Lilli Carré: Untitled, 2010, screen print, 8 x 8 inches. Photo by Angee Leonnard.

Top 5 People and Places We’ll Miss
Kathryn Hixson
David Weinberg Gallery
Rowley Kennerk Gallery
Green Lantern Gallery
James Garrett Faulkner
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Solo Exhibitions
Edra Soto/Ebersmoore Gallery
Philip Hanson/Corbett vs. Dempsey
Lilli Carré/Spudnik Press
Gladys Nilsson/Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
Ian Weaver/Packer Schopf Gallery
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Public Art Projects
Ray Noland’s “Run Blago Run”
Pop-Up galleries in the Loop
Nomadic Studio/DePaul University Art Museum
Hui-min Tsen’s tours of the Chicago Pedway
Marwen
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

A self-identified “second-generation collector” admitted, “I have never heard of a small artist group that’s having something [an exhibition] where anybody’s reached out to me.” This was in the MCA’s auditorium at a well-attended panel discussion on Chicago’s local art scene in November. The collector, who was seated in the audience, chose to respond to the topic of how emerging artists can connect with emerging collectors. The collector, who presumably lives in Chicago, admitted to not shopping locally (and only at art fairs) because artists don’t invite him to their exhibitions. As a caveat, he bluntly told the audience, “What we see [in Chicago] is generally not appealing.”

Most artists need collectors if they’re expecting to be career artists, but this collector did not toss out calling cards to the hundreds in attendance, nor identify his name. It’s likely that this collector, and many others, enjoy the prestige of collecting art, yet collectors are not public figures. (The highest echelon of philanthropy is the “anonymous” donor). If you are an artist in Chicago you can probably name fifty fellow artists, twenty art galleries, and maybe one art collector. This collector revealed a double-edged secret: collectors don’t need artists.

“Each and every month commit to identifying a minimum of fifty potential collectors and make at least one sale,” writes Katharine T. Carter in her new book, “Accelerating on the Curves: The Artist’s Roadmap to Success.” Her other advice for an artist to maintain good collector relations is to host an annual holiday cocktail party at your studio, send a glass of champagne to a collector’s table if you spot them at a restaurant, always thank them for a sale with a handwritten note, and update them with news about your current exhibitions. This last bit mirrors the complaint of the unidentified Chicago collector. Carter’s words of wisdom are not, in fact, unrealistic, but how does an artist who is not represented by a gallery connect with collectors in the first place? “Get creative,” she says. Collectors are not just museum aristocrats, but also your dentist, accountant, realtor, or friend who is an interior designer. These folks, who don’t shop at art galleries, have the power to purchase your art if they only knew you were an artist, she writes. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Designer and street artist Ray Noland, famed for spray painting images of Barack Obama and Rod Blagojevich on Chicago streets and underpasses, pairs with the Chicago Urban Art Society (CUAS) to present “Pork & Politics,” a group show in one of the Chicago Loop Alliance’s pop-up galleries. Visitors to the space are engulfed in a branded, commercial environment; Noland painted the walls yellow, red and blue, installed a yellow- and red-striped awning, and placed a red hotdog cart with yellow lettering in the center of the room.

According to color theory, red and yellow stimulate hunger, an idea often used by the leading fast-food companies. Here, the colors echo the political appetites of the show’s subjects, who are leading national and local political figures.

Grinding together varied allusions to politics and hotdogs, the exhibition peddles mixed messages and hidden meanings encased by slick surfaces. About a third of the works deal with national issues. In Noland’s “Capitol Pork,” the Capitol building is divided neatly into different cuts of meat—whether belly, fat, or rib—ready to be sold. Another, “Rangel Dog,” depicts Charlie Rangel caught taking his piece of the cut in a New York deli. The show is most successful when it hits closest to home, telescoping on Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Like many of the other artists from L’viv whom the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art has brought to Chicago, the Yarychs are more interested in using rather than defying their cultural legacy. The quiet and mysterious paintings of Svitlana Yarych (born 1960) are closer to Byzantine icons than to romantic realism or anything else that’s come out of Western Europe in the last two centuries. But the sweet, young, ghostly faces that emerge from her upbeat, colorful patterns belong in the home rather than the church. With her emphasis on enjoyable local color, Svitlana, a professor in the Department of Clothing Design at the L’viv Academy of the Arts, might even be considered more of a fabric designer than a painter. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Kristine Sherred

By Kristine Sherred

Remove the gigantic printing press, the paints and the papers, the file cabinets and the odds and ends. Repaint the walls, sand and stain the hardwood, add some track lighting. Reveal the open space.

After seventeen years as Tony Fitzpatrick’s studio, the space at 2124 North Damen now serves as Firecat Projects, a for-profit, commission-free gallery, as well as a publishing house. (Fitzpatrick’s moved his studio into his home.) A road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles gave Fitzpatrick and his art partner Stan Klein 2,000 miles of moments to discuss the formation of a rare gallery model that nurtures both artists and buyers, one that eliminates the intermediary and brings the public directly to the artists. Fitzpatrick, whose work was featured in the debut show at the gallery in November, quotes Mahatma Gandi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Or, in his own words, “Put up or shut up.” Read the rest of this entry »

