Carol Hummel, “Lichen it”

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As its name suggests, the Morton Arboretum is more about science than aesthetics. It’s a better destination to learn about trees than to enjoy magnificent views.  So, it’s an appropriate setting for conceptual art, where the information on the label is at least as important as the artworks.

Whereas the exhibits of trees and eco-systems teach us about the variety of life on our planet, just what can be learned from this collection of art installations interspersed throughout the Arboretum’s grounds? The target audience seems to be eight-year-olds. A stack of logs is wrapped with a giant bow ribbon and the brochure asks us, “What is the best gift trees give us?” A large kaleidoscope is installed facing a shoreline and we are asked, “How do the colors and shapes make you feel?” The artists, of course, have put their ideas into artspeak. Writes Letha Wilson, “My work creates relationships between architecture and nature, and the gallery space and the American wilderness.”  But has that really told us anything more? Read the rest of this entry »

"Machination"

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According to the 2010 Quilting In America survey, there are now 2.1 million active quilters from coast to coast. Most of them are trying to cover beds, not gallery walls, but ever since the 1971 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, quilting has been widely recognized as a contemporary art form, and designs echo a wide range of what can be found in contemporary painting, from geo-form to imagist.

Denise Burge, born in 1963, comes from the hills of North Carolina, where the women in her family have been quilters for several generations—her great-grandma even grew her own cotton for batting. Her brash, overstated imagery and improvisational use of materials resembles the outlandish work of that famous outsider artist from Georgia, Howard Finster. But it would be a mistake to call Burge a folk artist. For the past twenty years, she’s been an art academic at the University of Cincinnati. It would not be a mistake, however, to call her an outstanding designer. Her dynamic designs draw attention from a distance, while close-up, the voluptuous areas of detail can be intensely rewarding. As a kind of collage, quilting depends on whatever fragments of printed fabric an artist can find, so it feels like a miracle when all that diversity fits together so well and even tells a story. Read the rest of this entry »

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The paintings of Ruth Van Sickle Ford (1897-1989) have the sweet enthusiasm and giddy clutter appropriate to a mid-century suburban American mom, but working a career as both an artist and school owner, she was hardly a typical woman of her times. In 1934, she was one of the 875 artists chosen for the Chicago Century of Progress display (other artists included Watteau, Durer and Whistler). In 1937, she borrowed enough money to buy the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, the area’s foremost commercial art school, where she had first studied and later become an instructor. Commuting daily from Aurora, she ran it for the next twenty-three years. The faculty included Bruce Goff, who went on to design an ultra-modern “round house” for her in Aurora. Successful in both career and family, she was a modern, trend setting American woman. But organizing a 1960 demonstration on the steps of the Art Institute against the arrival of a painting by Franz Kline, she also took a stand against the kind of Modernism that was keeping her out of the annual AIC Chicago and Vicinity shows. Read the rest of this entry »

“Lady of the House – Venus”

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Among Chicago Imagist painters, Seymour Rosofsky (1924-1981) was both the most classically trained and the most puzzling.

A second generation, blue-collar Jewish kid from Chicago, Seymour’s talent was recognized early and he ended up studying oil painting with Boris Anisfeld at the Art Institute. He picked up that Russian’s dreamy, decorative style, which might be called classical but was hardly naturalistic. As Anisfeld once said “I always see a thing first in color and I paint what I feel, not what I see.” Rosofsky also became an art-museum junkie, both in Chicago and Paris, drawing from a variety of primitive, post-impressionist, surrealist and expressionist art. But when he put it all together, it was all about himself. There’s a musty, cluttered, claustrophobic feeling about his work, with the viewer often placed in the role of the therapist puzzled by the highly emotional, confused world of a patient who feels trapped in a female-dominated, family-centered life. Read the rest of this entry »

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The advent of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s meant a great deal to the art world. Generally, the movement of the body was now part of visual art, pictures didn’t need to have defined centers or edges, and, rather than being forced to represent, art materials could be allowed to speak for themselves. But in the U.S. in particular, AbEx meant modernity could look individualistic and eccentric rather than merely slick and mechanical; the movement espoused freedom so alluringly that the CIA supposedly organized traveling exhibitions as a means of winning hearts and minds during the Cold War.

American Christianity embraced the AbEx ethos architecturally, as sci-fi contraptions calling themselves churches proliferated, many predating Frank Gehry’s mature cheesecake factories. More recently, “Spontaneous Performance Jesus Painting” has, at least according to one blog, become a noteworthy latter-day AbEx phenomenon in some worship services. In general, gestural painterly abstraction seems to be quite popular among card-carrying Christian “fine” artists.

