Silk screen of the Butcher Shop building by Dan MacAdam

The Butcher Shop

By the beginning of the decade, the Lake Street art gallery/work space/crash pad the Butcher Shop was probably best known for its insanely, unsafely crowded Christmas balls, where wasted, uninvited guests blithely pissed in corners, in stairwells, and off the roof for want of sufficient toilets. Such youthful follies are now a thing of the past, but the Butcher Shop, in business since the mid-90s, remains a treasure. On the fourth floor, the print shop Crosshair soldiers on under Dan MacAdam, whose ravishing architectural designs grace some of the city’s best silk-screen posters. On the third, the gallery has undergone various curatorial changes—Lasso Gallery opened its first exhibit in the space this month—but longtime impresario Tom Colley is always somewhere in the background and the shows invariably kick ass—the swampy, drooling multimedia exhibit “Klustercrust” recently put together by local artist Paul Nudd being a case in point.

The venue’s also been associated with a number of bands, including MacAdam’s blasphemously tight metal outfit Arriver, whose Vanlandingham and Zone was one of the best albums nobody heard last year. But rock stars or not, these folks are in it for the long haul. a 1319 W. Lake, 773-517-9520, lassogallery.net. —Noah Berlatsky

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