"Bathing," 1940

RECOMMENDED

“Lost troves” appear so often in the secondary art market one wonders whether their amazing rediscovery has something to do with marketing. Whatever the reason, several dozen early prints by Jun’ichiro Sekino (1914-1988) have recently surfaced in Chicago. They are a remarkable collection of work done during the dark days of Japan’s failing empire by a young artist in his twenties, and are augmented by some equally remarkable postwar prints that Floating World Gallery is not offering for sale. It’s a real festival of rambunctious creativity by a printmaker who would later become distracted by commercial success. Many of them are one-of-a-kind monoprints, and many of them are of nudes, done in a peculiar, lively style that is a hybrid of Japanese and European, though owing a bit more to Picasso and Matisse than to Utamaro and Hokusai. Read the rest of this entry »

Harvey Moon's machine

By Jason Foumberg

Like zombies and cancer, sometimes machines are positioned to reflect the troubles of modern life. I’m not talking about coffee makers but atom colliders. Real or fictionalized, machines (and zombies and cancers) are human-born, but left to their own devices, can become automata that produce malevolent acts, and so they are perfect vehicles for artists, or anyone, to embody the fears and conflicts of our age. There is the fear of losing control, and the fear of destruction. While machines are good at destructing themselves or other things, they mostly excel at being perfect. The fear, then, lies in mechanization. If everything were to become mechanized, then humans, too.

What, then, of drawing machines? One drawing machine, built by Harvey Moon, is currently on display in a vacant storefront window in the old Carson’s downtown building, and several by Mark Porter were recently working up a frenzy at Fill in the Blank Gallery. Both machines make drawings. Moon’s machine reproduces, on a large sheet of paper, a photograph that he chooses using a micron pen. Moon programmed the machine to work day and night for the next three months. The little machine works quickly but the image is very large. It lowers a small metal arm to move itself around the sheet of paper. Read the rest of this entry »

Anne Meyer, “Tiger”

RECOMMENDED

Thirty-five years ago, Sister Johanna Becker, OSB, of Saint Benedict’s College arranged for a graduating senior, Richard Bresnahan, to apprentice with Takashi Nakazato, a thirteenth-generation potter in Karatsu, a Japanese port city near the coast of Korea, that has been known as a ceramic center since the sixteenth century. Three years later, Bresnahan returned to Collegeville, Minnesota and built the eighty-seven-foot long “Johanna kiln,” the largest wood-fired kiln in America. And so a revered Japanese tradition took root in the upper Midwest.

But, as Bresnahan notes, though his work may seem Japanese to Americans, the Japanese say, ‘Boy, Richard, you sure make American-style pottery.” That unavoidable American-ness is what is so fascinating about this exhibition of work by Bresnahan and four of his former students, as selected by Matthew Welch, curator of Japanese and Korean Art at the Minneapolis Institute. While rooted in traditional Japanese technique and aesthetic, these Americans are chomping at the bit to express a louder, looser, more extroverted culture. Read the rest of this entry »

"Chapter 6: Noodles in Brown Sauce"

RECOMMENDED

The experience of Deb Sokolow’s new drawings at Western Exhibitions is as important as the story being told. Bungled plots, secret caverns and the machinations of deceptive postal workers are once again exposed by her curious, paranoid protagonist in a non-linear and unending story penciled on lined, white drawing paper. These gripping tales lure us into this series of visually spare artworks. With only a few diagrams embedded in the text, one primarily reads these drawings rather than gazes at them.

This slight shift in perception dramatically changes the experience in the gallery. One must stop and stand while reading each word to glean the meaning of an individual drawing or chapter. This unusual experience in the gallery focuses attention on the act of reading, on how the story is internalized and interpreted. Traditionally, drawing tells an entire story in a single image using visual symbols. Sokolow adheres to this convention in part because each drawing is one chapter detailing a complete scene, but she also cleverly flouts the rule by adding footnotes in separate drawings. The viewer or reader pieces together the parts of the story, as told in each drawing or chapter, in order to understand the meaning of the entire series. Viewing Sokolow’s new drawings is like reading a collection of short stories, or like viewing a large sculpture, moving around the object, stitching together the parts visible from many viewpoints to form a sense of the whole object. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Social and political art these days is often oblique, using ambivalence and irony or subversive subtextual turns to make attenuated points. Rebecca Wolfram, whose paintings are at La Llorona in an exhibition called “Cruelty has a Human Heart,” are pretty straightforward about what used to be called ‘man’s inhumanity to man.’ Wolfram might not agree with the concept of inhumanity since it is clear she is also very concerned with the cruelty men and women visit on animals. Her highly worked, textured canvases, whose spaces are reminiscent of Egyptian friezes, are filled with naked (but desexualized) huddled people, often children or babies, negotiating strange, not exactly Piranesian, but precipitous lightless carceral spaces, struggling to do things which seem recognizable but which one can not actually name. There is some evidence that the manacles are, as Blake says “mind forged,” but other paintings of women being lead away in branks­—a metal device with a spike inside the gag to pierce the tongue fitted around the head of a termagant woman, favored by the Puritans but used by others—are quite specific. A series of small works depict the painfully twisted faces of people who strain against the merciless constrictions of the branks. Repeated friezes of forlorn school children, tormented animals and infernal machines, and one of my favorites, a group of people portaging an upside-down car, add to the dystopian carnival. Wolfram’s work is reminiscent of Leon Golub’s in both subject and technique, but on an intimate scale. Layers of scrapings, drawing and reworkings through yellows, reds and blacks build up her surfaces, and unlike Golub, some lyrical moments—gracefully falling figures, hopeful passages—are redemptive, not in a religious, but in a humanistic sense. (Janina Ciezadlo)

Through January 8 at La Llorona, 1474 West Webster