Arthur Chartow

RECOMMENDED

Lovers of Midwestern landscape will be delighted to find two mid-career masters currently on display at the Ann Nathan Gallery, both of them looking back beyond the twentieth-century, i.e., more concerned with sharp image than with selective focus or expressive brushwork. Arthur Chartow, from Michigan, wants us to share a bright beautiful day, even if we’re looking at a major industrial facility, so he makes a nice contrast with Charles Sheeler’s more severe homages to technology. His world is full of promise, and there’s no sadness in his work, except for some anxiety that such beautiful moments are too perfect to last for very long. While Ahzad Bogosian, from St. Louis, prefers a more cloudy, earthy, atmospheric, kind of day, like the moody Dutch used to have in the seventeeth-century. Bring along a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and join him beside the autumnal banks of the Kankakee, to meditate on that which has come and that which has gone. (Chris Miller)

Through April 16 at Ann Nathan Gallery, 212 W. Superior.

RECOMMENDED

In this high-energy retrospective of premier French rock photographer Richard Bellia’s twenty-five years of shooting idols from James Brown to Nirvana and beyond, one experiences the (dis)passion of a man who goes for the jugular—the money shot as some say—and captures his subjects in their most exaggerated and iconic moments of their shticks, or enjoying the rewards of rock ’n’ roll fantasy. Only a Frenchman would have dared to snap the shutter behind a groupie in a tight skirt kneeling as she gives a blow job to Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys, who winces with ecstatic pleasure as Joey Ramone stands behind him like a Praetorian guard, with a bottle of beer in his hand rather than a spear. Whether it is Radiohead being hipper than hip or Marilyn Manson mugging as a transgendered ironical monstrosity, Bellia gives us Baudrillard’s hyper-reality on steroids—the simulation is the standard. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 30 at TH!NKART, 1530 N. Paulina

Audry Cramblitt

RECOMMENDED

Whatever happened to Romanticism in Chicago? The moody autumn landscapes, the lonely beaches, the charming views of quaint rustic cabins? And sometimes, even the languid nude? (Although nudity was never very acceptable in Midwestern homes.) Romantic views of the world dominated the first eighty years of Chicago art history and then, poof! they were gone. Well, not really gone, but stripped of their medals, broken in rank, and shipped off to the shopping malls, and other the remote, middle-brow corners of the art world. One such corner being the Bella Vista Gallery, which is wandering around the North Side of Chicago and has temporarily settled at the corner of California and Augusta. But still, the Romantic spirit lives on! Romantic paintings are much smaller today than they were a hundred years ago. They’re more like sketches, furtive accounts of a passing world. But several of the artists in this exhibition are just as good, having mastered their craft over a lifetime of practice. Of special note in this exhibition of painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture are the finely-chiseled figure drawings of Lenin Del Sol, the silvery, monochrome landscapes of Kathleen Newman, and the dark but beautiful nudes of Mary Qian. (Chris Miller)

Through April 15 at Bella Vista Gallery, 1000 N. California

RECOMMENDED

How many people actually read the religious tracts given out on street corners, tracts which offer paths to salvation, tales of sin, illustrations of the everyman meeting a horned, pitchfork-wielding Satan? Though they have a strangely collectible quality, it’s entirely possible that they go right in the garbage, the message lost as the Bible becomes ever more irrelevant to the average guy walking down the street, soda in one hand, cell phone in the other.

Artists Lisa Anne Auerbach and Roman Jester are doing their part to change this. With The Tract House, they have written, designed and collected hundreds of new tracts, many contributed by friends and neighbors as well, but with more contemporary subject matter (read: relevance to lives being lived in 2009). There are rants and manifestos on education, drugs and economics; thoughts on ignorance, recycling, cleanliness; humorous meditations on the importance of eating Sunday dinner, flowers, bees and honey; exegeses on integrity, our attachment to our lawns, apathy and, yes, even divinity. The Tract House offers what the tracts you’re used to seeing do not: modern terminology for meaningful goals within our reach. You won’t find the threat of damnation and hellfire here, but encouragement to make art, to make conscious choices, to be a positive force for humanity. The many artists and writers involved tell us about what we know for certain, the facts of what we see and the disparity of what we do. As their powerful pivot point, many tracts offer a pregnant “And yet.”

There’s really no place in a traditional gallery setting for a show like this, though it almost fits in Three Walls’ project room. Where The Tract House belongs is on the street, stuffed into peoples’ hands, under windshield wipers, slipped under doors. Distributed. Read. Fortunately, anyone can print the tracts for free at www.thetracthouse.com (Damien James)

Through March 26 at Three Walls, 119 N. Peoria

Kerry James Marshall, untitled, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

By Jason Foumberg

This week I found a very similar image in two different exhibitions. The perspective is from the beach, looking seaward. There, against a cloudy horizon, a large wave breaks dramatically causing a frothy white cloud to rise up. In one image, by Kerry James Marshall, the wave splashes against a bracing figure who stands thigh-deep in the water; in the other image, a promo card for the exhibition “Women Get Fucked,” the wave crashes against a large rock. This image of unbridled nature could variously serve as an inspirational poster or as a romance novel cover, but here they’re positioned to speak about race in one exhibition and gender in another.

Just when you think you’ve shelved the history book on identity politics, chalked it up as a style that climaxed in the 1990s, and after Kara Walker has exorcised her demons, and black art is now post-black, they return and ask to be “reconsidered”—again. Just last April the Renaissance Society rolled out “Black Is, Black Ain’t,” a large group show that explored representations of African American race. One of its strengths was the inclusion of non-black artists, providing a thesis that ‘blackness’ is available to anyone willing to grapple with its history. Today, we have a new exhibition that opens much of the same dialogue. “Across the Divide: Reconsidering the Other” is on view at the Illinois State Museum. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Nourse’s show at Salvage One is a match made in heaven: the store’s alluring warehouse space, filled with architectural and furniture treasures, is a gold mine both for would-be decorators and the artists who will get to display their art amongst the ever-changing mash-up collection of designs (the store expresses a hope that Nourse’s show will be the first of many). This is to say that Nourse’s work benefits from Salvage One’s aura of authenticity, eclecticism and DIY ethic; half the fun of the show is discovering one of Nourse’s pieces almost hidden amongst antique chandeliers and gritty filing cabinets. Somewhere else, his pieces would be digested much more quickly, and with reason; unfortunately, the artists’ project—juxtaposing what he calls the old and the new in a world transforming from analog into digital—is not actually apparent in his pieces. Nourse transfers digital images using gel to a number of different surfaces, mostly glass, with the intention to create a kind of visual commentary about changes in mediation, but because the color palette is in single tones of sepia and purple, and the images themselves seem antique or merely old-fashioned in theme (men on bicycles, a group of orphans in kerchiefs), the final prints simply call to mind old glass photographic plates, with a purposely vintage finish resulting from the smears of gel. Because the images themselves are difficult to discern as digital, Nourse’s commentary and mission get lost in the context; the pieces fit a little too well in a storage area for retro and antiquated decorations. (Monica Westin)

Mike Nourse shows at Salvage One, 1840 W. Hubbard, though May 4.

Rose Piper, Slow Down Freight Train, 1946–47, oil on canvas. Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

RECOMMENDED

Between 1929 and 1948, Chicago’s Julius Rosenwald Fund, among its many other contributions to African-American life, offered fellowships to twenty-two African Americans in the visual arts, almost all of them represented by their paintings, prints, sculpture and photographs on display in the Spertus Museum. It really was an amazing project—selecting both established and emerging talent based on both past achievement and socially relevant projects like the one proposed by Rose Piper: “I want to do a series of paintings depicting the folk Negro as he comments on himself in his blues.” Some projects involve living with a family on a North Carolina farm or traveling to Haiti or the Sea Islands. And, happily, some of them produced some of the most moving American art of its time, like the “Legend of John Brown” series by Jacob Lawrence and the “Negro Woman” series by Elizabeth Catlett. Eventually, grants were given to thirteen white southerners who worked on racial themes, and in its final year, with a new jury that included Katherine Kuh (the maven of modern art in Chicago), even an abstract artist, Ronald Joseph, was chosen just to express himself. Overall, the quality is very high, even if the figurative styles being used would soon be marginalized by the onslaught of Abstract Expressionism. (Chris Miller)

Through August 16 at the Spertus Museum, 610 S. Michigan.

Hector Duarte, mural in Naperville, 1998

RECOMMENDED

Three special exhibitions are now running at the National Museum of Mexican Art (in addition to the regular collection). Many historic and contemporary artists are included, but it is especially interesting to find a lineage of three painters whose careers span the history of modern Mexican art. The Bank of America Collection of paintings, photography, and prints includes a great gouache painting, “The Prisoner,” by Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946), who is sometimes called the father of modern Mexican painting. That show also includes several lively lithographs by his famous student, the great muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Across the hall, we find Hector Durarte (b. 1952), a Siqueiros student who is working right here in Chicago. Indeed, Duarte has been painting within the museum itself, designing a 150-foot mural that wraps around all four walls of a gallery. It’s all a bit breath-taking—especially the Duarte mural that is as enjoyably decorative as a fine woven fabric, but does not fail to deliver an overwhelming emotional punch. Mexican art is so much about the immediacy of heartfelt love that it’s hard to imagine an art form more different from the irony, disgust, anger, alienation or cool aestheticism of the Anglo art worlds. (Chris Miller)

Through August 30 at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St.

RECOMMENDED

Titled “Pavilion 7,” Sebastian Craig’s instantly intriguing architectural installation confronts viewers with what looks like a dance-floor light show or a lair of crisscrossed light beams. As a techno-ish soundtrack composed and performed by the artist blasts from a large sound system at the back of the room, hot-pink rays appear to bounce off the walls, inviting viewers to dance through them or play secret agent. Closer inspection shows the lines to be a single strand of cord stretched tautly across two facing walls and secured at different heights and angles so as to spell the word DERMA. DERMA is also the title of a video at the back of the room that can be reached only by walking through the installation. Stepping over and under lines of cord, visitors unwittingly “dance” to Craig’s beat. The video—a series of bucolic images displayed on a tiny Sony Walkman screen—is sort of like Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, driving us forward through a tangled web for the sole purpose of getting to the big reveal. One wonders if the video’s banality is intentional, meant to revert our attention back to the physical act of getting there or to point out that the real significance of a space lies in the idiosyncratic associations it has for individual users. Regardless, Craig’s pavilion neatly illustrates the ways in which architecture lies close to the skin, sculpting the body’s movements and living on in cellular memory long after we’ve exited the building. (Claudine Isé)

Through March 15 at Old Gold, 2022 N. Humboldt Blvd., basement entrance

RECOMMENDED

In a most grisly and brightly colored photo-documentary about how the United States has been turned into a playground for anti-terrorist simulations, indoctrinations, seductions, drills and spectacles, Nina Berman mounts the most impressive and power-packed political art of the season. Beginning with the fruitful conceit that our country became a “homeland” (a militarized society) after 9/11/2001, Berman traveled the land shooting all the security exercises she could find with a social photographer’s eye and a deadly compositional intelligence. What comes out most in Berman’s incisive series—repeated over and over again—is how Americans find it so easy to retain their leisure culture and attendant attitudes as they participate in and observe practical and symbolic rituals of possible disasters; we see a “weapons display” by the Marines in which kids—some in face paint—pass around guns with childish delight: boys with their toys. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 22 at Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan.