Adonis Flores, "Sieve/Tamiz, 2005," Digital print. Courtesy of the artist and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam.

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In 1996 guitarist Ry Cooder traveled to Havana, assembling a group of aging Cuban musicians to record the hit album that would be called Buena Vista Social Club, introducing many Americans to the unique sultry swing of old-school Cuban nightclub music. But judging from this exhibition, a similarly unique enchanting style of visual art has not been cultivated by the National Council of Fine Arts and the Wifredo Lam Center (which also sponsors the International Havana Art Biennial). It’s more like what you would expect a hundred miles north, in Art Miami, only a bit less outrageous, more provincial, and twenty to forty years behind the times. Rather than a contemporary Cuban style, the themes and devices of mainstream contemporary art have been applied to Cuban subjects. So much of this exhibition feels like a trip to Havana and the surrounding countryside—with photographs of quirky peasants, decaying sugar refineries and weathered doors. Even more so, the blurry, damp-but-dynamic cityscape paintings of Luis Enrique Camejo share a real affection for a time and place. A homeboy affection is emphatically proclaimed by Roberto Fabelo’s installation called “Damned Trips”—in which a collection of well-worn suitcases are impaled by a twelve-foot dagger suspended from the ceiling. Velasco and Arellano have photo-manipulated the iconic Plaza de la Revolución into a series of images where the towering Marti Memorial is subjected to some rather severe weather conditions and finally partially submerged by the sea. This is all more than just a little nostalgic and is augmented by many works on that overworked twentieth-century theme of modern man lost in the maze of his own high-tech civilization. Read the rest of this entry »

Sadamasa Motonaga

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When progressive young postwar Japanese artists followed their American colleagues into the brave new world of Abstract Expressionist painting, they were only expanding upon a tradition that had been putting expressive shapes, lines, colors and textures on the surfaces of pots for over a thousand years. The Gutai Group, founded in 1954, encouraged experimentation with materials and methods. As their manifesto declares, one member worked a large surface “in a single moment by firing a small, hand-made cannon filled with paint by means of an acetylene gas explosion.” The manifesto turns much more traditional when it declares, “We tried to combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material in order to concretize the abstract space.” Despite their avant-garde mission of “creating a world that has never been,” the results, at least demonstrated by the two Gutai members in this exhibition, display the precise balance demanded by traditional Japanese aesthetics instead of exposing the self-destructive absurdity of the modern world. Read the rest of this entry »

Not everyone can yank their windows off the wall to have them rinsed and refurbished, but then again, not everyone has Marc Chagall’s stunning stained glass shimmering cobalt blue in their foyers.

After a five-year sabbatical, with labor and love from dozens of curators and conservators, the famed windows have returned to their home at the Art Institute of Chicago.

On Thursday night, Mayor Daley and his wife Maggie joined the granddaughter of Marc Chagall along with Art Institute directors and trustees, for a celebration of the artist, the people who brought his work to life, and those who continue their legacy today.

The cleaner, clearer “America Windows” express, in Mayor Daley’s words, the “true spirit of Marc Chagall.” Read the rest of this entry »