Collector Peter Lemke in his gallery

By Jaime Calder

“Here it is,” he says. “It” is stunning. To enter Peter Lemke’s gallery is to enter a forgotten world of Chicago street art, a time capsule of work from nearly a dozen artists, some of whom have since moved on to other cities and other projects, some of whom are still residing and creating right here on these very streets. Lemke walks over to the nearest wall and grabs from a heap of poster boards.

“These are my Wesley Willis pieces,” he boasts, and holds up a fish-eyed image of Milwaukee Avenue drawn by the deceased outsider artist. “Wesley gave these to me,” he explains, placing the poster alongside sixteen others like it, “but these I saved.” Lemke gestures to the walls of the gallery. Though the stack of Willis works is impressive, it is the gallery walls that truly amaze: the product of Lemke’s self-imposed rescue operation, an operation that has provoked the interest—and the ire—of a number of artists.

Peter Lemke began collecting street art in 2004 when, while living near the intersection of Milwaukee and Halsted, many of the installations Lemke had enjoyed seeing in his neighborhood began to disappear or suffer defacement. “When one of my favorites went,” he says, “that was it. I started taking them down before any more got ruined.” He holds up an older piece by (art)illery, a yellow canvas featuring a wounded eagle in flight. A Sharpie-scrawled “holla yo!!!” mars the work, alongside childish doodles and scrawls. “This is disgusting,” says Lemke, who is very vocal about what he does and does not consider art. Insistent that he couldn’t let taggers and Daley’s buffing crew continue to destroy these installations, Lemke spent the next four years taking down the works—some of which are impressively large—and storing them in his basement and garage so that they could later be enjoyed by the public in a safe environment, free from the city’s deleterious elements. Read the rest of this entry »

Tamms Year Ten mud stencil on the lakefront at 37th Street East. Photo by Paul Kjelland.

By Lori Waxman

Dirt, water, whisk, sponge, bucket, box cutter, tar paper—these are not your typical artist’s materials. Mix the water and dirt in the bucket, lay the cut-out paper against a cement surface, and sponge on the mud, however, and the result is a handsome work of environmentally friendly graffiti.

Street artists often work with stencils, using them to shape spray-painted statements. But a chemical medium dispensed through an aerosol container reeks of toxicity, so Milwaukee-based Jesse Graves, intent on finding a more compatible way to apply his environmentally and politically conscious messages, evolved an alternate means of tagging: mud. The technique is nothing short of ingenious. Simple, cheap, graphically effective and not necessarily illegal, mud stencils, if protected from the elements, can last up to ten years; or, like all dirt, they can be washed off with water. Consistency is key, however, to achieving a bold visual with sharp edges: the mud mixture must be carefully controlled so that it achieves a viscosity akin to peanut butter or feces.

Yes, feces—like the feces sometimes smeared by inmates at Tamms prison on the walls of their cells. Cells where they are held in permanent solitary confinement, bereft of all human contact, for up to twenty-three hours a day, with breaks only for showers and individual exercise. It’s a supermax jail in Southern Illinois originally designed for the short-term punishment of violent inmates from other facilities, but one-third of whose occupants have now been locked up in extreme isolation for over a decade, with no clearly defined standards for transfer in or out. Widely believed to cause permanent physiological and psychological damage, these conditions contravene the Geneva Convention, two United Nations treaties and various other international human-rights accords. Conditions which have led inmates not only to paint their walls with shit in desperate attempts for attention, but also to mutilate themselves, to attempt suicide, and to require—for one in every ten men at Tamms—regular doses of psychotropic medication. All this for up to $90,000 a year per inmate, three to four times the cost of incarceration at other prisons in Illinois.

Tamms Year Ten mud stencil outside Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Photo by Sam Barnett.

What any of this has to do with mud stenciling was revealed this past Saturday as some thirty artists and other activists took to the streets of Chicago armed with six-by-nine-foot cutouts, informational flyers and the resolve to help end torture in Illinois. That was the message they broadcast in mud—END TORTURE IN ILLINOIS—bordered with a broken line in the shape of the state, topped with a star for Tamms, the regional capital of cruel and unusual punishment. They hit locations across the city, from the Art Institute and the Board of Trade to the Logan Square Skate Park, Senator Rickey Hendon’s West Side office, the Lincoln Park Green City Market, the University of Illinois quad, the DePaul Student Center and various sidewalks, boarded-up buildings and underpasses in between.

The campaign was the latest tactical art action by Tamms Year Ten, and one of its most vivid and accessible yet. A coalition of more than seventy groups throughout Illinois, from mental-health alliances to human-rights advocacies and faith-based committees, Tamms Year Ten was founded last year on the occasion of the prison’s tenth anniversary with the goal of urging the governor of Illinois and the Illinois Department of Corrections to either close or convert the prison, following national trends; to establish transparency and standards at the facility; and at the very least to follow the original legislative intent for the supermax, which was only meant for short-term use.

Tamms Year Ten has also worked with Illinois lawmakers to introduce HB2633, which includes provisions for instituting accountability at the prison and prohibiting mentally ill prisoners from being moved there in the first place. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Julie Hamos with twenty-seven co-sponsors, seems like the least the state can do in the face of the grotesque human-rights violations it has been committing for the past decade in the name of law and order. Identical confinement at Guantanamo Bay, whose closure has been ordered by President Obama, has been determined by the Pentagon to be too isolating for prisoner safety. But, according to an editorial that appeared in the Tribune just a few weeks ago, it’s good enough for Illinois residents. Chicago’s newspaper of record fears that the situation at other prisons could get uglier if the IDOC loses its freedom to keep inmates locked up at Tamms indefinitely, despite studies that indicate supermax incarceration increases recidivism and that Tamms has done nothing to reduce violence in other state prisons. Never mind the international consensus that prolonged isolation equals torture—as the Tribune put it, the “worst of the worst” end up there. Read: who cares.

Who cares, indeed? With bold public rallies, calls to lawmakers, intelligent press, ever more studies and reports, meetings with legislators and IDOC officials, and some smart art activism, hopefully a whole lot more people. Mud washes off in the rain—years of being cut off from any social contact, being locked up and treated worse than any animal, doesn’t.

RECOMMENDED

It has been twenty-five years since Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s book “Subway Art” was first published. Widely regarded as the “graffiti bible,” “Subway Art” documented graffiti art during the 1980s in New York City, primarily in the borough of the Bronx. For its twenty-fifth anniversary, the book is being re-released this year in a special edition that includes more content and larger images. This coincides with the publishing of Cooper’s current book, “Going Postal,” which documents contemporary art disseminated through cities on postal stickers stuck to common urban surfaces. Cooper believes these stickers are an example of how graffiti has “progressed and endured.” “Going Postal” also includes the work of several Chicago-based artists. To celebrate, the Chicago clothing and design company Novem, in conjunction with Upset Magazine, is hosting a book signing by Cooper and a sticker sale. All stickers will be selling for $5 and Cooper will also be selling photographs of her work.

In contemporary art, graffiti still continues to pose a great deal of questions in terms of distinguishing art versus vandalism. Twenty-five years ago Cooper and Chalfant were unable to find a publisher for the book in the United States, but now graffiti is thoroughly assimilated in both fine art and advertising. Cooper and Chalfant’s book helped push the style into the mainstream by publishing a firestorm of written, photographic and video documentation of illegal and ephemeral street art. Martha Cooper is a pioneer and a legend in her field, and her presence in Chicago is not something to be missed. (Sara McCool)

Book launch and signing and sticker sale, May 1, 5pm-10pm, at Novem Life, 1114 N. Ashland

By Alicia Eler

Dresses swish as fast as palm tree leaves in Miami, where the entire art world gathers for the annual spending spree. Alicia Eler’s daily blog clues you in on finds at the fairs, from the established Art Basel Miami Beach (the mother of all the Miami art fairs) to Chicago’s born-and-bred emerging art fair, Bridge. Tips of the day provided by Kansas City-based artist Peregrine Honig.

Monumental Art:

When bigger is better

Should you pull out the big guns at the beginning, or wait till later? Do it now while viewers still have energy and open eyes, because after a week of looking at thousands of booths filled with art, even a Gerhard Richter might start to look like an Andy Warhol soup can.

Sies + Höke Galerie must have had that same thought when they decided to bring Kris Martin’s “For Whom…” (2008), which takes up the entire Düsseldorf-based gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. Borrowing from John Donnes’ eponymous line, Martin’s bell swings, hitting hard metaphorically but not literally precisely because of what it lacks: the pendulum. The nearly 100-year-old bronze bell, originally built in 1929, hangs from the top of a 216.54-inch tall steel support. In its original church context, this bell wouldn’t serve its purpose of keeping track of time, signaling a call to prayer or signaling ceremony commencements. In the white-cube context, one watches the bell swing back and forth, hearing only its whistling movements drift through the air. Posing existential questions about our own mortality and the fate of a flawed system that keeps going despite its lack of working parts, Martin’s piece stuns like a Jenny Holzer truism.

Monumental takes on another form at SCOPE’s grown-up carnival land installation “Fun House” by Miami-based collective FriendsWithYou. One merely slips off their shows and enters the giant inflatable bouncy house through a large circle entrance. Jumping up and down releases any stress and channels the oft-forgotten inner child.

Smiles begone, however, once one sees the installation of an oversized horse three-way scene by Gregory de la Haba (Gallery Privee at Bridge Wynwood). As a giant brown male horse stands on its hind legs—his large cock in mid-air, heading toward the vagina of a white female horse who is adorned with a red feather hat and glittery red harness—a second identical white female horse, floating on her backside, flings her mouth toward the brown horse’s membrane. A child-size doll stands nearby, her back to the scene. It’s questionable as to why a horse three-way would happen directly behind an innocent-looking girl, but thankfully she doesn’t notice the spectacle. A steady stream of viewers do, however; crowds gathered around the horses, muttering stunned remarks to one another. At once intriguing and disturbing, this installation provides an unusual foray into the world of horse sex. I suggest keeping your My Little Ponies at home.

Friendlier beasts abound in a wall-size mural by New York-based artist collective Antistrot, conveniently visible onto the exterior of Aqua Wynwood’s warehouse-like façade. Large-scale creatures and characters spew forth cartoon and comic book-flavored pop culture: A wary gorilla peers to his right, a sense of sadness emanating from his with eerily human eyeballs, while a light-brown-skinned Muslim girl, her big brown eyes distant, solemnly carries a neon pink machine gun.

Though all of these pieces are either large in scale or in message, the monumental theme best applies to a portrait of Barack Obama, arguably the most important man alive today. German photographer Martin Schoeller, whose large-scale 2004 portrait “Barack Obama” on display at Hasted + Hunt’s Art Miami booth, honestly captures the now-president-elect while he was still a state senator. Schoeller, who studied under Annie Leibovitz, uses his detailed lens to take crisp, straight-forward, large-scale portraits of celebrities, including Heath Ledger and Justin Timberlake. For example, in the Obama portrait, he illuminates Obama’s glowing brown eyes, and focuses details on the soon-to-be-president’s nose, cheeks and lips, exposing a feeling of gentle honesty that one can sometimes only see through a frozen moment in time.

With Obama peering out from at least one wall of every fair, the German church bell keeps swinging, never tolling. And so we arrive at Peregrine’s Miami tip of the day: German comes in handy. Learn it, especially if you recognize for whom the bell tolls.

By Kate Gardiner

The first things that hit the eye on a sunny day in Pilsen are the murals. There is art everywhere—on storefronts, brickwork, churches, restaurants. The Virgin Mary of Guadalupe glows blue and gold on the side of a four-story building; an unfinished Aztec god gazes down on people behind a tortilleria; in an older mural, a portrait of Che Guevara stares accusingly at passers-by, reminding the majority Mexican-American neighborhood of their collective ancestors and traditions.

These images have become symbols of the neighborhood’s identity. And throughout Chicago, emblematic public art encapsulates the people that make up the “city of neighborhoods.”

Experts say, however, that many of the city’s best “contemporary murals”—from the Public Art Renaissance that began in 1967—are in peril.

Artist Caryl Yasko painted a mural in a Hyde Park underpass near 55th and Lake Park Avenue. It has since been plagued by water damage and crumbling cement. She repainted a panel of the 200-foot long work in October, and is trying to find funding to complete the restoration, provided the city of Chicago fixes drainage problems in the underpass that are undoing her efforts.

Yasko says she returned because restoring the mural and keeping it going “affects another several generations of people.” The mural, she says, helps the neighborhood say to the world, “We think in this place.”

Artist and art professor John Pitman Weber, one of the co-founders of the Chicago Public Art Group in the late 1960s, says his mentors encouraged his group to make sure that murals from the first half of the century were preserved. With CPAG executive director Jon Pounds, Weber is fighting the same battle now, to preserve the murals they created.

“We’re continuing to lose the remaining masterpieces from the 1970s and 1980s at a very disheartening rate,” Weber says. “It’s in neighborhoods [all over the city] where it’s gentrifying and it’s more yuppie.”

Alejandro Morales stands in front of the mural he spent the past two months painting at the behest of a private sponsor, one of a few murals painted this year in Pilsen.

Pounds thinks if absolutely no effort is made to restore important murals, “we are choosing to allow them to be destroyed.” On the other side of State Street, Weber says the battle to save aging murals is succeeding. “There’s been less of a loss in the Spanish-speaking and black neighborhoods,” he says. “They have a different attitude about art.”

Marcos Raya, a Mexican painter who has been working in Pilsen since 1971, said he goes back and touches up his murals in the neighborhood, if they still exist. He said the public art he and fellow artists made together in the 1970s reflects history, and should be preserved.

“Chicago was one of the most significant cities for the public art movement,” he says. “The murals gave a sense of identity and change to the working people whocame from all over to see them.”

Weber, reflecting on his own work, says many of his murals—and murals throughout the city—have been lost. Raya said he does not know how many of his murals still exist, but that some of the best murals have already been destroyed. “The historic ones should be reconstructed, so that the younger generation are taught to give different voice to their history,” he says.

Weber says any mural restoration project does have access, at least right now, to many of the artists who painted the original works in the 1970s. “The artist can lead the restoration, or at least advise it,” he says. In cases like Yasko’s, then, the artist is able teach the classical, fine art-mural technique to the young artists helping to repaint the mural while revisiting the historic period of the mural. Mural restoration is expensive, however; the price tag on Yasko’s project, which she expects to pay for with community donations, is at least $40,000.

Weber estimates that for every mural reconstructed, perhaps two or more are lost. But mural restoration is only part of the public art movement today. Many artists are interested in creating wholly new work, and some argue that spending money on restoration may inhibit the painting of new projects in the city.  Other artists wonder if there could be a similar public art movement now.

“I don’t know if [the same kind] of mural art exists any more,” says Yasko. “We need to have a new idea, a strength of ‘saying’ to work with the public. I don’t know if it exists in the cities.”

In Pilsen, says Raya, the murals represent community identity. “One problem with not having a history, is not having a collective identity,” he says. “The murals reflect our fight to have our own alderman, [our own high school.]”

Raya says the buildings reflect Pilsen’s working class struggle to become part of the city, and that they’re being torn out to be replaced by condos. By losing that history, Raya says, “we’re becoming the city of big shoulders. And no head.”

Listen to an audio version of this story.

