By Regan Golden-McNerney

One of my favorite characters in American literature is Pearl, the rambunctious daughter of Hester Prynne and Reverend Dimmesdale in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Pearl is as lustrous and elusive as her namesake; she is alternately demonic and angelic as she flits through the forest taunting her mother and dancing in the sparkling sunshine. Many “Pearls” are uncovered by the artists and authors in “Girls! Girls! Girls!”—a collection of eight essays on the figure of the girl in contemporary art. This book draws attention to the transformative, almost chimerical, power of girls. As the two editors, Lori Waxman and Catherine Grant, explain in their introduction, the girl, nearing the end of adolescence, can be a potent symbol of the fluidity of gender identity and also expand cultural definitions of the feminine. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Appalled and infuriated by what she saw on the shoreline and in the waters abutting the Gulf Coast in the wake of the 2010 BP oil disaster, photographer Zoe Strauss was moved to document the scene in color so that no one who looked would fail to see that those who caused the debacle should be held responsible. An accomplished art photographer, Strauss had to avoid aestheticizing her subject if she wanted to get her message across; yet she also needed to and could not help but take strongly composed images that attract and even arrest the eye. The oil solves the problem for Strauss; in its various brownish-black hues, and through its slimy, viscous clumps and pools and spots, it seeps and spreads and oozes without discernible rhyme or reason, staining and splotching whatever it touches—it cannot evoke a sense of beauty, and Strauss makes sure it stays that way. In order to deliver a one-two punch, Strauss puts her images into a slide show and also displays them separately in large-format banner prints. Either way she drives her point home: it’s an abomination, just look. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 20 at Iceberg Projects, 7714 North Sheridan

Christina Ramberg, "Troubled Sleeve," 1974

“Go Figure” is the title of a new group exhibition at the Smart Museum, and a confession of the show’s thematic ambivalence. “Go Figure” shrugs its shoulders at the reason for its own being. Twenty-nine paintings, drawings and sculptures from nine artists represent figurative and body-themed art since 1948. The past sixty years is a meaty chunk of human history, in which “the body” has been gender flipped, self-mutilated, liberated, at turns desired and diseased, beautified, destroyed, duplicated and digitized, so an exhibition of contemporary figurative artwork need not resort to a blanket genre. Will the Smart Museum’s exhibition schedule follow up with other close-at-hand tropes such as landscapes and still-lifes? “Go Figure” takes place in the art museum of the University of Chicago, a campus dedicated to cutting-edge research, but the exhibition fails to propose a hypothesis, a provocation, or an analysis of body consciousness as manifested in the past sixty years of human history. Read the rest of this entry »

Ursula Sokolowska, "Currency Exchange, Union Street, Chicago," 2011

RECOMMENDED

In this carefully selected summer photo show of fourteen accomplished, intelligent and distinctive gallery artists from around the world, Ursula Sokolowska stands out for her unsparingly direct straight color shots of gritty commercial and warehousing neighborhoods right here in Chicago. Perhaps it seems perverse to single out Sokolowska from a field that includes such global luminaries as Lalla Essaydi, Magdalena Campos-Pons, Luis Gonzalez Palma and our own Patty Carroll—and they are all here to their best effect—but Sokolowska makes their ingenious and insightful turns seem contrived when placed up against the world we live in that she has revealed in ominously illuminated color archival pigment prints. Who needs scenarios, set-ups and poses if we let Sokolowska transport us to the back lot of a dingy brick currency exchange on Union Street on a winter day after a snow, under a smudged aqua sky, where a lone gleaming white Mercedes sits parked? Had there been thirteen realists and one devotee of the imaginary, it might have been different. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 26 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior.

Arturo Garcia-Bustos

RECOMMENDED

There may be some doubt whether the populist, agrarian, folkloric ideals of the Mexican revolution still apply, a hundred years later, to a modern state on the verge of anarchy. But they have been inspiring many Mexican artists ever since, including Arturo García-Bustos (born 1926) and his wife, Rina Lazo (born 1923), whose prints are now showing  at Chicago’s newest Mexican art gallery, Casa Avilés, located  next to the Park West in Lincoln Park.

No pair of artists could have a better pedigree in twentieth-century Mexican art. Arturo was one of the four “Los Fridos” who studied with Frida Kahlo in her home in historic Coyoacan, while Rina was a studio assistant to Diego Rivera from 1947 until his death ten years later. Indeed, it was through their famous mentors that the couple first met, characteristically, at a political demonstration. Like their mentors, the couple works independently. Arturo tends to be more bombastic, while Rina is more lyrical. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What’s charming about Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry, after Bollywood, the most prolific in the world) is that the quality of production is no greater than the quality of narrative. They work with low-rent soap operas spiced up to satisfy the West African taste for violent revenge and juju magic, and they are shot with what appears to be hand-held home-video equipment. The budget for one Hollywood blockbuster could fund nearly a thousand films made in Nollywood, so there’s some comfort in knowing that not  a lot of cash and talent has been wasted on making them.

