In the late 1980s and early nineties, Dann Nardi enjoyed a burgeoning art career in Chicago. His cast-concrete and shaped-wood sculptures were exhibited alongside Anne Wilson’s at the Cultural Center, in group shows at Paul Klein’s gallery, and in several solo shows at Roy Boyd Gallery. Following an economic recession in the eighties, the difficulties of making a living as a working artist disenchanted Nardi, and he dropped out of the game. “I stepped out of being visible,” he says, but continued making sculptures in his studio in Normal, Illinois, a rural college town. He sought, and won, several public-sculpture commissions outdoors, away from white-cube galleries (they are “too quiet,” he says).

Now, fifteen years later, Nardi has reemerged in Chicago with a survey of works from 1988-2010 installed in the lobbies of the Willis Tower. The seventeen sculptures on view draw from, simplify and distort forms found in nature—trees, spirals, the body—similar to the way that Martin Puryear warps nature into something graceful and strange. Most of Nardi’s works are scaled to the body, likely because he works alone in his studio, without the help of assistants or fabricators. They are as big as he can stack and lift them, and this guides a relational viewing encounter. The life-sized sculptures draw people toward them, and the contours invite a tangible, feelingful experience. “Nearly all my work is meant to be touched,” says Nardi, pointing to the fingerprint-stained copper leaf lined inside “Cusp,” a loop of wood that illusionistically glows from within. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In the quintessential summer show, the Center offers more than 150 photographs celebrating Chicago’s neighborhood vegetable and flower gardens, and the people who cultivate them with devotion. Shot by the gardeners themselves, the images are divided between studies of the flourishing plots and their produce, and environmental portraits of their proud temporary possessors who hail from all of the city’s ethnic groups. By eliminating any vestiges of concrete and steel in their framing, the anonymous photographers convey the impression that our sweet home is a rural paradise, and an exceedingly dense one at that. Some of the shooters have sharp eyes as well as green thumbs; a thick bunch of gnarled irregular carrots colored purple, red, and every shade of orange overflows and cascades with vitality, showing us the wild profusion of shapes and sizes that Mother Nature provides when she has not been made ready for the supermarket by agro-engineering. In another section of this lavish exhibit, wall plaques offer informative text and illustration that tells us everything we never even knew we might want to know about the manifold forms of urban gardening. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 19 at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 East Randolph

RECOMMENDED

If you have ever wondered what the world is like in one of the myriad roof gardens that pepper Chicago, look no further than Brad Temkin’s color photos of the beckoning spots of carefully cultivated nature that we usually glimpse from the streets. A veteran beauty photographer, Temkin takes full advantage of the contrast between the concrete and glass and the patches of greenery by encasing the gardens in walls of skyscrapers. Shooting in all four seasons, Temkin produces his most emotive images in the dead of winter, when the plants and shrubs have been denuded of flowers and foliage, and all that is left are brown stems and stalks, clumped and tangled on a blanket of snow, and returned to an unkempt wildness that challenges the geometrical order around them and the gardens themselves when they are in full bloom. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 6 at the City Gallery, 806 North Michigan.

Francis Chapin

RECOMMENDED

The primary function of art in Chicago before mid-century was to get the hell out of the big, grimy, corrupt city and retreat, like Thoreau, to the quiet pleasures of nature. So, Chicago art was mostly about landscape painting, and Chicago artists took their viewers on trips to the Ozarks, Brown County and other locales. One such sylvan location was Saugatuck, Michigan, where, in 1910, two Chicago artists established a summer residency that would become the Ox-Bow school of art, and now Corbett vs. Dempsey celebrates the school’s 100th anniversary with an exhibition of distinguished former residents.

Many styles of art have come and gone in the past hundred years, but the most charming, at least in this exhibition, is the Regionalism of the 1940s that promoted the quaint notion that there was something about our lives and land that deserved to be celebrated. What could be more worth celebrating than an artist’s colony in a scenic area? Even Miyoko Ito (1918-1983) and Margo Hoff (1910-2008), who would later be distinguished for their abstract painting, left charming views of “My Room in Ox-Bow” (1949) and “Summer Studio” (1945). The guys seem to have been more interested in the town. Edgar Rupprecht (1889-1954), who had studied with Hans Hofmann, the prophet of abstract expressionism, has a view of Saugatuck (1940s), and the W.P.A. artist Max Kahn (1902-2005) did a view of the Ox-Bow lighthouse (1945), while Francis Chapin (1899-1965), who seems to have specialized in recreational activity, is here represented by “Girl in Rowboat” (1948). More recent painters have, understandably, worked with less representational themes, but at the last minute, the gallery got some delicious watercolors by Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) of “Ox-Bow” (1967) that almost overcome his habitual neuroses. Overall, it’s a wonderful escape from the hot summer city and the rest of the twentieth-century art world. (Chris Miller)

Through August 21 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 North Ashland, third floor.

Robert Gober, "Double Sink," 1984. Promised Gift of the Donna and Howard Stone Collection, 2010.

By Regan Golden

If you have been to a Friday night opening at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, or a lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art on a Saturday afternoon, chances are you have seen Howard and Donna Stone there chatting with artists, curators and students alike. This month, an unusual confluence of events highlights the role that the Stones play as supporters of contemporary art practice in Chicago.

With little pomp or publicity, each year the Stone Summer Theory Institute, sponsored by the couple, draws scholars from around the world to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in hopes of answering sweeping questions about art, such as 2008’s theme “What is an image?” or 2009’s “What do artist’s know?” Art history is the main fare, but visiting scholars also include scientists, political theorists and philosophers. The topic for this year’s schedule of seminars and lectures is “Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic,” and one of the main speakers is critic and historian Hal Foster, who developed his theory of the “anti-aesthetic” in contemporary art in the 1980s.

