Running a commercial art gallery these days is no easy feat, perhaps especially in Chicago. Recent years have seen the closure of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Galerie F, and Shane Campbell Gallery, among others. Just this month, Rhona Hoffman announced she’ll be closing her gallery’s doors next year, after nearly 50 years in the business. So it is quite the accomplishment that Western Exhibitions, a commercial gallery that started out as a nomadic curatorial endeavor, is celebrating its 20th anniversary as a physical space with “20 Years of Western Exhibitions.” The show is a journey through the gallery’s history, featuring archival materials—including artists’ work hung salon-style in the office space and the owner’s to-do journals.

Western Exhibitions’s longevity is even more impressive when you consider that gallery founder Scott Speh [MFA ’97] launched with no formal training in curation, business, or arts administration. “When I figured I wanted to run a gallery, I didn’t have a necessarily concrete vision,” Speh says. What he had was an eye for what he liked—about an artist’s work or an exhibition’s design.

Stan Shellabarger and Dutes Miller are two of the artists that Speh has worked with the longest; both had work in Western Exhibition’s first show in a proper gallery, “This Thing We Do,” in 2004. The artists—who make work together as Miller & Shellabarger while also maintaining their own practices—agree that Speh has always been intentional with Western Exhibitions, from the artists he works with to the direction he wants the gallery to go.

“He’s always supported artists who have their distinct point of view, he’s always supported queer artists, he’s always supported women artists—and he wants to make careers for them. And I think that’s still what he wants to do. I see him doing it all the time. Growing the business and the look and the reputation of the gallery over the years has given him a better platform for doing what he wants to do,” Miller says.

Speh dipped his toe into curation in the late 90s after graduating from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with his MFA. He stayed in Madison for a few extra years, writing art criticism, curating, and continuing his art practice, which he says was mainly printmaking and painting. He got a job recruiting undergraduates for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which took him to NYC. While living there on a meager salary was tough, he spent his days off visiting galleries.

“I would go to Chelsea, and I’d start at White Columns and just work my way up to, like, 28th Street, where the last gallery was. It’d be like five, six straight hours of art looking,” he says. He was also curating some shows and writing criticism with the artist-run space 16 Beaver. “So it was like translating what I was seeing on these marathon days,” he says. “I didn’t think about it, but I was really training my eye of what I like to see in a show, and how are shows put together.”