Gustav Klutsis, "Worker Men and Women: Everyone Vote in the Soviet Elections," 1930

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The separation between everyday life and the visionary designers of the avant-garde is one of the ongoing ironies or misrepresentations of the twentieth century. An exhibition at the Art Institute retrieves the connections among graphic design, designed objects, art and “everyday life,” displaying book covers, teapots, postcards and the dynamic graphic work of six visual artists. What we now take for granted as industrial design was just beginning in the early years of the century when Ladislav Sutnar was designing dinnerware and posters celebrating commerce and industry. His sculptural china embodies the restrained play of spherical volumes, while Piet Zwart’s apple-green pressed glassware is more compact as tubular tea cups sit in hexagonal saucers. The emphasis on form rather than decoration not only severs ties with the clutter of the Victorian past but identifies everyday items with the values—efficiency, durability, mass distribution—of emerging industrial and communications technologies. Read the rest of this entry »

Carol Hummel, “Lichen it”

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As its name suggests, the Morton Arboretum is more about science than aesthetics. It’s a better destination to learn about trees than to enjoy magnificent views.  So, it’s an appropriate setting for conceptual art, where the information on the label is at least as important as the artworks.

Whereas the exhibits of trees and eco-systems teach us about the variety of life on our planet, just what can be learned from this collection of art installations interspersed throughout the Arboretum’s grounds? The target audience seems to be eight-year-olds. A stack of logs is wrapped with a giant bow ribbon and the brochure asks us, “What is the best gift trees give us?” A large kaleidoscope is installed facing a shoreline and we are asked, “How do the colors and shapes make you feel?” The artists, of course, have put their ideas into artspeak. Writes Letha Wilson, “My work creates relationships between architecture and nature, and the gallery space and the American wilderness.”  But has that really told us anything more? Read the rest of this entry »

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The Qianlong Emperor (1711-1799) was a fanatic patron of the arts who is quite familiar to lovers of Chinese painting. He stamped his big red seal on many of the 10,000 paintings that he collected, not just once, but each time he unrolled them. He is also known to Chicagoans thanks to the 2004 exhibition at the Field Museum, “Splendors of China’s Forbidden City.” Recently, the World Monuments Fund has focused attention on the Juanqinzhai, a two-acre compound of gardens and pavilions in the Forbidden City that the emperor commissioned at the age of sixty to serve as a retreat in his declining years. This year, many of the furnishings from those pavilions are touring the United States.

The imitation rootwood furniture is perhaps the most memorable. Displaying a passion for faux-rusticity, also shared by the contemporary French royal court, these  outrageously convoluted objects miraculously reflect both organic process and elegant human design, as well as the Buddhist ideal of a simple, quiet life. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Messin’ with Texas” at the Hyde Park Art Center is an eclectic group show of eight mid-career artists from Houston, Texas, all recipients of the 2010 Artadia Award. Artadia is a nonprofit organization that awards grants to artists in five U.S. cities, including Chicago. This exhibition was part of an exchange with DiverseWorks in Houston, which recently displayed the work of the 2008 Artadia Awardees from Chicago. It is important to note that Artadia grants are given to individuals and grantees are not selected on the grounds of a cohesive group exhibition. As a result, the works in this show are quite disparate, although some relationships emerge. David Aylsworth’s thickly painted abstractions of floating geometric forms share a surprising lightness and playfulness with Bill Davenport’s sculpture, “Super U,” a giant pink painted plywood “U” that fills the center of the gallery. There is a similar precision and emphasis on systems in Augusto Di Stefano’s drawing, “Plan for History,” as in Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher’s wall-mounted sculpture, “Cliff Hanger,” a grid of wires, hard drives and cameras that feed images to a flat screen TV. These formal similarities create some resonance between the works, but what is most compelling in the show is actually the dissonance between Nestor Topchy’s contemporary take on elaborately painted Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky) and Nathaniel Donnett’s gold-foiled objects displayed in a glass case on black velvet shelves with tiny white paper tags on which is simply scrawled “priceless.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not the sort of scene anyone can just waltz into. Chicago’s underground ballrooms are organized by and for the African-American transgender community, and although they are essentially dance competitions with esoteric rules, to join one is to grab onto a “tentacle of gang mentality,” says Todd Diederich. He’s been photographing the underground ball scene on Chicago’s South and West Sides for a couple of years. Access for Diederich was doubly hard: not only did he want to attend underground parties where he had no business as a straight white guy, he also wanted to document every dance-floor battle and behind-the-scenes drama he could find. To do so, he could not be an outsider or mere observer. Diederich gained the trust of the ballroom participants, and his photos testify it. As a gonzo photojournalist, Diederich’s photographs not only bring to light an underground scene but also document his relationship with his subjects. Would-be dancers and even newspaper journalists have tried to piggyback on Diederich’s access to this underground culture. He enjoys the limelight, for himself and the scene, but Diederich’s photographs are imbued with vitality not just because he shows up and takes snapshots; Diederich believes that his newfound friends, many living on the fringes of society, are the future of the USA. Read the rest of this entry »

"WEAR THE BRACELET," 2008.

