Cody Hudson

While the summertime draws music lovers out into the sunshine, artists traditionally use the hiatus from school and gallery shows to retreat to wilderness residencies, and so the city seems emptied of its artists while all other scenes thrive. Within the summer’s lull, Jennifer Keats saw an opportunity to create a new artist residency in Columbia College’s digital photography lab. Keats is the digital lab’s facilities coordinator, and instead of letting her machines idle, Keats contacted a couple of artists to spend a month in the lab, in collaboration with the summer crew, to make big, beautiful digital prints.

Last summer, Keats inaugurated the Digital Artist-In-Residence program by inviting Stephen Eichhorn into the lab for a month, and this month ended the current residency session with Cody Hudson. Both artists create photo-based work, that is, they scan and cut and re-imagine photographs that already exist in the world, culled from vintage books and Internet images, but neither Eichhorn nor Hudson are strictly photographers, which is what the digital lab specializes in processing, so the residency so far has been an experiment in heightening the quality of each artists’ work by introducing them to new methods or providing technology to make it shine. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s happy hour at Hinge Gallery. Co-owners Gretel Garcia Cuba and Holly Sabin sit in the front room of their storefront space on Chicago and Damen, drinking Blue Moons and talking with two friends and a printmaker they’ve commissioned to paint his first mural in the gallery’s back kitchen. “We like to encourage people that already have a body of work to continue exploring new ideas,” says Cuba.

After meeting seven years ago as members of the same art collective, Deadline Projects, the pair began seriously talking about opening a gallery this past February. “We thought if we put our forces together we could really create a space of our liking [to showcase the work of] artists who are around the same age range as us and whose work is just undersold and underrated, but we think is extremely valuable,” says Cuba. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

Polly Ullrich

Polly Ullrich, an established art critic, journalist and artist, died in a car accident on July 6 in Wisconsin. She was 60 years old. Ullrich kept a modest profile in the art scene while her writing was prolific, careful and sharply specialized. Ullrich was an expert on contemporary sculptural forms, and she dedicated her inquiry into this emergent field for decades, especially documenting and interpreting artwork produced by Midwestern and Chicago-based artists.

After earning degrees in journalism from the University of Wisconsin, in 1973 Ullrich moved to Chicago and reported on the arts for local and national publications, including the New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times, for which she contributed a series of profiles on contemporary artists titled “New Faces of the Eighties.” At one point she took a break from writing to make ceramic sculptures, which she exhibited in the Midwest, New York and Florida. Ullrich later returned to writing and pursued a graduate degree in art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she aligned herself with artists and practitioners of the fiber and material studies movement. During this period, her contributions to the New Art Examiner, such as the often-referenced 1998 essay “The workmanship of risk: the re-emergence of handcraft in postmodern art,” helped to define a new strain of contemporary craft. Following other major articles in the New Art Examiner, Ullrich contributed to many art and craft publications, including Sculpture magazine, which gave her a platform to explore and explain the development of expansive sculptural forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Hedrich Blessing mural/Photo: Brock Brake

When the longtime graffiti-artist “hotspot” on the backside of the headquarters of legendary architectural photographers Hedrich Blessing started a serpentine threat to devour the entire building, the firm’s partners decided to commission a mural of their own, in hopes that the taggers of the city would respect it and turn their attention elsewhere. Instead of Graffiti Blasters, they’d be graffiti masters.

They reached out for assistance to Nick Marzullo of street-art specialists Pawn Works Gallery. With Belgian street artist ROA in the country to promote his work in a high-profile Los Angeles museum show, Marzullo was able to convince him to add Chicago to his itinerary. Read the rest of this entry »

Boundary Line of Chicago's Metropolitan Area. Duct Tape on Asphalt, 2010. Courtesy of Alex Lehnerer /UIC

By Regan Golden-McNerney

Recently at the Graham Foundation, the question, “How Chicago are you?” was posed to a panel of eleven artists, architects and designers. To begin answering this question, panelists set out to determine the city’s essential qualities by selecting five “likes” and “dislikes” about Chicago. Moderator and architect Paul Preissner also posed the broader question: “Is there some thematic placeness to Chicago that results in the production of particular works, or do people become famous doing something here and the city retroactively applies that to itself?” But to fully answer both questions, panelists also needed to reflect on the influence of these defining characteristics on their artistic identity. Unfortunately, there was little time to address this second issue, and several panelists expressed some reluctance to tether their work to a particular place when many Chicago artists and architects exhibit and build internationally. With this portion of the discussion absent, the conversation focused instead on the surprising number of shared “likes” and “dislikes” among this panel of professionals in different disciplines.

The decay threatening to return the city’s “hefty” infrastructure to nature was the most noted quality of the city. One recurring “like” was that the remnants of the city’s industrial past remain visible, adding gritty texture and communicating an important part of Chicago’s history. On the other hand, several panelists waxed poetically about the city’s clean, precise grid as Chicago’s defining feature. As architect Dan Wheeler firmly stated, the grid “is the base understanding of our city and its intelligence is something that I absolutely love.” But Wheeler, along with artist Anders Nilsen, professed equal admiration for what defies the grid, such as the tremendous tree growing out of a railroad bridge in Wicker Park. Along the same lines, architect and professor Geoff Goldberg described watching the trees grow up around Mies van der Rohe’s iconic modernist buildings. Panelists also expressed both fascination and dismay with places where city planning appeared arbitrary like new parking meters along a vacant street, or the city’s edge where, as architect Alex Lehnerer highlighted, cornfields run on either side. Read the rest of this entry »

Cover art by Andre Guichard

By Jason Foumberg

A chronic criticism of Chicago’s art landscape is that, for a thriving urban center, its art venues and exhibitions spaces are too farflung across the city’s grid, and therefore largely inaccessible. A Chelsea-type stroll just isn’t possible in Chicago, and even if there are concentrated gallery districts in River North and the West Loop, they scarcely represent the full spectrum of the city’s visual art production. Our art scene has multiple centers with as many margins, and therefore many frontiers. Diane Grams’ new book, “Producing Local Color: Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago,” argues that Chicago’s island neighborhoods benefit from autonomous art production and consumption. The book offers three case studies—the Chicago neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Pilsen and Rogers Park—to describe how locally cultivated art scenes exist in relation to specific local issues, from real estate to crime, and to larger concerns of politics, civil rights and economic access.

