I met artist Peter Anton just as he was about to have a life-long wish reach fruition: seeing his work installed for the very first time in a formal gallery space. This dream was a long time coming for Anton, who is now 78. His reaction revealed that the wait was worth it. Anton, who is wheelchair-bound, gazed up at his paintings and the photos of his work, grinning unabashedly, his eyes wide behind plastic-framed glasses. His first words were “Wow, wow, wow!”

For someone who has experienced many personal struggles (nearly dying from pneumonia at age 3, mourning his brother’s childhood death, being removed from his decaying home by social services), Anton is a rarity—affectionate, outrageously funny, unpretentious, and humbled by his own life and experiences.

“I promised God, until I’m finished, for my life to have purpose, to serve people,” Anton says. “I’ve had perseverance, you know what that is? You have to keep trying, keep trying.” Read the rest of this entry »

“If I’m satisfied, there’s something wrong,” says Diego Leclery, reflecting on an art practice focused on his own self-identity and how to express, subvert, denigrate or indulge it.

For his solo exhibition titled “The Natural,” now on view at Julius Caesar, Leclery hand-delivered postcards to advertise the show, allowing him to fully relish each recipient’s reaction as they caught their first glimpse of a fully frontally nude Leclery amidst a lush Brazilian rainforest. The most salacious piece in the exhibition, however, is “You Watching Me Watching Congo,” an unedited documentation of Leclery watching the film “Congo” as he reclines feyly akimbo on an overstuffed couch. It is a gender-ambiguous restaging of the reclining nude genre. Read the rest of this entry »

"L.A. Claim," 2010, gouache on paper

“These are the people I love,” remarks Carmen Price as we admire his ninety-eight panels of graphically embellished names of friends. The salon-style grid of drawings, like commemorative texts, are adorned faintly with pearlescent acrylic washes and cubed or loopy cursive lettering.

Price traces his involvement in the arts back to grade school where he decorated classmates’ Trapper Keepers, and a similar adolescent distraction dominates his visual vocabulary today. Although a single work can engage Price for a year or more, he describes his approach to each composition as largely intuitive, with no particular plan of attack or specific outcome in mind when he begins.

This call-and-response method, a fluid, almost musical template for working, produces layers of transparency blocked by opacity, indivisible amalgamations of various mark-making and a variety of paint-handling techniques that make a single piece appear almost collaged together. Othertimes, images read left to right, row by row—an individuated, wholly imagined strand of hieroglyphics. Complicating this matrix is his employment of a handful of iconic symbols, namely the caricatured alien head a la 1990’s X-Files ads, that function as surrogates for the unknown, the ambiguous or the literal other worldly. Read the rest of this entry »

John Neff glances back over his shoulder to the empty café, to make sure no one is spying on us as he divulges the details of a work in progress. With Neff, whose large-scale sculptural installations are often spectacularly theatrical, it’s difficult to tell if his paranoia is also a bit of theatrics. In any case, I swore to keep Neff’s plans secret, and they are no small plans. He often thinks big. For instance, his current gallery installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, part of the “Production Site” group exhibition, is envisioned as a 1:5.75 scale model for a pornographic enlarging machine, of sorts. If ever fully realized and magnified, according to Neff’s scaled dimensions, the life-sized body casts here would become god-sized, and the printed pornographic images would be human-sized, and almost real. At least, that is the fantasy.

In press releases, art reviews and artist statements, we often read that a particular work of art is responsible for seismic shifts of consciousness. For example, an artwork can create a tension (political, sexual, formal, whatever), or it re-orders and recontextualizes our perception, or it unearths deep-seated fears and desires within the viewer. That contemporary art rarely attains these lofty goals isn’t the failing of inflated art speak, but the confusion of virtual reality for real reality. Whatever the fiction—porn, religion, or art—you must have a lapse of cold sober reality if the power of fantasy is to take hold. Read the rest of this entry »

Design: Ryan Swanson

By Jason Foumberg

This is the eighth issue of Breakout Artists, our annual selection of Chicago’s best emerging visual artists. This year is the first time that the Breakout Artists cover story includes an exhibition component, and since the issue always coincides with Art Chicago, it fits that our artists are showing in the fair. In years past we’ve easily showcased artists with performative and community-based projects. This year, the exhibition gives us the opportunity to focus solely on artists who are strong image and object makers, and who are committed to representing our contemporary moment through a visual idiom.

Newcity’s Breakout Artists are on view in booth 12-165 at Art Chicago, floor 12 of the Merchandise Mart, April 29-May 3. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Antone

By Rachel Furnari

When I arrived at Leroy’s, Chicago artist Theaster Gates was recording sound pieces with the Black Monks of Mississippi for his upcoming show at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Leroy turned out to be an actual person and the place turned out to be the converted first floor of his house in Humboldt Park, not the rehearsal space I assumed I was headed to when Gates invited me to watch a mass-choir rehearsal for the opening in Milwaukee. Of course, this wasn’t a rehearsal at all, and my insistent knocking during the recording session brought a Gates collaborator, Dara Epison, to lead me into the makeshift studio. Gates silently handed me headphones and I watched as he led the group with an understated confidence through a series of rhythmic Om chants that somehow blended the traditional low, repetitive hum with the intonations and shifting vocalizations of gospel and the blues. As the group passed the leadership of the chanting back and forth, Gates shifted seamlessly between his roles as the generative force in the collaboration and just another member of the chorus.