Performance artist (and non-Christian) Chelsea Culp has provided a new iteration for the cultural odd couple of Christian Expressionism (X-Ex?). In her installation at Trinity Christian College, six long church pews have been sawed and bolted together in a towering assemblage whose bulk recalls the welded piles of I-beams created by “plop art” public sculptor Mark di Suvero—although the form follows the smooth line of a Henry Moore work, and, as with Moore’s reclining blobs, the shape affords 360 degrees of striking viewpoints. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the statement for his installation “Negative Matter,” Dayton Castleman claims inspiration from the industrial light and magic of James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor and Disneyland. An enjoyable grouping, but the oddball in that list is not the Magic Kingdom, but Castleman himself. While I could easily imagine Turrell and his airport-rave ilk doing lighting design for the recent Disney remake of “Tron,” the imaginary movie “Negative Matter” calls to mind would perhaps be a David Lynch joint.

The viewer approaches a shed that emits a hum of activity and a soft movement of air. The wind gains in noise and intensity as one weaves in darkness around a couple of light-baffling walls and comes to face a dim spotlight on a giant standing fan. From the direction of the fan comes a steady blast of air, but its unplugged cord is visible on the floor, and its shining blades, free of any protective cage, are slowly shifting back and forth, as if being pushed by gentle, indecisive breezes. There is a black line on the ground and a boundary cable in front of the fan, and a sign at the entrance commanding viewers not to touch the art, but no posted explanation for the piece—so, spoiler alert: the secret is a lighting trick. The spotlight is a high-speed strobe that makes the blades on the high-speed fan (which is plugged in—the other cord is a dummy) appear to barely turn. Read the rest of this entry »

Anne Meyer, “Tiger”

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Thirty-five years ago, Sister Johanna Becker, OSB, of Saint Benedict’s College arranged for a graduating senior, Richard Bresnahan, to apprentice with Takashi Nakazato, a thirteenth-generation potter in Karatsu, a Japanese port city near the coast of Korea, that has been known as a ceramic center since the sixteenth century. Three years later, Bresnahan returned to Collegeville, Minnesota and built the eighty-seven-foot long “Johanna kiln,” the largest wood-fired kiln in America. And so a revered Japanese tradition took root in the upper Midwest.

But, as Bresnahan notes, though his work may seem Japanese to Americans, the Japanese say, ‘Boy, Richard, you sure make American-style pottery.” That unavoidable American-ness is what is so fascinating about this exhibition of work by Bresnahan and four of his former students, as selected by Matthew Welch, curator of Japanese and Korean Art at the Minneapolis Institute. While rooted in traditional Japanese technique and aesthetic, these Americans are chomping at the bit to express a louder, looser, more extroverted culture. Read the rest of this entry »

"Food For the Moon," 2010, oil and acrylic on canvas

There’s a lot of excess baggage that comes with being a young female painter who makes paintings of her dogs. Just ask Raychael Stine. A 2010 graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s MFA program, Stine is sometimes asked if she does commissions—“I have a Chihuahua too! Can you paint him?” When she was an undergrad at UT Dallas, Stine was referred to as “The girl who paints her dogs.” Even more vexing is the persistent assumption that Stine’s representational approach to painting is something she has yet to “outgrow,” as if it were not, in fact, a tactic she has consciously chosen for its ability to encapsulate emotionally inchoate and often covertly personal subjects within forms that have themselves been cast off as degraded, subservient, less-than. Read the rest of this entry »

By Emma Ramsay

It seemed like nothing more than a way for a couple of unemployed college students, living at home in the suburbs, to kill a few summertime hours. For the longest time this was the truth.

Vivek, my friend and collaborator, assured me that we could reconstruct Robert Smithson’s cornerstone of land art, “Spiral Jetty,” in a single day, in the forest preserve of DuPage County. I was skeptical. Smithson’s monument to nature, completed forty years ago on the coast of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, is a 1,500-foot long, fifteen-foot wide coiling mass of mud, precipitated salt crystals and black basalt rock. It reportedly took Smithson and his crew six days to construct, and was financed for nearly $9,000. Read the rest of this entry »

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Steve Tobin, who calls himself a “visual philosopher,” has done a lot of weird things since he got a bachelor’s degree in mathematics thirty years ago. He’s blown up barrels of clay, made shelters out of discarded glass art slides or tank windows, walls out of animal bones and bronze casts of termite mounds. His bronze cast of the “Trinity Root,” from 2005, gained him celebrity for the only art memorial permanently installed in the vicinity of Ground Zero. Since then, he has been designing his own tree roots, and now seems to be doing what traditional garden sculptors have done for centuries: make elegant figures that enhance the landscape, with fourteen towering sculptures installed on the grounds of the Morton Arboretum.

The large sculptures are figurative even if they are immediately recognizable as natural forms, such as roots. They display the balance, expression, rhythm and gesture of classic dance, and even of Chinese calligraphy. Indeed, some of his pieces look like they were assembled from Asian logograms that have been drawn by bending and welding enormous steel pipes instead of pulling an ink-filled brush over paper. The effect is electrifying on the pastoral landscape that holds the extensive conifer collection of the Morton Arboretum in Lisle. Some of the choreography is for solo dancers, others for groups of two or three. One figure arches over the garden path so viewers must walk between its legs, and one, that reaches up to forty feet high, seems more like a dancing brontosaurus than a human. Read the rest of this entry »