By John Greenfield

Born and raised on the South Side, George Roth, 78, spent much of the twentieth-century creating images for books, magazines, posters and record albums in Chicago. Currently fighting cancer, Roth will be showing paintings from his Jazz Heads series of monolithic black-and-white portraits of his musical heroes (tinyurl.com/jazzheads) at the Lucerne, Switzerland Railway Station later this winter. I recently sat down with him at his Evanston home to talk about how he got into the biz, the stories behind some of his works, and what it was like working for Playboy.

What was it like growing up in Chicago in the thirties?

My parents were Jews who emigrated from Hungary. My father came here to avoid being drafted into the Hungarian army for the third time. We lived at 69th and South Park, which is now King Drive, in a neighborhood called Park Manor. The area was mostly middle class and Irish-Catholic back then.

My dad was a headwaiter who took pride in working for good restaurants like the Glass Hat at the Congress Hotel. I worked there for a while in the hatcheck department. That could have been, but didn’t turn out to be, a good education for me, because the girls were cute. But I just didn’t know what to do. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

I first saw Lori Nix’s photographs online—scenes of post-apocalyptic interior environments abandoned and in the slow process of being reclaimed by nature—and I was amazed. After learning that Nix photographed miniature dioramas that she builds by hand, mostly from scratch, there followed a moment of disbelief. Each scene is so lavishly detailed down to wood grain and stained walls that I thought she simply set-dressed existing locations rather than create the world exactly as she wished it to be. After disbelief came relief; I was glad these locations didn’t exist, that they weren’t actually the result of some current natural or manmade disaster. This relief is a gift often administered by great art. Read the rest of this entry »

"Lippy," 1968

RECOMMENDED

The current Jim Nutt retrospective traces the artist’s decades-long preoccupation with female faces. These personages are not drawn from specific sitters—here they are called “imaginary portraits.” The matriline evolves from violent and violated amputees in the late 1960s (perhaps the victims and/or instigators of feminism) to subdued bust portraits of women who look as if they’re evaluating themselves, alone, in a mirror.

It is well known that the Hairy Who artists, Jim Nutt among them, culled source material and inspiration from comics—but so did Willem de Kooning, a collector of much early twentieth-century comic art. The female personage was the only subject of de Kooning’s for a long while, and although he later moved on to fully non-objective paintings, Nutt has varied little since closing the Hairy Who chapter. Both Nutt and de Kooning have achieved an expressive potential through the often-generic format of a cartoonish woman’s head. Nutt’s long, sustained experimentation with female faces grants viewers an opportunity to witness the slow procession of his creative output. Many pencil drawings in the show are interspersed among the paintings, which are supposed to reveal the artist’s precise process. But what painter doesn’t have working drawings lying around the studio? Nutt’s message reaches fever pitch when rendered in exacting, glossy and complex paint. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The problem with contemporary religious art is that it seems the result of conformity rather than discovery, so you get the feeling that nobody, including the artist, really believes it. Like a docile parishioner, it’s just following rules and dutifully going through the motions. But there are no rules in the contemporary art world, so when an artist like William Eckhardt Kohler (born 1962) fills a gallery with large, visionary paintings, it can actually feel like a spiritual experience. Kohler is obviously on some kind of a quest, and its goal is not especially to sell paintings. He explores the world, both inner and outer, rather than reacting with the irony, anger, humor, or disgust that is more common to successful contemporary Chicago artists. With titles like “In the Garden of the Blessed,” “Night Ceremony,” and “Up the Mountain,” his paintings lead us into high chroma landscapes that feel as much like Mughal miniatures as they do the American land or the free, swirling, calligraphic brushstrokes of Abstract Expression. And unlike his paintings from earlier years, this series from 2010 is more of a solitary journey, with only an occasional, loosely sketched human or animal figure. Are the hares and crows intended to guide the seeker through these fantastic hills of pink and blue trees? Is this the same kind of journey that the intoxicated Carlos Castaneda took with his brujo through the chaparral of northern Mexico? This may not be among the very best visionary art. Kohler is quite adept in navigating the ins and outs of pictorial space. But these paintings are just not beautifully sharp and ecstatic enough to convince this pilgrim that the Truth has been found, though I am convinced that he’s on the way, and would certainly like to see where he goes next. (Chris Miller)

Through February 26 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 West Fulton Market.

