Frank Smith, "Banner for a New Black Nation"

“Black Men – We Need You – Preserve Our Race – Leave White Bitches Alone,” screams the angry text on a silk-screened poster from the early 1970s. Thank goodness Barack Obama Sr. didn’t heed that advice ten years earlier! This is but one of several historical issues that arise when contemplating the AfriCOBRA exhibition at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Gallery.

Why did the young women carry rifles? Why do the colorful graphic designs seem as psychedelic as they do African? And whatever happened to the Chicago-based AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists)? As it turned out, most of the commune artists began or continued careers in academia. Forty years later, all that anger and Afrocentric cultural activism seems gone, especially in the concurrent exhibition of “African American Contemporary Paintings” at the Murphy Hill Gallery in Garfield Park. The skills in graphic design seem gone, too, as Murphy Hill has assembled a hodgepodge of local artists, most of whom lack professional training, have any kind of ideological commitment, and some of whom aren’t even African American (similar to the “post-black” strategy used in “Black Is, Black Ain’t” at the Renaissance Society in 2008). Ethnic boundaries may not be drawn as sharply as they were back in 1970, and, as opposed to relentless ethnic idealism, there’s instead mugshots of relentless despair, as seen in attorney Tim Leeming’s paintings and drawings of young criminals.

Most of the AfriCOBRA people were competent graphic designers who could carry and sugarcoat a message as well as any commercial artist. Some are exceptional artists, like Murry Depillars (1938-2008), who managed a brilliant synthesis of narrative figuration with African-American folk-art quilting in his homage to the imaginary “Queen Candace.” Depillars eventually retired as Dean of the Visual Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Frank Smith (b. 1939) took that quilting back and forth with abstract expressionist painting in his “Banner for a New Black Nation,” and later became a professor at Howard University.

At Murphy Hill, Mary Qian’s recent drawings effectively record and celebrate the individual spirit of people she meets on streets and trains. It’s too bad that Murphy Hill could not pull in more good work on African-American themes, and even show local masters like Kerry James Marshall or Robert Guinan. Perhaps, though, only museums can mount that kind of comprehensive exhibition—but would they, and have they? (Chris Miller)

“AfriCOBRA and the Chicago Black Arts Movement” shows at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Memorial Gallery, 1999 Campus Drive, Evanston, though March 17. “Contemporary African American Painting” shows at Murphy Hill Gallery, 3333 W. Arthington, though April 3.

Vanessa Bell, "Virginia Woolf," ca. 1912, oil on paper board. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, gift of Ann Safford Mandel, class of 1953.

RECOMMENDED

Intimate portraits of well-loved Bloomsbury-era British artists and writers in their cozy interiors and idyllic exteriors are sure to please. Artists in this remarkable group—Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Dora Carrington, E.M. Forster—gathered around the creative hub of the sisters Vanessa and Virginia in the Bloomsbury district of London or various country cottages for creative stimulation or conversation about “art, sex or religion” freely (as Woolf said). Carrington’s charming, cartoonish drawings are an unexpected surprise. Crockery, decorative arts and household goods display the good intentions of the Omega Workshop, Roger Fry’s brainchild to create high-quality, handcrafted goods by anonymous artists. However short-lived, the workshop’s principles still inspire. Tantalizing explanations of the group’s romantic relationships may inspire visitors to do some googling of their own. (Kelly Roark)

Through March 14 at the Block Museum of Art, Arts Circle Drive, Northwestern University

RECOMMENDED

Boasting one of the most comprehensive collections of Robert Motherwell’s graphic works in the world, the Walker Art Center is an important resource not only for Motherwell’s editioned prints but for the study of the New York School painter’s entire oeuvre, which spanned hundreds of lithographs, screenprints, collages, drawings and artist’s books and, of course, iconic paintings. This representative sampling of more than forty works on view in “Robert Motherwell: An Attitude Toward Reality,” an exhibition organized by the Walker and drawn exclusively from its own holdings, provides a well-focused overview of the artist’s career with a particular focus on his prints, drawings and collage works.

Motherwell’s study of psychoanalysis, psychic automatism, Carl Jung’s theories of unconscious creativity and the principles of Zen Buddhism, among numerous other areas of interest, led him to view abstraction and reality as a spectrum. The artist plumbed the material world and the subconscious alike for inspiration, extracting key gestures from both that helped him hone in on an individual style. Motherwell’s series of spare red pencil automatic drawings is but one example of how he used automatism to unearth a core gestural vocabulary from “the preconscious” mind, while another, more uncompromising approach to automatic techniques is seen in his exquisite “Lyric Suite” from 1965, a series of several hundred ink-on-Japanese-paper drawings executed one after the other without pause or subsequent alteration. Motherwell’s incorporation of bohemian detritus into collages and lithographs enabled him to tap into another type of reality, the sheet music, cigarette packages and wine labels he favored providing a fundamentally different yet equally powerful vehicle of self-expression. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“From a Position,” like Russian nesting dolls, begins with a single question that leads to another, then another, and so on. Initially questioning the relationship between a piece of art and its subject, the viewer is encouraged to further contemplate artworks’ relationship to the gallery space, other artworks and the position of self-as-viewer.

The exhibition’s relationships are the actual focus; the show’s strength comes less from the individual power of the pieces and more from their play with one another, the gallery and the viewer. Pieces that don’t “play” with others aren’t as compelling; two drawings by Lucy McKenzie, presenting figures without settings, appear detached from the show (in part due to their placement) and retreat rather than engage. The gallery’s four separate areas reinforce the separation and unification of specific pieces. Upon entering, viewers are blocked by Jason Loebs’ “Barricade.” This translucent plexiglass barricade decorated with barricade-centric articles, forces viewers to alter their entry into the galleries. Other pieces are far subtler in manipulating the gallery environment. The syncopated beats in “Nevercage,” a sound piece by Heather Guertin and Zak Prekop, are so slow that, without a visual component, viewers may initially mistake the sounds as belonging to the building’s old pipes. (Or perhaps credit it to the metal facets in Valerie Snobeck’s installation, which is successfully undifferentiated from the gallery space—appropriate for a show that questions context.) The show’s other works, more clearly defined from the gallery surroundings, may also be read as both subjects and backgrounds. Though this twofold reading of artwork is not exclusive to this exhibition, the old Evanston Art Center manse as a venue certainly heightens the effect more than a white cube could. (Patrice Connelly)

Through June 28 at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Rd., Evanston

Luca Cambiaso, "Hercules"

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The problem with Italian Renaissance drawings is that they’re boring. Highly skilled? Definitely. Of historic interest? For sure. But so would be an exhibit of sixteenth-century office furniture. Mostly, these drawings, on loan from the Prado Museum in Spain, are just working sketches for mediocre paintings, and they’re not intended to be contemplated on their own. But still, there are some magnificent exceptions, which are usually the ones that the curators like to highlight. Luca Cambiaso’s “Hercules the Archer,” which is on the brochure for the collection, is a stand-out. Isidoro Brun (1819-1895) was the Spanish engraver and restorer who assembled a collection of more than 3,000 European drawings, seventy of which have been chosen for the current tour. He was also something of a specialist in Cambiaso, collecting more than fifty pieces, though many are now judged too weak to be authentic. But the four now being shown in Evanston are all masterpieces. More than just readable narratives, they are tours de force, where every line, waxing fat or thin, controls the imaginary space it leaves behind, creating a world that is more mythic than merely human. They alone are worth the trip, but fortunately there are also some very interesting working sketches, like the tiny anatomical studies that Michelangelo made for the Sistine Chapel. Chicago has gotten two surveys of Renaissance Italian drawing over the past year, and hopefully the next show will focus just on the heavyweights, like Guercino, Cambiaso or the Carracci family. (Chris Miller)

Through April 5 at the Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Dr, Evanston

RECOMMENDED

Memory is a slippery thing: prismatic and shifting, it’s only grasped when viewed slightly askance. The guiding metaphor in the twelve-person group show “Trace/Memory” is—you guessed it—the trace: something that leaves a physical (and, in this case, psychological) imprint on the world that remains after the actual event has passed.

In the exhibition, Jelena Berenc’s drawings and mixed-media installations serve as records, or remnants, of private acts. In one, the artist stamped 11,929 fingerprints (one for each day of her life) onto a lengthy scroll of paper, each print making a different impression from the others. In Sarah Earle’s paintings, illegible words made by dragging a paintbrush tip or other pointed object across layers of encaustic appear as if bubbling on the surface of some primordial goo. Memory takes on a sedimentary texture in Jean Sousa’s digitally altered photographs of floating bodies, and is layered, sandwich-like, in luminous collages by ATYL (Alexandra Lee) that combine childhood snapshots with Hong Kong street scenes. ATYL captures the experience of looking simultaneously at and through a window in images that liken the chaotic cityscape’s optical dazzle to the illusory nature of memory itself.

Curators Beth Hart and Barbara Blades have a keen eye for visual poetry and, for the most part, have selected works that address their subject matter on personal rather than social or political levels. Were these choices less strong, the exhibition might feel constricting or indulgent, but instead their cumulative effect is like memory itself: elliptical, fragmented, and open to interpretation. (Claudine Isé)

Through February 15 at Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Rd.

By Jason Foumberg and Burt Michaels

It’s hard not to interpret the Juror’s Awards at the Evanston Art Center’s 19^th Evanston & Vicinity Biennial as a commentary on the state of the nation. Three award winners deal with rot and decay, a much-missed but irretrievably disintegrated past and an ominous future, while the fourth offers an escapist fantasy.

A record 450 artists submitted work this year. From them jurors Barbara Wiesen, director of the Gahlberg Gallery at College of DuPage, and Lanny Silverman, curator of exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center, selected forty-five for the show, with a heady forty percent or so photography.

SAIC grad Amy Mayfield won both a $500 Juror’s Award and an independently juried two-week Ragdale residency for her enamel and ink, “Withering Bursts and Floating Spinnerets,” a dark display of organic decadence. A fanciful hovercraft of brightly painted foam and plastic by SAIC prof Rosalynn Gingerich received an award, as did the haunting and ominous photo “Harbinger” by SAIC grad Joyce Lopez. IIT grad Eric Holubow won for a digital photo of a crumbling urban community center; the remnants of a sign proclaiming “Summer in the City” punctuate the abandoned space and give the work its title.

Coinciding with the June 1 opening of the biennial, which runs through July 6, was the opening for the art center’s latest Sculpture on the Grounds by Kansas City sculptor Matt Dehaemers. “The Nereid Beckon” at first glance looks like five huge Absolut bottles littering a lawn after a wild party, but Dehaemers has a more cerebral explanation. The shapes, which point at the lighthouse next door, represent shipwrecks. Each shape—sixteen-feet-long and about a fourth as high—consists of more than 1,000 smaller plastic bottles, on a structure of wood, PVC tubes and the plastic sheeting greenhouses use. About three out of five bottles contain messages written by art students and community groups. Sensor-triggered LED lights illuminate the capsized vessels at night. You could easily argue that this fascinating sculpture represents still another commentary on the state of the nation.

Artists from seven counties in northern Illinois were eligible to submit up to four works each. The biennial’s intent is to give emerging and mid-career artists exposure they might not otherwise receive. (Burt Michaels)

Where the Whitney Biennial in New York takes the pulse of the nation, and the venerable Venice Biennale puts the world on stage, the Evanston + Vicinity examines a cross-section of Chicago’s art scene—the city’s only such effort. Hosted at the Evanston Art Center, the exhibition is in its nineteenth-year, that is, it has opened every two years since 1972 (if my math is correct).

The range of art is limited mostly to the type that hangs on the walls: painting, drawing and photography. There are about three sculptures this year, one of them wall-bound, and not counting the new sculpture on the front lawn, an annually rotating commission. Surely Chicago appreciates the taste for new media—sound, performance, video—but it seems the bulk of submissions, and the judges’ picks, cater to the small and manageable. Not to their detriment, though, the small and mid-sized works speak to the self-contained nature of individual creative accomplishment. (Years’ past have featured large-scale installations, as do the several temporary exhibits not part of the biennial).

As noted, Amy Mayfield’s enamel-and-ink painting won the coveted first place, no doubt bolstering her career, and deservedly so. Surely Mayfield’s unique works come to mind when thinking of Chicago painting today, yet there are also some gems by artists that are not always in the limelight. Rosalynn Gingerich, who graduated three years before Mayfield, also from SAIC, shows a sculpture in similarly sugary hues with soft contours. “Boogie,” located in the Center’s sun room, is composed of cast resin in chalky pastels. Much like an overgrown child’s toy, its softly rounded edges and nipple-like protrusions could be fondled by infants and suckled by adults alike.

From the same class at SAIC as Gingerich, Susan Dwyer shows plaster and polyurethane sculptures that were likely cast from plastic bags. They at once nod to glut, with stretch marks near bursting, and emptiness, their color pallid and drained. These minimal, quiet shapes extend Dwyer’s interest in air-filled flotation-like objects that lend an illusion of lightness bound by density. On an opposite wall, a small abstract watercolor by Doreen Johnson also achieves such Zen-like quietude, the “little black painting” being a monument to the day’s task of depiction.

Other works of note are on view by Brain Yates, Jennifer Ray, Scott Gruss, David Parker and Eric Holubow, highlighting a theme of suburban desolation. Yale Factor’s painting of a naturalist’s worktable, with specimens, books and tools, is a work that I could gladly ponder for an hour. Jason Foumberg)

The 19^th Evanston + Vicinity Biennial shows at Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Road, Evanston, (847)475-5300, through July 6.

A record 138 artists donated 144 pieces for the exhibition culminating in Saturday’s silent and live auction at the Evanston Art Center, and Alan Leder, Center director since 2003, is connected in some way with all of them. It’s almost incestuous.

Barbara Crane was one of Leder’s photography instructors in the MFA program at SAIC back in the 1970s. She donated a unique Polaroid transfer with hand coloring. Her husband John Miller, a painting professor at SAIC, gave a pastel and pencil abstract. Donors Tom Seghi and Richard Paulsen were Leder’s roommates at both SAIC and in the BFA program at Northern Illinois. Seghi donated a hyper-realistic painting of a pear. Paulsen, who teaches art at Elmhurst College, adds a sensuous painting of bananas. Like his pals, Leder is also into produce; his office is a virtual supermarket of his photos of vibrant, even eroticized pomegranates, artichokes, eggplants and pinto beans. His entry in this exhibition is a collage of photos he shot while sailing on Seghi’s boat in Miami.

As visual and media arts director of the Illinois Arts Council for eighteen years, Leder helped launch innumerable art careers with grants—for announcement cards, catalogs, framing—and several entries represent payback, like Michael Paxton’s muscular charcoal “Wall.” He also made ties with gallerists, like Ann Nathan, who contributed an antique two-headed mask from Ivory Coast. Catherine Edelman sent both a hilarious beach shot by Melissa Ann Pinney that was just shown at the Art Institute and Art Chicago, and a luminous Terry Evans aerial photo of the Point in Hyde Park.

Leder’s helped further other careers through shows at the Evanston Art Center, and artists have been generous in return. Dennis Kowalski, who had a retrospective there, sent a collage of photography and watercolor straight from his one-man show at Flatfile. And Corey Postiglione, who also had a retrospective, gave a bold charcoal drawing. And, of course, faculty from the art center contribute. Christopher Schneberger, who heads the photography program, brought a mystical photo from his recent show at Printworks that earned unusually glowing reviews.

Leder starts soliciting for work in January, “always afraid I’ll lose my friends.” Artists are constantly asked to donate and have to set limits, he says. He even taps connections made through his wife Jane, an author whose friend collects Chuck Walker. Walker, whose recent mid-career retrospective at the Hyde Park Art Center also garnered great reviews, donated a beautifully gritty cityscape. (Burt Michaels)

The Spring Benefit and Live Auction happens Saturday, May 17, 7pm-10pm, at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan, Evanston, (847)475-5300. 

RECOMMENDED

Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota, once said that in his day children were taught to listen intently when all was seemingly quiet. Urban visitors at the Evanston Art Center are well advised to take on this attitude in order to best experience the “acoustic ecology”—a subtle, non-visual art. In a small square room, Shawn Decker has hung four galvanized buckets full of water in each corner from piano wire; the wire is struck by a spinning motor programmed with a computer chip, making the water resonate. The result is a random chorus of cicadas chiming in with one another, but the effect is one of becoming-insect rather than rural nostalgia. Lou Mallozzi’s “Interval” studies certain repetitive acts invested with meaning: tuning a piano, a cough, chopping wood. In a gesture of humanistic defiance, speakers attached to bay windows project these sounds outward into the environment, toward the lake in the distance, perhaps toward New York. Mark Booth’s audio piece in an upper room presents his own field recordings in two channels, with a dispassionate voice coming through a third, labeling the sounds: “This is the sound of a non-magical four-leaf clover…” The dark room with the low-hanging bulb gives it an aura of a metaphysical interrogation. Christy Matson’s work involves whispering robotic devices in which a magnetic fluid forms and deforms. On the wall opposite Sabrina Raaf has hung three pieces of metallic cloth hand-woven on a jacquard loom. When you touch the cloth, it interacts with your body’s electrical field to produce a tiny, fugitive rustling. If Decker’s piece makes you think of your body as a resonating chamber not unlike a bucket of water, Raaf reminds you that even amid proliferating and mutating media, your own body is an electrical system too. In this way, these works go beyond sound art, and reanimate the idea of sculpture. (David Mark Wise)

Through April 6 at Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Road, Evanston, (847)475-5300.

RECOMMENDED

“Imaging by Numbers” cuts a wide cross section through the relationship between printed image and digital technology since 1952. From woodcut and silkscreen to plotter and inkjet, a wide range of work can be seen in attempting to translate images seen on screen or written in code into reality. Influence between the fine arts and digital art is mutual. Plotters are pushed to portraiture and excel at line field landscapes, colorful geometric environments spill out of early inkjet printers, and, clearly enticing viewers into the show is none other than the Olympia of Bell Labs in “Studies in Perception no. 1,” a large-scale facsimile of a nude produced by two company engineers in an early development of computers for artistic purposes. It’s hardly difficult to see how computer imaging techniques have influenced the precise and repetitive manners seen so frequently in art today, especially in this exhibition of work formed by computer code. (Lisa Larson-Walker)

Through Apr 16 at the Block Museum at Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive.