Image: Tony Lewis, Plunder (detail), 2017
The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago will present "Tony Lewis: The Long and Short of It" from 12 December 2026 to 7 February 2027. It is the artist's first solo museum exhibition in Chicago, the city where he has lived and worked since 2009, and is curated by Karsten Lund.
The show introduces the ways Lewis has used shorthand notation as a catalyst for drawing. Gregg shorthand, a stenographic system he learned, transcribes speech into quick strokes based on sounds, and the Renaissance Society describes it as a link between words and gestures driven by kinetic energy. Spanning more than a decade, the exhibition moves from monochrome graphite drawings to denser compositions that bring in coloured pencil, and on to labour-intensive wall works on a far larger scale. New drawings appear alongside works made since 2013, revealing lasting through-lines as Lewis tries out new moves and methods. Across these series, his drawings are visual and tactile explorations of meaning, abstraction and form.
Born in Los Angeles in 1986, Lewis completed an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. From the start, his practice has examined the formal qualities of language, how writing can turn into a kind of abstraction, and how linguistic systems become bound up with the dynamics of power and race. He took part in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and has had solo exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art (2023), the Hirshhorn (2018), the Rose Art Museum (2017), Museo Marino Marini (2016) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (2015). He was the 2017–2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence at the Rose Art Museum.
The exhibition also anticipates a larger publication offering a more comprehensive look at Lewis's shorthand-related series, under the show's full title: "The Long and Short of It: An Introduction to Gregg Shorthand as the Amalgamator of Language Systems, Drawing, Abstraction, and Improvisational Gesture in the Work of Tony Lewis".