Peter V. Walsh, Jason Thompson, Clarke Canedy, Dana Schmidt

With more than two-dozen art galleries located in one neighborhood it can be difficult for the new kid on the block to stand out from the crowd. Throw in an economy slowly climbing its way out of recession, let alone it being February in Chicago—not exactly the most conducive environment to foot traffic—and it’s hard to imagine a new art space hanging on, let alone thriving. Yet that’s what The Black Cloud Gallery of East Pilsen (1909 South Halsted, blackcloudgallery.net) has managed to do. Since opening in October, the fledgling gallery has gone from six contributing artists to nearly thirty, and says it is currently turning a profit every month.

“We represent artists, not just display them,” says gallery co-founder Clarke Canedy. “When we show an artist, we don’t just put work up and hope people come in on 2nd Fridays, we curate the work to strengthen it. We hang work at local businesses; the artists are being exhibited out of the gallery for more exposure. We rent our space for all sorts of private events; classes are taught here. We try to get as many people in front of the art as possible in different ways.”

Some of those different ways have included hosting charity events, a birthday party, baby shower, wedding reception, jewelry show, sewing classes, comedy shows, and drawing sessions with live models starting in March (and they’re looking into yoga). Their latest hook: an “Art Bazaar,” with more than ninety pieces from more than thirty different artists set at $200, all through February, kicking off with a gala event February 4 from 7pm-10:30pm. Read the rest of this entry »

Enrique Chagoya, "Return to Goya No. 9," 2010

By Julia V. Hendrickson

Comic and cartoon artists work quietly but profusely in Chicago, drawn, perhaps, to the functionality of its gridded streets, city blocks like frames on a page. Comic book and specialty bookstores like Quimby’s and Challengers flourish because there is an audience for experimental narratives and a vibrant community surrounding comic art. In reaction to such public interest, January brings a flurry of exhibitions related to comic and sequential narrative art.

For those interested in historical context, the Block Museum in Evanston offers a small but superb collection of prints in “The Satirical Edge,” with work from the 1950s to the present, all using graphic comic and cartoon imagery for socio-political commentary. The majority of this collection features a group of artists, the “Outlaw Printmakers,” who were part of a 2004 exhibition at Big Cat Gallery in New York. Most striking are Tom Huck’s series of small-town narratives depicted in large, hypnotically intricate woodcuts. A handful of R. Crumb comic books from the early 1970s are the only direct connection to comics, but the influence of comic art is evident in works like Richard Mock’s bug-eyed linocuts and Enrique Chagoya’s collaged accordion book.

Chagoya’s newer work is also prominently displayed, and includes an etching from his latest edition, a dancing, demon-chased Obama, a subtle revision of Goya’s “Los Caprichos.” The Block aptly compliments the “Satirical Edge” with a concurrent exhibition of prints by eighteenth-century caricaturist and political cartoonist Thomas Rowlandson. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In her new exhibition, “Rewinds,” at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Anne Wilson showcases an artistic practice rooted in hands-on processes of making, forming and creating. Wilson reintroduces a visual vocabulary relying on depictions of sewing tools and ephemera to advocate for the contemporary relevance of craft-based production in material culture. Rather than rely on a kitsch or homespun style, she communicates through starkly beautiful minimalist forms and surfaces that have almost clinical suggestions. Although previously known as a textile artist, Wilson explores a new medium for this show, glass, that when molten can be similarly woven, shaped and spun.

Half of the space in the gallery’s main room is occupied by Wilson’s eponymous “Rewinds” sculpture, a series of horizontal glass panels forming a raised sterile surface. Wilson littered the long minimal expanse with handcrafted glass forms that reference small sewing bobbins, specifically rewinds, which are spindles wound with leftover thread. Implying an interrupted or paused action, these static remnants of labor are clustered seemingly sporadically, forming a type of topographic assemblage that could be a sewer’s careless workspace. Kneeling pads positioned at both ends encourage onlookers to become participants in this space and its suggested fabrication work. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kristine Sherred

A full year past, we reflect on that which once was, that which persists, that which may be. Lilly McElroy’s second solo exhibition at Thomas Robertello Gallery honors 2009, a year that, for many, typifies economic unrest, unemployment and home loss. Even for those of us unscathed, a new year carries new possibilities, new responsibilities, and McElroy urges us to reflect on a year’s worth of hardships with the quips of another. She set up a website (aroughyear.com) to solicit others’ images, stories and jokes that epitomize their most painful moment, or in some cases, their triumphant reclamation.

McElroy describes her artistic mission as an interactive attempt to make a connection with her audience, and she is accustomed to participatory art. Her inspiration for soliciting photographs, she says, may have emanated from a past project for which she asked her mother to photograph twenty-four reasons why she loves her, using nothing more than a disposable camera.

User-generated content leaves the end result a bit, well, open-ended: “I was expecting so many more images of home and job loss,” McElroy says, “but I was actually really surprised about [the stories of] heartbreak. For people who weren’t experiencing those economic stresses, [2009] was equally rough but in a very different way. It made the project much more interesting and much more complicated.”

McElroy spread the word of her developing project by posting ads in Craigslist and Coffee News, distributing flyers to cafes, “emailing anybody who had ever emailed me about anything,” she laughs, and even snail-mailing strangers chosen at random from old phone books. “I got a lot of responses asking who I was,” but her breadth of personal connections and that of friends and family catalyzed the project’s dissemination, fashioning a potent spiderweb chronicling a year in the life. Read the rest of this entry »

Group exhibitions, the Chicago Tribune reported in December, usually occur during the summer months, when “curators are left to throw a few back-room canvases on a wall and call it an exhibition.” This makes both curators and group shows sound a little pathetic; while everyone is out splashing in the lake, the pale, over-worked curators are dusting off third-tier unsold art works for makeshift exhibitions. The Tribune’s critique of no one in particular reflects a pseudo-boredom with the arts, itself a tired and tiring attitude. But it seems that boredom is widespread, evidenced by the growing amount of correctives for the public disaffection of curators—often by curatorial institutions themselves.

“The public” was invited to help curate an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis recently from a kiosk in the museum’s atrium. 183 images, pre-selected by museum curators, were up for vote, which finally (somehow) were turned into an actual exhibition of 200 artworks for “50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection,” on view through mid-July. This attempt to elevate the power of public opinion was a charade: the public was limited to voting on 183 works, which were limited by what was in the museum’s collection. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Alfonso Iannelli (1888-1965) may have been too precocious for his own good. Apprenticed to Gutzon Borglum (Mt. Rushmore) at the age of 12, he was fabricating stained-glass windows for a vaudeville theater in Los Angeles ten years later when the owner asked him to design posters for upcoming shows. Combining the dynamic geometrics of the Russian avant-garde with sharp figurative characterization, this work caught the eye of John Lloyd Wright who recommended him to his father, Frank, back in Chicago. Soon Iannelli was sculpting the playful “sprites” on FLW’s legendary Midway Gardens in 1914. Eventually, Iannelli opened his own studio in Park Ridge where he designed everything from theater interiors to vacuum cleaners to architectural sculpture. His most visible work in Chicago was one of his last public pieces, the Rock of Gibraltar relief high up on the side of the Prudential Building that faces south towards Grant Park. Currently, his sculptures can be seen in both the Art Institute and the Smart Museum. He may have never become an icon of Modernism, but all this time his fertile brain was fascinated by form and content in the modern world, as evidenced by many of the sketches discovered in his office files and now on display at ArchiTech Gallery. They include cubist fantasies, as well as geometricized caricatures of lawyers, musicians and pretty young city girls. There are also a few watercolor abstractions that could hang beside the work of Arthur Dove or Charles Demuth and industrial cityscapes that compare to Charles Sheeler. Ultimately, one wonders whether too much of his time was spent in the commercial design of toasters and hair clippers. He enveloped his expressive figuration within designs that were more dynamic than either the isolated figures of our neo-traditional figure painters or the strong but static patterns of our Imagists. (Chris Miller)

Through April 30 at ArchiTech Gallery, 730 North Franklin, Suite 200.