Nick Wylie

Nick Wylie is an artist, organizer, and educator based in Chicago.

Wylie’s practice, which incorporates technology, performance, drawing, and queer time travel, has haunted galleries in Chicago and beyond for the past twenty years. His work recently focused on Elmer Ellsworth, dandy abolitionist and purported lover of Lincoln, who was first to die in the Civil War after taking down a giant Confederate flag. More recently, he’s been a member of Metabolic Rift, a group organized by Watershed Art and Ecology, and has been focusing on Lynn Margulis, Gaia Theory, queer mystery cults, parthenogenetic mother goddesses, and the space rocks they’ve lived in. To this end, he’s been running a secret monastic residency at an undisclosed location for the past few years.

Wylie has been making and supporting artist-run organizations for over 20 years. Since 2018, he’s been Director of Public Media Institute, an arts, activism, and independent media nonprofit that operates platforms like Lumpen Radio, Co-Prosperity gallery, The Buddy Shop, and MdW, a coalition of artist-run organizations in the Midwest. Before that, he served as Associate Director of Southern Exposure, a long-running artist organization in San Francisco. He was a founding Co-Director of ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions), an artist residency in rural Wisconsin, and in 2005, co-founded Harold Arts, a residency outside of Athens, Ohio. He has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of St Francis. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, did post-baccalaureate work in Art History at Northwestern University, and went to the University of Illinois at Chicago for his MFA.