April Camlin

Roxaboxen gallery’s obscure location on a residential stretch of 21st Street in Pilsen ensures that only those who already know it’s there are likely to come across it. Which seems appropriate in light of Roxaboxen’s most recent exhibition, the “Best of 2010 Poster Show,” a retrospective of Chicago DIY concert posters for 2010, which constitutes a chronicle of an underground artistic community that depends on a certain degree of anonymity for its survival.

Indeed, Roxaboxen resident and artist Liz McCarthy is hesitant to even name the DIY venues where many of these shows take place without including the proviso that any mention of them in print exclude location. This tension, between the need to promote and publicize these events and the desire to keep them off the radar, is well represented in the medium of the poster, which allows organizers to reach their community without bringing on too much heat.

As McCarthy explains, “There’s almost this tribal aspect about it, like there is this group of people that all have these shows, especially in Pilsen, Wicker Park and Logan Square and they’re all interconnected and know each other. It’s a good way for a community to interact with each other and communicate not just ideas about the culture informing that community, but also events and gatherings.” The posters of the Roxaboxen show, then, represent a very insular form of communication, one that takes place at street level, placed as they are in the coffee shops, nightclubs and unguarded building fronts which comprise the interstitial geography of an often-hidden urban music culture. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

The closing of summer marked the end of ACRE’s inaugural season of artist residencies in rural Wisconsin. The ripening of autumn, though, brings ACRE’s residents back into the city for a yearlong exhibition program at the ACRE home base, a storefront gallery in Pilsen. Of the many local, national and international residency programs that swell with artists each summer, like Ox-Bow, Ragdale and Skowhegan, few offer solo exhibition opportunities for their participants. For ACRE, the exhibition component is part of a package deal, and built into the program’s name: Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions.

Directors Emily Green and Nicholas Wylie founded ACRE on the premise that shared experiences and resources can help build an artistic community, and they’ve professionalized the experience. Residents must apply for a spot in the program, and applications are reviewed by a panel of art professors and curators (this year included Tricia Van Eck, Jason Lazarus, Lorelei Stewart, Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke). The exhibition component is another layer of professionalism. For many of the emerging artists who attend the summer sessions, this will be their first solo show. ACRE provides a clean, white-walled space and is partnering with other local galleries for the solo shows, including Mess Hall, Johalla Projects, No Coast/Roxaboxen, The Hills Esthetic Center and others. Read the rest of this entry »

Jenny Priego

By Bert Stabler

New media artist and University of California-San Diego faculty member Ricardo Dominguez was threatened with revocation of tenure this past spring over protests made by three Republican congressmen against state funding of his projects to create cell phones that could lead migrants to fresh-water stations in the desert, and another to initiate a “denial of service” virtual sit-in against college fee hikes on the UC president’s home page. Dominguez’ institutional censure is hardly up to the level of hardship endured every day by thousands of illegal immigrants, especially since such notoriety can hardly hurt his art career. But it makes the point that there are real stakes, and a real audience, in the new culture wars around socially engaged art, as well as in the much larger propaganda battle over immigration.

The reason Dominguez’ work attracted animosity was because it initially caught the attention of major media outlets, including CNN, owing at least in part to his ideas. The quality (and thus the power) of aesthetic works that take on important issues is… important. The effect of a clear, strong statement is immediate in the video interview that Chicago artist Miguel Cortez shot with his parents; it simply presents his father’s memories of the brutality he repeatedly experienced in his younger days at the hands of border police, when he wasn’t given passage to come work in almost equally brutal conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

Shawn Stucky, “When You’ve Forgotten How to Love"

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I met Deadline Projects Art Collective founding member Holly Sabin in her recently remodeled Pilsen gallery space. We sat on the only piece of furniture there, a rose-colored Victorian-esque couch. “I’ve got a lot to do before this weekend,” she said, looking around the mostly empty room, which would soon be filled with art and artists for a show she curated. Titled “Art Party,” the show is intentionally themeless.

“It’s really about bringing friends together, to connect talented people I know with enjoyers and purchasers,” Sabin said. “Art Party” features the work of seven local artists of various mediums, among them Ryan Shultz, who is currently competing on the Bravo network’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” Shultz’s oil paintings expose the fine line between pleasure and self-affliction. Also on display is the work of Kansas-native Shawn Stucky, including his mixed-media image, “When You’ve Forgotten How to Love,” whose muted colors are reminiscent of the gauzy and gray state of dreaming. The work of local notables Scott Ashley, Arielle Bielak, Gretel Garcia, Damien James and Sarah Perez is also on display. Read the rest of this entry »

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For the time being, Ray Noland has set up camp in Pilsen, covering the walls of the cavernous Chicago Urban Art Society (CUAS) with his graphic stencils and posters. Noland’s “Sweet Tea & American Values” is the first exhibition to christen the non-profit’s new 4,200 square-foot space run by siblings Lauren Pacheco and Peter Kepha.

Noland’s work is unabashedly political. He skewers celebrities, musicians, politicians and assumptions about race and gender, all with equal abandon. It’s clear that Noland was working through a lot of ideas for “Sweet Tea,” riffing on old imagery, alongside new works created with the CUAS space in mind. According to the artist, almost three-quarters of the work is new (the rest is comprised of his Obama posters and the iconic “Go Tell Mama” series). With the flexibility and sense of experimentation that portends a good future for CUAS, the directors gave Noland the opportunity to work (and occasionally sleep) in the gallery for a month prior to the opening. Read the rest of this entry »

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The minaret-shaped recesses, French doors, steam radiators and relief tiles in Roxaboxen don’t evoke for me the bookstore that was the space’s last occupant (since I never visited it), but more generally a strange Art Nouveau eclectic exoticism at the tail end of its postwar home-décor revival—the environment of my 1970s toddlerhood. Printmaker Miranda Stokes may not have the same associations, but since she lives in the adjoining living area, it seems as if the wedding-cake Orientalism of her surroundings has seeped into her subconscious as well.

Her show in the space features a long twenty-odd-foot scroll of collaged images and decorative motifs across from a number of small works in shadowbox frames; both walls use a number of techniques, from etching and block print to lithography and screenprinting, to create a curious theater of childhood memories and personal narratives. Sometimes echoing the indistinct fever dreams of Odilon Redon, the parlor tragedies of Felix Vallotton or the quaint vignettes of A.A. Milne’s illustrator Ernest H. Shepard, her scrawled drawings, blurred through intermediary processes, melt into the photographs she uses as source material, creating a sense of the magical possibility of handicraft so cruelly foreclosed by industrial modernity.

But there is an irony and violence that cuts the nostalgic treacle. At the end of the room, small, incomplete cartoon drawings reminiscent of David Shrigley cower meekly in the shadow of a comically bedraggled but thoroughly ferocious model of a polar bear’s head. Sporting mangled teeth and empty eye sockets, its presence hammers home the odd but distinct menace common to curio shops and deep memories. (Bert Stabler)

Through May 23 at Roxaboxen, 2130 W. 21st St.

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If you’re put off by the serial self-portraiture for which Susanna Coffey is best known, the body of paintings now on display at PEREGRINEPROGRAM should come as a relief and a revelation. Coffey’s technical facility and feel for color are evident in this “Night Painting” series, but these landscapes in oil are unpopulated, quiet, and diminutive, sometimes just the size of an index card. They carry all the emotion of her portraits but lack foregrounded faces, and they also convey something at once more abstract and affecting. Millet’s “Starry Night,” a painting admired by Van Gogh, is an inspiration for Coffey, who wants to “observe the appearance of darkness.” The “color of night,” as she calls it, is investigated in “Main Street Moon, Johnson Vermont,” an homage to Millet through Van Gogh, in which stars appear as bright jagged tears in a sky awash with blues and grays. In “Skowhegan,” meanwhile, deep blue hues differentiate themselves in Rothkoesque auras, both subtle and expressive. Though their tones are mostly quiet, these paintings are not quietistic; there’s too much drama in the painterly gestures and voluptuous application of oils to suggest detachment or passivity. The artist’s hand remains conspicuous, and the surfaces of the paintings abound with action. Read the rest of this entry »

“Every warrior has a weapon and mine is art,” is Eric Garcia’s motto, used as a banner headline on his website. Garcia’s work reduces complex political issues to one-liners. The artist gives us an advertisement for Halloween costumes, “illegal aliens,” of which we can choose the English Puritan, French soldier, or Spanish conquistador. This is a clever and funny piece, but its purpose seems merely to deliver a message. Likewise, Uncle Sam serving us a steaming turd enclosed in wrapping paper represents the Iraq war. The punch lines are clear but the punch is missing.

The rebuilding of Iraq as a parody of “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” is one of Eric Garcia’s funnier political cartoons. You smile, and you get the point. In another piece, standing at the base of the Statue of Liberty, an undocumented family screams up at the words of Emma Lazarus’s poem, “You lie.” Their rage is rendered palpable in heavy, black ink.

This is a radically un-radical show, at times merely re-chewing cliché: Israel and the Palestinians are like Goliath and David; natural disasters are nature’s reaction to a human pest. Aimed at an audience that already shares its stance, the work here shows no interest in educating its viewers. US-funded mercenaries in Columbia could be explained rather than referenced, or, if Jeremiah Wright really breathes the fire of truth, Garcia could offer some hint of how. Likewise, are university textbooks really “the ultimate scam” because one can’t sell them back for the same price one paid for them? There’s more violence and rage in this piece than in Garcia’s commentaries on genocide, which reveals much about this “warrior” artist. Read the rest of this entry »

Chicago turns a spritely 173 this year, and to celebrate Casey Cortez and Anthony Spina are throwing a party. To help the celebration, the two paired a photographer and DJ from Wicker Park, Pilsen and Wrigleyville to document their own neighborhood. “I want people to walk into this event and discover things about the city and say, ‘Wow, this is my city,’” says Spina. The impetus of the party, it seems, is to shrink Chicago down; to help people understand how close we really are. “You have these dynamic themes going on in the city,” says Cortez, “and a lot of times they don’t interact with each other.” The birthday party is as much a call for collaboration as it is a celebration, and that’s exactly what the pairing of photographers and DJs show. Cortez and Spina talk of how people become comfortable in their neighborhood, and it’s a sentiment echoed by photographer and the party’s Pilsen representative, Kyle LeMere. “We [he and DJ Baby Magdalene] both live on sort of opposite ends of Pilsen, so it was great to show each other parts of our neighborhood we haven’t yet been exposed to.” And what’s a birthday without a cake? Bleeding Heart Bakery will provide, as Cortez puts it, “a 3-D, three-layer Willis Tower/Old Style-can cake.” The party starts at 7pm March 4 at 1837 South Halsted. (Peter Cavanaugh)

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In 1922, Jose Vasconcelos,  Secretary of Public Education for the popular presidency of Alvaro Obregon, hero of the Mexican Revolution, initiated a program to develop a new, Americanista culture and educate the masses through public art—a program that would eventually be picked up by Roosevelt’s WPA and is still transforming concrete walls into vivid murals around  Chicago. This exhibition traces that path that began so gloriously and explosively with los tres grandes: Diego  Rivera (1886-1957), Jose Orozco (1883-1949) and David Siqueiros (1896-1974). Perhaps because those three had lived through the chaos, idealism and disappointment of the revolutionary period, their work continues to stand out from those who followed. And unlike the social realist painters of Soviet Union, they led careers as artists that were independent of any regime or even nationality, as they moved freely between Mexico and the United States. Probably the most influential of all was Orozco, whose powerful spirit, evident in the Christian mural as well as the simple charcoal figure sketches that are included in this show, seems to run through the entire tradition like a high-voltage electrical current. Being propaganda, there’s a lot that’s simple-minded here: the evil, vicious forces of repression versus the good, innocent common folk. But this exhibition shows how that strong spirit lived on even after the politics was over, in the post-political career of Sequeiros and in Jackson Pollock, who was never politically minded at all, but who followed and even adapted the work of Orozco to express his own kind of anger and personal despair. Mostly, the exhibition focuses on the two decades from 1930-1950, and among the Americans shown, special emphasis is given to those from Chicago. (Chris Miller)

Through August 1 at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 West 19th Street