This is also true of the hand-painted movie posters that mobile movie theaters in rural Ghana used in the 1980s to advertise their shows. Slap-dashed together on the recycled cloth of flour bags, the images are as demented, ugly and goofy as anything the Chicago Monster roster and their descendants ever made, but far less serious since the intended audience is bored adolescents of all ages rather than art collectors. Read the rest of this entry »

Marina Ross

Bigger is not necessarily better, especially when it comes to an exhibition where anything can be art and everyone is an artist. The latest edition of the National Self-Portrait Exhibition is 300-percent larger than last year and fills up the entire 12,000 square feet of the first floor of the Zhou B. Art Center. At this rate, curator Sergio Gomez, who first created the show seven years ago in his small 33 Collective Gallery (now 33 Contemporary), will eventually move a mile east and fill up all of Cellular Field. Yes, it’s fun to grab a glass of wine and wade through the carnival of all the wild-desperate-cranky-wacky self-presentations. But at some point, one has to ask whether any of these selves are especially worth knowing. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s happy hour at Hinge Gallery. Co-owners Gretel Garcia Cuba and Holly Sabin sit in the front room of their storefront space on Chicago and Damen, drinking Blue Moons and talking with two friends and a printmaker they’ve commissioned to paint his first mural in the gallery’s back kitchen. “We like to encourage people that already have a body of work to continue exploring new ideas,” says Cuba.

After meeting seven years ago as members of the same art collective, Deadline Projects, the pair began seriously talking about opening a gallery this past February. “We thought if we put our forces together we could really create a space of our liking [to showcase the work of] artists who are around the same age range as us and whose work is just undersold and underrated, but we think is extremely valuable,” says Cuba. Read the rest of this entry »

James Goggin

By Laura Fox

“In a way, this position is my first job,” James Goggin tells me, referring to his transition last August from running his own design studio in London to becoming the director of design, publications and digital media at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Goggin’s approach to design is transgressive; he explores ideas across supposed boundaries, like museum departments and mediums ranging from print and digital to spatial and architectural. With other past roles as a magazine art director, university visiting critic, lecturer and even writer, Goggin’s expansive mindset dovetails neatly with the new models for audience engagement and institutional innovation currently pursued by the MCA. We talked about his role in further extending the MCA’s reach into the city.

One of the main reasons Madeleine Grynsztejn recruited you to the MCA was to create a new visual identity. What’s happened so far?  

This new identity isn’t window dressing. I didn’t want to just produce a new logo, color, or different font. We’re spending the year talking to every department, asking such questions as how do the databases work, how does the point of sales system in the store work, how does ticketing work. We have to know how everything functions before we can design a new identity. And, much of that is logistical rather than aesthetic design. It might not be something that’s tangibly visible as design to the public, but it can be seen in the overall visitor experience.

The release of the new identity will coincide with the culmination of Michael Darling’s curatorial planning, the restructuring of the building and galleries, new people arriving, and all of the programming started by Madeleine Grynsztejn more than three years ago. As a designer, I want to be working with the overall context—here, it’s the city of Chicago and our links with the community. Read the rest of this entry »

“Was dying as she thought, or different?”

RECOMMENDED

Art is one of the few professions where playfulness is encouraged. You don’t want your orthopedic surgeon playing around with your hip, but it’s okay for an artist to play around with shapes and references, and the artworks themselves, like tarot cards, for example, can be used for either serious divination and self knowledge, or just to play a game like poker.

Rita O’Hara’s acrylic, gouache and watercolor paintings are very much like tarot cards. They offer archetypes like the mandala (self), the butterfly (soul), the fish (transition), etcetera, and she is quite serious about them. She is not a commercial artist dabbling in metaphysics to design posters that hang above the scented candles in a new-age bookstore. She’s had a long career counseling the chronically mentally ill and adults with developmental disabilities. But neither is she a therapist dabbling in art. Over that period, she has chosen and followed a single teacher, Robert Guinan, the master of a clean, sparse narrative style that effectively presents gritty life on the streets of Chicago. O’Hara has adapted that style to present the buoyant but sometimes desperate life of the soul in the sunless world of dreams. The sense of craftsmanship is impeccable, as it should be for such a serious subject. Whether they work as vehicles for self-awareness is another matter, and perhaps, despite claims to the contrary, the archetypes she employs are more specific to her background in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family than they are universal. To her, for example, a swan represents the supernatural, while to me, it’s the aggressive, voluptuous bird that’s always been trying to mate with poor Leda. But still, I found some of her images haunting and memorable, like the parade of uniformed women in “Was dying as she thought, or different?” Read the rest of this entry »