Although it was already after 8pm on a school night, it turned out that Gates was hoping to fit our interview in between another interview, for a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a dinner at the Illinois Arts Council. On the way to the California Clipper, he apologetically picked up the call from Harvard. While I waited for Gates to return to his cosmopolitan, I had ample time to consider Gates’ recent rise to prominence in the national art scene. Read the rest of this entry »

A sticker by Alvendia

“I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top,” wrote Claes Oldenburg, in 1961, in a non-traditional artist statement titled “I am for an art.” Brandon Alvendia would like to see more artists define their practices in light of Oldenberg’s spirited dictums. He reframes Oldenburg’s “everyday crap” into “everyday pragmatism.” It’s a phrase that guides his own work. “How do I make best use of this,” he continually asks himself.

Alvendia re-purposes things at every turn, from bargain-priced floppy discs (gutted, they make good CD cases) to out-of-print books that he photocopies and binds into paperback books for free distribution. Not everything that he re-purposes is an object, though. For example, exhibitions are readymade platforms for the creative presentation of other artists’ work. “Curating is my art practice,” says Alvendia. For the Miami art fairs in 2007, he exhibited the work of ten artists in his wallet, a fitting context for the moneyed affair but also an economic means of exposure for the ten artists.

Alvendia’s latest artistic-slash-curatorial mission is “Fair Use: Information Piracy and Creative Commons in Contemporary Art and Design,” which recently opened at Columbia College, where he teaches part-time. The exhibition features about a dozen artists who test the limits of copyright law. Image appropriation has been a hot topic since the 1980s, but the rules of the game keep changing. As the law adapts to deal with artistic interventions, artists keep pushing the envelope. Read the rest of this entry »

The Seychelles sheath-tailed bat

As studio artists, Jenny Kendler and Molly Schafer felt limited in the amount of time and money they could spare to champion “the magical and natural world” that they both care deeply about. Through their previous collaborations they learned that activism sometimes works better outside the gallery system. “We found there exists enormous gaps between artists and activists,” Kendler says. It’s not only awareness campaigns, but also, and mostly, money that makes a tangible contribution to activist projects. One-hundred percent of the profits from the Endangered Species Print Project are contributed to specific foundations and research groups.

Kendler and Schafer began by researching the population of the Seychelles Sheath-Tailed Bat, numbering a dangerously low thirty-seven. Accordingly, they created a print depicting the bat in an edition of just thirty-seven. Through their project Kendler and Schafer have been able to work directly with organizations such as the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles, Project Golden Frog and The Marmot Recovery Foundation. These organizations, composed of scientists and researchers, many times are the sole entity working to preserve a species, and as a result none of the groups the women contacted have ignored their requests. In addition to contributing funds, Kendler and Schafer have been able to compile reliable, current statistics on these species in a single source: their website. Read the rest of this entry »

I walked into Woman Made Gallery this past Wednesday to review Beatrice Fisher’s retrospective, surveying fifty years of art making. Intrigued by the gallery’s website, which noted this was Fisher’s first solo exhibition and that she had studied under renowned Chicago artists Karl Wirsum and Don Baum, I had certain expectations; I was instantly taken, overtaken, by not only the range of her work but its consistent beauty, energy and wit. Two days later, on the day of the opening, I learned that Fisher had just passed away.

On my first visit I spent twenty or so minutes with Beate Minkovski, co-founder and executive director of the gallery. Beate told me it was possible that this would be the seventy year-old artist’s final show, as she was fighting brain cancer. The artist’s son was in the day before to say his mother wouldn’t be able to attend the opening. Beate pointed out some of her favorite pieces and offered a bit of background, brought me a chair, and welcomed me to spend as much time with the work as I wished. Read the rest of this entry »

It may seem like a small victory, but paper still exists. Yes, paper, that humble material. What we once claimed to drown in is now a collector’s item. For some, it’s like Tic Tacs, disposable and then who cares? But many do cherish and covet it. I’ve seen someone sniff paper and sing, “Ohh that smells like paper.” I’ve seen someone mourn a crinkle. I’ve seen strange rituals involving paper cuts (no, I jest). In spite of the digital and the recycling revolutions, paper survives. Better than that, paper, and the things placed atop it, are time capsules. If you enjoy libraries or archives you can appreciate that.

So, it’s no wonder that people hoard newspapers. Their hoarding keeps long-dead information in constant vigil. Jeremy Lundquist isn’t a hoarder but he has collected ephemeral papers, or ephemera, in order to propagate them, to let them live again and again. His output, fittingly, is on paper. Lundquist is a printmaker, itself a technology on the brink of extinction and with a thick history, from mass commercial applications to avant-garde experimentation. Artistically, Lundquist sits right between these two poles, culling material from pamphlets and signs and turning them into subtle etchings that kiss the paper they’re printed on. Read the rest of this entry »