Alexis Mackenzie, "El Arbol," 2010

Death, in the board game lotería, is safe as Rose. They are simply nouns, presented in picture, as playing-card decoration. Lotería is a game of chance but you don’t really get Love or Death from it, only win or lose. In the card set of tarot, though, Death or The Fool mean what they mean, whatever they mean.

Two current exhibitions recruited contemporary artists to re-imagine these well-worn decks of cards. “Wild Card” at Johalla Projects uses the Major Arcana tarot deck as its jumping-off point, and “Mano/Mundo/Corazón: Artists Interpret La Lotería” at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts draws from the popular Mexican card game lotería.

The common tarot deck (twenty-one cards) and the lotería deck (fifty-four cards) share six characters: The Devil, The Moon, The Sun, The World, The Star and Death. Both decks were popularized about 200 years ago, in Mexico and Europe. The current enthusiasm for and allure of these card decks is their singular, focused imagery. Spider or sliced Watermelon, they float against the blue sky. The Devil, what’s he got to do with it? Homage to these decks reinforces the supernatural perception that images have meaning in our lives, as talismans. Metamorphosis is a common theme in many of the remakes. People morph into animals, and animals morph into dead animals. Read the rest of this entry »

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Jason Pickleman discovered dozens of psychedelic silkscreen prints from the sixties and seventies tucked away in flat files he purchased two years ago from a now-defunct art gallery. “Corporate Psychedelia” marks the first time his collection has been displayed in its entirety.

The prints are psychedelic in the strictest sense of the word, with unnatural color schemes and geometric yet strangely evocative forms. These works do not offer conventional portrayals of anything in particular. Like true psychedelic art, they attempt to transcend the mundane. They show what is not there as opposed to what is.

Though thoughtfully crafted, the pieces are compelling neither individually nor as a group. From either perspective, the shocking nature of psychedelia is lost; garish hues and abstract images become expected, like slight variations of the same image. However, the collection cannot be written off entirely—the intriguing, ambiguous nature of its provenance compensates for its banality. Read the rest of this entry »

"Stonehenge (with Two Persons) Blue," 2005, Mixographia print on handmade paper

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Equal parts eye candy and brain-teaser, this gem of an exhibition spans roughly forty years of John Baldessari’s printmaking career.

His signature stock photographic images of figures with their faces painted out by round, color-saturated circles are just the tip of the iceberg for this engaging retrospective. Film stills and collage elements are introduced, with framed pieces grouped together in an over-determined salon style aped by generations of subsequent Southern California artists, most notably the New Folk/Beautiful Losers circuit.

These poignant vignettes, sometimes expressed via chock-a-block arrangements, and sometimes contained within a single, large-format work, employ all the magic of successful surrealist art by beguilingly de-familiarizing the familiar. Read the rest of this entry »

Untitled, 2010, screen print, 8 x 8 inches. Photo by Angee Leonnard.

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Lilli Carré’s exhibition of new prints at Spudnik Press contains mysterious symbols, fractured forms and cautionary tales. This small, informal show of works that Carré completed as an artist-in-residence at Spudnik includes several intricate screen prints and two handmade books. Carré is best known for her graphic novels and illustrations, but this series of prints is her first foray into traditional printmaking.

In her prints, Carré layers flat translucent colors to create the ghostly figures that float through her narratives. In the simple accordion-fold book, “Dreams,” a man imagines a naked woman appearing next to him on the train. Her red hips lean against his blue coat making a rich purple color where the two overlap. In the handmade book, “Don’t Drink from the Sea,” Carré depicts a hot summer evening in the city where people sweat so much it forms a pond and pale green figures swim through deep blue water. In both works, Carré uses the ability to adjust the transparency of the ink to tell a story about the fragility of the human form. 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.

"Year of the Dog #8," woodblock print with collage and hand coloring

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Despite a prolific output of work, this is Judy Pfaff’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. For a large part of her career, Pfaff has been known for her pioneering installations and sculpture. However, in recent decades there has been a marked transition within her work.

In a ­­­1998 interview with Richard Whittaker, Pfaff describes this transition as a shift from the exterior to an “interior landscape.” A 2004 MacArthur grant also spurred changes and increased production in Pfaff’s work. With the unrestricted grant she acquired five acres of land in upstate New York, a staggering amount of studio space, and legions of assembling assistants. Read the rest of this entry »

Romare Bearden, "Out Chorus," 1979-80, etching and aquatint. Courtesy of the Romare Bearden Estate

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Weren’t Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence two great jazz artists who made prints instead of record albums? They were both storytellers, and as they improvised on their various themes, they had more in common with Ben Webster or Miles Davis than with the icons of late modernism in the visual-art world, especially with the scenes from Lawrence’s Genesis series, now on view at G.R. N’Namdi Gallery. Internet renderings cannot do justice to the delight and impact of these images, where Lawrence tells the story of creation through the body language of a charismatic minister at a storefront church, as Lawrence himself had experienced him sixty years earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954). Bathers by a River, 1909–10, 1913, 1916–17. Oil on canvas, 260 x 392 cm (102 1/2 x 154 3/16 in.) The Art Institute of Chicago, Charles H. and Mary F. S. Worcester Collection, 1953.158. © 2010 Succession H. Matisse / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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As the exhibition “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917” shows, what is radical at one moment in history is often mainstream the next. Henri Matisse’s nudes and still lives might seem placid to a contemporary sensibility, but if one can imagine the years when Matisse worked on many of the paintings on view in this exhibition, the confrontational immediacy and disruptive energy of these paintings becomes clear. In 1913, the Model T had just hit the streets, the first transcontinental telephone call had just been made and the First World War, the first mechanized war, was about to break out. Matisse’s own brother was sent to a prison camp in Germany when his hometown was occupied.

For me, it’s the scale of these paintings that register the shock waves of a collision with modernity transforming time, space and social, political and economic arrangements of the previous era. However, the curators of the exhibition are interested in what Matisse called his “modern methods of construction.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Novelist Italo Calvino once said, “I believe that fables are true.” Printmaker Damon Locks and furniture designer Eve Fineman appear to take this as a guiding principle in their show at Heaven Gallery, “The Invisible City.” Like Calvino’s novel of a similar title, the works in this show project imagined cities and the things that might fill them. Locks, the frontman for the band the Eternals, has created digital prints, silkscreens and relief prints that play with two sides of “invisibility,” depicting neglected urban spaces, overlooked perspectives and marginalized people, while also envisioning cities not yet visible.  Some of his images recombine elements of Chicago, putting train tracks, buildings and buses in new and provocative relations. Locks’ printing process gives these pieces the scabrous texture of cracking brick and concrete, while the hues—in everything from faded walls and smudged “newsprint” to supersaturated skies—endow them with an aura of nostalgia for things to come. From desolate to populous, disconsolate to euphoric, the cityscapes and inhabitants imagined here provoke questions about race, urban planning, and socioeconomic disparity, all oriented around a hope summed up in the words emblazoned on one print: “Tomorrow starts today.” Read the rest of this entry »

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.