Cover by Alex Valentine, Breakout Artist 2009

By Jason Foumberg

This is the ninth issue of Breakout Artists, our annual selection of Chicago’s best emerging visual artists. Chicago is a visually stimulating city with tons of energy and room to thrive. It’s no wonder that artists find it an inspiring place to create. This year we are expanding our own definitions to include designers and illustrators, who contribute to our visual landscape as much as gallery artists do. Breakout Artists make fresh, innovative and compelling work—see for yourself.

Newcity’s Breakout Artists are on view in booth 34  at NEXT, floor 12 of the Merchandise Mart, April 29-May 2. Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Marian Frost

By Laura Fox

In a day and a half in Bridgeport last weekend, connections both professional and personal formed between local art groups and artists. The catalyst was the new MDW Fair.

The fair’s genesis itself is a bit of a feat in community-building. In February, Ed Marszewski, the founder of The Co-Prosperity Sphere, Version festival and Public Media Institute, asked threewalls and Roots and Culture if they wanted to help host an art fair focused on Chicago artists and art organizations. In two months and with less than $10,000, the three partners recruited sixty-plus exhibitors to fill 25,000 square feet of exhibition space in the Geolofts warehouse, plus a separate sculpture garden. Read the rest of this entry »

Cover art by Andre Guichard

By Jason Foumberg

A chronic criticism of Chicago’s art landscape is that, for a thriving urban center, its art venues and exhibitions spaces are too farflung across the city’s grid, and therefore largely inaccessible. A Chelsea-type stroll just isn’t possible in Chicago, and even if there are concentrated gallery districts in River North and the West Loop, they scarcely represent the full spectrum of the city’s visual art production. Our art scene has multiple centers with as many margins, and therefore many frontiers. Diane Grams’ new book, “Producing Local Color: Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago,” argues that Chicago’s island neighborhoods benefit from autonomous art production and consumption. The book offers three case studies—the Chicago neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Pilsen and Rogers Park—to describe how locally cultivated art scenes exist in relation to specific local issues, from real estate to crime, and to larger concerns of politics, civil rights and economic access.

A common tactic in Chicago, especially today, is the domestic gallery. In 1961, several people decided to start a “home-based museum” on the South Side and called it the Ebony Museum to represent black history in Chicago. Twelve years later they moved locations and changed the name to the DuSable Museum of African American History. This boldly innovative museum only became culturally legitimate and publicly influential, writes Grams, when the institution was relocated into the city’s parkland alongside other major cultural institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

"Filleted Male Salmon," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Marion Kryczka’s well-made, highly ordered, masculine vision of reality may fit the blue-collar streets of Chicago, but he’s been peripheral to the contemporary art world. Kryczka’s work also lacks either the photo finish and sentimentality, or the anger and ugly distortions that other corners of the art world  might appreciate, and he’s not even goofy, damaged or unsophisticated enough to qualify as an outsider.

As critic G. Jurek Polanski wrote about Kryczka’s 1999 exhibit in the Fine Arts Building, “The variety of pieces tell a story, one in which each work, while complete in itself, is placed to build a context with its companions and comprehensively reveal the artist’s personality.” And the same is true today, although the story is changing, as the artist mellows into his sixties. The still-lifes include the same dead fish, sharp knives and bottles of alcohol on low-rent kitchen counters that he’s been painting for decades. But the light feels less harsh, the whiskey has been replaced by wine, and fish seem almost happy to be offering their tender, pink, slaughtered flesh. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish mathematician Hugh Blackburn invented the harmonograph, a device that draws elegant abstractions through the movements of two or more pendulums. Blackburn observed that the visual “harmonies” resulting from intervals of ratio in pendulum height correlated to similar steps in the musical scale. University of Chicago musicologist Larry Zbikowski is exploring the visual patterns of movement made by dancers of the waltz, and correlating these patterns both to the musical scores that accompanied the dancing and to states of emotion and consciousness in the brain. These synchronistic models serve as inspiration for Conrad Freiburg, whose virtual universe, erected in the main gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center, is divided into sections matching the seven notes of the Western major scale with sconce-like chimes affixed to the wall. While Freiburg doesn’t claim adherence to any esoteric system, the number seven recurs throughout occult cosmology; in theosophy, for example, the seven-step “septenary” describes the various “energy envelopes” of the soul that exist in subatomic emptiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Mac Katter, "Double Back," 2010

RECOMMENDED

“Beauty Ritual” is a group show of photographs by Billy Buck, Hani Eid, Mac Katter and Olivia Swider, whose work gives an unspoken shape to the titular concept: the ritual capture, construction and dismantling of “beauty.”

Swider’s work suggests a rite of preparation, after which she hunts and traps existing beauty with the lens. The elegant composition of “The Clicking of Bones” transforms manicured lawns into a geometric suburban jungle where a prowling housecat is stalked by the photographer.

In “Cheap and Easy,” Buck performs his ritual at the helm of a computer. He repurposes a Photoshop filter normally used to perfect an unruly image into a tool that warps and foreshortens a mundane image of a stack of sponges into a funhouse deconstruction of focus and aperture.

The two untitled works by Hani Eid answer Buck’s method with sly acts of sleight-of-lens. Eid suggests manipulation where there is none, toying with his own authorship; what appears to be a dusty print of a gaudy sunset is in fact an extreme enlargement of a license plate smattered with the carapaces of highway insects. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Social Mobility” is an installation put together by Temporary Services, a group that investigates public space. Their projects represent and raise questions about everyday places and people, rather than the colorful outpourings of privileged individuals. Relational art is not political per se, except that it generally takes place in the city, and simultaneously in the flow of signals we call the internet. Although the people who practice in this area likely have what we might call progressive ideas, their tactics often owe more to Dada, Situationism and punk rock than any theoretical or ideological position. “Social Mobility” centers on projects that challenge accepted (or hegemonic, if you like) channels of distribution of art and information by freely sharing information as pretexts for social exchange. Their current exhibition contains several vitrines of booklets and found ephemera, such as stickers, posters and religious tracts, some bookshelves that hold the Self-Reliance Library, an unpredictable collection of books and references regarding practices like self-publishing, nomadic living, herbals and weapons production.

Despite the aleatory nature and potential for disarray in its divergent collections, the installation seemed antiseptic (like a hospital waiting room) and just a bit too cerebral for the on-the-street strategies usually enacted by the group. Banners designed to call attention to the economic and political forces shaping the ubiquitous and homely personal petrochemical plastic shopping bag make an impact—they were quilted—but for all their admirable labor, they are very neat and drab. Among the banner slogans: “The inexperienced dreamer simply cannot survive alone—The Survivor.” Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Paul Germanos

RECOMMENDED

In what has turned out to be domestic art space He Said She Said’s last exhibition, Sheila Pepe presents the ongoing project “Common Sense.” In it Pepe exhibits an especially sensitive intervention into the living space. Her work suspends looping strands of crochet and shoelace from the living room, entryway and dining room. The low-hanging web physically connects the spaces with its languid gesture. In her recent projects, the artist has involved the participants in the creation of the work. For He Said She Said, part of the looping installation links up with a collection of playful art objects created by the child of the house.

Elsewhere, the shoelace and crochet intersect in connections that support, uphold and create the structure of the form. These connections are frequently tied in ways similar to shoes, where it is apparent that a single pull would release the tension and collapse the shape. As such, there is an air of contingency in the work, aside from its corporeal, weighted quality. Adding to this transient feeling, Pepe encourages participants at the end of each installation of “Common Sense” to unravel part of the work and take away the material for their own purposes.

Drawing significant inspiration from an artistic matrilineage that includes works like Faith Wilding’s crocheted environments, Sheila Pepe’s architectural intervention updates and extends their concerns. Here the notion of communal connectivity, of material poised sympathetically amongst spaces inhabited by living bodies, yet without the rising to the coercive force of solidified architecture, is posited as an ideal. What better way to celebrate (though perhaps unintentionally on the artist’s part) the life of an exhibition and conversation space that was itself temporary, inhabited and bred new forms of connectivity across disciplinary boundaries. (Dan Gunn)

Through May 14 at He Said She Said, 216 North Harvey, Oak Park. Open by appointment.

"Untitled (woman with floral hat)," 1961

RECOMMENDED

A nanny by profession, Vivian Maier’s passion—and that is no exaggeration—was street photography intensively pursued in New York City, Los Angeles and her base of Chicago. Shooting mainly during the 1950s and 1960s, Maier’s archive was only discovered after her death in 2009, and a selection of fifty-seven black-and-white images, mostly portraits and mostly candid, now receives its first gallery show. Maier comes out as a minor master, a child of her time whose images resemble those of Diane Arbus; her subjects are quirky, often discomfited, not especially conventionally attractive, and sometimes downright dyspeptic. Of course, the Chicago school is never as extreme as the New Yorkers, so we can get close to and familiar with Maier’s subjects, and then find out that we might have wanted to keep more of a distance. An elderly bony-faced lady sporting a helmet-like floral hat gives a sidelong look into the camera that defines what is meant by baleful. Maier serves up the all-too-human family of the morose. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 18 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 West Superior.

Bo Zhang

RECOMMENDED

In 1955, the Soviet Union sent Konstantin Maksimov (1913-1993) to Beijing to teach a select group of Chinese students how to make social-realist art. Thus began another East-West cultural exchange, one that is still practiced by Chinese artists around the world. With Maksimov, as well as many others, the work often seems to have been made to impress other artists, not just the unwashed masses, and at its best can be enjoyed as subtle, expressive, post-Impressionist painting in the style of Cezanne or van Gogh.

Now, more than fifty years later, we have the fifteen members of the Oil Painting Society of Chinese American, most of them art professors in Midwestern universities, and now free to express whatever they wish. All but one were sent to peasant villages during the Cultural Revolution, triumphed against the odds to win the post-Mao national competition to get into college, studied art with the generation trained by the Russians, learned English and finally realized the dream of coming to America. Each of them would be a success story even if they never lifted a brush again, but indeed these fifteen are still painting, some of them quite well, and a few of them, like Zhi Wei Tu and Victor Wang, gaining national reputations despite an art education that was incompatible with the academicism of contemporary art. Read the rest of this entry »