"Honor Among 5," 1987/2011

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A long-time “spectator of public sexuality,” Doug Ischar was in his prime and in his element in the hey-day of the untrammeled breakout by gays from the closet and into the beaches and bars. In 1987, Ischar found his perfect scene: San Francisco’s leather bar, the Eagle, in the thick of its chock-full-of-patrons “beer busts,” at which erotic moves were communal and intimate at the same time, evincing the trust and confidence of social, cultural and personal revolution. Read the rest of this entry »

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Nowhere in the world is more socially complicated than Lebanon, with its dizzying array of religions and sects, and nowhere is more cosmopolitan than its capital Beirut, where all of them meet, mingle, fight and fraternize. Conflict photographer Jamal Saidi knows his native city intimately and has documented its troubled vicissitudes and its resilience for more than three decades in edgy, bold and energy-laden black-and-white and color shots. Contrast is the name of Saidi’s game; he wants to show, in this retrospective, the devastation and oppression that Beirut suffered in the late twentieth century as a result of civil war instigated by external powers, and its rebirth as the jewel and entrepot of the Middle East after the millennium. Read the rest of this entry »

"Autumn with Drawings" by Wyatt Grant

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The title of New York-based artist Lionel Guzman’s light-box sculpture, “Synthetic,” operates in a few registers. First, a single visual impression is created from disparate elements, by arranging cutouts, rotating color filter gels, a microcontroller, a fan and LEDs inside a stereo speaker case and behind a layer of Plexiglas and vintage graph paper. Guzman’s grid-curtained window shows rows of rectangular lights, like glowing flickering screens, receding into an illusory distance. Read the rest of this entry »

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When the New York World’s Fair closed in October, 1940, the map of Europe was not the same as when it opened, in 1939. The Republic of Poland no longer existed, so the contents of the Polish pavilion were bought by the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America. Many paintings and sculptures were taken to Chicago where they have resided ever since, in the Polish Museum on Milwaukee Avenue. But they haven’t always been on display, and the museum gallery has been closed for the past five years. Now, thanks to a major donation, its exhibition space has been remodeled and reopened as the Kusmierczak Art Gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

"368 S. Michigan," watercolor on cardboard

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David Lefkowitz’s exhibition, “Facilities and Grounds,” is a careful examination of the relationship between the natural world and the built environments we inhabit everyday. In his series of pristine watercolors on meticulously unfolded cardboard boxes, Lefkowitz depicts everything from grand views of a city, to sturdy-looking stone buildings, to airport terminals. The architecture, however, is completely nondescript; it seems to be no place in particular, just a sprawling expanse that could be any Midwestern city. Read the rest of this entry »

Marco and Martine. photo by Jessica Williams.

By Jason Foumberg

Golden Age, Chicago’s only venue dedicated to selling artists’ books and printed matter, is closing this November. Artists Marco Kane Braunschweiler and Martine Syms opened the shop in Pilsen in 2007, with a focus on affordable art publications by emerging artists, and moved to the West Loop in January 2010, where they hosted exhibition, lecture and performance programs among their well-stocked tables and shelves of printed projects from international artists. Golden Age also had a publishing arm, producing ten titles from emerging American artists, and they participated in events such as the NY Art Book Fair. Golden Age was more than a traditional shop with unusual product; it was also a place where people hung out, browsed books, and chatted with the always-enthusiastic owners, Marco and Martine, about new ideas and trends in contemporary art. But “Golden Age is completely over,” they told me. “We will not resuscitate the brand under any conditions. It’s a done deal.” Read the rest of this entry »

untitled, 2007

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If you’re in the mood for a full-strength shot of grotesquerie, glom on to Gary Briechle’s black-and-white Collodion portraits of Maine rednecks (they’ll beat the southern gents and belles any time for their unstudied naivete and unadulterated rawness). Ralph Meatyard’s backwoods surrealism and Diane Arbus’ freakish individualism fuse in Briechle’s studies of people who let their emotions hang out because they don’t know how to front, even if they’ve been posed. Read the rest of this entry »

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After eighteen years of tending bar and driving a cab, Dmitry Samarov is finally receiving the attention he deserves, thanks to “Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab,” published by the University of Chicago Press.

Two non-gallery shows popped up last month, featuring his sports- and music-related illustrations and some nearly abstract paintings of tumultuous bookshelves. Now, Lloyd Dobler Gallery has brought together a few of his Hack stories along with the original artwork that accompanied them. But unlike Samarov’s spot-on observations of humanity, all of these exhibitions miss the real story, namely that Dmitry Samarov is an exceptional painter, especially of cityscapes and interior views. The two ink and wash drawings are the only evidence at Lloyd Dobler of the adept, inventive and inspirational work in many media that can be found on the artist’s websites. Read the rest of this entry »

Sergio Gomez

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There’s no way to account for the objects in this exhibition except to point toward the large, glowing heart of its curator, Sergio Gomez, his own depiction of which is also on display. He loves art and artists, and since the opening of the Zhou B. Art Center in 2004, he’s been putting on shows of mostly figurative art in his 33 Gallery. Some of those artists share his Latino heritage, and in this exhibition, he joins them with many others from around the community to “celebrate Latino spirit, imagination and creative force in Chicago.” Rather than an attempt to identify the most important Chicago Latino artists, this is more like a cross-generational, community-building event, though it must be noted that most of Sergio’s community is Mexican, as only one Cuban and two Puerto Ricans are included. Some of the older artists Sergio has known for decades are included, beginning with Mario Castillo, who inspired him to become an artist at Joliet Junior College in 1990. But there are others that he has just met, like the graphic artist Dolores Mercado, who also works at the National Museum of Mexican Art. Read the rest of this entry »

Lynne Cohen, "Untitled" Office with fish on wall, 1978

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Travel back to the 1970s hip scene—think Talking Heads. There you will find Lynne Cohen who gained fame and acclaim from the photographic cognoscenti for her deadpan, straight-on black-and-white images of depopulated institutional interiors that come at you as starkly delineated stage sets for the absurd rituals of modern life, after the illusions of the sixties have been dispelled. Read the rest of this entry »