John A. Kurtz

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Meet three wild and crazy Chicago guys from the generation that grew up in the 1950s and sixties, back when the language of art had not yet been deconstructed and the Beatles had not yet met the Maharishi. Although John Kurtz, Paul Lamantia and Bruce Thorn are introspective, their artworks are hardly private, and rather than inviting you into their own pictorial world, the energy of each picture is always pushing into the world of the viewer.  Read the rest of this entry »

“Chained Soul”

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Right up front about using photography to express her ever-incomplete journey of self-discovery, Jodi Swanson (Alempijevic) does not specialize, deploying whatever technique and genre depicts the mood that she wants to represent to herself and communicate to viewers. Whether she is shooting in black-and-white or color; going straight or venturing into digital manipulation; posing models in formal studies or turning the camera on herself; or capturing slices of life on the streets, meditating on natural forms, or flirting with surrealism, Swanson is always intensely passionate—she is addicted to feeling and she is a consummate pusher who knows how to break through our emotional resistance. Read the rest of this entry »

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After three decades producing contemplative oil paintings and sumi-e ink studies, Terri Zupanc’s latest source of meditation is the land around his family’s cottage on Paint Lake in Upper Peninsula Michigan. The artist’s first exhibition at Jean Albano Gallery, “Paint Lake” contains wood bark and occasional animal shells categorized as “found objects” alongside misty, black-and-white photographs of nudes frolicking through the forest. Zupanc found and chose the curving and twisting bark to place in the gallery as biological readymades, and these sculptures indeed draw the viewer to reflect on the wood’s beauty and natural patterning. Read the rest of this entry »

Mary Rafferty

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Of the eleven gifted veteran Chicago art photographers whose work is on display here, running the gamut of genres, techniques and sensibilities, Mary Rafferty’s in-your-face color punk portraits against white backgrounds of roller derby queens, Jane Alt’s wild color shots of swirling smoky controlled (you wouldn’t know it) forest burns, and Susan Annable’s edgy mysterious atmospheric black-and-white studies of indistinct subjects deserve special mention; but Jessica Tampas outpaces the pack with her large-format color, close-up head shots of cracked, scarred and broken one-hundred-year-old dolls that stare at you as though they were animated, beseeching you to connect with them. Read the rest of this entry »

Joel-Peter Witkin opening in 2008 at Catherine-Edelman/Photo: Paul Germanos

By Jason Foumberg

This is a story about what Chicago’s art galleries are doing to grow our local art economy.

More than once I have heard an art dealer joke that their commercial art gallery is really a not-for-profit because, well, their business makes no profit. Despite that appraisal, non-profit fundraising techniques are finding their way into the business models of some for-profit startups. Traditionally, commercial galleries have been run as shops that sell products with negotiable price tags. Now, some are experimenting with fundraising and sponsorships as strategies for growth. Oppositely, a couple of non-profit art organizations are incorporating commercial aspects into their practices, such as selling art and organizing an art fair.

For a long time, for-profit galleries and non-profits behaved like mirror images of each other, performing similar actions toward opposite ends, yet never touching. However, boundaries were made to be blurred in the art world. It was a huge shock to see NYC dealer Jeffrey Deitch take a director’s seat at MOCA in Los Angeles in order to save the institution from financial ruin. On the flip side, the success of many “social entrepreneurs” is changing how for-profit startups operate, including many art galleries. Read the rest of this entry »

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At the heart of Elsa Muñoz’s exhibition of recent seascapes, landscapes, still-lifes and portraits seems to be a coming-of-age drama with recent or impending tragedies that may or may not be autobiographical. The sun never penetrates a humid atmosphere of sadness that hangs over these dark images, even when the artist steps outside to share a daylight view of Ireland or Mexico. All the paintings are so quiet!—as quiet as Vermeer. The interior views feature the slender figure of a young woman, alone, never facing the viewer, and always in front of a door or window. In one version she is opening a door for a presumed visitor, but she is so cautious, and the lock on the door is so large, heavy and prominent. Read the rest of this entry »

Meredith Zielke and Yoni Goldstein, from “The Jettisoned”

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We all have our visions of medical hell that grow out of traumatic childhood memories that we would rather forget, but that haunt us throughout our lives. Meredith Zielke and Yoni Godstein have unsparingly confronted their painful pasts, merging them in a set of color photographic scenarios taken in a dark and dank derelict Chicago soap factory, that they have combined in a slow-motion video loop, which should not be seen by the faint hearted or overly sensitive. Reminiscent of a latter-day Hieronymus Bosch deploying real people, Zielke and Goldstein populate their tableaux with dense arrays of subjects administering, suffering and observing various disconnected procedures featuring tubes and seeping fluids in decidedly less-than-antiseptic settings. The artists propose to offer the “possibility of abject recognition,” and their work definitely delivers on that promise. They perform the service of alerting us to the underside of life if we are strong enough to tolerate their harsh visual medicine, which is never palliative. Read the rest of this entry »

Barbara Jones-Hogu, “Unite,” 1970

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A venerable South Side institution of which many Chicagoans may not have heard is the starting point for a three-stage investigation of the artists’ group AfriCOBRA. A timely collaboration among several South Side arts institutions celebrates the origins, philosophy and impact of this group of artists.

AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) was the cultural counterpart of the Black Power movement. Most people are familiar with writers like Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, but Chicago moved into the 1960s with a very strong visual arts tradition located in Margaret Burroughs’ South Side Community Art Center in the 3800 block of South Michigan Avenue. Works in this exhibition by Elizabeth Catlett, Charles White and others associated with the center since the late 1930s, when it was established as part of the WPA, laid the groundwork for what was to come. Read the rest of this entry »

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Kaoru Arima likes to straddle the lines between control and surrender, formal and casual, revelatory and obscure, mindless and calculating, and, of course, art and non-art. What better place to show the results than in this tiny second-floor apartment gallery in Pilsen. It’s as randomly located as Arima’s own gallery in Inuyama, Japan (curiously named the Art Drug Center). The gallery’s white walls feel like the small areas of white paint splashed onto Japanese newspapers on which Kaoru executed the twenty-eight cartoonish line drawings in the collection of the Walker Art Center. Read the rest of this entry »

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Unless it’s referencing popular graphics, postmodern drawing often retreats from the aesthetic page and collapses into a maze of detail. Technical illustration does the same thing, accompanied by text suggesting that analytical study will result in a greater understanding of some organic or mechanical function. Xiaowei Chen’s ink drawings resemble biological specimens, but they are more about life as an incomprehensible mess, as a high-school freshman might contemplate the innards of a dissected frog stretched out on a cold white laboratory counter. There may be something Read the rest of this entry »