David Leggett paints while listening to the stand-up comedy of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, which serve as kindling for his sometimes cartoonish, playfully rendered mixed media artworks. “In the early 1990s when Def Comedy came along, it was extremely popular, but if you listen now, it was horrible,” Leggett says. “They were doing impersonations of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor just using the punch lines. Saying ‘dick’ and ‘pussy’ doesn’t make it funny. Those are just words, and that’s kind of how I see some artists—they can say ‘Oh I’m riffing on this,’ but so what?” From his process to his product, Leggett is interested in inauthentic reproductions of 1980s art and hip-hop culture.

Leggett laughed readily, both at himself and his work, discussing his first solo show at Western Exhibitions, titled “It’s getting to the point where nobody respects the dead. Fresh to death.” Leaning back on a small chair in his compact East Garfield Park studio, narrowed further by layers of leaning paintings, Leggett said his work is not a “moral compass.” He treaded lightly on questions of racial or political tension, and when questioned about stamps of men in black face that appear in earlier works, he answered with an incredulous giggle that he bought the stamps on eBay, fascinated by the fact that they existed at all. Read the rest of this entry »

"Coloring Book"

By Damien James

Riva Lehrer’s art is fundamentally about one thing: the body in the world. Which is not to be reductive. The potential for variation is limitless; how we live in our space and interact with each other, how we are shaped by and how we shape each experience. Lehrer’s most frequently considered variation is that of variation itself, often in the form of disability and the psychological freight of being seen as something other, something different, which stems from disability. With variation come questions of beauty: what is beautiful and how do we define it, and how can our ideas of beauty expand to encompass more than the sort of vacant-eyed plasticized images constantly crushing down on us. Read the rest of this entry »

Joan Mitchell in 1951

By Janina Ciezadlo

How much do we need to know about the feelings and ideas that give a painter the energy to push a brush around a large canvas? Having just read the new biography ”Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter,” by Patricia Albers, I now know a great deal about what Joan Mitchell did from day to day. Some of it, not all, by any means, is pertinent to appreciating and thinking about her work.

This extraordinarily detailed biography on Joan Mitchell will be particularly compelling to Chicagoans for the picture it offers of a financially and culturally privileged girlhood on the Near North Side during the 1930s and forties. Mitchell, the daughter of an overbearing doctor, who “wanted his daughters to compete like boys, but also, confusingly, to behave like little ladies,” grew up with mixed messages. Her mother was an editor for Harriet Monroe’s modernist journal Poetry and friends with Chicago artists like Manierre Dawson. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Louis Strobel, a steel and wrought-iron engineer, a colleague of Louis Sullivan, John Holabird and Sylvia Shaw Judson, among others, constructed the rolling bascule bridge at Van Buren Street. 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 »

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 »

Chicago buildings look like dirty cakes, Edie Fake tells me, and I imagine not a wedding but the bachelor party—who or what kind of person might jump out of a giant dirty cake? Fake’s drawings from the “City of Night” series, which are fictional portraits of architectural façades, inspire a little guessing game. “I trust you can imagine what goes on inside,” says Fake.

He begins with the name of a historic Chicago spot that served or promoted the gay and lesbian community, such as Sappho, The Virgo Out and The Cabin Inn, and dresses it up in architectural fantasy. Although all of these clubs, bars, community centers and gathering spots are now shuttered, photographs and narratives exist in various local archives. Still, Fake refigures their street-view facades using a composite of architectural details culled from his observation of Chicago vernacular styles. These are small, human-scaled buildings, decidedly not skyscrapers, that sport rainbow siding, or a swinging saloon door, or slanted roofs like a suburban residence. There is little sign of people in these drawings, besides a half-pulled window shade in one. The facades are still and quiet, like the exaggerated monuments to the dead in Graceland Cemetery. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Colleen Durkin

By Ella Christoph

There’s no hiding at Club Nutz—the comedy club nestled into the second floor of a building on Clark and Hubbard Streets is a tiny, twelve by twelve foot space. Darkly lit with a spotlight on the stage, small balconies give some viewers a tiny bit more breathing room. Still, performers can’t avoid looking audience members in the eye, and vice versa. The club, the brainchild of brothers Scott and Tyson Reeder, and Scott’s wife Elysia Borowy-Reeder, sells itself on the claim that it’s the world’s smallest comedy club, as though that is something people seek out. But the owners claim it makes comedy way, way better. Scott compares it to watching a movie on a plane and laughing out loud even when the movie’s not funny. “There’s something about that enclosed space, and the fact that you might die, that leads to heightened emotions,” he says. It’s the same at Club Nutz. “Even a bad act has a certain intensity to it.”

