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.

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Elizabeth Shreve, a former psychologist, mines the iconographic unconscious of our culture, tweaking the styles of grocery circulars and shoe-store catalogues. Female figures, birds and desserts predominate in paintings that are nothing if not overindulgent. Previously balancing buffets of glistening cold cuts with decapitated flowers and syrupy pancakes, Shreve mounted a full-frontal assault, turning desire into disgust. The current exhibition, “Fears and Desires Magnifique,” represents a new turn. In contrast to her previous top-heavy nauseating images, the new works offer, instead of indictment, a dreamy vision of bouquets and party hats, color wheels recapitulating Ferris wheels and all feeling playful, pleasurable.

“The pleasures of life were always at her fingertips and needed no explanation or judgment,” Shreve writes in one of the cartoons, “Jidjits,” collected alongside the new paintings, and it is a sentiment that speaks to the new tone in her work. The nude in “Four Birds” is defined by strength of stance and self-determining gaze. Populating a fantastic space brimming with food, flowers, cartoon bugs and a distant circus tent, her attention remains elsewhere. In the lower corner of the painting, at crotch level, a bee rises from a box, likewise undistracted by the chock-a-block visuals. As in its sister painting, “The Smile,” Shreve gives us the experience of pleasure in a world of boundless promise. Excess, after all, need not lead to gluttony. The cornucopias’ contents have been flung onto canvas, but the effect, rather than sickening or shameful, is exhilarating—perhaps best represented by the ever-present color wheels, exemplifications of the potentials of painting itself, the abundance of options to be fingered, tasted, and played with. Read the rest of this entry »

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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

The Flat Iron Arts Building opens at six on “First Fridays,” and by seven a small line has formed at the gallery’s entrance. It’s a donation affair, and considering you’re bound to spend twenty dollars on cheap beer or a cab at some point later in the night, giving the girl at the door five dollars doesn’t sound like a waste. She hands out maps and points people up to the stairs.

The early gallery crowd is comprised mostly of adults over 30. They’ve got their standard-issue clear-plastic wine cups and smart glances. The wood floor creaks as a woman goes in to hug an artist. She points at a mural behind him. It is an abstract piece full of greens, yellows and oranges. It is also the main focus for the night. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Expect the Unexpected,” a survey of paintings and works on paper by the late Hollis Sigler (1948-2001), organized by the Rockford Art Museum, is now on view at the Chicago Cultural Center. Adroitly curated by Patty Rhea, the volume of works by Sigler helps reveal their lasting value.

A Chicagoan by way of graduate school, Sigler was one of the founding members of the feminist art collective and alternative gallery Artemisia (1973-2003). She found critical success in the early 1980s, and showed at the 1981 Whitney Biennial. The current retrospective contains twenty years of her work.

The lack of irony in Sigler’s work instantly identifies her as part of a previous generation. Domestic scenes heightened with symbolic narratives pulse with energy in van Gogh-esque staccato brushstrokes, dots and dashes. Shallow, warped spaces and cartoon-like representations betray Sigler’s heavy reliance on the traditions of outsider art, complete with apocalyptic imagery and populist religious overtones. These tropes are employed to an emotional end, repurposed to address the nature of feminine and queer desire. “Desire Released,” from 1983, shows a woman backlit by the moon as she dances in an earthen valley that is subtly erotic. Much of Sigler’s work focuses on the liberation of desire, whether just beyond the valley, outside of a window or rising to heaven.

Sigler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, which recurred in 1991. She created the “Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers” series in response. An artist who makes work specifically about the cancer experience may face marginalization in the survivor story genre, but Sigler’s art transcends such easy shelving. The current retrospective reveals Sigler’s intense engagement with culture. While she certainly positioned herself as a passionate advocate for women’s health issues, her painted legacy suggests a larger project of self-actualization. (Dan Gunn)

Hollis Sigler shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 W. Washington, through April 4.

William Kentridge, Video still of "Tabula Rasa," 2003. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

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Fresh on the heels of Liam Gillick’s recently closed exhibition, which showed how unfulfilling a post-studio practice can be, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened “Production Site,” their contribution to the yearlong, citywide Studio Chicago project, which seeks to re-energize the city’s artists to get back in the studio to make stuff. While so many artists today use digital technologies, contract outside fabricators and expand the role of art beyond the studio-to-gallery system, “Production Site” proves that museums still need studio artists. Curator Dominic Molon charts the transformation that objects undergo between their private creation and their public reception. Some of the mythical, magical heat that bubbles over in the artist’s studio then dissipates in transport to the gallery or museum, but more often than not, the thirteen artists in this presentation tend to reveal that they can conjure stunning effects regardless of place. So, we end up with an engaging, visually vibrant show that nominally tries to link artists around this theme, but the artists take such markedly different turns on this journey that we ultimately get the impression that “the studio” means markedly different things to different artists. Read the rest of this entry »

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Justyna’a Adamczyk’s “New Paintings” is a taut, elegant show of eight roughly similar paintings from 2009. They are all the same size, 23.5 by 27.5 inches, and the same material, washed-out acrylic on linen. They all embrace white space and, at their best, simplicity. They also seem to represent a journey, taken clockwise around the gallery, of an artist discovering and developing her strength. “Sztukas” is the title of the first work, which is an apparently untranslatable Polish word meaning… “something untranslatable.” An opaque white cloud—noteworthy for the absence of opaque forms—rains down a tangle of vines that might festoon a ceramic tile or a teapot, engendering an initial fear that the work is too decorative, too crafty; a fear that is then gradually dismissed. By painting the final painting, “Seriously…,” any sign of the stiff knick-knackery is gone, replaced by two dark washes of varying opacity. A large blob reads as a torso. A second, thicker blob is an ominous, even brutal shape, like a bird pecking out the eyes of a dead man or thoughts forcibly escaping the brain and turning into a comic thought-bubble, mocking and cruel. In between these two extremes is the transition, with each work selectively adding and subtracting elements, searching for the best fit. Cutesy lipstick puckers and seashells are first allowed to exist alone, before being met with threats of violence. The tchotchkes then disappear altogether, but for the remnant bloody splash, and finally a vague remembrance. Adamczyk’s process hones the work to its finest point of expression, leaving me with hopes of the next works to come. (Erik Wennermark)

Through February 13 at EC Gallery, 215 N. Aberdeen

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Showing work that lacks even a hint of anger or disgust, this is a painter who does not especially belong in Chicago, and so, indeed, this youthful retrospective marks the end of Angel Otero’s stay in the city where he has spent the last six years as a student at the Art Institute. He’s a very old-school kind of painter—all about nostalgia and beauty and evident craftsmanship. His still-lifes belong in the seventeenth-century, except that he uses materials in such unlikely ways, and his sense of despair feels less cosmic/eternal and more personal/fragile.  Even when his still-life escapes the painted surface and pours out onto an actual table, it’s still composed with great care and beauty, although these installations do seem unbearably, even morbidly vulnerable to cobwebs and dust. Like other masters of the Spanish school, he can turn black into a rich, delicious color. “With paint, I want to give a sense of abundance, unbalance, ambition, courage and persistence within form, color and texture in every painting,” he says. Perhaps he’ll end up back in Puerto Rico, like the painter who first inspired him to become an artist, Arnoldo Roche Rabell, who graduated from the Art Institute thirty years ago. But hopefully, this will not be the last time he has a major show in Chicago. From the Union League Club to Kavi Gupta Gallery to the Cultural Center, he certainly has gotten a lot of support here in a short amount of time. (Chris Miller)

Through March 28 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Randolph

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Why would anyone spend thirty-five years teaching art at Wheaton College? It’s an Evangelical institution that, until recently, forbade drinking, dancing, extra-marital sex, the teaching of evolutionary biology, and all such sinful behavior. Throughout those thirty-five years, Joel Sheesley has continued to develop his painting, with one theme following another, every five years or so. His current theme is puddles, and this seems to be his most transcendent series of all. Gone are the well-dressed but painfully tense suburbanites who populated his earlier work, and all that’s left are puddles of water on the city pavement, the blue sky they reflect, and an old, wooden ladder that might connect the one to the other, echoing the words of an old Negro spiritual. Everything in Sheesley’s  paintings is done so well: the textures of the pavement, the luminosity of the sky, the dramatic design of the whole, and the occasional foot or reflected silhouette of a human figure who still seems a bit uncomfortable in the majesty of God’s creation. But that’s Protestant Christianity, isn’t it? And please note: Sheesley is not making hokey illustrations for Sunday School textbooks or religious tracts. Outside a place like Wheaton College, where else could this kind of spiritual art be developed?  (Chris Miller)

Through April 4 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Randolph

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If one thought of Kim Piotrowski’s current show at 65Grand in musical terms, it would be an accomplished, refrained EP album from a talented artist who has had several hit albums. Simply titled “Crowns,” the show presents a selection of works that allegedly depict crowns sourced from Internet searches, though some are more literally apparent as such than others. The jeweled tiaras and golden coronets are so lush and layered that each piece adds a distinct timbre to the record. And the artist has allowed the works to be playful and experimental, adding new materials to her repertoire, like plenty of gold leaf and a synthetic paper that absorbs less of the paint. With the variety of instruments at her disposal, the pieces could be cacophonous messes, but they veer brilliantly toward cohesive inventiveness and sustained melodies. The strongest pieces are works like “She King” and “Sunken Glory,” but each of the tracks adds a new element and supports the whole experience. Like any good EP, the show whets your appetite for the upcoming releases. Luckily that’s not too far in the future with Piotrowski’s solo at the Hyde Park Art Center this Fall. (Jason Pallas)

Through February 13 at 65Grand, 1378 W. Grand, entrance on Noble.