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Mary McCarthy describes her new paintings as a metaphor for the “general conflict between order and chaos.” The same could be said for everything under and beyond the sun, but what distinguishes her work is that the conflicts she creates are thrilling and almost beautiful. In each painting there seems to be something that doesn’t quite fit, yet belongs there anyway. Like the chunk of one-by-six pine board that’s been defiantly nailed to the corner of “Beatrice (The Kiss Off),” holding together what otherwise seems to be an explosion of conflicting, overlapping polygons. Is this also a metaphor for the break-up of a relationship, as the title might suggest? The artist speaks of her work in strictly formal terms, but she seems to be presenting the active, challenging life of an ambitious young woman in the city. Read the rest of this entry »

Emily Long

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Take eleven veteran Chicago photographers and set them to the task of showcasing the deeds of civic, social service and political activist groups—inspired by the Kay Rosen public art project “Go Do Good”—and most of them end up producing images that could grace brochures and newspaper features—everything and everyone are resolutely goody-goody to the max. The one stellar exception is Emily Long, who chose to document the work of Preservation Chicago by shooting the buildings on the group’s list of “the most at-risk architectural treasures” with a pinhole camera. The distortions of shape and the chiaroscuro effects of the pinhole transform Long’s subjects into structures that seem to be plucked from a surreal gothic romance. Surrounded by murky shadowy black, Children’s Memorial Hospital in Lincoln Park, which will soon be vacated, appears in a circle of dull light, isolated like a castle in Transylvania. Long subverts “goodness” and dissolves document into fantasy with welcome effect. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 1 at the Chicago Photography Collective, 108 North State.

Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalia, "Wolf the Moralist," July 19, 1943.

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In 1939, Clement Greenberg famously distinguished avant-garde art from kitsch, the “predigested art” manufactured for the “ignorant Russian peasant” who knows “no discontinuity between art and life.” That distinction has framed the discourse of American art ever since, but it was a matter of life and death for Soviet artists once social realism was officially established by Stalin, and even more so after June 22, 1941 with the beginning of a Nazi invasion that would take twenty-three million lives.

In 1997, twenty-six mysterious brown paper parcels were discovered deep in a storage room of the AIC’s Department of Prints and Drawings. They turned out to be the legacy of a cultural exchange fifty years earlier that brought to Chicago a collection of war propaganda posters created by TASS, the Soviet News agency. Ranging in size from five to ten feet tall, their irresistible visual impact is stunning, especially now, after they have been restored to their original condition, augmented with spectacular pieces from other museums (including MoMA and the Hoover Institute), and displayed chronologically to tell the story of both the art studio that created them and the nation that was fighting for its life. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

What’s charming about Nollywood (the Nigerian film industry, after Bollywood, the most prolific in the world) is that the quality of production is no greater than the quality of narrative. They work with low-rent soap operas spiced up to satisfy the West African taste for violent revenge and juju magic, and they are shot with what appears to be hand-held home-video equipment. The budget for one Hollywood blockbuster could fund nearly a thousand films made in Nollywood, so there’s some comfort in knowing that not  a lot of cash and talent has been wasted on making them.

This is also true of the hand-painted movie posters that mobile movie theaters in rural Ghana used in the 1980s to advertise their shows. Slap-dashed together on the recycled cloth of flour bags, the images are as demented, ugly and goofy as anything the Chicago Monster roster and their descendants ever made, but far less serious since the intended audience is bored adolescents of all ages rather than art collectors. Read the rest of this entry »

“Was dying as she thought, or different?”

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Art is one of the few professions where playfulness is encouraged. You don’t want your orthopedic surgeon playing around with your hip, but it’s okay for an artist to play around with shapes and references, and the artworks themselves, like tarot cards, for example, can be used for either serious divination and self knowledge, or just to play a game like poker.

Rita O’Hara’s acrylic, gouache and watercolor paintings are very much like tarot cards. They offer archetypes like the mandala (self), the butterfly (soul), the fish (transition), etcetera, and she is quite serious about them. She is not a commercial artist dabbling in metaphysics to design posters that hang above the scented candles in a new-age bookstore. She’s had a long career counseling the chronically mentally ill and adults with developmental disabilities. But neither is she a therapist dabbling in art. Over that period, she has chosen and followed a single teacher, Robert Guinan, the master of a clean, sparse narrative style that effectively presents gritty life on the streets of Chicago. O’Hara has adapted that style to present the buoyant but sometimes desperate life of the soul in the sunless world of dreams. The sense of craftsmanship is impeccable, as it should be for such a serious subject. Whether they work as vehicles for self-awareness is another matter, and perhaps, despite claims to the contrary, the archetypes she employs are more specific to her background in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family than they are universal. To her, for example, a swan represents the supernatural, while to me, it’s the aggressive, voluptuous bird that’s always been trying to mate with poor Leda. But still, I found some of her images haunting and memorable, like the parade of uniformed women in “Was dying as she thought, or different?” Read the rest of this entry »

Leopold Segedin, "Remember III," 2008

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As co-curator Judith Lloyd Klauba writes for this exhibition, elders of the Crow people are keepers of star knowledge, and “teach the young understanding of the night sky as it combines mythology, spirituality, social, ritual, and practical aspects of tribal life.” She also relates that, according to the Center for Aging of the National Health Institute, “those who engaged in creative arts had fewer illnesses and injuries, and reduced risk factors for long-term care.” Accordingly, she has collaborated to produce an exhibition of eleven Illinois artists, all of whom are distinguished not only by their body of work, but also their longevity and careers in teaching.

Now in their seventies and eighties, this is the first generation of postwar art students, almost all of whom worked in another postwar phenomenon: the university art department. Yet, as one of those professors, Leopold Segedin opines on his website, “It is ironic that Painting—the dominant Fine Art in the Western world for over 300 years—finally gains status in universities—only to lose it in 30 years.” Read the rest of this entry »

"Filleted Male Salmon," 2010

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Marion Kryczka’s well-made, highly ordered, masculine vision of reality may fit the blue-collar streets of Chicago, but he’s been peripheral to the contemporary art world. Kryczka’s work also lacks either the photo finish and sentimentality, or the anger and ugly distortions that other corners of the art world  might appreciate, and he’s not even goofy, damaged or unsophisticated enough to qualify as an outsider.

As critic G. Jurek Polanski wrote about Kryczka’s 1999 exhibit in the Fine Arts Building, “The variety of pieces tell a story, one in which each work, while complete in itself, is placed to build a context with its companions and comprehensively reveal the artist’s personality.” And the same is true today, although the story is changing, as the artist mellows into his sixties. The still-lifes include the same dead fish, sharp knives and bottles of alcohol on low-rent kitchen counters that he’s been painting for decades. But the light feels less harsh, the whiskey has been replaced by wine, and fish seem almost happy to be offering their tender, pink, slaughtered flesh. Read the rest of this entry »

Jean Hey, known as the Master of Moulins. "Madeleine of Burgundy Presented by Saint Mary Magdalene," c. 1490. Oil on panel. Musée du Louvre.

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As its title denotes, this is an exhibition of things made to flatter and delight a French royal court, and since so many of the artists are Flemish or Italian, it is French patronage rather than national origin that distinguishes this collection.

When shown in the Grand Palais, in Paris, earlier this year, it was called “France 1500 entre Moyen Age et Renaissance” to focus on the major historic transition underway in that century. By the year 1500, the secular ideals of the Roman Republic had already been reborn in Italy, bankers were becoming more important than landowners, France was uniting into a nation state and Martin Luther was a teenager. Although Humanism and Italian mannerism would soon define French taste, the court of Charles VIII still savored that sweet medieval dream of a divine order with the Madonna’s family at the top, the extended royal family one notch down, and beautiful angels floating freely in between. Read the rest of this entry »

"In the Carpet Shop," from The Sausage Photographs, 1979. Chromogenic print.

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Swiss collaborative duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss excel at multiplying mundane elements to create captivating visual summations. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibits three early projects in which the pair plays with materials and imagined environments, demonstrating a subtle humor and unfettered enthusiasm for the acts of looking, experimenting and questioning.

Their first joint undertaking, 1979′s “The Sausage Photographs,” is a photographed series of ten miniature tableaux that use bizarre materials culled from a “typical Swiss-German refrigerator,” which apparently includes processed meats, Styrofoam and cardboard packaging, cigarette butts, parsley, stray bottle caps and peanut shells. Staged in an apartment where bedsheets become mountains and scrawled lines within a soot-lined oven stand in for ancient cave markings, these theatrical scenes communicate a whimsical fascination with make-believe and child-like play. Read the rest of this entry »

Self Portrait

By Jeremy Biles

Chicagoans are loving Vivian Maier’s photographs. On my multiple passes through the Cultural Center’s “Finding Vivian Maier” exhibition, the rooms were crowded and the excitement palpable.

Much of the considerable buzz around the photographs has to do with their intriguing backstory. Maier grew up in Europe and New York City, but worked as a nanny in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs for about forty years, before passing away in 2009. She appears to have taken photographs almost constantly on her walks through Chicago’s streets and on her trips to New York City and around the world—yet she never showed the pictures to anyone.

In 2007, a trove of Maier’s negatives was obtained by a young Chicago real-estate agent named John Maloof when he purchased the contents of a storage locker at auction. He now has in his possession a total of 100,000 negatives, and maintains a blog (vivianmaier.blogspot.com) where you can read the story of the discovery and view a selection of photographs. Thanks to Maloof and to the organizers of Vivian Maier Photography (vivianmaierphotography.com), who hold another 12,000 negatives, these images are now internationally recognized, earning comparisons with the work of great modernists like Paul Strand, and legendary street photographers Brassai, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Harry Callahan. Read the rest of this entry »