By Laura Fox

Mark Bradford’s mural-scale “Helter Skelter I” fills nearly an entire wall in his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Complex, competing layers of images, colors, textures and materials are lacerated by overlapping networks of arterial lines streaming endlessly across its expanse. I attempt to follow one line across the plane, trying to absorb particulars despite its nearly hyperbolic immensity. Starting with the faded, upside-down text scrap “King,” the remnant of a merchant poster that Bradford found on the streets in his south Los Angeles neighborhood, my eyes travel to the layers of bubbling silver paper, bright day-glo colors and a half-submerged image of a woman’s face. My singular line disappears, merging with the larger system, so I jump from passageways to smaller alleys navigating my way through Bradford’s landscape.

Bradford’s art seems to welcome these intimate interactions. Although composed on canvas, none of his works are stretched or mounted onto a backing board. Instead, they adhere unceremoniously to the wall; the left-hand corners of “Helter Skelter I” even curl up, implying the limited temporality of its constructed surface. Read the rest of this entry »

"Convalescent Home"

“I’ve been to IKEA ten, maybe twelve times, for this project,” remarks Jeff Carter as we survey his current installation arching across the western corner of Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His gaze drifts over the modified IKEA products, and a small smile splays open his lips as he reflects on those trips, “I now know that modernist mecca far better than anyone should.”

While his current work, “The Common Citizenship of Forms,” isn’t Carter’s first use of the mega-store’s materials, it may be his most thoughtful. Carter establishes a formal dialogue between common representatives of modernist design—IKEA and the Bauhaus—through a series of large-scale architectural models, composing a microenvironment that represents the layout of demolished buildings from the Michael Reese Hospital Campus. Former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius had created a master plan for its 28-building campus in 1946 as part of a post-war urban renewal effort to revitalize its surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood, as well as designed the eight structures that Carter chose to recreate. Read the rest of this entry »

“Class of ‘67”

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In the 1960s, the baby boom generation was conscripted into a war in Southeast Asia that turned out to be as unnecessary as it was futile. In the early 1980s, some of those who served, especially artists who had seen combat, realized that they had unfinished business. Coming mostly from blue-collar backgrounds in small towns or inner-city neighborhoods, they had something to say about experiences that most Americans only knew as Hollywood entertainment. Exhibitions were organized to tour the country and eventually a national museum was established here in Chicago. One of the founders of that movement was Charlie Shobe (1940-2011), a Marine lieutenant from Petersburg, West Virginia. Shobe wrote, “My paintings are of the horror show that was Vietnam: butchery carried out for politicians, bureaucrats, and ambitious generals whose egos would not let them say ‘enough’; art for an indifferent public; art to honor those who lived and died there, and earned only a few hundred dollars a month. It would take a lifetime to paint it all.” And that’s what he did in the 1980s and nineties—not the romantic memorials that celebrate victory, but how it felt to have boots on the ground, and meditations on that ultimate insult to the invulnerability of youth: sudden and violent death. Read the rest of this entry »

"Machination"

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According to the 2010 Quilting In America survey, there are now 2.1 million active quilters from coast to coast. Most of them are trying to cover beds, not gallery walls, but ever since the 1971 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, quilting has been widely recognized as a contemporary art form, and designs echo a wide range of what can be found in contemporary painting, from geo-form to imagist.

Denise Burge, born in 1963, comes from the hills of North Carolina, where the women in her family have been quilters for several generations—her great-grandma even grew her own cotton for batting. Her brash, overstated imagery and improvisational use of materials resembles the outlandish work of that famous outsider artist from Georgia, Howard Finster. But it would be a mistake to call Burge a folk artist. For the past twenty years, she’s been an art academic at the University of Cincinnati. It would not be a mistake, however, to call her an outstanding designer. Her dynamic designs draw attention from a distance, while close-up, the voluptuous areas of detail can be intensely rewarding. As a kind of collage, quilting depends on whatever fragments of printed fabric an artist can find, so it feels like a miracle when all that diversity fits together so well and even tells a story. Read the rest of this entry »

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Several weeks ago, at a mock funeral for the death of painting, Charles Mahaffee set up a few amplifiers and drowned the audience in a crushing drone. Had it been a real funeral, the monotone dirge would have been the perfect accompaniment to oblivion’s threshold. The drone makes another forceful appearance in Mahaffee’s solo exhibition, titled “Chorus.” A stacked-television totem sets the mood for the show and greets gallery visitors with open-mouth shouting. Here, the focus is on the artist’s mouth hole as it emits a single, sustained tone that is somewhere between a wail and a meditation, and ultimately uncomfortable to hear. The fleshy air of sound and words is further explored in several wall-sized charcoal drawings. These depict, again, the mouth holes, and repeated words (such as “damn” and “dumb”), in an obsessive, chalkboard style, like a self-punishment. The drawings, akin to the sound pieces, suggest an action without end, and drawn in thick black layers of charcoal, they are stark, serious, and overpowering. The sum pieces in “Chorus” work over viewers in the same way that sacred silence does, opening a portal to a void. Ultimately, Mahaffee’s drone silences the chaos of the mind by obliterating it. Get out of your body and bathe in the unrest, the works seem to say; release your self. (Jason Foumberg) Read the rest of this entry »