RECOMMENDED

The walls of Phaiz have been transformed by graffiti artist Jersey Joe Rime. Rime’s letter styling has brought him recognition in and beyond the graffiti world, and the word “Chicago” stands out high and proud on the east wall. Just below the city name and not to be overshadowed, looms a massive, detailed vagina. The giant vag seems artistically appropriate and gratifyingly accurate, not crass. Though Rime’s roots are in the graffiti style he also creates fine art and apparel designs. Phaiz is a boutique where “fashion and art collide” and Rime’s artistic backdrop sets the tone for the presentation of visiting designers’ screen print ensembles and hand-crafted jewelry. Rime’s instillation is certainly something to see if you’re in the area. (Rachel Turney)

Through September 14 at Phaiz, 673 N. Milwaukee Ave., (312) 226-9070.

RECOMMENDED

At a new Northwest Side gallery called OhNo!Doom is a current group exhibit consisting of work made in tribute to the late Chicago street artist Brendan McGlynn Scanlon, aka SOLVE. Scanlon’s unexpected death at 24 on June 14 shocked the Chicago street-art-and-graffiti communities. The packed opening reception included a video address from Scanlon’s parents via YouTube and a silent auction was held for the pieces in the show, the proceeds of which will benefit the Madison East Art Department, an organization in Madison, Wisconsin, Scalon’s hometown. Curated by Scanlon’s close friend NiceOne, the show includes work by local artists such as Wise, Joey D and Brooks Golden, answering the question “What is solve?” In a variety of mediums including photography, painting, printing and collage, the answers are all different: a friend, an inspiration, an artist, a movement. This group show is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the memorials and tributes to Scanlon throughout Chicago and Madison. Through his death a part of the Chicago art community grew stronger and more committed to the hope and healing that art can bring. An army of artists has formed in the wake of this tragedy, as tributes to Scanlon’s life and work can be seen at every corner of the city, continuing the dialogue on the issues Scanlon cared about in his own work and life. (Sara McCool)

Through September 19 at OhNo!Doom, 2955 W. Lyndale.

By Jason Foumberg

A cabinetmaker’s dumpster is often a good source for the thin wood planes that Cody Hudson likes to use in his street-art installations. He paints the boards cyan or hot orange, and leaves others with the wood exposed, rounds their edges and stacks them in the gritty alleyways of Chicago, Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio.

As both an artist and a graphic designer, Hudson plays with the public presentation of an underground style. Roughly hewn and jagged-edged paper cut-outs often jostle with public-domain clip art—made catchy like a dub bass line in Hudson’s hand—and careful dabs of spray-paint, laid out in an orchestrated disorder. Hudson’s stage is the public sphere. Under the moniker Struggle Inc. his illustrations grace snowboards and LP covers, and his sculptural installations are often built from materials found on the street. An upcoming exhibit at New Image Art Gallery in Los Angeles marks the occasion for the release of “Save My Life,” a book spanning the past two years of Hudson’s various artistic enterprises.

In the recent past Hudson’s DIY street-beautification team included Juan Angel Chavez and Michael Genovese, Chicago artists who continue to mine the street aesthetic. The allure and anonymity of street art seems like a youthful indiscretion—just ask Barry McGee or Banksy; sooner or later the itch to go commercial sounds less like selling out and more like reaching a larger audience. These days, Hudson realizes most of his installations in art galleries, although he still does use found wood and other detritus objects such as pots and pans fashioned into a spinning chandelier.

Hudson’s Logan Square studio is an airy white space with an area designated for painting on one end and his Mac on the other. He can flow seamlessly from painting to design, one informing the other, the painting an outlet for his independent visions and the design an opportunity to hear his creative voice resound publicly. In between his painting studio and his design table, pieces of inspiration are taped to the wall: a bootleg Nirvana poster, some examples of package design and a spray-painted upside-down cross (more on that in a minute). The tight composition recalls a similar installation in his 12×12 solo exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in November, 2007. There, Hudson transposed a corner of his studio into the gallery where a painting casually butted up with found-object sculptures, a chair and television set. The piece looked like a 3D sketch, and was an insight into Hudson’s great sense of playful and intuitive composition that is reiterated in many of his cut-paper collages.

Much of the work, the fine art and design alike, are based on abstractions. How can anyone dislike a circle, Hudson asks rhetorically. The strength of a shape such as a circle, continues Hudson, is its many associations and interpretations; its meaning is not limited to its form. Harnessing the boldness of simple shapes, and their attendant accessibility, may have helped propel Hudson to a point of popularity. It’s only recently that the shapes have started coming together into quasi-figurative faces and bodies that, in their quirky simplicity, stand up next to a Miro collage or a Dada-period Picabia line drawing.

The cross or crucifix also features prominently in Hudson’s pieces, although when questioned about it as a recurring motif, Hudson finds little relation between the symbol and any personal religious affiliation. Perhaps like the circle, a cross can be randomly grabbed from the universe of symbols, and its graphic identity can be unfixed and tweaked. Perhaps it has potential as a design element rather than a loaded refrain. In this light Hudson experimented with a series of drawings involving hot-air-balloon-like contraptions that often sport small crosses. The structures float in the middle of pages torn from old books, their edges browning with age. To divine the imagery Hudson imagined that it wasn’t he who drew them, but that they were relics from a manual from a bygone Christian cult. The contraptions, therefore, are machines for spiritual ascension.

The fictional removal of the artist from this series of experimental drawings reflects Hudson’s daily practice of a seemingly authorless graphic-design process. Often the design of, say, a book or a record cover posits a particular style and identity, but its maker sits in the background, almost anonymous to the viewer. The same is true with the street-art installations, as the unsigned works simply live in the city like an elegant but nameless passerby.

Cody Hudson’s book “Save My Life” is available locally at Quimby’s and Penelope’s, $20.

RECOMMENDED

The Hoosier state is showing Chicago some love with this exhibition of long-standing Chicago graffiti stalwarts such as Slang, Risk, Stef, Mike Genovese, ChuCho, Chris Silva, Pilot and many more. With the explosion of graffiti-influenced art, design and advertising it is important to remember why this form of art was so influential in terms of its questioning of public-versus-private space, art versus vandalism, vandalism versus advertising and who controls the urban landscape. With graffiti, the where and the when of the work is not constant and must be given consideration with each piece. As well as showcasing the artists that are the foundation of the graffiti community in Chicago, this show highlights artists that are well versed in the considerations of space and location that are involved in the creation of their visual work. The show includes such stand-out pieces as a tribute to the infamous graffiti bomber CAP by the artist Pilot, entitled “I’m not a graffiti artist, I am a graffiti bomber.” Indeed all of the artists in this show have defined themselves as both bombers and artists. If you want to know the difference and understand why your soda can and sneakers look like they do, you need to see this show. (Sara McCool)

Through July 11 at Indiana University Northwest Gallery for Contemporary Art, 3400 Broadway Ave, Gary IN (219)980-6891. 

RECOMMENDED

When a dead soldier’s body returns home it’s draped in a flag, keeping death at a uniformed distance. In this series of thought-provoking screen prints at the Art on Armitage street gallery, conceptual artist Alan Lerner forces us to reexamine convention and form, and as a result, alters our ingrained servitude towards formality. Through marching bands and feathered caps, Lerner raises consciousness about the dark underside of pomp and circumstance. Civic responsibility, as it turns out, is indicative of society’s need to cloak violence from war in a mask of duty and honor. Two members of a marching band, painted in red, appear against a smoky gray landscape—their whistles and feathered hats just as ominous as their determined, military-style marching. A bright red trumpet juxtaposed against a mass of black and white skulls suggests the inevitability of death as a result of blind allegiance. In Lerner’s most stirring piece, a mysterious black book looms alongside men in conflict, depicting the perilous power of words. In just a few screen prints, Lerner poses a much-needed challenge: how to separate independent thought from societal exigency. By showing the interrelation between the imperative and violence, the artist conveys the need for morality above national obligation. (Marla Seidell)

Through May 31 at Art on Armitage, 4125 W. Armitage.