The intimacy raises the stakes of the event—if a joke falls flat, there’s no hiding. Scott says there’s one serial performer that has shown up at Club Nutz a number of times. “He just told all these terrible facts about his life,” Scott says, laughing. “I mean they were terrible, a really rough childhood, and he didn’t present them in any funny way. And the content—I mean it was kind of funny, but it was heartbreaking. I don’t know if it would work at a normal comedy club. There’s something about the scale of it where it’s more intimate, or people can feel comfortable sharing something like that.”

The Reeders often work with small spaces. First and foremost visual artists, the comedy club is just the latest venture in their series of weird enterprises. Beginning in 2002, the Reeders curated at The Wrong Gallery in New York. The smallest exhibition space in New York, it was “nothing more than an expensive-looking glass door identical to those of the Chelsea white cubes it satirized,” the Reeders write. Designed and curated by class clown of the art world Maurizio Cattelan, Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni, The Wrong Gallery crossed lines without ever opening its doors. Peeking through the locked single glass door, labelled with the gallery’s irreverent name in simple black type, viewers could see whatever art they exhibited on the brick wall of the gallery, which had two-and-a-half square feet of floor space. After being evicted from its New York location in 2005, it moved to the Tate, where it exhibited pieces like Dorothy Iannone’s “orgasm box,” a colorfully decorated box framing video of Iannone’s face as she masturbated. Read the rest of this entry »

"LF4-5," 2008. Blood, UV resin, plexiglass

Cattle blood taken from slaughterhouses, Plexiglas and UV resin make up the components that Jordan Eagles uses to create his preserved-blood paintings. “Most people come into the studio and expect it to smell. It doesn’t even smell. I know,” Eagles says. In the past, he needed to leave the blood in Tupperware containers to get the blood from red to black. This would leave such an offensive odor he would have trouble breathing and would need a mask at times. This prompted him to develop a new technique for aging the blood.

In 2006 Eagles won the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) award for best emerging artist. His exhibition at David Weinberg Gallery is his first show in Chicago, with nine pieces on view. Their colors are exquisitely bold and rich, and each image is reminiscent of the solar system with sunspots, exploding stars, the cellular structure of the body, or fireworks.

“What I am hoping is that the viewer is drawn into it and the imagination starts to wander and starts to feel wonder in the material,” Eagles explains. “That experience for them brings them to a place to experience their own set of circumstances in spirit and body. What is also interesting is that you take something that is no longer living and it is killed and making something beautiful out of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Isaac Bloom

By Pedro Vélez

Have you ever seen a thawed-out caveman brought back to life? How about two cavemen? On September 19, 2002, William Ligue Jr. and his 15-year-old son jumped onto the playing field in Cellular Field (home of the White Sox) and attacked Kansas City Royals first-base-coach Tom Gamboa. Shirtless, out-of-control and under-the-influence, this pair of super fanatics was acting up without a reasonable cause. The scene was ridiculous and scary; especially for U.S. audiences not accustomed to seeing physical violence perpetrated against their sports heroes. Nothing new to soccer fans across the globe.

The Ligues might have disgraced the holy grounds of baseball’s diamond dirt a long time ago, but their specter still lingers in Ben Stone’s psyche. Luckily for us, because the artist is about to unveil a major work based on the events. Using the attackers as metaphor for all dysfunctional American families, Stone, a resident of Berwyn, has built three life-size realist sculptures, or contemporary versions of Roman statues, that capture the exact moment Gamboa hit the ground, his cap flying, while the father-and-son tag team frantically surround him, in poses reminiscent of prehistoric men. Sure to raise some eyebrows, the sculptures will be on view starting this Friday at Western Exhibitions. Read the rest of this entry »

In Latham Zearfoss’ 2008 video “Self Control,” an animated silhouette formed by a pair of hands, “the spirit of… past and future utopias,” appears in the multicolored bars of a test screen, announcing its intention “to guide you to the new subjectivity, a place of great trust and sensuality.” This magical optimism of communitarian queerness, a theme throughout his work, has an intriguing dissonance with an assertion made in another video: “The personal is NOT political!” This is a call-and-response chant led by Anil Ramayya, a speaker on behalf of the collective Feel Tank at “Pilot TV,” a 2004 event focusing on radical video and “queer feminist trespass” held over a space of four days in 2004 and documented in Zearfoss’ 2006 documentary, co-directed with Dylan Mira: “A Call and an Offering.” Ramayya’s statement presumably had some ironic intention, but it’s hard to escape the suspicion that the “spirit’s” promises, particularly in a video focused on themes of trust and danger, also connote emotional distance. Read the rest of this entry »