Oli Watt

Oli Watt is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and curator who emphasizes pivotal humorous moments as seen in cartoons, novels, films, music, and personal history narratives. He has been producing and exhibiting prints, sculptures, installations, and neon works since 1999, all of which use what can only be described as “dad humor” to shift perceptions of pop culture. Watt’s recent fabrication of numerous duck decoys served as an exercise towards the understanding, utilizing, and undermining of repetition as a process and a tool.

Watt has exhibited his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; La Band Art Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Rocket Gallery, London. His work has been discussed in numerous publications including Art on Paper, Art US, the New Art Examiner and Village Voice. He is a recipient of the Maxine and Stuart Applebaum Award of Excellence and the Tweed Museum of Art Purchase Award. Watt runs the free range gallery and project space in the Albany Park neighborhood.