Max Guy
Lecturer
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Bio
Max Guy (he/him) lives in Chicago. Guy works with paper, video, performance, assemblage, and installation. He uses fast, ergonomic ways to make poetry of the world, filtering it through personal effects. Guy received his BFA in 2011 from Maryland Institute College of Art and his MFA in 2016 from Northwestern University.
Awards: 2024, Illinois Arts Council Agency Fellowship, New Forms; 2017–18, Fellow, Field Trip / Field Notes / Field Guide, University of Chicago Arts, Science and Culture Initiative; 2012, Think Big Grant, Station North Arts & Entertainment, Baltimore.
Publications: Guy, Max, and Harrison, Michael (eds.), But tell me, is it a civilized country? The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2024; Schwartz, Ben (ed.), Unlicensed: Bootlegging as Creative Practice, Valiz/Source Type, 2024; Guy, Max, and Ruslana Lichtzier, "Frasier’s Joke and the Devil’s Voice," Portable Gray, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2022; Cristello, Stephanie, and Junge-Stevnsborg, Kirse (eds.), Sustainable Societies for the Future, Motto Books, 2021.
Exhibitions: 2024: Mythic Space Time Group, with Irena Haiduk, Audain Gallery, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, CA; Running from one time, Good Weather, Chicago, IL; Wheel of Time, with Elly Reitman, Romance, Pittsburgh, PA; Max Guy, And Now, Dallas, TX. 2022: But tell me, is it a civilized country? The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago.
Residencies: Ox-Bow, Saugatuck, MI; Surf Point, York, ME; 2017–18: Jackman Goldwasser Artist in Residence at the Hyde Park Art Center.
Personal Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist who makes and primarily works with video, installations, cutouts, collages, photography, and sculpture. I seek fast and ergonomic making, incorporating objects into harmonious and novel arrangements. Paper is my favorite material, so I treat everything else like it. I structure my very experimental (sometimes compulsive) art practice by organizing my work into distinct projects. My breadth of work is eclectic—each piece approaches a topic tangentially or marginally. It led to me grouping my results into specific installations to create exhibitions that read like essays and fictional narratives.
I cut masks from paper and metal or carve them from wood to advance my work toward narrative art. Recently, I've been interested in worldbuilding, the characters and narratives emerging from different worlds, and what it means to be a "product" of one's environment. In my first solo museum exhibition in December 2022, I presented a portrait of Chicago and its intertwined history with the Wizard of Oz franchise, first written in the city in 1900. The exhibition explored the influence of fantasy in city planning and racial equity and the relationship between connoisseurship and fandom. I exhibited two sculptures, two videos, a flag, an artist's book, and a series of photographs of Oz Park—a park in Chicago home to four monuments of the fantastical characters in the franchise. My sculpture, "The Emerald City, the Big Head Scientist," joins several silhouettes cut out of acrylic into a large grid of city skylines, resembling a fantastical and alien city.
Since then, I've wanted to design singular works to represent aspects of whole cities and the dynamics of people that inhabit them. My current work is a two-part photo essay documenting a personal history of downtown New York, where I grew up from 1989-2007. In this first chapter (still in progress), I document my first 12 years—before the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001—and the arts, culture, and technological optimism characteristic of the 1990s. Growing up within a mile of the “Twin Towers,” my life and community were greatly influenced by the generation of avant-garde artists of the 1970s who settled in Tribeca, Civic Center, and Battery Park City and had kids. To that end, I’ve been thinking about a community (and world) built by artists and lost to commercialization, war, and historical currents. My most current research collects souvenirs of the time: personal ephemera, literary and photograph representations of the neighborhoods and the people in them, cultural criticism, interviews, profiles, and other news media, video games, and books.
In spring 2024, I led a graduate seminar at the University of Illinois Chicago called Nostalgia Today, inviting students to consider nostalgic impulses in contemporary art. The course examined the term’s roots in clinical psychology and Homer’s Odyssey as the foundation of nostalgia as an aesthetic tendency. The class considers nostalgia, contemporary examples, and critical texts in their life and work contexts.
Research areas: Tourism, globalism, mnemonics, worldmaking, second-language acquisition, sociocultural anthropology, theater studies
