Throughout our history, it has remained crucial that we pursue the vision of a contemporary art field that is inclusive, diverse, and dynamic. Kavi, our founder, was born in Chicago to parents who immigrated from New Delhi, India. Before coming to America, the Gupta family was deeply involved in supporting the arts, and they brought that passion with them to the United States. Kavi’s father, an architect and engineer who worked on many significant buildings in the Chicago area, raised Kavi in an environment of creativity and taught him to think big. Throughout his undergraduate and graduate studies, Kavi immersed himself in the complementary worlds of art and business. His ambitions led him to learn everything he could about art history, and then to dedicate himself to making a life in the art world.
In the late 1990s, Kavi was one of the first to see opportunity in Chicago’s West Loop Area. He recalls strolling through the area with beloved Chicago philanthropist and art collector Lew Manilow shortly after returning from a trip to New York. Admiring the rugged beauty of the neighborhood’s numerous warehouses and industrial buildings, Kavi looked at Lew and said, “Do you know what this reminds me of?” Lew, thinking the same thing, said, “Chelsea.”
All the major Chicago galleries were in River North at the time, but Kavi felt the energy of the West Loop and knew that was where he wanted to be. He built out his first art space there by hand. Today, he owns two buildings in the neighborhood, which together present more than a dozen large-scale exhibitions a year, in addition to hosting the gallery’s professional offices, its publishing operation, Kavi Gupta Editions, and a dedicated space for research and archives. The nearby Pilsen neighborhood is home to Kavi Gupta’s main warehouse and production facility, while the gallery also recently established an exhibition space and warehouse facility in New Buffalo, Michigan.
Kavi comes from a long line of art lovers who were also pioneers in the International, Asian Diaspora and Chicago art world.
Setting Kavi Gupta’s programming apart is our key interest in discovering underrepresented and underappreciated artists who are deserving of global attention. Sometimes an artist is underexposed within the art world because their work is noncommercial, conceptual, or based on social practice concepts. Other times it is because they originate from a location too far from a major art center. Still other times, an artist is overlooked because of biases related to gender, race, or another aspect of personal identity. Kavi Gupta is intrinsically dedicated to finding such artists, facilitating their work, and promoting their efforts to the international art world.
The gallery has played an integral role in raising the profiles of emerging artists who have grown into crucial influencers within the contemporary art field. We have also shed light on underappreciated art movements that were overlooked because they occurred outside of the traditional narratives of art history, such as AFRICOBRA and the Chicago Imagists. As representatives of founding members of AFRICOBRA and the exclusive representative of the estate of Chicago Imagist leader Roger Brown, we are in a unique position to extrapolate these important movements and bring them much-deserved international attention.
In terms of artistic production, Kavi Gupta encourages the artists we represent to think big. We have proudly helped our artists realize visionary projects at many of the world’s leading contemporary art exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale, documenta Kassel, Germany, and Athens, and Prospect New Orleans. We prioritize investing investment resources to enable our artists to realize works through our large-scale production facility that might otherwise be considered too ambitious to be made. Kavi Gupta has also established itself as one of the foremost partners in the realization of meaningful, high-impact, contemporary public artworks.