One example of Foster’s “anti-aesthetic” is now on view in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute, Robert Gober’s “Double Sink,” a 1984 sculpture owned by the Stones. “Double Sink” reexamines Marcel Duchamp’s modern-art icon, a urinal titled “Fountain,” 1917. In a reversal of Duchamp’s “Fountain,” Gober’s “Double Sink” is handmade, even though its white enamel paint and large institutional scale makes it appear mass-produced or as fit for a kitchen as an art museum. Early criticisms of Gober in the 1990s cast his art as against modernism, but Hal Foster argued that, on the contrary, one had to deconstruct modernist ideas in order to recoup their cultural significance. This is just a taste of the discussions that will take place this week at the Theory Institute, with Hal Foster giving a keynote speech. Read the rest of this entry »

I met artist Peter Anton just as he was about to have a life-long wish reach fruition: seeing his work installed for the very first time in a formal gallery space. This dream was a long time coming for Anton, who is now 78. His reaction revealed that the wait was worth it. Anton, who is wheelchair-bound, gazed up at his paintings and the photos of his work, grinning unabashedly, his eyes wide behind plastic-framed glasses. His first words were “Wow, wow, wow!”

For someone who has experienced many personal struggles (nearly dying from pneumonia at age 3, mourning his brother’s childhood death, being removed from his decaying home by social services), Anton is a rarity—affectionate, outrageously funny, unpretentious, and humbled by his own life and experiences.

“I promised God, until I’m finished, for my life to have purpose, to serve people,” Anton says. “I’ve had perseverance, you know what that is? You have to keep trying, keep trying.” Read the rest of this entry »

Howard Schatz, "You are... four years old; first time at the circus," 2007

RECOMMENDED

In one of the most illuminating and intriguing educational exhibitions to be mounted in Chicago in recent memory, Catherine Edelman has brought together twenty-eight photographers and, for each of them, has paired a full-size image with the contact sheet from which it was selected. Call it conceptual curating at its finest; no wall text is required—and none provided—for viewers to test their judgment against the photographer’s and to try to understand the choices that were made and then second guess them. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Johnson, "Ice, Ft. Riley KS," 2002

RECOMMENDED

For its maiden show, Chicago’s newest—and very promising—photography gallery showcases the works of Joel Wellington Fisher, Justin Thomas Leonard and Joe Johnson, all of whom studied at the New England School of Photography and present emotive studies of intimate urban and rural spaces, ranging from Fisher’s gritty and edgy black-and-white abstractions, through Leonard’s dreamy color impressions of Gulf Coast glades, to Johnson’s muted color shots of the Kansas boondocks. If, as social critic Tom Franks has insisted, there is something the matter with Kansas, you would not know it when you look at Johnson’s take of old George, who owns and operates a simple foundry out in the sticks of Wannego, sitting on the hood of his Jaguar with his dog; he has repainted the car garishly in white stars on a blue background, along with other touches, that make it look like a thinly disguised beater. Cultural play is alive and well in Kansas, far from the city-slicker status seekers. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 8 at Alibi Fine Art, 1966 West Montrose

By Jason Foumberg

It’s always pleasurable and edifying to chat with Jim Duignan, the founder of Stockyard Institute, as I find him to be one of the more inspiring people I have come to meet in Chicago’s art world. He is a “connector,” a term famously coined by Malcolm Gladwell in reference to Lois Weisberg, Chicago’s Commissioner of Cultural Affairs. Like Weisberg, Duignan is in possession of a powerful toolkit, concerning not just the visual arts but also music, publishing and radio, which he shares openly with anyone who needs a creative lift. Unlike Weisberg, though, Duignan does not need to navigate the city’s red tape and dwindling funds for art. Instead, his enterprise operates in addition, or as an alternative, to Chicago’s institutional imprimatur. Still, Duignan works with the public, specifically in Chicago’s Back of the Yards and Austin communities. For the next five months, through November, you may connect with Duignan and his team of cultural producers at “Nomadic Studio,” headquartered at the DePaul University Art Museum.

It takes more than just opening a storefront gallery space, and hosting a potluck and Friday night film screening, says Duignan of the various successes and trappings of alternative art events. Often, alternative community art centers have all the charm of a street fair, with the compulsory kids-craft table. But Duignan is after something more enduring. “I want the level of quality to be as high as possible,” he says of the art made by his students. To reach this high level of quality, he enlists experts. Sometimes, even, these experts include the students themselves. On one occasion, he facilitated a workshop where students taught teachers how to use spray paint as a creative medium. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a photographic trip down his personal memory lane, New York photographer Gregg Evans, who has recently moved to Chicago, lets us participate in his bleak nostalgia for times gone by through straightforward color images of humble objects that he “once owned,” such as a day planner, catalogues from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a pin collection indicating left-of-center political-punk proclivities. Laid on a tacky bedspread or a rough table counter in a dingy room, the objects radiate a sense of distaste, as if Evans had been dragged into a past that he would rather not relive, yet has been forced to try to reclaim. Evans’ flat pathos is distilled to its essence in the assortment of pins, some of which are rusted on the edges and all of which have lost their freshness and luster. The most battered and worn message button reads “Welcome to 1984.” For Evans, it has all just come and gone, and what remains has been rusted out in the mind. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 7 at Ebersmoore Gallery, 213 North Morgan #3C