Inside the DePaul Art Museum's inaugural exhibition, "Re: Chicago," with a sculpture by Juan Angel Chavez

By Jason Foumberg

The DePaul Art Museum seems to have risen as quickly as it was realized. Part of a campus-wide flourishing of the arts, including new and forthcoming buildings for the schools of theater and music, the new museum building will open September 17. The galleries were formerly hidden in the university’s library. Now, the museum has a fully accessible public entrance on Fullerton Avenue, directly next to the CTA’s Red Line station. From that station’s platform, people waiting for trains will be addressed by a large video monitor from the museum’s second-floor gallery window, with special projects commissioned by the curators. The first is an interactive video conceived by the design team Plural, who is also responsible for the museum’s new design identity. Read the rest of this entry »

Alison Ruttan, "Evered Is Interested (detail from Dean Sequence)," 2009

RECOMMENDED

Taking on the time-honored conundrum of the meaning of human life, curator Allison Grant brings together sixteen photo-artists, each of whom approaches the question from a different angle and distinctive strategy. Some of the contributors are smitten with contemporary science, others with their fantasies about it; some are straight documentarians of the survivals of primeval ages in our world, others set their fancies free in constructions and scenarios. Read the rest of this entry »

Tessa Siddle

RECOMMENDED

I didn’t expect a youthful art show to represent sex, as did Quentin Crisp, to be “the last refuge of the miserable.” But the libidinal charge driving recent utopian art seems, at least in the group show “Splay” now on view at Roxaboxen, to have fizzled. Elise Goldstein hung a series of twenty-four cotton handkerchiefs that physically record the artist’s act of forcing herself to cum once per hour over the span of a day. Read the rest of this entry »

"Bamboo Forest Kamakura"

RECOMMENDED

Designed to harmonize with the topography of the land in which it is set, to have an integral relation with its surroundings, to imitate nature, and to incorporate asymmetry, each Japanese garden is different—spare or lush (sometimes both by turns), colorful or monochrome, terraced or flat. Yet Japanese gardens have in common a peaceful beauty cut to the quick by traces of the rough edges of reality. John Faier, an American photographer smitten with the Japanese sensibility, has attempted to capture it in medium-format color images that are straight-on and unprepossessing, letting his subjects convey the carefully controlled disorder rather than adding to it himself. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s an eclectic good time,” says Charlie Rees, a member of the Flat Iron Artists’ Association (FIAA) and an organizer for this year’s Coyote Art Festival. In its second year, Coyote will bring more than 140 artists of everything from music to poetry to visual arts to Chicago’s Near Northwest Side.

Wicker Park/Bucktown used to be the home to the Around the Coyote festival and arts organization, which would draw thousands of visitors yearly for a weekend festival in September. The organization eventually chose to leave their home neighborhood and hold a more curated event, but shortly after making the change both organization and festival disappeared. A few years later, the FIAA decided to start their festival borrowing the Coyote name, one that returned to the original idea of a neighborhood-based, uncurated event.  Read the rest of this entry »

By Christopher Sperandio

You couldn’t get farther from the jockeying and social positioning of the international art world than Manawa, Wisconsin. Just a few miles from this small rural hamlet, however, sits the Great Poor Farm Experiment, a new idea about the art institution, summoned from thin air, seemingly, by Chicago artists Brad Killam and Michelle Grabner.

Brad and Michelle, a power couple famous for their kind and entrepreneurial engagement with the art world, invited me to spend this summer at the Poor Farm, part temporary exhibition site and part artist residency, in order to make a new artwork for exhibition there in August. The idea I got was that the Poor Farm was founded by and for artists much in the spirit of Mickey Rooney’s “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” The instant I heard about it, I knew I wanted to see it for myself. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Representational accuracy is a severe challenge to pictorial composition that usually results in the prosaic rather than the poetic. There are plenty of textbooks on perspective and anatomy, but passionate sensitivity seems to be a rare, unsolicited gift from the gods. So rare that when it happens, a painting screams for attention, as the work of Elsa Muñoz did when noticed by distinguished Chicago painter Marcos Raya in 2009 at the now-defunct Around the Coyote art fair. Raya introduced her to the Dubhe Carreño Gallery, which gave her a show the following summer. That show was seen by Cesáreo Moreno, visual arts director of the National Museum of Mexican Art, and he gave her a six-month one-person show this summer. Isn’t that the way an art community is supposed to work? And all this began just three years after Muñoz got a bachelor’s degree from the American Academy of Art, which is mostly known as a commercial art school. Read the rest of this entry »

Copyright 2011 Paul E. Germanos

RECOMMENDED

The uncanny potential of domestic objects is key to the art-world appeal of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 sitcomesque horror classic “Poltergeist.” Twenty years later, Paul Pfeiffer’s series of sculptures by that name recreated the tower of chairs stacked on the kitchen table by Spielberg’s ghost. In “Renovation Creep,” Antena gallery’s current show, Daniel Bruttig, Joseph Cassan and Erin Thurlow remake the gallery as a dysfunctional domestic environment of desiccated ephemera (perhaps a foreclosed hoarder home) similarly inhabited by ambient menace. Echoing the Reagan-era TV through whose static the ghosts communicate in the film, a hulking monitor encased in veneer and sitting on a mat of lush pile plays Bruttig’s “Carpet Master,” a video featuring black-and-white carpet textures. One delicately painted stain on the wall evokes an absent staircase, and another suggests recently removed tile. Atop sits Bruttig’s “Glass Stack,” a precarious nonsensical tower of jars, dripping rainbow hues like a psychedelic candle and topped by a casserole dish and a marble. Jagged shards of glass protrude upwards from various sculptures, some painted as trompe-l’oeil mirrors. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A new twist on the old truth that the photograph, especially when it is meant to flatter a product or a person, or show an ideal situation, has nothing to do with actual life is provided by Aron Gent in his twelve color photos that send up staged and posed images by showing their evil doppelgangers. The most ingenious and successful of Gent’s conceits is to stage a scenario in which a fictitious family that is to be posed for a celebratory dinner portrait is caught before the set-up in a variety of detached postures and expressions. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In ten color fantasy scenario photo-works, Sabina Cosic illustrates the story of Mary Mae and her brother Chaos—a tale of sibling rivalry that puts Cain and Abel to shame for its utter descent into horrifying absolute evil, which Cosic relates in texts below each image in small print. Suffice it to say that Mary Mae suffers from the worst case of nihilistic existentialist envy this side of Satan: she resents Chaos because she has no heart and he has a good one; in consequence, she tries to kill him in the most hideous ways—the ones we find described in books on contemporary child abuse. We can see it all in the photo-works, which Cosic composes in the computer out of photographs and her digital tweaking, coming up with ghoulish scenes out of a fairy-tale book that would be sure to frighten any child to death, and might do the same for some adults if they looked at them long enough. With Cosic, the bad seed has blossomed into the flower of evil. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 2 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln