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 »

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Mannequins, grocery-store checkout belts, paintings and an assortment of domestic detritus are a few of the items in Cathy Wilkes’ mixed-media installation, “I Give You All My Money,” at the Renaissance Society. Most of these items have undergone some form of decay: ash-covered pierrot mannequins, jars of encrusted baby food, tattered bits of cotton, flower petals and a rusted basket.

The death of a child imbues the overall theme and tone of the exhibition. Macabre traces and remnants of this child—an empty stroller and empty jars of baby food, bowls with baby spoons and a knee-high table that suggests a child’s accessibility—imbue the installation with maternal mourning. Wilkes’ installation, in total, is a still-life arrangement that remarks on the fragility of life. Read the rest of this entry »

Tony Kushner in conversation with Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell

By Monica Westin

There are few words in either the arts or academia that are used as often, and occasionally mean so little, as “interdisciplinary.” The overwhelming surge in interdisciplinary work over the past decade ranges from a variety of motivations and understandings of what exactly it is and should do. At best, this work combines the expertise of several areas to solve important problems or shed light on complex issues better than any one perspective or discipline could. But there’s often a dubious quality of work claiming to be interdisciplinary—its success can be difficult to judge (the peer review system, for example, falls apart on the academic end of things), methods and standards between disciplines differ, and the broadness of perspective can result in vagueness and inconsistency. In the arts, interdisciplinary work can especially fall into chaos as the perspective and conversations within the various disciplines involved can get muddled and idiolects misunderstood.

The general consensus has recently seemed to be that we ought to work to create more coherent and coordinated work within this type of holistic undertaking, from clearly defined problems to consistent methodologies and narrow focus. Which is why, when I sat down with David Levin, the director of the University of Chicago’s new Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, I was surprised and even disarmed to hear that his approach to running the fellowship program for visiting artists and scholars at the Gray Center (supported through a $1.35 million Mellon grant) is to stay out of their way. “Look,” Levin murmurs, excitedly but gently, as he often begins his sentences, “the thought is that the pairings between scholars and fellows we’ve set up will have a truly transformative effect on both their work, but it will take awhile to know. I’m not going around banging on their doors asking to see what they’ve produced.” Read the rest of this entry »

Joakim Ojanen

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In talking about the “Drunk Vs. Stoned” exhibits that Scott Reeder and the General Store in Milwaukee put on at Gavin Brown’s Passerby space in New York in the mid-oughts, art critic Ken Johnson said that while “drunk art” is “impulsive, active, aggressive,” stoned art, on the other hand, “tends to be introverted, tends to focus on details, tends to be repetitive.” The companion psychedelic shows now at the Hyde Park Art Center, curated by Chris Kerr and Paul Nudd, blow away any such clear symptomatic distinctions. Read the rest of this entry »

Combining as best it could the functions of a youth-tutoring and adult-education provider, a counseling center and a social service agency, the Blue Gargoyle, located in a grand decaying mansion in Hyde Park, closed its doors in 2009. But for the next year, the space will be brought back to life as a community art center, known as the Southside Hub of Production, or SHoP. John Preus, formerly of the reclamation and construction collective Material Exchange, has been central to the buildout and programming of the space, along with Laura Shaeffer, whose Op Shop initiative has occupied various temporary locations throughout the Hyde Park neighborhood over the past two years. For last weekend’s grand opening, people got a chance to see some features that are intended to remain consistent throughout the SHoP lifespan, things like a child-care area with guided art-making, a potluck table, an ongoing rummage sale and a functional woodworking shop for adults as well as another for kids—aspects that offer at least a grassroots echo of the nonprofit functions undertaken by the former residents. In addition, there will be a seed bank, a library, a movement space, studio spaces for artists and a time bank for service bartering. Read the rest of this entry »

Victor Koretsky, Untitled, c. 1960s. Ne boltai! Collection.

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“Propaganda is hyperbole rendered urgent,” according to the exhibition’s catalogue, written collectively by a team of art historians, curators and media studies professors, accompanying the Smart Museum’s “Vision and Communism.” The exhibition centers on Cold War posters and maquettes by Soviet cultural worker Viktor Koretsky, and is the Smart’s contribution to the citywide conversation regarding the visual language of Russian posters, The Soviet Arts Experience. Koretsky’s incendiary posters take aim at the myth of capitalist democracy and give shape to its external threat (whereas more common Soviet realist images exhorted workers toward productivity) to the communist vision with images of Klansmen hugging bombs, a black man about to be hung by a rope in the shape of a dollar sign, and unemployment lines. Read the rest of this entry »

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A new twist on the old truth that the photograph, especially when it is meant to flatter a product or a person, or show an ideal situation, has nothing to do with actual life is provided by Aron Gent in his twelve color photos that send up staged and posed images by showing their evil doppelgangers. The most ingenious and successful of Gent’s conceits is to stage a scenario in which a fictitious family that is to be posed for a celebratory dinner portrait is caught before the set-up in a variety of detached postures and expressions. Read the rest of this entry »

Christina Ramberg, "Troubled Sleeve," 1974

“Go Figure” is the title of a new group exhibition at the Smart Museum, and a confession of the show’s thematic ambivalence. “Go Figure” shrugs its shoulders at the reason for its own being. Twenty-nine paintings, drawings and sculptures from nine artists represent figurative and body-themed art since 1948. The past sixty years is a meaty chunk of human history, in which “the body” has been gender flipped, self-mutilated, liberated, at turns desired and diseased, beautified, destroyed, duplicated and digitized, so an exhibition of contemporary figurative artwork need not resort to a blanket genre. Will the Smart Museum’s exhibition schedule follow up with other close-at-hand tropes such as landscapes and still-lifes? “Go Figure” takes place in the art museum of the University of Chicago, a campus dedicated to cutting-edge research, but the exhibition fails to propose a hypothesis, a provocation, or an analysis of body consciousness as manifested in the past sixty years of human history. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Messin’ with Texas” at the Hyde Park Art Center is an eclectic group show of eight mid-career artists from Houston, Texas, all recipients of the 2010 Artadia Award. Artadia is a nonprofit organization that awards grants to artists in five U.S. cities, including Chicago. This exhibition was part of an exchange with DiverseWorks in Houston, which recently displayed the work of the 2008 Artadia Awardees from Chicago. It is important to note that Artadia grants are given to individuals and grantees are not selected on the grounds of a cohesive group exhibition. As a result, the works in this show are quite disparate, although some relationships emerge. David Aylsworth’s thickly painted abstractions of floating geometric forms share a surprising lightness and playfulness with Bill Davenport’s sculpture, “Super U,” a giant pink painted plywood “U” that fills the center of the gallery. There is a similar precision and emphasis on systems in Augusto Di Stefano’s drawing, “Plan for History,” as in Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher’s wall-mounted sculpture, “Cliff Hanger,” a grid of wires, hard drives and cameras that feed images to a flat screen TV. These formal similarities create some resonance between the works, but what is most compelling in the show is actually the dissonance between Nestor Topchy’s contemporary take on elaborately painted Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky) and Nathaniel Donnett’s gold-foiled objects displayed in a glass case on black velvet shelves with tiny white paper tags on which is simply scrawled “priceless.” Read the rest of this entry »

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The impulse to sort and classify William J. O’Brien’s 100 vessels, urns, plates, masks, heads, fragments and geometric constructions in his current exhibition should be suppressed, at least momentarily, for the power of this display is in its collective glut, as a chorus of many shouting, horrible and sick faces and visceral sculptures, raw or glazed, in densely textured and richly colored patinas. After this exhibition, the 100 sculptures will be removed to their respective homes and propped onto shelves or pedestals like the good trophies that they are, but for now, these goblins of taste are presented buffet-style like the feast of some pagan ceremony.

The mostly ceramic sculptures tickle the line between natural-history-museum artifacts and Tiki mug souvenirs, not as a critique of ethnographic cultural consumerism and exoticism but as a way for O’Brien to articulate a spectrum of symbols on the cusp of original feeling and mainstream sentiment, like a parade organized by James Ensor. The crowd of objects expresses a dynamic psychology: there are things buried and prematurely unearthed; there are freshly bundled and hoarded piles of waste; there are plenty of finger-sized orifices. Most importantly, the urns, vessels, heads and totems burn with internal tension, reliquaries of ashen and neutered desire. Like Freud’s tchotchke shelf, some things seem grotesque because they are so familiar. (Jason Foumberg)

Through June 26 at the Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis, Cobb Hall 418, University of Chicago, (773)702-8670.