By Jason Foumberg

You’re not going to find an abstract painter in the bunch of this year’s breakout artists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s getting difficult to define the value of traditional, solo practices in the age of the networked artist. Today’s image makers are less studio artists than opportunists in the expanded field, less gatekeepers of taste than trailblazers in the public sphere—“social entrepreneurs,” as Mike Bancroft calls it. The timing is just right. As this feature is printed, Chicago’s renowned but diminished commercial art fair has opened its doors to include the city’s beloved alternative, artist run and non-profit spaces. The market’s embers are cooling off, and for many that smells like opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

Compiled by Jason Foumberg

I asked art fair participants and insiders to make predictions for this year’s fair. At turns grim and hopeful, the responses present a slice of Chicago’s varied interests.

Brian Sholis, Art Critic: I suspect this year’s fair will be a cake of apprehension and worry frosted with taut smiles and outward expressions of hope.

Britton Bertran, Curator and Dealer: Commodity expectations are at their lowest and artists will do whatever they can to be heard in the loudest possible way. But what might be more interesting is when galleries and other enablers (non-artists) start to rear their own heads in protest and anger without repercussions from their own enablers (those that run these fairs). But what are they protesting against?

Carl Baratta, Artist: Everything will be at least competent except the free drinks. They will be perfect. Read the rest of this entry »

Our Literal Speed [OLS] is a self-reflexive, art historical all-star, conceptual art “media pop opera” taking place in Chicago over the May Day weekend. Its first iteration occurred last winter at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany, and brought together an A-list roster of jet-set historians, artists, critics and curators for a program that attempted to materialize the structures of consumption and circulation that make up the contemporary art world—with the idea that these structures have become the material of contemporary art itself. Through performances, panel discussions and art happenings, the OLS events in Chicago represent a collaborative effort to literalize the theoretical and pedagogical technologies that make up the experience of contemporary art, particularly as that experience is mediated by various institutions such as the museum and art historical discourse. Read the rest of this entry »

HuskMitNavn, untitled (2009)

Imperfect Articles was launched five years ago when artists Mike Andrews and Noah Singer took their love of t-shirts (and, in Singer’s case, a growing obsession with the art of custom hand-dying) and turned it into a collective enterprise whose goal is to promote the work of artists they love, and to offer that work to people at a reasonable price and in an eminently wearable form. Their first collection, which included shirts designed by Chicago-area artists like Adam Scott, Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, Josh Mannis and others, sold like proverbial hotcakes when Singer and Andrews brought them to the first Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago. “We were kind of shocked,” Singer recalls. “After that we got invited to the Volta show at Basel. Once we went to Basel we did Nada in Miami, and it took off from there. Last year we did six art fairs, which was crazy. And, um, we’re not going to be doing that again this year,” Singer laughs. Read the rest of this entry »

Version>09, or simply Version, could be aptly described by the instructions for artist Ashley Metcalf’s installation at NFO XPO: “Please look through the wormhole to our parallel universe.” And Version will take you down the worm’s hole, to a sprawling alternate art world of friendly artists, affordable art and beer. Parts of the Version festival are timed to precede Art Chicago, with a small overlap, and upcoming events are posted on their website.

Taking a cue from Chicago’s 2016 bid for the Olympics, Version partnered with several art groups to organize events examining Chicago’s historical international event, the 1893 Columbian Exposition. On April 25 there was a walking tour titled “A Working Man’s Guide to the Columbian Exposition,” which allowed attendees to learn about the laborers of the Exposition. The tour ended next to the Experimental Station, which is hosting King Ludd’s Analog Arcade through the first weekend in May. Physically close to the Midway Plaissance, the site of the 1893 carnival games and rides, King Ludd’s also consists of carnival-style games, made by artists. Following their Luddite title, the games are low-tech and emphatically use recycled materials in their construction. The most ambitious of these was a bike-powered air-hockey table, the actual functioning of which was uncertain at the time of my visit, though that suited the Experimental Station perfectly.
Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Harking back to the voguish spiritualism of a century ago and deploying its rich photographic techniques—the light blue cyanotype, the faded pink kallitype, the attenuated etched tintype and the luminous dreamy gum-platinum print—John Metoyer serves up seductive surreal images with more than a dash of the gothic and some side orders of grim wit. Thoroughly postmodern, Metoyer simultaneously pays homage to the old-school experimentalists and subverts them; in “Phantom Limb,” we are treated to the vision of a prosthetic leg levitating above a draped table, as though it had been summoned at a séance, perhaps to the horror of a bereaved lover seeking rapport with a soul who had passed to the far side. Seeking to vindicate the “alternative process photography” of a long-lost era by celebrating its imagination, craft, beauty and “poetry;” to disturb our complacency in everyday life and to have some fun in and with the process, Metoyer is sublimely successful on all counts. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 5 at Harold Washington College, 30 E. Lake, Room 1105.

RECOMMENDED

Imagine you are being haunted in your dreams. The ghost is probably one of your relatives—specifically, one of your older, male, Jewish relatives–and he is trying to tell you something you don’t entirely understand. Thus begins the meandering story of Deb Sokolow’s new work, “The ways in which things operate,” the first of a series of Ground Level Projects at the Spertus Museum. Sokolow, whose family keeps their archives at the Spertus’ Asher Library, combines her personal history with Chicago’s Jewish history though a hand-written, hand-drawn storyboard bursting with tangents, half-truths and occasional drawings of Robert De Niro. Spanning the walls of the Spertus’ street-level vestibule, the piece incorporates the museum in both the telling of the story and how the reader experiences it, guiding them by way of thinly inked arrows through the museum’s permanent collections, their hallways, and even down the elevators as it spins a half-true, half-farcical tale of family, life and loss in the Windy City. Told in second person, this garrulous mural propels itself forward through the simple supposition that there is something from the past will change your life today. Sokolow’s ability to ensnare readers in her narrative is remarkable, drawing them in by the traced sketches and penciled commentary. The foundation of our past is an intoxicating subject for both Jews and Gentiles, and Sokolow successfully carries her audience through to the end of her story–an end that, at the time of this writing, has not yet been revealed. (Jaime Calder)

Through July 19 at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, 610 S. Michigan.

Marc Dennis’ photorealistic paintings seem not so much to appropriate or impersonate the images that litter smut magazines as to imitate them. Women’s naked bodies, in poses straight out of Hustler, are displayed against backgrounds that are at first somewhat jarring; one woman shoves her breasts out of her tiny tank top in front of a Sistine Chapel mural, while another is featured from behind on her knees against a nighttime cityscape, and one stands next to a dog in a sort of twisted family portrait. The majority of the paintings, however, simply feature naked women spread on beds in hotel rooms, with tacky bedspreads and trashy poses so that Dennis might as well have been staging a pornographic photo shoot while he composed them. There’s some sense that Dennis is trying to provoke an affective response, however visceral, as testament to what the artist statement calls the power the women in the images know their bodies have. However, as graphic as the paintings are, they ultimately don’t shock or even provoke simply because they don’t make use of the images in any new aesthetic or rhetorical way, and there’s no obvious evidence that the artist is doing much more than profiteering from the old discourse surrounding female nudes and the relationship between pornography and art. (Monica Westin)

Through May 30 at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 N. Wells.

RECOMMENDED

You can’t swing a dead cat in Chicago without hitting one of Richard Hunt’s peaceable public sculptures. The stacked totems of winged industrial blocks and holes sit outside hospitals, schools, libraries, churches and government buildings, but Hunt doesn’t exile his monoliths to the elements. Some of his pieces live inside buildings, like the appropriately titled “Oasis” inside the Kafka-esque Stroger Hospital of Cook County, and, currently, a collection of his less sizable work is under the roof of the David Weinberg Gallery.

Hunt’s public work has become shinier, larger and more ambiguous since the beginning of his career in the 1950s, and he’s had many opportunities to evolve: he has created and displayed more public sculptures than any artist. His smaller-scale work, like the larger, has become less and less anthropomorphic. Hunt has traded eyes, mouths and limbs for angular swoops, balanced curves and holes planted in blocks. Not to say that the viewer can’t find, say, a horsey or serpentine quality in his work; his sculptures imply an organic, flowing, upward movement. Even the lower-lying floor sculptures, like “Low-Flight,” a buffed, stainless-steel space-ship-snake-nest sprays its chunky twirls upward.
Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It has been twenty-five years since Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s book “Subway Art” was first published. Widely regarded as the “graffiti bible,” “Subway Art” documented graffiti art during the 1980s in New York City, primarily in the borough of the Bronx. For its twenty-fifth anniversary, the book is being re-released this year in a special edition that includes more content and larger images. This coincides with the publishing of Cooper’s current book, “Going Postal,” which documents contemporary art disseminated through cities on postal stickers stuck to common urban surfaces. Cooper believes these stickers are an example of how graffiti has “progressed and endured.” “Going Postal” also includes the work of several Chicago-based artists. To celebrate, the Chicago clothing and design company Novem, in conjunction with Upset Magazine, is hosting a book signing by Cooper and a sticker sale. All stickers will be selling for $5 and Cooper will also be selling photographs of her work.

In contemporary art, graffiti still continues to pose a great deal of questions in terms of distinguishing art versus vandalism. Twenty-five years ago Cooper and Chalfant were unable to find a publisher for the book in the United States, but now graffiti is thoroughly assimilated in both fine art and advertising. Cooper and Chalfant’s book helped push the style into the mainstream by publishing a firestorm of written, photographic and video documentation of illegal and ephemeral street art. Martha Cooper is a pioneer and a legend in her field, and her presence in Chicago is not something to be missed. (Sara McCool)

Book launch and signing and sticker sale, May 1, 5pm-10pm, at Novem Life, 1114 N. Ashland