of xenophobia, hardened borders, war, death, destruction. Many governments are shifting to the extreme right, and in the midst of it all, we’re trying to figure out how humanity can go on,” Stinkfish says. “The spines in my portraits evoke self-defense, like in plants — beautiful yet fragile. The people I portray also reflect this fragility, but through the power of their gaze, a different future can be glimpsed — perhaps one without barbed-wire borders, a world to walk through freely, just like these spiny portraits do.”

Stinkfish snapped the photographs sourced for each ‘Prickly portraits’ stencil in the course of his travels across Colombia, Honduras, Austria and the Caribbean island of Nevis. “In my work, inspiration always begins by moving — walking — as a way to understand this world, both beautiful and horrible at once,” Stinkfish says. “Walking allows me to encounter people through whom I can understand, firsthand, what life is really about, far from the illusion of social media and hegemonic mass media. Uplifting these everyday people I meet along the way, in all kinds of places, is the aim of my work. For this exhibition in particular, I wanted to portray some of the most meaningful encounters from the past few years.”  

Stinkfish urges viewers of ‘Prickly portraits of a fragmented world’ to focus on the moment, not the message. 

“I don’t expect viewers to take away a specific message,” he explains. “I’m more interested in the connections they might make, the questions they might ask, the thoughts that arise. When a message is too fixed, the exchange is lost. Just like in the street, I hope these exhibition pieces create surprise and curiosity.”  

Stinkfish (birth name classified) was born in Mexico City but raised in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital and largest city. The self-taught artist adopted the alias “Stink” at age 15 to tag the walls and tables of his high school, adding the “-fish” suffix prior to launching his stencil graffiti career in 2003. Stinkfish gained international recognition for his colorful, often colossal murals before showing his work in galleries: outside of Vertical, he has exhibited in London, Paris and Berlin. 

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Vertical Gallery is very proud to present ‘Right Back at It Again,’ a solo showcase for painter and printmaker Steve Seeley. 

‘Right Back at It Again,’ on display May 2-31, unpacks the art of making art, drawing on the slapstick surrealism of classic cartoons to affectionately lampoon the day-after-day struggles and sacrifices of a creative life. Vertical toasts the exhibition’s launch with an opening reception Friday, May 2 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. 

‘Right Back at It Again’ follows just six months after Vertical presented Seeley’s collection ‘They Cometh!’ at Aqua Art Miami 2024 — a quintessential example of the productivity and pace demanded of working artists. Its 27 acrylic paintings depict the beginningless and endless cycle of artistic life, death and rebirth via the hyper-exaggerated visual grammar of Looney Tunes-style mayhem: i.e., heads spontaneously combusting, anvils falling from the sky and all the other stuff that Wile E. Coyote’s nightmares are made of. 

“Art is a grind. There are no breaks. I don’t mean that to sound negative. But you have to psych yourself up every day. You fall down or stumble, and you bounce back up and go right back to it,” Seeley says. “That was part of the impetus for the title ‘Right Back at It Again,’ but I’m addressing the subject in cartoon jest. Cartoon characters are indestructible. They can't die. You blow them up, and they reinflate. You can’t escape the dark humor aspect, but there's a light there somewhere.” 

While ‘They Cometh!’ paid homage to Seeley’s lifelong idol Jack Kirby, the promethean comic book artist responsible for co-creating Marvel Universe icons like Captain America, the Fantastic Four and the Black Panther, ‘Right Back at It Again’ mostly eschews established pop culture properties in favor of a tabula rasa approach. 

“It was a nonlinear process this time around. The first piece I did led to the next piece, and that piece led to the piece after that. I didn't give myself any walls or confines, and I didn't care where I went with it as long as it referenced the piece prior to it,” Seeley explains. “It was really important to me to keep everything optimistic, even though it’s a show about people getting their asses kicked. I just don’t know a better way to depict [the creative process] than to show someone getting knocked down or squashed.” 

‘Right Back at It Again’ also blows up and reassembles Seeley’s color palette. 

“Color is my favorite part of making art,” he says. “A lot of times in the past, I've mixed 20 or 30 different colors for a show. That's the base. Sometimes I allow myself to use different colors if I need to. I did less of that in this show. One way for me to jump from one piece to the next was to pick a prominent color — a very prominent blue, for example — and then continue that color into the next piece. Also, there is not one ounce of black paint in this entire show. I don't use black. All my line work is what I call ‘suede.’ It’s a brown-ish, violet color. I always like the drab, desaturated colors.”

Seeley is a mainstay of Chicago’s contemporary art community. The Wisconsin native came to the city in 2004 after earning a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from the Ohio State University, appearing in group shows across the Midwest before headlining his earliest solo exhibitions in partnership with Chicago’s Packer Schopf Gallery. Seeley — a former partner in Windy City printmaking specialists POP!NK Editions — first exhibited at Vertical in 2013 as part of the gallery’s very first holiday group show, ‘Deck the Halls,’ and returned in 2015 for ‘Heroes & Villains.’ He has remained a Vertical fixture in the years since, co-headlining 2023’s duo show ‘Love Notes’ opposite Blake Jones.

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Vertical Gallery, Flog rejoin forces for NYC solo showcase ‘Hand in Hand’ 

Vertical Gallery, Chicago’s premier urban-contemporary art gallery, is very proud to present ‘Hand in Hand,’ French painter Flog’s debut New York City solo exhibition. 

‘Hand in Hand,’ on display May 8–24 at 2 Rivington Street on New York’s Lower East Side, spotlights Flog’s signature Human of Glass character, within whose transparent, genderless body the colors and complexities of life swirl and splash. Vertical toasts Flog’s Big Apple premiere with an opening-night reception on Thursday, May 8 from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. 

‘Hand in Hand’ follows close to 18 months after Flog’s first-ever U.S. solo showcase, the sold-out ‘Rewind,’ presented by Vertical at SCOPE Miami Beach 2023. While ‘Rewind’ drew visual and thematic inspiration from formative events in Flog’s adolescence, ‘Hand in Hand’ occupies our present moment, focusing squarely on the Human of Glass and the character’s interactions with a pair of giant-sized, color-filled glass hands. 

“‘Hand in Hand’ explores the contrast between the hands and the character, and their difference in size emphasizes the difference between power and weakness — who has the power, and who doesn't,” says Flog, born Florian Gaborit. “There's also a focus on how hands link people. There’s holding hands, of course, as well as how we communicate with our hands. You can send a reassuring message. You can display the peace symbol. You can also give someone the middle finger. Hands are such a powerful symbol and storytelling tool. They convey so many emotions, both positive and negative.” 

Subtle, gradient colors dominate ‘Hand in Hand’ — a sharp turn from the dayglo tints and tones of ‘Rewind.’ “It’s a whole new color palette. There’s not just one flat green or one flat blue, and there’s much more work with the spray can,” Flog says. “I’m always in search of new colors, and I love to experiment. I’m sure the show after this one will have a different color palette, too.” 

New York City has its fingerprints all over ‘Hand in Hand’ as well. “Never would I have imagined that something like this exhibition with Vertical Gallery would happen. I’m a bit speechless about this incredible opportunity,” Flog says. “New York is one of the biggest cities in the world, and these concepts of gigantism and reducing the scale of my character come directly from wondering if I will feel like an ant in that environment. But I’m confident I’m showing the New York audience something new — something very different than everything I’ve done before.” 

Flog studied graphic design at Nantes’ École Pivaut before pursuing a career as a painter. His deft, dazzling blend of aerosol spray, acrylics and oils gained international attention following the 2020 introduction of the Human of Glass series, and two years later he made his Vertical debut via the gallery’s nine-year anniversary group show, inaugurating a collaboration that continues to deepen with each passing year. Flog has also exhibited his work in Paris, Rome and Taipei, among other international destinations. 

FLOG 'Hand in Hand'
May 8-24, 2025
Opening reception with the artist: Thurs May 8, 5:00-8:00pm
Vertical Gallery Pop-Up Space: 2 Rivington St., Lower East Side, NYC
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