Is William Staples a man out of time, or does the rigor with which he poses questions about his medium provide an unsettling reminder of how easy it’s become to collapse art history into visual culture, paintings into “images”? To look at Staples’ paintings is to grapple with this question. Most of his works are small enough to fit comfortably on an easel, though Staples himself doesn’t use one, and use classic art-historical subjects like flowers, landscapes and horses to ask questions about perception and artifice that obsessed Modern painters but are now often assumed to have been sufficiently answered.

“I’m interested in painting as a continuum, as a tradition, not in trying to break away from something or destroy or subvert it,” says Staples, who earned an MFA from UIC in 2002 and is a founding editor of the late, great visual-art journal Blunt Art Text (B.A.T.), published in Chicago from 2005-2007, which dedicated itself to the art of long-form art criticism. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

I’ve long romanticized the role of Old Man. Retired and happily pensioned, my time is my own. The long days return with childlike buoyancy, I drink bourbon for sport, and maybe write a memoir because, hell, I’ve seen it all. But old age is a destination, and like any long road trip there’s bound to be moments when the best mix tape gets monotonous. The journey is dotted with weird smells that creep in through the closed windows, rest-stop romances, cliché detours and midlife-crisis sports cars speeding fast toward metastasized tumor bumps in the road. If we reach the bald, wintry peak on all three legs (cane included), wise but weathered, we may find not keys to the kingdom but a death panel reaching for the plug.

Growing old is the topic of The Glue Factory, a new project initiated by the Museum of Contemporary Phenomena. When Helen Slade, Mike Newman and Rashmi Ramaswamy first collaborated under the banner of the Museum of Contemporary Phenomena they presented House of Fear. It was around Halloween, 2006, and they surveyed visitors at the Ravenswood Art Walk, asking, “What do you fear?” The national threat level was orange, unconvincing like a fake tan, and unreflected in the survey’s collected data, which was surprisingly terrorist-free. Respondents admitted fears of spiders, rats, strange dogs and heights. They expressed fears of rape and homelessness. Mostly, though, the majority feared growing old in America, with its attendant problems: obsolescence, loneliness, failure, loss of mental and physical health, “memories of youthful indiscretions,” poverty and, simply, the fear “that life is too short.” It’s a list long enough to prompt an existential binge. Read the rest of this entry »

An artist working in collage can make one of two major statements: by selecting and cutting material from piles of old magazines, the collagist either despairingly critiques the ever-flowing fountain of consumer information, or else she is a cosmopolite, joining disparate faces and places into a communal frame.

Candace Hunter is this second type of collagist. She is a practitioner of inclusion and willingly inherits the wealth, and burdens, of history. When Hunter was a child, she visited the Art Institute so often with her mother and siblings that she believed the museum was built for her. She saw every exhibition, and was privy to behind the scenes tours. Later in life it came as a surprise to her that not everyone in her community felt this way about the museum. Although it is open to the public, many African-Americans, she says, do not feel welcomed by high culture. They restrict their own access.

“Like the air we breathe,” says Hunter, “art belongs to all.” For seven years Hunter covered the African-American art scene in Chicago for N’Digo, a weekly magazine. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

Elijah Burgher introduced me to sigils, which are words or sentences with the vowels removed and the remaining letters crushed into a compact shape. The phrase, now unreadable, resembles an abstract line drawing in its careful composure. If the sigil’s creator wishes to release its original meaning into the world, like a spell, he must successfully activate it by gazing at it during an orgasm or other climactic experience.

Sigils look wonderfully artistic, but they’re not usually displayed as artworks. Instead, they are private matters representing personal desires—for power, love, whatever. Elijah’s sketchbook contains a few sigils interleaved among his drawings, and he admits to burying some sigils in the undercoat of his paintings. The sigils have produced results, he says. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

On a recent summer evening at dusk, a group of people decided to go for a walk together, silently. This involved, most basically, a quiet herd of amblers moving through a Logan Square neighborhood eyeing green grass and fingering cinderblock walls. On another level, though, this was a Walk, as Thoreau would have it; not just the shuffling of sneakers against sidewalk to get from train to home, but a saunter—Thoreau’s word—for the sake of sauntering. Thoreau, of course, wrote a treatise on it. Buddhists call it “walking meditation” when you’re consciously walking, but it is decidedly not exercise.

Walking seems to be the perfect antidote to a full day of writing, or reading, or working creatively. The poet Wordsworth’s working method included obsessively pacing a path in his yard to help stoke the creative fire. Solutions and connections become clear while walking, as the brain and senses are reminded of a world beyond the fifteen-inch tunnel connecting your face and the computer screen. A little breeze tickles your eyeball. The mind becomes unburdened.

The Logan Square walk was coordinated by Michelle Tupko and Adam Jameson as part of the Red Rover reading series. The value of walking for a bunch of happily sedentary types was made clear by Tupko and Jameson as they introduced the phrase “reading a space,” meaning that a walker may observe the sights—say, a burning shopping cart—as metaphors and symbolic pieces culled from a larger text, the world. Perceiving the banal set piece of one’s life with elevated intentionality helps us to recognize the built environment as built, says Michelle. But why would she want to do that? Read the rest of this entry »

By Rilee Chastain

On a day filled with the fresh, budding appearance of spring sun, Patrick Skoff arrives at Diversey Harbor in Lincoln Park with a gleaming poster-size white canvas and an abundance of paint supplies in tow. With the shining Chicago skyline as his backdrop, Skoff begins his trademark performance of squirting paint on the canvas using a ketchup squeeze bottle while park visitors walk past.

“What are you painting?” asks a 6-year-old boy who has been fishing in the harbor.

“Just a picture,” Skoff replies.

“What kind of picture?” the child presses.

“An abstract picture,” Skoff answers. “Do you want to help?” Read the rest of this entry »

Gladys Nilsson, "Turnabout Walk," watercolor and gouache on paper, 2009

By Jason Foumberg

Gladys Nilsson, an unrelenting Imagist painter born in 1940, and Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, age unpublished but of the same generation, attended art school together in the early-1960s in Chicago. For the most part, both have stayed here to live as working artists, exhibiting regularly and selling paintings with enough frequency to encourage a continuous output over the past forty-odd years. The early sixties in Chicago proved to be a highly fortuitous moment for Gladys, as her art was aligned with several others who formed the seminal Hairy Who group under Don Baum’s curatorial direction. Eleanor did not break through with this group. Although the two artists do not have cause to speak to each other, their respective bodies of work are like splinters from the same tree; where Gladys’ art has bloomed in the light, Eleanor’s adapted to the shade. Today, they each have solo exhibitions one block apart on West Superior Street. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit Chris Diers

Ray Noland understands the importance of duplication and distribution. His designs and Internet campaigns (including on the cover of this magazine) contributed to the ground swell of support around president Obama’s campaign, and continue to rally the populace around political figures and events. He’s the mastermind behind the “Go Tell Mama” traveling art show, and co-curator of the exhibition “Officially Unofficial,” which profiles art inspired by Obama, at the Chicago Tourism Center until May 31. Read the rest of this entry »

Armita Raafat recently returned to Chicago after spending a few months in Iran. While there, she researched architectural ornamentation on mosques in Isfahan, a city known for its resplendent Islamic landmarks and Persian tapestries, in preparation for her first solo museum show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In a gallery on the museum’s first floor, Armita has effectively transposed the distinctly Islamic decoration to the distinctly bland white-cube exhibition space. The wall sculpture conflates two (or more) cultures by way of their artistic achievements—a thicket of visual information on one hand and a fiction of asceticism on the other, here tensely vying for surface dominance. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

You’re not going to find an abstract painter in the bunch of this year’s breakout artists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s getting difficult to define the value of traditional, solo practices in the age of the networked artist. Today’s image makers are less studio artists than opportunists in the expanded field, less gatekeepers of taste than trailblazers in the public sphere—“social entrepreneurs,” as Mike Bancroft calls it. The timing is just right. As this feature is printed, Chicago’s renowned but diminished commercial art fair has opened its doors to include the city’s beloved alternative, artist run and non-profit spaces. The market’s embers are cooling off, and for many that smells like opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »