226 is a site-specific installation and conceptual fan zine by Maxwell Volkman. The project contains a body of selected collage works documented and presented through video and print media. 

The title refers to Room 226 at the Marco Polo Motel, located in Seattle, WA. 226 is known to have been a favorite hideout of musician Kurt Cobain, where he stayed just days before his death in April 1994. 226 has since become a tourist attraction for Nirvana fanatics. A quick YouTube search will reveal many vlog-style videos posted by these super-fans documenting their experience staying the night in 226. 

On February 21st, a day after Cobain’s birthday and weeks before Volkman’s twenty-eighth, the artist traveled from Chicago to Seattle with a Sony Handycam DCR-SX41 and six collages in his carry-on. Volkman rented Room 226 for one night, mounting the collages on the wall and documenting the space using the Handycam. The film component consists solely of footage shot by Volkman in 226 or just outside the room’s door. The video and audio were edited using iMovie; no audio was added.

The film, screening twice on September 12th, 2025, captures the haunting impact of mental illness, addiction, loss, isolation, and the coping mechanisms specific to America’s struggling and vulnerable middle classes.

Volkman's publication 226 is made up of screenshots from the Handycam footage, photographs of Room 226 taken with a Nikon D5600 and an iPhone 16, images sourced from Kurt Cobain’s personal photography and journals, and images from Volkman’s personal archive.

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“I am at this instant in a white void awaiting the next instant. Measuring time is just a working hypothesis. But whatever exists is perishable and this forces us to measure immutable and permanent time. It never began and never will end.” (Clarice Lispector, Agua Viva)

Grunts Rare Books is pleased to present Sympathy Ribbon, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Margaret Crowley and Madeline Gallucci. The exhibition considers the transitory and its relationship to what is fixed or permanent, bringing together two practices attentive to the fragile ways time, sentimentality, and recognition are held in form.

In her paintings, Gallucci performs an accumulation of dust and weather, often treating the surface as if standing behind it, like fingers on fogged glass. These reflective grounds register time and perception, holding the residue of what pollutes or passes across them. Onto this atmosphere Gallucci affixes trompe l’oeil strips of ‘tape,’ a framing device immediately referring to the everyday, to labor, or to the provisional act of masking in utility painting. Stripped and twisted across Gallucci’s surfaces, the frame’s dual nature comes forward: tape is both precious as a material and utterly ubiquitous as a symbol, discernible here by its color. In some works the tape begins to spell, or cast spells, acting as a device for language and abstraction. For example, a shadow appears above the text in SPAT (2025) as if a body looms or has just passed by it. The distinct impression of another recalls the first double, the self split into a shadow on the ground or in a watery mirrored reflection. 

These echoes of presence, temporary and insistent, find a counterpart in Crowley’s sculptures where memory and loss, or a blend of them called devotion, are formalized in fixed or enduring objects. Occupying the center of the floor is 50 years of service (2022), an enlarged replica of a watch given to her grandfather by the International Union of Operating Engineers. The gift, meant to honor a lifetime of labor, is commemorative yet alarmingly slight, collapsing decades into a single object designed to keep time. What is meant to stand for permanence instead exposes its own instability and slips under the weight of what it is tasked to hold. Crowley’s scale shift, mâchéd in postmortem paperwork, marks and exaggerates the imbalance while also operating as an act of loving, allowing Crowley to commemorate better. Similarly, Husband (2025)  is a token of loss; such sympathy ribbons typically adorn funeral arrangements so guests can easily identify the sender of each bouquet. Considered here as a found spool, the ribbon strings mourning into ritual and extends the given language beyond its set occasion. 

Both practices beg how remembrance might be translated into form, and how fragile these forms may be. Gallucci and Crowley create works that measure: tokens of debris, labor, love, or grief. In their work, time and attachment play against the edge of memorial. The two suggest that the things we make to measure, to honor, or to keep ultimately disclose the impossibility of holding experience, or a synthesis of time, intact.

Grunt's Radio is a sound series within Grunts Rare Books, presenting the fixed media sound work of Chicago-based musicians and sound artists during gallery hours (Saturdays 1-4pm, resuming Sundays in September). The series, played through a radio in the bookshop, offers artists an opportunity to show new, unreleased, or longform sound works.

Grunt's Radio is curated by Lia Kohl, and begins with a series of works by Kohl. Other artists will begin rotating in the coming weeks and months.

Lia Kohl (b. New York, NY) is a composer and sound artist based in Chicago. Trained as a cellist, she also incorporates synthesizers, field recordings, toy instruments, and radios into her work. Kohl gravitates towards sound practices which reveal and speak to their time and place: field recording, improvisation, radio broadcast and transmission. She performs as a soloist, a collaborator and composes works for ensembles.

Recent venues for Kohl's work include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Union Station Chicago, Eckhart Park Pool, and Big Ears Festival. She has created sound installations for Experimental Sound Studios' Audible Gallery and Roman Susan Art Foundation. She has been a resident artist at ACRE, Vashon Artist Residency, High Concept Labs, dfbrl8r Performance Art Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Stanford University, and Mills College and a Transmission Art Fellow at Wave Farm. An active recording artist, Kohl has arranged strings and recorded with Makaya McCraven, Circuit des Yeux, claire rousay, and Steve Hauschildt, among others.

Kohl has been featured in Pitchfork, The Quietus, The Chicago Tribune, The Wire Magazine, and Downbeat Magazine, and on NPR, NTS Radio, Kunstradio, BBC Radio 6 Music, Dublab, and WFMU. Recent releases include The Ceiling Reposes on American Dreams Records and Normal Sounds, on Moon Glyph; recent duo releases include with Whitney Johnson on Drag City and Zander Raymond on unjenesaisquoi. She tours nationally and internationally.