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.

RECOMMENDED

How is a kitchen different from an art gallery? It’s busier, but also more relaxed—because this is the center of somebody’s home, where family mementos are up on the refrigerator door and everyone comes in to chat. It’s the place where all problems get fixed, whether it’s a hurt feeling or a craving for a bologna sandwich. It’s a positive, comfortable, predictable, non-judgmental place unlike, say, an art gallery. Which is just to say, I don’t think Deborah Maris Lader’s work especially belongs in one. But then neither do good contemporary statues of Buddha or the Virgin Mary. Lader’s “teeny etchings” are windows onto a happy, if harried domestic world, and unlike so many artists, Lader does seem to have a healthy, happy life that she expresses in song as well as prints and paintings. She has been performing and recording with her alt-folk trio Sons of the Never Wrong for ten years now, with the same kind of playful whimsy. She is clearly highly skilled as a printmaker and she ingeniously incorporates photographs into her multimedia, dreamlike images of birds and people swinging through space. But the most enjoyable art has a sense that the artist, not the just the subject, is performing a high-wire act, and Deborah Maris Lader is just too darned comfortable. (Chris Miller)

Through March 15 at Chicago Art Matrix Gallery, Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 W. 35th, 3rd floor.

Eugène Carrière, Sleep, 1897, Lithograph. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

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Nan Goldin, whose photographs of her friends revealed a twilight world of entertainers, addicts and melancholy lovers, has nothing on Albert Besnard, whose 1887 etching of two morphine addicts is on display in the exhibition “The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy 1850-1900. This beguiling show of prints, illustrated books, drawings and small, fluid, mysterious bronzes, traverses not only dark private states of mind connected with reveries, madness, love, suicide, domestic violence and rape, it contains prints which express intimate reactions to the public tumult of the age. A view of Paris in which the victims of a cholera epidemic of 1865 sail off in the ill-wind of a terrible human cloud by Nicolas Chifflart and a grieving weaver, her loom and wool waiting in the background, watches a dying child in a dark lithograph titled “Need” by the German Kathe Kollwitz. The print is part of a suit documenting the sorrows associated with the Weaver’s Rebellion of 1897 in Germany.

Curators from the National Gallery in Washington, DC, where the exhibition originated, assemble these works to shed light on media and imagery during a period where there was a reorganization of the boundaries between what we think of as public and private life. Because of their size, discursive or contemplative nature, collectors often stored prints and studied them in private rather than displaying them. The entire cycle of Max Klinger’s wonderfully strange symbolist saga “The Glove or Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove,” narrating the finding of a woman’s glove in ten fantastic, subtly erotic and non-linear etchings, hangs in the dimly-lit galleries among other intimate, variously decadent, symbolist and realist prints. Etching and lithography build subjects out of inky layers of dark tangled or cross hatched lines, drypoints are perfect for creating atmospheric grays, the medium, in turn, is predisposed to the subjects of obsession, possession and describing the low light of the sick room or the ill-lit corners of the fin de siècle urban world. (Janina Ciezadlo)

Through June 13 at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

"Siesta Upstairs," c. 1945, oil on panel

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“There is a living, moving geometry in a city, and it tells a human story,” Margo Hoff (1910-2008) explained to an art magazine in 1963, and that’s pretty much the story of her painting, from the thirty years spent in Chicago, to her following five decades in New York.  The current retrospective, at Corbett vs. Dempsey, shows just how much those stories changed after she left Chicago at age fifty. The Windy City was full of mysteries for this Oklahoma girl, and her paintings are small windows into urban life, usually nocturnal. What are those strange neighbors doing tonight, anyway? Moving to New York, she felt more like one of the crowd—a bustling, thrilling, restless crowd, and her paintings began to resemble vibrant, folksy art quilts. Indeed, she had begun cutting painted canvas into pieces and then pasting them all together, with a very precise sense of design, into collage, full of brilliant colors, sharp edges, and rhythmic energy. Was she going to the jazz clubs to hear Monk, Davis and ‘Trane? She went to a lot of places, teaching classes in Uganda, Beirut, and Sao Paolo, as she had at Hull House, and just seemed to have an endless enjoyment and curiosity about the world. “A hospitality of heart,” as one friend put it. More understated, but still quite enjoyable, are a few of the urban geometries of contemporary Chicago painter and post-rock musician, Sam Prekop, which play, like a b-side, in the east wing of the  gallery. Visiting this show will likely be the highlight of any dark, wintry day in Chicago. (Chris Miller)

Through January 16 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

RECOMMENDED

It’s not surprising that the strong, simple woodblock prints of Unichi Hiratsuka (1895-1997) would appeal so much to Chicago structural engineer Theodore Van Zelst (1923-2009) whose family just donated his collection to the Art Institute. The artist’s grandfather was an architect, and the sense of gravity weighs heavily on the grandson’s bold depictions of earth and buildings, while the collector innovated the study of soil for its load-bearing potential. Hiratsuka was an innovator as well, being among the founders of Sosaku Hanga and the first teacher of wood block printing at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1935. Sosaku Hanga is the modern version of Japanese woodblock printing that unites design, wood-cutting, and printing into the hands of one skilled artist instead of three. What is lost in delicacy is gained in boldness. But beyond that technical aspect, everything else is open to the widest variety of expression. Many Sosaku Hanga artists rose to prominence in the postwar era for their abstract or neo-primitive designs, but Hiratsuka’s work seems more like a simplified version of the nineteenth-century, with a love of landscapes and occasionally young, naked women. And he lived a very long time—allowing him two almost separate lives, with his last thirty years spent with his daughter in Washington D.C., patronized by presidents and making images of national monuments. His strong, cheerful, extensive oeuvre is something of a monument itself—a monument to a life well spent in the catastrophic twentieth century. (Chris Miller)

Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

1963

By Bert Stabler

This year marks the centennial of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, as many art fans probably know. Somewhat fewer art fans may be counting down to next year’s anniversary of Pope Pius X’s 1910 encyclical, the “Oath Against Modernity,” which, while diametrically opposed to Marinetti in attitude, shares much of his fierce vision of an absolute and triumphant Reason. And, caught between (and somewhat after) these two grand phallic statements of the cultural epoch, we find the colorful, thoughtful, and humane artwork of Corita Kent, also known as Sister Mary Corita.

Kent was born in 1918, and attended Catholic schools in Los Angeles, joining the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1938. She learned silkscreen printing while in graduate school for art history at the University of Southern California, and won a local art contest in 1952 held by the Los Angeles County Museum with a print titled “The Lord is with Thee.” In her work of this period, she used bold colors and a Picasso-esque appropriation of simplified gestural renderings of sacred illuminations and calligraphy.

1964

She was eventually censured by the Los Angeles Archbishop, in keeping with the aforementioned “Oath Against Modernity,” and was told to stop rendering the human form in a contemporary style. In the 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement and the progressive statements made in the Second Vatican Council, an expression of liberation theology that ran directly counter to the reactionary approach exemplified by Pius X, Sister Corita began making prints that combined large cropped commercial text, reminiscent of Pop Art, with handwritten quotes from literature, Scripture and politics that expressed her opposition to war, racism and economic inequality. In 1968 she left her order. She ended up leaving the Church, as well as the West Coast. She moved to Boston, where she made much more subdued work, and came to identify herself as a Jungian and a Buddhist. In 1985 one of her prints kicked off a long series of U.S. postage stamps, simply titled “Love”; she died of cancer the next year. Read the rest of this entry »

Marina Kovalevskaya

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The wonderful thing about this exhibition is the variety of genres that each of these middle-aged women have entered throughout the decades of their lives as artists—a luxury available only in art careers that never felt the financial pressure to stick to a successful format. And there’s also that wonderful difference between artists trained in St. Petersburg, Russia and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Like the ancient Romans, twentieth-century Soviet sculpture was mostly about depicting strength and importance in portraits of old men, and Kovalevskaya has mastered this demanding art. Soviet sculpture also followed the cool, simple classicism exemplified by Maillol, and she is good doing that in clay and stone, as well as practicing a looser, colorful, geometric kind of folk ceramic art. Brody’s American training focused on a more personal, self-expressive style, with dreamlike silk-screens and abstractions from the seventies leading up to figurative sculpture reliefs and her current photographic documentation of a quiet, meditative life overlooking the changing moods of Lake Michigan. Here are two Chicago women with two very different lives, but both with a sense of beauty that is not specific to any time or place. (Chris Miller)

Through November 18 at Palette and Chisel, 1012 N. Dearborn.

poster for Mandate

By Jason Foumberg

“Why do all the work?” asks Nadine Nakanishi of traditional printmaking techniques. The rhetorical question is often posed to her and Nick Butcher, who together run Sonnenzimmer, a silk-screening poster-design studio in Roscoe Village. A shopper at the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco stopped at their booth to ask why he shouldn’t simply get posters made at Kinko’s where 11×17 full-color sheets are available for about one dollar each. The question doesn’t frustrate Nadine but emboldens her to promote print culture, and she’s clearly spent a lot of energy doing so. Nadine is thoughtful, articulate and passionate about the continuing need for local, hand-crafted prints—not fine-art prints but posters, announcements, catalogues, books, flyers—and Sonnenzimmer’s output is testament to this ethic.

Nadine and Nick started as painters and gravitated toward prints as they realized how a print could fulfill a need where a painting couldn’t. At first, they traded rent for poster designs. After mentoring with local print legend Jay Ryan, they founded Sonnenzimmer in 2006 as a fully functioning business enterprise. Their love for painting hasn’t died, though, as painting and drawing often makes its way into their printed compositions. Read the rest of this entry »

The Seychelles sheath-tailed bat

As studio artists, Jenny Kendler and Molly Schafer felt limited in the amount of time and money they could spare to champion “the magical and natural world” that they both care deeply about. Through their previous collaborations they learned that activism sometimes works better outside the gallery system. “We found there exists enormous gaps between artists and activists,” Kendler says. It’s not only awareness campaigns, but also, and mostly, money that makes a tangible contribution to activist projects. One-hundred percent of the profits from the Endangered Species Print Project are contributed to specific foundations and research groups.

Kendler and Schafer began by researching the population of the Seychelles Sheath-Tailed Bat, numbering a dangerously low thirty-seven. Accordingly, they created a print depicting the bat in an edition of just thirty-seven. Through their project Kendler and Schafer have been able to work directly with organizations such as the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles, Project Golden Frog and The Marmot Recovery Foundation. These organizations, composed of scientists and researchers, many times are the sole entity working to preserve a species, and as a result none of the groups the women contacted have ignored their requests. In addition to contributing funds, Kendler and Schafer have been able to compile reliable, current statistics on these species in a single source: their website. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Google anything about Japanese prints and eventually you will end up at Floatingworld.com, an internet art dealer based right here in Chicago, which has just opened an amazing 8,200-square-foot display space in Lincoln Park. (That’s four times larger than the Buckingham Japanese print gallery at the Art Institute). It’s a simple, beautiful space, something like an upscale storefront restaurant, and perfect for the delectation of a genre that’s meant to be tasty and pleasing. The first entrée is a retrospective of Yozo Hamaguchi (1909-2000), an artist best known for his perfection of the laborious mezzotint technique that had all but disappeared in the twentieth-century. His monochrome kitchen table still-lifes from the 1950s feel like Japanese variants on  Giorgio Morandi, but as he further explored his medium, his work got smaller, more colorful, and ever more precious, to the point where he was making a new kind of graphic jewelry. And despite spending his adult life in Paris and San Francisco, his later work feels ever more Japanese—i.e., more natural and evanescent. Happily, the gallery displays these prints outside the protective but annoying glass frames that are so necessary in public museums. This exhibition also includes the metal plates that were used in the printing process. In the shrinking world of art galleries, this ambitious new space, with its large public exhibitions, is bucking the trend, and let’s hope it’s not as evanescent as the aesthetic it will display. (Chris Miller)

Through November 30 at Floating World Gallery, 858 W. Armitage, #148.