"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 »

Designed and executed by Magdalena Abakanowicz. Brun Rouge, 1970/73. Gift of Dr. Anne Baruch in memory of George Overton.

The Art Institute’s newly reopened textile galleries present “Contemporary Fiber Art: A Selection from the Permanent Collection,” but the show’s use of the term “contemporary” refers only to a range of dates rather than a practice, or the making of thought-provoking and forward-thinking fiber arts. This might be due to the fact that out of the sixty-one works on display, more than half are traditionally woven, and the abstract works seem like decoration. Contemporary fiber art does more than just root itself in tradition; it uses that tradition as material to address vital issues such as gender, race and labor.

One of the hurdles for early fiber arts being considered fine art was that it was thought to be utilitarian or decorative. For instance, Lyn Inall’s 1993 quilt, “Denim Cubes,” pieces together denim bits from commercially produced jeans complete with their original seams and buttons to depict a geometry of stacked blocks. This work does little to investigate quilting as a potential method for critiquing who wears denim, and why, and how. Instead, the denim quilt is a neatly constructed object composed of reused excess fabric, which is the traditional nature of quilts. It’s an unfortunate piece for display while a work by renowned quilter Faith Ringgold remains in storage. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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Beginning with McCormick, Deering and Field, Chicago’s wealthiest families have been donating tapestries to the Art Institute for more than a hundred years—so why is this the first time in living memory that most of these artworks are being exhibited? Because, as the museum tells us, “Some have viewed tapestries as mere copies of paintings or as little more than interior furnishings” (i.e. peripheral to the history of art). But now things are changing. In 1995, the AIC began to clean and restore its impressive collection and in 2002 the Metropolitan Museum in New York had “the first major tapestry survey in the United States in twenty-five years.” That show drew twice the predicted attendance and skyrocketed the career of its curator (who is now the Met’s director). So why are these old-fashioned heirlooms finally meeting with such success? Because they are so awesome, running from floor to ceiling, filling one glorious room after another with life-size heroes and gods who are perpetually tumbling out of their magical worlds and emerging into ours. And don’t forget the details—the designers didn’t—especially around the borders. Each enormous work could be cut into dozens of pieces, each of which could stand on its own as a delightful still-life or figure study. The earliest works, c. 1500, have the flat, magical, pictorial space of the Middle Ages, but most of these tableaux have the deep and voluminous space of the Renaissance and beyond, which can leave a viewer somewhat woozy since woven fabric cannot hold a straight line. Especially woozy, and especially exciting, is the complete fourteen-piece dramatic spectacle of Caesar and Cleopatra from the seventeenth century, and especially regal are the Gobelin “Seasons” made for Louis XIV. Let’s hope these magnificent things, now that they’re conserved, are trotted out more than just once per century. (Chris Miller)

The Divine Art: Four Centuries of European Tapestries shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan, through January 4.