A common tactic in Chicago, especially today, is the domestic gallery. In 1961, several people decided to start a “home-based museum” on the South Side and called it the Ebony Museum to represent black history in Chicago. Twelve years later they moved locations and changed the name to the DuSable Museum of African American History. This boldly innovative museum only became culturally legitimate and publicly influential, writes Grams, when the institution was relocated into the city’s parkland alongside other major cultural institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Heads rolled when the Museum of Contemporary Art closed their running series “Mash Flob: Turning Flash Mob Inside Out” on April 19 with a slightly dangerous game spearheaded by Industry of the Ordinary, the Chicago-based performance art group of Mathew Wilson and Adam Brooks.

Based on the origins of soccer or, to the British-born artists, football, the game involved kicking around rubber molds of the artists’ heads.

“Back in Mayan times, supposedly after battles, tribes would take the heads of their slain victims and use them as rudimentary balls,” said Brooks. “So we decided what we would do is have a game with both of our heads.”

The artists said they have a long history with creating art that deals with soccer and were fascinated by its violent origins. “It has this rather disturbing, possibly apocryphal history of kicking heads around,” Wilson said.

Despite the wind and persistent mist that left the tiled sidewalk and steps outside the museum slick and wet, around twenty people volunteered to play “football.” Another twenty-five or so gathered on the museum’s steps to watch the scuffle from above, where Brooks and Wilson, decked out in army-green parkas emblazoned with “Industry of the Ordinary,” presided over the melee. Read the rest of this entry »

If you walked into the Kunsthalle New gallery in Pilsen at around 8pm last Saturday, the first thing you would have noticed was a group of people standing and staring at the ceiling. Above them, what looked like a pile of rags jumped and rustled, like a cat wandering under a pile of clothes. It was artist Chris Collins’ contribution to the thirty-some projections at Chicago’s BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), a one-night exhibition by Chicago-based internet artists.

BYOB is the brainchild of Rafaël Rozendaal, a Berlin artist who started the event as a way to bring net artists together in a seamlessly adaptable exhibition. Because the only stipulations are that artists must attend and they must bring their own projectors (they’re known as beamers in Europe), BYOBs were meant to be exported far and wide. Since its first incarnation in Berlin in July 2010, there have been more than ten BYOBs in cities across the globe. Nicholas O’Brien and Brian Khek, both SAIC-affiliated artists who do internet and computer-based art, organized the Chicago version. “It’s really about coming together and saying, yes, this is kind of one community, even if it’s not in one geographical location,” O’Brien says. “Also, being able to share with others in the physical space and not having to be limited by the typical channels of communication on the internet. Like, you don’t have to have a certain number of ‘likes’ to engage with the space, which can really dictate the online traffic of certain projects.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Artists’ Coalition (CAC) is moving to an 8,000-square-foot space in the West Loop—the former FLATFILEgalleries—which has prompted CAC to initiate Bolt Residency, a juried one-year artist residency program that will offer continuous support for the chosen artists’ professional and artistic pursuits. Cortney Lederer, Director of Exhibitions and Community Outreach, says she hopes the new residency program will build the relationship between artists and the community. “We’re partnering with major cultural institutions, visiting artists, galleries and dealers from Chicago who are going to work with these artists on an ongoing basis and really evaluate their work one-on-one,” Lederer says. “I would say that that is the core of the residency program. I think, for us, it’s so much about community.” With enormous studio space, two exhibition areas and nine open studios, the artists will have the freedom to work with the space as they choose. “I really want to make sure that folks are serious, dedicated and want to be there,” Lederer says. Open-house tours of CAC’s new home at 217 North Carpenter will be held April 10, 2pm-5pm and April 19 from 5:30pm-8:30pm. (Nancy Wolens)

Peter V. Walsh, Jason Thompson, Clarke Canedy, Dana Schmidt

With more than two-dozen art galleries located in one neighborhood it can be difficult for the new kid on the block to stand out from the crowd. Throw in an economy slowly climbing its way out of recession, let alone it being February in Chicago—not exactly the most conducive environment to foot traffic—and it’s hard to imagine a new art space hanging on, let alone thriving. Yet that’s what The Black Cloud Gallery of East Pilsen (1909 South Halsted, blackcloudgallery.net) has managed to do. Since opening in October, the fledgling gallery has gone from six contributing artists to nearly thirty, and says it is currently turning a profit every month.

“We represent artists, not just display them,” says gallery co-founder Clarke Canedy. “When we show an artist, we don’t just put work up and hope people come in on 2nd Fridays, we curate the work to strengthen it. We hang work at local businesses; the artists are being exhibited out of the gallery for more exposure. We rent our space for all sorts of private events; classes are taught here. We try to get as many people in front of the art as possible in different ways.”

Some of those different ways have included hosting charity events, a birthday party, baby shower, wedding reception, jewelry show, sewing classes, comedy shows, and drawing sessions with live models starting in March (and they’re looking into yoga). Their latest hook: an “Art Bazaar,” with more than ninety pieces from more than thirty different artists set at $200, all through February, kicking off with a gala event February 4 from 7pm-10:30pm. Read the rest of this entry »